Motherboard – Nvidia nForce 100 SLI Bridge for 4 Graphics Cards

The 5400 northbridge doesn’t possess a sufficient number of PCI-Express lanes to provide four x16 PEG slots. For this reason, Intel partnered with Nvidia for the Skulltrail project, using two PCI-Express port switchers. The two nForce 100 SLI bridges split the 32 lanes of the 5400 northbridge into 64 lanes, with each of the nForce chips providing 32 lanes in this manner.

Both the 5400 northbridge chip and Nvidia’s nForce 100 SLI port switchers support PCI-Express 2.0. If the system is equipped with two graphics cards, each can utilize a transfer rate of x16. With four graphics cards installed, each of the cards is still able to take advantage of an x16 connection, although all of them together have to share the bandwidth of an electrical x32 connection. Thus, the four cards cannot take advantage of the x16 bandwidth simultaneously, so the bandwidth is allocated dynamically.

The large heatsink that covers the southbridge and the Nvidia SLI-chips is equipped with a 60 mm fan. It runs at a very high speed and is so loud that a headache is almost guaranteed.