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Intel wants to charge 50 bucks to unlock preexisting features on your processor

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AceHigh:
You would thing that it's impossible to crosslink more than 2 SLI, but that is what EVGA has done. Their motherboard comes with a 4 way bridge and MB has controller for 4 Graphic cards.

http://www.evga.com/PRODUCTS/IMAGES/GALLERY/170-BL-E762-A1_LG_3.jpg

As you see on picture you get a 3 and 4 way SLI bridge. The three way SLI is good if you plan to use the 4th graphic card as a dedicated physX card.

As for the question what to use it for, do you know the biggest innovation about DirectX 11? It's called "tessalation" and the technology is explained here.

And here is a guy who runs Heaven benchmark with maximum tessalation effect and his FPS is still impressive. My card is one of the good ones and it choked on a tessalation effect greater than medium.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY8uppkjwL0

vuzedome:
4 cards, water cooled!!!
There's no way someone with x4 SLi would not go water for cooling.

Pentium100:

--- Quote from: rostheferret on September 21, 2010, 01:13:44 AM ---The cards alone will draw 600W of power when idle, and if you're very very lucky, you'll get a good couple of hours gaming in wearing nothing but your birthday suit and a towel to pat down the sweat in your custom built sauna before the top card begins to warp and/or melt.

--- End quote ---

Well, you can cool them with big fans that were designed for good airflow and not quiet operation. Also, while I don't have 4 way SLI, I have more than one computer with combined power usage (when not gaming) of about 650W (monitor uses additional ~100W, when gaming the power goes up to around 1kW). I cool my room with a 25cm, ~1400m^3/h fan, that's inside a tube, the other end of which is near an open window (not out the window, since I have a grating that prevents bugs from flying in or being sucked in). The other windows is also open and has a tube near it, but no fan, this is or the warm air to get out. I can manage to keep my room at about 5 degrees (C) above outside temperature, which still sucks in summer when outside is 30 degrees and my room is 35. The fan uses about 60W of power, much less than an AC unit would use.

So, it would be possible to cool down a 1kW of video cards.

rostheferret:
Eh, fairly impressed they found a way to link them, but its still seems a bit pointless to me. Getting a $5000 machine, specially rigging up a room to deal with the heat (according to some benchmarks, you'd be looking at ~2.4KW for the cards alone under duress, though since I expect they won't be running at max capacity I reckon it might only be half that) and for what? A marginal improvement for DX11 games using a card that slapped it together at the last minute? (ATI came up with the idea, and when their line was released nVidia had 6 months to match it) I still can't imagine you'd be able to cool them properly; they'd start to get hot and soon drop off in power. Surely it'd make more sense to go dual HD5970? That way you can actually cool the damn thing, spend half the money, use half the power, generate half the heat and still have quad GPU's. I still can't quite see how getting this says anything more than "I don't have a penis."

AceHigh:
I wasn't arguing about how pointless or not it is, just that 4 way SLI is actually possible.

I myself have been an ATI fanboy myself and the last time I used nVidia is when it's main competitor was the Voodoo cards from 3DFX. Right now I have a Radeon 5750 card.

If I would have invested money in a better rig, I would have bought 2 5900 cards and be happy with that.

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