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NVIDIA's Quad SLI system uses four G71M GPU's |
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Written by Mavke
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Thursday, 27 April 2006 |
It all makes perfect sense now. The Inquirer learned that Quad SLI, GeForce 7900 GX2 cards are clocked to 500MHz and we wondered why. The answer is the power consumption. We guess that NVIDIA didn't have any other choice than to use four G71M a mobile variation of its G71 chip and use it for Quad SLI, otherwise the cards would just demand too much power. Even with the mobile chips inside the cards are incredibly huge, larger than anything else you've seen. The good news is that the cards work in combinations of four, each at 500MHz and you can bet that Quad SLI would get even better performance if NVIDIA could clock the cards to 650MHz each.
 NVIDIA's Quad SLI system uses four G71M GPU's
We saw some initial scores and we can tell that at least in infamous 3DMark06 four cards performs roughly twenty percent faster than the two cards in SLI, that much right? NVIDIA wants all Quad SLI gamers to play at 2560x1600 resolutions, with all features on of course, but somehow we know that NVIDIA won't be able to enable its users to use FSAA and HDR together as this simply doesn't work on G7x based chips. This is also the case for the high-end GeForce 7900 GTX and GT video accelerators, so it isn't just the Quad SLI to blaim.
To be on the fair side, system integrators are happy with Quad SLI as they are selling machines with those cards and no one complained much about them. I guess that the number of systems can be counted in tens rather than hundreds as not too many people want to spend $1600 on four graphics cards.
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