Quad SLI: GeForce 7900 GX2

It reminds me of the old 3dx philosopy - quantity over quality. Anyone remember the Voodoo 6000?

 

Thats pretty neat, but it comes pretty expensive to buy 30" TFT (which can run 25xx*xxxx resolution) and Quad 7900GT SLI I would be happy if i get even one 7900GT!

 

As i thought it was born to die. First time i ever saw a pic from thoes i thought that they cant be good

 

Do Nvidia not run any kind of UAT, or Q&A prior to launch?

The benchmark on TechPowerUp which shows a single card out performing the Quad cards is just embarassing.

After spending £1000+ on a these cards, you would think Nvidia could do the buyer justice in providing drivers that work, and a 25% performance increase!

 

That account was actually his second - it transpired that he was the same person who had been banned a few months ago for posting crap all over the place.

 

It would be possible to acquire one from somewhere, even if it meant buying the barebones from scan and flogging most of it, but from the looks of it theres not much of a point

 

has this actually been released yet ?

reviewers seem to have them, but do end users have them

you dont really need SLI unless you have a massive screen, which only people with too much money have anyway

SLI is enough for a 30" screen, next gen games will need next gen cards anyway, so its not a big deal

you can run your current game on your 30" moniter with your current SLI setup, what do you gain from quad SLI ?
Enough heat to fry an egg and a PSU large enough to be classed as a class A amplifier

 

You can buy the barebones kit (or the full system) from Scan in the UK. However, I don't know how soon it will be before end users actually get their hands on the hardware because the drivers are clearly not ready (as we've said).

The heat isn't as bad as it sounds, in all honesty. Noise is a problem because the PSU is loud (the cards themselves are pretty quiet), but power consumption isn't as high as one would expect.

We wanted to include this in the review but ran out of time (I'd already worked ALL of my bank holiday weekend at this point): the FX-60 equipped Quad SLI system uses around 420W of power at peak graphics load and an FX-60 equipped 7900 GTX SLI system uses 385W by comparison. There were two hard drives and two optical drives in the Quad SLI system, compared to one hard drive and one optical drive in the SLI system. I was actually quite surprised at how low the power consumption was - you're only looking at about a 30W difference at full load as a result of adding two more GPUs.

At the moment, there isn't any reason to buy Quad because the concept is too unstable. That doesn't mean it won't take off in the future when drivers are better equipped to handle four GPUs and manage to make them work together as they should.

 

so you could just plonk in a nice enermax 600w jobbie or somthing

that quad SLI PSU is a complete waste, they just bolted 2 PSU's together, thats not good engineering

PCP&C makes a 1kw PSU and thats not made by bolting 2 together

 

Not necessarily, we said that the PSU was essentially two PSUs bolted together for simplicity's sake - it's more than just a standard PSU, due to the different loading requirements in a Quad GPU configuration. There are two transformers and you can see pictures of the internals here: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/03/22/tagan_quad-sli_power/

 

Thats a bit like SLI then - why have one card to do a job when you can have lots of cards. And make them bigger too.

Actually I'm thinking the people that designed the last 3Dfx cards got to them.

 

why do they need 2 transformers

the freeking power lines dont use multiple ones (do they )
They could have just used a bigger transformer, instead of 2

their still drawing all the power off a single power cable/plug

 

adapting 2 power supplies (that are part of their current lineup) into a single unit is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper than designing a new unit capable of pushing out 1000w+

 

Good review. To summarize, based on the review as well as the thread:

• Noisy.
• Super expensive.
• Power hungry.
• Runs at high temperatures.
• Majorly buggy drivers.
• Requires a 30" display to start showing performance improvements.
• Even with a 30" display, shows only incremental improvements for the most part.

Mmm, sounds attractive. Where can I throw away money... er, sorry... buy one of those? Oh, wait, I forgot: you can only buy it as part of a system from select vendors.

I'm not so sure. You can't say it scales based on adding one card. Four cards should be a better indicator. And there's a lot of added overhead to handle.

Most people have the one video card that's integrated into the motherboard. Until motherboards come with integrated dual graphics, they won't become mainstream.

 

i was wondering though why in fear with 4 cards do you not put soft shadows on?

 

PCP&C made a 1000w PSU that doesnt sound like a small commercial airliner

Also scalability isnt guarantted

1 card = 1 card performance

2 cards = ~1.8 card performance

4 cards = well assuming that sequence, 3.4

But combining 4 cards worth of data is more of a challenge then 2 cards

 

You can't run the game with both soft shadows and anti aliasing enabled - we have strongly felt that the game benefits more from AA than it does from the rather ugly-looking soft shadowing technique used in the engine.

 

I think a commercial airliner is probably a little harsh, but it's certainly not "quiet" - hopefully with time, better and more efficient designs will come out.

 

This is just something for Nvidea to show off with. And its a start of probably a long development.

As I see it, most people don't have dual graphic cards. So maybe its better to offer a more affordable dual solution first.

But, impressive, nonetheless.

 

basically the hardware designers are throwing out too much too fast and the software devs are trying to keep up.

If there was alot of focus on drivers i rekon the performance would be amazing.
I mean take any drivers that come with ur oldish card, then try out drivers about 5 revisions later and there is always a pretty decent improvement.