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Quad PCIe Motherboard

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the imagining-eight-30-inch-widescreen-flatpanels dept.

SlipKid writes "PCI Express Graphics cards have allowed for some new and innovative ways to increase rendering horsepower in Desktops and Workstations. Recent introductions of NVIDIA's SLI and ATI's CrossFire technology have enabled dual PCIe Graphics cards in a load-sharing architecture. Motherboard manufacturers are jumping into the fray now and Gigabyte has released a Quad PCI Express graphics enabled motherboard, capable of running four cards at once. The board is not capable of running Quad SLI, mostly due to lack of NVIDIA driver support currently but it does offer support for eight simultaneous display outputs on four Graphics cards."

6 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. I'd rather have some NICs, soundcards, etc. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, $topic pretty much says it all. More PCIe-slots, great, but it'd be nice if there were stuff besides graphics-adapters to push in.

    1. Re:I'd rather have some NICs, soundcards, etc. by atrus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why would a soundcard need a 16 lane PCI-e slot? How many channels of sound are you sampling anyway?

      And yes, there are plenty of 8 lane PCI-e cards which aren't graphics. There are NICs as well as hardware RAID controllers which can push that much data.

    2. Re:I'd rather have some NICs, soundcards, etc. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Is 450 enough channels?
      225 stereo, over 110 quadrophonic.

      That's how much fits in 2Gb of bandwith, which is under the 2.5Gb 1x PCIe offers, so an 8x would have room for over 3500 seperate channels.

      Unless something funny with my arithmetic, but sound is really small.

  2. Re:Just wait a few more years by ickeicke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This has been an issue for years. There are always upcoming games that seem too require insane systems (the "recommended 1GHz CPU for Max Payne when the rest of the world though 500 MHz was decent"-era comes to mind), but it's just a matter of time before those systems are the new norm.

    And you fear that within a few years there will be games that require 2 or 4 $300 dollar GPU's just to get the game running. How many game developers would make games that only run on a small fraction of PCs? They want to get a decent audience, and to realise such an audience, the technology has to be avaiable at reasonable prices.

    The whole hardware software market is both self-regulating (releasing games with insane requirements does not work) as well as self-stimulating (higher software requirements boost hardware technology and sales and better hardware results in software with better graphics).

    BTW; Happy Pi Day!

    --
    Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
  3. Only for professionals not for gamers by rahulkool · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This Motherboard will better option for them who wants to run 8 moniter at a time ...... but i don't think in day to day ususal computing this is having any importance as u u willl not be having any PCI slots. so fitting a sound card or TV tuner card will be a problem. but people doing video editing or photo editing can be really benefitted from this. and about quad SLI i will say dual GPU on single card is better option but still u will be wasting all the PCI slots. i don't think we need 4x7900GTX even we are playing with 25xx X 16xx resolution. a normal SLI of 2 card will do fine for that. so i think it will nbe useful for professionals and games sud stay away from this.

    --
    i work for money, if u want loyalty, Go get a Dog.
  4. Re:Even if you could do Quad SLI... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    1ms per scanline? Far faster, since that would give you 4 frames/second with one card. We're talking microseconds in real life ;-)