NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 4-way SLI exemplifies law of diminishing returns
By Sean Hollister 
posted April 26th 2010 5:27AM
posted April 26th 2010 5:27AM
posted April 26th 2010 5:27AM
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I had pants on when I-WAIT A MIINUUUUTE..
@eddieexe
I was dry when I started reading this article.
@eddieexe
bunnies, the always deceive me..
* reaches for the power button *
Houston... we launch at 3... 2... 1...
PPWPWPWPWPWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!
* lights dimming, ear breaking noise, neighbors calling the police *
@loocas
My electricity bills may be as big as Iceland volcano eruption.
What is the use of 4 way SLI anyway, one graphic card is already ok to run Crysis at very high already, unless you using eyefinity, but that NVIDIA isn't developing that.
@HydroRage If you run SLI with 3-4 cards you are definitely playing higher resolution than you seem to think...GTX 480 1.53GB Less than 22 FPS with AA off @2560x1600, 18FPS AA on:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-480,2585-10.html
@eddieexe
Silly foo's...
Now you got no space left for that better-than-onboard sound, hardware RAID or NIC.
"NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 4-way SLI exemplifies waste of space"
@eddieexe That CPU cooler is trembling in fear. :)
@eddieexe, yea a guy on IRC has one of these, overclocked it requires a 1500+ PSU.
That being said it can play Metro 2033 at max detail without flinching.
@E71 If you liquid cool them (as you most likely would need to) you could probably cut them down to a slot each (or so I've read). Then you can waste the three extra slots to run SEVEN way SLI (though personally I think a seven way 5970 crossfire liquid cooled would be a better example of awesomeness and excess.. or would that be 14-fire?)
Surprised they didn't melt that motherboard off
@CaptainPlanet
Or break it in half under the weight.
Was the whole thing connected to a nuclear reactor? :O
@CaptainPlanet I sense a freak return of water cooling
Sounds like a fire hazard
@Broderbund
Yes. Especially because the fans are blocked on the other 3. AAAAAHHHH
I would think the limit is temperature with the cards being sat next to each other like that with no additional cooling. The cards will lower their speed to stop overheating.
@petebob796 Chuck it next to the AC without a case, otherwise it'd be too hot for comfort in the room to play Crisis anyways.
@juanvaldez plus liquid cooling? I dunno, I'm still so far behind the times with liquid cooling... :(
@petebob796 Maybe, or bus bandwidth. I expect if they put them to work on some long OpenCL loops they'd see a difference.
@juanvaldez
Would they really heat a room?
With This I wouldn't need to turn the heat up next winter!
@Dysun yeah but you will have to turn on the ac... and just imagine your electricity bills. this thing runs on what like 1.21 jiggawatts?
@squirrelnut1416 I'll just take it back to the future with me when it's a low end setup
Even if it were cheap to cool in a CPU case, I think this set up is too sexy to hide. Cases were so Y2009 anyway, maybe my next rig will be naked...
I'd hate to accidently spill coffee on that thing.
@spy323
the coffee would evaporate on contact.
@elduderino How optimistic, that rig would evaporate any liquid within a 15.7 meter radius.
Scientific computing is a relevant market for such a rig.
@ftv
Yes.
There will be a few of 4 way SLIs build in universities for desktop aerodynamics simulating, or tectonic plates etc.
CUDA ftw
@newone
"...There will be a few of 4 way SLIs build in universities for desktop aerodynamics simulating, or tectonic plates etc."
Breaking encryption for the Russian mob...
http://securityandthe.net/2008/10/12/russian-researchers-achieve-100-fold-increase-in-wpa2-cracking-speed/
somebody, somewhere will spec this system, and overclock it just to get a really big score in some benchmarking program.
That looks like a heater.
@Atkins In a way, it is a heater
@kirigoe Dual purpose? The price seem better... :)
That would be immensely powerful for Folding@home. However, I don't want to build a folding rig that needs to be watched 24/7, fire extinguisher in hand just in case.
ATI=Win. The 5870 preformed better. The 480 was the best though in tessellation. One thing bothered me though. Why couldn't the 5970 be ran in 3-way crossfireX.
@KingFaisal94 Is 3-way really needed when you already have 2 :-p
@Dysun Yeah cause the 480 3 way and the 5870 3 way BOTH beat the 5970 2-way. I don't think it was fair since they didn't compare top of the line 3 way to top of the line 3. Maybe they had a reason, I dunno.
@Dysun I didn't notice this was about 4-way, when 3-way was the one done in the benchmarks. Ignoring this my point still stands about how the 3-way 5870 beat the 3-way 480 in most games. WHY COULDN'T THE 5970 be ran in 3 way?!
@KingFaisal94 I'm sure the 5970 could be run in CrossFire x3. Obviously, just one 5970 trumps the 480 where two 5970s would also trump two 480s. But two 5970s against three 480s? It isn't a fair competition. The 5970 is still the best card, bar none. They just didn't want to prove disloyal to NVIDIA by proving that three 5970s are still greater than three 480s.
@KingFaisal94
I believe that due to the 5970 having two gpu chips, it in and of itself is running a form of crossfire. The maximum number of gpus you can have is 4, due to driver constraints, thus currently limiting you to 2 5970s in crossfire. I'm not certain about this, please correct me if I'm wrong.
@quester74 You are correct. The max number of GPUs compatible with SLI or Crossfire is 4. The extra 2 GPUs would go unused.
...Sure, but think of the money you'll save heating your home in the winter. I don't care what you say, there's just no downside to this.
Wow, and after installing this setup, it STILL won't allow you to turn up the settings in games to the top level!
few things they didn't really mention on the article which struck me, the limit of the PCI-E on the x58 platform (all cards drop to 8x not 16x PCI-E Bandwidth) and secondly why did they not have phys-x enabled, surely this would of lifted the CPU bottleneck in certain benchmarks. I'm still not convinced by this onchip PCI-E controller for the 1366 cpu's, limiting it to 36 lanes when GPU and parallel processing is taking the load off the CPU seems to be a step in reverse, even 939 had true x16 x16 support on some boards. Course if you have 3 power house cards running in x16 x8 x8 (3way config) then half the final slot for (x8 x8 x8 x8) you still have the same bandwidth, the difference is without phys-x enabled that extra power is not being used so the benchmarks are not going to be that impressive. Just seems dubious thats all.
@Jaster
.That's exactly what I was thinking, there is not enough pcie bandwidth on this chipset to actually use all these cards at full speed.
@DoctarPeppar well Nvidia have an ongoing lawsuit with Intel over them saying Intel is "Hindering" its graphics performance....but when you look at the Nforce 4 northbridge having 32 dedicated PCI-E lanes 5 years back you gotta admit it sounds a bit fishy especially seeing as with CUDA they are bypassing the archeic inherent cpu architecture and not getting stifled with the software (check out nvidia's cuda page to see what I mean)....still doesnt explain why the reviewers did not have phys-x activated within the gaming benchmarks....its like benchmarking a horse....but cutting all 4 legs off below the knees....I smell lawsuits ahoy...and I smell a massive shift from the IBM PC model to something more parallel based....but we'll see.....amd's thurbans are on the way....lets hope we see some juicy northbridges with 128 PCI-E lanes (probably dual cpu based) ...
three way 5870s is what there talking about that beat 4 480s ati wins
@sbvikings30
Actually, they're talking about it losing to a 3-way SLI 480 setup. You would see that if you went to the source.
This is obviously a driver problem, regardless.