2x6600GT GPU's on a single card

[piesang]

Gigabyte will be introducing this thing tomorrow.

Link

Interesting...

 

[The Green Bean]

very interesting

 

[Demo24]

WOW! sweet

 

[Lonyo]

Chicago (IL) - Gigabyte will announce Friday the industry's first graphics card running two graphics processors on one board. According to sources, the SLI card will lift current 3DMark2003 record revels by a significant margin while being priced lower than ATI's and Nvidia's single-GPU high-end cards.

Voodoo?
Rage MAXX?
Or do they not count as graphics processors?
How about the 9700 setup that was a specialised thing?

Interesting development though, I wonder if you will be able to SLI them.

 

[Demo24]

Originally posted by: Lonyo

Chicago (IL) - Gigabyte will announce Friday the industry's first graphics card running two graphics processors on one board. According to sources, the SLI card will lift current 3DMark2003 record revels by a significant margin while being priced lower than ATI's and Nvidia's single-GPU high-end cards.

Voodoo?
Rage MAXX?
Or do they not count as graphics processors?
How about the 9700 setup that was a specialised thing?

Interesting development though, I wonder if you will be able to SLI them.

sweet more pics added

and there isnt a connecotr for sli I suppose thats because one is already using the driver for SLI add another one and it probably wouldnt work

 

[venk]

Quad-SLI :Q

 

[slash196]

But do you have to have an SLI board to run it?

 

[Demo24]

Originally posted by: slash196
But do you have to have an SLI board to run it?

I seriously doubt it

 

[SilverTrine]

All the rendering is done on one board so its not accurate to call it quad sli if you could manage to get two of these things working at the same time.

 

[slash196]

Originally posted by: DEMO24

Originally posted by: slash196
But do you have to have an SLI board to run it?

I seriously doubt it

If you're right, this blows the whole enthusiast market wide open...

My main question is, why is performance of this so much higher than two 6600GTs in a standard SLI configuration?

 

[T9D]

My main question is, why is performance of this so much higher than two 6600GTs in a standard SLI configuration?

"and is the first 6600 GT card on the market to offer a total of 256 MByte DDR 3 memory and 256 Mbit of memory bandwidth"


I wonder when they will be able to dual GPU with 6800 gt's and ultras.

 

[Todd33]

How can two 6600GT on one card in SLI do so much better than two 6600GT PCIe in SLI? Is it just the 256bit memory difference?

Is the effective memory 256MB or really 128MB due to the single board SLI?

 

[ponyo]

256bit memory interface is the key

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: slash196

Originally posted by: DEMO24

Originally posted by: slash196
But do you have to have an SLI board to run it?

I seriously doubt it

If you're right, this blows the whole enthusiast market wide open...

My main question is, why is performance of this so much higher than two 6600GTs in a standard SLI configuration?

My guess would be that there is no need for a SLI connector which to me, would obviously decrease load management latencies and communications requirements. This is the most powerful "Single card" solution out if this is all true. Can you imagine Nvidia doing this with Dual 6800U's with 512MB GDDR3?
O....M....F...G.....!!!!111!11

 

[otispunkmeyer]

imagine if they had the sli connector on the top of the card as well !!! quad gpu good ness

 

[Keysplayr]

I don't want to start a war here, but I just had to share. I can picture all ATI enthusiasts reading this and lowering their heads in despair saying "F*** Me..."

I just laughed to myself about it. If ATI did something like this and NV didn't, Im sure Nvidia enthusiasts would be doing the same.

HUMOR.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I wouldn't expect dual 6800 GPUs on a single card. It'd run way too hot. Perhaps a special water-cooled one maybe, but that wouldn't be very feasible either.

I guess there is the possibility if nVidia moves the 6800 to a 0.11 process and is able to clean up the design enough to cool it. One way would be to just drop the worthless PVP and have the GPU's do that work themselves.

Exciting stuff though.

Did anyone read how it beat even an X850XT PE? Thats some crazy stuff, especially with what Gigabyte said about it being cheaper than the top cards. Of course it'll be price gouged like crazy, so that won't really happen probably. If they find a way to run dual cards of those then it'll be very popular.

 

[LoneWolf15]

Better question...if the SLI is on the card, might it be possible to port this solution to AGP? It would make for a seriously cool niche product and I think it would get quite a few sales.

 

[BW86]

This is crazy Anyone know if 2 of these cards can run in sli?

 

[ZobarStyl]

Though this thing is obviously incredibly cool, I don't think you can SLI two of them together for 4 gpu...quite simply, look at the picture and you'll see there is no SLI connector on the top of the board like on other PCI-E cards. This definitely shows that the 6600GT's have the power, they just didn't have the memory to push out the big FPS when they are SLI'ed regularly. As for dual 6800 series cards...the heat/power issues would be out of this world...I mean, a regular ultra needs dual molex and two slot cooling already...imagine two on the same PCB...watercooling would have to be standard fare.

Anyone else think this might nVidia's partial answer to the cancelled NV50?

 

[Drayvn]

Changing it to 256bit...

Wont that mean its NOT a 6600GT...

As its not conforming to the reference design...

One other thing, how could both nV and ATi not do anything like this, they must have something like this in the works wouldnt they?

 

[Todd33]

Originally posted by: Naustica
256bit memory interface is the key

It's also the reason it will be so expensive. How many cards on the market are 256bit DDR3 256MB under $400? Now throw in a second GPU...

Don't get to excited and hope you are going to get a 6800U beater for $300.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Drayvn
Changing it to 256bit...

Wont that mean its NOT a 6600GT...

As its not conforming to the reference design...

Yes. It doesn't make any sense, as the memory controller is IN THE GPU, and the 6600s only have a 128-bit memory controller built in. In conventional SLI setups, all the memory accesses are done by a single GPU and sent across the link; I would *assume* this card does the same thing, but the link is between two GPUs on the same board. It would be quite a trick if they managed to use both GPUs memory controllers simultaneously, when NVIDIA doesn't seem to have that working on other SLI solutions.

And 6600GTs in SLI already score 13-15K on 3DMark03 (look in their ORB database, folks). OCed 6800GTs/Ultras score ~14-15K, and OCed X800XTPEs score 17-18K. Their performance numbers don't seem remarkably higher than expected for a 6600GT SLI, and certainly not faster than the best scores posted by an X800XTPE.

And no, there is no SLI connector on the card pictured. NVIDIA's SLI tech only supports two GPUs right now.

 

[mldeveloper]

there are a couple things to point out based on the little info we've got.

1. No you couldn't run two of these cards in a quad sli mode. Or atleast not until Nvidia is willing to support it. Right now the drivers have been designed for two gpus.

2. Nvidia has to optimize their sli drivers for certain games at the moment, if your game isn't on their list, the sli mode might look terrible or not work at all, so you're still better off buying a single gpu high end card to make sure all your games look good.

 

[CU]

This could be just marketing talk. Each gpu has 128bit memory and can access 128meg. So in marketing talk that means 256megs of 256bit memory.