Epox today announced the first SLI mainboard for socket 754 AMD Sempron processors. According to the manufacturer, the new board was made possible through Nvidia's SLI driver included in the v77.76 package, which eliminated the need of a SLI bridge by enabling dual-graphics functionality through PCI Express. Epox said that the slower speed of the Sempron processor has "minimum impact on gaming speed" when compared to a regular Athlon 64 chip: Results in 3D Mark 2003 and 2005 benchmarks run with Athlon64 3000+ and Sempron 2800+ differ by less than 10 points, according to the manufacturer.

The EP-8NPA SLI board for Sempron processors integrates two x16 PCI Express ports, supports up to 2 GByte of DDR1-400 memory, SATA II, and includes Epox' "ThunderProbe" software, which offers debugging features, a power-on feature without power cable, as well as a hardware monitoring to auto detect voltage, temperature and fan speed. Pricing and availability information has not been made available. (THG)