Graphic Cards Two's Company, Four's a WOW! Sneak Preview of NVIDIA Quad GPU SLI

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For complete article with benchies, images click here

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Gist of the article
The Asus Muscle Card: If You've Got The Money...

Thanks to the PCI Express (PCIe) interface, combining two graphics cards in an SLI configuration is easily achieved. Just plug two identical GeForce 6 or GeForce 7 cards into the motherboard, and connect them with the SLI bridge connector. The two cards will then split the 3D rendering load between them, which can result in a performance improvement of up to 70 percent in everyday life. Now that PCI Express motherboards are available with PCIe x32 - or, more correctly, two x16 slots - there are also some new and intriguing possibilities.

Enter Asus with its brand new Extreme GeForce 7800 GT Dual. This monster of a graphics chip sports two 7800 GT chips running in parallel. We'd like to note a few things that are special about this card. First, only 2000 samples of this my-card-is-faster-than-your-card graphics board exist, worldwide. Second, the THG lab received two of them. Third, although the cards lack the usual SLI connectors, two of these monsters can nonetheless be combined via SLI. That means we can now achieve Quad SLI with four GeForce 7800 GT chips and a total of 1 GB of video memory.

Performance: Staggering Under Its Own Weight

These benchmark scores need to be viewed with a charitable eye - after all, this concept is not yet fully functional and not officially supported by NVIDIA. According to Asus, our setup, consisting of an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe (Revision 2) and the two Extreme 7800 GT Dual cards, should work just fine. Indeed, our lab didn't run into any problems in 2D mode. At first, the same held true for 3D mode, when we tested Quake 4. At 86 FPS, the dual-chip card runs this game faster than a single GT but 5 FPS slower than a conventional GT-SLI setup. Using the v77.77 driver included by Asus', the card should be able to reach 91 FPS. The newer reference driver v81.95 pushes the SLI configuration of two conventional 7800 GTs to over 100 FPS.

However, after completing our benchmark run and rebooting the system, Quake 4 refused to start at all without producing a blue screen. On our first benchmark run, the synthetic benchmark 3DMark 2005 made it through the first of the three game demos, but then the system froze. Even before that, the image output was very jittery and not well synchronized. The following benchmark runs ran smoothly and completed without incident, aside from the problem with the fidgety image. The Quad setup's score of 11821 is a good 2400 points higher than that of two normal 7800s in SLI mode.

The game F.E.A.R. benefited the most from Quad SLI. The two Dual cards reached 92 FPS, while the two 7800 GTs together only managed 47 FPS. However, the image was corrupted in the lower third of the screen. Since a part of the image is rendered incorrectly, it isn't clear whether the benchmark results come from only the correctly displayed portion of the image (with the rest simply being ignored) or can truly be attributed to the Quad SLI setup.

Conclusion:

Ignoring the driver's teething problems and the phenomenon regarding the image synchronization, it seems obvious what the future holds. SLI is no longer limited to only two chips or two cards. Whatever the future may bring, Tom's Hardware is looking forward to updates from Asus and further technical highlights.
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Yeah this was expected after the launch of the A8N-SLI 32 but real-world performance will be the key. AFAIK even a FX-57 will be a bottleneck for such a video subsystem...

Edit: Not worth the money. In FEAR it thrashes 2x7800GTX but in Q4 it actually is beaten and the 3D Mark gain isn't significant. ASUS Sucks !
 
Anish said:
Yeah this was expected after the launch of the A8N-SLI 32 but real-world performance will be the key. AFAIK even a FX-57 will be a bottleneck for such a video subsystem...

Edit: Not worth the money. In FEAR it thrashes 2x7800GTX but in Q4 it actually is beaten and the 3D Mark gain isn't significant. ASUS Sucks !
Click to expand...

Agree with you that the card is not worth it....not even close...anyways implementing such stuff is always hard and the results are that it may not also always be 100% stable....I'd stick with a single 7800GTX 512 which would be better in the long run, what with this one running hotter, consuming more etc etc..

Your last part however..."Asus sucks"...beg to differ....These guys have churned out some of the most amazing boards and cards that we've seen. While their cards may not be the fastest around but they have some of the industries lowest return rates.
On another note I guess your personal opinions (and mine for that matter) won't mean a penny to them...:p
 
^^ No, no I don't doubt thier quality and all, I mean even I have a ASUS boards and thier boards are the best for sure...

The card pricing sucks, and the 7800GT Dual concept sounds nice but sucks in real-world gain. And you have to use the A8N32 SLi ONLY so it becomes a total ASUS rig...

BTW, one neat feature of the 7800GT Dual is that it uses an external power source, like an adapter...very innovative I must say so u can even have that SLi system running on a 400W PSU...
 
goldenfrag said:
^^ Very Useless.
Overpriced and dismal performance to price ratio. :).

Long Live 7800GTX 512 :p.
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lmao ! thats even more poor value for money ! Prices are over 700 $ now, a x1800xt or 2*7800gts are much better vfm.
 
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