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NVIDIA Gives Details On New GeForce 6
An anonymous reader writes "According to Firingsquad, NVIDIA will be announcing a new GeForce 6 card for the mainstream market at Quakecon this week. Like GeForce 6800, this new card will support shader model 3.0 and SLI (on PCI Express cards), so you can connect two $199 cards together for double the performance. NVIDIA will also be producing AGP versions of this card as well."
A beowolf cluster of video cards...??? Oh wait...
*Ducks.
I can't wait for the GeForce 27, it's going to be sooo much better. :-)
Seriously, can't they figure out a new name already?
This is nice and all, but it's kind of ridiculous to only be able to link two video cards together. What of one of them dies? Then you're back to single speed performance until you can get a replacement. I would much rather get a RAIVC-5 array of, say, five to ten video cards. Then if any one dies, no big deal; the others can handle the load. And does anyone know if these new NVidia cards will be hot-swappable?
My first NVidia card was a GeForce 256, but then I upgraded to a GeForce 2. Later I bought a GeForce 4MX card which was actually slower than the GeForce 2 in my older system. Lately I've upgraded to a GeForce FX 5600... now a GeForce 6800 is the best, but they want me to buy a GeForce 6? I can't keep up with this shit. So my $250 GeForce FX 5600 card that I bought last year is no longer any good? It runs Battlefield 1942 alright, but now they're saying it's not good enough for Doom 3 which I just bought but haven't installed yet. Ugh. I suppose my Athlon XP 2400+ I built last year is now too slow as well?
...when you see the phrase "connect two $199 cards together" and say to yourself "Hey, that's a good value!".
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
so you can connect two $199 cards together for double the performance.
Much like you can duct-tape two cars together for double the performance (but certainly not double the speed).
You need two fo them? I was under the impression that you'd be fine with one and two was just double the fun...
Moe: "And that's how, with a few minor adjustments, you can turn a regular gun into five guns." [applause]
Read Pynchon.
I just wish they would give some real, across the board benchmarks. I want to know if it is going to give me enough additional FPS for nethack to make it worth the purchase? Would I have to get some exotic motherboard combo to make that happen?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I was hosting a LAN party at my place about a year or so ago. One of my coworkers showed up with his computer and another 512MB DIMM that he planned on installing before we got started.
We balked. There's an unspoken rule that no hardware changes during the LAN unless necessary. Murphy's law simply looms too large. He ignored it.
The case was a smaller mid-tower that he uses for LANs, and with a couple of hard drives and the associated cabling it gets pretty tight. As he's sliding the RAM into place, we hear a "plink." Shit. The RAM's in place, so he steps back to survey the situation. There's a capacitor sitting on the floor of the case. "Um, maybe it's one of those capacitors that's, you know, for show..." The computer throws a video error at post.
We pull the card. Murphy's law has struck; it's a GeForce 5800 Ultra (the old dustbuster model), and a cap has sheared right off the card. I don't have a soldering iron in my apartment, so the coworker is prepaing for an evening of staring over shoulders. That's when we break out the electrical tape. We give the card a good hard wrap with the tape to hold the cap in place, and...
It works spedtacularly. No crashs, no video glitches, no problem. In fact, it works for another month while he waits for the 5900 Ultra to release before exchanging the card. It led us to praise NVidia for the Unified ELectrical TApe architecture (ELTA), which we theorized could provided bootleg performance maintenance across the entire NVidia line, from the TNT2 up.
Replies from a website where people want more options in Operating Systems, but they bitch about more options from hardware, just makes me wonder if people just want to bitch.
"In a few days we're going to turn up the heat another notch."
;)
Translation: my computer's electricity bill and my winter heating bill just became synonymous.
throw in a couple of 3 ft black candles. And you know, a baby goat.