External Video Cards

[TheGreatSatan]

About a year ago I saw a whole bunch of articles on external video systems. Many that I saw would sit on top of [or on the side of] a case. They would be graphic monsters, easily blowing away anything on the market now. Anyone know what's going on with these?

[Omega]

Care for a link?

I've heard of USB video cards, USB to VGA adaptors, hell, even USB monitors (Made by Samsung, you can daisy-chain them together, too), but external video solutions that are more powerful than internal? I can't see anything that's bottlenecked by eSATA/USB/1394/etc whooping an 8800GTX on PCIe 16x.

[TheGreatSatan]

http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/28/ati-to-release-power-hungry-external-video-card/

and this Monster

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060802-7409.html

[Omega]

Holy.

****.

[TheGreatSatan]

Did you see the price on the second one?

[Collinstheclown]

The first one was the rumor of what the R600 was going to be IIRC.

As for the second one:
http://store.nvidia.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=nvidia&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=49538700
Edit*: You can also take a look at the Tesla (http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_deskside.html) products.
..."powered by two 128-processor computing core GPUs."




-CollinstheClown

[TheGreatSatan]

I would love to see the 3dmark/Aquamark score on that monster!

[xRyokenx]

Holy crap dude... those are nice. I should almost get one of those for my next rig, lol... we'll see. $17.5k... just... wow.

[XcOM]

is i rem correctly, my dads company has three of these setup, i asked, i went it, installed doom3, it ran LIKE



















CRAP, the graphics was good, but no better than a gfx card in your pc, after consulting my dad, it appears there designed for hih end cad designs, and video work, this is somthing that would be used in the making of 3D films like FF, and shrek 3.

[xRyokenx]

I guess that makes sense... for $17,500 I bet you aren't gonna use for gaming, lol. So that's who can afford 'em... Pixar and the rest of those guys, huh.

I wonder when they're gonna have external cards for gaming, that'd be cool.

[Airbozo]

Here is what an engineering friend said about the QuadroPlex;

Given the hardware architecture, you pretty much get what you would expect.
Operations that require downloads from host memory to the QuaroPlex are
bottlenecked by the single PCI-16 connection, but peer-to-peer operations
(board to board on the QUadroPlex are very, very fast. So, If you custy is
running a flight simulator, they are better off with the SLI, if they are
doing screenspace composited volume rendering, or anything where multiple
cards composite to one display, then the QuadroPlex is the ticket.

He IS running flight simulators, so he feels it was a waste of his money. However, it is useful for development OF that simulator. Here is his site so you have an example of what he is doing;
www.andesengineering.com (although it appears his site is down at the moment. I left him a message letting him know)