Multi GPU video cards

Now I know that there have been a few dual GPU cards around, but why is it that they have not yet become mainstream in the consumer market, even for high end cards, seeing that multi core CPUs have been common for over 5 years? Is it due to the excessive heat output or power consumption of these cards?

SMOKEU said:

Now I know that there have been a few dual GPU cards around, but why is it that they have not yet become mainstream in the consumer market, even for high end cards, seeing that multi core CPUs have been common for over 5 years? Is it due to the excessive heat output or power consumption of these cards?

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Probably a bit of both...that and cost. Not to mention the size and form factor they have to sqeeze it into. Think about it, a modern video card is RAM/CPU/Mobo all in one. That and I suspect the architecture of a GPU...stream processors and whatnot doesn't lend it's self as easily to multi core tech.

In addition to this...you have to really be overclocking any modern CPU to get the most of out of a top end card. I'm currently running two 480 GTXs (so you can pretend thats a dual core if you would like). Even with my 920 at almost 5ghz...all 4 cores, 8 threads, I cannot begin to be bottlenecked by the cards. They could take 2 of my CPUs pushing that hard.