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

Voodoo 5

[Hobbitgh0d42]

Is anyone else reminded of the Voodoo 5 with the size of this thing?

Overkill

[miyako]

This machine certainly seems like overkill. What would be nice would be if they would make a system like this that uses budget cards. Given that graphics rendering is a task that is easly split between multiple processors (IIRC that's the case anyway), I would think that they could offer something like this with cheaper cards and get better performance than going up to the next generation of cards.
Since a bleeding edge card tends to run around $500, and a card a couple of generations old tends to run about $100, you could get four older generation cards for less than a bleeding edge card, and equivilent if not better performance.

Re:Overkill

[Osty]

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.

Actually, it used to be that the cars were the same. "Stock car" racing is named such because it used to be the racing of stock (as in, righ off the showroom floor) cars. It's obviously not that today, where only the shell is similar to (but still not the same as) the cars you can actually buy.

That said, there are still race series where the cars really are (mostly) stock. Some safety additions are required, like bolt-in rollcages and multi-point harnesses, but aside from that you're running stock in a class like Showroom Stock. The categories may not contain the newest cars, but you could theoretically go buy a used car, bolt in a roll cage and harness, and compete.

Re:the payoff

[mrm677]

Many top game studios I'm familiar with buy Dell computers for game development.

And what about the extra PCI Slots???

[TMonks]

From the looks of that picture, the motherboard and case only support four total expansion slots. What about sound cards and other PCI peripherals? Are extreme gamers now going to be forced to live with built-in sound? If I were going to pay $6,000-$8,000 or even more for an absolute top-of-the-line system I think I might want something more than just raw graphics power.

Re:Wonder what the power bill would be like....

[NeutronCowboy]

Yes, but no one leaves a hair dryer on for 16 hours a day.... and I know some of my gaming sessions have lasted that long. Let's see - 1kW* an average of 4 hours a day for a year (yeah, I pulled those numbers out of my butt - sue me) and a price of $0.12/kwh and we get.... a whopping $182 a year to use that sucker. This is assuming you switch the thing off from time to time, and that you have another machine in the wings for your low-intensity computing.

I smell a Beowulf reference...

[nobodyman]

I'm inclined to crack jokes, but I've been out of the game for a long time so I have questions. Better do both.

- I couldn't really tell, but in the images it only looks like the mobo has one cpu. Just one? I imagine the kind of frea^H^H^H^H consumer who would go for 4way SLI would demand nothing less than 2 dual-core CPU's.

- If it does only have 1 cpu, or even 1 dual core cpu, wont the games be CPU limited before you even scratch the surface of this qual-sli madness?

- They've drawn flames on this thing. I imagine this is redundant given the heat it will produce, and ultimately confusing to the jerk^H^H^H^H consumer when it actually does burst into flames. :-)

Is there much benefit to more 3d hardware?

[typical]

I only have a very high end AGP card and it runs every game out there quite nicely - only FEAR gives it any trouble.

You know...it isn't actually all that important to have fancy hardware to make a good, fun, replayable game. Oh, it's easier to sell games with fancy graphics -- you can slap screenshots all over the box. Ultimately, though, there are an awful lot of more-technically-advanced games that have falled by the wayside, and I've played a lot more angband and tetris than any of them, and kept playing over the years.

I'm not denying that you can make more accurate renditions of real-world environments...but does that really make for better games?

Nintendo started to deviate from this a while ago -- most of Nintendo's 3d games are graphically pretty primitive compared to the competition. However, you can't deny that they make some very entertaining software.

It's always nice to have more tools...but ultimately, these days, a little more 3d hardware doesn't really buy you much more game.

My favorite PSP game is Lumines, which is possibly the most graphically primitive game on the PSP. It uses...well...alpha blending, a handful of textures, and that's it that I can think of off the top of my head. It doesn't even do any perspective rendering.

I can already empathize with characters in 3d games -- the limiting factor isn't the polygon count or the texture resolution, but in how good the modelling and animation is -- not a hardware-dependent issue.

32bit OS memory addressing limit

[Kagami001]

If this is being used with 32-bit Windows XP for gaming, does that mean the machines virtual address space is more than maxed out with 2GB of main RAM + 2GB of VRAM + other hardware memory overhead on top of that? How much actual addressable physical RAM is left for the OS and applications?

Re:The visionaries releasing 1kW PSUs....

[n00tz]

Maybe this new machine will come with its own loan officer.

In the theme of overpriced computers: My company will be buying a $9.2k Xeon server from Dell, about $3k of it is windows liscensing(SQL2005, Server2003EE). I custom built a comparable AMD/*nix server and it only cost them $4.2k. The problem was the software company we are dealing with either A.) didn't know how to deal with *nix, B.) was unfamiliar with 64-bit SMP (AMD opteron 265's x 2) or C.) the technical staff wasn't educated enough to know that four 1.8Ghz cores are better than two 2.4 Ghz cores.

Their implementation survey simply asked what speed the processors clocked, and how many PROCESSORS there were. So I answered 1.8Ghz and 2 CPUs and we failed the survey. I was expecting that so I composed an email explaining how their survey was faulty and gave them a few ways to improve it as to not make the mistake again with a potentially new customer (a friendly business suggestion). I was instead denied without further investigation forcing us to pay for this new bohemoth of the wallet. /rant