ASUS shows off production single-card SLI, Crossfire and heatpiped mainboard
ASUS shows off production single-card SLI, Crossfire and heatpiped mainboard
If you have a good look around ASUS's stand here at Computrex, you'll get the distinct impression that they're just strutting around, showing everyone how it's done. They've got single-card SLI, Crossfire (that works) and an nForce4 mainboard that sports a heatpipe cooler for the core logic, amongst a skip full of other bits and bobs. Want pictures? You got pictures.
On a PCB that's not only bigger than the Taipei 101, but also Bit-Trusted's Tim Smalley, ASUS have packed the requisite NV45 GPUs, 256MiB of memory per GPU and the required power circuitry needed to create their single-card SLI product. Topping it all off is a heatsink that could probably cool another two of the chips. Blue LEDs make the fan look purdy and the fact a games bundle is mentioned on the product card says to me ASUS are planning to sell it. As soon as I find a chassis that'll take it, I'll request a sample.
Not to be outdone by their competitors, ASUS also had ATI's Crossfire on display, on a Pentium 4 Radeon Express 200 mainboard. The Radeon X850 Crossfire Edition mates with a regular Radeon X850 XT to draw the pretty pictures.
Finally, seemingly heeding the vitriol the hordes of journos that reviewed the A8N-SLI Deluxe spewed forth about that product's core logic heatsink and fan, ASUS have created a Premium version of the board with a heatpipe cooler for the nForce4 SLI chip. Carrying heat to a sink that appear to sit on some FET circuitry, the cooling solution uses the air from your CPU's heatsink to get rid of the exchanged heat.
