AM3+ SLI capable boards

kfish2oo2

Title says it all really - I'm looking for an AM3 or AM3+ board thats capable of running two GTX 460's in SLI. I know AMD and nVidia haven't been on the best of terms since the AMD/ATI merger and that SLI capable AMD boards were extremely hard to come by at one point, but I hear rumblings that there's a few SLI boards knocking around nowadays. I've also seen a few people mentioning a BIOS hack of some sort?

Any info would be much appreciated. There's no pressing time limit on this - I would be aiming to buy the board in the next month or two (maybe 3!) and my total budget would be around €120 for the motherboard and 4GB+ of DDR3 RAM.

EDIT: Oh, and if anyone knows of a cost effective way to switch to all AMD architecture (AMD mobo and ATI crad), I'm all ears! I do love my GTX 460 but if it would be cheaper to go all AMD then I'm all willing. Student wallets don't stretch far.

af_thefragile

Asus has a few that support sli:
http://www3.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=47590&agid=1232
http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM3Plus/M5A99X_EVO/

marco_polo

SLI is officially suppported for all 990FX based boards, as nVidia finally agreed to to license the technology to AMD .

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/990fx-sli-am3,2953.html

Monotype

Any 900 series AM3+ board will do, you shouldn't need the SLI patch any more.
So long as it's capable of using two cards unrestricted - i.e., watch out for boards from some of the 970 series and below which have a second PCI-E slot limited at x4 speed.

Have you already got a processor?

Two 460s is hard to beat without substantial funds with and given that funds are low, I'd wait until another generation of cards comes out unless you can sell them.

kfish2oo2

I have a full system already:

AMD Phenom II x4955 BE
4GBs DDR2 RAM
Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3
320GB Seagate HDD (7,200)
GTX 460 (768MB)
700watt PSU

I want to get a new motherboard and DDR3 RAM because my current board (which was a refurbed unit that only cost €30) only has one PCIe x16 slot and I could use faster (and more) RAM as I do a lot of multimedia work (video editing, high resolution picture editing, animation etc). I want to get the second GTX 460 for BF3 and Red Orchestra 2 - I know my current card will run them both just fine, but I want to get back into competitive gaming when BF3 drops and would need the extra FPS - and SLI would be the most cost effective route.

I saw that there's a GTX 460x2 unit out at the moment, but the cheapest I could find them for was something like €350, which is a lot more than the cost of a new motherboard, RAM and a second GTX 460!

deejer

Hopefully in a month to 6weeks Bulldozer should be released and you will have a better idea of what AM3+ board to go for as at the moment all reviews are being done with Phenom chips. You would imagin they should react differently with AM3+ MBs. That should still leave you with enough time before BF3 comes out.