HydraLogix Vs. SLI And CrossFire: MSI's P55A Fuzion Tested

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]sdk1985[/nom]Well thats not a real explanation... since i'm actually considering to buy a p55a fuzion (or a gd80/85) it would be a bummer if my board would not support it (given the benchmark results).[/citation]OK, so here's the back story: I set the board up and installed two GTX 460 graphics cards, Nvidia control panel said "This system is SLI capable", I opened the panel and it gave me the warning about the SLI bridge. I picked up an SLI bridge that was laying on the bench, shut down, installed the bridge, and rebooted. I got the message about SLI, went to the control panel and enabled it. I ran a couple test to confirm that SLI was working, and that was the end of it.

After confirming that CrossFire also worked on the P55A Fuzion, we debated whether we should publish all of our benchmark results using the P55A Fuzion or a competing board. Points of the debate:
1.) Competing boards included the SLI bridge, the P55A Fuzion required one to be purchased separately.
2.) Competing boards were cheaper to begin with, and adding a separately-purchased bridge to the P55A Fuzion made it even more expensive. Minimum added cost was $10 with shipping. Had the bridge been included with the board, the price difference should have been around $1.
3.) The P55A Fuzion has a PCIe bridge: Most readers would want to see how it compares to a standard board.
4.) We didn't want to test SLI and CrossFire twice, since the article had to be finished in a week (including photos, edits, etc).

So, we decided the competing board would take precedence in the SLI and CrossFire comparisons, and left out the two added configurations to make this a one-week project.

The few benchmarks we did run to compare P55A Fuzion in SLI mode to the non-Hydra board in SLI mode showed that the difference between the two boards was less than 1FPS when both were used in SLI mode.

HydraLogix (the logic portion) doesn't work with SLI or CrossFire, so enabling SLI and CrossFire is a simple matter of disabling HydraLogix in its control application. With HydraLogix disabled the Hydra 200 becomes a simple PCIe hub.

 

[waffle911]

I'd be very interested if this technology could be used to enable both SLI and CF configurations on AMD boards. If only AMD had the money to spend to buy Lucid or to help with R&D, it could greatly improve the versatility of its platform upgrade paths in the value market. They might even partner up with Nvidia to develop it further, giving AMD boards at least as much graphics versatility as modern Intel boards, if not more. Even if it means supporting a competing graphics company, it adds value to your own non-graphics platform. Ah, but we can dream, can't we?

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]waffle911[/nom]I'd be very interested if this technology could be used to enable both SLI and CF configurations on AMD boards. If only AMD had the money to spend to buy Lucid or to help with R&D, it could greatly improve the versatility of its platform upgrade paths in the value market. They might even partner up with Nvidia to develop it further, giving AMD boards at least as much graphics versatility as modern Intel boards, if not more. Even if it means supporting a competing graphics company, it adds value to your own non-graphics platform. Ah, but we can dream, can't we?[/citation]No, the Hydra 200 does not enable SLI on the 870A Fuzion. We checked. This also makes sense because it's a driver check: The driver checks for an Nvidia component or an SLI hook in BIOS, and if it doesn't see either of those, it disables the SLI menu.

I told MSI that people hate Nvidia chipsets so much that they'd likely pay extra for an AMD-chipset board that has an NF200 bridge. Something like the 870A Fuzion...but as an 870A NF200. Unfortunately, as a graphics card manufacturer they don't want to risk getting on Nvidia's bad side.

 

[sdk1985]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]OK, so here's the back story: [...]

HydraLogix (the logic portion) doesn't work with SLI or CrossFire, so enabling SLI and CrossFire is a simple matter of disabling HydraLogix in its control application. With HydraLogix disabled the Hydra 200 becomes a simple PCIe hub.[/citation]

Thank you for the extensive reply. My fear is that the reason that there is no SLI bridge included is that MSI probably did not pay the required SLI license fee. Although you made clear the driver notified you of SLI capability, this would mean that if my fear is true and nvidia gets a hold of this, that there could be a driver update to remove this effect. Just as the nvidia driver disables PhysX as soon as it detects an AMD/Ati card in order to prevent PhysX in X-mode.

So still some fears here. Maya I should enquiry msi (or just go with the gd85).

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]sdk1985[/nom]Thank you for the extensive reply. My fear is that the reason that there is no SLI bridge included is that MSI probably did not pay the required SLI license fee. Although you made clear the driver notified you of SLI capability, this would mean that if my fear is true and nvidia gets a hold of this, that there could be a driver update to remove this effect. Just as the nvidia driver disables PhysX as soon as it detects an AMD/Ati card in order to prevent PhysX in X-mode. So still some fears here. Maya I should enquiry msi (or just go with the gd85).[/citation]
It's not likely Nvidia would write a driver to block a specific board that had the BIOS tag applied improperly. It's more likely that Nvidia would catch MSI on this and force MSI to provide a new BIOS that didn't have that tag.

 

[Guest]

no cross version/model test
most nvidia fans would stick to nvidia models.
so i would like to see how 2XX combines whith 4XX
or for ati fans an 48XX whith + 58XX test