Slashdot Mirror

http://www.tomshardware.com/site/vgacharts/index.h tml

OK it's not exactly what you are looking for.
but it should give you an idea on how they scale.

http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=listarticles&secid=13

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2717

http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/326/

http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=213

http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/9529

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvi dias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/

There was a famous video clip made by Tom's hardware in 2002 (or something like that), where they took off the heatsink off an Athlon XP and Pentium 4 while the CPU processing lots of data:
http://www4.tomshardware.com/images/THG_CPU_Coolin g.zip
The AMD melted in 10 seconds, the temperature rising to something like 350 degrees Celcius, while the Pentium 4 lowered its FSB and continued working without any cooling for some time.
However I think the situation would be the opposite today.

It's much worse than that! AMD's Thermal Design Power is set higherthan the Maximum power used (worst case scenario), whereas Intel's refers to the Average power. This can translate into a difference of approx 50 watts.

Examples of the actual power consumption differences:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/05/09/amd/page20. html

Here is a detailed discussion:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article169-page3.htm l

It's been said that the 360 is equivalent to two Geforce 6800 Ultras. Depending on which benchmark you pick, there are plenty of sub-$300 cards that are faster than a 6800 Ultra SLI rig. Better looking too. Try running your 360 at 1200p (widescreen, of course).

It's been said that the 360 is equivalent to two Geforce 6800 Ultras. Depending on which benchmark you pick, there are plenty of sub-$300 cards that are faster than a 6800 Ultra SLI rig. Better looking too. Try running your 360 at 1200p (widescreen, of course).

It's been said that the 360 is equivalent to two Geforce 6800 Ultras. Depending on which benchmark you pick, there are plenty of sub-$300 cards that are faster than a 6800 Ultra SLI rig. Better looking too. Try running your 360 at 1200p (widescreen, of course).

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/21/a_look_at_a mds_socket_am2_platform/

Why is there such an editorial delay at slashdot all the time? I'm not new here, but Jeez.

...that he received a ThG diploma...

Jumping off point indeed. They stock virtually all of VIA's mini-ITX parts. From what I read in this Tom's Hardware Mini-ITX roundup, I think that the newer C3 hardware should work just fine. I'm a bit concerned that the older stuff would have a hard time meeting my customer's needs. DVD playback is a kind of baseline for required performance IMO.

I think I'll make a SP 130000 based system my next project. If the dollars and cents work out, this may find its way into my inventory.

I would have jumped all over the P M, except there was no desktop gear for it; unless I bought a notebook PC and did some expensive hacking...

Examples:

• AOpen i915GMm-HFS motherboard
• AOpen XC Cube MZ915-M barebones
• AOpen MP915 MiniPC
• DFI 915GM-MGF motherboard
• Shuttle XPC SD11G5 barebones
• Shuttle XPC M1000 Media Center system

Tom's Hardware has a June 2005 review on the AOpen I915Gmm-HFS motherboard:

The Next Generation of Cool: AOpen's 37 Watt Pentium M Desktop PC

There is no advantage over ML cores, and hell, we've known the Athlon 64 desktop can operate under 30w full-load since the release of the Winchester core. In fact, I bought a Winchester core when they were released because of the low power consumption.

Here is an early test of the Winchester's DC power consumption. Note that these cores have even lower power consumption than the Turions tested because they use a smaller cache (512k versus 1MB).

The MT cores have a slight advantage over desktop processors, but that also comes at a hefty price. See my previous posts for more information.

Really, I think they started this review with the idea of providing a cheap and low-power upgrade path for Socket 754 users, but when you consider the price premium of Turions over desktop processors, and the incompatibility with older mainboards, this just isn't a good idea at all. I figure they just finished the review for the sake of finishing it.

Here is an interesting battery life benchmark at tomshardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/16/will_core_d uo_notebooks_trade_battery_life_for_quicker_respon se/page21.html

Maybe not in CPU speeds, but in performance testing and battery life, Intel still has a pretty good advantage.

In desktop gaming AMD generally beats the snot out of Intel - you can see that by reading the CPU testing here, so it's no surprise (to me, at least) that high end gamer rigs prefer AMD.

Anandtech

Techreport

Neoseeker

http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/02/16/dual_displa y_gaming_bigs_up/

Currently I'm running a Leadtek 6800GT on two Dell 2001FP monitors. I noticed that one of the monitors ends up going black for a moment with some screens, and refreshing afterwards.

I did a little bit of looking into it, and believe that the problem is with DVI compliance on one of the video outputs. Tom's had a good article on it:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/29/the_tft_con nection/

So my question ultimately becomes: are there any problems running any of these cards on two monitors, at 1600x1200? Are they fully DVI compliant without reduced blanking?

Heat source management
Do not put large transformers in HVAC space.
Encourage the use of dc power supplies. (12 24 48 72)
http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/it.A /id.300/.f efficiency %95
http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/it.A /id.417/.f efficiency %97

this is only %70 at full load http://www.powerstream.com/DC-PC-48V.htm other units can be %30-%75 see http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/01/22/getting_the _right_power/page3.html and http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/11/how_thg_tes ts_power_supplies/page3.html for more info.

Cooling
Take a look at heat pumps for local heat dumps.
Do not run your ac on UPS

Peak shaving
Run your generators during peak loads
Use the heat from your gen set to cool the datacenter (continuous-cycle absorption cooling) http://www.nh3tech.org/absorption.html
Use solar / wind to recharge the battery bank.

smart non data center power use
turn off elevators/automatic doors during peak usage
use efficient low level/low power (led) lighting.

Have your users pay a heat tax per 100wt

Look not only at the cost upfront but the total cost over the life of the data center. There are a whole bunch more, but it depends on your needs/design/issues.

Heat source management
Do not put large transformers in HVAC space.
Encourage the use of dc power supplies. (12 24 48 72)
http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/it.A /id.300/.f efficiency %95
http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/it.A /id.417/.f efficiency %97

this is only %70 at full load http://www.powerstream.com/DC-PC-48V.htm other units can be %30-%75 see http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/01/22/getting_the _right_power/page3.html and http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/11/how_thg_tes ts_power_supplies/page3.html for more info.

Cooling
Take a look at heat pumps for local heat dumps.
Do not run your ac on UPS

Peak shaving
Run your generators during peak loads
Use the heat from your gen set to cool the datacenter (continuous-cycle absorption cooling) http://www.nh3tech.org/absorption.html
Use solar / wind to recharge the battery bank.

smart non data center power use
turn off elevators/automatic doors during peak usage
use efficient low level/low power (led) lighting.

Have your users pay a heat tax per 100wt

Look not only at the cost upfront but the total cost over the life of the data center. There are a whole bunch more, but it depends on your needs/design/issues.

How 'bout when the toaster is running linux- on RAID:
(http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/01/raid_on_ry e/)

If I am going to spend $8000 on a ovenfridge, then I want to be able to "call it up" and have it bring the cold beer and hot pizza to me, otherwise not interested.

Would you actually trust this thing not to burn down your house?

People trust AMD processors not to burn down their house either, but check these out:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2001/09/17/hot_spot/

http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArti cle.asp?ID=193

this is SO lastyear for /.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/07/can_gigabyt e/page8.html
look at 2 cards in raid0

the I-RAM2 is gonna come out Q1 2006, 300 G/ps sata, stick in a 5.25 drive bay,perhaps with external power, 8 slots and ddr2.

http://vr-zone.com/?i=3052
(the good stuff so we do not crash the vr-zone server)
Gigabyte for the first time has unveiled the specifications of their upcoming i-RAM 2 during HKEPC Tech-day. The i-RAM 2 will be using DDR2 memories instead of DDR1 and the data transfer interface is SATA 3Gb/s double of the current SATA 1.5 Gb/s. It will be externally housed with by means of an external case or fitted into the 5.25" bay with eSATA interfaces. The number of memory slots are expected to double to 8 and you can have up to 16GB max memory. The expected announcement of i-RAM 2 is targeted for February next year.

http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/hard_drives /RAM_Drive/Gigabyte/I-RAM/index.htm
review of I-RAM1

so assuming that I-RAM2 scales as well as I-RAM1,2 of these should get 500 G/sec or so.not bad for a 64gb drive.

now WHY are people doing this, and not just adding memory?well, assuming i have a nifty MB such as
http://www.iwill.net/product_2.asp?p_id=102

i can have up to 32 gb of memory on the MB if we look at the o/s selection guide for windows...

32-bit 64-bit
XP Pro 4 GB / 1-2 CPUs 128 GB / 1-2 CPUs

2003, Standard 4 GB / 1-4 CPUs 32 GB / 1-4 CPUs
2003, Enterprise 32 GB / 1-8 CPUs 1 terabyte / 1-8 CPUs
2003 SP1, Ent 64 GB / 1-8 CPUs 1 terabyte / 1-8 CPUs

2003, Datacenter 64 GB / 1-32 CPUs 1 terabyte / 1-64 CPUs
2003 SP1, Data 128 GB/ 1-32 CPU 1 terabyte / 1-64 CPUs

we see that in the 32 bit land, 2003E is the only thing that starts to come close to using that amount of memory. and its 1-2k (USD)

so assuming i'm made of money, and have stuffed my box with $5k of memory and i want to get a little more boost out of it, i can go 15k rpm SAS (with extra cost, and heatloads) or i can go 6x I-RAM2, raid 0. 96 gig of space at 1200 G/s throughput.

other programs like, mail servers, proxies, web servers, and Photoshop requires lots of fast swap space, and most people are unable to use more than 4 gigs of memory, (those running 32 bit windows).

Its a nice product, IF you have maxed out the 4gb limit for your o/s and/or you have to have ubber fast swap/cache.

back when i was at a CDN this would have been a no brainier to raid up in an external chassis (I-RAM1) and connect to a 16/24 port sata controller. We would not have cared that it was only as big as the large sata drive and cost as much as a new car,it got the job done.

There is a place for silicon drives that do not cost as much as a car, if you do not see the need for yourself, great. I would rather wait for I-RAM2 to come out and use it where it makes sense,wherever i need a huge honken bit of fast space.

My backup server is a good example. I have a few boxes dumping deltas as fast as they can across a couple gigE ports to a backup server, so that server can toss them to LTO.

my backups are only as fast as the slowest device, having a I-RAM2 raid 0, works for me. the other boxes are waiting on their local/network issues, not on my backup servers slow large raid. (the x-fer to the slow raid can happen whenever, as long as i have enough space in the I-RAM2 array for the next dump.

right now disk is the slow part in the local box,this addresses the issue

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html

What of this comparison indicates a clear Intel advantage in processing power?

I don't get it. I see all these posts about Intel roxorz with a vengance. AMD is slooow and consumes more power and produces more heat...etc. While all of those claims seem counter to the truth. AMD is waay behind they're using engraved cobblestone for processors for no apparent reason then they use 332 tera-amps and require about 2 nuclear fission reactors while producing more heat than the sun...which is ludacris, not the rapper, the state of plausability. All this and that processor can't even recalcualte a 4 cell excel sheet in 3.5 years.

I call shenanigans, get your brooms.

WTF? are there intel shills in the slashdot crowd or am I not looking at the facts correctly.

From the stuff I've read that wasn't published by Intel, AMD wins in Wattage per processing score and in the thermodynamics category as well. From some of the crap I see here, AMD is akin to using a 10 megawatt light that puts out about 3 candle power but dips into the infra red range then straight to heat energy at an astonishing rate. I just don't see that being true with independant studies.

What do you mean? Cooling your PC with cooking oil is completely practical ;P

Tom's Hardware reports that Intel Yonah processor prototypes have energy consumption problems. HardMac also points to this article, by the way... This can explain why Intel and Apple are delaying the availability of the MacBook Pro (ugly, ugly name, bad)

All the statistics i'm seeing show that the Core Duo beats the Turion hands down by as much as 25%. Also, the Pentium M outperforms the Turion as well. For example:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/16/will_core_d uo_notebooks_trade_battery_life_for_quicker_respon se/page16.html

> Considering Apple switched to Intel for performance per watt, and also considering Intel wins that
> race by a wide margin over the entire industry

Where did you get that from? Intel may be about to catch up with AMD in the near future, but at the moment AMD is way ahead on perfomance per watt. AMD's Athlon A64 Venice processors, which have been around since June, only use a little over 30 watts. Intel processors with comparable performance use at least twice that.

Here are some numbers for complete systems:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/13/the_amd_and _intel_energy_crisis/page16.html

The fact of the matter is that several intel products (the P4 anyone?) were notorious running benchmarks and not much else.

That can be clearly seen in the mother of all CPU charts on Tom's Hardware. Generally, and especially in the gaming benchmarks, the AMD chips take most of the top spots - apart from some of the synthetic benchmarks (3DMark05 Futuremark especially), in which the first dozen or so places go to Intel chips.

Se for example the 3dMark Futuremark, which Intel utterly owns, and the Far Cry or UT 2004 benchmarks, which AMD dominate. (The Doom 3 benchmarks are a little more neck-and-neck)

The fact of the matter is that several intel products (the P4 anyone?) were notorious running benchmarks and not much else.

That can be clearly seen in the mother of all CPU charts on Tom's Hardware. Generally, and especially in the gaming benchmarks, the AMD chips take most of the top spots - apart from some of the synthetic benchmarks (3DMark05 Futuremark especially), in which the first dozen or so places go to Intel chips.

Se for example the 3dMark Futuremark, which Intel utterly owns, and the Far Cry or UT 2004 benchmarks, which AMD dominate. (The Doom 3 benchmarks are a little more neck-and-neck)

The fact of the matter is that several intel products (the P4 anyone?) were notorious running benchmarks and not much else.

That can be clearly seen in the mother of all CPU charts on Tom's Hardware. Generally, and especially in the gaming benchmarks, the AMD chips take most of the top spots - apart from some of the synthetic benchmarks (3DMark05 Futuremark especially), in which the first dozen or so places go to Intel chips.

Se for example the 3dMark Futuremark, which Intel utterly owns, and the Far Cry or UT 2004 benchmarks, which AMD dominate. (The Doom 3 benchmarks are a little more neck-and-neck)

The fact of the matter is that several intel products (the P4 anyone?) were notorious running benchmarks and not much else.

That can be clearly seen in the mother of all CPU charts on Tom's Hardware. Generally, and especially in the gaming benchmarks, the AMD chips take most of the top spots - apart from some of the synthetic benchmarks (3DMark05 Futuremark especially), in which the first dozen or so places go to Intel chips.

Se for example the 3dMark Futuremark, which Intel utterly owns, and the Far Cry or UT 2004 benchmarks, which AMD dominate. (The Doom 3 benchmarks are a little more neck-and-neck)

Actually, the new Yonah processor is significantly faster than the Turion. Check out these benchmarks:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/16/will_core_d uo_notebooks_trade_battery_life_for_quicker_respon se/

Promise actually has a decent RAID 6 controller using SATA. Tom's Hardware reviewed it and two others a few weeks back: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/02/safer_6_for _raid_controllers/

The link to the Firmware upgrades isn't available on the website. You have to email them to source it (which I am waiting for at the moment)

As for the speed... Firmware wont fix "Intel's Xscale IOP80219 chip is too slow for the XOR calculations of a RAID 5 array." but I am attempting to source the upgrades none the less

I've been putting together the specs for such a beast. I decided to go with SATA for cheap drives and "SATA-II" (or whatever you want to call it, since there isn't a standard name for NCQ and 3.0Gbps support) for future-proofing.

1) The natural first choice was 3ware. 12 port SATA-II controller (9550SX-12), for about $800. 3ware products are very well supported on Linux. The only downside is that it's a PCI-X device (this is NOT "PCI Express"!), and PCI-X busses are generally only found on very high end motherboards for servers and workstations. Any athlon motherboard or single-processor opteron board claiming to have PCI-X is lying, they really mean PCI express (AMD chipsets did not support PCI-X at all until around the time dual opteron motherboards were being created)

So since I didn't want to spend $500 on a motherboard that had built in scsi raid, support for 16GB of ram and dual opteron processors just to use that $800 card, I looked around some more...

2) And found a serious contender, the 12 port Areca 8x PCIe ARC-1230 (also about $800). While most low end motherboards don't provide an 8x PCI Express slot, they DO provide a 16x slot which will work just fine for this card (after all, this will be the fileserver, so a motherboard with crappy built in video will do, we're not playing Doom 3 here). Linux drivers are provided as source, even including a kernel tree patch which will build the driver into the kernel rather than as a module, making booting directly from the RAID controller easy.

Slap the Areca into Tom's Hardware's 37 watt computer (motherboard has built in GigE, but pentium-Ms are 32 bit processors, making giant files/filesystems a pain. An Athlon 64+cheap mini-ATX can be had cheaper, but uses more power), add in a stack of 10 watt 400GB WD Caviar Raid Edition 2 drives, and you're set for a very low power fileserver with a lot of storage.

Now, my turn to "ask slashdot":

Where do I get a 250-300 watt powersupply with 12 SATA power connectors?

Alternatively, do the SATA drive cages (like 3ware's RDC-400-SATA (pdf) have their own SATA power connectors built in and use standard molex connectors on the outside? Do I need special cages to support 3Gbps drives (ok, not a serious problem for now, but futureproofing)? 3ware's website says it'll work, their product PDF doesn't.

Promise DOES sell at least one RAID 6 card: the Promise SuperTrak EX8350.

And if someone is looking for some RAID card reviews... Here's a couple links:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/2006/01/02/safer_6_fo r_raid_controllers/
http://www6.tomshardware.com/2005/10/31/sata_spell s_trouble_for_scsi_raid/
(Yeah Yeah, THG... Still a good roundup and worth the read if you're looking for a card - jump to the feature table on the last page if you don't want to read the whole thing)

Lots of people seem to mention the 3ware cards, but at that price I'd rather get the nice Areca ARC1220 instead (which is also PCIe - no PCI-X req'd)

I'm looking for a similar solution, but even though these cards look very nice, I'll definitely go with software RAID5 too, those controllers are too expensive... I'd rather spend the extra money these controllers cost on more storage (that 500$ will buy around 1TB).

Promise DOES sell at least one RAID 6 card: the Promise SuperTrak EX8350.

And if someone is looking for some RAID card reviews... Here's a couple links:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/2006/01/02/safer_6_fo r_raid_controllers/
http://www6.tomshardware.com/2005/10/31/sata_spell s_trouble_for_scsi_raid/
(Yeah Yeah, THG... Still a good roundup and worth the read if you're looking for a card - jump to the feature table on the last page if you don't want to read the whole thing)

Lots of people seem to mention the 3ware cards, but at that price I'd rather get the nice Areca ARC1220 instead (which is also PCIe - no PCI-X req'd)

I'm looking for a similar solution, but even though these cards look very nice, I'll definitely go with software RAID5 too, those controllers are too expensive... I'd rather spend the extra money these controllers cost on more storage (that 500$ will buy around 1TB).

This is the intended link above for Winchester versus Prescott

The original poster meant well, but AMD is really about 2-3x more efficient for the same performance level on the desktop.

This is still an impressive figure, and it is even more impressive when you consider how much less power Athlon 64 processors use at idle than P4 processors (about 5-10x less, with Cool 'n Quiet enabled).

Athlon 64 processors are 3x more efficient at load than their Prescott counterparts (90w+ load). They are about 2x more efficient at load than Cedar Mill (~60w load, .65nm, reduced core voltage).

http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/15/3/page21.ht ml">Read the power usage of Prescott versus Winchester here (this is the raw power supplied by the voltage regulators to the processor, not the total system power)

Here is the total system power consumption comparison between Cedar Mill and Prescott. The reduction is about 30w at load.

Of course, this will all change once Conroe is released. But, I welcome Intel's return to competitiveness on the desktop. AMD has been floundering about since the move to 90nm, canceling next-generation chip projects, and doing a half-assed job of competing in the mobile market. They need this wakeup call.

Not 100% true,

I have just "converted" some clients (3 specifically) from Intel to AMD, they where die hard "ignorant brand-name buying" users which believed that Intel is better than AMD (and VIA and any other CPU manufacturers) just because they saw more commercials on TV.

What I told them is the tale of the NN processing bits, I told them "do you remember a long time ago, when machines used Windows 3.1, well, when you changed from that to Windows 95, you used a machine that was 32 bits, instead of 16 bits. Well, that was in 1995! now AMD has new processors which are 64 bits, thus can use Windows XP 64 instead of the normal Windows XP which is still 32 bits!" .

I know my tale is not 100% accurate or complete but, I did those people a favor, they spent quite less using AMD and that also showed them that GHZ is not everything (that along with "the mother of all charts" of tom's hardware".

Of course, the computers I am talking about are setup by me, the problem with brand computers (dell, hp, gateway, etc) is that they do not offer alternatives, or the AMD alternatives always seem pretty bad

my computer only uses 37 watts, you insensitive clod http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/06/21/the_next_ge neration_of_cool/

I agree that it is a valid question. The CPU is just one part of a computer, and depending on what you do it may not even be the most important.

I have a ATI 9600 / 128. It was about $120 dollars when I bought it, which seemed reasonable at the time. High-end graphics cards go for $400 dollars, and can be doubled up for an $800 gaming graphics system. I haven't seen quads, but they must be right around the corner.

Oddly enough the one bottleneck that kept coming up during developing the one PC game I've worked on was RAM. If you ever ran out of RAM, your system went through the floor. If you could speed up your RAM bus, your game performance went up in almost direct proportion. There is just so much data in modern games (real or superfluous), that faster and better can be really helpful, and if you ever fall below a certain threshold (my game was about 512MB) your performance is screwed.

YMMV, but my gaming rig came in at about 700 dollars with specs that most people would be quite pleased with... 1GB RAM, 200GB silent HDD, a motherboard that didn't crap out in the first week, a 300W psu / "silent" antec sonata case, video capture card, 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk drives, a DVD+-RW dual layer drive... Basically, there is no need to spend more than 1,000 dollars to get a really solid home computer, including monitor. (If you're in the market for a server, you have special needs which may not be covered here)

According to toms, in most cases the 955 couldn't even wax the X2 4800 in most benches.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/05/the_65_nm_p entium_d_900s_coming_out_party/page20.html

Even though it is 65 nm it still can't even beat the X2 for power consumption either.

And to the person who said go out and buy an X2 you've got it all wrong (well somewhat). The most cost effective cpu right now is the 939 dual core opteron for its legendary overclockability. My 170 was installed yesterday and I had no problems bringing it up to 2.4ghz running cool. X2 4800 performance for half the price and I'm not even pushing it at all. I've got no doubts that 2.6 is easily attainable. All for maybe quarter the price of an fx-60.

Those of you looking for a $1000 cpu might be wise to look into the 940 dualcore opterons that can be dualed on a board for 4 cores. Whilst you might pay a few more hundred dollars nobody can deny that 4 core is going to beat the pants off anything 2 core.

Oh but of course most games don't support threading so you're better off with a single core still if you are a gamer.

Hope that helps

Ive been using the Abit Fatal1ty AN8 for a while now. Had a few quirks at first, but after a bios update its been working like it should. Im quite happy about it - and despite some reluntance to utilize the guru panel at first, I must admit that I get a kick out of the LED and front jacks.

Setup: Athlon 3800+ Venice Core, 1 GB ram (Too little), Asus Geforce N7800 GTX (yup; I am a gamer. Neither pro nor clan player through)

I based my purchase on this: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/05/13/life_in_the _fast_lane/page3.html

Here is an extract from the conclusion of that toms hardware article: At the end of day, two motherboards receive our recommendation: both the Abit Fatal1ty AN8 and MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum Edition offer well-appointed and flexible boards based on top-grade components. These units shine above all through their range of functions and overclocking abilities - the wealth of experience of both manufacturers in the enthusiast market is obvious.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_t he_fans/page11.html

You can see what look like hundreds of little stress cracks forming in the clear plastic they used for the case already. How long did they have this put together, a week? At that rate, it seems the case will fracture in just a few weeks. Of course, they say they used plexiglas which has poor solvent resistance..

Three cup disappearing pea.

Here's the link: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/14/sneak_previ ew_of_the_nvidia_quad_gpu_setup/.
What's most scary? Each of the cards has its own powerbrick.

its the double core card from asus

This reminds me of Asus's Quad 7800GT setup tested on Tom's Hardware a while ago, because it's such early tech, on most tests it was beaten by a two-GPU 7800GTX SLI setup and not everything ran properly, either. I'll way to see how this one turns out, but so far, I'm sceptical.

Sigh, it looks like the majors are finally catching up with my Onyx2. I remember back in the day seeing Indigo2 systems with Extreme (funny how SGI was even ahead of the curve on over using the word 'extreme' and the letter 'x') graphics which has 8 GEs on two multi-chip modules. Well though they're slow today they're still built like tanks, fun to use, and pretty as hell.

I say hell yeah to multiple GPUs! Finally. I hope they'll make Quadros for us 'professional users' which won't have Xs in the model name and will be on plain green PCB with regular heatsinks (remember the ones without the LEDs and holograms?).