Gigabyte Creates Dual-GPU Graphics Card

16 Dec, 2004 at 9:05pm ET Article published in Tech

Gigabyte will announce Friday a graphics card running two graphics processors on one board. According to sources, the SLI card will lift current 3DMark2003 record levels by a significant margin while being priced lower than ATI’s and Nvidia’s single-GPU high-end cards.

If two graphics cards in one system are too expensive or simply not fast enough, Gigabyte’s new 3D1 board may be worth a serious look. Sources told Tom’s Hardware Guide, that the company prepares to launch a dual-GPU card Friday, saying that it will “revise the VGA performance ranking”.

The card integrates two Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT graphics processors and is the first 6600 GT card on the market to offer a total of 256 MByte DDR 3 memory and 256 Mbit of memory bandwidth, according to the manufacturer. The card is cooled by two on-board fans.

The 3D1’s two processors communicate through Nvidia’s SLI interface and achieved 14,293 points in 3DMark2003, sources at Gigabyte said. This would not only be almost twice the performance of a regular 6600 GT card, but also more than ATI’s Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which achieved in Gigabyte’s test environment 13,271 points and Nvidia’s GeForce 6800 Ultra, which posted 12,680 points.

Source: Tom’s Hardware Guide

Comments

16 Dec 2004 ~ 10:38pm entropy Holy nuts. What happens when someone takes this technology and does the same, only with 6800 GT or Ultras... and uses two of them in PCIe 8x slots? In (dual?) SLi? Good God ... 4 of the world's most powerful GPUs...
16 Dec 2004 ~ 10:39pm Geeky1 /me wonders if you could put 2 of these cards in one system for 4 GPUs

//edit
Bah. Entropy beat me to it. On a side note, You know you're a geek when two 6600GT GPUs just aren't good enough
16 Dec 2004 ~ 10:47pm EMT Awesome!
16 Dec 2004 ~ 10:49pm Thrax Well. Seems Gigabyte finally made a consumer product worth buying.
16 Dec 2004 ~ 11:32pm madmat I want one, I wonder if it'll come in AGP flavors as well.
16 Dec 2004 ~ 11:48pm GnomeWizardd actually thrax I ended up buying a Gigabyte 6800gt with the heatpipe cooler and backwards fan. I am utterly amazed. I installed it yesterday and the Ocing is great and the temps are unbelievable. You can ask Prime I was very upset at myself for ordering it but now I am completely satisfied. But don't get me wrong I'd never buy another gigabyte Motherboard
17 Dec 2004 ~ 12:16am entropy Bah, it's all luck of the draw... with any company. I have a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-L rev. 2. I have never had a problem with it, other than things I just didn't understand.
17 Dec 2004 ~ 12:22am muddocktor I just hope the fan on your brand new fancy Gigabutt vid card doesn't take a dump on you like what happened with my Gigabutt 9700 pro card and fry the gpu.
17 Dec 2004 ~ 12:23am Sputnik no you can't put two of them together (find me an SLI port on the card). not likely on the AGP, though the AGP 3.0 spec says that you can have multiple AGP links on a bus (though noone implemented this ever).

sorry to be a kill joy.
17 Dec 2004 ~ 12:29am RWB I've bought plenty of Gigabyte parts, no more problems than any other product I've had. But I am curious too if this is possible with AGP, or if it requires the whole SLI thing and PCI Express?
17 Dec 2004 ~ 2:39am Geeky1

muddocktor wrote:

I just hope the fan on your brand new fancy Gigabutt vid card doesn't take a dump on you like what happened with my Gigabutt 9700 pro card and fry the gpu.

And whose fault is that mudd? FIRST THING YOU DO WITH A NEW GRAPHICS CARD*: CHANGE THE DAMN OEM HSF

*excluding the GF6800s, FX5800/5900, and possibly the X800/X850
17 Dec 2004 ~ 2:45am madmat AS far as I know the GF-FX series, the GF-4 series and the GF-6 series are all supposed to be able to support dual GPU cards, no-one ever strayed from the board designs nVidia released though and since nVidia never made a dual GPU board it just never happened.

I don't see why the AGP spec. would matter one way or the other, it never stopped the VooDoo 5500 or the Rage Fury Max...
17 Dec 2004 ~ 9:17am entropy

Sputnik wrote:

no you can't put two of them together (find me an SLI port on the card). not likely on the AGP, though the AGP 3.0 spec says that you can have multiple AGP links on a bus (though noone implemented this ever).

sorry to be a kill joy.

I haven't looked at the card itself, yet. I was just saying "what if." Some brand will make their own, and pull dual card, dual GPU SLi eventually. THAT will be the day
18 Dec 2004 ~ 8:36am Enverex My Gigabyte board tried to set it self on fire and welded itself to the ATX connector Still have pictures somewhere...