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Battle for the best GPU is good news for us

Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 10:20 am
by Death_Dealer[CotC]
ATI and Nvidia are battling to be the top GPU. The next GEN is here and we are are really benifiting. The next gen cards are from $350 to $550. If that is still too high grab a last gen card while the getting is good, the last GEN cards are only about 4 to 6 months old but can handle any game today with high settings. Last GEN was selling $350 to $750 for high end and was hardly in stock, but now the price will drop drastically for all last GEN cards, if you check the web these new cards are in stock and ready for sell by atleast 4 different manufactures. This was exciting news to me so I thought I would share it with everyone. We are talking about GPU's now pushing 650 - 700 MHz thats faster then my fisrt CompaQ Pesario's CPU.


http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ ... ch_mayhem/

Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 8:00 pm
by Baron[CotC]
heh my first computer was something like 16MHz with a turbo switch to boost it to 25... graphics cards have been beyond that for a loooong time -- hell sound cards are way beyond that lol

Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 11:35 pm
by Neophyte
Baron[CotC] wrote:heh my first computer was something like 16MHz with a turbo switch to boost it to 25... graphics cards have been beyond that for a loooong time -- hell sound cards are way beyond that lol
They still use CPU's like that for equipment in space travel. It's hard to make CPU's that can take the extreme heat, cold and radiation. Stuff around 25 Mhz seems to cut it!

I worry when Engineer's start to SLI their cards. I think it's a ready excuse to not push the limits of silicon. An Engineer can simply miss the performance mark with the reasoning that a customer can just buy 2 if they want more performance. I seem to recall 3DFX doing the same thing with the Voodoo cards back in the 90's. And better engineering at Nvidia killed that product.

Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 11:52 pm
by Baron[CotC]
well anandtech.com is showing benchmarks that put single ati x1900 cards ahead of the crossfire (SLI) dual setups -- im sticking to single-card machines :)

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 12:00 am
by Neophyte
Yea, that's odd Baron... SLI is supposed to be a free performance improvement for games. Plus I don't think you need to write your game for SLI like you have to write instructions for multi-core CPUs. I would think that drivers are to blame for that. Anand tends to get his cards reviewed before the drivers are fully optimized and before they go out to retail.

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:01 am
by Baron[CotC]
The other thing is that a lot of the SLI cards are dumbed down versions of the single-cards, and on a lot of the mobos the PCIX slots run at half speed when using two video cards.

I'm just not sold on it.

what I am sold on is 500Hz monitors http://www.benq.com/product/detail_FP93GX.cfm

lol

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:25 am
by Baron[CotC]
Hmm I take it back, just saw a recent anand article showing definate performance gains with ATI crossfire -- I gather there were big problems with crossfire when it was first released and I was poking my nose in an old article :roll:

Its still not enough gain to justify the price IMHO

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 8:43 am
by shawn
i still have my Voodoo II with the accelerator card. it dont play CS so good thought,upgraded it to a Gforce4. looks the same to me LOL.

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 8:50 am
by KrAzYdAvE
lol, I had a Voodoo 2 SLI setup at one point...
I still actually have both cards too, but they're just collecting dust and spiders at the bottom of a box...

I remember our first LAN party at PTW when everyone was jealous of Neo because he had a Voodoo! lol

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 9:11 am
by Death_Dealer[CotC]
I had like a vodoo 5 back in the day or something like that. The card had 4 processors I think maybe only two and the driver support sucked. 3DFX used to be on the cutting edge then PUFFFFFF!

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 9:14 am
by TooLBlue
I hope the older video cards (example: gforce 6800) see a drop in price to the dirt-cheap range because of the new 7900's release.

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 9:15 am
by Death_Dealer[CotC]
TooLBlue wrote:I hope the older video cards (example: gforce 6800) see a drop in price to the dirt-cheap range because of the new 7900's release.
I know at http://www.newegg.com you can get 6800 for $100 - $200.