Nvidia readies Quad SLI refresh

THERE IS A LOT of FUD floating about the Quad SLI cards, their release dates, and what the new v1.1 is going to do. Here is a rundown of what I know on the topic.

The current QSLI cards are not all that nice to play with, calling them fraught with problems would be overly kind. There are no power supplies commercially available that I am aware of that can power them, you need 750W or so and four PCIe power connectors at a minimum.

They are also overly long, something that we hear makes Nvidia quite nervous. If you want to run them not in pairs, well, you are also out of luck, it is four GPUs or no GPUs with the first release.

These problems will be addressed with a new revision, coming out on the 1st or the 8th, or even at E3, depending on who's talking. We hear Nvidia blessed a few people to talk early, but the editors' day is not until the 8th, and E3 is when it will get the headlines.

Let's call it in the next few weeks.

What do the new cards bring to the table? Since it is mainly a relayout of the older boards, with a little updating here and there, the short answer is not much. I am told it solves the stand alone operation problems, and by virtue of that, it can probably run on any PS that will support vanilla SLI. The layout also solves the length problem, we hear this v1.1 QSLI board will fit in most machines.

The only thing it will not fix is performance, or lack thereof. The new cards do not change the fact that they are mainly CPU bound no matter how fast you clock them. Kentsfield will help, but only for multithreaded code. The rest of the people, well, stick to good old SLI or Crossfire and buy yourself a decent car with the money you save. Overall, think of this as a polishing of a not quite all there v1.0. µ