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Nvidia Reintroduces SLI with GeForce 6800 Series
An anonymous reader writes "It's 1998 all over again gamers. A major release from ID software, and an expensive hotrod video card all in one year. However, rather than Quake and the Voodoo2 SLI, it's Doom3 and Nvidia SLI.
Hardware Analysis has the scoop, 'Exact performance figures are not yet available, but Nvidia's SLI concept has already been shown behind closed doors by one of the companies working with Nvidia on the SLI implementation. On early driver revisions which only offered non-optimized dynamic load-balancing algorithms their SLI configuration performed 77% faster than a single graphics card. However Nvidia has told us that prospective performance numbers should show a performance increase closer to 90% over that of a single graphics card. There are a few things that need to be taken into account however when you're considering buying an SLI configuration. First off you'll need a workstation motherboard featuring two PCI-E-x16 slots which will also use the more expensive Intel Xeon processors. Secondly you'll need two identical, same brand and type, PCI-E GeForce 6800 graphics cards.'"
These cards are expensive enough, now they are suggesting we buy 2!?
I guess if you have a lot of money and want to play with a (marginal) advantage, an SLI setup is for you.
As for myself, I am a poor college student not even able to afford 1 of these cards. A situation I think is similar to a lot of other geeks/gamers.
Which begs the question, who is this aimed at?
"Here's a spoiler: You're will die alone."-Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
... till we have multi-core and/or multi-GPU consumer cards. (they're already available at the high-end)
Questionmark.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
like 3dfx they bought?
maybe they shouldn't have.. sure they probably had some great people and so on but ultimately "it didn't work out".
"hey, we can't keep up! let's just use brute force on increasing our cards capabilities!!! that's cheap and economical in the long run keeping our company afloat, right? right??"
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So, One card that requires a 400 Watt power supply + Another card that requires a 400 Watt power supply = The need for an 800 Watt power supply?!
I picked up a Voodoo 2 card way back when for the incredibly high price of $300 (which was a ton close to ten years ago with the money I was making). A couple years later, I picked up my second Voodoo 2 for $30.
Think of it as an inexpensive way to nearly double your video card's performance at a fairly cheap price when others are upgrading to the new version of the card that is only 40-50% faster (unlike the SLI mode which is rumored to be 75-90% faster).
The tricky part will be that you have to have a motherboard to support it, which for now will only be the ones made for high-end workstations.
Never mind how they are held together. The Geforce 6 already requires a shitload of power (2 molex connectors on the rear of it) and puts out a lot of heat. So you have two very hot cards right next to eachother, one of them getting really bad airflow. If one of your $500 video cards doesn't die, your PSU surely will!
Alienware took a very different tack with their solution because it requires a 3rd PCI slot AND it's analog (3rd & 4th pics). I guess its a series of tradeoffs: Space vs flexibility, with Nvidia winning the battle for space but losing on flexibility.
That aside, its rediculous that nvidia is expecting their OEM cooling solutions to do any kind of justice to the heat from those cards. Alienware already expects water cooling to be part of the solution and has cases designed accordingly... couldn't NVIDIA have done it any other way? Do they absolutely have to have a hardware link between their cards?
"A power draw of 250 Watts for the 6800 Ultra SLI solution is very realistic."
Then explain how this will work.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!