From the latest sneaky snake pictures taken of X58 boards from at least four of the major motherboard manufacturers, it appears that SLI will be absent in the launch products. We previously wrote a nice long editorial about the whole SLI on X58 debacle, in which we stated that Intel would not be putting an extra chip on their board just to enable SLI. Whether or not this was based on Intel thinking they don’t need NVIDIA graphics with ATI currently dominating, or if they excluded it on principle is not really known. What is known, however, is that Intel X58SO and several other new boards based on the X58 chipset will not include SLI functionality when Bloomfield launches.

MSI’s first X58, the X58 Eclipse, was first pictured over at Syndrome OC. On the pictures, you can see that although MSI has departed from Intel’s reference layout, it does not incorporate the extra nForce 200 chip for SLI. The board features 3 PCI-e x16 slots, but configuration of those slots is unknown. Final heatsink design for the Eclipse is also unknown, since the only two pictures of the complete board layout offer differing designs. The X58 Eclipse brings back MSI’s famous Turbo button, which was introduced many many years ago and offers what amounts to one-touch overclocking. There is some speculation over whether or not this button has anything to do with Turbo Mode (an interesting power budgeting feature on Nehalem), but from what we’ve seen working with Nehalem, Turbo Mode is handled completely within the BIOS.

Foxconn’s X58 board, called Renaissance, features the same sort of physical layout as the X58 eclipse and is devoid of the nForce 200 chip. Renaissance, which will likely be released as part of Foxconn’s Quantum Force line, features 4 PCI-E x16 slots. Again, since there are no official specs posted anywhere, the electrical configuration of these slots remains unknown. Pictures of the board can be found at techPowerUp.

Pictures of the ASUS and Gigabyte boards have also leaked onto the net. The ASUS P6T Deluxe, a non-ROG X58 has shown up on bit-tech.net without an nForce 200 chip, though ASUS has promised to release an SLI capable ROG X58 board in the future. The P6T-Deluxe has 3 PCI-e x16 slots, and although no official specs have been posted, it is pretty obvious that the blue and white ones will allow for dual x16 operation. The Gigabyte board, to be launched as the GA-X58-DS4, actually has 4 PCI-e X16 slots right next to each other. We question this design decision, since the only thing you could do with that kind of configuration is either four (hot) Radeon HD4850 cards in CrossFireX, or some kind of crazy ass water-cooled configuration of other ATI cards. We suspect that the blue slots run at x16 electrically until you put something in the orange slots, and then it switches to x16, x8, x8, and then to 4 x8 when the fourth card is added. The early picture of the board also features a northbridge with water cooling barbs.

As far as we know, only MSI and ASUS have committed to building X58 boards with nForce 200, and those products will come after the initial release.

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