Video Cards
Besides the CrossFire offerings we saw, there was still plenty to see in the world of currently available GPUs (though not necessarily the cards we see here).
These two shots show the MSI dual 6800 Ultra graphics card that also still has an SLI connection at the top of the PCB. While MSI didn’t say that they had plans to sell this board, they merely wanted to demonstrate that they had the ability to churn out this type of hardware if they saw a need for it or a demand.
Also at MSI we ran into this card: an X800 XL card that has BOTH PCI Express and AGP 8x support on it, with a detached dongle on it to facilitate the users’ choice. This is the first time we have seen anything like this at all, and again, though MSI wasn’t sure of where this product might end up in their lineup, it is great to see some innovation in the marketplace.
This is the Gigabyte 3D1-68GT card — that’s right is sports dual 6800 GT GPUs on the board with a single PCI Express power connection. This first image doesn’t give you an indication of the cards mass, but these next two should.
You can see that both the front and the back heatsinks have fan embedded in them and even Gigabyte noted that they were ‘far from quiet.’ The second picture also shows off the fact that Gigabyte added support for four displays from this single video card. Nice!
This is something we have seen before, but still not in a working system: the Asus dual 6800 Ultra graphics card. Again we doubt we will ever see this card in production, especially with the release of G70 looming very close.
Finally, ATI was showing off their support for hardware acceleration of the H.264 HDDVD codec in a ‘yet unreleased GPU product.’ Hmm, can you smell R520 in that picture?
