Sapphire shows of 3GPU setup with R600 boards

SAPPHIRE WENT A bit overboard with this year's WCG event in Seattle. Over 600 systems are running AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors, Kinston DDR2-1066 memory and Sapphire 670V motherboards in combination with Atlantis HD 2600XT boards.

But the most interesting things are being shown over at Sapphire's booth. The company is showing an engineering sample of its RD790 motherboard combined with three Sapphire Atlantis HD 2900XT cards.

As you can see for yourself, three cards are not connected via bridges.

What makes this setup interesting is that these three cards are not connected in TriFire, yet all three GPUs are working together. This is thanks to the bandwidth available with PCIe 2.0, since the 16 lanes are efficiently doubled up. Whether future cards will come with bridges or will they become thing of the past, it remains to be seen.

Ideal setup for flying fanatics.

The demo system was connected to no less than six monitors, all running the same edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

The future of this setup is three RV670 boards, with a price of $250 each. It is far more realistic to expect that folk will shell out 500 dollars for two and 750 for three cards rather than 1000 dollars for two. Especially if you consider the performance we're going to see from G92 and RV670.

Sadly, mess with cabling cannot be avoided, but we were surprised to see analogue connectors on Samsung LCD monitors.

Seeing this setup in action at very playable rates only makes us wonder when we will see more games that are able to use more than one monitor. Then again, same thing applies for physics in games.

We wonder when we will see 2GPU, 3GPU, 4GPU setups supporting more than one monitor when all GPUs are working as one (Crossfire, SLI).

ATI showed us beta drivers that enabled Crossfire running on three monitors. However, these drivers are in beta for almost a year now, and when it comes to Nvidia, leave all hope those who enter. I remember the time when we were caught in an argument that multimonitor works when Quadro boards are used in SLI... but that was yesteryear. And no two monitor setup is working in SLI today. µ