Inside ATI & NVIDIA: How they make frames fly

Testing GPUs

Next up on the NVIDIA tour was one of their FA labs where manufactured GPUs and chipsets were tested.

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In order to make testing a lot of GPUs easier, the video cards actually have sockets on them and the individual GPUs are just dropped into the socket. Don't get any ideas though, these sockets are only setup for use with one particular type of GPU and thus are only good for testing a bunch of the same GPU. It would be nice to have a socketed graphics card that you could upgrade down the line, unfortunately you'd need to upgrade the memory as well to keep memory bandwidth growing at the same pace as GPU speed.

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An array of Quadro4 GPUs is waiting to be tested:

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The socketed testing principle extends to the chipset arena as well; here we have a nForce board running through its paces. Note the socketed North Bridge:

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