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The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 Series
An anonymous reader writes "HardOCP has posted their evaluation of the new GeForce 7900 technology. They fully cover widescreen gaming this time around too. 'NVIDIA has worked hard to try and produce a more powerful, albeit power-efficient GPU in the 7900 GTX and GT, and they've succeeded. They run cooler; are smaller, have less transistors, and they don't make you stuff cotton in your ears. The 7900 GTX and GT are just more efficient while being lightning fast.'"
Please read the article. The 7900 is an actual step forwards from the 7800. In this article, Nvidia delivers.
I'm interested to see what ATI is going to do. I'm not a fanboy of either manufacturer, but the 7800GT/GTX and the GS series have been laying into ATI hard, and they still havn't released a card that matches the 7800 series yet. I'd like to see something comparable, just so the prices are driven down a little on these higher-end cards.
http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=listarticles&secid=13
7
i dias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=271
http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/326/
http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=213
http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/9529
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nv
To combat the new GeForce 7600 GT and GeForce 7900 GT, ATI just launched the new Radeon X1800 GTO. The only review I can find so far is at Hot Hardware.
You are looking for something like GPUbench http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/gpubench/ , which contains bandwidth test amongst other things.
,
In English, the word you use depends on whether the thing you are describing is countable or uncountable. If English isn't your first language, that is the best way to think about it. Native speakers, of course, don't stop to think about it (and often get it wrong, for that matter :-) )
Some examples:
Countable:
A cow
"I have three cows"
You can see individual cows; you can't divide a single cow into other cows.
Uncountable:
Water is uncountable*
You don't say "I have waters" (unless you are being strangely poetic)
instead, you say "I have some water."
If you divide up some water, each piece is still just "water".
How does this affect language?
"I have many cows, and I have much water."
"I have few cows. I have little water."
"I have fewer cows than Michael. I have less water than Michael"
Hope that helps.
*Water itself is uncountable, but you can count the quantities it is in.
"I much water" vs. "I have many litres of water"
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Namely, the Quadro. The GeForce series are their gamer cards. That's their target market, well at least with the higher end ones. Hence, they send them to gamer sites and they get reviewed for gamers. nVidia's professional line of cards are the Quadros. They are the same chips as the GeForces, but use different drivers, certified for pro apps, and have features available not found on consumer cards like HDSDI output.
Now if you feel like saving money by getting the gamer card instead of the pro one, I don't have a problem with that, however don't get angry that everyone else taks about it and reviews it as though it were a gamer card since, in fact, it is. If you want a card taht's treated like a pro card, look at a Quadro.
It says the price is $449 for a 7800 GT.. but thats off by some 150 dollars... newegg has these cards priced at $285 to $350!
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
Maybe from the benchmarks on all the sites? Or maybe from the fact that it has the same number of vertex/pixel shaders, and higher core/memory clocks? Did you even read any of the reviews?
that in itself is a touchy subject - the common designations nVidia gives are
Ultra and GT - better than the standard card
LE, GS - low end/discount version (GS is sometimes better, depending on age of the original card) of the original card.
x extension (gtx, fx) was for a while PCI-X, but they've since dropped it.
you may also see TC, which stands for Turbo Cache. You'll find that on low end cards.
You will sometimes see GS cards that are more expensive than GT cards, but I've never seen a GS card that is better than a GT card, so I suspect that's a volume issue (pricewatch has some 7800GTs that are cheaper than GS's). It may be onboard memory, but I doubt it. The GTs are usually the same card as the GS, however (so you may be able to unlock the features nVidia shuts off).
Generally, the bigger the number and the more letters it has the better it is (GT, GS, and anything with an X or the word ULTRA in it are the best). It gets confusing because sometimes the high-end of one generation are better than the low-end of a newer generation. Basically if you just compare the clock speeds between them higher is almost always going to be better. If the choice is between a 256mb card with a lower speed vs. a 128mb card with a higher speed it's a safe bet to go with the higher speed. If you wanted to stick with AGP a 6800GS or a 6600GT is about the best you can get, I think there is going to be a 7600 that runs on AGP but that's probably the end of the line for AGP right there. Personally I'm going to buy a 6600GT soon (~$140) and wait another year or two before I switch over to PCI-E - by then I should be able to afford a 7800GS or whatever the hell is under $150 by then, they all fall down to the sub-$200 price range eventually.
On the PC version all you need to do is rename all those movie files in the correct directory, another reason I will never own a console. (Mods being the main reason)
Just because you THINK there is some purpose in Nvidia's naming scheme doesn't mean there actually IS any purpose.
Take the GeForce 6 series, for example:
Within the first six months of release, Nvidia had laid-out a very simple set of cards (in performance order):
6800 Ultra
6800 GT
6800
6600 GT
6600
6200
6200 TC
Now, they had this great arrangement of performance levels, where all the cards within a lower numbered range were slower than the cards in the next higher numbered range. but like any company they had to deal with inefficiencies in their production processes, and try to keep their brands fresh. Thus, many cards were added to fit small but profitible niche or OEM markets.
So, by the end of 2005, you had a whole mess of cards. Some of them were added to compete with ATI, others were added to deal with yields (and had disabled pipes), while still others were introduced to replace a product that was "old" with something easier to make.
The mapping, in true performance, of all GeForce 6 chips, end of 2005:
6800 Ultra
6800 GT
6800 GS (Added as a reduced-cost replacement to 6800 GT)
6800 GTO (Added in response to ATI's x800 GTO)
6800
6600 GT
6800 XT
6800 LE
6600 DDR2
6600
6500
6600 LE
6200
6200 TC
See how confusing that became? It's just a natural progression, and ATI does the same thing. The 7 series is already beginning to see the effects of the naming scheme madness. Once Nvidia transitions fully over to the 7 series, expect the same product fragmentation to occur.
Oh, and I must correct you on this:
x extension (gtx, fx) was for a while PCI-X, but they've since dropped it.
Do you mean PCIe?
Incorrect. The FX series (GeForce 5) was entirely AGP. Board makers later released versions of the FX series with PCI-e bridge chips so they could dump their stock as "PCIe" cards.
The 7800 GTX is the only card EVER MADE by Nvidia to wear the "GTX" monkier. The 7800 GTX is PCIe, but so is the 7800 GT...see the problem with your assertion?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
If you need a single-slot cooler (i.e. doesn't overlap the adjacent pci slot) then about your only choice with the grunt for HDTV is the nvidia 6600 passive (i.e. fanless); it comes as both AGP and PCI-E versions from club, xfx or gigabyte. With a reasonable specc'd CPU and a scythe ninja cooler, and of course a quiet or passively cooled PSU and a mechanically decoupled hard-drive, you should be able to build a PC that is only cooled by a single low-speed 120mm fan - effectively silent (I can't hear mine from more than a couple of feet away, and most of the noise is the hard-drives). If you want to cut the noise even further, use a 2.5" laptop hard-drive.
:)
If your HTPC case is big enough to allow a dual-slot cooler for the GPU, you can buy pre-fitted or post-fit a zalman vf700-cu or arctic cooler to pretty much any high-spec GPU, that will keep it cool and run really quiet - the zalman on my 7800gt in my gaming rig is on a fan-controller, at 50%, and is quieter than either the CPU fan or the PSU fan - and both of them are ultra-quiet.
For air-cooling kit, I'd recommend silentpcreview.com for starters, they have some great reviews on what 'quiet' kit is actually quiet.
Your final option, if you have the money, is water cooling. You can cool the entire system with one or two low-speed 120mm fans and a big radiator, and still have ninja specs for the PC, if you wanted a dual-purpose gaming and DVR rig.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by HDVD's - blueray and HD-DVD aren't out yet, and either way, the copy-restrictions will stop you ripping them for now. The real advantage of HTPC's with say, mythtv, is fitting multiple TV tuners, whatever drive-sizes you like, and being able to play music and DVD rips off the hard-drive. With the flexibility comes the problems of retro-fitting PC hardware to run passively. If you want small passive kit that 'just works', I strongly recommend a Tivo (or similar prebuilt kit) and decent DVD player, as mythtv or windows MCE definitely needs a little sweat to get working fully.
BTW - I just invested in a 5.1 speaker setup, and WOW is it better than 2 speakers. I know you didn't ask, but I had to tell someone
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
You got it.
As of March 2006 here are your choices (using the newest technology available in each category, and cards are ranged in order of typical performance in their category):
Budget (ie: you really shouldn't spend this little):
GeForce 6200 256MB ($49)
Radeon x300 256MB ($55)
Upper budget (cards that will actually play new games):
Radeon x1300 Pro 256MB ($95)
GeForce 6600 256MB ($85)
Lower-midrange gamer:
GeForce 6600 GT 128MB ($120)
Radeon x1600 Pro 256MB ($125)
Upper-midrange gamer:
GeForce 6800 GS 256MB ($185)
Radeon x1600 XT 256MB ($200)
The 7600 GT 256MB card should be in this price range,
and should have slightly better performance than the 6800 GS.
Lower-hardcore gamer:
Radeon x1800 XL ($350)
GeForce 7800 GT ($285)
The 7900 GT should be in this price range,
and if it is it will be the fastest card under $300
Upper-hardcore gamer:
Radeon x1900 XT 512MB ($496)
Radeon x1800 XT 512MB ($479)
GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB ($415)
The 7900 GTX should be in this price range
Crazy gamer:
Radeon x1900 XTX 512MB ($575)
ATI has responded to the ultra-low prices of the 7900 series by bringing down prices across the board, something they should have done for a long time. Already in only 6 months of life, ATI has cut $100 or more off their upper-midrange (x1600 XT) and lower-hardcore (x1800 XL) parts, just scambling to keep up with Nvidia.
It might take a few weeks to filter through the channel, but those price cuts would make ATI a whole lot more competitive on the mid to high-end.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
It was more of a subbtle attempt at a sarcasm http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/ 17/1353223
after nvidia and ati have been advertising "HDCP compliant" hardware which may not be the case because the standards for HDCP suddenly changed overnight