News - ASUS Immensity concept motherboard combines Radeon HD 5450 and Lucid Hydra

[HEXUS]

Kitchen-sink model coming soon.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

If that doesn't razzle dazzle your fantazmagazzle

Nice

[sammorris]

Would be an amazing product, if Lucid Hydra actually worked...

[-VK-]

An interesting assumption you make about the Lucid Hydra - Have you tested it?

If you're taking your assumptions from reviews of previous boards with Lucid on you're going to be in for a shock....Lucid have co-worked with ASUS to iron out a few issues and Lucid on the Crosshair IV Extreme (First ASUS board with Lucid) performs excellently, often seeing 1-2% faster speeds than with SLI / Crossfire

[sammorris]

Now there's some marketing talk if ever I heard it - got any data? Fixing the scaling is only half the problem. Hydra also only worked with about 3-4 games when it was last tested. Whether or not this has been expanded, the fact that it's still game-specific and needs software written for every game is an inherent problem in the system, and they're going to need to work very hard programming in the required data for hundreds, or preferably thousands of game titles. I can't see it happening myself. They also need to get it working with dual GPU cards, else its benefits are very limited (especially given its absurdly high cost).

[-VK-]

Actually I have some data, but NDA's prevent me from posting the details up - Rest assured, you'll see it once reviews of the Crosshair IV Extreme arrive.

Also, regarding the cost of Lucid, it's really not as much as you might think.

[GheeTsar]

So could you use the onboard 5450 for 2D/desktop usage and only enage the second card for 3D when required automagically and even then make some use of the 5450 for rendering? That would be nice.

[sammorris]

VK: The MSI board was £350, versus the version without Lucid costing £160. That's more than an HD5830's extra, that's steep. As for NDA, these performance improvements, are they specific to Asus boards? I find it surprising that only with Asus boards would you get Hydra performance that goes to being the best technological advance in the last few years (which Hydra would have been, had it worked) from being one of the worst technological failures of the last few years (which Hydra is, at the moment). I am going to need a pretty comprehensive set of benches to be convinced otherwise.

[baius]

Let's term this SLIFire.

You preferred that to Cross-I, eh?