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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."
http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/195/caseopen_2 .jpg
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.
Is anyone else reminded of the Voodoo 5 with the size of this thing?
Lock in!
No one can defeat the quad-laser!
It is over now!
The bullet is enormous, there is no escaping!
Jumping...is useless!
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?
I am totally creeped out by the Nvidia eye logo thing. I would have to get my compy two, just so it had depth perception.
*Lights dim*
*PSU explodes*
*case begins melting*
"Wow! 3FPS faster!"
*this space intentionally left blank
"One of the four pointers saying 'come and see', and I saw, and beheld a white
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.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Many top game studios I'm familiar with buy Dell computers for game development.
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.
I, for one, welcome our new karma-whore sig writing overlords
I got one of the first run today.
On the front of the case it has a little sticker that reads, "Windows Vista Ready."
http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/195/shipcase_2 .jpg
That isn't the paint job. It's a translucent case!
It may just be powerful enough to draw the desktop in Windows Vista ;-)
Tomshardware tested this kind of setup few weeks ago. Link to story and some benchmarks. http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/14/sneak_previ ew_of_the_nvidia_quad_gpu_setup/
The case is actually made of a clear material.
2 .jpg
http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/195/shipcase_
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Bleeding edge gamer: "Hey, guys? I'm about to start Doom 3! Activate the Quad SLI!"
Gamer's best bud: "Commence primary ignition!"
Dude's buddy flips switches to crank up liquid nitrogen pump and nuclear power-plant tie-in.
Sound of neighboring houses' power being drained: Beeooooooooooo...!
Other buddy looks away from the see-thru case mod, and covers his eyes...
Yeah. Something like that.
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.
Great, now they can verify that their games run well on what is sure to be a hugely popular configuration.
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!
After extensive testing we have found these PC's aren't able to run numerous popular games. The games that this machine runs, does so at a much lower frame rate then expected.
Unless Dell changes their software policy and stops shipping new systems with so much crap @ startup it won't matter how good the hardware is. To get decent performance from one of Dell's recent gaming machines one has to spend over an hour uninstalling crap and disabling random services @ startup.
The following is a hardocp review of the Dell Dimensions XPS 400. Covers the buying process, Dell's support, along with the hardware and software it ships with. The system's hardware potential was great, too bad you had to make an extensive software cleanup make this perform respectibly.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTI0
Hmmm... Pie...
Well you can make fun of me, just spent $8.5K on a Dual SLI Rig.
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.
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.
Sorry, has to be said...
No one needs quad sli, and of course - 640k ought to be enough for anybody.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
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.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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?
What you say has been done, and has been already researched in Pixel Planes!
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.
There is only "kill" with ever-increasing levels of assurance.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Maybe this new machine will come with its own loan officer.
/rant
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.
I had college once, but I drank some fluids and got a lot of rest and eventually it was cured.
they will use separate "blocks" for the power, not the power supply on the motherboard since it obviously wouldnt be able to handle it...
Multiple screens are indeed a great thing for flight sims. I'm just about to finish my private pilot training, and the first thing my instructor told me when I started was "stay away from a flight sim for right now".
Reason being, with a flight sim, you learn to look straight at the monitor. Sure there's a view hat, but in general you still keep your eyes fixed directly ahead. This can lead to some very bad habits as when flying a real plane, you have to be constantly looking all around and scanning the sky for traffic avoidance.
Flight sims that allow you to physically look around to different sides help with this a lot. They still don't solve the other issue though, in that most people don't have a force-feedback control, so you don't really get a good feel for the varying pressures and "bumpiness" that is there in a real plane.
In reality, single display sims are just not that good for teaching basic flying, though they can be used to help with instrument procedures, navigation, and other such thing.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain