Is triple 2-way SLI/Xfire possible?

[windreamer]

This question is not a matter of how reasonable it is, but whether it's possible as a fun hypothetical so please bear with me. An increasingly smaller number of high end motherboards support 4-way SLI/Xfire which has always been the king of the hill since it was introduced with Windows Vista, exceptions like when people in AMD Xfired together 8 Fury X's on Linux notwithstanding. You could have dual SLI/Xfire, two cards for each of two monitors for a total of four. However, since Pascal and Vega Nvidia and AMD respectively have dropped official support for 3-way and 4-way SLI/Xfire even though you can still hack together 4 Titan Xps in SLI. It's conventional wisdom though that past two cards it doesn't scale well. You can have each monitor in a multi-monitor setup powered by a single card so could you have two cards in SLI/Xfire run each monitor in a three monitor setup for a total of six cards? This would be equivalent to having a dedicated dual card like the Radeon Pro Duo for each monitor. I know this is a dumb question, but I would appreciate any serious answers that explain why if this isn't possible e.g. not enough lanes on the motherboard or driver incompatibility.

 

[Glenwing]

You can't have multiple independent crossfire/SLI configurations. It's either On or Off for the whole system, there is no way to pick certain cards or configure anything.

 

[windreamer]

Does that mean you can have three pairs of the same card with them either all being turned on or off? Or is my interpretation of your answer just totally off the mark?

 

[Glenwing]

Does that mean you can have three pairs of the same card with them either all being turned on or off? Or is my interpretation of your answer just totally off the mark?

No, you cannot have multiple sets of cards in CrossFire. You can have a single set of 2, 3, or 4 cards in CrossFire.

 

[windreamer]

Thank you for the further clarification. That's interesting to know. You didn't say anything about SLI this time though... so is that a yes? I'm wracking my brain trying to think of a use case for my silly scenario - maybe flight sims.

 

[Glenwing]

Thank you for the further clarification. That's interesting to know. You didn't say anything about SLI this time though... so is that a yes? I'm wracking my brain trying to think of a use case for my silly scenario - maybe flight sims.

What I said applies to both CFX and SLI.