mboeller said:To summarise the editorial :
if you buy the NV30 in Dec (if it is on the shelf then) then you buy an product not worth the money. I wonder how they will be able to sell an barely functional product to their customers (read OEM's + board manufacturers).
I hope they have better luck then ATi. Imagine ATi would have released the A01-chips for production (even higher power-draw; <250MHz). This product would have had an performance lower then the GF4Ti4600 (without AF+AA). If this happens with the NV30 <-> R300 then all FanATics would have an really good december
Edit :
so with all the nice postings in the "R9700-Screenshots"-Thread about my harsh NV30 comments; here is an small explanation:
"barely functional product" =>
I didn't mean that Nvidia would ship NV30 with defects (one chip with this defect, the other with an other defect). This would be stupid. I meant, that they might have to disable one/two or even three functions of the NV30 due to problems with the chip itself. If they really intend to ship A01-chips then they will have (IMHO) far more problems then they had with the GF3. As pointed out the first shipping batch of GF3's (A03) had problems with 3Dtextures and so this feature was disabled in the drivers even when they had A05-chips which had this feature corrected.
A01 chips could even be slower than intended, like with the R300. The A01 chips worked only (according to Mufu) at up to 250MHz due to a problem with the memory interface. The production units now can be overclocked till 400MHz. The same or even worse can happen to the NV30.
If Nvidia really has to ship A01-chips to meet their schedule then you can predict with an high probability (80-90%) that the cards will perform sub-par. I really hope that they only ship fully developed chips like in the past and not A01-crap.
