ASUS Trinity Tri-GPU Graphics Prototype Benched

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HotHardware got a little hands on time with that ASUS Trinity Tri-GPU prototype and they ran it through a handful of benchmarks. How well does a video card with triple GPUs actually perform? Probably not as good as you’d expect, hit the link for all the details.

In reality, this quick and dirty triple-GPU showcase from Asus probably suffers more from lack of driver optimization than anything else; that and probably a shortage of PCI Express bandwidth and latency over the on-board switch. Regardless, it's interesting to see this implementation come together and we wonder about the practicality of it moving forward.
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Its based on the 3850 so is not gonna perform well anyway.
 
why would even asus waste their time and money on something like this.....
 
the same reason that 3dfx wasted their time on the voodoo 5 6000 or wtf that 4 GPU beast was. it's very interesting to look at, but I can't figure out why they would use MXM module GPU's and composite all the processing power into a desktop solution. I would have to imagine th cost for the mother card would be at least $200 in mass production levels, and the MXM modules are stupid expensive.

Note: This comes from someone that has prices an additional 8800M GTX 512 SLI kit for my laptop. It's $700 for the card, and it's roughly on par with the new 8800 GT/GTS line. To fully populate a mother card like ASUS designed with MXM GPUs would probably put the TCO around $1700...definately not worth it, IMO. You could get a CrossfireX board and the 3x 3850's + new PSU to power it al for less than half of that. The only reason to do this is CrossfireX in a mATX build or some other environment where you are limited to 1x PCI-E x16 slot.

It's pretty to look at...but I can't answer the question that wveryone's gonna ask...."why?"
 
mjz_5 said:
why would even asus waste their time and money on something like this.....
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Pop the 3850 mxm cards out and replace them with 4800 series mobile chips when they are released. It would effectively allow them to design the board and just upgrade it as new mobile chips are released.

Or they just did it to prove it could be done...
 
must have some bored engineers, so its a "look what i can do" kinda thing, its cool technically speaking but it has no real use.
 
This is the wrong website to ask "why?"...

HardOCP has always been more of a "why not?" kind of place. :)

I think it's pretty cool. I love when companies are willing to take the time to create something new, even if it isn't that practical. A lot can be learned with this type of experimentation.
 
Love-Man said:
This is the wrong website to ask "why?"...

HardOCP has always been more of a "why not?" kind of place. :)

I think it's pretty cool. I love when companies are willing to take the time to create something new, even if it isn't that practical. A lot can be learned with this type of experimentation.
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understandable, but when i could by a faster 4870 for less,... why not?

:)
 
I think you guy are wrong here, this is proof of concept product, nothing else. And a lot of time projects like these allow engineers to test idea and learn things that can be taken to other places. they have been working on this for a while, though this is the first I have seen it benched. and the 3580 would be easy to work with and the low performance of the GPU would not change the results of the experiment.

The fact is that they can do it and for some special applications it might even be worth while. imagine doing this with a 4850 instead. (if you can do this with 3850 you can do this with a 4850). Put 4 of these in a quadfire capable board. You will be able to do some serous folding, or other apps. As I recall some one has done something similar to this with the 9800GX2
 
Cool idea, but they would need to make it worth buying (i.e. ditch the 3850 chips for something better).
 
i seen pics of this card a while back,cannot recall exactly when....

cool concept,but useless.....this thing could be insane with 4850 cores....
 
mac292 said:
i seen pics of this card a while back,cannot recall exactly when....

cool concept,but useless.....this thing could be insane with 4850 cores....
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There was another version posted on here, I think.
I like the concept for one main reason: It provides a base from where the video card can be upgraded from within. The rationale behind trying a card like this could probably be explained with trying something new with off the shelf parts. I have an ASUS laptop and it has an MXM video card in it. They probably had plenty of stock and considered making a 3 way card out of parts they ordered for laptops.

May not look pretty or work well right now, but it could lead to a cheaper way to build a card. Much easier, and cheaper, to build a 3 socketed MXM PCI Express card and drop in 3 MXM cards... Once the economy of scale kicks in, of course. I wouldn't be surprised if video cards ended up becoming more modular in the future.
 
this could possibly lead to a different form factor, instead of having the MXM slots on the inside and requiring you to open the case to upgrade they could simply have a flap or slot in the PC case and drop in the MXM module (assuming with a shell) into the slot for super easy upgrades.

there was some talk about this a few weeks ago somwhere. instead of needing to open the case and see scary computer guts just plug in a standard upgrade module. Think PCMCIA slots but for everything. CPU, RAM, HDD, GPU etc.
 
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