ELSA hints GT206 and GT212

ahh yes the fabled X800XTX- Phantom Edition.. belongs in the annals of graphics history along side the 6800 GTX Ultra Extreme Edition, 7800 GTX 512MB and Asus Mars...

 

Yeah, except it actually sold a fair amount and at a cheaper price. I still remember 7800 GTX 512's going for 1000 USD. I think Newegg even got 5 of them to sell.

Anyways, I'm a proud owner of a X800XTX-PE. Could have sworn it was just X800XT-PE. I'll have to see if I still have the box...

Well, I'm glad at least one graphics company has stopped rebranding (so far). I'll be happy when the other company stops it also.

I'm getting tired of explaining the differences (or lack of differences) to customers and friends when they ask me about the newest Nvidia cards and whether they should replace their current ones. And it turns out their currents cards are virtually the same as the new ones, just with the older name. /sigh...

And then they think I'm an idiot because it MUST be different since the name is different. Then I have to spend an hour or two explaining and sometimes arguing with them... UGH.

Regards,
SB

 

Yeah for some reason nV is very capable of having a strangle hold on the $1000 video card market where as ATI can't sell the market's top performing graphics card for less than the GTX 280 intro'd at w/o catching flack.. then again nv also seems to have cornered the market on renaming where as ATi's last rename (that i can recall) was the RV630.. some 3 generations ago. I think someone correctly pointed out that most re-branding/re-naming seems to go hand in hand when a company is floundering .. just as ATI was during HD2XXX and now with nV and the whole G92->b->210->310 ->410 ??

 

Did these cards (hd 4250 and friends) actually ever appear in the market? Can't remember I've actually seen one for sale...

 

Just do what I do, push the parts that are named correctly. Any vendor that screws with it's customers like that does not deserved to be promoted.

-Charlie

 

Just curious. Did Nvidia shed some engineers. Did they lose some to Intel... or cashed out their stock options and retired? The company used to execute like clockwork. These last couple of years, all they got out was the GTX200/b. GTX200 derivatives are a year late & a dollar short, Fermi is late, and derivatives are never even mentioned.

 

The issue isn't whether they sell a 210 or a 310, but rather how many they sell. And I suspect introducing a newer model boosts sales, otherwise they wouldn't do it. And they've been doing that sort of thing for a while now, so it probably works.

I said newer, that doesn't necessarily imply faster, but new is good, right? And yes, people are morons, but more importantly they're not experts, and 300 > 200 so they may not always think beyond that. They might also know that the GTX 260/80s and Radeon HD 4850/70s were released around the same time, and therefore figure that the GeForce 310 is somehow equivalent to the Radeon HD 5000s.

 

They sell chips to OEM's and AIB's, not to consumers. Why would they buy more of something because it has a new sticker on it?

You must assume that people behave more stupidly when buying OEM PCs than they do when buying other electronic devices.

 

Because the new sticker will help OEMs sell more computers to consumers.

I think on average people behave fairly stupidly, but mostly they don't know the ins and outs of computer hardware, and NV's constant renaming makes it even more confusing. It's easier with other devices: when you're buying an iPod, it's pretty clear that the 80GB version can store twice as much music as the 40GB one. If you don't really know what you're looking at, a GeForce 9400 1024MB might look a lot better than a 512MB one, but we both know that's not the case. I think Silent_Buddha's post just confirms that.

 

That's quite a fallacy and still it's thrown around constantly when discussing this "issue"...

People take price over anything to assume something is better than something else i.e. if A is more expensive than B, then it means A is better than B. That's just common sense for those not "in the know", so no one in that group would think the GeForce 310 is somehow equivalent to the HD 5000s...

And are people morons, just because they don't follow tech news or look at hardware specs thoroughly ?

 

That's quite true, though for OEM parts you often can't really see the price of the individual components. I guess the expectation people have is that a pc costing twice as much as another one is just faster at everything - of course it might just have much faster cpu but slower gpu indeed. In that case though it won't matter at all what the graphic card is named.
GT310 though probably sets a new record for rebranding in shortest time, GT210 has barely been on the market (1 month or so?)...

 

Not equivalent to the HD 5800s and 5700s, but to the low-end 5000s, they could very well assume that.

And no, they're not morons because they don't follow tech news, it's completely unrelated.

 

But certainly there are those out there that believe higher number = better/more performance as was stated. After all, that is the naming scheme, albeit minus the all-important caveat that performance starts with the 2nd digit and the 1st digit is just the generation.

 

Except Nvidia doesn't seem particularly concerned with the first number denoting generation. But they expect their customers to think that, easy way to bilk them...

Granted this was general practice for both Nvidia and AMD in the past, but at least AMD has moved past that (and hopefully won't go back). Now just need Nvidia to hop aboard.

Regards,
SB

 

Renaming certainly complicates things, but even the performance of these parts is accurately reflected by the model number.

 

In other words we should expect the 300 series to be roughly as fast as the similar 200 series?

 

doubt that very much. Performance of products based upon model number alone is only meant to be compared within the same generation.

 

Well if 310 does equal 210 when it comes out, Nvidia is basically saying performance of 3xx generation is the same as 2xx generation, indirectly.

Renaming works both ways... And either way, just wish everyone would stop doing it.

Regards,
SB

 

Remember the Charlie's nv Roadmap?