SLI is back!

[Helevitia]

Didn't see this coming. This is turning into a killer year for computers. Next year should be spectacular.

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1728/

[bsdgeek]

I hope everyone adopts this. It may be a longshot, but I would really really really like dual P8x+ PCI-Express cards to keep Surround Gaming viable for the future.

Oh, I expected you'd have to get a special motherboard and all, but it's limited to Xeons?

[Wombat]

I hate that they're calling it SLI. It has almost nothing to do with the original implementation.

[Helevitia]

True, it is closer to the Alienware design I believe. Plus, it only runs on dual PCI-E which apparently is only supported with Xeon CPUs. It's getting expensive. Pretty soon it'll cost me money to think about it.

Dave

[Wombat]

I'm sure you'll be able to get dual 16x PCI-E other places soon enough. It's likely on the Xeon boards because servers have <I>real</I> use for the bandwidth (not just toys ).

[Marshmallowman]

Still its nice, good to see that the benefits of PCI-E are going to be popping up pretty quickly.

free 's to the first person to provide me with a link to a dual opteron mobo with at least 2 PCI-E 16x slots

[thop]

What a bunch of useless crap.

[dZeus]

yeah nobody bought 2 Voodoo2 cards because SLI was useless crap, and 3dFX didn't make massive amounts of money off the voodoo2 partly because of that reason

[TransformX]

10 years from now:
Me: Yo, check out my new #$%&*$#%@ computer man !
Friend: (green with envy) Holy shit ! How much did it cost ?
Me: So and so.
Friend: Shit man, I can't afford it. I guess I'll have to settle for a BMW instead.

[thop]

Except that one 6800 costs as much as a SLI setup did back then, consumes 50x the power, produces 10x the heat, 5x the noise and whatnot. Excellent step in the wrong direction.

I'd prefer a more efficient version instead of two freaking monsters but that's just me. But i can already see FPS whores creaming their pants.

It's a huge problem for Matrox though, now nV has quad-display.

[mmp121]

Not to mention the 600 Watt PSU that will be required to run 2 NV 6800 cards...

[piaxVirus]

Don't forget that this setup will also use up 4 card slots.

[Novdid]

I tend to agree with thop, this is just a tad to much. dual Voodoo2's had it's place back then...but this is just to much.

[ALBPM]

I still have my old Quantum 3D Obsidian X-24 sitting in the box. I wonder what it is worth nowadays.

[TdB]

the point with sli back then was that with 2 voodoo2´s you could run your games in 1024*768, that was a difference everbody could see and understand.

now, the only difference lies in the framerate, and the nv40 can already run every game REALLY fast at any setting, that is, faster than the refreshrate most people run their monitors at.

my point is: back then you could see the effect sli had in your games even without knowing much about computers, now you have to enable a framerate counter and disable v-sync, just to see if sli is enabled...

this is imo only needed if you use your computer for professional graphic-rendering...(the quadro-line will benefit from this, no doubt) or for triplehead gaming or really exotic resolutions.

Seriously do any of you expect a game this year (or the next). that ONE nv40 can´t run perfectly with everything to the max?