SLI Bridge Available in Retail - ‘Turn Your nForce4 Ultra into nForce4 SLI’

You probably know that some nForce4 Ultra based mainboards are equipped with either two full-size PCI Express x16 slots or with one full-size PCI Express x16 slot and one PCI Express x4 slot , which allows installing a second graphics card. None of the mainboard makers however is brave enough to announce officially that their solutions really support SLI. As you know, NVIDIA is doing its best to prevent the “unauthorized” modification of the nForce4 Ultra based mainboards into nForce4 SLI based ones.

Nevertheless, it is possible to overcome the “anti-modification” protection in the driver and change the chipset ID on the hardware level. However, it has been impossible to make up for the absent connection bridge-card. At least the SLI technology from NVIDIA doesn’t allow it. VIA and ATI promised to use no SLI-like bridge cards in their alternatives to NVIDIA SLI. So, we’ll see.

Here is the SLI bridge selling in some Japanese hardware stores today. It is available as a separate item and is not included into any bundles: The name of this device is very simple: “VGA Bridge”. The package doesn’t say anything about the manufacturer or the compatibility with SLI: everything is arranged so that the unhappy NVIDIA would lose track immediately.

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