How come no quad cards?

[Quartz-1]

People seem to like dual cards, so triple and quad cards seem a no-brainer, especially with the limited number of PCIe x16 slots. Most people only have one. But I've not seen a quad gaming card since the 3dfx V5 6000. (I had to make do with the dual-chip 5000 ) I'm not in that market myself - funds do not yet permit - but I rather think the market for such cards would be rather greater than that for purchases of 4 individual cards.

Cooling? Slap a Corsair H100 on it.

 

[SolidBladez]

Cooling? Slap a Corsair H100 on it.

Not going to do it. Lets say AMD makes a quad-GPU 7970. First you need to understand that the TDP for a reference 7970 is 210W (on average). A dual-GPU card, aka 7990, would be roughly twice that but would have to downclock it's core and memory to stay within PCIe power specifications.

Now image three GPUs. The TDP would be ~375W and then add another 150W for an additional GPU - 525W to cool this thing! You would need a custom liquid cooling solution (4x120 rad w/ high speed fans). A Corsair H100 may match some of the high-end HSFs but it is no match for custom water cooling.

Also to power this thing would be mind boggling. 75W from the PCIe slot and (3) 8-pin PCIe connectors (450W) just to power one card. Of course that may connectors isn't something new as it's been used on limited edition cards such as the EVGA GTX 580 Classified and Asus Mars II.

Cost, power, cooling, and driver support are going to be the biggest issues facing multi-GPU cards. Asus was able to stick three 3850's in one card several years ago but it was a total flop.

 

[night_2004]

Because (1) quad GPU configurations are ridiculously overpowered and only for a very small market segment and (2) drivers don't really seem to scale well to quad configurations?

 

[cannondale06]

People seem to like dual cards, so triple and quad cards seem a no-brainer

yes it would require no brain to make such a silly card.

 

[GotNoRice]

People seem to like dual cards, so triple and quad cards seem a no-brainer, especially with the limited number of PCIe x16 slots. Most people only have one.

Boards with 2 16x (physical) slots are very cheap and plentiful these days.

But I've not seen a quad gaming card since the 3dfx V5 6000.

Well there were no dual AGP boards so it actually made more sense back then compared to now.

I rather think the market for such cards would be rather greater than that for purchases of 4 individual cards.

But that market would just buy two dual-GPU cards. They wouldn't be spending that much money (we'd be talking about a $2000 card for 4 GPUs by today's pricing standards) without also having a good motherboard, which means at least 2 16x (physical) slots.

 

[Trimlock]

The funny thing was amd was about to do this with the 4870 core. They had power saving options out the wazoo and a small chip at the time. Then they found out it was pretty damn fast on its own (without the power saving tech turned on) and competition wasnt amazing. Then the price of putting 4 of those chips on the board ... The size of that board (where would the memory go!?!?) and everything was shortly realized that such a product is a bad idea. You spend a lot of money to make no money on a novelty item.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

The funny thing was amd was about to do this with the 4870 core. They had power saving options out the wazoo and a small chip at the time. Then they found out it was pretty damn fast on its own (without the power saving tech turned on) and competition wasnt amazing. Then the price of putting 4 of those chips on the board ... The size of that board (where would the memory go!?!?) and everything was shortly realized that such a product is a bad idea. You spend a lot of money to make no money on a novelty item.

pretty much, look at 3dfx, they made 1000 of those quad GPU cards.. how much money did they make off them? nadda, zero, zilch, nothing.. because the card was never released for obvious reasons, which those reasons destroyed 3DFX as a company.

 

[L4d]

At SolidBladez, P.C.I.-E. 2.1 can supply 150 watts via its slot.

 

[Quartz-1]

pretty much, look at 3dfx, they made 1000 of those quad GPU cards.. how much money did they make off them? nadda, zero, zilch, nothing.. because the card was never released for obvious reasons, which those reasons destroyed 3DFX as a company.

Obvious reasons? Rubbish. I was itching to buy one, as were many others at the time. They actually built 8 chip boards for the commercial sector. The one mistake they did make was to use an external PSU rather than run the thing off the internal PSU.

 

[jojo69]

uhhhh, how are we supposed to get DC in and thermal out of the monster OP proposes?

not that it wouldn't be cool and all...but a kilowatt in one slot??

 

[metallicaband]

Based on what I've read about multi GPU micro stutter issues, going tri-SLI/tri-fire gives the best/smoothest performance when it comes to rendering the video game's frames and reduce the issue. So I honestly would welcome a tri SLI card, video cards are consuming less and less power these days, having a high end Tri-gpu card with 3x140w (or 130w) for a total usage of 390-420w isn't out of the question and doesn't sound crazy at all.

It's not exactly the same as running 3 individual cards, there are motherboard, space, heat/airflow..etc restrictions that wouldn't allow such setups for some people.

 

[Zepher]

People seem to like dual cards, so triple and quad cards seem a no-brainer, especially with the limited number of PCIe x16 slots. Most people only have one. But I've not seen a quad gaming card since the 3dfx V5 6000. (I had to make do with the dual-chip 5000 ) I'm not in that market myself - funds do not yet permit - but I rather think the market for such cards would be rather greater than that for purchases of 4 individual cards.

Cooling? Slap a Corsair H100 on it.

It'll be a small market for $2k cards.

 

[Trimlock]

Obvious reasons? Rubbish. I was itching to buy one, as were many others at the time. They actually built 8 chip boards for the commercial sector. The one mistake they did make was to use an external PSU rather than run the thing off the internal PSU.

That was just one mistake, when 3dfx could finally get that card out it was too little too late. You could be itching to buy it but the cold hard fact was that card was slower than nvidias single gpu, took longer to get out and cost more money to make. The only reason people want these things was for the novelty of it all.

3dfx wasnt going to make any money off if the 6000s.

 

[Trimlock]

Obvious reasons? Rubbish. I was itching to buy one, as were many others at the time. They actually built 8 chip boards for the commercial sector. The one mistake they did make was to use an external PSU rather than run the thing off the internal PSU.

And the obvious reasons would be 3dfx's dumb decision to compete by slapping more vpu's on a card instead of developing a gpu with true tnl support. using the 6000 was a bad example, it was a terrible attempt to brute force the competition.

 

[lostinseganet]

People seem to like dual cards, so triple and quad cards seem a no-brainer, especially with the limited number of PCIe x16 slots. Most people only have one. But I've not seen a quad gaming card since the 3dfx V5 6000. (I had to make do with the dual-chip 5000 ) I'm not in that market myself - funds do not yet permit - but I rather think the market for such cards would be rather greater than that for purchases of 4 individual cards.

Cooling? Slap a Corsair H100 on it.

But then i would wonder why video cards dont have memristor vram, and 1024 spu's+64ppu's "From ps3", Why can't the 4th processor be a Ray Tracing Processing Unit (RTPU)....