NVIDIA Announces SLI LED Bridges
by Jarred Walton on September 23, 2014 1:25 PM ESTFor those that just can't get enough bling in their cases, NVIDIA today announced the availability of SLI LED bridges, available for the time being exclusively through the NVIDIA Store. Besides the obvious addition of LED lighting to the bridges, it's also worth noting that these are rigid bridges so the cards need to be in specific slots. There are three bridges available, two for 2-way SLI, one for systems where the cards are two slots apart and one for systems where the cards are three slots apart, with a third bridge for 3-way SLI with the cards spaced two slots apart.
The new LED SLI bridges were recently on display at NVIDIA's Game24 event, but this is the first time the bridges have been made available to the public. There are some caveats, unfortunately: for the time being the LED bridges are only available in the US/Canada at the NVIDIA Store. I suspect there will be some enterprising individuals that buy the bridges and then put them up on eBay or similar sites, but the other drawback is that the cost of the bridges is rather high already, so paying extra for non-North American markets will simply add to the price.
Speaking of which, the 2-way SLI LED bridges are priced at $29.99 while the 3-way SLI LED bridge will cost $39.99. That's not really very different from EVGA's existing illuminated 2-way SLI bridge and there's now a 3-way LED offering, but it's over four times the price of a normal 2-way or 3-way SLI bridge. Such is the price of bling.
As far as compatibility, the bridges are designed to work with all modern GTX cards with SLI support. NVIDIA specifically mentions the following products as being supported: GeForce GTX 770, GTX 780, GTX 780 Ti, GTX TITAN, GTX TITAN Black, GTX 970 and GTX 980. These are for NVIDIA reference designs, so the bridges may not work on cards with custom cooling solutions. GeForce Experience 1.7 or later is also required for the LED Visualizer, which allows control of the LEDs.
Source: NVIDIA
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dragantoe - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
I still like AMD's crossfire bridge better.eanazag - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Are talking about the PCIe bus on the newest cards? I would agree with that.dragantoe - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
yephojnikb - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
yep, nvidia needs to come to 2013 and dump the sli bridge alltogether.nathanddrews - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Yup.dragantoe - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
woah woah woah, since when were there led's in 2013?invinciblegod - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Hey, development cycles are 2 years! Got wait some time for the respective companies' photocopiers to warm up.Samus - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
AMD has severe microstutter issues in 2-way crossfire because of the lack of direct GPU syncing.wolrah - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
Bridgeless SLI has existed since before CrossFire was a thing. Seriously, look it up. ForceWare 77.76, dated July 2005, enables bridgeless SLI on the 6600LE. CrossFire was released in September 2005.At least the 337 and 340 drivers still mention updates to it in release notes, so it has to be supported on more modern cards as well.
Considering they have the technology and continue to support it, yet don't enable it on anything remotely high end, I have to imagine that there's a reason for that and it's probably not sales of SLI bridges.
WinterCharm - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
I'd be willing to bet it's the lack of availability of PCIE lanes... why be limited with that on most boards, when you can just have an external bridge, and guarantee a good experience?