Asus is showing they’ve got a few engineers with a bit too much free time by demonstrating a pair of souped up GTX285’s.
In terms of design, it’s not dissimilar to a GeForce GTX 295. There are two PCBs sandwiched together inside one package, although each of these features 16 memory chips making for a total of 4GB of 1.2GHz (2.4GHz effective) GDDR3 memory. In short, this isn’t a card for anyone running a 32-bit operating system. Asus has also designed its own dual-slot cooler for the card, although it works in a similar way to the reference Nvidia GTX 295 cooler, with a single fan cooling both PCBs.
Obviously still in the Engineering Prototype stages, as shown above, the actual details behind the design are where it’s interesting. The GTX295 is a single-card SLI card, containing two individual slower cards sandwiched together with an integrated SLI chipset, so it only occupies a single PCI-e slot within the system. Because of this, NVidia has strict rules on maximum clock speeds and such, to prevent them from melting into slag on the motherboard.
What Asus has done is go beyond those limitations and use full-speed GTX285’s (with liquid nitrogen cooling, it seems), and a special third-party SLI chipset to make it all work. The end result works with standard NVidia drivers and appears as a GTX295, but has all the chipset features of a GTX285. The end result is incredibly hot and powerful, and allows 4GB of onboard video memory (using 0.77ns memory from Hynix).
If they can iron out the last few wrinkles, it’s expected to appear at Computex.
Asus shows off mammoth dual gtx 285 graphics card – The Inquirer and Guru3d.
