NVIDIA Dual GPU Spotted At CES

NVIDIA currently has the fastest, single GPU video card on the market today, the GTX 580. At this year’s CES it looks like its largest North American partner, EVGA, has decided to add to that portfolio with yet another custom card.

What was previewed at EVGA’s suite was a monster of a card that features dual GPU’s, 1GB of Samsung DDR5 per GPU, triple DVI connections allowing for NVIDIA’s Surround Gaming, SLI capability and a set of 8-pin power connectors. While still a high performance card it will utilize the GF104 GPU, the same used on the GTX 460 and not the GF110 GPU from the GTX 580, as I am sure most of you had hoped, although this will help keep costs at a somewhat reasonable level. The card also featured a brand new, triple fan, custom heatsink. Three fans should give you an idea of just how long this card is so be ready for a case upgrade if space is tight inside your current chassis.

Attendees also had a chance to look at a prototype P67 Classified and launch version of the P67 SLI motherboards. In addition to more PCI-E x16 slots than you can shake a stick at, the Classified model also sported a Compact Flash slot that allows for the installation of a flash card to act as a boot or storage drive. Another neat little doo-dad was an analogue gauge that showed the current CPU speed although it will not be bundled with the board. There was also a micro-ATX P67 motherboard that looks like an incredible base for a LAN Party rig with dual PCI-E x16 slots set to run at x8x8 with two cards installed. If that isn’t enough, EVGA showcased a GTX 570 using the same cooling solution mentioned earlier only this time with two fans mounted onto a custom PCB that is smaller than the reference board.

The economy may still be trying to pull itself up out of the gutter but EVGA looks primed to take advantage of the very crowded and highly competitive, yet lucrative enthusiast market.

EVGA wouldn’t give us many details about the card in question, but they did say it’s a future dual-GPU product. Given that EVGA is an exclusive Nvidia partner, that essentially confirms something we’ve half expected for some time now: a dual-GPU, SLI-on-a-stick video card must be on the way, presumably as a member of the GeForce GTX 500 series.