AsRock Dual SATA and SLI -

[merlin2001]

would appreciate any thoughts on this, before i waste an afternoon...

A mate of mine, as a result of some silly upgrading (and not listening to my advice at the time) as both a PCI-e and AGP versions of 6600GT 256Mb cards. he is currently using the PCI-e card only with the other one gathering dust. may be same manufacturer, but he is not sure. I currently have the ASRock Dual SATA II board (with AGP and PCI-e slots), which i'm happy with, but not particularly loyal to and happy to swap with his s939 asus board...

..so here's the question. given that the m/board has both AGP and PCI-e slots and that have two copies of a card with the same chip and memory configuration (but differant slots), would it be possible to get them up and running in SLI mode on the asrock board?

my suspicion is that the uli chipset on the mobo won't support SLI, although I know it can be used to have dual output from the two slots, but any advice from wiser and more knowledgable heads (i.e pretty much everybody over 3) would be much appreciated...

[Splash]

in a word, no. Unless I'm very much mistaken you can't run SLI with one AGP and one PCI-E card.

[kalniel]

Definately no.

ULI may have been heading towards adding this kind of functionality (they were also supposedly working on a joint SLI/crossfire driver) when NVidia bought them and stopped it.

[merlin2001]

thnks - that's pretty much what i thought- ah well, maybe i can convince him to buy my 7800GT and i can upgrade in readiness for NWN2...

[drbob]

I think you may be able to run both an agp and a pci-e card at the same time for a triple monitor set up though (they won't work together to speed up games though).

[Syd]

The Idea of the two slots was to allow upgrades to existing AGP users to athlon 64, without having to junk your agp card - which is exactly what appealed to me, after all the board was only 38 quid!!
You can however run as a dual monitor system - which I am lead to beleive works very well

[kalniel]

Yep.. though I'm eagerly awaiting SM3.0 accelerated physX - stick an old SM3.0 card in the AGP slot, run the main graphics in the PCIE.. and you have your cheap hardware accelerated physX solution

[drbob]

I doubt that will happen. New features like hardware physics acceleration are created to sell you new hardware, not leverage the stuff you've already paid for. Expect to see physics acceleration debut on the ati x2000 and nvidia 8000 (or wahtever they end up calling them) cards.