I am building a new computer and need to buy a motherboard. I will be using an Intel Q9450 and have two geforce 9600GT's in SLI.

Does the motherboard I buy have to say it has the NVIDIA nForce chipset? Or will any board with two 16x PCIe slots work? If it's the latter, does the nForce chipset provide any advantages for SLI configurations?

Thanks.

If you want SLi, you'll have to get a board with an nForce chipset. Since you obviously have no problem over-paying for hardware, there are plenty of nForce 790i Ultra SLI / DDR3 boards for about $300.

SLI is a Nvidia technology. There is no other SLI. Crossfire is the ATI equivelent. Look at the links below. There is a chart in the first link. Pay attention to the various chipset features. Some chipsets will only have PCIe 8x when runing SLI. Others 16x.

http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/35382...

http://www.slizone.com/page/home.html