Graphics Card Compatibility With The Motherboard

[Meaple]

I feel like a nub for asking this question, but how can you tell if you can only have one or the other cards, or both, on the same motherboard at anyone time? I know that there is a Lucid chip but still.... I am really not getting this.

I also apologise if this has been asked before but I did search the forum.

 

[hmmblah]

What board do you have and what chipset does it have?

 

[alienware]

You can run more than one card in a motherboard that -

1. Has more than one full length PCIE slot.

2. Supports either Crossfire or SLI (if you want to strap them)

3. Has Lucid, which intercepts the DX signals and straps normally non compliant cards for a performance increase*

*If the drivers work.

 

[Meaple]

What board do you have and what chipset does it have?

It's a general question.

So if a motherboard says in the specs that it supports CF and SLI, you can mix and match cards from AMD and Nvidia?

 

[hmmblah]

No. You just need multiple PCIe slots to have additional cards. The board doesn't need SLI or CF to do this and in fact won't use those with mixed brands.

 

[Meaple]

Getting the cards to mix in the first place was my initial question. You need the Lucid chip to mix and match?

 

[alienware]

The only way to 'mix' a Geforce and a Radeon and strap them is with Lucid. That's it, there is no other way. However, Lucid is flakey at the best of times sadly. It needs more work and better drivers.

 

[Bocephus]

AS Alien says Mobo's with the Lucid chip is the only way to mix different brand GPU's. Lucid is too buggy still...why mix cards in the first place? Sell one card to a friend or whoever and buy a matching card. nuff said...hehe

 

[Meaple]

Lovely, thanks for clearing that part up. Now, I have always thought that if you had an Intel CPU then you could only use a Nvidia card and the same if you used an AMD CPU. How does that work?

 

[hmmblah]

Lovely, thanks for clearing that part up. Now, I have always thought that if you had an Intel CPU then you could only use a Nvidia card and the same if you used an AMD CPU. How does that work?

There's no limitation like that. AMD chipsets don't support SLI though, just Crossfire, while Intel chipsets like the x58 support both SLI and Crossfire.

If you are running a single GPU though, the CPU brand does not matter.

 

[Meaple]

Now I fully understand

thank you all for clearing it up for me

all the best and have a great christmas