NVIDIA TITAN V Lacks SLI or NVLink Support

[btarunr]

Earlier today, we brought you a story about NVIDIA TITAN V setting you back by up to $7,196 for two cards and two $600 NVLink cables. We got word from NVIDIA that the card neither features NVLink, nor supports SLI, and have since edited it. The NVLink fingers on the TITAN V card are rudiments of the functional NVLink interface found on the Tesla V100 PCIe, being developed by NVIDIA, as the TITAN V, Tesla V100, and a future Quadro GV100 share a common PCB. The NVLink fingers on the TITAN V are concealed by the base-plate of the cooler on one side, and the card's back-plate on the other; so the female connectors of NVLink bridge cables can't be plugged in.

With the lack of SLI support on what is possibly it's fastest graphics card based on the "Volta" architecture, NVIDIA seems to have responded to market trends that multi-GPU is dying or dead. That said, it would be interesting to see if professional overclockers chasing benchmark leaderboard glory pick up the TITAN V, as opposed to two TITAN Xp in SLI or four Radeon RX Vega 64 in 4-way CrossFireX.



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[Chaitanya]

 

[Ebo]

If your stupid enough to spend 6000 dollars on GFX power then another 600 isent going to set up back at all, or is it ?.

 

[silentbogo]

$hut up and take my moneyz!

 

[VulkanBros]

$hut up and take my moneyz!

You made my day

 

[dicktracy]

Why they keep releasing a gimped Titan at first and then follow up with a another one with all the cores intact. Next Titan will probably have all of the V100 cores + 16GB HBM2.

 

[agent_x007]

@btarunr Source for NVLink support ?

What does separate the Titan from the Tesla then from a performance standpoint is quite simple: memory capacity, memory bandwidth, and the lack of NVLink functionality.

Direct quote from anandtech : LINK.
NV Link connector looks like this :

And Titan V has a standard SLI finger (single) on official NV pics.

 

[btarunr]

@btarunr Source for NVLink support ?

Direct quote from anandtech : LINK.
NV Link connector looks like this :

And Titan V has a standard SLI finger (single) on official NV pics.

Do these look like standard SLI fingers to you?

 

[agent_x007]

Sorry, NVM...PCB shot shows NV Link (two edge connectors) :

Angle on this photo confused me (together with "lack of NVLink support" on Anandtech article) :

Still...

And as for card-to-card communication, PCB itself appears to have NVLink connections on the top of the PCB, but these look to have been intentionally blocked by the shroud to prevent their use and are presumably disabled.

From same anandtech article...

 

[chaosmassive]

these are you get when there is no competitions at all
mirroring what happen to Intel from 2011-2017

now either AMD or Intel need do some serious pressure to Nvidia

 

[londiste]

Simple SLI bridge bandwidth should be around 1 GB/s (two of them - twice that if it works).
HB SLI bridge is at around 1.5 GB/s per SLI connector so a little over 3 GB/s total.

NVLink maxes out at 150+150 GB/s. This bridge according to Nvidia's own specs does 40GB/s (80GB/s with two bridges) Even with much wider connector, the bridge itself needs to be pretty substantial. So far we have seen primarily mezzanine NVLink connectors in workstations and servers.

Looking at this, I am actually starting to wonder what connector AMD is going to come up with for InfinityFabric.

Edit:
I was very confused with it not being clear on the PCB rendering and some other pictures where two of these should connect but some pictures actually show two connectors properly, one right above GPU and the other towards bracket.

 

[Tomgang]

60 bucks you say.

Wait what. 600 bucks.

Poor answer.

Rich answer.

600 bucks for a brigde . Dosent matter sli is on the way to a slow deafh and has no plans for volta. Gtx 1080 ti shut keep me going for a year or two.

 

[bogami]

Far too much, $ 3,000 is a very good Pc price. 599? Is it a Taipo? Consumption will be high.

 

[dj-electric]

Might as well keep the next one in notepad to put anywhere there's TITAN V related stuff:

This is meant for deep learning machines, where they don't use stuff like SLI. They just stack them and they get dressed individually.

Wait for gamer-grade stuff.

 

[champsilva]

According Nvidia/Guru3D, Titan V won't support Nv link neither SLI.

 

[Vya Domus]

SLI is slowly dying anyway as it should, alongside with CF.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

but didnt some people say that an SLi bridge wasnt required to use SLi on windows 10???

 

[Th3pwn3r]

I love when I tell someone wanting to go SLI not to and they still do. Then they experience the bugs and lack of support.

 

[Mussels]

I love when I tell someone wanting to go SLI not to and they still do. Then they experience the bugs and lack of support.

just went through that on facebook, someone wanted to go 970 SLI to play fallout 4 in 4k on ultra.

Having done that exact setup myelf i could clearly state 'yeah nah, not gunna work' (VRAM too low) but he's still doing it anyway :/

 

[Lycanwolfen]

I have run SLI for years. Almost every game that said it did not support it I got it to run in SLI. Currently running two 1070ti's now in SLI and all my games are running 4k with no issues at all. Average fps is 100+ in 4k. Single card ran around 30 fps which for me is not enough even 60fps I personally do not like. I talked to so many new gamers that said SLi sucked and didn't work. 80% of the time lol Sli wasn't even enabled on there drivers. 10% of the time it wasn't configured correctly and maybe 10% of the time the frame rendering was not configured.

Fallout 4 I got working in SLI just fine.

Also in SLI games run soo much smoother. Been working with SLI since my Diamond Monster Voodoo 2's

 

[the54thvoid]

Editted for me being wrong!

 

[Th3pwn3r]

I have run SLI for years. Almost every game that said it did not support it I got it to run in SLI. Currently running two 1070ti's now in SLI and all my games are running 4k with no issues at all. Average fps is 100+ in 4k. Single card ran around 30 fps which for me is not enough even 60fps I personally do not like. I talked to so many new gamers that said SLi sucked and didn't work. 80% of the time lol Sli wasn't even enabled on there drivers. 10% of the time it wasn't configured correctly and maybe 10% of the time the frame rendering was not configured.

Fallout 4 I got working in SLI just fine.

Also in SLI games run soo much smoother. Been working with SLI since my Diamond Monster Voodoo 2's

Heroes Of Newerth, CS:S and Fallout 3 all worked terribly on my SLI setup so I got off that train real fast. Not everyone has problems but I have. That's why I would rather stick to what will most likely work, a single card solution.

 

[zo0lykas]

A bit weird, why they dont try compare titan v vs vega frontier edition, why they compare to vega 64 lol

And sure price..

 

[NicklasAPJ]

Is cause there is comeing one MORE TITAN, with the price of 1200 Dollers.

Titan V is not the GEFORCE BRAND. there will come a Titan there is and will support SLI.

 

[mouacyk]

There's no competition above the 1080, so they're selling the crappiest SKU first for the most amount of money. Economics of opportunity.