MSI Hydra Lucid Chipset

[nzcompgeek]

hey guys.

I'm about to upgrade my motherboard and need some info and advice. I currently have an OEM board and wish to upgrade to something that will allow me to overclock in BIOS and also support SLI. At the moment I have a Lynnwood i7 chip that I intend to continue using so I need a socket 1156 board to seat it.

This is the one i was looking at as I can pick one up cheap:

http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Big-Bang-Fuzion.html#?div=Detail

Now my questions are these:

The specs state that it is crossfire supported but not SLI, however it says it has Lucid chipset that allows for different combinations of differing GPU cards. There is a N mode that says you can combine 2 separate nvidia cards.

Now this confuses me. This isn't SLI but I can still use 2 Nvidia cards? (from what i've read it appears I can)

Does this method offer a performance drop from regular SLI

Does this Lucid chipset allow Nvidia cards to be run in 8x/8x or is it going to be 16x/4x?

I currently have an EVGA 560gtx ti card and plan to buy another one the same.

 

[suteck]

There are actually 3 modes. N, A and X
LucidLogix- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Exclusive - - - - - - - - - - - -Example Config
N-Mode: - - Identical Nvidia Cards- - -- - - No - - - - - GeForce GTX 285 / GeForce GTX 285
N-Mode: - - Non-Identical Nvidia Cards - - Yes - - - - - GeForce GTX 285 / GeForce GTX 260
A-Mode: - - Identical ATI Cards - - - - - - -No- - - - - - Radeon HD 5870 / Radeon HD 5870
A-Mode: - - Non-Identical ATI Cards- - - - -Yes - - - - - Radeon HD 5870 / Radeon HD 4870
X-Mode: - - Multi-Vendor- - - - - - - - - -- -Yes - - - - -Radeon HD 5870 / GeForce GTX 285
Copied from a tomshardware review - But everything I read says it doesn't cut it in the SLI department. I don't see much if anything later than the 2010 when it came out so some things might have changed but after a year if it was taking off it would be a lot more popular.
Yes, performance drop
2 identical nvidia cards - NO
2 different nvidia cards - YES
1 nvidia card and 1 ati/amd card YES
go figure But you might be able to use you current card and instead of buying a duplicate you can get the 590 and blow some socks off as a pair. I'd check to see if they have a compatibility list before I spent all that money though.
So - Buy another one the same - NO
And it looks like it's up to the motherboard still as to whether you run in X16 X16 / X16 X8 / or X8 X8 modes