IT-review.net - nForce Professional multi-monitor with SLI?

nForce Professional multi-monitor with SLI?
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 12 Jun 2006

You might find us insane, but we wanted to check out this nForce Professional-SLI-Multi Display Support thing on our own. We've been using one of these motherboards with two Opterons 246 for quite awhile now (backup server). The motherboard used was Tyan's Thunder K8WE (S2895) based on nVIDIA's nForce Professional 2200 and 2050, with full AMD Opteron 2xx series CPU's. We used 2 GB's of ECC REG memory (1GB OCZ, 2x512MB Transcend), two ASUS EN7900GTX/2DHT/512MB graphic cards, SLI bridge from ASUS's A8N32-SLI Deluxe, Plextor's PX-712 DVD+/-R(W) optical drive, Maxtor's 120GB Parallel ATA drive, and two PSU's just to be sure - Fortron's FSP460-60PFN for powering up the motherboard and the system, and OCZ's PowerStream 600W for powering two ASUS's cards, HDD and Plextor PX-712. Of course, the case is an obvious big tower from Chieftec. We used stock Opteron coolers with (as previously noted) two AMD Opterons 246 (2.0 GHz).

Upon installation of Windows XP and all of the necessary driver support, we tried out everything there is to have SLI working on two monitors but we failed to do so. When we disabled SLI, we could have cloning, spaning - whatever we wanted (we used different resolutions in this mode, as well). With SLI enabled, we can only "enable" one display, and when we try to enable another monitor, it just doesn't turn on. Check out all of the pictures to validate our work.

First, let's take a look of our backup system machine:

Next step - we use non-SLI configuration, both displays work (click on the image to view larger picture:

Finally, we click on "Enable SLI multi-GPU":

and then we can only enable one monitor, plus - all of the additional options (clone, span) disappeared from the menu:

And, of course, only one monitor works:

We have to say that we're very sorry to say that this doesn't work because we could REALLY use this SLI-multimonitor configuration for a couple of upcoming projects.

Previewed by Vedran Dakic and Grga Curkovic.