Gigabyte's Four Graphics Card Motherboard

[Silverstrand]

Gigabyte is currently developing a motherboard, called the GA-8N-SLI Quad, that has four physical PCIe x16 slots on it. This would allow four NVIDIA SLI graphics cards to be used, or two dual GPU boards. It currently only supports LGA775 Intel processors.

The board is reported to use the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition for its northbridge, and the AMD version of the chip as its southbridge. Also on the board are four SATA II ports, ten USB 2.0 ports, three Firewire ports and 4 DDR2 ram slots.

Retail pricing and release date is unknown at this time.


Source: Tom'sHardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050526_155843.html)

[2JSC]

:eek: - omg, Giga-Byte is nutz!

[biggiy6]

10 usb ports? Dang, and I thought six was gonna be plenty for me.

That board is going to cost the whole lower half of your body and maybe a kidney.

MY question is, why? Are you seriously going to be able to get a huge increase in performance by using four cards or is it going to be like SLI but with a little more gain in performance?

[zer0]

i guess ill wait till that board comes out...

how exactly do they get the intel and amd versions of the chipsets to play nice with each other?

[Fibbles]

i guess ill wait till that board comes out...

how exactly do they get the intel and amd versions of the chipsets to play nice with each other?
There was another board at Comdex that has both Intel and AMD ability on board. Meaning, one day you could use an LGA P4, and the other you could swap it for a 939 Pin AMD64...

[jaguarking11]

There was another board at Comdex that has both Intel and AMD ability on board. Meaning, one day you could use an LGA P4, and the other you could swap it for a 939 Pin AMD64...

I saw that mobo. It used two northbridges but the same southbridge.

The thing about the amd southbridge working with the intel northbridge is that the only diference between the two is a memory controler. Amd has their own on the chip versus intel has to have it on the northbridge.

And the nforce 4 sli chipset for intel has been developed for a long time they just did not relese it untill intel let them.

But if you want sli with an intel chipset the 955x chipset is the one you should look at and it also suports dual core cpu's and the older 915 and 925x or xe dont, well suposedly.

Well anyway, im not a big fan of sli. I would rather inves my cash in a good videocard and be happy than two lesser videocards and have the same performance, just for the sake of stability. But for now ill have to make due with my fx5900xt @ 5950U

[zer0]

I saw that mobo. It used two northbridges but the same southbridge.

The thing about the amd southbridge working with the intel northbridge is that the only diference between the two is a memory controler. Amd has their own on the chip versus intel has to have it on the northbridge.

And the nforce 4 sli chipset for intel has been developed for a long time they just did not relese it untill intel let them.

But if you want sli with an intel chipset the 955x chipset is the one you should look at and it also suports dual core cpu's and the older 915 and 925x or xe dont, well suposedly.

Well anyway, im not a big fan of sli. I would rather inves my cash in a good videocard and be happy than two lesser videocards and have the same performance, just for the sake of stability. But for now ill have to make due with my fx5900xt @ 5950U
actualy i was very supprized to find out that intel had an sli chipset however have a look at this poorly designed board

http://images10.newegg.com/productimage/13-131-534-02.JPG

it seems asus thought that sli users would only have 1 pci card (or have 2 realy small ones)

so because it dosent have the card like the nvidia based ones do i presum the option to change it between 1 card 16x mode and 2 card 8x mode is in the bios.

[mrplow]

Double sli o_O

I still only have one agp card :( :rolleyes:

[Imagenesis]

Mmmm, 4 7800GTX's and a FX57. Tasty!