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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 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.
Most hair dryers draw 1200 - 1600 watts so you don't have much, if anything, to worry about.
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/
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.
Most hair dryers draw 1200 - 1600 watts so you don't have much, if anything, to worry about.
See, that is just the kind of thinking that gets a person into trouble. I thought my systems were OK until my wife went off and bought a 12A vacuum cleaner. Every time she fires the thing up (depending on if the socket shares the circuit) my UPS is screeching at me. She claims it is stock, but would not put it past her to over clock it. That road leads to madness...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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...
If you are buying a gaming rig with essentially 4 Geforce 7800 cards with 512 MB of RAM each in it,... I don't think $128 over a year for electricity is really going to put you off.
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.