by Anton Shilov
04/24/2006 | 11:30 PM
Despite of earlier assumptions that personal computers (PCs) with four graphics processing units (GPUs) by Nvidia Corp. cannot be actually bought, a high-ranking executive at Falcon Northwest, a maker of high-performance gaming systems, said his company has been supplying appropriate personal computers for some time now.
<%BANNER[article]%>“I can tell you that Falcon Northwest has been shipping Quad-SLI for several weeks now. We did have a slow start waiting on some motherboard BIOS updates to support Quad and final drivers, so we didn’t begin shipping until early April,” said Kelt Reeves, the president of gaming PC specialist Falcon Northwest.
Nvidia quad SLI technology uses special GeForce 7900 GX2 graphics cards, each of which has two GeForce 7900-series graphics processors. Quad SLI allows to turn on 32x antialiasing, the maximum level possible today, or to play the latest games in 2560x1600 resolution. Even though quad SLI may not mean the highest performance possible, users buying systems featuring four GeForce 7900 GPUs may expect better graphics quality than those who use one or two graphics cards.
When announcing its new flagship GeForce 7900-series and 4-way SLI technology in early March the leading designer of graphics processing units (GPUs) proclaimed availability of systems featuring four Nvidia GPUs. Even at press time, however, few systems builders could actually ship their computers featuring Nvidia Quad SLI technology.
Nvidia Corp., the developer of the GeForce 7 GPUs and scalable link interface (SLI) multi-GPU, did not comment on the news-story.