NVIDIA SLI Certification Program

Why You Should Care

by Josh Walrath

Why We Need Certification

            While NVIDIA has done its best to make SLI a reality for the consumer market, there is still a lot of work to do to get good results and affordable products.  To achieve their goals, NVIDIA had to implement a certification program to ensure that the costumer receives a product that will “work right out of the box”.  To receive certification, both the board level and system level products need to go through a rigorous testing procedure.

This will be one of the first available and certified nForce 4 SLI motherboards on the market.  The MSI K8N Diamond should be available to the general public in late November of 2004.

            The SLI motherboards will mainly be made up of 6 layer boards.  6 layer boards are more expensive than 4 layer boards, but the signal integrity should be greatly improved.  In SLI applications, data integrity is absolutely key.  While PCI-E helps to overcome many of the data errors, each video card is going to draw a lot of power and have a lot of data traffic.  In the future we may see 4 layer SLI boards, but I wouldn’t count on it anytime soon.  The BIOS for these boards do not necessarily need certification, as the SLI hardware really only needs to be turned on or off.  There are very few settings in this situation where the manufacturer could really mess up the basic SLI functionality by releasing a half-cooked BIOS.

            There are four distinct areas where certification can be applied to: video cards, motherboards, complete systems, and applications.  For example a company like MSI sends in their video cards to NVIDIA for testing, and when their products pass the tests then they can be labeled as “NVIDIA SLI Ready”.  The same holds true for motherboards.  For the system builder, the process is a bit different.  Companies such as Alienware send the entire system in, and it is rigorously tested for electrical and thermal properties, not just of the SLI components, but on the entire system (hard drives, heat from those drives, power draw, etc.).  Once a system has passed all tests, it can have the “NVIDIA SLI” certification.

            Applications are somewhat different.  While SLI is mostly transparent to applications, there are many things that developers can do to optimize their software to an SLI environment.  NVIDIA is offering developer support for SLI, and those developers who have passed their software through NVIDIA can receive the “NVIDIA SLI Ready” certification.

            Currently the SLI certification only really covers things like electrical stability with motherboards, video cards, and systems as a whole.  Thermal characteristics are also checked into, especially with the video cards and the full systems.  Some areas where NVIDIA is also looking to expand this program are in standalone retail power supplies, and possible acoustic specifications.  In Phase 1 of the SLI certification program, the power supplies for the pre-made systems are rigorously tested, but 3^rd party power supplies are left in the cold.  NVIDIA is currently talking to power supply manufacturers at this time about expanding their certification program to those parts, but it takes manpower and time to do a good job here.  Eventually we will probably see companies like Antec and OCZ able to slap “NVIDIA SLI Ready” onto their high end power supplies.  The amount of power that two GeForce 6800 Ultras would draw in a single system is pretty amazing, and a poorly constructed power supply would not last very long.

            Acoustics will also be very important.  Imagine a user that buys a top of the line Voodoo PC featuring SLI 6800 Ultras, but when they plug it in and turn it on is greeted to 70 dB of noise emanating from all the fans in the machine.  This does not make for a positive user experience.  Again this is an area NVIDIA is looking into.

            What this all boils down to is that NVIDIA wants to make any user’s transition to SLI a relatively painless one.  SLI is initially aimed at the high end enthusiast where money is not an issue, but a second category of users will also find SLI attractive.  Not everyone wants to drop $800 to $1200 for two top-of-the-line video cards, but if they settle for spending an extra $50 on the motherboard they will have the ability to place that second card in the machine sometime in the future (when prices have either gone down, or they have saved enough money to purchase that second card).  This is a very cost effective way to achieve the next level of performance without having to buy that next generation card when it comes out.  Currently the best value in this type of program would be with the 6800 GT products, as they are widely available now, and in six to eight months they should be in the mid $250 range.  At that time the user can buy one of those and get performance nearly equal to a 32 pixel pipeline/12 vertex shader video card with a 512 bit memory controller running 1 GHz DDR3.  The only requirement for SLI is that the user has video cards from the same generation and chip level (eg. you shouldn’t mix and match a 6800 GT with a 6600 GT, or a 6800 Ultra with a 6800 GT).

            Oddly enough, the first product to receive SLI certification is the Alienware Area-51 ALX X2 system, which is based on the Intel Xeon/Tumwater platform.  This is somewhat of a “one off” situation, and I doubt we will see certification for another Intel based SLI system anytime soon.  NVIDIA hopes to have SLI systems based on the nForce 4 architecture available by the end of this month.

            In conclusion, this is not a marketing gimmick from NVIDIA.  It is a genuine program that will benefit the user a great deal by making sure that any product they buy with “NVIDIA SLI” or “NVIDIA SLI Ready” attached will give them a good experience.  This program will continually develop, and NVIDIA’s hopes that anything with the certification can be put together in multiple configurations and work as advertised.

Return to Home

Copyright 1999-2004 PenStar Systems, LLC.