Inq: SLI with 4 GPUs coming

[Florin]

Our Chinese colleagues managed to get a picture of the motherboard that can accommodate four graphic cards and you can take a look at it here. This is something that you will see toward the end of the year if not even alter.

For the ones that plans to get new Nvidia two by 16 PCIe slots Nforce 4 motherboards you can expect that such boards might be able to accommodate two Asus or Gigabyte dual GPU cards. You can find some details about the Asus Geforce dual 7800GT card here.

Full story at the Inq.

Some pics at HKEPC (Chinese).

Looks like the upcoming 90.x Deton^H^H^H^H^HForceWare drivers might support this in two ways: Either by running 4 videocards on such rare boards as the Gigabyte GA-8N SLI Quad Royal, which provides 4 x8 PCIE slots, or by running 2 dual cards like the Asus Extreme N7800GT Dual (although these dual cards do not yet provide an SLI connector) on 'SLI32' boards or even, presumably, on any old SLI rig.

Uses other than bragging rights or space heating purposes?

 

[AlNom]

Buddy had better be running quad Apple 30" cinema displays for games. I cannot even begin to imagine how CPU limited the system will be...

 

[see colon]

horray for the "physics on the GPU" and GPGPU camps.

 

[BlueTsunami]

If I take a fan, place it in front of my PC with this motherboard and 4 7800GTX's and have it ocelate from side to side..will it adiquitly heat my room?

 

[Florin]

This does make me wonder if the SLI connection protocol could've been designed to allow for more than 2 hosts to be present.

Could it perhaps be a bus type setup, which would theoretically allow for a new type of extended SLI connector that would bridge up to 4 cards? I think it's more likely that it's just a point to point system, which would mean that any constellation with more than 2 cards would have to resort to using the PCIE bus for communication.

In any case, I've read that the newer 2.0 versions of Gigabyte's 3D1 dual GPU card series will feature SLI connectors, so that would at least make the 2 x 2 SLI setup a very real possibility with these new 90.xx drivers.

 

[Megadrive1988]

interesting, but ultimately it would be a big waste of money to invest in a 4-GPU PC configuration, be it 4 cards with 1 GPU each or 2 dual-GPU cards. PC games never take advantage of the highest end configurations as we all know.


what i want is a new closed-box system, be it computer or console, like the Amiga or NEO-GEO, with 4 GPUs. compete with PS3 and X360.

 

[Slides]

What about 4 dual GPU cards? :smile:

 

[Florin]

There are probably diminishing returns with each additional card, but still it's a fascinating what-if proposition. And even if having more than 2 cores would only add something like 20-30%, that could still mean grabbing back the absolute performance crown in consumer graphics.

Still curious about the SLI connector possibilities. Just how scalable is the S in SLI?

 

[volt]

thinking of power...600-700 Watts ?

 

[Kanyamagufa]

What about 4 dual GPU cards? :smile:

Now you're talkin'.

The PC would have to be next to a window to meet the cooling requirements (an air conditioner blowing into the box).

Either that or you must live in the artic. You know, for those polar LAN parties.