The future

NVIDIA ruffled a lot of feathers among system manufacturers when they chose Dell to demonstrate Quad SLI technology. Based on that, many believed that Dell would be first to release a Quad SLI PC to market. Since their Quad SLI debut at CES though NVIDIA has clarified that Quad SLI won’t be exclusive to Dell. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if one of the specialty manufacturers such as Alienware, Falcon Northwest, or VoodooPC is first to market (among OEMs) with Quad SLI technology. Due in part to their smaller size, these manufacturers have been able to integrate the latest and greatest technologies into their PCs quicker than larger PC manufacturers such as Dell.

We’d guess that NVIDIA likely chose to demonstrate Quad SLI with Dell because NVIDIA knew in advance that Dell was going to launch their 3007WFP LCD at CES. Think of it from NVIDIA’s perspective – what better way to showcase Quad SLI than to show it up and running on a 30” LCD at 2560x1600?

Also, while this wasn’t made clear on launch day at CES, NVIDIA was quick to reiterate to us that this wasn’t a new product introduction. Instead NVIDIA characterized the Quad SLI announcement as a technology demonstration.

Basically, don’t expect NVIDIA to start selling Quad SLI GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB-based cards tomorrow. In fact it’s most likely that a GeForce 7800 GTX-based Quad SLI card will never see retail shelves. Instead you should expect the first Quad SLI cards to ship with upcoming GeForce GPUs that haven’t been announced yet. After all it wouldn’t make much sense to fork over thousands of dollars for a GeForce 7800 GTX-based Quad SLI solution if a newer GPU were available in just a few months (or less) would it?


Based on all this, we seriously doubt that the XPS 600 Renegade as it was demonstrated by Dell at CES last month will ever see the light of day. On the contrary, the final Quad SLI solution should be even faster!