Two's Company, Four's a WOW! Sneak Preview of NVIDIA Quad GPU Graphics

Installation: Not So Easy, Continued

The two DUAL cards in our test platform as a Quad configuration

Comparing Sizes: On top we have the Asus DUAL, below is a petite standard graphics card.

When only one board is installed, the Extreme 7800 GT Dual acts like a normal single-chip card - it just has twice the power. Its benchmark results reach the same level as that of a GT SLI configuration. Once the first card is working, the next step is rebooting Windows and installing the second card. This is the moment of truth, but Windows XP recognized two more GT graphics chips. Prompted by the Device Manager, the Asus driver then proceeded to initialize itself two more times, once for each new chip. In total, Windows then reported three operational GeForce 7800 GTs. The master card is always detected as a single card, the slave card on the other hand shows off the two graphics chips of its Dual board.

The Dual cards will only run correctly with the bundled Asus driver. Its version number is 77.77, while NVIDIA's current reference driver is 81.95.

The device manager reports our Quad SLI setup as three 7800 GT chips.