About Me

Warszawa, Mazowieckie, Poland
I am a hardcore gamer wich likes to have good hardware to run the newest games in full details.

Friday 21 May 2010

Asus ROG Xpander = nVidia FAILL

I am not an nV or ATi fanboy but nvidia now keeps failing.
Why? For example to run SLi technology on a motherboard companies needs to buy a special nf200 bridge witch enables SLi and expands pci express lines and to run 4x GPUs from nvidia
(4-way SLi) nvidia wants to put on a motherboard two nf200 chips.
NF200 chip makes the whole motherboard more complicated also nv wants from companies to pay money for the nf200 chip and for the SLi official licence(about 100$ for 2x nf200 easy to calculate 50$ for one chip). 
With crossfire there aren't such problems so you can have cheap motheboard with crossfire support.
ASUS on Rampage III Extreme wanted to keep reasonable price for the technology thats why the mobo supports only crossfire. But the true is that the nv is now breaking records with 4-way sli thats why asus wanted to have a 4-way sli support on Rampage III Extreme.

They created a special board with 2x nf 200 chips and 4x pci express called
ASUS ROG Xpander.
It allows to run 4x PCI express at full x16 speed 
Lonley 2x nf 200 chips can't provide in SLi full x16 speed but combined with x58 chipset it is possible.
Now to to be completley clear. The x58 provides it's pci express lines and 2x nf200 provides it's pci express lines. Chips combined together gives us 4x PCI express slots with x16 speed on all slots. Cool? not realy. The nf 200 chips are on the stand alone pcb and the price will be too big as for a board witch only enables SLi technology.
Also i think we would need a special case to fit this. And as for me it is just looking ugly. So the pictures as always below

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