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Introduction

The Quad SLI saga has been as eventful as NVIDIA could have bargained for. The push on NVIDIA's part to get Quad SLI to market is definitely justified - potential performance gains being only part of the reason. Companies such as ASUS and Gigabyte have all taken significant strides to try and incorporate multiple graphics processors onto a single board, and while these attempts have been limited at retail to special editions, they have made waves regardless. Unfortunately, these third party solutions almost always require specific hardware (motherboard) and frequently have bugs and major inhibiting glitches that keep them from widespread acceptance, not to mention the high pricing generally associated with these cards.

While Quad SLI and Dual-GPU graphics boards are not the same thing and are not necessarily tied to one another (as proved by Gigabyte with their quad PEG slot equipped motherboard), they do make the most sense in terms of functionality and efficiency. NVIDIA in January unveiled its Quad-SLI boards for use in high end system integrator systems such as those from Dell, Alienware, Voodoo et al. While ASUS and Gigabyte both chose to stick two GPU's on a single PCB as far as dual graphics boards go, NVIDIA have simply coupled two PCB's together, which when used in a pair, create a full Quad SLI setup. The 7900 GX2 was unveiled at CES in conjuction with Dell and was demonstrated in the company's Renegade XPS desktop PC. While not available at retail, the 7900 GX2 was still surrounded by a significant amount of buzz, with many users wondering how everything would run in normal situations. The cards however turned out to be very problematic in a large number of cases. While there were definite performance gains made in some games (FEAR being an example) others such as Oblivion were hardly functional in a quad setup.

NVIDIA have not been idling on the matter of implementing mass market Quad SLI however, and have been working diligently bringing a refined version of the 7900 GX2 to market - the 7950 GX2. What's important to note about today's launch however is that this card (for the time being) will not work in a Quad SLI setup. More on this on the next page.