True that. But then again, Crysis is so ridiculous it's not even feasible on a console.

Can the 680i SLI mother board really handle 3 cards? I have one of them and it only has two PCIEx16 slots. Where would the 3rd card go? (And if it was a 3rd 8800gtx, wouldn't that take up too many slots)

Amen. I love my xbox 360 I would probably buy a PS3 also if they would actually make some games for it.

"Cost More Than Actual Three-Ways"

Jason, give us the numbers on that would you.
Thanks.

The PC gaming world is ridiculous. I'm not sure whether gaming companies are acutally kicked back a fee from manufacturers for pushing the audience into performance upgrades with their insane and constantly rising system requirements, but they basically create new games for ultra-high end PCs, and then allow you to gear them back for more moderate systems. Which is CRAZED. It's like the whole thing with VISTA pushing people's hardware envelopes.

The fundamental architecture of game creation is actually aimed towards improving the equipment endlessly. Couple this with the endless buggy-ness of PC games versus the relative stability of their console counterparts, and you have a truly stupid business model. and if the industry does NOT change, then they are going to DIE. Which is a shame, because I love the versatility and imagination in the PC gaming world. They make games that console companies would never touch. Sid Meier games, the Sims series, things like Evil Genius and Black and White.

So, do you need a 1000W powersupply for theses monsters?

Consoles don't have to contend with the high resolutions PC games offer.

'Plug and go' works on consoles because the hardware specs are locked. Same argument Apple uses to keep OSX proprietary to their hardware.

@Prosumerist: I wouldn't say 1080p is not a "high" resolution... 1920x1080 pixels seems quite high for me...

@huggy: I was just gonna say, any gaming pc I've had would have to kill its preformance to try and run anything decent looking on a 1080p tv...

@Razta: I'm betting the power supply actually needs to provide more than 1kw to power this thing. Back when Apple's G5 towers were about to be killed off, they were still using 1kw power supplies. I'm betting these multi-core multi-gpu boxes need more juice than that.

everybody gives crysis such a hard time....I have a paltry 8800GT (1) and I can run it pretty much maxed out.

@POPE JOHN PEEPS II: your console games have the same bugs as the pc versions 90% of the time. The only difference is that on PC, you can actually patch it.

If they can't even get SLI to work 100%, then why in the hell are they going for 3?! It just doesn't make sense.

Can't they just make 1 powerful card to rule them all?

At this rate. in 5 years we'll have to buy 6 cards at $500 a piece just to play some fucking game that we can't even run at medium settings.

@bpatten:

"your console games have the same bugs as the pc versions 90% of the time. The only difference is that on PC, you can actually patch it."

Um, they've been patching games on consoles for a while now.

@DEAD_RED_EYES:
"your console games have the same bugs as the pc versions 90% of the time"

"Um, they've been patching games on consoles for a while now."

Thanks for proving my point.

@bpatten: "everybody gives crysis such a hard time....I have a paltry 8800GT (1) and I can run it pretty much maxed out."

At what resolution?! 640x480? At that res, I could probably get Crysis to run on a first-gen Voodoo card...

I doubt that very much. I run my 8800GTS 648mb on medium settings.

What Im confused about is with thier new 8800 GT SSC card being all the rage, they don't make that 3 SLI compatible????? WT F. It performance that is affordable, why else wouldn't you make it 3 SLI capable?????

COMON NVIDIA!

Even though I can only play Crysis at 640x480 on medium graphics, I can still safely say I haven't been out of the house for quite some time due to it...
...and when I have ventured out i've been all like "MAXIMUM STRENGTH" and the guy in the newsagent has looked at me funny.
Anyway....

Why can't people understand that PC gaming is an "enthusiast" market now. I would say most hardcore PC gamers love to tinker with their PCs and overlock them and mod them, etc. It's not about the price, it's about the tinkerability.

I would argue that many hardcore gamers love the tweaking more than the actual gaming.

The bottom line is, it's not supposed to be simple or cheap, that's what consoles are for. And putting consoles versus PCs is a waste of an argument. PC gaming is for people that love to get their hands dirty.

@bpatten: Sure, there are some bugs. But I find it hard to believe that had there been a console version of Evil Genius, it would have had an unnoticeable bug that ruined 70 hours of my gameplay.

@sidepocket: Hooray to that. I always loved the tinkering more than the playing.
Same with miniature games. Hardly ever played, but I sold the finished pieces at 50-150% profit.

Now, gaming is the only avenue still feeding a ridiculously over-inflated market. What casual PC user ever really uses the performance boost of a dualcore system?
And only architectural or industrial grade computers will use a threefold SLI setup for anything but gaming.
Which only goes to show that more than half the current computer development is aimed at a relatively limited consumer base.

I'd rather they put more funding into energy efficiency. How about that 6-8 hour battery for full scale DVD playback on my laptop?

Cost more than actual three-ways

Ah, but the price of high-end graphics cards will come down, actual three-ways will probably always be expensive (and besides, you wouldn't want to go with a cheap actual three-way).

@sidepocket: I agree and disagree. I would say that PC gaming can represent several niche markets. Sure it has the enthusiast market, but it routinely makes up about one ninth of the total gaming market. That sounds bad until you divide up all of the consoles it has to compete against. When the PC is on one side against Wii/GC/PS2/PS3/PSP/DS/XBOX/XB360/GB/etc, those numbers don't look so bad. In fact, looked at per platform, the PC is pretty competitive.

Outside of the "gamers" market, I would say the PC still reigns supreme for casual gaming (where MS and Sony are just now starting to make a splash), Those numbers usually aren't accounted for in sales reports.

Lastly, PC gaming can represent bleeding edge performance. We're seeing the teething pains of the next major shift in gaming right now. Give it a couple months, and it'll have worked itself out, and PC gaming will be enjoying better graphics than any console can produce. The downside? Bleeding edge costs money, but if you want the best you buy the best.

It's interesting to me that software is already starting to surpass what consoles are capable of. PC gaming easily bookends the market (casual gamers to extreme tuners), and comfortably takes a good chunk out of the middle as it's own platform.

Oh and it's these re-DONK-ulously expensive systems that help fund the development of consoles.

@Prosumerist:

"Same argument Apple uses to keep OSX proprietary to their hardware."

Except not really.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; 'cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.

@huggy: Prosumerist has the right idea, but is stuck on "resolution" instead of "image quality". There's a fundamental difference in making games for consoles and for PC's.

Consoles have a set performance envelope that never changes and is completely uniform.

Games on PC's are criticized for not taking advantage of all the latest and greatest graphical goodies that only a small percentage of people have at launch. They also need to have a reasonable set of minimum requirements so they don't spec the game out of the market.

You'd be hard pressed to find a console game that uses the same high quality textures, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, bump mapping, etc. as its PC equivalent. Resolution isn't the only thing that matters; image quality makes a huge difference in both realism and performance. Most console gamers have no idea things like AA and AF even exist, so its like arguing particle physics with a pig farmer.

I wouldn't be surprised if it did help you get into a threeway, except the other two would be drunken, greasy gamer guys you met at a LAN party, lol. Shudder.

@bpatten:

Proved your point? Didn't you say this?

"The only difference is that on PC, you can actually patch it."

FAIL. WRONG. TRY AGAIN.

@ANoel: I was offered a 3 way by two good looking hookers in Vegas for 300 bucks. However, I did turn it down because of rising medical costs and my inevitable need for medical care.

Hurray for the environment

Signed,

GreenPeace

All arguments aside, the growth of the technology is a good thing, right? (i.e. in the days of single core processors, buying a dual or quad processor setup was pretty pricey) No doubt the dual and quad cores were, at least in some respect, born out of that desire to run multiple processors, and now those multicore chips are very affordable. Potentially this might also eventually occur with the video cards (e.g. 3 GPUs on a single card?). In any case, all the newest gizmos and gadgets will always be at a premium. Wait some time if you want this and you'll be able to afford it.

@fusiongt: The 680i board has 3 16x PCI-E slots. Originally marketed as "SLI + physics".

and have you guys forgot the age old question of using the ultimate keyboard+mouse combo or crappy gamepad for FPSs...

Man, and the MODS! People STILL battlefield 1942 online. Thats a 6 year old game.

Oh, and we enjoy backwards compatibility with just about any game ever made. Even ones made for older consoles.

Oh, and I'd like to see your console do some video editing, or web browsing (unless its a wii, but thats pretty limited) or run open source software, or play a decent selection of homebrew games.

@FusionGT

I have the EVGA 680i T1 and it has 3 slots. Altho I have seen in a few different places that 2 are 16x and one is 8x, as they were/are assuming an 8x physics card would go in that place. Havent really found any solid answers on this board, anyway.

The thing that is making all the current owners mad now is the lack of compatiblilty w/ the 45nm Quads, as Nvidia said it would be capable w/ the 45nm chips, but they 'didnt specify' which ones. (Duo or Quad) (bastards)

6

The MSI p6n Diamond has 4 16x Express interfaces, although they only run at 16-8-8-8, they'll seem to work well for SLI sorta work. We use them in server boxes. Abit and ASUS have 3 16x Express interfaces, too, as do a few other manufacturers. Again, you won't get the full number of lanes, but with small cards or the bridges, you don't need them.

Oh, and Vista SLI support is still sucktastic, so don't expect most of the demand for this to come from Vista users.

I agree that this is overkill, but it may be useful as times goes on and prices go down. Three 7950s may not have the same DirectX support as an 8800 Ultra, but it'll probably cost you less for the next few months, and have much more memory bandwidth available. Nothing I'd want to put into a gaming machine (I kinda like having some address space left over, thank you very much), but a few graphics processing machines we run would love it.

At what resolution?! 640x480? At that res, I could probably get Crysis to run on a first-gen Voodoo card...

Crysis can run at 1280x1024 resolution with high settings on a machine with a single 8800 GT at more than 30 FPS. It will not do so with AA or AF on, however, which may be the difference for you.

It's also very responsive to the differences between a single core machine and a dual core, and a dual core and a quad core.

I really wouldn't consider "high" graphics as what the developers intended, though. It's more for future-proofing; Crysis and Bioshock have pretty enough pictures on high mode that they won't cause people to puke in three years if they go back to replay them.

The same can't be said for a lot of consoles games, sadly.

Alienware goes for the high end customers with money to burn. They are in an arms race to keep ahead of others, and it doesn't matter if you need it, or can even use that for a lot of games, it's for people who want the fastest they can get. It's not worth the money, but their goal is so you can say you've got the fastest now. I don't even know if there's one game that supports quad cores, most are just supporting two now. Of course in the future they will, but prices will drop by then.
I remember back when dual CPU boards were the rage. Little support for it, but they did it anyway.

I don't even know if there's one game that supports quad cores

Crysis and any game built around the Source engine and updated to Source's HL2:Episode 2 or higher standards.

Most development tools are also built for multi-core support up to and surpassing that of quad core systems.

3 ways cost $1,000,000. At least to get the type of chicks to double up on a dude like me.

@dead_red_eyes:
LOL! Yes indeed.
You'd think that they would have come up with dual GPU chips or something like that by now.

Motherboard standards have got to change beyond ATX and BTX. When you're gonna install 6 graphic cards, you're gonna need some room to install the sound card and some other crap, right...so you're gonna need a ton of slots.

Oh, and don't forget that in addition to your 6 graphics cards, you need to install 3 physX cards. Oh yea, its coming!

You'd think that they would have come up with dual GPU chips or something like that by now.

nVidia 7950x2. They already exist.

@racermd: I don't want to get into spec comparison or anything, but seriously, 1280x1024, all settings on high (note, NOT very high, I'm not on vista/DX10), and the game is VERY playable. maybe drops below 30 fps once in a while, but not enough that it bugs me.

Either way, I feel like I am getting the experience the developers intended, and my box cost me ~$1250, not the $4k this monstrosity costs.

@pop john peeps II: Remember "Lair" for ps3? It was GARBAGE when it came out, and all the reviewers said so. From what I can tell they since patched it and it's decent, but the point is Consoles are NOT immune to game ruining bugs.

Vista, dual 8800gts 320's, 4 gigs RAM, intel q6600, asus mobo, wd raptor hdd 150, xfi sound card.

Crysis on all high at 1650 by 1080 = 30 - 40 fps and chop in HIGH ACTION environments. Funny thing is, even if I lower the resolution to say, 1440 by 900, and go to medium settings my framerates only jump marginally and the chop still gets unbearable fighting lots of combatants.

@SomeAudioGuy: and dont forget..you can use your PC for microsoft office,photoshop,etc..