Bio-Hazard
05-01-2006, 02:01 AM
A extremely interesting read along with some very interest results when you think about it being 2 GPU's against 4 GPU's, the 2 GPU's even wins a round or 2............
" At this year's CeBIT the most controversial and most debated new hardware (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#) was NVIDIA's Quad-SLI, which was awarded "best product of CES" earlier this year. By now everybody should know about SLI which combines the rendering power (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#) of two video cards to achieve greater performance, or better image quality through higher Anti-Aliasing Levels. The logical evolution of this dual solution is using four GPUs. However, since there are no chipsets/motherboards which support PCI-E x16 on four slots, NVIDIA had to come up with a way to make their idea happen.
In the past we have seen dual GPU solutions on one PCB (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#) from manufacturers like Gigabyte or ASUS. But these were just GeForce 6600 designs which were not using such complex PCBs. The 7900 GTX is the biggest and baddest NVIDIA card around, of course it has a completely different range of requirements when it comes to power and signal stability.
So putting two GPUs on one PCB was out. The clever people at NVIDIA worked up a rather simple but ingenious solution - just stack two video cards (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#), let them use only one slot connector and interconnect (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#) them with an own PCI-E bus. Each card has a little bridge device on it which connects the second card to the main PCI-E slot into which the card is plugged."
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1
" At this year's CeBIT the most controversial and most debated new hardware (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#) was NVIDIA's Quad-SLI, which was awarded "best product of CES" earlier this year. By now everybody should know about SLI which combines the rendering power (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#) of two video cards to achieve greater performance, or better image quality through higher Anti-Aliasing Levels. The logical evolution of this dual solution is using four GPUs. However, since there are no chipsets/motherboards which support PCI-E x16 on four slots, NVIDIA had to come up with a way to make their idea happen.
In the past we have seen dual GPU solutions on one PCB (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#) from manufacturers like Gigabyte or ASUS. But these were just GeForce 6600 designs which were not using such complex PCBs. The 7900 GTX is the biggest and baddest NVIDIA card around, of course it has a completely different range of requirements when it comes to power and signal stability.
So putting two GPUs on one PCB was out. The clever people at NVIDIA worked up a rather simple but ingenious solution - just stack two video cards (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#), let them use only one slot connector and interconnect (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1#) them with an own PCI-E bus. Each card has a little bridge device on it which connects the second card to the main PCI-E slot into which the card is plugged."
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/1