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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  • at80eighty - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link

    while 'fugly' is debateable - to me, the last pic on page 2 - of the rig in flames , is frickin perfect on two levels

    1) Blazing performance
    2) Reminds you that you'll need a fire hydrant handly in case that baby blows up :-)
  • at80eighty - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link

    while 'fugly' is debateable - to me, the last pic on page 2 - of the rig in flames , is frickin perfect on two levels

    1) Blazing performance
    2) Reminds you that you'll need a fire hydrant handly in case that baby blows up :-)
  • Tanclearas - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link

    QFT
  • WoodenPupa - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link

    What are the power requirements of a quad SLI??
  • Cygni - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link

    Each dual 7800 card requires an external power brick, which takes a huge ammount of strain off of the PSU. In effect, it doesnt have to power the most power hungry item in any case, the graphics card. The PSU is actually mounted in the front of the case, beneath the HD's and CDROM drives, underneath the Dell logo panel. There is one PSU, but its likely quite a beast.
  • Xenoterranos - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link

    What's the total power draw of that Dell Renegade?! four pentium cores, 4 nvidia gpu's, and 2 10,000 raptors!? The thing must come with dual PSU's to boot!
  • Iv3RSoN - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link

    dunno bout the power requirements - must be heaps lol. But i see this as kinda a publicity move - ordinary ppl see how fast this comp is 4 games then they think dell comps r really good and go buy one of their more budgeted offerings
  • eun-sik lee - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link

    We are very intersted in boards as sample 2pcs.

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