NVIDIA and Dell Display Quad-SLI System

Ryan @ CES writes "Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Dell and NVIDIA announced a new XPS system coming later this year that will sport not one, not two, but FOUR GeForce 7800 GTX 512 GPUs running in a quad-SLI configuration. There are two physical graphics cards in the system still, but each has two seperate PCBs with a GPU and 512 MB of memory on each. PC Perspective has some information including pictures of the cards and Dell system as well as specs and details on how NVIDIA handles the new SLI data configurations. No word yet on power consumption and heat levels, of course."

Re:the payoff

Ah, but finally a legit use for that 1000 Watt power supply, as long as you include the multi-cpu and raid setup, of course. :)

Re:the payoff

Many top game studios I'm familiar with buy Dell computers for game development.

For future performance

Actually, one value for this is in predicting future generations of video cards early in the dev cycyle. When I worked at Intel, the research group would freon-cool the newest chip off the assembly line. They told us it basically did the job of showing us how the next (18 months away) shrink would perform.

The same would go for graphics performance. In theory this should allow a game company to design for the next gen of graphics processors today from a performance perspective, though not from a feature perspective.

That green light..

is fission.

http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/195/caseopen_2 .jpg [pcper.com]

Voodoo 5

Is anyone else reminded of the Voodoo 5 with the size of this thing?

Mooninites unite!

Lock in!

No one can defeat the quad-laser!

It is over now!

The bullet is enormous, there is no escaping!

Jumping...is useless!

Re:Wonder what the power bill would be like....

If you are buying a gaming rig with essentially 4 Geforce 7800 cards with 512 MB of RAM each in it,... I don't think $128 over a year for electricity is really going to put you off.

Re:Wonder what the power bill would be like....

Most hair dryers draw 1200 - 1600 watts so you don't have much, if anything, to worry about.

See, that is just the kind of thinking that gets a person into trouble. I thought my systems were OK until my wife went off and bought a 12A vacuum cleaner. Every time she fires the thing up (depending on if the socket shares the circuit) my UPS is screeching at me. She claims it is stock, but would not put it past her to over clock it. That road leads to madness...

Lions and Tigers

I am totally creeped out by the Nvidia eye logo thing. I would have to get my compy two, just so it had depth perception.

And now to boot it up....

*Lights dim*
*PSU explodes*
*case begins melting*

"Wow! 3FPS faster!"

Overkill

This machine certainly seems like overkill. What would be nice would be if they would make a system like this that uses budget cards. Given that graphics rendering is a task that is easly split between multiple processors (IIRC that's the case anyway), I would think that they could offer something like this with cheaper cards and get better performance than going up to the next generation of cards.
Since a bleeding edge card tends to run around $500, and a card a couple of generations old tends to run about $100, you could get four older generation cards for less than a bleeding edge card, and equivilent if not better performance.

Re:Overkill

You among the rest of Slashdot just dont "get it" do you?

PC Gaming today is just like Golf. Most of the high-end shit is for bragging rights...period. Trust me, it's not over. Expect to see rigs going for 8 grand. Sure, it's extreme, but we also have an exreme market too with extreme people will to pay the, ehem...extreme price.

This should be EXPECTED and not questioned. Has anyone learned anything an econ 101? Oh ya, I guess they don't teach that anymore.

Re:Overkill

I don't think this is aimed at gamers, exactly. I would think this would be aimed at professionals. I could be wrong. Who else would need the ability to drive 4 monitors at over 1600x1200 each?

I agree this is overkill, but I think that it is like those 108" TVs that someone (Samsung?) is showing at CES. It may be a product that is for sale, but they don't expect to actually sell any number of them greater than 5. It is more a PR boast than anything else.

Personally, I can't wait for Mac World SF. Rumor has it Apple will introduce a new version of their pro apps (specifically Final Cut Pro) that can work on ultra-HD content (I think it was 11 megapixels a frame, 4000x2700 or so) and a new monitor designed with a high enough resolution to be able to show it full-frame, unstretched. Now THAT should be cool to see.

But it is CES and products fall into two categories: "wow, that's neat" and "wow, that's neat and who would ever buy that".

Re:Overkill

they don't expect to actually sell any number of them greater than 5.

Car makers used to have a saying "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday". Everybody knew that the cars winning the races weren't the cars you could buy but people assume that if their race cars are better than the competitors race cars, then their regular cars are better than the competitors regular cars too.

Dell is hoping that having a system this high-powered will drive up the sales for its mainstream models as well.

Re:Overkill

I don't know, maybe if I get a machine like this I'll switch from vi to EMACS.

CGMT

I got one of the first run today.

On the front of the case it has a little sticker that reads, "Windows Vista Ready."

CGMT

http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/195/shipcase_2 .jpg [pcper.com]

That isn't the paint job. It's a translucent case!

Vista?

It may just be powerful enough to draw the desktop in Windows Vista ;-)

Allready done.

Tomshardware tested this kind of setup few weeks ago. Link to story and some benchmarks. http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/14/sneak_previ ew_of_the_nvidia_quad_gpu_setup/ [tomshardware.com]

"That's no power supply ... "

No word yet on power consumption and heat levels, of course."

Bleeding edge gamer: "Hey, guys? I'm about to start Doom 3! Activate the Quad SLI!"
Gamer's best bud: "Commence primary ignition!"
Dude's buddy flips switches to crank up liquid nitrogen pump and nuclear power-plant tie-in.
Sound of neighboring houses' power being drained: Beeooooooooooo...!
Other buddy looks away from the see-thru case mod, and covers his eyes [theforce.net]...

Yeah. Something like that.

I smell a Beowulf reference...

I'm inclined to crack jokes, but I've been out of the game for a long time so I have questions. Better do both.

- I couldn't really tell, but in the images it only looks like the mobo has one cpu. Just one? I imagine the kind of frea^H^H^H^H consumer who would go for 4way SLI would demand nothing less than 2 dual-core CPU's.

- If it does only have 1 cpu, or even 1 dual core cpu, wont the games be CPU limited before you even scratch the surface of this qual-sli madness?

- They've drawn flames on this thing [pcper.com]. I imagine this is redundant given the heat it will produce, and ultimately confusing to the jerk^H^H^H^H consumer when it actually does burst into flames. :-)

The law of diminishing returns

has been triggered by this setup.

There's no way even a dual cpu setup could produce enough computing power to actually push a quad SLI GFX 7800 to its maximum output. There'll be bottlenecks with CPU speed, memory speed, and quite often, the performance of the hard drive itself. I bet even the operating system will present another bottleneck.

I'd love to see how this performs in benchmarks, and how much advantage it has over regular SLI (2) cards.

Low Performance + Not compatible with major games

After extensive testing we have found these PC's aren't able to run numerous popular games. The games that this machine runs, does so at a much lower frame rate then expected.

Unless Dell changes their software policy and stops shipping new systems with so much crap @ startup it won't matter how good the hardware is. To get decent performance from one of Dell's recent gaming machines one has to spend over an hour uninstalling crap and disabling random services @ startup.

The following is a hardocp review of the Dell Dimensions XPS 400. Covers the buying process, Dell's support, along with the hardware and software it ships with. The system's hardware potential was great, too bad you had to make an extensive software cleanup make this perform respectibly.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTI0 [hardocp.com]

#70

I'd just like to point out that the 5.2 Terraflops of computing power they quote would place it at #70 on the top500 Supercomputer list! While I realize that its by now means a general processor, its still quite amazing that they've reached that kind of computing density, albeit in a well defined and inherantly paralizable problem domain.

It edges out Russia's Joint Supercomputer Center, which uses an MVS-15000BM, eServer BladeCenter JS20 containing 924 IBM PowerPC970 processors at 2.2 GHz for the #70 spot.

Re:It contains 1.3 billion transistors

don't know about the radio but fta:


Consider the standard Dell SLI system costs around $3-4,000 you can expect this custom designed PC to cost at least double that.


even if that thing pulls out 1.3 billion fps in solitaire or 1300 fps in doom3, it's stil a bad value for the money :s

ofcourse some 3d modellers have no choice than to buy something like this.
or go for a fullblown cluster with software rendering, but that wont be cheaper either ;)