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Graphics Software Hardware

NVIDIA and Dell Display Quad-SLI System 306

Posted by CowboyNeal from the pretty-pictures dept.
Ryan @ CES writes "Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Dell and NVIDIA announced a new XPS system coming later this year that will sport not one, not two, but FOUR GeForce 7800 GTX 512 GPUs running in a quad-SLI configuration. There are two physical graphics cards in the system still, but each has two seperate PCBs with a GPU and 512 MB of memory on each. PC Perspective has some information including pictures of the cards and Dell system as well as specs and details on how NVIDIA handles the new SLI data configurations. No word yet on power consumption and heat levels, of course."
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NVIDIA and Dell Display Quad-SLI System More

NVIDIA and Dell Display Quad-SLI System

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  • I wonder how much Dell paid Nvidia for this one. I mean, there must be plenty of manufacturers they could have picked, especially ones much more known for being gaming-oriented companies (Alienware, or Falcon Northwest).

  • That green light.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @11:47PM (#14406643)
    is fission.

    http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/195/caseopen_2 .jpg [pcper.com]

  • Voodoo 5 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hobbitgh0d42 ( 863818 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @11:49PM (#14406651) Journal
    Is anyone else reminded of the Voodoo 5 with the size of this thing?

    • Re:Voodoo 5 (Score:2, Funny)

      by Amouth ( 879122 )
      i am waiting for the flames of the case to be real.. that would keep the spirt of the Voodoo5 alive..

      nVdia did buy them if you remember.. and i am sure that is where they are getting their SLI tec from

  • Mooninites unite! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05, 2006 @11:49PM (#14406656)
    Lock in!

    No one can defeat the quad-laser!

    It is over now!

    The bullet is enormous, there is no escaping!

    Jumping...is useless!
  • had it right all along. Here i was, making fun of the 800 and 1000W PSUs we've started to see over the last 6 months, and now I get to eat crow.

    But at least I know get to make fun of the people spending 6000-8000 dollars (general swag the article took based on the current Dell SLI setups) on a gaming computer.

  • Wonder what the power bill would be like.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'd be scared to turn that besat of a box on, unless I knew for sure that my house wiring could take it...I wonder how many watts the PSU is rated for (and who built the PSU..muhaha)

    Also, who would be able to use this other than the extreme gaming folks?

    This box will cost a pretty penny, but would a person even be able see an improvement over the current popular 939 pin Opteron + fatass video card combo?

  • Lions and Tigers (Score:4, Funny)

    by Artie Dent ( 929986 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @11:51PM (#14406664) Homepage
    I am totally creeped out by the Nvidia eye logo thing. I would have to get my compy two, just so it had depth perception.

  • And now to boot it up.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sduic ( 805226 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @11:51PM (#14406666)
    *Lights dim*
    *PSU explodes*
    *case begins melting*

    "Wow! 3FPS faster!"

  • Overkill (Score:4, Interesting)

    by miyako ( 632510 ) <miyako AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday January 05, 2006 @11:53PM (#14406680) Homepage Journal
    This machine certainly seems like overkill. What would be nice would be if they would make a system like this that uses budget cards. Given that graphics rendering is a task that is easly split between multiple processors (IIRC that's the case anyway), I would think that they could offer something like this with cheaper cards and get better performance than going up to the next generation of cards.
    Since a bleeding edge card tends to run around $500, and a card a couple of generations old tends to run about $100, you could get four older generation cards for less than a bleeding edge card, and equivilent if not better performance.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:02AM (#14406717)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Most of the high-end shit is for bragging rights...period. Trust me, it's not over. Expect to see rigs going for 8 grand
        Keep it going guys! Cheap high performace clusters are built from what is effectively gaming god boxes without the expensive video gear.
      • Bragging rights?

        I want something that'll give me at least 3 screens on MS flight sim 2004 (and FSX when it's released).

        This setup would allow me to turn everything up and have it running on 4 screens! If the price comes down by the end of the year I'll be considering this sort of thing (realistically I'll probably end up with the mid range cards of the day rather than top of the line). ...and in non-specialist situations the speed's going to be a godsend when the next wave of resource hogging eye candy (gam
        • 3 screens IS a gimmick. It is just a trick to get a more useful aspect ratio. A single panoramic projector that does 4800x1200 resolution is better than 3 1600x1200 screens. I am actually surprised no one has started producing arc-shaped LCDs, for flight sims and even normal desktop work it would be kinda useful to have a very very wide display curving from one side of your desk to the other.
          • How about a long (like three to four feet), high-res OLED "roll-up" screen that could be shaped anywhere from flat to semi-circle to a circle (with one's head in it)? It would probably take some extra software/OS configuration work but you could make one nice HUD out of it.
        • Multiple screens are indeed a great thing for flight sims. I'm just about to finish my private pilot training, and the first thing my instructor told me when I started was "stay away from a flight sim for right now".

          Reason being, with a flight sim, you learn to look straight at the monitor. Sure there's a view hat, but in general you still keep your eyes fixed directly ahead. This can lead to some very bad habits as when flying a real plane, you have to be constantly looking all around and scanning the s

    • Re:Overkill (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:02AM (#14406719) Homepage
      I don't think this is aimed at gamers, exactly. I would think this would be aimed at professionals. I could be wrong. Who else would need the ability to drive 4 monitors at over 1600x1200 each?

      I agree this is overkill, but I think that it is like those 108" TVs that someone (Samsung?) is showing at CES. It may be a product that is for sale, but they don't expect to actually sell any number of them greater than 5. It is more a PR boast than anything else.

      Personally, I can't wait for Mac World SF. Rumor has it Apple will introduce a new version of their pro apps (specifically Final Cut Pro) that can work on ultra-HD content (I think it was 11 megapixels a frame, 4000x2700 or so) and a new monitor designed with a high enough resolution to be able to show it full-frame, unstretched. Now THAT should be cool to see.

      But it is CES and products fall into two categories: "wow, that's neat" and "wow, that's neat and who would ever buy that".

      • Who else would need the ability to drive 4 monitors at over 1600x1200 each?

        Here's my guess, the real product is a single one of these cards, with 2 GPUs on it. But since they already had SLI done, they could put a couple of these dual boards together to get four total almost for free (in engineering terms), so they did... mostly as a stunt.

        It's like putting a pair of dual-core CPUs in a dual-CPU motherboard. Most people buying dual-core CPUs will only run one.

        • It's not a stunt if it works. As expensive as four 7800GTX 512MB cards (or four chipsets in two cards) would be, we're not talking car prototype expensive. Given the number of silly people already using two expensive video cards in one PC (my parents paid less for their PC with LCD monitor than the cost of two new 7800s), it's not a big stretch to imagine them buying a couple more if they're getting a measurable performance advantage. Hell, maybe someone will actually be able to run Everquest 2 at its hi
      • Maybe I am missing something, but I don't think they want to run four monitors at 1600x1200. I think SLI is to get better performance on one monitor, so maybe you run even higher, like 2500x1600 or something crazy.

        Think 1080p HD quality rendered video.

      • Re:Overkill (Score:4, Informative)

        by StarWreck ( 695075 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @01:07AM (#14407003) Homepage Journal
        they don't expect to actually sell any number of them greater than 5.
        Car makers used to have a saying "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday". Everybody knew that the cars winning the races weren't the cars you could buy but people assume that if their race cars are better than the competitors race cars, then their regular cars are better than the competitors regular cars too.

        Dell is hoping that having a system this high-powered will drive up the sales for its mainstream models as well.

        • Re:Overkill (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Osty ( 16825 )

          Car makers used to have a saying "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday". Everybody knew that the cars winning the races weren't the cars you could buy but people assume that if their race cars are better than the competitors race cars, then their regular cars are better than the competitors regular cars too.

          Actually, it used to be that the cars were the same. "Stock car" racing is named such because it used to be the racing of stock (as in, righ off the showroom floor) cars. It's obviously not that today, wh

      • Sorry, has to be said...

        No one needs quad sli, and of course - 640k ought to be enough for anybody.
    • Possibly, if they support SLI. So maybe a generation or 2 from now you can use this setup. Of course by then you could do quad-SLI with whatever the new and fastest is.
    • I know a few Everquest 2 players that would love to have that machine. Might even be able to adjust the display settings to "Extreme".

      Of course what with playing EQ2 all day they can barely afford the electricity to run the thing.

    • Re:Overkill (Score:5, Funny)

      by ArsonSmith ( 13997 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:25AM (#14406838) Journal
      I don't know, maybe if I get a machine like this I'll switch from vi to EMACS.
  • From the looks of that picture, the motherboard and case only support four total expansion slots. What about sound cards and other PCI peripherals? Are extreme gamers now going to be forced to live with built-in sound? If I were going to pay $6,000-$8,000 or even more for an absolute top-of-the-line system I think I might want something more than just raw graphics power.

  • CGMT (Score:5, Funny)

    by Konster ( 252488 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @11:58PM (#14406698)
    I got one of the first run today.

    On the front of the case it has a little sticker that reads, "Windows Vista Ready."

  • CGMT (Score:5, Funny)

    by Konster ( 252488 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:02AM (#14406714)
    http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/195/shipcase_2 .jpg [pcper.com]

    That isn't the paint job. It's a translucent case!

  • Vista? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ryan Mallon ( 689481 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:02AM (#14406721)
    It may just be powerful enough to draw the desktop in Windows Vista ;-)

  • Allready done. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vaakku ( 698260 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:03AM (#14406725)
    Tomshardware tested this kind of setup few weeks ago. Link to story and some benchmarks. http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/14/sneak_previ ew_of_the_nvidia_quad_gpu_setup/ [tomshardware.com]

  • "That's no power supply ... " (Score:5, Funny)

    by H_Fisher ( 808597 ) <h_v_fisher@yah[ ]com ['oo.' in gap]> on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:04AM (#14406735)
    No word yet on power consumption and heat levels, of course."

    Bleeding edge gamer: "Hey, guys? I'm about to start Doom 3! Activate the Quad SLI!"
    Gamer's best bud: "Commence primary ignition!"
    Dude's buddy flips switches to crank up liquid nitrogen pump and nuclear power-plant tie-in.
    Sound of neighboring houses' power being drained:     Beeooooooooooo...!
    Other buddy looks away from the see-thru case mod, and covers his eyes [theforce.net]...

    Yeah. Something like that.

  • I smell a Beowulf reference... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nobodyman ( 90587 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:09AM (#14406761) Homepage
    I'm inclined to crack jokes, but I've been out of the game for a long time so I have questions. Better do both.

    - I couldn't really tell, but in the images it only looks like the mobo has one cpu. Just one? I imagine the kind of frea^H^H^H^H consumer who would go for 4way SLI would demand nothing less than 2 dual-core CPU's.

    - If it does only have 1 cpu, or even 1 dual core cpu, wont the games be CPU limited before you even scratch the surface of this qual-sli madness?

    - They've drawn flames on this thing [pcper.com]. I imagine this is redundant given the heat it will produce, and ultimately confusing to the jerk^H^H^H^H consumer when it actually does burst into flames. :-)
    • Anything less than windows server 2003 standard edition (not small business, I think?) will only support 2 cpus.
      Anyway, in server 2003 there is little driver support in the graphics card world for server 2003, and for many other pc parts for that matter. Plus a copy of server will run you upwards of $1000. T

      PLUS, most games are gpu limited anyway, not cpu.

      Dual core is on there I'm sure, but right now most games aren't even optimized for that, let alone 4!

      On top of it all the P4 does not support a 2 cpu r

      • On top of it all the P4 does not support a 2 cpu rig, that would be a Xenon. You priced a dual core/dualcpu capable chip lately. I'm not even sure they exist, but just a dual core Xenon is...ouch.

        Yeah I have - they cost around $250, but usually aren't SLI. Of course, I was looking at AMD chips; none of that inferior Intel crap fo me.

      • Anything less than windows server 2003 standard edition (not small business, I think?) will only support 2 cpus.
        Right, but that's really 2 CPU packages. We run dual-CPU dual-core Athlons at work quite frequently on XP Pro. My understanding is that MS has said that per-package license will continue to be policy. I'm really hoping AMD can cram 4 CPU-cores on a package in the near future.
    • Two reasons:

      (1) In the past couple years multi-processor systems have slid further out of the hobbyist market and towards the server market.

      (2) While it's not that uncommon to run sound processing or something relatively light in a second thread, most games do most of their work in a single thread. If you're buying a system to game rather than to run PHP for Apache, getting more CPUs probably isn't going to help you much.
    • A couple points.

      It's got a four and a quarter gigahertz dual-core Pentium in it. Overclocked like that, the Pentium can probably keep up with a fast Athlon.

      There don't seem to be benchmark results anywhere, but if Tom (yeah, I know) is anywhere near right, Intel and Nvidia would have to have gotten a lot of optimization done to make this anywhere near useful. And I mean that in the loosest sense of the term: faster with 4 GPUs than with 2.

      Also, you need to be playing games at 1600x1200 or higher resolutio

  • The law of diminishing returns (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Travoltus ( 110240 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:12AM (#14406780) Journal
    has been triggered by this setup.

    There's no way even a dual cpu setup could produce enough computing power to actually push a quad SLI GFX 7800 to its maximum output. There'll be bottlenecks with CPU speed, memory speed, and quite often, the performance of the hard drive itself. I bet even the operating system will present another bottleneck.

    I'd love to see how this performs in benchmarks, and how much advantage it has over regular SLI (2) cards.

  • Dell has really been pushing their XPS gaming machine brand lately. Could this just be a marketing gimmick?

    1. Build the most ultimate uber neeto cool computer that all of use geeks will talk about.
    2. People see XPS as the most advanced gaming machines.
    3. Everyone buys the normal priced systems instead of the one with 3489 video cards.
    4. PROFIT!
  • We need a new furnace for the house, but this beast will easily keep my house ( located in the nether regions of Canada ) warm all winter. I am only disappointed that this rig will cost about the same as a new furnace.

  • Low Performance + Not compatible with major games (Score:3, Informative)

    by Nazmun ( 590998 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @12:35AM (#14406883) Homepage
    After extensive testing we have found these PC's aren't able to run numerous popular games. The games that this machine runs, does so at a much lower frame rate then expected.

    Unless Dell changes their software policy and stops shipping new systems with so much crap @ startup it won't matter how good the hardware is. To get decent performance from one of Dell's recent gaming machines one has to spend over an hour uninstalling crap and disabling random services @ startup.

    The following is a hardocp review of the Dell Dimensions XPS 400. Covers the buying process, Dell's support, along with the hardware and software it ships with. The system's hardware potential was great, too bad you had to make an extensive software cleanup make this perform respectibly.

    http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTI0 [hardocp.com]
  • To time how long it takes to get this kind of power in a single $75 valu-edition graphics card. My bet is 1Q2008.

    I mean, really, how does your current video card stack up to a dual-card solution, circa 1996?

  • Saw this funny thing today [techreport.com] at TechReport, a PCIe card where you can mount two mobile graphics modules/cards (MXM) for SLI in desktop systems. Weird prototype thingy. Not sure what market this is targeting...

  • ASUS seems to be working [tomshardware.com] on something very similar but in a smaller package (2 PCB each with 2 GPUs and ugly external PSUs).

    Sigh, it looks like the majors are finally catching up with my Onyx2. I remember back in the day seeing Indigo2 systems with Extreme (funny how SGI was even ahead of the curve on over using the word 'extreme' and the letter 'x') graphics which has 8 GEs on two multi-chip modules. Well though they're slow today they're still built like tanks, fun to use, and pretty as hell.

    I say hel

  • am I the only one who has thought that? I mean really, who is going to buy 4 of those video cards? Are we supposed to believe a very smart company like nvidia would waste their time with a venture like this? If they expect us to believe that, then i'll believe that nvidia has reached their graphics card ceiling, becuase theres no way they would bother with quad sli, which about .025% of the population could afford / want. I only have a very high end AGP card and it runs every game out there quite nicely
    • I only have a very high end AGP card and it runs every game out there quite nicely - only FEAR gives it any trouble.

      You know...it isn't actually all that important to have fancy hardware to make a good, fun, replayable game. Oh, it's easier to sell games with fancy graphics -- you can slap screenshots all over the box. Ultimately, though, there are an awful lot of more-technically-advanced games that have falled by the wayside, and I've played a lot more angband and tetris than any of them, and kept playi

  • #70 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ravyne ( 858869 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @01:15AM (#14407043)
    I'd just like to point out that the 5.2 Terraflops of computing power they quote would place it at #70 on the top500 Supercomputer list! While I realize that its by now means a general processor, its still quite amazing that they've reached that kind of computing density, albeit in a well defined and inherantly paralizable problem domain.

    It edges out Russia's Joint Supercomputer Center, which uses an MVS-15000BM, eServer BladeCenter JS20 containing 924 IBM PowerPC970 processors at 2.2 GHz for the #70 spot.
    • But, c'mon now, do you really believe that they've managed to put the equivalent of 924 2.2GHz processors into a consumer rig? I certainly don't :)

      Just like I don't really believe the PS3 has a 'supercomputer on a chip'. Manufacturers love to take things out of context, and that makes big meaningless numbers which generate sales.

      I can almost smell the burning karma, but I bet that entire rig won't put out 1 Teraflop in practice.
  • Now you can order a Dell at work and actually be proud of it. This may be a tiny bit easier to sneak past accounting because it has the Dell logo on it. However when they see the price tag that might change. Don't forget to add one of those new Dell 30" monitors.
  • Until nVidia figures out whatever patent fuckup they got themselves into with SGI and resolves it so we can have open source accelerated drivers, the product in this article is just another expensive, shiny piece of unusable shit.
  • I have an SLI system I bought almost a year ago now. Dual 6800GTs and a substantially overclocked Athlon 64. The box is definitely badass, but frankly, what nvidia needs to do is get more game developers making their games work with SLI. Recently City of Villains came out. I play at 1600x1200, and a single 6800GT is not cutting it with all the bells and whistles. (They added antialiasing, specular bloom, and depth of field effects, plus the poly counts are supposedly higher than in CoH with larger textures)
  • If this is being used with 32-bit Windows XP for gaming, does that mean the machines virtual address space is more than maxed out with 2GB of main RAM + 2GB of VRAM + other hardware memory overhead on top of that? How much actual addressable physical RAM is left for the OS and applications?
    • Video memory is not directly addressable by the processor; it is read/written to using the PCI bus. Even if some of it is mapped into the CPU's virtual address space, it is likely that not all 2 GB will be mapped at the same time (especially considering that the contents of each card's 512 MB will be mostly duplicated except for the frame buffers; what a waste of RAM!).
  • i can't see dell shipping machines overlocked from the factory like this one. seems more like CES candy, like the 105 plasmas.

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