Nvidia has announced that it has licensed SLI to the leading motherboard companies for integration onto their upcoming motherboards featuring AMD's 990FX, 990X, and 970 chipsets. Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI will be among the first motherboard manufacturers to offer this new capability, though Nvidia says that more companies will be added shortly. Nvidia did not share any technical details (such as limitations to two-way SLI) but motherboard makers will likely help us out with that in the next few weeks.
Nvidia says it made the decision because when PC enthusiasts and PC gamers are looking to build a new rig, the best CPU price performance ratio is important. The company explained that while for a long time AMD offered great high-end CPUs, in recent years AMD's stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs became the gamer's choice, so Nvidia only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets. More recently users have been asking for "SLI for AMD CPUs" (according to Nvidia, but the truth is this has been a requested feature for years) and the company has finally decided to give them what they want .
AMD-based motherboards with SLI support were rumored late last month. The original tidbit discussed AMD's upcoming 990FX and 990X chipsets, which are slated to launch in Q2 2011 alongside AMD's anticipated Bulldozer processors, but the fact that 970 chipsets are included is great news. In short, it means we should see the new motherboards sooner rather than later.
"After all, we want to make sure gamers can benefit from the new CPU competitive landscape and ensure they have NVIDIA SLI - the highest performance, most stable multi-GPU solution - to game on!" an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement. "According to Steam, 93% of all multi-GPU systems in use today use SLI. We hope you enjoy GeForce GTX gaming in SLI on motherboards featuring either Intel or AMD CPUs."
Will this news make your reconsider purchasing an AMD-based motherboard, or are you going to stick to the Intel camp?