Four GPU Motherboard

didde writes "The people over at Tom's Hardware are running a story on Gigabytes experiments with quadruple GPU's on one motherboard. Perhaps we'll need something cooler than liquid metal to keep this beast from running hot?" From the article: "About half a year ago, we learned that Gigabyte was working on a graphics card that integrates two GeForce 6600GT graphics chips. While we were impressed with the out-of-the-box approach from Gigabyte, there was of course the question, whether two of those cards could be combined for a total of four graphics chips."

Comments

Limitations

[taskforce]

One of the major limitations of the GB Dual GPU cards is that they only worked on their propreitary motherboards, which is useless for people who use other brands of motherboards; this was supposedly because it was using the SLi in some strange way. (2 SLi links accross the GPUs as opposed to 2 boards)

I would hope that they would be able to get these to run on all SLi boards, I've always thought one of the main strengths of building your own PC was the compatibility between differnet brands of components.

Re:Quad Cards?

[taskforce]

This is 2 cards with 2 GPUs on them each, not 4 cards. Last year Gigabyte launched their dual GPU cards, but they couldn't run in SLi. At the time one of the main comments from reviewers and fans who were shocked by the power was "Whoa, wouldn't it be cool to run 2 of those in SLi and have 4 GPUs!"

Re:Quad Cards?

[Thinko]

Actually, it's both.. It discusses running in 4- 8x PCI-Express configuration for 4 Single Chip cards, and 2- 16x PCI-Express configuration for 2 Dual-Chip cards.

Re:Could someone please explain how this works?

[kebes]

The 4 GPUs are on two dual-core cards. You could use this in an SLI setup to run a single monitor with ridiculous amounts of graphics power, or two monitors with still amazing graphics rendering, or more monitors if you wanted to, I suppose.

SLI is Scalable Link Interface. It's a way to have two video cards running a single display. If, for instance, you have a video game with really high graphics requirements, but you don't want your frames-per-second (fps) to drop, then you could use the two graphics cards to render alternating frames. That way, you have high frame rate combined with the best graphics. In theory you can double the graphics complexity of whatever you are trying to render. In practice, of course, it can be hard to get it running, and for many games/applications won't make any difference whatsoever. It's still a very much "power gamer" setup, only for people who (1) have the money, (2) like tinkering, (3) enjoy being "bleeding edge" just for the heck of it, (4) really like their games to look slick... at any cost!

Despite the fact that SLI is currently seen to be sorta frivolous by many, it's quite possible that SLI (or multi-GPU cards) will become common in the future, and will in fact be required to play modern games.