Talk about crazy: try building a supercomputer consisting of 960 Nvidia processing cores. That's what the madmen of Asus has done, a Frankenstein of the computer industry squashed into a desktop-sized form. In the end, Nvidia and Asus managed to squeeze out speeds of up to 1.1 teraflops--that's enough juice to run Crysis at its highest setting.
Will it be used for gaming? Probably after work hours, as the supercomputer is ideal for medical image manipulation, engineering, scientific research and other process-hogging applications. Under the hood, Asus' ESC 1000 uses Intel's LDA1366 Xeon W3580 microprocessor running at 3.33 GHz. Nvidia's 960 processing cores comprise of three Tesla c1060 computing processors and one Quadro FX 5800.
Additionally, the Asus supercomputer is housed in a 445-mm x 217.5-mm x 545-mm chassis. Other components include 24 GB of DDR3 1333 MHz DRAM, a 500 GB SATA II HDD, and a 1100W power supply. According to PC Advisor, the ESC 1000 will cost around $14,512 over a five-year period; the company would not provide pricing for individual units.
Asus said that the ESC 1000 will be available globally, and that the computers are now ready to ship.
