Maximum PC

I Recently updated my video card drivers for my 9800gx2's to find out that I am no longer able to run quad SLI. A quick look into Nvidia's website shows that quad SLI is only enabled on 9800gx2's for Vista or W7 operating systems. I'm still running XP on both of my systems with 9800's in them. So, now I'm stuck with either dual SLI, or upgrading two systems to W7.

First they cave to Intel allowing them to put SLI on their chipsets, now the jump in bed with MS, trying to force me into an OS upgrade?

Now, I could roll back to my older drivers, but I like a lot of the features of the newer ones. I guess I'll have to try to find an archive of a driver version that's in between what I had and the newest.

You know, I usually despise Nvidia's underhanded marketing practices, but this time I'm with Nvidia on this one. Why exactly do you think they should waste their time supporting a 7-year-old OS that doesn't even support the highest level of DirectX that their aging 8800 series has support for? The architecture of Windows XP is very different than that of Windows Vista or Windows 7, which means that they have to waste time writing drivers and game profiles for XP, which delays updates for people who are not running an ancient OS.

I think its time to roll the drivers back to the last version that worked and leave it there. XP's time is over and its time for a lot of people to come to terms with that. Doesn't mean you can't still use XP, but you can't expect companies to support it forever.

Also, you do realize that was an EXTREMELY good thing, right? Nvidia chipsets were always inferior to Intel chipsets in performance and overclocking ability. Additionally, Nvidia was only in the chipset business so they could force users to buy more proprietary junk from them, because if they don't... sorry, no SLi! Standardization is a good thing. Now you can run CrossFire and SLi on the same standardized, stable motherboard with an Intel chipset. How is that a bad thing?

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13790/5

Really!? Memory peformance alone was better on Nvidia than Intel chipsets. And NOT ALL Intel chipsets were ideal for OCing anything to include Celerons. Then there is also the fact that Intel pre X58/55 line chipsets almost NEVER has 2 16x PCIe slots as they alsmot always fell to 8x/8x with 2 slots populated witha GPU.

Well, I can always count on you to shoot me down, even when the topic is dead. Thanks.

As for the rest. Woo, one article. I don't even know what to think about reviews any more, I've seen it happen too many times where people can pull any article out of anywhere to prove anything. Also, they don't include X48 or P45, both of which had hugely improved memory controllers over P/X 3x. I know that not all Intel chipsets were monster OCers, but Nvidia chipsets weren't really ever incredible Overclockers. 680i was good for its time and that's about it. Notice how Nvidia chipsets don't really hold many overclocking records?

As for PCIe, it wasn't necessary at the time- The fastest cards out there didn't really need the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0 and were 2.0- the 9800GT, more or less the biggest mainstream card at the time, was perfectly fine running at x8. For those with faster cards, Intel had X48, which had 32 PCIe lanes.

I've read before, on these forums as well, that OCing with Intel chipsets were easier and usually held up better than most nVidia chipsets. I recall a quote who I believe it was from either occiferfriendly or quakendude about their experiences and I quote it to the best of my abilities: "The nVidia chipset got just as far as the Intel did, but the Intel got their faster and easier with less stability issues.