Asus mocks your dual GPU card by putting 3 GPUs on one card.

Posted By: Steve McBarnes - 04:36:45 Tue, March 25, 2008

For clarity I want to begin by saying that this is a concept for now, and that Asus may or may not manufacturer and sell this card.

Nordic Hardware tells us that the card is called the ASUS EAH3850 Trinity. It features 3 3850 GPUs (RV670) on a dual slot form factor and 4 DL-DVI ports. Two of the GPUs are located on the back (or top) of the card and the third is located on the usual side. All three GPUs are cooled by heatsinks that are connected to a watercooled copper block by copper heatpipes. The watercooling is performed by a self contained unit that fits in two 5.25" drive bays.

If Asus can give customers a reason to buy this card instead of a single HD 3870 X2, I think we may actually see this for sale sometime this year. Do you guys think that a product like this will sell?

20 Comments

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 5:32:16 PM

spydag
guest

Nice try but imagine the cost(3 gpu water cooled).i don't think that it will be viable.As we have seen in the past the next generations models perfoms much better with one or two gpu,supports new features,they are cheaper(performance/cost ratio and you don't need so powerfull psu) and require less power,so there is a small window to sell these cards.the target group for these cards i think it is very small.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 6:34:15 PM

nick
guest

Someone at Asus woke up on the wrong side of bed. Too much power consumption and I bet the cost is sky high.

Mind you though just imagine a set-up with 2 or 3 of these cards. Its gotta kick some ar**

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 7:08:23 PM

aVaLaNcHe
guest

haha, i don't see many of these being available as the market for these will be VERY tiny

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 10:28:28 PM

Angelh
guest

3x3850 can beat a 2x3870 right? so that would be nice but anyways, the price shouldnt be friendly i think :(

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 10:45:14 PM

Headfoot
guest

Wow, this is really cool! 3850 uses GDDR3, so that should be cheaper than GDDR4. The water cooling should allow some pretty high clocks, probably reaching into the 3870X2 range. Im seeing this as beeing a 3870X2 with 3 GPU's and only very slight lowered clocks. Eitehr that or you could OC it easily yourself. I think this is a great idea!

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 12:37:22 AM

anonymous
guest

I would love to see this in Quad Crossfire. That would be nuts! It would suck the power but ey, Come on!;)

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 12:58:08 AM

GPU Expert
guest

Do you all guys think it's better to replace this 3 GPU per card with my 2 Radeon HD3870 X2, or contiunue using it??

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 9:36:42 AM

spydag
guest

i also want to add that it would be slower than 9800gx2.remember that 3870 x2 is slower.However i am wondering how much merory this card has, and how perfoms in 1920 X 1200.finally i believe that these kind of models sould be upgreadable in order to succed.if these gpus are sloted in the main card, imagine buying the main card with one sloted gpu and gradually buying the other two sloted gpu one by one depending your needs,without having problems if they are 3850 or 3870

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:45:23 AM

Radiator
Senior Member

Three GPUs on one PCB ? Riddiculous... anyway , it MIGHT sell , if it performs well and has a nice pricetag on it .

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 12:25:55 PM

Sunny
guest

I guess it doesn't seem that bad if all the 3 gpu's do a good job at working together. Doesn't have a crossfire connector though. The other bad thing is you have to waste 2 drive bays to house that cooling unit. I honestly never liked those little thermaltake water cooling units that would mean heat coming off your radiator would stay in your case.

What kinda power connectors does this thing have? I see the 8 pin but don't see anything else.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 12:31:00 PM

Sunny
guest

If you pay attention to the pics though they have the standard PCB like all graphics cards do. But then they have an offset pcb where all the gpu's are at. They are kinda sticking out a bit. As if all the gpu's have there own little pcb. I assume this is to conserve space.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 1:13:41 PM

mustangshawn1991
guest

this pisses me off, why do manufacturers f around with crap. they release a 3870 which i own and instead of making a cool top of the line card cooler they keep making r&d on crap noone will buy. i would sell my 9600gt and 3870 right now if they made a tripple core 3870 come on

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 9:43:57 PM

turbo
guest

wtf lies 9800gx2 ftw

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 10:04:57 PM

Ajax9000
guest

This uses MXM modules, so it isn't three GPUs on one PCB. In theory it could be upgraded, other than how damn hard it is to buy MXM modules.
(As an aside, I'd like to see a mini-ITX board with an MXM slot, so as to keep the PCI-e for other cards)
( ... or even two MXM slots -- mini-ITX SLI/CrossFire :-)

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:56:28 PM

-RK
Senior Member

OMGROFL SUXXOR 1337! OMG ROFL!!1!! PWND!!! /sarcasm

The card won't compete well with the 9800gx2 or 3870x2 without a very nice pricetag.

Can someone tell me why the internet angers me so much?

Thursday, March 27, 2008 12:15:16 AM

GPU Review
guest

Damn!!! Bought one of these and realise there's no crossfire connector....

Thursday, March 27, 2008 12:16:06 AM

wyz135
guest

Something that can compete with the 9800GX2, hope ATi made it official by having a Radeon HD3850 X3

Friday, March 28, 2008 12:47:43 PM

Flinchy
guest

hm. but what framebuffer size does it have?

if it's 3x256mb 3850's... i can seriously see it sucking something fierce, no matter how fast it was, it would HATE high res/AA

512's? yeah i can see that being good.

Friday, March 28, 2008 12:56:39 PM

-RK
Senior Member

Looks like they perform nicely in benchmarks...

Let's see some in-game benches.

The card seems to be targeted at people who don't have a crossfire MoBo and it does very nice for that.

Saturday, March 29, 2008 11:22:51 AM

nice bench
guest

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