When X58 was first announced there were rumours about its graphics card support. Would it get SLI approval from NVIDIA and would it still support Crossfire? - Originally NVIDIA specified that X58 would need to use an nForce 200 PCIe bridge chip to run SLI, but a lot of pressure was put on NVIDIA from all of the motherboard companies and SLI support was granted to X58 through a native setup allowing two or three cards. However, Intel’s 3-way SLI still requires a 16/8/8 setup; not the fastest out there, but still good enough. NVIDIA still recommended its nForce 200 chipset for best performance SLI.

To this end ASUS has finally produced its first X58 board paired with the nForce 200 chip. This has given ASUS the ability to provide the board three PCI Express x16 slots as well as three extra x16 slots in a variety of modes, which we will explain later.