Slashdot Mirror
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."
Ah, but finally a legit use for that 1000 Watt power supply, as long as you include the multi-cpu and raid setup, of course. :)
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I'd be scared to turn that besat of a box on, unless I knew for sure that my house wiring could take it...I wonder how many watts the PSU is rated for (and who built the PSU..muhaha)
Also, who would be able to use this other than the extreme gaming folks?
This box will cost a pretty penny, but would a person even be able see an improvement over the current popular 939 pin Opteron + fatass video card combo?
You among the rest of Slashdot just dont "get it" do you?
PC Gaming today is just like Golf. Most of the high-end shit is for bragging rights...period. Trust me, it's not over. Expect to see rigs going for 8 grand. Sure, it's extreme, but we also have an exreme market too with extreme people will to pay the, ehem...extreme price.
This should be EXPECTED and not questioned. Has anyone learned anything an econ 101? Oh ya, I guess they don't teach that anymore.
Life is not for the lazy.
I agree this is overkill, but I think that it is like those 108" TVs that someone (Samsung?) is showing at CES. It may be a product that is for sale, but they don't expect to actually sell any number of them greater than 5. It is more a PR boast than anything else.
Personally, I can't wait for Mac World SF. Rumor has it Apple will introduce a new version of their pro apps (specifically Final Cut Pro) that can work on ultra-HD content (I think it was 11 megapixels a frame, 4000x2700 or so) and a new monitor designed with a high enough resolution to be able to show it full-frame, unstretched. Now THAT should be cool to see.
But it is CES and products fall into two categories: "wow, that's neat" and "wow, that's neat and who would ever buy that".
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Looks like Mike Lavallee's paint work, he's been on Discovery and a couple of other custom auto TV shows.
http://www.killerpaint.com/
has been triggered by this setup.
There's no way even a dual cpu setup could produce enough computing power to actually push a quad SLI GFX 7800 to its maximum output. There'll be bottlenecks with CPU speed, memory speed, and quite often, the performance of the hard drive itself. I bet even the operating system will present another bottleneck.
I'd love to see how this performs in benchmarks, and how much advantage it has over regular SLI (2) cards.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Is it just me, or are towers and components going the way of athletic shoes in looking absolutely disgusting? Why not go with something really classy, like baby blue with faux wood panels? ;) Every effort the manufacturers make to "improve" the look of a system is another dollar from the pocket of the buyer, and for what? Maybe i just don't get it.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: That averages about 660,000,000 of each kind.
I'd just like to point out that the 5.2 Terraflops of computing power they quote would place it at #70 on the top500 Supercomputer list! While I realize that its by now means a general processor, its still quite amazing that they've reached that kind of computing density, albeit in a well defined and inherantly paralizable problem domain.
It edges out Russia's Joint Supercomputer Center, which uses an MVS-15000BM, eServer BladeCenter JS20 containing 924 IBM PowerPC970 processors at 2.2 GHz for the #70 spot.
It doesn't matter how much you pay for your system. It will be outdated in two years. You will need a system with a least 16gigs of memory, countless terabytes of hard disk space, and 4 cores within two to three years. Windows Vista and OSX 10.5 are going to be resource hogs. You will be able to run them on much less hardware but why would you want too?
I think you need at least two cores @64bit with 4096MB of memory and at least a TB of disk space. A good video card with at least 512mb of memory and a next generation dvd burner. In two years this system will cost less then $1000.
don't know about the radio but fta:
:s
;)
Consider the standard Dell SLI system costs around $3-4,000 you can expect this custom designed PC to cost at least double that.
even if that thing pulls out 1.3 billion fps in solitaire or 1300 fps in doom3, it's stil a bad value for the money
ofcourse some 3d modellers have no choice than to buy something like this.
or go for a fullblown cluster with software rendering, but that wont be cheaper either
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
I completetly disagree with your sentiment. PC Gaming is an intellectual pursuit. The things we do in our spare time are just as important as those we do for work. It is in our fantasies that we develop our greatest ideas. Games, books, movies... they all serve to ignite the spark of creativity. They inspire us to create today things we could only dream of yesterday.
Although there is no direct line between game -> societal advancement, the transition is obvious for anyone who is ever inspired to do great things.
RPGs, FPSs, RTSs, they're not simply wastes of time, they're important mental exercises that allow us to expand our minds in fun ways.
I doubt 4-way SLI--much less 8-way--will ever become mainstream. It's a neat idea, but let's be honest here: how many people here are going to shell out close to $2,000 just for video cards that will be nearly obselete in two years? And if the average slashdot user won't spend the money, don't expect many people at all to do it.
Two-way SLI is too expensive for most gamers to maintain. Four-way will be awesome in workstations, but in the consumer market it will be a novelty rich kid geeks use to impress their peers at LAN parties. Eight-way will be stupidly expensive and only justifiable in the most demanding applications.
This sort of technology will become common right around the same time SASCSI becomes the standard for consumer PCs.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.