Dell have thought up a use for that massive 30 inch TFT of theirs. They've teamed up with NVIDIA at CES to showcase the biggest thing to hit PC graphics since SLI... Quad SLI.
Showcased in Michael Dell's keynote speech today is a Dell XPS 600 Renegade system, under the hood of which roars a pair of dual GPU GeForce 7800 GTX cards - yup, two cards, each with two G70GTX cores. Sat on a motherboard built around the nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset, this is the first ever system to support SLI utilising not two, but four GeForce GPUs.
Combining the system and its hilarious amounts of graphics power with Dell's 30 inch 3007WFP TFT monitor gives the possibility for gaming at 2560x1600, with framerates nothing else will be able to touch (right now, anyway.) A whopping 32x antialiasing is supported, along with 16x anisotropic filtering for an injection of image quality. Of course, it'd be wrong not to run these cards without all settings set to max wouldn't it?
Head over to NVIDIA's website and you can find a little information, plus a rather nice animation of how the hell the thing goes together. Each card consists of two PCBs to accommodate the G70GTX cores and 512MiB of RAM each - so that's 2GiB across all four cores.
Just as ATI's Crossfire was starting to catch up with SLI, NVIDIA pulls this rabbit out of the hat, and raises the bar in graphics performance once more. Of course, it's common to find now that the sheer power of modern graphics cards leads to issues with CPU-limited applications, but with the opportunity to run at such high resolutions and with extremely high image quality settings, we at least have the prospect of framerates and IQ never before seen at such high definition resolutions.
Quite when gamers will be able to take such a system for a spin remains to be seen, but the ball is rolling now.
HEXUS.links
Dell.com :: Dell's CES page.
