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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."
I don't know about you guys, but wasn't it AMD not too long ago who released a '9600/9800'? I think it might be time to come up with a new numbering schema - maybe a whole new marketing plan. It reminds me of how pinball manufacturers jacked up scores to make their pinballs look more impressive. They started out with targets and bumpers worth 1-5 points, and towards the end, a ball would hit a mumber and BOOM! 10,000 points was scored. Stupid.
Please don't tell me we're going to have the Nvidia 10,000 or the AMD/ATI 1,000,000+...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Seriously - the "new graphics card" is a joke. It's two 8800 GTx cards in SLI. There are two old G92 processors, on two separate PCBs, with a leafblower holding them together. I guess if you want SLI with the minimum amount of fuss, this is the way to go - but come on. Where is the new silicon?
Same goes for the 790i. It's neat that it can do DDR3 (ho-hum) or that it can run 1600Mhz FSB CPUs (which you'd expect from a recent chipset). Let's face it - it's a very minor improvement over the 780i which itself did little to improve upon the 680i.
Props to Asus for the nice motherboard - it's nice to see such an innovative northbridge/southbridge cooling solution. Other than that, I don't think there's much to see here.
I don't mean to be a party-pooper but article sounds like the author got overexcited once or twice during the writing process. I just don't get what the enthusiasm is all about.
In geektopia Slashdot, kissing distance is infinity!
which is totally what she said
Seriously, any game that requires that much shit to be playable isn't advanced, it's poorly fucking programmed.
Go back 20 years when home computers were fixed boxes with minimal upgrade potential & limited memory/CPU power, truly smart programmers were doing things on those machines that weren't thought possible in order to get a bit more power for a demo or game on Commodore Amigas and C64s, Atari STs, etc. etc. because they didn't have the option of GPU upgrades and all that good stuff that they do now.
Yep, I sound like an old git but in those days the same guy that had an innovative idea for a new game probably also did most or all of the programming of it. That meant innovation in games like Elite, Doom and many others.
Nowadays, it just about commercial interest and assuming that the games player is going to make their machine meet the requirements of the game, even though it's just another linear rehash of an FPS or a slightly prettier sports game.
Personally, they can stick almost all of their new games where the sun don't shine because £35 for 8 hours of playing a linear rehash ain't worth the money - the Half-Life and Galactic Civilisations series are more than adequate to fill my tastes for modern games, and the mods and engine improvements for the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem 3 still make those older games great fun to play.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.