No three-way love for GTS G92Only big boys get to playBy Wily Ferret: Monday, 03 December 2007, 7:14 AMBAD NEWS FOR THOSE hoping to pick up one of the new G92-based 8800 GTS cards - despite the co-incidental revealing of 3-way SLI around the same date from the green team, the new board won't actually support it.We saw the first pictures of the reference boards at the tail end of last week, and now OCW has quite rightly pointed out that, without the dual slot connector, there will be no hot 3-way action for the GTS.Whilst Nvidia reckons that Tri-SLI can be achieved over the PCI-E bus, that's going to be a slow and buggy solution for the foreseeable future.In the short term, at least, it seems that 3-way is going to be restricted to the 8800 GTX and Ultra. Can you imagine the mortgage required for three Ultra cards? We'd rather not. µ
3SLI has a big flawIt is all in the PCIe slotsBy Charlie Demerjian: Wednesday, 05 December 2007, 9:39 AMONE REALLY INTERESTING bit has bubbled up about Nvidia's on again/off again 3SLI. If you look at a circuit diagram of the 780i, you see one very standout part, the PCIe slots.It goes something like this, and the NV diagrams, like everything that comes out of the company, is really vague and meant to make you draw the wrong conclusion. The problem is that two of the PCIe 16x slots are PCIe2 and one is PCIe1. Hmmmm. The PCIe2 slots are connected to the north bridge via a chip called the Nforce 200 bridge chip. This is rumoured to be one of the things they still haven't managed to get completely functional yet.The one 16x PCIe1 slot may or may not be connected to the south bridge, the diagrams are purposely misleading here. In the end, you have 2 PCIe2 links 2 hops from the NB, and one PCIe1 link one hop from the SB.See a latency problem? Thouight so. To make matters more humourous, how well do you think the third card does four hops away from the other two while running at half the speed? We sense problems in the making, do you? This could quite possibly be why the 780i and 3SLI are so delayed and fraught with problems.In any case, we will know in a couple of weeks. People with it describe performance of 3SLI as adequate, but since they are hamstringing it to only the most expensive of cards, you have to wonder if anyone besides reviewers will care. µ
