'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."

Comments

Wow

[McGiraf]

Which game you need to run to take advantage of the equvalent of 4 graphic cards?

Re:Wow

[HugePedlar]

DNF?

Re:Wow

[ceeam]

Windows Vista Aero Glass.

Re:Wow

[Tim C]

Today, none (unless you want to run something like Doom 3 or Half Life 2 with all the options turned up to max and at an insane resolution).

Tomorrow, who knows? I remember a time when a TNT2 Ultra was considered overkill, now you can get more powerful GPUs in mobile phones.

Re:Wow

[matt328]

The one where you win by claiming higher frame rate than your peers.

As an aside: it doesn't matter how long you've been playing a certain fps, your eyes have not mutated to give you the ability to discern a difference between 400 and 405 frames per second.

OMG

[EW87]

I think my Dell just Cried.

Weight

[Bios_Hakr]

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.

Re:Bleugh

[mrchaotica]

What would you prefer -- that hardware manufacturers artificially held back new technology?

Exclusivity- what's the deal?

[Coopjust]

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.

FINALLY

[Quick Sick Nick]

*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!

Attack of the GFX E-penis argument?

[LordKazan]

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

I predicted dual video cards was a fad

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

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.

In case you're like me

[szembek]

SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface.

Re:Bleugh

[moonbender]

Remember, the best ride is on the face of the wave.

I'm sorry, you'll have to come up with a car analogy.