SLI on Chinese X58 and X79 Motherboards
I have bought Chinese X58 and X79 motherboards from AliExpress. They are brand new, and usually sold as bundles with used workstation parts, like Intel Xeon processors and Server RAM (DDR3 Registered ECC).
X58 (LGA 1366) and X79 (LGA 2011) platforms have more PCIe lanes compared to the consumer platforms at the time. They are fully compatible with CrossFire, and two Radeon graphics cards will run with full 16x PCIe lanes on both cards.
However SLI is not supported. Without modifications, you can install 2 identical graphics cards, but cannot enable SLI. You only get an option to configure PhysX.
However there are software workarounds. A range of tools exist, some work with these Chinese motherboards, others do not. There is little documentation about this topic, so I did some initial testing and hopefully others will get interested and also carry out tests and share their findings.
X58 (LGA 1366) and X79 (LGA 2011) platforms have more PCIe lanes compared to the consumer platforms at the time. They are fully compatible with CrossFire, and two Radeon graphics cards will run with full 16x PCIe lanes on both cards.
However SLI is not supported. Without modifications, you can install 2 identical graphics cards, but cannot enable SLI. You only get an option to configure PhysX.
However there are software workarounds. A range of tools exist, some work with these Chinese motherboards, others do not. There is little documentation about this topic, so I did some initial testing and hopefully others will get interested and also carry out tests and share their findings.
Patches and tools
I have uploaded various tools I have been able to find, and that others have helped me find. I've added some notes.
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Driver Signature Enforcement Overrider
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SLIPatch 1.5
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sli-patch-[guru3d.com].exe |
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Hyper SLI 1.0
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DifferentSLIAuto 1.0
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DifferentSLIAuto 1.3
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DifferentSLIAuto 1.4
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