From the looks of it Nvidia’s partnership with AMD has grown four more legs in the support of the 4x4x4. As AMD asked Nvidia to create a chipset for its Quadfather launch.
News has hit the web that Nvidia has created the new platform for AMD for the 4×4 launch. The 4×4 plays host to 2 Opteron socket “F”‘s on the same Motherboard which will than be upgradeable to AMD official Quad Core CPU which will be released next year. The system will not require registered ECC memory as rumored over the last few months, but will ask for regular DDR2 memory such as Corsair, OCZ, & Geil all provide currently.
The system will not only support quad-core Barcelona CPUs, but will support four graphics cards at the same time. Since the 680a chipset is created from a north bridge and south bridge chipset, there were enough PCIe lanes available to use four PEG (PCI Express Graphics) slots. Two slots come as x16 and two come as x8.
Since Nvidia is touting networking interfaces as an important point for games, you will not be surprised that this feature has got a significant upgrade. The Nforce 680a chipset will be also able to serve as a hardware router, since the chipset comes with no less than four Gigabit Ethernet ports, all using the well-known features of the “Nv Gb Engine”.
It will support 12 S-ATA ports and has the ability to have two RAID5 arrays of six drives.
In case you’re wondering how this all is possible, the answer is simple. The 680a chipset is nothing more than two nForce 590SLI chips placed on the same motherboard. Hypertransport is very flexible and ATI Crossfire is not mentioned anywhere.
So AMD new 4×4 platform seems to be shaping up quit nicely, offering more features than today’s setups I can see gamers jumping all over this one. 4 – 8800GTX’s in SLI under one hood should be showing their faces sooner than later.
Source: The Inquirer
Articles RSS