Quad SLI: GeForce 7900 GX2

Its definatley driver issues there, however I would rather have 2 good cards than 4 mid cards.

I cant get over how big those cards are.

 

Wow, that's outright silly.

I'm a bit lost as to how a single 7900GT can be playable with Oblivion at 1920 with about the same setting as the 7900GTX SLI setup (and quad SLI, save the bugs), but go figure.

Never had any interest in something this nuts, and these numbers are a bit comforting for someone who enjoys the bleeding edge but can't afford it.

 

in about 8 months 1 card will have the same theoretical power of a quad sli.

 

i would never throw all my eggs into this basket. the investment required to get these cards is beyond obscene, and with a reviews tearing strips off Nv, theyre not going to have many takers.

i wonder if the people who paid like 10,000 for those limited edition Dell machines are pissed

 

Bought a Dell Renegade? Kept the receipt did ya

 

IIRC ATi has done a 64 GPU setup for the military but that's multi-million, one off style stuff.

I'm still content with my 9800pro as I can run oblivion at 1042x768 with low settings. It still looks great and with enhanced textures it looks even better. I've got an X1800XT 256mb on order and thats going to be more than enough for me. £170 or £1000, what would you choose?

I know people want the bleeding edge, but for the majority of the people out there its just not necessary. I have a friend who just got a new laptop with intel graphics and he thinks it the most inpessive graphics hes ever seen. Something like this is just obscene and just another nV publicity stunt like laptop SLI.

 

I panned through the article. This is ridiculous. The state of PC gaming sickens me. I'm parting out my high end gaming rig right now as we speak.

The thought of 900watt power supplies...to play...a game...

When M$ has a 360 that I've been having just as much fun with...will anyone ever wake up put a stop to this madness? 2K+ for the gpu's alone? Seriously...

 

I think they just need to come out with a retail modle that has those bugs fixed. I am sure that a quade sli card can be overclocked with a little water cooling. I wonder witht he two cards being link like that do they do better performance then a set-up like SLi. What I mean is two card so close to each other better then to linked together from a PCB bar thats a little longer.

With the 7900GX2 so large why not make a 7900GTX with physX card built in. There is no way the a 7900GTX take up the full bandwidth of a PCI-X slot so why not put a physX core on the card.

Anther thing I want to say is that no many people have a 30". And even fewer game at 30". There is no point in having a card that can do well at 12X10. What are they thinking. Look at the last Valve survay most people game at 4:3 of 1024x700 or 1280x1024. Why create a card that sucks at the level.

I have all ways thought the reason for creating such high end card is for the CPL gamer that need the best. But now I see its just for the rich kid who has to have one. There is no real benfit at the res that gamer play at the moument.

 

Alot of comments ^^ that the cards are huge and should be getting smaller not bigger??

Theres a lot of VGA cards out there that are that size so theres nothing new there, just you not seen that many VGA cards

I would expect them to be huge at first, any later models will be smaller.

Theres those that say whats the point as not many people out there with 30" screens or can afford the set up. These cards are for the rich that have far too much money and splashing out for kit like this is like us slpashing out for a DVD.

 

bah, its getting ridiculous. Im still sitting on socket A with a 2500 @ 2500mhz and a 5900xt (9800 died ). Graphics cards are becoming ridiculously expensive, a top end card cost you 150-200US a while back, now here you're looking at 400US... no WAY i can justify that for a video card... I wonder if sanity will ever return, the hardware requirements are killing game buying for many.

 

Overkill...

 

Well said.

I agree with this guy^^

 

Well... I'm quite disappointed too. I used to believe that nVidia's SLI stuff worked well but they don't seem to get this beasts to work together correctly. As I can't see the problems being solved in the near future with newer drivers I don't think this might become anything near mainstream.
But anyways... I'll wait for AM2 and G80/R600 before I upgrade...S939+G7x/R5xx will still be enough I guess in like half a year.

 

So, running one of these on its own. Does this run like normal SLI (ie, properly) or are the bugs and performance issues still there

 

You can't buy them on their own, so we didn't attempt to test one on its own. However, TechPowerUP did do some single card testing. Because the Quad SLI numbers are all over the place, it's hard to determine whether the single card is running in SLI or not.

 

Performance - Very disapointing!
Size - Well lets say that you could probably use them as very expensive ski's
Cost - I could probably buy a large part of africa with that much money.

However give Nv a few months to work out the bugs etc and bring out some improved models.... it could actually be good.

Would i buy? HAHA no way!

 

this entire thing is obscene

firstly, those PSU's are plain stupid, bolting 2 PSU's together is not a decent solution, get your ass in gear and actually make a proper PSU

Second, Theres no need for this much pixel power
Game developers cant develop games that need this much umph, as you would chop off about all the market, only allowing people with very high spec machines being able to play your game - and thats not going to happen
And the benifits become less and less as you increase the settings, as you are limited by what the low settings are

Third, Those PCB's are crazy, 300+mm long, what case is that ment to fit in ? Deep blue ?? !! (thats the super computing project by IBM - if im correct)

Forth, Heat, id be interested how much quad SLI raises the case temp then normal SLI (if bit tech could do this ...)


On a side note though, are those cards 30cm long to allow enough room for the coolers ??
Couldnt nvidia impliment a watercooling solution for their quad SLI to make the cards smaller (if thats the determening factor)

Finally - why is "XLGlobetrotterXL" banned ? hes posted a few times in this topic, but hes banned now

Oh yeh, ill take some screenshots later, but how am i getting 100FPS on BF2, maximum settings i can choose ingame (1280x1024, as BF2 wont run at 1680x1050) on a x1900XT

 

I've been trying all day to sit down and write a post to this thread, and finally I'm managing it!

I'm witholding judgement on the quad SLI concept until we see if nVidia can work the bugs out of the drivers. In theory, there is no reason this couldn't work out very well. After all, the 7900 GTX is an excellent and powerful GPU, two are even better, so we know it scales, and therefore 4 should be even better yet. The issue at this point is drivers, and nVidia is hardly the first to have a great product held up in the beginning by driver issues. Didn't ATI recently have their new card widly declared a lemon (I think it was the 1800 or 1900 series, but I forget which) until new drivers were released and suddenly it started kicking ass? I'll agree that nVidia jumped the gun on releasing this before they had the software in place to support it, but from their perspective the success as a marketing tool far outweighs the headaches associated with it.

As for the future of video cards, I think multiple GPUs are here to stay. Lets face it, most people have one video card, having two is much cooler even if the performance delta isn't THAT big. We all agree that the heat and power consumption is getting out of hand, but that can be solved without a performance hit. Think Netburst to Conroe, smaller archetecture and more efficient design. I also think that dual core and multiple core GPUs are going to deliver de-facto quad SLI (or more) on two cards in the next few years.

I still say kudos to nVidia for raising the bar, even if only symbolically. I think in the grand scheme of things quad SLI will go down as a iffy idea that never caught on, but it will also have a good sized cult following, sort og like the old Voodoo cards do now. Keep your quad SLI's, someday they'll be worth a fortune on the collectors market!

 

utter waste of money for morons with too much of it.

"Lets face it, most people have one video card, having two is much cooler even if the performance delta isn't THAT big."

hmm well if it doesn't perform much better it's a waste of money which is oh SOOO cool.
Give it a couple of years and SLi will be dead. Again.

 

Given that every six months to a year a new GPU comes out with roughly double the performance of its predecessor, but with less heat/energy expenditure and at the same cost (or less), I do not really see what is gained by quad SLI.

Six months from now two new nVidea 8000s (or whatever they are going to be called) will pwn these four 7900s. Two years from now you will be able to get a single card doing the same thing. And you won't need a 900 Watts PSU for it.