NVIDIA and Dell Display Quad-SLI System

Ryan @ CES writes "Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Dell and NVIDIA announced a new XPS system coming later this year that will sport not one, not two, but FOUR GeForce 7800 GTX 512 GPUs running in a quad-SLI configuration. There are two physical graphics cards in the system still, but each has two seperate PCBs with a GPU and 512 MB of memory on each. PC Perspective has some information including pictures of the cards and Dell system as well as specs and details on how NVIDIA handles the new SLI data configurations. No word yet on power consumption and heat levels, of course."

Comments

Re:Overkill

[StarWreck]

they don't expect to actually sell any number of them greater than 5.

Car makers used to have a saying "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday". Everybody knew that the cars winning the races weren't the cars you could buy but people assume that if their race cars are better than the competitors race cars, then their regular cars are better than the competitors regular cars too.

Dell is hoping that having a system this high-powered will drive up the sales for its mainstream models as well.

For future performance

[emarkp]

Actually, one value for this is in predicting future generations of video cards early in the dev cycyle. When I worked at Intel, the research group would freon-cool the newest chip off the assembly line. They told us it basically did the job of showing us how the next (18 months away) shrink would perform.

The same would go for graphics performance. In theory this should allow a game company to design for the next gen of graphics processors today from a performance perspective, though not from a feature perspective.