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NVIDIA 790i Chipset and GeForce 9800 GX2 Launched
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA has launched their next generation desktop chipsets for the Intel
platform today, now known as the nForce 790i and 750i SLI families, along with a new high-end graphics card dubbed the GeForce 9800 GX2. The new motherboard chipset offering brings support for DDR3 to the NVIDIA platform for Intel's Core 2 processors with 1600MHz Front Side Bus support, as well as Gen2 PCI Express for multi-GPU graphics and NVIDIA's new ESA health monitoring/control functions. Performance with the new platform looks fairly impressive in both
workstation and gaming scenarios."
The last time I bought a high-end nVidia chipset (the 680i), the reference design came with an "optional" chipset fan, to be used when overclocking memory. Without the fan, and without overclocking memory, the system would die within 15 minutes of memtest86. With the fan, you get a noisy whine all the time, also because the fan can only be operated at 50% speed, not less. (At 100%, the fan is ridiculously loud.)
Just sharing my experiences; don't listen to me if you don't want to. Other than the noise issue, the thing is very stable even with a slight CPU+memory overclock.
The one for Windows doesn't even work correctly. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Are you looking at the same benchmarks I am?
Go back and look at them again, 9800GX2 trounces the 8800GT as soon as you turn the settings up. It is very comparable to the SLI 8800 GTS 512mb which is 2 8800 GTS cards put together. That will cost you more to do then buying this card will.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
A $1000? Do you shop exclusively at Alienware? Assuming you can reuse your HDD, Optical Drive, Case, Power Supply (might be iffy depending on what you currently have), Monitor, Keyboard, and Mouse, and any other PCI cards you might already have; you can build a very decent Core2Duo system for $500. You won't be using a 790i or a 9800GX2, but there's no way you should be hitting $1000 if you make sane price/performance tradeoffs.
I mean you're replacing the Motherboard (~$100), CPU (~$100), Memory (~$100), and Graphics card ($200). Those numbers are very rough too, you could play around quite a bit with them (Get a $175 graphics card to upgrade the CPU for example). Your system won't be a slouch either. It'll be something like a Core2Duo E4500, 2GB Memory, a motherboard with built-in ethernet, sound (unless you already have a sound card), firewire, etc... a Geforce 9600 and all of the peripherals you already have.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's simple, the number is XYY0, with X = series number (manufacturer specific), YY = performance number (within series, higher=better).
ATI had a 9xxx series years ago (2002), because they didn't start with a "Radeon 1", instead it was the 7000 to match Direct-X 7.0. nVidia started with the "GeForce", followed by 2, then 3, then changed to the standard "thousands" naming with the GeForce 4000 series, also released in 2002.
nVidia has overlapped ATI's graphics card numbers since the GeForce 7000 series a couple of years ago, but few people noticed because ATI's 7000 cards weren't that memorable. However pretty much everyone who has been building PCs for more than 6 years will still remember the ATI 9800, and how it beat nVidia's "GeForce FX" 5800 so soundly that they had to release a revised version called the 5900, and then ANOTHER revised version called the 5950 in an attempt to beat it.
I don't yet see a need to get a GeForce 9800, I haven't found any games that my GeForce 8800 GTS r1 (320MB) can't run perfectly fine on high settings. Let me know if one turns up.