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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."
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.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
...It's full of GPU's!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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!"
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Gigabyte has stated they will throw in a free Nuclear Power Plant to help pay for power consumption when you buy one of their 4-card chipsets.
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Remember Carmack promising us real-time rendering for full CG movies? Can you imagine a game with the visuals of the Shrek series?
Personally, as an old-skool gamer, I'm hoping that if it ever comes to that, gameplay won't completely be forgotten, as the ratio of gamplay to graphics seems to diminish every day.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
Can anyone think of a reason why you need more than one of these cards? Currently my machine runs the most complex game I can think of (HalfLife 2) at 1280x960 at more frames per second than my monitor even scans at.
Why would you need it to be 4 times faster than that?
OK, I can see that a handful of people might want to play at 1600x1200 if they have a decent monitor, but usually, running at resolutions higher than that is fairly pointless unless you have a 21" or bigger monitor. The average monitor can't do resolutions that large without blurring the pixels together from what I've seen.
The new Gillette MACH 6© 6 GPU motherboard, with comfort strip.
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.
This is /. , we've gotta give people like you something to whine about.obligatory speeling errur.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
.....and a hell of a lot of porn. How sweet is that?
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.