ULi M1695 PCIe/AGP for Athlon 64 – Part 2 with SLI

SLI and Dual Video

Benchmarking and performance comparisons were covered in FIRST LOOK: ULi M1695 PCIe/AGP Socket 939 for Athlon 64. Please refer to the Part 1 of this review for test comparisons to other Athlon 64 Socket 939 chipsets.

The other big news with ULi Reference 2 is the ULi support for NVIDIA SLI with their chipset and the option for dual PCIe video. Does it work?

There is no doubt that dual PCIe video works as intended with the riser card. Mount two PCIe cards, install the driver, and dual video (or triple with the AGP, or quad with AGP and PCI) is certainly possible.

ULi supplied some custom drivers for SLI testing, since at this early stage they have not received SLI certification for their Reference boards. The special ULi drivers are based on NVIDIA driver build 71.24, so they are quite a bit older than the current 77.72.

After setting the board to two x8 in BIOS, installing the riser card and a matched pair of MSI 7800 GTX with an SLI bridge, we thought that we were ready to go.

As we started driver installation we were informed the hardware was not supported. As 71.24 is a pre-7800 driver we figured out the 7800 were not supported. We have asked ULi for an updated driver with 7800 support.

We then installed two NVIDIA 6800 Ultra video cards. To our surprise, the two double-width cards would install in the riser card. The riser looked tight, but the 6800 Ultra fit just fine.

The ULi-modifed 71.24 drivers installed fine with the 6800 Ultra video cards, SLI was recognized and properly enabled. However, as we began testing, we noticed 2D mode worked fine, but any Direct 3D applications - which is virtually all the games for SLI benchmarking - failed to initialize properly. ULi is working on the problem with Direct 3D support and will supply updated drivers as soon as it is ready.

It is clear from the enabling of SLI with the pre-production driver that SLI will work on the ULi M1695/M1567. ULi just has a bit more work to do on the special driver for ULi SLI.