I like this idea frankly. It means a person can get a motherboard that supports their CPU, and then buy any video card they wish. Much better flexibility to the end user in my opinion.

Its definitley a plus!

Very good!


Still it would have been much nicer if it came before the x58 which runs both already

Its been available for a while. Either the HP Blackbird or one of the Dell XPS(I cant remember which) had this BIOS hack.

Well, available is perhaps the wrong term. More like 'in existance' Ive searched high and low and this doesnt seem to have proliferated beyond that specific model until now.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] ire-nforce

It was the Blackbird afterall.

Yeah i remember that too, so theres no actually nothing new here. The innovating thing here is that a mobo maker is starting to make this working defacto and available to anyone, a trick that once was reserved to geeks with the vast pc/programming knowledge to hack a bios config.

Something i would really impressed to see is a nvida carded slied/xfired with an ati one. (of course that might be impossible since ati and nvidia have huge difference in the architecture of their cards... but who knows!)

Nicely done ASRock! a really good idea. i find this a little to late however considering that the X58 platform is already out. Had they released this at this time a year earlier i think there would have been a huge market for this but now that X58 boards are able to offer the same things I wonder how well this board will sell

it's about time !!!!!... I remember when i first heard about pci-e, nvida's sli, and ati's crossfire. back then i saw a living nightmare , that being the nightmare of laying out 250-400 $ bucks and being forever tied to one brand of video card as long as you are on that main board. well i can say agian , it's about time. I have never been one to stick to one brand of video card, back in 97 my first video card was an ati , then in 98 i got a tnt 2 ultra (nvidia) for a few years i was on nvidia updating to a gf 2 ultra then the gf 4400 ti after that card i went to a radeon 9700 pro and then a radeon x800 xl. Now i'm back on nvida with the GF 9600gt, and given teh current market my next card may very well be a ATI one. though my curent main board only ahs one pci-e (16x) 2.0 slot, I imagine i'm a good image of the average pc gamer. Sure fan boys willb e fan boys , but i imagine most teh market is liek me and tend to go with what ever company is offering the best bang for the buck at the time and with sli and crossfire this isn't always an option .. perhaps now we'll ahve beter choice.


though i can guess my next vid card is an ati , i cant say with certainy what vid card will find a home in my next computer i build 3-4 years from now... but i can definitely say if asrock is the only oen offering this "either choice" main baord ... I will look forward to tryign out an Asrock main board. (though i will admit , in the past i went with asus or MSI, current pc excluded i went with biostar on it and so far i aint been disapointed so guess add biostar to the list of brands i trust)... any way , next comp i build i'll take alook at asrock's offerings.

nope wont see that you might ahd nvida and ati both used the same shader standards but as it is they don't. nvidia cards use 16 bit precision shaders , and ati is using 32 bit precision shaders . (this is also the reason why ati's are a tad slower but give more vivid colors than nivida) not mention both companies have acompletely different way of arranging how thier shaders work it would be like trying to get a box 360 to communicate with a ps3. or ant to communicate with a rat.

This is certainly good news and hopefully others will jump aboard and do the same. However I have to ask can Nvidia do anything to prevent this? Whether through a protection to stop it in the future or even through court?

hmm they might beable to force thier chipsets to not allow this ... but they can't force intel , amd ,and via to dis allow this hack .. nor could they force a main board company into not doing a hardware form of this (ie building a main board that can toggle between chipsets)

Dell has been offering this for quite a few months via their XPS 630i system. That system has been wrought with problems (check out www.my630i.com for some intersting reads), not the least of which being that the cards don't actually run in crossfire mode sometimes, even though the ATI interface indicates that they are, framerate and performance indicates that they clearly are not.

I agree

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applica [...] otherboard
SLI CF mother bards have been around for quite a long time. asua rampage 2 for example can support both.

I don't think Nvidia has to do anything, how are they going to stop people from running CrossFire on an Nvidia chipset?

I'm more surprised that ATI allows cross-fire to be run on an Nvidia chipset, I would think the display drivers would prevent this.

Remember, the only reason SLI didn't work on old Intel chipsets was because Nvidia locked everything but Nvidia chipsets out of their drivers. Once they worked out a licensing deal for the x58, it only required a driver update (and possibly some tweaks to Intel's BIOS).

bustapr, I believe the ASRock motherboard is a Core2 motherboard. Intel licensed SLI tech for their x58 Core i7 boards (that asus rampage 2 you linked).

This new board is really only applicable to old Core2 duo/quad users who apparently need a new motherboard and want to keep their GPU upgrade options open in the future. But really, how far are you going to stretch that Core2 before upgrading your GPU isn't the problem anymore? I mean, with single-card solutions like the GTX295, 9800X2, 4870x2, 4850x2, etc..., is your single-PCIe motherboard really whats holding you back?

Cool. It seems like nVidia always had a stick up their butt about users running crossfire on their SLi boards or SLi on non certified SLi boards. I think this will be the board of choice for a few power users since it will be nice to know that whenever nVidia and AMD one up each other you don't have to ditch your main board to take advantage of the latest and greatest dual card configuration. Of course i7/X58 users enjoy this but that privileged currently comes at a high price.

As ASROCK loses it's access to any nVidia products. It is nVidia's right to not allow Crossfire to run on it's boards. It is one thing for a consumer to breach this wall of seperation, but altogether another thing for a company to do so. I am certain there are liability issues at stake here. Just like the reason Intel motherboards could not just add Crossfire or SLI onto it's motherboards because of licensing of the technology, there is no way that ASRock can get around the Licensing of nVidia chipsets. A consumer could, but ASRock cannot. If nVidia wants to change it's licensing to allow this, all the better, but it is not in their interest to do so, so not likely to happen.

While I do not see any downside to this arrangement I think most people are aware if they are buying ATI or Nvidia at the time they purchase a Motherboard. I think this is a good idea but I don’t see this board gaining any kind of popularity.

I could not see myself buying this board for that feature.

I think Nvidia has had enough law suits recently (and market share loss) that they will give a pass on this one; even though it would be a slam dunk case against Asrock because of the precedent already set....*thinking about the old emulator Bleemcast which could play playstation games better on dreamcast that got shut down in court*

Anyway, guess this means no more flaming on the newbs in the forums that ask if they can crossfire on an Nvidia board

Market Share Loss? Um, they gained market share recently.

Running crossfire on a SLI board is kind of like putting a 4 cylinder into a vette. Nvidia's got nothing to worry about.