sli quatro boards

awhir

has anyo seen any of the new boards

8T8

Not sure I follow ?

I assume Quatro is a typo and you mean Quadro which are GPU's for professional workstations these are SLI capable but are actually slower in games than the GeForce cards they are based on as they focus more on OpenGL.

On the other hand maybe you mean Quad SLI all this needs is a normal dual 8x or 16x lane motherboard to work plus the special GeForce 7900 GX2 GPU's, of course its utterly useless unless you have a 30" display or better and intend to run games at it's native resolution like 2560x1600.

ChityWest

Isnt there a way to use 4x nvidia GeForce cards in a quad sli mode ? ie using 4 full length pci-e slots ? I would have read the original post as asking about that (but could be wrong).

8T8

ChityWest wrote:

Isnt there a way to use 4x nvidia GeForce cards in a quad sli mode ? ie using 4 full length pci-e slots ? I would have read the original post as asking about that (but could be wrong).

No not possible it seems, Gigabyte showed off such a motherboard with four 4x or 8x slots I think a while back but NVIDIA have no plans for such a system.

The GX2's have an inbuilt 8x PCI-E lane [maybe 16x not sure] that transfers the data between the two GPU's on each card this allows both cards to operate on a standard 8x or 16x board without running into major bottlenecks.

Essentially NVIDIA have a system whereby the 7900 GX2 two GPU's operate in a form of SLI which appears as one GPU which then operate in tandem with another GX2 to deliver quad SLI. The normal GF7 cards I believe do not have this capability so a quad setup is probably out of the question.

awhir

sorry i ment the Quad SLI thought it was 4 cards lol.

Sparky

I assume your on about
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_quadsli.html

Looks interesting, but unless you have some fair bit of money

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=314963
Granted the card is two GPU's in one.

8T8

Actually that board isnt a Quad SLI one that is just a custom job from Asus with two 7800GT's on once PCB which run in SLI mode.

The Quad SLI boards are 2x 7900GTX with 512MB per GPU so all 4 have 512MB each! They are clocked a bit lower than the normal 7900GTX cards and have a special design as you can see in the screenshot here.

There were some previews up the other days but NVIDIA pulled them for some reason something to do with the NDA date.

Sparky

I see, I did have a feeling the Asus one looked quite different.

uberpixie

8T8 wrote:

Actually that board isnt a Quad SLI one that is just a custom job from Asus with two 7800GT's on once PCB which run in SLI mode.

The Quad SLI boards are 2x 7900GTX with 512MB per GPU so all 4 have 512MB each! They are clocked a bit lower than the normal 7900GTX cards and have a special design as you can see in the screenshot here.

There were some previews up the other days but NVIDIA pulled them for some reason something to do with the NDA date.

Had a look at one of the previews.

Looks like only system builders will get the first few batchs of the 2x 7900GTs.
(some rubbish excuse about the cards being too hard to setup for enthusiasts due to all the extra heat generated by the cards!)

Looks like the system builders plan on using 2 dual core cpus on new high end dualie boards as a single dual core is not enough to feed 4 gfx cards.

Had a look at some quick benchies and seemingly quad only makes a difference if you turn everything up to the max.

No speed difference for running at regular settings for todays games.
(in some cases the quad setup was slower than a sli setup in games!)