Quad PCIe graphics? Ah, go on then!

[Steve]

Tom's Hardware has taken Gigabyte's GA-8N SLI Quad Royal for a spin. It's got no less than four PEG slots. Alas, you won't find quad GPU support in NVIDIA's graphics drivers.

Once more, Gigabyte has managed to surprise us. Although the news about this motherboard has been out since late May, and we couldn't be sure whether quad GPU SLI would work or not, this is by far the most interesting Pentium 4 desktop motherboard we have seen. We hope that it will be available soon, even if it is only for a small number of enthusiasts, or certain user groups such as dealers.

[Tom's Hardware]

[technophreak]

This looks amazing. Shame I'd never be able to afford it

[lawrywild]

tbh its too pointless, the drivers dont support 4 gpus atm and if they do, nvidida will have to rewrite them for 4 gpus.

plus no sound cards or other pci cards..

[Swafe]

Onboard 5.1 I'd guess, and everything else will probably be there, I havnt used a PCI for 5 years now

[TheAnimus]

firewire soundcards ain't too bad, same goes with usb.

the thing with quad proccessing as all SMP is it lets you get around the stupidly high price they put on high end CPUs/GPUs/GFX Cards. As such nvidia/ati wouldn't really want to support it, enless it was only on their highest end cards.

What i'm trying to say is, imagine the performance you could get from 4 of the cheapest cards.

[SpawnofSonic]

potentially the performance would be amazing, however the cost would make it impracticle.

Would love to see it running though

[Kef9]

The inquirer today states that nvidia are going to release drivers to support 4 gpus so this board may be viable after all.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27300

[Stoo]

Obvious tbh, otherwise gigabyte wouldn't have bothered making the board in the first place, and if they didn't, ATi would..

[TheAnimus]

big question is will get you get a good bang for your buck?

I mean cooling them via water is going to be a pain in the arse.