PCI Riser/Splitters

Hi everyone,

 

So im toying with the idea of putting dual GPU onto an mITX. First it cant be done, but, why not?

 

So there's these PCIe risers and splitters to exist, if 2 cards are put onto the end of a splitter and connected via SLI bridge, is there any reason why they wouldn't work? We have dual GPU cards, and we've had a GTX690 split into a 680 and quadro on the same PCI slot.

 

I undersatnd the bandwidth would be shared across the 2 cards, but if a PCIe 3.0 16x slot is being split into 2x PCIe 3.0 8x slots there should be no hit here.

 

If anyone has tried this I would be very interested in your results. I have an ITX board now I just don't have two cards to test for myself.  (only have 750ti which cant SLI and 780Ti)

 

For reference this is what i'm talking about for the riser/splitter.

http://i.imgur.com/IKXNGrY.jpg

SLI needs a board that is certified so it wont work. Crossfire may work. The problem i see is that you are splitting the PCI-E power between two cards. 

You could do dual PCIe cards but not dual GPUs. As billgatez said SLI needs a certified board and I think Crossfire does too. You could run a GPU and a really nice RAID card or something though :P

No Crossfire doesn't need a certification. Crossfire is really all over. You can mix RAM, clock speeds, vendors, GPUs, whatever. So long as the GPU is the same family and there are some PCIE slots its good.  

The nVidia one is BS tho. X8 lanes required and shit... It is just so they can charge a license fee. 

I wonder how much, if at all, PCIe 2.0 x4 bottlenecks cards.  SLI only works on SLI-cert boards and on x8 slots, but Crossfire works all the way down to x4.

Awww,this is very upsetting. I was so excited about this project. :(

The only way i think you could get SLI on an non SLI board would be to use something like this. It's used to add quad SLI to a motherboard and i am guessing you could just use half of it.

It breakes a single PCI x16 slot in to two and uses a NF200 chip so SLI should work. Well at least between the two slots that are conected by the NF200 chip.

Holy shit! look at that thing, Awesome find!

OK so an SLI expansion board is what I need, that board is huge though. I need it to in an NCASE so I really dont have a lot of space. 

I still want to try 4x sli on my board. PLX chip so all my pcie lanes have a minimum speed of 8x.

Bandwidth wont be a problem. The question is is a 4770k capable of powering 4x gpu's

I believe Linus tested it or someone I remember seeing it somewhere recently. 

It honestly only cuts performace buy a few percent. It is almost unnoticeable and if you have a powerful enough GPU it won't really matter.  

As far as i know there are only quad SLI boards. And i don't even know if it would work as you may need more then just the NF 200 chip. I also recently came across some people saying that there are some modded NV drivers that allow SLI to work on unsupported motherboards.http://www.overclock.net/t/670810/howto-sli-on-a-non-sli-motherboard-gtx5xx-compatible-1-0-final-released