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NVIDIA 790i Chipset and GeForce 9800 GX2 Launched

Posted by Zonk on from the don't-eat-these-chips-with-dip dept.

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."

13 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. New toys! by d3ac0n · · Score: 3, Funny

    And I still can't afford them. :(

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    1. Re:New toys! by Nichotin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You are still getting a lot of bang for the buck by going 8800GT or 8800GTS instead. 9800GX2 performs much better, but I mean, the price seriously does not justify it this time. Heck, even the 9600GT will give you decent gaming performance these days, and that is a card almost anyone can afford.

      --
      Dvorak on Doomtech
    2. Re:New toys! by jandrese · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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  2. Re:Zzzzzz! by pandrijeczko · · Score: 5, Funny
    Dear Slashdot Friends Thank you all for your wonderful support so far for my efforts in trying to get one of each Slashdot moderation type in a single day.

    So far today my posts have achieved several "+1 Insightfuls", two "-1 Offtopics", one "+1 Funny" and one "-1 Redundant".

    Keep them coming, we are almost there! This one alone must be worth a "-1 Troll"!

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  3. in financial news by Lord+Ender · · Score: 4, Interesting

    NVDA shares are down over 50% and are trading at 14 times earnings. Their balance sheet is beautiful, though. No debt on the books!

    http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=nvda

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    1. Re:in financial news by Crazyswedishguy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No debt is not always a good thing. Healthy debt (good interest rate) is an indication of a stable company with a growth strategy. Most large companies have debt, even if they have lots of liquid assets (cash) lying around. Debt is the (usually cheap) way to raise capital without diluting ownership, and capital is necessary for growth, especially for a company like Nvidia that most likely has a lot of R&D.

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  4. New cards are great and all... by pathological+liar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... but hey NVIDIA, when can we get purevideo support for Linux? I appreciate you folks fixing the black window bug and all, but having accelerated x264 would be incredible.

  5. As is the names of cards wasn't confusing enough.. by ZipR · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now Nvidia has taken the name of one of ATI's best and most memorable cards, the 9800. Is it intentional?

  6. NVidia chipset? I would think twice by Godji · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Wow by ShiNoKaze · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wow Core 2 processors with 1600MHz Front Side Bus!! AMD watch out!! Wait... nvmd.

  8. How about a new numbering schema? by Chordonblue · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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+...

    --
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    1. Re:How about a new numbering schema? by TheThiefMaster · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  9. Sheesh, this took them a year and a half? by Marton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.