Asus Trinity

Asus Trinity
Three GPUs, One PCB

Asus has been well known over the years as being a leading ODM for many top-tier computer manufacturers, from motherboards and graphics cards to notebooks and other types of SFF systems. Although motherboards and graphics cards have historically ben an Asus core competency, Asus is also well known for its ability to execute on new, leading-edge design and architectures that push the envelope beyond the standard reference design from OEMs such as Nvidia, AMd, and Intel. Often, with its significantin-house engineering resources, Asus is also the first to market some new innovation or design twist in graphics or motherboard.
Though multi-GPU graphics cards are nothing new, reference designs that employ more than one GPU on a single board are few and far between. You can probably count on one hand the number of procuts like Nvidia's dual-GPU-based GeForce 9800 GX2 or AMd's Radeon HD 4870 X2. However, as of late, AMD specially has been rather vocal about the future of graphics moving away from the single, billions-of-transistors, monster GPU to smaller multi-GPU designs that allow higher efficiencies at the wafer manufacturing level.
As such, it was no surprise when Asus contacted us regarding a wild new 3D graphic s product that was intended to be nothing more than a "Hey, look what we can do" proof of concept. Asus developed a prototype graphics card code-named Trinity that was built with not just two GPUs on board, but a trio of AMd ATI Radeon HD 3850 GPUs in CrossFireX on a single card. As you can imagine, we were pretty fired up to get our hands on this thing for a closer look, although we should underscore again that this card will never ship as a retail product and is more of a test vehicle than anything else.
The Asus Trinity is a single-card design that extends well beyond the standard ATX motherboard depth and consumes two slots in term of real estate in the card slot area. What you see on the top and back sides of the card are actually MXM (Mobile PCI-E Module) graphics modules slots hosting three horizontally mounted mobile GPU graphics modules. Some of you may be thinking Nvidia develped the MXM mobile graphics form factor and interface standard for its own use, but recall that ATI also decided to follow it for some of its mobile offerings, as well; it really isn't anything more innovative than bringing out PCI-E links on simple card edge "gold fingers" design.
If you look closely, sandwiched between the daughter card modules and the main PCB are traditional AMD ATI CrossFire ribbon cables. Also although we weren't daring enough to actually pull this one-of-a-kind prototype apart to confirm this, there must be a PCI-E switch under the Trinity's hood, allowing a single x 16 PEG slot link to be divided up amongst the three Radeon HD 3850 GPUs.
Finally, you'll also notice the Trinity has some exotic cooling going on, with a custom heatpipe and heatsink design that connects to liquid-cooling hoses. In fact, Asus shipped us Trinity along with a Thermaltake Bigwater 760i liquid-cooling kit. There's no question that this graphics card is way out there, in terms of both its board design and its base multi-GPU architecture.
Now obviously, a three-way CrossFireX configuration on a single board has never been done. In addition, efficient GPU performance scaling, especially in certain game engines, can be hit or miss. We begged Asus to let us run a few numbers on Trinity. For starters, we pulled down 16888 3DMarks in 3DMark06 and were then greeted by 50.1fps in Company of Heroes at 1,680 x 1,050 with 4X antialiasing. And believe it or not, it could play Crysis at 1,680 x 1,050 with medium image quality, clocking in 42.84fps. That's not bad for a prototype card with prototype drivers.
The Asus Trinity was definitely a fun diversion from the norm and possibly a glimpse of things to come for the future of multi-GPU graphics.

by Dave Altavilla

source: Computer Power User October 2008.
www.asus.com.tw