Introduction
A recent headline article on HEXUS introduced the ASUS Extreme N7800GT Dual in a hands-on preview of the first single-board SLI product to use NVIDIA G70. ASUS had previously tried their hand at something similar with dual GeForce 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra on the same PCB in SLI, but the product never made it to retail despite ASUS's best intentions.This review of a full retail example confirms that ASUS have succeeded this time around in pushing the product into the hands of their customers. In a limited edition run of 2000 units, the Extreme N7800GT Dual puts two NVIDIA G70 GPUs in GT configuration, each clocked at 430MHz with their own 256MiB compliment of memory running at 600MHz, on the same graphics board.
The benefits of SLI are well understood by now, the basic idea of adding further GPUs to help out with 3D rendering tasks well established and understood since NVIDIA resurrected the idea in polished consumer fashion last November.
To do multi-GPU on the same graphics board is one traditionally doomed to failure since 3dfx gave up the game nearly 5 years ago. However, Gigabyte's successful (launch and sales wise) of their GeForce 6600 GT-based 3D1 showed that a market was there, albeit limited, for SLI on a single board using NVIDIA GPUs.
Therefore we present you EN7800GT Dual number 34 in a limited edition series of 2000. Utterly niche, orders of magnitude more people will read this article than examples of this product will ever go on sale. But utterly worth having a look at, I think you'll agree.
