V00D00

Golden Member
May 25, 2003
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They say scalable, so does that mean some time in the near future we will be able to hook 3 or 4 gpu's together.
 

Rami7007

Senior member
Dec 26, 2004
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Dont think so... It only has 2 PCI-Express slots and i dont think that they would make cards that can support plugging 2 into the slot...
 

V00D00

Golden Member
May 25, 2003
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They are very misleading then.

Just imagine how much power four 6800's would consume.
 

EvilRage

Senior member
Dec 20, 2004
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I'm guessing the 'scalable' refers to the ability to use 2 cards instead of 1. If motherboards can support up to 32/48/64 PCIe Lanes (none of which appear likely currently) then it is possible that additional PCIe x16 slots could be added to support multi-GPU rendering with more than 2 cards. It may also be possible to use PCIe x8 slots instead of x16 slots, since that's all SLI supports anyhow, but same situation, just not as high requirements on PCIe lanes (theoretically, with 36-40 PCIe lanes you could run 4 graphics cards at x8 and still have room for other components. But that's still talking almost twice what's available now.). I suppose they'd also have to redesign the SLI connector to support in excess of 2 cards as well, but I don't imagine that bit would be too hard. The trick is increasing the number of PCIe lanes to the connectors. Don't expect to be using 3-4 graphics cards anytime soon, though.

Also keep in mind that all of what I've said here is based on what I know of SLI and motherboards, which is to say, not that much. Take my info with a grain of salt, I don't know it all. But those are my best guesses from how I understand the information.

You also may want to check out a thread about a video card that uses SLI in the card and does not require two cards to run in SLI mode, but you'd have to run a search since I don't know how to link and I'm too lazy to look it up myself =p
 

V00D00

Golden Member
May 25, 2003
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Obviously, yes, it would require some new chipsets that can support it, but I was just wondering if Nvidia planned to make it actually 'scalable' any time soon as their name implies.

I don't ever plan to buy a video card that costs more than $150 anyway, and I never plan to use SLI, I was just curious.
 

Insomniak

Banned
Sep 11, 2003
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Nvidia has stated that the SLI interface can link up theoretically infinite graphics cards. The trick is the other end - busses and motherboards. You probably will never find motherboards that offer more than 2 card capacity, but we may see workstation silicon for graphics/rendering companies that are custom made to support many GPUs...