GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0 - SLI support?

[azuriel]

Hello all!

I've been building computers for years, but I'm fairly new to SLI and CROSSFIRE. On that, I'm not too sure as to what I should be looking for when checking to see if my motherboard supports SLI or not. I hope I picked the write forum category for this. If any of you could give me a hand, that would be greatly appreciated!

My motherboard is a GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0. It has two PCI-E x16 1.0 slots (x16, x4).

http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=2624&ProductName=GA-P35-DS4

The cards I want to set up for SLI are dual GeForce GTX 460 (PCI-E 2.0 x16).

I read that PCI-E 2.0 cards will run in a 1.0 slot, even though they lose overall performance.

My questions are:

1) Can my motherboard support SLI?
2) Can my motherboard support SLI with PCI-E 2.0 cards in PCI-E 1.0 slots?
3) With the x16/x4 configuration, if SLI is possible, is it worthwhile? Do they both get scaled down to 4x?

Thank you for your time,
Az

 

[tecmo34]

1) Can my motherboard support SLI? --- No it will not support SLI. It is a Crossfire only board.

2) Can my motherboard support SLI with PCI-E 2.0 cards in PCI-E 1.0 slots? --- PCI-E 2.0 cards are backwards compatible but you'll have a slight performance decrease.

3) With the x16/x4 configuration, if SLI is possible, is it worthwhile? Do they both get scaled down to 4x? --- Your card setup would run at x16,x4, which is not a highly recommended setup for Crossfire or SLI.

 

[azuriel]

Best answer selected by azuriel.

 

[azuriel]

Thank you, you're awesome.