A tale of two GF FX's

But you usually also have to add in shipping to the cost. Even if it is a few bucks cheaper online, it may not be cheaper once it gets to you. And there's also the issue of impatience. If you wait, particularly for a product that looks like it's going to be rather low-volume (though the $399 price is promising...maybe it's not going to be that low in volume...), they may be sold out before you get a chance. I know I had this problem with the GeForce DDR. I didn't want to preorder it, and I ended up not getting one for a while because they were continually back-ordered by a week or two.

 

Uttar, CompUSA DO CHARGE TAX!

This means $399 preodered - you'll be charged $433 w/ $0.01 shipping...

PS: It's just an example here in NY...

 

I think you should return on newegg and look at the product link

 

Yes, at least in Europe the law states the price shown has to be the price _including_ all these stupid taxes.

When I'm in the US I get very sick of handing over 5 bucks for something I was told was $4.99 and then having to dig for shrapnel.

 

Interesting that the Product Link and See it! links seem to indicate a retail PNY card, not the white box card that they are selling. Maybe Newegg glues a picture of the PNY image on to the white box.

Anyway, This CompUSA web page does indeed list 500/500 clocks. So it does look like the $399 pre-order will get you a 500/500 card.

 

I don't think Nvidia can charge $600 or $500 for the card even if they want to. At that price sales will be anemic, especially considering the performance doesn't appear to be that much better than the R300 (granted based on only a single set of benches so far). Also, I seriously doubt the cost of the cooler is a really big deal. At most that cooler probably costs $20 (and probably much less), not really that noticeable on a $400 card. Then again, the store mark-up is usually 50%, and the AIBs also have to cover costs from Nvidia, so I can see how $20 per card could have a pretty big impac (especially if the card doesn't sell well, since they'd get very little money from margins and also little money from overall volume).

 

If there is a 400/400 card, it will be released later, like the 9700 was release later than the 9700 pro.

 

The 9700 product launch has nothing to do with the GeForce FX product launch. What is released will depend pretty much entirely upon yields.

As an example, remember the GeForce4 Ti 4400 and 4600? Those were released at the same time. And the GeForce SDR was available quite a while before the DDR.

 

From everything that I've seen so far, it looks like the 128MB model at 500MHz is selling for $399 on pre-order, and (atleast according to some seemingly legit register screenshots) the 256MB 500MHz version will be $499. That seems to be pretty likely given that we know the 128MB version's preorder price, and the cost of DDRII memory. I doubt nvidia would try to sell anything at a higher price than that.

In the other benchmark thread it was also mentioned that the card runs at 300MHz in 2D mode. This makes me wonder about how fast the core is actually capable of going. Laptop cpus have been doing this for a while to save on power/heat, but I wonder if for the FX it was done because it's a nice power saving feature, or because they want to minimize the amount of time that the core is being pushed to 500MHz? We'll of course see more when people can attempt to overclock, but I'm having my doubts as to what speed this core was originally supposed to run at. Especially given the original release schedule. I don't think we will see anything faster on the current process (atleast for now).

Nite_Hawk

 

I would guess neither (at least not as the main reason). It's supposed to be a quiet card when doing non 3D stuff. Thus, they lower the clock to 300 MHz while doing 2D stuff and lower the speed of the fan accordingly.

 

bjorn:

Well, that brings up an interesting point. Was the FX designed to run at really high speeds with a large cooler, and to slow down in 2D, or is the giant cooler an after-thought hack to get the card running at 500MHz during games, but then it's brought back to more stable levels during 2D. Similarly, how stable will this thing be running at 500MHz if it only clocks at 300MHz for 2D? That's a pretty big differential. I wonder what temperatures the core hangs around at during 2D work vs 3D work, both with and without the cooler running at full-blast and at quiet levels. Would Mac OSX running in GL mode (aqua extreme) need to have the fan blasting away even at reduced clockspeeds (or would it run at full clockspeed?) If/when windows goes this way, will we have the same situation?

Nite_Hawk

 

I think it's pretty obvious that the dustbuster was added due to the process difficulties Nvidia encountered with NV30. It seems fairly well substantiated that NV30 was originally intended for TSMC's advanced (low-k dialectric) .13u process, and was only moved to the basic .13u process when they couldn't get that working. Presumably NV30 on the intended process would have hit 500 MHz (or better) with traditional cooling. They still needed 500 MHz to get the performance they were targeting, so they came up with a decent plan B.

Life/TSMC gave Nvidia lemons and they made...lemon juice. Good for them. While of course they'll never admit that the dustbuster was a late workaround, the form factor gives it away. No one in their right mind woud ever target a two-slot form factor for a consumer card. Nvidia will drop this design as soon as is feasible.

That said, I don't think The Fan is really such a fiasco either. GFFX 5800U is going to be targeted firmly at the enthusiast market, and such people tend to have large tower cases and probably won't mind having to move any PCI card which happens to occupy the top slot. The noise may be an annoyance, but the fact that it will be restricted to 3d game playing (and believe me, a GFFX at 300/300 will be way more than fast enough to run OS X or Longhorn very adequately) is a huge mitigating factor; all in all it's probably less annoying than a card with a slightly quieter fan going all the time. And...I think that the chartreuse version in the new PR pics is kind of pretty!

 

Is anyone really looking forward to an even more bloated version of Windows that runs in 3D all the time? WinXP ran slow enough for me until I disabled all that unnecessary GUI crap. Constant 3D at the desktop just sounds like HELL to me. I can just see it now, you open your e-mail client and your FPS drops down to 20 so you can barely move the mouse cursor.

 

'nah, i think it will be much faster.
The only problem will be that graphic card driver issues will be even more problematic - z-fighting on your graphics card?
oops! the windows are flickering on each other!

 

Every GeforceFX board picture so far has 8 memory chips on them. How much does 8 4Mx32 DDR2 chips cost? (That would give them 128MB). How much does 8 8Mx32 DDR2 chips cost, and what memory vendor actually sells those? (That would be 256MB)

 

Bobble:

The same issue was raised by someone over on the hardocp forums. It appears right now that the only chips that samsung makes right now that would work for a 256MB DDRII board are rated at 700MHz, so you are probably right. Still, it's possible that it might just be comming out at a later date when 500MHz higher density chips come out.

:?

Nite_Hawk

 

Wouldn't it be better for the FX to have 700 MHz memory anyway?

 

I think it is 700 Mhz effective, 350 Mhz actual. Not fast enough for a 128-bit bus.

 

Well this is getting kind of confusing then, because people were saying they had 700 MHz available, but not 500 MHz. So is that 250 MHz actual on the 500 MHz, or is it 1000 MHz effective? I assume the latter?

 

welcome to why i hate the use of stating "effective" frequencies as though they are actual!