[url=“http://www.dangerden.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11341”]http://www.dangerden.com/forums/viewtopic....f=7&t=11341[/url]
These are single-slot water blocks designed for the new single-board GTX 295s. Theoretically, a single standard ATX motherboard and case could now accomodate seven GTX 295 cards (14 GPUs!) The water cooling would eliminate the cooling problem, however power and PCI-E lane issues would remain. Has anyone looked at these with the thought of increasing GPU density?
Tom
7 PCI-E 2.0 x16 (actually, 4 x16’s and 3 x8’s, but they’re all x16 size slots):
[url=“ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer "Ultimate Gamer" choose 3Way SLI + PhysX at Real X16 X58 CEB Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com”]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813131390[/url]
Though…I don’t know what kind of power supply you’d get to handle SEVEN cards. You’re also looking at spending $5k on the cards + water blocks alone, plus probably another $2-3k for the rest of the system.
Good luck getting a BIOS that works with that many GPUs… (also I don’t know what the theoretical maximum for our driver is but I am pretty sure you will hit BIOS problems long before you hit driver problems)
Even though the board gets thinner, I don’t think those are single slot widths. Look at the water hose barbs at the top, they angle sideways, not up, and don’t really leave room for another card right next to it.
That’s good to know about the driver. The (8 GPU) BIOS limitation seems more like a chicken/egg problem, in that, the manufacturers are not motivated to provide support for something that is (used to be?) physically impossible. If BIOS support was available, what other reasons might people have to not trying to use single-slot GTX 295 cards side-by-side? The “Best PSU solution for 4 x GTX 295” thread has a lot of clever solutions for providing power, so I can’t see this as being insurmountable.
PCIe bandwidth would be so bad that it would be mostly unusable for real applications. If you had a dual X58 system, it’d be better but still not great.
Doing some more research, I found this article describing a big advantage of single slot GPUs is that you can then use the middle slots (hardware RAID, Infiniband cards, etc.).
Wow, I love all that copper. Makes it look like the Difference Engine!
Here is a new design with the nozzles angled front to back. I think that it all the pieces are in place for an adventurous system builder to fit seven of these in a 4U box.
Except there would be no point in doing that with the current 8 GPU maximum.
Is that really single slot? The mounting bracket in the picture seems to be two slots wide.
Some of these single-pcb GTX 295s have single-slot brackets, and some have double-slot brackets.
Two things:
You can order the single width back plates from DangerDen (I got a pair for my old 8800GTX cards back in the day).
Don’t put anything between these cards unless you like it cooked, even water cooled these cards will far exceed the operating temp of most good raid cards (about 45C).
An old thread of mine is revived - to no purpose. tmurray was right on both counts; there is still no motherboard with BIOS support for 14 GPUs and bandwidth will be bad no matter how many nf200 bridges are installed. This is a future technology. The current state of the art is GPU clusters (shameless plug).
