As it turns out, NVIDIA’s SLI technology may not be completely supported by all chipsets for AMD’s upcoming Ryzen consumer processors. Computerbase.de is reporting that only X370 will be compatible with SLI at all in what might seem like a bit of a tax, of sorts.
SLI could be a limited commodity on Ryzen
In order to include SLI compatibility on their motherboards and with their chipsets, AMD has to pay a licensing fee to NVIDIA, and likely is a business decision made to limit the amount of money be transacted between the two and likely not AMD “gimping” the functionality of their motherboards in regards to NVIDIA GPUs. Multi-GPU setup’s are also still marred by frame-pacing issues that would otherwise provide a less optimal and enjoyable experience. That isn’t to say that leaving out NVIDIA SLI was a good decision, however.
The leaked document from Computerbase does seem suspect, however, because “8th” does not indicate a number of PCIe 2.0 lanes, but instead a place. Also, 20 PCIe lanes should be available regardless of whether SATA is being accessed. Perhaps if NVMe is being used then up to x4 will be reserved, but otherwise SATA is not accessed over PCIe lanes. Thus, this seems rather off. Soon we’ll have the full specifications of all chipsets and a full review of Ryzen to boot. That will inevitably clear this all up.