Multi-GPU mayhem

WITH THE ARRIVAL of the Catalyst 8.3 drivers, AMD taken an advantage over Nvidia in the multi-GPU end of business – at least until Nvidia releases its next-gen-yet-not-next-gen 9800 series GPUs. There are improvements across the board – but you could only expect that from a “final” driver version (as opposed to the CrossFire X beta drivers that were floating around). Tech Lounge’s prognosis is positive, yet with some reservations.

Anandtech also has a similar article – on 3 and 4-GPU configurations – ATI in particular. It’s starting to look like what began as a statement of military might from the GPU makers, is now becoming the target of scepticism and what’s-the-pointery by the review lot. They’ve got benchmarks galore – but the true benefit of tri and quad configs is the redundancy in raw power to execute ultra-high level AA. In other words, your games will play fine on single setups, but tri and quad will give you the feeling of being a true powerwhore in the eyecandy department. Read Derek’s analysis here.

TweakTown also has their analysis on the state of affairs of multi-GPU configurations. They aren’t tongue-tied about it either; as they clearly state the future of Quad GPU configs is grim – right in the title. It’s more of a rant about the damn thing than a review of anything, but it sums up the pros and cons of owning such systems – Nvidia and AMD alike. No future for Quads, they figure.

Metku Mods has written a guide to building a fully passive computer system. V ille started off by creating a heat-pipe casing then went off to create the CPU ‘sink from blocks and sheets of copper. It starts off by looking like something out of a Mad Max movie and goes on to becoming a pretty cool looking rig. It was years in the making, says the author.

Toshiba isn’t known for its gaming laptops – nor do they have the creds HP/Voodoo, Alienware and Dell XPS have on the market. What they do have is some reasonable offers such as the X205-SLi4, a dual “everything” laptop (uhm... except maybe memory). Dual Core T8100, dual HDD and SLI. It performs very well, thinks Hot Hardware’s Jeff Bouton, and they really liked it. It does have a $2400 price tag (yeah, we stole a buck). Read it here.

Enter the weirdness. Frosty Tech has a review of the Auras CTC-868 heatsink. It’s a dual-fan, triple action heatsink. You essentially have three cooling bits hovering on the CPU block, in what looks like a vertical sandwich. The idea is to reduce noise, while maintaining or improving cooling performance – but it isn’t entirely effective. Since the two fans are on heatpipes that swivel on the CPU block, Frosty Tech believes it might have something to do with that.

CircuitREMIX has a test on Crucial’s Ballistix (DDR3, 1600MHz) 2x1GB kit. Rife with overclocking stats, the Ballistix performs above par as long as you supply it enough voltage. Like they say at REMIX, most of Crucial’s kit is a balance of looks, performance and overclockability. Which is the case. No talk about price, though. Get remixed here. µ