Any system they do build though is unlikely to be a hardcore as this system on show at the Boston stand. Boston are distributors for Supermicro, among others.

SLi actually first appeared on Intel’s ‘Tumwater’ chipset for Xeon processors. As this is a workstation processor it’s normally paired with professional graphics cards such as nVidia’s Quadro range. However, it’s taken till now for nVidia to nail down SLi for Quadro. It has now though and Boston was showcasing it in this full-on system.



It consists of a pair of dual Xeon 3.6Ghz processors running in a Supermicro X6DAL-G2 motherboard with dual x16 PCI Express slots. These are filled with a pair of Quadro FX3400 cards. The system has 4GB of DDR2 RAM, and six hard disks – two striped for performance and four in RAID 5 configuration for data security. This is vital so professional users can avoid dataloss when working on expensive, critical projects. Oh, and it has a DVD Burner too.

This little lot will set you back in the region of £5,000 - without a display.

That’s all from me for now, but strap in, there’s lots more on the way.