Can you put 4 Radeon 4870 X2 in One computer?

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keysersoze311

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Hi guys, I know someone who claims he has 4 Radeon 4870 X2 in one gaming computer, 8GB of total video ram! Can this actually be done?!

Cheers, Jake
 
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Using a Troll sentence, but i really think it applies here:

"Pics or didn't happen"
 
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it can, but you cant have an 8x crossfire system, he must have them running in a non crossfire configuration to have it work, a bit useless unless he does a lot of parallel computing
 
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^haha i was about to say that 😛

some university or something stuck 4 9800GX2's in a system without sli bridges on an AMD board with 4 PCI express slots.. double wide. developed their own drivers, and they had something faster than a multi million dollar supercomputer.

so if you're an epic folding freak, and want to get the world record on your own without anyone else on the team interfering, or you're a kind of solitary guy, no reason not to, assuming you have the cash. waste of money for gaming though :lol:
 
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Well, I'd figure that there are perhaps some server power supplies that could be used to power four of these cards together. Or it might be possible to get a way to rig two power supplies together... (Possibly splicing their connections to the power switch) So I figure that it's gotta be possible.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure how few displays you could group all that power to. I'm pretty sure that with current drivers, you could have 4 displays running with 2 GPUs per. Not sure if you could possibly do two displays with 4 GPUs per. I know that anything more than 4 GPUs per display is impossible.

Also, I'm under the impression that the 4-slot motherboards aren't capable of driving fewer than two displays with all four cards; to the best of my knowledge, 4-GPU display setups revolve entirely around using dual-GPU cards.
 
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yeah. i doubt they could get drivers to run 6x cards (3x dual gpu cards) on one mobo... three GTX 295's in SLI ftw? obviously something is limiting both companies from having more than 4 GPU's. possibly OS limitations more than anything hardware related.

btw nottheking you don't need to splice two PSU's or anything... theres quite a few cases on the market these days that allow you to use two power supplies. so for high end people who don't want to cash out for a 1400W PSU, they just get two midrange 700W's.

and back on the quad card issue, is there any mobo out there that has 4 PCI express 2.0 slots? to my knowledge there are only a couple which support pci e 1.1 slots.. most of them not running at full x16 speed. which kinda defeats the purpose.

and now for the pink elephant standing in the middle of the room that everyones ignoring: the collossal amount of heat the 4870X2's would be producing, and their inability to get enough air into them would probably result in them shutting down after a minute, or if not, lasting damage.
 
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its called a 790fx board..... amd in case you didn't know. supports 4 8x 2.0 slots. maybe not the full 16x, but 8x 2.0 is fine. but there was a university that made a computer using the 4 9800GX2's like was said above, but they used it for their imaging computer. they claimed it could come up with the cat scan images (or at least i think it was cat scans) somewhere in the 12x faster range than the small supercomputer they had at the time, while using less power ((insert banished word "green" hear)) at the same time. quite impressive when you think about it.

but of course, i heard from reliable sources that there will be a university or two that will be getting a gpu farm from NVIDIA sometime in the next year!
 
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Is it possible to put 4 HD4870 512s or 4 HD4830s into a computer with a 790fx mobo?

There really wouldn't be any point in doing so- but I want to know if it is actually possible to do this.

I noticed that you can put 4 2600XTs into a mac pro (Retarded imo)
 
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Uh, GUYS, it's not only possible, there was a few guys on this very forum who made them (one guy AMD & one guy an nV rig), they came here for help in the build starting with a similar question.

But they were NOT gaming, it was for GP-GPU work, where having the 8 cores was a benefit for number crunching.

Anywhoo, for gaming it's of little use except for multi-monitor situations, but would rarely offer much of a performance benefit over 4 single GPU cards unless you get the models with the 4DVI support for that specific reason.

As for Xfire, the drivers would be a pain to control. Under XP your max support would be 6 cards with a hella-complicated AFR+SFR setup since SFR is limited to 3 frame support, but under Vista you could support 8 GPUs in Xfire, but it would be such a god awful mess to get it to work I doubt you'd see much benefit after 6 GPUS, and likely not worth it after 4, and all you would be adding is complications and CPU overhead.

I can't find the old X2 thread (search function is less than ideal here nowdayas), but I was able to find the older thread from March for the guy putting the 4 GX2 into one rig for his GPGPU rig, (helps when there's more posts on it);
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/249450-33-four-9800gx2-cards-work

That type of situation is the only good reason to do it, for gaming any more than two of those type of cards is a little useless.
 
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yeah as the other guy said there are gpu only power supplys that work in line with the main psu, lol I even bought one accidentally, if u used a 650w like the one I bought to power two of the 4870x2's and a big main psu to power the other two you could get enough power
 
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That's sorta what I was thinking. At that level, you'd reach the point where the GPU hierarchy would have too many tiers to be not just practical, but even perhaps to be possible without serious issues. Could wind up having a fair amount of processing latency as buffer portions bounce from one card to another, resulting in a hilarious situation where going beyond 6 cards would likely yield a LOWER framerate.

However, for a arguably infinitesimally practical case for gaming, I'd imagine that one could hook up 8 GPUs... Closest to "single-display" that might work is perhaps using them for use with 3D glasses or such, since as I recall the two halves act as separate displays, so you could have effectively 2 CrossFire/SLi setups, one for each eye. Or alternatively, of course, you could run a pair of 2-GPU cards for graphics, and use the others for one helluva physics array, which is partly what I'd imagine the actual use of such 8-GPU machines would be; relying on them just for their FP number crunching, not driving displays.
 
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