***Asus Rampage III Extreme Owners Thread***

[Benton]

Hey guys,

Looking for some guidance on the potential for two dual-GPU Fermi cards on the R3E. Based on Guru3D's earlier attempts at quad SLI with this board, I am concerned it may not be possible.

I understand 4 discrete cards will not work with quad SLI, as outlined in the linked Guru3D article; however, I'm hoping two dual-GPUs may be a different story.

Also...I understand quad SLI can be overkill, but this is XS. Need I say more?

Thoughts?

Quad SLI (4 separate cards) on this motherboard is impossible because it doesn't have enough PCIe lanes. 4 cards will only run at x8 on the R3E. Quad SLI is disabled in the NVIDIA drivers unless there are 4 PCI slots running at actual x16. So for this (with X58 chipset) you need an NVIDIA nf200 chip, which you can find on boards that do support Quad SLI such as the Gigabyte UD9 and EVGA X58 Classified 4 way SLI.
You can run Quad CrossfireX with seperate cards on the R3E though because ATI haven't disabled it in the drivers when the PCIe slots are less than x16.
But to answer your question. Two NVIDIA dual GPU cards can run without restriction on the R3E. Preferably run them in slots 1 & 3 which will give both your cards full x16 bandwidth, although it has been proven that the difference between x8 and x16 is very little because its not yet a bottleneck. I ran two dual GPU ATI 5970's on this board for a while and the performance was just incredible. I was getting 3DMark Vantage close to P48,000. Now Im running Tri SLI GTX 480s and get a similar score. I did it for 3D surround but I wish I had stuck with my 5970s now. No more graphics cards for me until next gen NVIDIA, if they bring out something decent.