On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 11:14 -0500, Robert Snyder wrote:
> Ken Elliott wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 01:29 -0600, michael hast wrote:
> >
> >> The coolest thing about this jewel is that
> >> it's got 2 PCI-E x16 slots! (I gather that's what the SLi means.)
> >>
> >
> > (Forgot to mention this on my last post.)
> >
> > Dual slots do not automatically mean SLI. SLI uses the small cable that
> > fits between two boards to allow the second board to be the slave of the
> > primary board. SLI requires two slots, but two slots don't make it SLI.
> > The OS can split the display between two boards without SLI, using the
> > main CPU to act as the traffic cop. SLI offloads this task from the CPU
> > and does it all on the graphic card, thus increasing the speed on really
> > heavy workloads.
> >
> > Ken Elliott
> > -------------
> >
> >
> Ken,
>
> Asus has a card they are comming out with that was on Tom's Hardware
> site, that is dual gpu 7800s and if you have two of them they can be put
> into sli mode via a software driver bridge instead of the cable bridge.
> I dont know why they would do that as it not hard to connect a cable but
> hey what do i know. Also ATI answer to SLI ( since they cant call it
> sli) Crossfire is the same two cards that are bridged together via
> software no via the famous sli cable.
>
> SLI made a lot more since back in the days of 3dfx when the first SLI
> card came out Voodoo2 1000 PCI and you coupled two of those cards
> together and used a glide enabled game and you had one hot rig.
>
Anandtech had one of these cards a few months ago. But they didn't try
to run two together. Interesting...
According to the article, "the best results are achieved with an SLI
bridge". And "this concept is not yet fully functional and not
officially supported by NVIDIA". I was surprised that it would work at
all, since the card was clearly not designed to be used that way. They
mention that Quake 4 ran slightly slower than with a regular SLI setup,
and crashed often. Since the SLI cable allows the cards to communicate
directly, not using it slows down the communication, since it must use
some of the bandwidth of the PCI-Express bus to communicate between
cards. Yes, it works without the cable, but that's not a good way to
run it.
Ken Elliott
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