by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on 1/7/2006 3:07:14 AM
Posted in Trade Shows

Our second day at CES proved to be our most fun-filled yet, with tons of interesting technologies and much more to cover that what we're reporting here today. We will have follow-up coverage over the weekend and into next week so keep checking back.

Before continuing let's recap what we've seen thus far at CES:

CES 2006 Pre-Show Coverage: Before the official start of the show, ATI gave us a demonstration of their OCUR device that enables CableCard support in Windows Vista Media Center.

CES 2006 Day 1 Coverage: Our first day at the show gave us time with Dell's new 30" LCD panel as well as a preview of NVIDIA's Quad-SLI.

Intel's Centrino Duo Launch: Also taking place during the first day of CES was Intel's official launch of their new Centrino Duo platform.

With that out of the way, it's time to revisit one of the more interesting items from our Day 1 coverage.

Up Close and Personal with NVIDIA's Quad-SLI

Yesterday we reported on Dell's Inspiron XPS 600 Renegade system that will be shipping with the world's first NVIDIA Quad-SLI setup. Unfortunately the system we showed you pictures of did not actually have the Quad-SLI cards installed, but today at NVIDIA's booth we were able to not only take some pictures of the actual setup but get a better understanding of how it works.

NVIDIA's Quad-SLI works on any nForce4 SLI motherboard with two PCIe x16 slots, in the case of Dell's XPS 600 Renegade the chipset of choice is a nForce4 SLI x16 Intel Edition. There is no technical reason the setup shouldn't work on an AMD nForce4 SLI x16 motherboard.


Click to Enlarge

Although the picture above appears to be four independent cards, there are actually only two PCIe x16 cards plugged into the motherboard. Each pair of two PCBs features a master and a daughter GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB. There is a small connector that joins the master and daughter PCBs, but it isn't visible in the picture above.

At the far end of the cards you will see a heatsink; that heatsink covers a chip that splits the PCIe x16 slot into two x8 buses, with 8 lanes going to the master PCB and 8 lanes going to the daughter PCB.

With both cards plugged into the motherboard, all that is left is to run SLI bridges connecting both master PCBs and both daughter PCBs to each other. Remember the hidden connector between the two PCBs on each card? That's what connects the master PCB to the daughter PCB on each card.

With the bridges installed, the hardware setup of NVIDIA's Quad-SLI is complete. NVIDIA had the Renegade with Quad-SLI hooked up to a Dell 3007WFP running at its native 2560 x 1600 resolution, which is pretty much where the setup is best used.

PureVideo to Offer H.264 Decode Acceleration
by gibhunter on Monday, January 09, 2006
Is that Serenity that I'm seeing on the Toshiba laptop playing back in high definition? If so, WHERE CAN I BUY IT?!!! and How much?
gibhunter
Motorola Bluetooth Pen*s by Troll4Hire on Monday, January 09, 2006
Is it just me, or am I the only one who saw the Motorola Bluetooth headset and laughed because it looks like a penis and testicles?

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/200...">Photo #1 http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/200...">Photo #2



http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=266...">http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=266...
Troll4Hire
Vaio by Jynx980 on Monday, January 09, 2006
The Vaio on "The Four Viiv PCs Worth Mentioning" looks a lot like a cash register with the keyboard on top.
Jynx980
rollable display by longfred on Sunday, January 08, 2006
For more info on the rollable display shown by Philips look at http://www.polymervision.com">www.polymervision.com. You can find some nice pictures and a video at the website (Technology -> download).
longfred
Hmmm... by HamburgerBoy on Saturday, January 07, 2006
That rollable display is pretty neat, but how does it work? For something that thin, would you have to use some really small batteries or what?
HamburgerBoy
Keep up the Good Work! by AndrewChang on Saturday, January 07, 2006
For those of us unable to attend a show like CES, I appreciate the quality and focus of your coverage. It's a nice reminder that you guys are still as dedicated as ever to Anandtech, as the quality of some recent articles had left me wondering. Thanks.
AndrewChang
by DanaGoyette on Saturday, January 07, 2006
My god, you could heat a house with that quad SLI system! What I want to know is how they plan to cool the inner heatsinks on those cards. This would be a really good use for a modded version of the Zalman TNN case.
Of course, they should ditch the dual Prescott (if that's what it is) and go with a custom Yonah board.

They'd be better off with a much longer heatsink with the fan perhaps sticking out the end, or something like that.

Quantum3D Mercury, anyone?
http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/q3d_mercury_bri...">http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/q3d_mercury_bri...
DanaGoyette
by ohnnyj on Sunday, January 08, 2006
It is interesting that the Quad SLI actually is stated to have over 40Gpixels/s output which is about 4 times the power shown in the graph there:

http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6020675.html">http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6020675.html
ohnnyj
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