CES 2006 - Day 1: Dell's 30" Display, Quad SLI, WUSB and more
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 6, 2006 4:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
The World's First Upgradeable Graphics Card
MSI had an interesting proof of concept design at their booth: a PCIe x16 graphics card that featured two NVIDIA MXM interfaces. With two separate MXM interfaces, you can theoretically put any MXM GPUs on the card - making it an expensive, but upgradeable graphics card.
The problem is that since each MXM module has its own memory, there's no real benefit to this sort of approach today. And you wouldn't want to keep the memory on the PCIe card itself and just upgrade the GPU since you'd inevitably end up being way too memory bandwidth limited after one or two GPU upgrades.
Instead, this sort of an upgradeable GPU design may make sense if technologies like NVIDIA's Turbo Cache gain acceptance in the mid-range and high-end graphics markets. Reducing the dependency on high speed local memory for anything more than a cache would eventually allow these sorts of upgradeable designs to be used on desktops (or maybe even pave the way for the socketed GPU).
MSI also had a solar powered laptop on display:
The construction was crude, but a single lamp had no problems powering the notebook just fine.
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Aerows - Saturday, February 4, 2006 - link
This design has a lot going for it. As one user suggested, kids going to college. BUT, I think that a strong argument could be made for it with small business owners.Why?
Considering that I went through Hurricane Katrina, and literally everything (including both of my cars, my father's brand new Avalanche, both PC's) was underwater, the one thing that saved all of our records was my mother's laptop.
No one expected it to be quite the monster that it was, and even though the PC's were put up high, and bagged, they were swamped. My mom's laptop of course, went home with her.
Had we had two of these mobile PC's, I *guarantee* they would have been taken out of the building and away from the storm, and we wouldn't have to deal with waiting for insurance to settle, the inevitable depreciation involved (even though the two PC's involved in the storm were perfectly okay for our needs), and lost productivity. Backups are great and all, but let's face it, they are fallible and it can take a lot of effort to recover from two lost PCs.
Personally, if these units were available in "value" flavors without the souped up video cards, I know several folks I would recommend them to right now.
Of course, I'd want a decked out screamer for my own personal use :)! ::drool::
estbear - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
I think this is a verry intresting thing, but can it realy work like houres whit solar power. I mean thers almoust light everywhaer when this can work let's say 10 h I be impressed.Sry for bad englis :P
PeteRoy - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6020675.html">Watch the videodev0lution - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
Funny that everyone thinks of dell for low price/cheap computers and now that profit margins have slowed they drop a 30" LCD for 2 grand that takes a "limited edition" overclocked (Overclocked by Dell...hell must be cold!) quad GPU XPS just to eke out playable framerates on the newest games. What's next?!?! Water cooling and AMD brought to you by the dell duuuude? =XAnonymouseUser - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
Who'd a thunk it?hoppa - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
Does the flaming skull graphic on the Dell machine automatically change to a rusty snail over the next 3 years?ohnnyj - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
Very true. Plop down an estimated 10 grand on a system like this today and it will be outdated next year or even by the end of this year (there is no way nVidia will leave Quad SLI as a Dell exclusive). People will stick them in an overclocked FX-57 (perhaps watercooled) they build themselves and save themselves a few thousand dollars (and have a higher performing system to boot).Griswold - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
We'll leave you today with a picture of Toshiba's HD-DVD player that was sitting in Intel's booth. The player crashed when we took this picture, but other than that there was nothing particularly interesting to see here.Aww poor DVD player is shy. Dont take pictures please! Move along, give this DVD player some breathing roomm!
yuchai - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
I don't think it's a good idea. I quote the article "Internally it's basically a notebook with discrete graphics and support for up to two 2.5" hard drives running in RAID."It offers nothing over a Desktop Replacement Laptop imo.
Nick5324 - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
I was thinking the same thing, however I think it has potential. Assuming it's priced competitively, and we could dump the discrete graphics, I'd be interested.