What do i look for when shopping for an SLI ready motherboard?

Caxus

Am I looking for a board that mentions something about being SLI ready or is any board with two pci-e 16x slots SLI ready? Also, what about the boards that have one 16x pci-e and one 1x pci-e?

Nickboxer7

Just because a board has two pci-e 16x slots does not mean it's SLI certified. I believe I read about a board on tomshardware that said they got SLI to work on a non certified board, but it was a pain in the butt. Get one that says SLI on it.

Also, the x1 slot is not designed for video. It is designed for other things such as a wireless card, raid card, etc. You need two 16x spots and make sure they are not both half speed equaling 16 total, although I don't believe there are many boards like that anymore.

Hope this helps a little bit. I'm no expert with SLI though.

If you search for a board on Newegg and post it here, I'm sure we could let you know if it will work.

Thrax

NVIDIA Intel boards with two PCIe x16 Slots: SLI ready.
Intel Intel boards with two PCIe x16 slots: No SLI, just crossfire.
NVIDIA AMD boards with two PCIe X16 slots: SLI ready.
AMD AMD boards with two PCIe X16 slots: No SLI, just crossfire.

Caxus

Cool. Also, SLI is different from Crossfire in that you only need two "SLI Ready" cards for it to work right? You don't need a special SLI edition card to be the master like with Crossfire do you?

mmonnin

SLI - nVidia
Crossfire - ATI

2x SLI ready cards will work.

Caxus

Do the cards need to be identical like with Crossfire?

NiGHTS

IIRC, crossfire no longer needs master-slave cards. SLi never did.

Edit: Yeah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_CrossFire "Crossfire X"