Does NVIDIA have a R300 board now?

An interesting thing came up, got an IM from a friend who works at S3/VIA and he said that their marketing guys got a R9700, and ran it on a P4 2.8GHz. They got a score of 16,000+. So now, there's no doubt that the R9700 is getting out into some systems, but the question is how do marketing people at companies like S3/VIA get it? Makes one really wonder.

 

well , OEMs and motherboard manufacturers likely have had 9700s in some form or another for internal testing for a while now. It's a fact of life, when a product gets launched, you want to certify it with as many companies as possible. It's also a fact of life that sometimes there's some crossover..

Let me tell you a story once upon a time (it actually happened). About 2 1/2-3 years ago a friend of mine was working at Asus doing Tech Support (ironically he now works for NVIDIA). 3dfx found a issue with the Voodoo5 6000 and Asus motherboards. So he called his friend over at Asus and hand delivered a Voodoo5 6000 so Asus could test it out.

 

I guess that's unavoidable.

 

LOL. I think I know who that was actually.

 

ATI claimed at their launch event that they were an AGP 8X validation partner for Intel and Via... since the Radeon 9700 is the only ATI board we know of that supports AGP 8X, then obviously those companies must have had samples to test out their new AGP 8X chipsets.