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Introduction
'Two heads are better than one' - So the saying goes. It's common
knowledge in real life that having two people around to work on a
problem often pays dividends, but the same has rarely been said about
video cards, particularly when it comes to putting two GPUs on a single
PCB. Whereas both the original SLI seen with 3Dfx's Voodoo 2 chips
and the new SLI technology used by NVIDIA found success, the history of
putting two GPUs onto a single card is a veritable graveyard of failures
- Think Rage Fury Maxx and Volari Duo V8. Only 3Dfx's VSA100 chip
used for the Voodoo5 stands out as being a multi-chip design that
actually worked in the retail market.
After those aforementioned
failures, it seemed that the industry would never again set down that
path, for the foreseeable future at least. But, NVIDIAs SLI
technology has buoyed the hopes of producing competitive cards by using
two GPU cores on a single board, as well as gotten the enthusiasts
drooling, so it was only a matter of time before some forward-thinking
AIB put their thinking caps on and came up with something innovative....
Step forward Gigabyte's 3D1 accelerator - Two NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT
GPUs... On a single board! All of this sewn together with a
'256-bit' memory bus (after a fashion) and 256Mb of GDDR3 RAM. On
paper it sounds like a fantastic concept, but then so did the other 'Two
cores on a single board' video cards of the past. So, can
Gigabyte's offering succeed where the others have failed, or should we
prepare a new space in the GPU graveyard? Let's take a look...
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