14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia is about to release its first official graphics card sporting two graphics processors. While AMD is getting ready to unveil its Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card, Nvidia is still working on the world's second dual GPU card sanctioned by the producer itself.
AMD stuffed both graphics processors on a single PCB (printed circuit board) and joined them with a PCI-Express 2.0 GPU bridge, in order to keep the manufacturing costs to a minimum (since the extra PCB would add up some extra $10 - $15 to its final price). Nvidia took another approach and decided that it will work with two separated PCBs for achieving its own version of dual-GPU card. This method has been successfully used by Nvidia in the previous 7950GX2, so the actual 9800 X2 card should look pretty much the same.
It seems that Nvidia has been quite innovative and the GeForce 9800 pictures show us the two cards facing on their component side, just like an electronic sandwich. Between the cards, there is the graphics cooling system that manages to cool both video cards at once. The actual model is still a prototype, but it looks as if it were a pair of inverted and sandwitched GeForce 9800 cards, linked by a huge cooler where the mayonnaise would usually sit.
Although Nvidia's approach might seem wrong just because the first dual-processor card included both GPU's on a single PCB, it might be more efficient than AMD's version. Linking two GPUs on the same board and meshing them via a PCI-Express 2.0 bridge might not be the brightest idea, because in the "real world", two-processor computing systems do not scale well, and this would likely apply GPUs, too.
Although the initial performance of the GeForce 9800 X2 is extremely low, this could be the result of a complete lack of driver support. Let's not forget that AMD delayed the launch of its RV780 chipset for the very same reason.
There is no word on the card's availability yet, but it will surely feature quite a price tag. Instead, it may support QuadSLI links, just as the 7950GX2.