Discussion Mysterious dream graphics card from 2003

[noobenverfer]

I had a dream last night. It was in the style of a Budget Builds Official video, where he was reviewing a high-end graphics card released in the year 2003 intended for use in workstations, servers, and such. It had 4GB of VRAM, multiple cores, a dual-slot cooling solution, and had a feature which was like SLI which let you use multiple GPU's (up to eight, I think).
The cooler was special as it had a clip on the back that let you attach additional heat sinks. There were clips on the back of the heat sink which would allow you to daisy chain another cooler behind the one you already had, and you could daisy chain another one behind that, and so on. It's difficult to describe what I'm seeing here so I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of it. It turned out weird but it should help you get the idea.

AFAIK I'm making all of this up and it was just random firings from my brain at night but thought that I might as well ask if any of this stuff from the dream existed in 2003 - 4GB of VRAM, multiple cores, SLI, that weird bracket which lets you attach additional heat sinks to the GPU, et cetera. Night, y'all.

 

[Aeacus]

if any of this stuff from the dream existed in 2003 - 4GB of VRAM, multiple cores, SLI, that weird bracket which lets you attach additional heat sinks to the GPU, et cetera.

Not everything.

GPUs released in 2003, at most, had 256 MB of VRAM. DDR2.

SLI was released in 2004.

As for that bracket cooler thingy, that didn't happen either. Makes 0 sense why it should be reality in the 1st place.


But multiple cores was a thing back then. E.g XGI Volari Duo V5 Ultra,
specs: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/volari-duo-v5-ultra.c90

If you want to educate yourself, here are all GPUs released in 2003,
link: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?released=2003&sort=name

Happy hunting.

 

[BFG-9000]

I had SLI in 1998. Of course back then it was Scan-Line-Interleave and not Scalable-Link-Interface but the initial versions of the latter also required a bridge connection to minimize bus traffic.

Apparently SLI was around much earlier than that but only inside arcade cabinets. With 4MB SDR VRAM per chip, not 4GB.

 

[stonecarver]

There was a one off company back than that did some major hardware custom SLI card but one it was in the thousands to buy and two by the time it was ready Nvidia's SLI was hitting the market and was dirt cheap.

Linus over on youtube a couple years back bought one of these vintage GPU's and actually did game one it for what it could do.

If you can find that old video it was interesting in the fact it actually existed but never really made it to market.

 

[Aeacus]

Linus over on youtube a couple years back bought one of these vintage GPU's and actually did game one it for what it could do.

Are you speaking about 3DFX Voodoo5 6000? A quad-core GPU;
specs: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/voodoo5-6000.c3536

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrWfhbqURC4

 

[stonecarver]

That video seems right but the one I remember Linus also was able to interview the guy who did the project. So if that's in the video you posted than it must be the same one.

But I also remember some stacking of boards so you could keep adding to the card. But been a couple of years ago I seen it.