Nvidia Announces Licensing of SLI by Big Players

Nvidia has announced that that ASUS, EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte, and DFI have all licensed Nvidia SLI technology for their new lines of boards designed around the Intel X58 chipset. Adding SLI to these boards (and adoption by major OEMs such as Dell) means that consumers will be able to use the power of Single, Dual, or even Triple SLI configurations.

Quoting Patrick Cooper, Director of Product Planning for Dell Gaming : “Dell Gaming is known for industry-leading graphics and unparalleled performance. With the marriage of Nvidia SLI and the latest generation of Intel chipsets, we will continue to offer hardcore gamers the opportunity to push their Alienware systems beyond the limits of today’s hottest titles.”

The new boards designed for Bloomfield processors utilizing the X58 chipset are currently in final production and are being readied for market introduction based on Intel processor launch schedules. The boards and PC systems coming to market will feature of variety of graphics options. Two of the options will be implementations utilizing the Nvidia nForce 200 SLI processor, and then boards designed to run SLI technology natively through the licensing and certification program.

Joe Hsieh, General Manager at ASUS Motherboard Business Unit, enthusiastically added, “ASUS is bringing many motherboards into production with support for Nvidia SLI technology, and a motherboard worthy of mention is the new ASUS Rampage II Extreme which is based on Intel’s upcoming X58 chipset. This state-of-the-art motherboard is specifically designed to serve as the nucleus of the most demanding PC configurations available on the market today, and will be a boon to extreme overclockers and hardcore gamers. We are expecting gamers to take full advantage of the graphics capability that 3-way SLI provides to build a screaming-fast gaming machine. I’m sure our customers can hardly wait to start gaming !”

Regarding the licensing and certification program that these manufacturers will be taking part in, they will all be, apparently, required to pay Nvidia a fixed sum of money for every motherboard sold to legally enable Nvidia’s SLI multi-GPU technology in all Intel X58-based platforms.

As covered in a news article by Expreview, Nvidia will be charging board makers $5 per unit for SLI licensing. It is currently unclear if the company also plans to charge manufacturers of board for actual ‘certification’ at this point in time.

A lot of people have been asking for Intel platforms that support SLI for years now, and they are finally getting their wish. Nvidia actually has no SLI compatible architecture that will work with i7, so they had pursue other avenues to keep the customers interested, and all of this is what came of it – possibly a pretty slick and smart move. It feels like we might see a huge war of enthusiast boards soon.