Thursday, April 8th 2010
GeForce GTX 480 Supports 4-way SLI?
Soon after EVGA laid its hands on stocks of GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards, it claims from an internal test that 4-way SLI is possible on the reference design GTX 480 graphics cards. The GTX 480 was advertised to work with up to two more of its kind in 3-way SLI, in NVIDIA's presentations to the press. EVGA's feat of running four GTX 480 cards was possible on its X58 Classified 4-way SLI motherboard, which has room for four graphics cards, and a special SLI bridge that connects to four NVIDIA graphics cards with two SLI interconnect bridges each. EVGA released a special-edition GeForce GTX 285 4-way SLI ready graphics card to go with the motherboard.
The EVGA X58 Classified 4-way SLI isn't the only motherboard to support 4-way SLI, the recently released EVGA Classified SR2 also ships with the special SLI bridge. No other motherboard vendor released a 4-way bridge, yet. EVGA demonstrated the 4-way SLI setup with a run of Unigine Heaven, although it did not give away any performance numbers. 4-way SLI is not to be confused with Quad-SLI, which is also a four-GPU SLI configuration, but involves a 2-way SLI connection between two dual-GPU graphics cards (such as GeForce 9800 GX2, GTX 295, MARS). Any SLI-supportive motherboard supports Quad-SLI.
The EVGA X58 Classified 4-way SLI isn't the only motherboard to support 4-way SLI, the recently released EVGA Classified SR2 also ships with the special SLI bridge. No other motherboard vendor released a 4-way bridge, yet. EVGA demonstrated the 4-way SLI setup with a run of Unigine Heaven, although it did not give away any performance numbers. 4-way SLI is not to be confused with Quad-SLI, which is also a four-GPU SLI configuration, but involves a 2-way SLI connection between two dual-GPU graphics cards (such as GeForce 9800 GX2, GTX 295, MARS). Any SLI-supportive motherboard supports Quad-SLI.
82 Comments on GeForce GTX 480 Supports 4-way SLI?
Seriously, who would buy such a set?
vs several minutes spent in changing the CPU cooler, and taking pics of it.
For gaming, some of us demand a certain level of performance. Me, I know for a fact one of my cards can easily handle my native res without breaking a sweat . . . but I can't settle for anything less than x FPS at my native res . . . and I also prefer to game with all the eye candy on, too . . . I'm just a bit goofy like that.
Do I know multi-GPU doesn't scale well? Yerp. Does it also depend heavily on the game? Yerp. Does it have more of an imp0act at higher res and with the eye candy enabled more than not? Yerp. Does it bother me that some might consider it a waste? Not at all.
But. Unlike most others, I also put my GPUs to work when I'm not at home or gaming . . . F@H keeps them busy.
Both of us knows that benchers rately leave their cards at stock.
2000w of PSU needed and probably a min of two 360mm radiators and two or three pumps for proper cooling via water.
Fanboi out-
Ok, seriously less than 1% of users will use a 4x SLI/CF setup and those that don't use it don't understand why they do it(not to grill hotdogs).
In 3-way SLI:
With Quad-SLI:
So 4-way SLI is implemented like Quad-SLI, albeit over four physical cards. In that 4-way SLI pic, card 1 and card 2 are like GPU1 and GPU2 of card 1, while card 3 and card 4 are like GPU1 and GPU2 of card 2. So the two sub-arrays are linked.
Interesting how chip design sounds a lot like software design, which share similarities with legislation and sausage making. It ain't pretty.