Gigabyte has been busy lately. They have derived a Quad SLI out of 4 Discrete Cards, no GX2′s needed. The primary catch is Nvidia does not support SLI in this fasion, nor is it in Nvidia’s road map. It seems that they had some dated northbridges to use up because the board uses 2 nForce 4 SLI northbridges and lacks a MCP or Southbridge.

This seems like a bold move to basically throw together 2 old northbridge chip sets and market it as a new high end motherboard. It doesn’t even support a Core 2 Duo. While being a Socket 775 motherboard the lack of this critical support puts it at a disadvantage. I don’t even see this as a likely gaming platform. It will be difficult at best to find a CPU that will operate in this motherboard.

The mainboard is comprised of 2 nForce 4 northbridges. The main north bridge is a Intel based which drives 2 of the 4 PCI Express x16 slots, and the ‘slave’ north bridge is an nForce 4 AMD based, and it controls the other 2 PCI Express x16 slots. The 2 north bridges are connected using HyperTransport technology from AMD. If you are running all 4 slots in ‘SLI mode’ they don’t run in full x16 mode. Its the early first generation SLI which the cards ran in 8x mode.

One benefit it does have is the ability to support many displays. Each discrete card can have 2 monitors hooked up. Which with no additional hardware you can run 8 independant displays. This almost seems like a proof of concept to show the world that even with locked down standards there can be some great modifications that allow some innovative results. While I would really like to see this in main stream motherboards, hopefully no more expensive than they are now, with some support from Nvidia or ATI would make some seriously high end systems.