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SLI Using PCIe based 7600GS and
AGP based 7600GS on ASRock 939DUal-SATA2
ChinoBino 11 March 2007
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Pricing
of
GEForce 8800GS-320MX
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Introduction
Ok, yes, everspiral from Taiwan demonstrated SLI on the Asrock
DS2 using 2 6600GT's, so credit goes to him for being the first - I can also
verify that SLI is actually possible, but this time I used two 7600GS cards.
Does anyone remember this thread about the 7600GS AGP? Well Having read nVidia's
comments on SLI I was lead to believe that AGP just wouldn't work at all, see
this quote taken from the nVidia slizone website:
Originally Posted by nvidia slizone
"Does SLI technology work on AGP?
No. SLI technology is designed for PCI Express.
How does SLI technology work on PCI Express?
SLI technology is designed for PCI Express. This new bus has superior bandwidth
(two to four times AGP 8X), support for isochronous data transport, and the
capability to drive multiple high-speed graphics devices. AGP 8X is limited to
one high-speed graphics device and was not a good candidate for SLI technology."
So this information is not really true? It is quite possible and has been done
using two different nVidia GPU's, NV43 (6600GT) and NV73 (7600GS) on the Asrock
939Dual-SATA with modified drivers.
Here is my test setup;
CPU: AMD 64 3000+(1800Mhz) Winchester Core, 512KB L2 cache, oc'd to 250 x 9 =
2250MHz
MB: ASROCK 939DUALSATA2 BIOS P2.20
RAM: Kingston DDR400(200MHz) (4 x 512MB)
HDD: PATA 80GB Western Digital 8MB cache
OS: WINXP PRO SP2
Graphics cards:
LEGEND 7600GS 256MB AGP @ 400/400 (800MHz DDR)
XFX 7600GS 256MB PCI-e @ 400/400 (800MHz DDR)
Ok, so the first question I had was, "Will it work?"
Here is a screen of SLI being enabled using the
modified 85.96 driver.
My next question was, "Is it practical?"
Well, maybe... I think that with a more powerful CPU in combination with a
monitor that supports high resolutions it could be. My results were inconclusive
as I had serious time contraints and only managed to run a single pass of
3dmark05 @ 1600 x 1200 (the highest res my 19" monitor is capable of);
3Dmark05 1600x1200 SLI (PCI-e + AGP) = 2569
3Dmark05 1600x1200 No SLI (PCI-e card
only) = 2517
As you can see, the results are very close. You could argue that they're close
enough to be insiginificant, however, I think that the two cards were being
bottlenecked by the CPU when running SLI so I really needed a more powerful
processor (preferably an X2 or a dual core Opty) to find out...
Maybe someone else out there would like to give it a go and report your findings
at http://www.ocworkbench.com/asrock
Discuss in Forum
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