***Official*** NV40 Benches (Updated as they go live) ANANDTECH Review Added

[SithSolo1]

Originally posted by: ectx
I own stocks of both companies. What should I do w/o digesting all the information?

Eh, I wanted to buy ATi shares back when they were under $4 because I knew they would go up but alas I was short on funds.

 

[Regs]

Have you ever played a poker game in which the man who was bluffing showed first?

But then again, when I play poker, I would like the others to show their hands first. Because If I knew if they stayed in the hand for that long they must have something good, but not good enough for the hand I'm about to show them. They never saw it coming.

If you bet big to early you'll give away your hand.

Play the cards right, you end up with a lot of suckers. The funny thing is, both Nvidia and ATI seem to be playing the same exact way with a even hand.

 

[Draco]

Originally posted by: Regs
Have you ever played a poker game in which the man who was bluffing showed first?

But then again, when I play poker, I would like the others to show their hands first. Because If I knew if they stayed in the hand for that long they must have something good, but not good enough for the hand I'm about to show them. They never saw it coming.

If you bet big to early you'll give away your hand.

Play the cards right, you end up with a lot of suckers. The funny thing is, both Nvidia and ATI seem to be playing the same exact way with a even hand.

so, uh what are you trying to say? *me stupid*

 

[RussianSensation]

Hey Chad what are you worried about? you already have a 480 watt power supply. And you have a decent videocard and those high 499 prices wont stay long. the cards drop $100 within the first 2 months of introduction it always happened and always will. So by the end of the summer you can bet that they will hover around $300-380 for 6800 non-ultra, 6800 ultra respectively.

I understand where you are coming from, but remember there are ppl who will agree with you and who will disagree with you. For someone 500 isnt a lot but for me and you it is. If you are looking from bang for the buck, 6800non-ultra doesnt offer the best but not the worst either. Consider how much a 9800xt costs right now and 6800ultra wipes the floor with it. Of course you can make an argument that an amazing motherboard, cpu and 1 gig of ram cost as much as this whole videocard alone making it a better investment for some as it is basically the whole system. For those who want to pay less to get the most, the new generation cards are not the best choice, but they were never designed to at those ppl. NV and ATI will later introduce lower grade cards for those who want reasonable performance <$300. For someone who wants the best in performance $499 is justified just like those same ppl who before went out and bout a 5950U or 9800xt that both offered 15% performance tops while costing $200+ more than 5900xt and 9800Pro respectively. It will take some time for us to find the next 4200 or 5900xt price/performance ratio, but don't you worry it will come.

Still 6800ultra offers up to 2x the performance of a 5900U and 9800Pro and costs about 2x more. So technically speaking you get what you pay for. Now do you need to pay $500 to run UT2004 at 1600x1200 4AA/16AF enabled at 77.84 frames per second and be able to run Halo, Splinter Cell and Far Cry with all bells and whistles? That is a personal preference. Some ppl will be content playing 1024x768 0AA/0AF, some ppl just care about 1600x1200 0AA/0AF, and others want the most they can get. For last group of people this card has lived up to the expecations I believe. I mean 2x the performance in roughly 2 years is about how fast CPUs evolve as well so it's not far off. How come you are not dissapoined going from p4 1.6 to your 3.2ghz p4 HT? In the real world, the price increase highly justified the $640 MSRP when the 3.2 first came out. For some ppl of course...for others that didn't matter....IT is all relevant.

 

[NFactor]

If the video processor works properly and decreases encoding/decoding time and CPU strain that alone will give me a good reason to get this card.

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: Draco

Originally posted by: Regs
Have you ever played a poker game in which the man who was bluffing showed first?

But then again, when I play poker, I would like the others to show their hands first. Because If I knew if they stayed in the hand for that long they must have something good, but not good enough for the hand I'm about to show them. They never saw it coming.

If you bet big to early you'll give away your hand.

Play the cards right, you end up with a lot of suckers. The funny thing is, both Nvidia and ATI seem to be playing the same exact way with a even hand.

so, uh what are you trying to say? *me stupid*

Marketing strategy.

 

[ectx]

Originally posted by: SithSolo1

Originally posted by: ectx
I own stocks of both companies. What should I do w/o digesting all the information?

Eh, I wanted to buy ATi shares back when they were under $4 because I knew they would go up but alas I was short on funds.

I bough ATYT US at 5.8 USD. I am happy and have been on ATI camps for awhile now. Will end up holding both stocks for awhile longer, I guess.

Guys, be practical, turn you passion and undertanding of the technolgy into $$. How do we get rich? Let's what what I look for. In general Wall Streen Analysts are still on Ati's camp but, hey, what do they know?

 

[XBoxLPU]

I think the technology/features that the NV40 has is very IMPORTANT. Nvidia now has a great base to build on ( and they will ), unlike the NV3X.

From AT

Theoretical maximums aside, all this adds up to a lot of extra power beyond what NV3x offered. The design is cleaner and more refined, and allows for much more flexibility and scalability. Since we "only" have 16 texture units coming out of the pipe, on older games it will be hard to get more than 2x performance per clock with NV40, but for newer games with single textured and pixel shaded rendering, we could see anywhere from 4x to 8x performance gain per clock cycle when compared to NV3x. Of course, NV38 is clocked about 18.8% faster than NV40. And performance isn't made by shaders alone. Filtering, texturing, antialising, and lots of other issues come into play. The only way we will be able to say how much faster NV40 is than NV38 will be (you guessed it) game performance tests. Don't worry, we'll get there. But first we need to check out the rest of the pipeline.

 

[Lyfer]

I WANT ONE! I WANT ONE!

 

[Wolfsraider]

I have been an ati user for years,
I bought the 9700 pro when it came out and paid over 300.00 for it
that was 2 septembers ago
this card doubles the 9700 in most if not all benchmarks
and to think when the 9700 came out it was a similar tale
maybe not as impressive across the board
This will be the first nvidia card I would drool over
If ati produces a card with similar numbers
it will be a hard choice this time

mike

 

[chilled]

Originally posted by: NightRain
nVidia= Brute Force
ATI= Finesse.
It's much like a Mustang versus a Porsche.

Xbitlabs were saying the the X800XT will have 600Mhz core clock (I would link but my patience is wearing thin on this 56K).
Even if they are wrong (which they probably are) thats swinging things the other way, wouldn't you say?

Things change too easily in his business; look at ATi's leap between R200 -> R300 and nV's lack thereof.

 

[UNCjigga]

Originally posted by: Chad

Disappointing? What do you do tell yourself it would be 5x faster? And power requirements are just going to keep going up, ATi or Nvidia it will make no difference, they both will keep needing more power. This is one of the bigger performance jumps we have seen in quite some time. Sure there are some games that it barely makes a improvement but thats because it's CPU limited, you can tell that when some go UP in speed with AA/AF, or atleast stay very very close.

I am disappointed because for $500.. let me say that again FIVE FREAKING HUNDRED DOLLARS I get a video card that requires a new power supply, has an average jump in FPS (I am not as impressed as some of you) and basically no new cool features.

Riiiggghhtt...well I consider a programmable video encoder/decoder that can essentially offload video processing work from the CPU (allowing me to invest in a cheaper AMD-based solution with confidence) to be a *VERY* cool feature.

 

[Corporate Thug]

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjA2LDk=

$499

what happened to $399???

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: rbV5
If those are the Ultra benchmarks, why does the core clock say 400MHz manually overclocked?

Because maybe the review unit couldn't meet the spec of 400Mhz.

-Por

 

[Viper96720]

Hope the PCI-E version doesn't need the two power plugs. Since PCI-E should be able to provide more power than AGP slot.

 

[Rudee]

My monthly electicity bill is high enough as it is without adding a 480w power supply so I can play games with all the eye candy.

 

[Corporate Thug]

Originally posted by: Rudee
My monthly electicity bill is high enough as it is without adding a 480w power supply so I can play games with all the eye candy.

i assume if one can afford to drop $500 on a video card, the extra $ for the electricity shouldnt be an issue

 

[Chad]

Originally posted by: RussianSensation
How come you are not dissapoined going from p4 1.6 to your 3.2ghz p4 HT?

Heh, funny you should ask that (this is a post I made earlier)...


http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1290845

 

[phreaqe]

hopefully the non ultra version will have good performance and not need to have the dual power connectors. i only have a 350 watt psu. i would like to be able to use the non ltra version on that. i read somewhere that the non ultra will only use one conntector. did i hear that right?

 

[SithSolo1]

I dunno if this has any consequence or if anyone has even cared to think about it but I'm wondering how many of these reviews were done in an open air environment(laying out or with the side of the case off)? I'm not saying that it matters just that I'm curious. I'd like to know the same when the R420 is reviewed.

 

[JBT]

I have a feeling that a 480 watt PSU is mostly targeted at the lower quality PSU's. I would be the highier quality Forton, Enermax, Antec etc... of the 400 watt variety would do just fine. On that wattahegraph floating around this card actually only uses a little bit more power than the 9800XT and 5950 at idle and full load.

 

[BoomAM]

Theres alot i could comment on some of the daft comments by alot of you....

To be honest. Im not that impressed. Im impressed with the SC performance, but thats down to the pipelines.
Even if r42x is faster, the nV40, unless ATI do something similar, is a more attractive option, due to the onchip video decoder. If it does DivX, Xvid & WMP9HD then it`d allow people with less powerful PCs to use the latest media.
Im hoping that the R420 at least matches it. Its more interesting that way.

Im planning on buying a budget upgrade soon, and waiting an extra month to get a brand new video card along with it, would give me a video card that`d last as long as my 9700pro, & would "prop" up a conservative system of a XP2500M for a while.

Its about time that nV40 was released, now we need r420/423, and we`re set for an interesting time of price wars, oem product differentiations, fancy cooling designs and whatnot. The market was getting stale imo.

 

[Eug]

These speeds are stupid-fast and all, but this power utilization and die size stuff is getting way too out of hand.

WTF? NV40 is approximately three to four times the size of the IBM G5 PPC 970FX 2.5 GHz CPU (66 mm2). And NV40 requires a 480 Watt power supply?

What happens with the next generation?

 

[Regs]

499? Shizer. Maybe the non ultra was 400.

That could only mean ATI will charge the same for the RV420 even if they're a flop. ( Remember the original 5800?)


500 dollars is insane. I even got over 1k back in taxes to afford this, but still, 500 dollars is insane!

 

[GTaudiophile]

I guess SFF owners can forget about a 6800U?