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'SLI On A Stick' Reviewed
Bender writes "What would happen if you took NVIDIA's multi-GPU teaming capability, SLI, and stuck it onto a single graphics card? Probably something like the GeForce 7950 GX2, a 'single' video card with dual printed circuit boards, dual graphics processors, dual 512MB memory banks, and nearly twice the performance of any other 'single' video card. Add two of these to a system, and you've got the truly extreme possibility of Quad SLI. We've seen early versions of these things benchmarked before, but the latest revision of this card is smaller, draws less power than a single-GPU Radeon X1900 XTX, and is now selling to the public."
Which game you need to run to take advantage of the equvalent of 4 graphic cards?
i wonder
4 cards with 2 dual-core, double-the-cache, twice-the-speed GPUs each? Is that what the future keeps for us?
http://ascending.wordpress.com/
I think my Dell just Cried.
Don't snap off your PCI slot. Soon, we'll see modder cases with rails for support the front of the cards.
Or maybe, just maybe, old-school lay-down cases will come back in style.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I'm not the only one that thinks 'great, just what we need' am I? I only just upgraded my graphics recently from a 5900-series to a reasonably priced 7600-series, and since doing so reviews of CrossFire[sic?] and SLI keep popping up, and now quad- is appearing. This time next year can I expect my graphics card to not even be considered minimum-spec to run new games on the PC, yet are going to be on the Xbox360 and PS3 running just fine?
Who truly honestly needs this much horsepower for personal use? Seems like a case of making the product long before any real demand for it actually exists.
The review states:
Before you get all excited about the prospect of dedicating 96 pixel shaders, 2GB of memory, and 1.1 billion transistors to pumping out boatloads of eye candy inside your PC, however, there's some bad news. NVIDIA says Quad SLI will, at least for now, remain the exclusive realm of PC system builders like Alienware, Dell, and Falcon Northwest because of the "complexity" involved.
So they are going to alienate the majority of the market that would spend the money on a Quad SLI setup to keep it exclusive to system builders for whatever period of time.
Seems like a bad business decision to me, at least until (and if) Nvidia comes to their senses.
*Throws away 4 7900 GTXs running in SLI*
If I upgrade, I might be able to go from 200 frames per second in Doom III to.... 205 frames per second!
I can't wait to get rid of my old setup! It was a piece of shit!
Yeah, but does it finally support HDCP for us DIY system builders?
0x68ADA2CC
I have a dual core duo 2 with dual channel GB DDR2 and dual GPU dual card (SLI) setup with dual monitor, cooled with dual case fan, powered by dual (redundant) PSU on 220V. Oh forgot about my dual layer DVD burner and dual button mouse.
Now all we need are games to utilise that power!
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
Less power consumed than the high-end Radeon, and take into consideration the heat is going to be coming from two GPU cores instead of one. If you're already on an ATI setup this will surely take your temp down a couple of degrees.
/nVidiot fanboy
I'm probably going to loose even more karma for posting with that title and subject - but i'm on a karma--; roll lately.
Graphics cards innovations for the past several months/year with SLI seem to be me mostly "i have a dual SLI system!", "yeah? well i have a QUAD SLI system!" - soo much performance that is unused it's pointless. Furthermore for the price of one of these brand new cards in the article I can build a decent gaming computer or a HDTV mythTV box.
I would rather spend $600 on much more useful things that would see use right now on pricewatch the video cards at $100 are: radeon x1300 256mb agp, radeon x1600 pro 256mb pci express, radeon x800 pci express 256mb, geforce 6600 gt pci-e 256mb
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
This sounds too much like, "640K should be enought memory for anyone".
Like the original dual Voodoo cards, multiple video cards is just one of those things that keeps going out of style (but like old fads, makes its appearance every decade or two).
The cost to implement and manufacture multiple video cards is ridiculous. Who honestly would spend $1400 just to have two video cards, and then only get at most 20% performance improvement.
With the current trend of multiple cores, I figured it would be just a matter of time for the SLI and Crossfire solutions to switch back to a single video card. Either they would dual core the GPU, or simply put two GPU on the same card.
I just makes sense to keep a video card as a single card. You dont have to duplicate the production costs and all the other components that are wasted in a dual card configuration, you also dont have to duplicate the bus technology on the motherboard in order to implement dual video cards. Overall, this will be a much cheaper configuration that will actually bring high performance video technology into the realm of being practical.
Eventually, 4 way GPU cards will be released, and eventually nVidia and/or ATI will start to dual core their GPUs, those spending money on their expensive dual or even quad based SLI configurations just wasted a bunch of money.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Now've the full package: a 4x4 car, a 4x4 AMD chipset and a 4x4 SLI video card.
Someone shoot me.
SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface.
nothing
Nice card...err...cards. I would buy one if I had the $$$. But if you look at the price point of the 7900GTX and this new card the price difference isn't that big. Still though, thats a pretty penny just to make games look better. My 6800GT is still hanging in there.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
I seem to remember a day and age when a chip manufacturer thought the best way to outperform its competitors was to place two processors on the same graphics card. Then, they placed four. I believe they had an eight-processor version in the pipeline when everyone told them to stop selling junk. I believe the reasons were overhead caused by the load-sharing, and that resources invested in single processor paid off much more in terms of performance.
Could someone point out exactly why this is not likely to be repeating itself?
I heard these new cards were developed especially for Duke Nukem Forever!
Just don't create a file called -rf.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those?
If your in firefox and it's just the text size that's bothering you, do CTRL-+ (Press the control and plus buttons) It will increase the font size, but not change the font. (you can use CTRL-- CTRL and minus buttons to change it back)
The more you know.
"graphics cards today are more and more starting to look like tanks"
$600???!! Why, that's way too expensive. I mean no one would spend $600 for something you only can play games with. The makers of these cards are stupid.
I'm still getting by with my ATI RADEON 9700 PRO. Still plays just about anything I can throw at it. Oblivion gives it a hard time, but it's still adequately playable.
I'm going to hold off as long as possible until the card can't play the latest games, at which point I may get one of these quad SLI setups. by that time, we'll have DDR3 memory and quad core CPUs too.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
hold ctrl and scroll your mouse wheel, geez you'de think these video cards would be able to resize fonts on the fly.
While it's nice to always push the envelope, certain directions of this are only good for the hardcore bleeding-edge types. Products of these caliber definitely appeal only to a limited audience.
Now, I know about a month ago I read about NVIDIA releasing the quad card setup to high end PC manufactures for those that wanted "Lambo" price & performance. The reason why people (and nvidia) released these quad setups to high end manufactures was the fact that these cards took too much room for DIY do make an efficent setup not to light a fire within the case.
Since this article stated this was NVIDIA's way of releasing the Quad setup to DIYs, where is the dual on a stick idea? (after reading the article & comments, I think this was submitters hype)
At first I was really actually hoping that this would be dual graphics chips on one PCB. Not two PCBs attached together. Nothing different compared to the ones released awhile back to "only manufactures". I like a clean case. Thats why I spend the extra cash on longer cables, and spend at minimum an hour or so getting the cables out of the way of airflow. Seriously, I have a great gamer rig with only half the fans that most gamer rigs will require just to keep them cooler.
Having to have a oversized video card (other than bragging rights) is just causing the proper airflow from being efficent. Again, this article just spoiled my hopes of buying a dual sli on one pcb, but just one pcb.
wake me when these get IC'ed onto one PCB and then I will be surprised. AND WILLING TO BUY.
"Don't Forget to Salt the Fries"
I just bought the budget edition of 'Deus Ex' the other day. What I really like about it is that I needn't think twice about wether it will run smooth or not. I have an Athlon 2100 XP + and a Geforce 4 Ti 4-something, I can crank up the grafics to full and needn't worry about lag or something.
That's allways the more fun way to go IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I overlooked the logical layout. The concept is there.. two cores on one pcb. logically!
I don't doubt that gamers already have the large enough rigs to have a longer than usual video card. I mean, hell, if I can fit a old SCSI card into a standard PC case. (Remember those old ass SVGA cards, so long that it actually contacted the front end of the case.)
I am sure they could have lengthened the PCB, placed both cores on the same PCB, then actually made a air duct system using less parts. After seeing the 'logical' diagram, I know we will soon see, these duals on a stick. just gotta get the engineers involved.
"Don't Forget to Salt the Fries"
Just in time. My graphics card was top of the line for almost a week now.
NVIDIA has officially taken the wraps off of their new ultra high-end Graphics card dubbed the GeForce 7950 GX2. HotHardware has a full review and showcase posted that shows performance with this new single card design that employs a pair of GeForce 7900 GPUs on a single card. One of the more interesting aspects of the card is its PCI Express switch that provisions a X8 PCI Express connection to each GPU, back down to a single X16 PCI Express Graphics slot. The new card certainly rips up the benchmarks pretty much as well.
because for the large numbers of us with laptops, it's really hard to upgrade our video cards, given space constraints, but quite easy to pop in a "stick" video card so we can run the latest graphics apps.
... I will need to be able to play Spore ...
Sigh.
See, if I'd bought the "latest" computer, I'd already be out of date - by choosing to just buy a cheap $500 laptop, I'm just as out of date as I was a month ago.
But
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
With so much of the highest-level CPU design going into GPUs, and so many of the most wily consumers of the fastest GPUs going to any lengths possible to trick them out, I'm surprised there's not a lot more development of GPGPU, harnessing these processors for general purpose computing.
Given the qualifications and interests of that joint community, I'd expect to see a "PCI network" that parallelizes MP3 encoding on much cheaper MFLOPS GPU HW by now.
Maybe actually playing the games is eating up too much time.
--
make install -not war
is that it doesnt work for GPUs.
Instruction Parallisation was never a problem there, so the cores are inheritly as parallel as the die-size allows. If you could squeeze twice as much transistors on a chip, your GPU would have 64 instead of 32 pixel piplelines, for example.
Plus dual core does nothing for the bandwith problem... (and no, going to 1024 bit memory or something isnt an option
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
... i'm happy that NVIDIA & ATI keep coming out w/ these overly slick, largely under-utilized cards into the gaming market, as they continue to drive the price of pre-existing, under-utilized cards down. The mobo/v-card combo i've been eyeing was ~$400 a month ago. Now it's ~$300. I'll be drooling over HDR Oblivion by the end of the summer ;-)
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
Next winter, I can just set up my quad core GPU in the middle of the house and it should be able to heat everything.
SLI = Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a method for linking two (or more) video cards together to produce a single output. [wikipedia]
so SLI = 2 cards or more
normally you have 1 GPU per card, so that means that with the standard or "old" SLI you would have a Dual GPU setup.
now, with 2 GPU's per card you can link those 2 cards together and get SLI, but with Quad GPU power.
So, it's not "Quad SLI", but "Quad GPU" or "Dual SLI".
Similar cards are already out there. Gigabyte make the 3D1, 3D1-XL and the 3D1-68GT. Based on the 6600 and the 6800 chipsets.
They are pretty nice. Just haven't found a water cooling kit that will fit on the 3D1-XL yet.
...."But does it run Linux?"
*ducks and runs*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
This sounds great, but what is supported under Linux?
Whatever font /. uses now is ugly :(
Legalize it.
You know, I've been stuck behind the kbd for many, many years and I'm ready for a change that seems obvious to me as needing to be done.
Get the Gfx 'card' out of the computer. Add a GPU socket to the motherboard and expandable video-ram slots.
I could spend an hour on why I think this solution would be better but here are a few of my reasons:
1) As fast as PCI-E is, a direct motherboard interface would be faster
2) Directly upgradeable memory allows you to afford the better chips and expand the ram as you have the money instead of 'settling' for a lower card because the higher memory version doubles the price.
3) The ability to use the same memory and JUST upgrade your GPU since many revisions happen to cards while the memory stays the same.
4) You could use standard CPU cooling on the GPU to have a much more efficiently cooled GPU instead of adding more weight to a relatively flimsy PCI-E connector saving the occasional card/mb damage.
5) A forced standard all chipmakers would have to produce chips under the same interface standard for new boards and motherboard mfr's as well as CPU mfr's would have to be on the ball too. A GFX chip that you could buy for one year would still plug into new boards 5 years later as would the vid-ram, CPU and the system ram. Also, once any of them are upgraded the bios would need to auto-set to handle the faster speeds...so I want them to predict the speed of the GPU/CPU/RAM 10 years from now and at least try to make motherboards that can support the changing times for a realistic amount of time.
Sure, have boards with dual GPU's or more but it's time to get off the slot and move into a better format.
I know, the motherboards would cost more because the expectation would be that you could use the same motherboard for 10 years and frequent upgrades to the CPU/GPU/Ram/Gfx-Ram but I'd pay more for a board I didn't have to keep freaking changing while still being able to keep my game on and upgrade only the pieces that need upgraded, as I can AFFORD them.
But that's just my 10 cents.
You almost got it!
Tell him what he's nearly won!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Right on the first page of TFA it says that it is HDCP compliant, so you need the latest HDTV "set" in order to run it. So it's not like there was much of a chance of me purchasing one of these in the first place, but I'm not going to buy a DRM crippled product.
You now there are people who have this thing, called "work".
Where they have to put up with "recently corporate-purchased Dell, we won't feel necessary to change them before 2 years" crappy machine, that are slugs compared to what geek assembled in his garage 4 years before, out of spares.
On the other side, this thing called "work" comes with a nice stuff called "pay-check" that enables you to buy even more ultimate-leet-gear (and also buys baits for girlfriends such as "dining in a nice restaurant")
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Or, to put it in another way : maybe enough to boil eggs in the tank of your watercooling setup ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This caused me to be suprised that my original sblive basic model is capable of 96KHz 32bit float audio.
How common is this really? Or is endemic a better word?
hrmm...where have i seen this before??? OHHH!!! thats right... http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/v55500preview/ default.asp
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
FYI, search the internet - I seem to remember someone doing High-Res textures for Unreal Tournament, which they said could also be used for DX.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
On one side that's something that we'll be seing in the near future thanks to the HyperTransport format. Slashdot recently announced programmable chips (FPGA) that could be plugged into dual opteron motherboard and that could use the HT bus.
Also recently announced on slashdot, the developpement of a standart hypertransport connector (as part of the HT 3.0 revision).
So maybe in a near future you'll see motherboards featuring HyperTransport connectors, in which you could directly plug CPU/DDR board, GPU/GDDR board, or specialist copreocessor boards (Phys-X, FPGAs, ultra-high speed raid & networks board for severs, etc...)
On the other hand : supporting different size of memory for a GPU is something that is going to bring more complexity and costs. (this was something discussed in forums about building open-source GFX card) so diffrent GPU/GDDR board speaking among them thru HT bus is more likely than a GPU board with upgradeable GDDR.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Or is this nVidia offering still limited in this way? I don't care how fast it is when games still aren't looking their best.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Karma roll? wtf? Compared to those strings of flamebait mods, I guess, but before this you only had one +5 and a bunch of 1s... Not much of a roll.
Think about this... What were graphics like 20 years ago?
Calling them graphics is almost silly.
Think about how good Half-Life 2, Oblivion, F.E.A.R., Doom 3, FarCry, and the gameplay footage of E3 looked. Now think about how good it's gonna look in 20 years.
Think 40 years now.
Full-speed ahead to the Metaverse!
Run through this thought process with medical technology and practices too... I feel optimistic that I'll have plenty of time to enjoy that Metaverse when it finally comes out along with Duke Nukem Forever.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
"..as long as we move the GeForce up a few inches in the picture to compensate!" See those backplates?
I'm not sure how outta touch some people here are - but there are several games which imho need this kind of power.
Ghost Recon: Adavanced Warfighter (especially if u enable physics chip)
Oblivion (still cant be played totally maxed with this card)
Half Life 2 (and episodic content with full HDR)
Far Cry (with full HDR)
Crysis (coming very soon)
Fear (and upcoming expansion)
My current comp can't even touch these games with my 6800GT.
Now - I'm not saying everyone go out and buy this card - like some of you before me - I get the sweet deal on used PC games such as Never Winter Nights Platinum ($7.99) or MS 2004 Flight Simulator ($2.99) or Silent Hunter III ($6.99) and Max the heck outta them!
And when Direct X 10 comes out - and this card falls to $150 or so - I will then get it and play all the aforementioned games in their fully realized Glory!
I sure hope they retro patch XP with Direct X 10 tho eventually - the thought of changing to Vista makes me a little ill...
http://www.ratztatz.com/
"Oh yeah? my card pulls 150fps on HL2, I pwn u stupid n@@b! Joo st@@pid highschool n@@b girl, joo such a st@@pid n@@b!!!" --Anonymous gamer.
Seems that some newer laptops use a mini pci-e card now. I guess it's feasable to replace/upgrade those... it would be neat to see them for sale in the aftermarket.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
They will always offer more than you need at any given time. If you feel the need to upgrade simply because an upgrade exists, you're rich and a fool, or poor and a chump. :) The octo-core processor is going to drive down today's quad core and bring it to us in plenty of time to enjoy the games that need them. I don't need 600fps to kick your ass in a shooter. I'll do it just fine with 100fps, trust me. Unless of course, you're just a better twitcher than me.