The Quad FX system
AMD sent us the top Athlon 64 FX-74 model for initial testing as a preconfigured white box and it made was clear that this AMD New Product Review Programme (NPRP) system was very much a 'work in progress'. For instance, even prior to our receiving this NPRP system, AMD pointed out that, amongst other things, the fans on the active heatsinks used to cool the two FX-74 processors were a little noisy and that should be no firm indication that shipping systems will be the same.
Surprisingly, our system did not come with Quad SLI on board. According to AMD, this isn't working with Quad FX just yet. Instead, the system was shipped with a pair of Nvidia GeForce 7900GTX cards configured in SLI.
It would already be possible to use dual-GPU graphics cards in just two PCI Express 16x slots to make Quad SLI (if it was working yet). But the Nvidia 680a SLI chipset also allows the Asus motherboard to have four physical 16x slots, although two of these run at 8x electrically. This only leaves room for one legacy PCI slot, and another 1x PCI Express slot for good measure.
