nVidia brings SLI back

[Noite Escura]

By: Sander Sassen

I'm sure many of you can remember the days of 3dfx, the first Voodoo Graphics back in 1996 and about a year later the introduction of the Voodoo2. Voodoo2 actually made sure that 3dfx reigned supreme for quite some time as two cards could be combined in something called an SLI, Scan Line Interleave, configuration. Each card rendered half of the image scan lines which resulted in double the performance of a single board and the ability to play OpenGL games such as Quake 2 in a 1024x768 resolution. To date no manufacturer has come up with a similar concept simply because modern graphics accelerators are all AGP based, there's no dual AGP motherboards and PCI simply doesn't have the bandwidth to handle modern graphics accelerators. With the arrival of PCI-E things have changed though, a number of workstations motherboards featuring the Tumwater chipset will have dual PCI-E-x16 slots making dual graphics accelerators a possibility again. Nvidia steps up to the plate today with the re-introduction of the SLI concept on the GeForce 6800 series, again using the SLI moniker but now with a different approach to the same principles that made Voodoo2 SLI a huge success.

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

 

[Neo]

sweet, i miss voodoo. but it will be interesting to see what Nvidia can do with it.

 

[Huge]

Is that the same Sander Sassen formerly of hwc?

Alienware is making a system similar to that; will be $$$ though...

 

[Huge]

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjMz

 

[Neo]

yes huge same guy. wow nice and big card. how many slots is that gonna take up? 4? if so man that alot to give up. It had better be damn fast and mind blowing.

 

[Gonzo]

That big, it had better blow more than my mind and fast.

 

[Noite Escura]

I didn't notice before it used 4 slots
Huge Sander set up Hardware Analysis as soon as he got the boot of HWC. It seems that Duckman is no longer on his staff though...

 

[Neo]

duckman has his own site. he is doing more of the OC and specialized cooling now days.

 

[Huge]

Oh. I forgot why Sander left; he was a pretty guy.

Well, if one of those things takes up 2 slots, you can imagine what 2 of them will. But these are PCI-X right?

 

[Neo]

nah they are 2 6800's connected at the top. but i dont think i would give up 4 out of 5-6 slots for it. I just dont see that it could be that good since NV is doing it. You know they are gonna make anything 3dfx worse.

 

[Huge]

Well, like I was saying about Alienware's system, the two pci-x slots have a big gap inbetween them. So maybe this is feasible...

A stupid question about pci-x: why aren't all the slots pci-x? All the boards I've seen have 1 or 2 pci-x; all the rest are normal pci (maybe 2 at best)?

 

[Noite Escura]

Compatibility?

 

[ImRaptor]

Well, like I was saying about Alienware's system, the two pci-x slots have a big gap inbetween them. So maybe this is feasible...

A stupid question about pci-x: why aren't all the slots pci-x? All the boards I've seen have 1 or 2 pci-x; all the rest are normal pci (maybe 2 at best)?

pci-x is expensive.
And there isn't really much need for a lot of pci-x slots as of yet as most things will not need the added bandwidth.
Honestly, how many things can you think of that need to have a much higher bandwidth than what pci can deliver?
Same thing happened when pci was introduced to replace EISA slots, it took awhile for boards to come out that had only PCI slots.

 

[Huge]

I know...

But I want 4 GFX cards in my machine running dual SLI