News - ASUS ROG Xpander might be the craziest four-way SLI solution you've ever seen

[HEXUS]

Ever wanted to run four-way SLI on a Rampage III Extreme motherboard? The ROG Xpander could be the answer.

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[scaryjim]

Unless the Rampage III has those x16 slots running at double frequency, the fact that each card has x16 doesn't change the fact that all four cards are still sharing 2 x16 slots, so the total effective bandwidth to the system is still the same as each card having x8...

Surely anyone who was seriously considering quad sli would've bought a mobo that supported it natively? Which leaves you wondering whether this is meant to be a commercial product, or just a corporate e-peen XPander

[Lee H]

What cases are going to be able to accomidate the extra height added by the additional PCB?

I don't really think there are that many, unless Asus are planning to bringing out a special case for this as well.

[-VK-]

So the Xpander is designed to give Quad-SLI on R3E and to do this, you'd need 2 x NF200 chips because of the way the Nvidia design is. Xpander will add 2 * NF200 and 4 * PCIe x16 slots.

The reason for this design, in my opinion, is: NF200 can actually decreases graphics performance by approximately 1.5% - Something you can't really allow on a board designed for breaking world records.

In the case of NF200, X16+x16+x16 is SLOWER than X16+x8+x8.

(HardOCP did some research on this - http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=...hlbnRodXNpYXN0) - Sorry if linking's not allowed!

So in the case of the board, the R3E outperforms a certain competitors board that has the solution onboard, by approximately 2% with 4 way CrossfireX 5870s. (Showing that if the design is right....Quad x8 > Quad x16) When we look at Quad SLI figures themselves, the performance difference is approx 1.2% with 4 x GTX 480 (R3E with Xpander vs other)

In my opinion, the reason for the Xpander, instead of an onboard solution is quite self explanatory....

4-Way SLI is not for everyone, in fact, less than 1% of users use it.....NF200's are expensive, hot and are 6w of power each....If you dont *need* Quad SLI, they're just a bad addition for you, in terms of additional cost to the board. - Basically, the consumer gets to make the decision, without being forced to have the chips that they'll never use...

(Note, you'd need 2 x PSU to run 4 x GTX 480 in Quad SLI anyway....) So when it comes down to the target audience of the board....you have the option of adding Xpander, if you really must have Quad SLI. It'll be a struggle to fit in a chassis, that's a fact...but anyone who is running 4 x GTX 480's isn't going to be doing so in a case.....unless it's a custom build (Can you imagine the heat of 4 x GTX 480 + 2 x PSUs!??!)

Really, the board's designed at world record breaking, LN2 chugging, extreme overclockers who spend their days benching and climbing the HwBot ladder - This just gives them that additional option for breaking the 3DMark records too.