Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 PCIe question

[Beholder88]

So I have this board in my rig currently, the Asus M5A97 Le R 2.0. No the best, not the worst. I never intended to do anything crazy with it. I have an Asus GTX 660 Ti installed, and happened upon another one that I wanted to SLI.

Well, this board only has one x16PCIe slot running at the full 16x, and the other is at 4x. I've been wondering, is that hardware limited, or is there anything in the BIOS that could theoretically be tweaked to change it and allow SLI?

The board has the 970 chipset which Nvidia licensed to be used for SLI, but ASUS never did anything about it on this board. I've also thought about trying hyperSLI, but that slot running at 4x will limit the cards bandwidth. To head it off, no, I don't have the money for another motherboard right now.

 

[ak47jar3d]

No, its not possible on that motherboard. 970 + sb950 chipset is incapable of sli.

 

[Beholder88]

If your talking strictly the chipset combination, that is not totally true. The MSI 970 Gaming board has the same chipset and supports SLI. It's listed PCI widths are 16x for both or 8x with SLI. If it's a hardware design difference I can understand, but if the ASUS board is locked somehow by the BIOS then there could be a way to modify it to make it work. Have looked at a few BIOS tools out there but I don't want to waste my time researching if its a hardware issue.

 

[ak47jar3d]

That's interesting. Sli 8x/8x? This how I understand it.

 

[Beholder88]

The website here: http://us.msi.com/product/mb/970-GAMING.html#hero-specification , states Gen 2 (1x16 , 1x8). On AMD's website here: http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/chipsets/9-series it only mentions "PCI Express® 2.0 technologies enable 1x16 graphic boards for a great everyday computing experience." Also that graphics are not included and "one slot for graphics upgrade". Not sure if MSI has something weird going on to allow one slot at x16 and another at x8, however I'm thinking those are the max and they would drop based on the PCI devices installed in the system.

 

[ak47jar3d]

It's not uncommon for motherboard manufacturers to find clever ways of pcie lanes than the processor can handle. I know z170 Asus deluxe has 36 total lanes (20 from the pch and 16 from the processor). Msi could have implement a similar controller setup add more lanes.

 

[Beholder88]

I was reading into it a bit more last night and found that to be common. The MSI one in question has some pretty bad reviews, and even some cases of the board catching on fire. If anything I think I'm just going to get a new board. Looking at a Gigabyte 990fxa.