'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."

Re:Wow

[Kutsal]

Nothing yet, probably. But that doesn't mean there won't ever be any.. Also, in most cases, these boards are used by people like John Carmack to come up with proof-of-concept of new ideas/technologies, or whatever cool thing he's cooking up...

While they may be overkill for your average user, for (game) developers these things will be goldmines..

-K

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Oblivion. At 1600x1200. Turn up the antialiasing to 4x and turn on all the effects.

Less than one Radeon X1900XT

[Anonymous Coward]

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

In case you're like me

[szembek]

SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface.

Re:Completely off topic

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Completely off topic

[Anonymous Coward]

hold ctrl and scroll your mouse wheel, geez you'de think these video cards would be able to resize fonts on the fly.

Re:Wow

[greatguns_17]

i thought the same about my 7800 GTX till i tried playing oblivion with all setting....and the fps i get mostly below 30. you get the hardware and getting the software to saturate that piece of hardware is not so hard....

This is not Quad SLI, its Dual SLI at best.

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:Wow

[Kjella]

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

Oblivion at 1920x1200? Good thing I don't have an Apple Cinema Display. Personally I think Oblivion's game engine is a bit overrated. Ok it's pretty but not *that* much prettier than the other freeform 3D games that don't kill my GFX card. Right now I'm working on a HOMM5 addiction instead...

Pro and cons

[DrYak]

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 [slashdot.org] (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 [duskglow.com]) so diffrent GPU/GDDR board speaking among them thru HT bus is more likely than a GPU board with upgradeable GDDR.