Heck, I would almost buy it for the paint job.
And not only is it dual core, it's overclocked to boot.

http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_quadsli.html

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I saw the CES news today too. Nvidia is certainly dominating the multi-gpu market. Too bad there isnt much going into getting non-graphics apps running on GPUs. If you have money coming out your ass then sure, get one, but you wont find me getting any Dell product. If I wanted a PC with a pretty paintjob id get a Falcon NW.

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omg, just get an ATI Radion X1600 and you'll probably be able to play every single game until uh... 2010 ? on high settings....

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Imagine tearing through today's most advanced PC games with an unheard of 41 gigapixels per second of raw graphics performance, 5.2 teraflops of compute power, 96 pixel pipes, and an astounding 2 GB of on-board graphics memory. Nothing can stop you when you have this kind of hardware on your side.

My wallet can. I need to buy 3 of those cards? Yeah, right. Plus a special motherboard. Or go to Dell? Yikes!

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I myself just wish they would come out with a good general crunching board. That would simulate or be a standard CPU. That way little or no custom software would be needed. The trickery to get it to work be handle by the OS not the APPs. It would plug into a AGP or a PCI port. Plugging the into a PCI port would give most people the ability to run 3 to 5 of the cards.
Many people will think of the PCI port as a bottleneck for a card like this. They tend to think of this type of card as a video cards. With the heavy demands that a V card places on it's port. Were as a card like this running Seti will have very few and small I/Os. Making any slowdown by the PCI port all but meaningless.
The card could be made from parts now in production. It would use much less power then a other PC. Less space. It COULD cost a lot less then a other full system. <- But don't bet on it.
Winblows XP pro would need !!! NO !!! upgrading. Hell with just a little help 98 will do just fine.
The Mother box would be little more then a server for the boards.
This is not the first time a card like this would be made. But they had some real drawback and may have been before there time
I say the time is right so were is my board.

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I myself just wish they would come out with a good general crunching board. That would simulate or be a standard CPU.

They're available, just expensive - for example: (link)

I myself just wish they would come out with a good general crunching board. That would simulate or be a standard CPU.

They're available, just expensive - for example: (link)

ok.. please forgive my ignorance on this subject, but what would be a typical setup for using this type of board?

would someone buy an "off the shelf" motherboard, and then fill the PCI slots with these boards? If this is the case, then would this then be bascially 3 or 4 or 5 computers in one? or am I just way off base?

Thanks for the info.

Jim

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I myself just wish they would come out with a good general crunching board. That would simulate or be a standard CPU.

They're available, just expensive - for example: (link)

ok.. please forgive my ignorance on this subject, but what would be a typical setup for using this type of board?

They're normally used with a "passive backplane" motherboard, i.e., one without its own main CPU, that handles power distribution and (sometimes) storage and I/O control. They're normally installed in rackmount cases for industrial use, and there are a variety of different configurations - often the passive backplane is "segmented", and one PC card is used on each segment, with one or two extra slots available per PC card. In some cases, each master plug-in card is actually a complete PC, with its own CPU, memory, video, I/O, and often even storage installed, with no additional peripherals necessary. There may be versions that would install on a standard motherboard, but I'm not aware of them. Down side is that since it's an adaptation of current technology, the CPUs available generally lag current state of the art by a year or so.

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.

They're normally used with a "passive backplane" motherboard, i.e., one without its own main CPU, that handles power distribution and (sometimes) storage and I/O control. They're normally installed in rackmount cases for industrial use, and there are a variety of different configurations - often the passive backplane is "segmented", and one PC card is used on each segment, with one or two extra slots available per PC card. In some cases, each master plug-in card is actually a complete PC, with its own CPU, memory, video, I/O, and often even storage installed, with no additional peripherals necessary. There may be versions that would install on a standard motherboard, but I'm not aware of them. Down side is that since it's an adaptation of current technology, the CPUs available generally lag current state of the art by a year or so.

I looked all through the link that you provided earlier, but saw no price list. What would a typical backplane mobo and a typical "single board computer" cost separately? The application that I have in mind, I wouldn't need but one hard drive on a server and the rest of the computers would be booted to linux over lan. So, sound is an unneeded option. video would rarely, if ever, be needed.

I think I'll do some more searching to see if I can find any more information.

Thanks. :)

Jim

**edit**
I found one website. I spec'ed out a 3.2GHz, with 2 Gig mem, no flash mem and no OS. Their website quoted a price of $1,700 for the single board computer. OUCH

maybe this isn't the way to save money.

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I myself just wish they would come out with a good general crunching board. That would simulate or be a standard CPU.

They're available, just expensive

I don't see why it couldn't be done; fifteen years or so ago, I had a 486 Windows "computer on a board" that sat inside my Macintosh. Instead of running Windows in emulation, I could toggle a software switch and the PC board would take over, running Windows at "full speed" (for a 486...) while the Mac stuff was still running in the background.

The board had a CPU and RAM, shared the Mac's power supply, hard drive, network, video, keyboard, mouse... and cost less than a comparable 486 PC. The ones in the link try to do "everything" - have their own SATA controller, VGA output, Ethernet, etc., which is way overkill for what is wanted here.

Yes, the OS running on the motherboard PC would have to be modified (or a background app run) to handle communications, and hard drive access will definitely be slower, and video _very_ limited... but I see no reason why such boards couldn't be built using "mobile" processors (no room for desktop-style heat sinks if you're going to have more than one) for Linux, at a very reasonable price.

At one time there was even an 8080 plug in board for the Apple IIe. But by the time they got it out you could buy a 286 pc for about the same money.

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Kind of slow by today's standards but still...5 P3 SBC
They take P3s up to 800MHz.

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