News Gigabyte anticipates quad CrossFire

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/06/06/gigabyte_anticipates_quad_crossfire/1

COMPUTEX 2007: With AMD's RD790 chipset closer than you think, Gigabyte (among others) expects it to launch soon with quad CrossFire not far behind.

 

How is that going to work with HD 2900XTs? You would have to replace the cooler on it to a single-slot solution, and would pretty much mean water cooling for a card of that energy use. Although I suppose if you can afford quad HD 2900s that isn't much of an issue for you. Interesting idea, could you have oct-crossfire if you used 4 X1950Pro duals or the dual HD 2600 Sapphire is going to make? I would love to see oct-crossfire in action!

 

I did mention this in my pre-show computex coverage, but here we've actually got pics of the board running

 

I would like to see some pictures and benchmarks of the board up and running. Did you get any word there on possible octo-crossfire?(sorry for being repetitive, but the thought of it is pretty cool).

 

We can't benchmark the board at the moment, since it's unreleased hardware (I've already asked if we could...). I'm not sure about Octo CrossFire, but you'd be waiting on drivers for a while, since quad-CrossFire drivers (for the dual HD 2600 XT) are months away. Also, that card has a dual slot cooler on it, so you'd not be able to get a pair in Gigabyte's board.

 

ya I was just about to say something about that, would be sick to two see octal actually work on that, be insane numbers not to mention the ability to have 16 dvi monitor support lol

 

No I think it's because the "Canadians" are hoping for some more global warming, so that they don't freeze so much in the winter. with the power needed to run quad crossfire you would think that the governments soon would start charging greenhouse tax on our GFXs

 

What are the other PC-E slots at when in 16x-16x mode?
And octo wouldn't work even if you replaced the cooler, the PC bracket is a dual one and there are DVI ports on both.
Still Quad is just money grabbing, even SLI/Crossfire are really just money grabbers.

 

Not to mention that, if you think about it, the cost vs performance figures are going to be terrible. The processing overhead for keeping 4 cards in sync has got to be exponentially higher than for two cards, so your probably looking at getting maybe 3x the performance of a single card rather than 4x.

Of course until we actually see it working that's just a hypothesis, but it's a reasonable assumption based on current data.

 

this will need a thermonuclear reactor to feed it.

 

rofl

 

Not so sure it'll be as power-hungry as many are worried about. Since it can only cope with single-slot coolers, that limits the really ultra-power-hungry cards right off the bat. And the HD2400 and 2600 are supposed to be cool running chips.

 

Yeah once the 65nm R650 comes out, heat will be less (as one would expect) and who knows, maybe driver support for Octo (which is completely insane). Would the two extra slots that are x8's be bandwith limiting?, if so, would it just be best to wait for a mobo that supports (4) x16's? In my next rig, I want a lot of headroom for the future and for OCing. I just don't want to get bottlenecked right from the start. It would be a wise investment to go with a 4 slot PCI-E 2.0 config that can support Crossfire because you can continually upgrade every year or so and notice improvement....well atleast I think you would, or would all the new cards run at the same clock as the slowest? O man, somebody help me figure that one out cause that would suck.

 

TBH I don't get it. Like the current SLI-systems wouldn't heat up like hell and be powerful enough?

Uh oh.. wait... AHA it's an ATI/AMD-system, sure you need four of those to compete the half-a-year old 8800GTX SLI! That explains.. But still has someone been actually waiting for such board?