eta on test nv30 test boards

[oyvind]

Nvidia said that NV30 should be available to a few customers before christmas. Will the sites that test these boards (THG,beyond3d) get the samples at the same time the boards reach the few selected stores?
I feel that time is running out here, a review usually takes some time, (a week?) doesn't it?
Are there more delays, perhaps?
Dave, will you tell us the minute you receive the sample or will you be silent until the review is complete?
Since no test boards are out yet, maybe nvidia is afraid the reviews will be no good for them and ship them to the stores at the same time they handle out the test boards, so they at least will sell a few of them, before the "judgement" is out...

Øyvind

 

[ben6]

My crystal ball says -January ... Though there is a possibility earlier , just wouldn't hold my breath for them .

 

[megadrive0088]

it would be kinda interesting if even 100 GFFX boards arrivied on shelves for the average joe consumer to buy before the end of the year. that way, GFFX will forever be called "2002 technology" otherwise it will be concidered 03 technology by most people

 

[noko]

Doesn't sound like what Nvidia has at the moment would put on a good showing for what ever reason. If the GF FX had good overall performance at this time it would be to Nvidia's best interest to let it out to garner interest and let people put aside purchase money for it vice buying other items during the holidays. To me it seems that Nvidia concluded that to release samples at the moment would tarnish or handicap the launch of the GF FX. In other words it doesn't look too good for Nvidia at the moment.

 

[Gollum]

Doesn't sound like what Nvidia has at the moment would put on a good showing for what ever reason. If the GF FX had good overall performance at this time it would be to Nvidia's best interest to let it out to garner interest and let people put aside purchase money for it vice buying other items during the holidays. To me it seems that Nvidia concluded that to release samples at the moment would tarnish or handicap the launch of the GF FX. In other words it doesn't look too good for Nvidia at the moment.

Yes exactly, I also think that ATI is holding back on R350 benchmarks as well, because both are actually slower than R300 and they don't want to embarrass themselves...

Sorry but I think its perfectly okay of Nvidia not to send out any hardware based on their first alpha chips/boards (remember the boards that were shown running were probably based off the first silicon they got back from fab). If they let people run their own benchmarks etc. without the final revision of the chip/board it can only do harm, there are bound to be bugs in the hardware or they wouldn't need another respin. Apparently most bugs can be worked around for presentation under a controlled environment, but certainly not for a full blown review/stability test with dozens of games! It would have been the same to ask ATI to let people conuct a full review of the R300 based off the hardware the Doom 3 Demo was run on at E3! Certainly wouldn't have been very fair, the chip was able to run and worked pretty reliable already, but certainly wasn't yet representative of final R9700Pro quality.

Reviewers will certainly get their FX samples a few weeks ahead of stores. We'll probably have to wait will at least the end of the month, but they will get to test final hardware that way (unlike those less than helpfull downgraded R9700Pro boards that were sent out as pseudo R9500 review samples from ATI a while back and caused more confusion than information IMHO - "it has a 256bit bus" "no it hasn't" "yes it does and also ...")! I can imagine what every article done right now of an early board with and old chip revision would read like: "the benchmarks and tests were conducted an alpha board with pre-pre-release drivers and are unfortunatelly not at all representative of what the shipping GFFX may or may not be like. Is it better than R300? We can't say for sure, it sure has potential blabla ..." no answers would really be given! I'd rather wait a couple weeks longer and at least get reliable information...

 

[Sxotty]

That leech on the back

I think they want to get that humongous heatsink monstrousity off it before they release it, and until they can it wont ship, but who knows.

 

[jvd]

Gollum- shouldn't they have final silicon by now ? Or at least in the next week or so. I mean if they are ramping up production they should have a small number of chips ready to go.

 

[noko]

Apparently at this time Nvidia doesn't have anything that would turn some heads. Now Feburary is only a little over a month and a half away come to think of it and yet still silence about real boards. So far it has not been a good end of year for Nvidia in the graphics card end, high end. Nvidia NForce2 chip though is a different story which right now is the best platform for an AMD processor.

 

[Gollum]

Gollum- shouldn't they have final silicon by now ? Or at least in the next week or so. I mean if they are ramping up production they should have a small number of chips ready to go.

I'm not sure, ask someone who knows more about the matter, like Russ, how long it takes from start of production till they recieve the first chips in quantity, it should be at least a couple of weeks though. I agree, they might already have some form of final chips by now or at least recieve them soon. They still need to verify everything works as it should, which also takes a while, then they can probably start producing and sending out review samples of the reference board. My estimate would be we might see a couple reviews before the year is over, but that's just a guess, they might start popping up as soon as tomorrow or as late as February...

Apparently at this time Nvidia doesn't have anything that would turn some heads.

Dunno what exactly you want to say with this, but as I stated before I think its perfectly normal that we're not seing any hands-on p/reviews yet. As long as there is no final hardware why would you expect them to give anything out to the press? The damage was done, they're far behind ATI and missed a cycle, now they might as well wait until they're really ready with their next big thing instead of acting even more desperate and hasting something out just for the sake of it.

So far it has not been a good end of year for Nvidia in the graphics card end, high end.

I agree with that, their image took significant damage and at this point they're still further behind the competition (in performance and technology) than anybody was probably willing to bet only a year ago.

Nvidia NForce2 chip though is a different story which right now is the best platform for an AMD processor.

Now they only need an Intel license to open up to those other 80% of the chipset market...

 

[JD]

Looks like it's going to be ati christmas this year. Ati is stomping all over nvidia, covering both high and low ends. Even I'm tempted to go with 9500Pro from my gf2. I think that missed cycle(xbox) and .13 process might have thrown monkey wrench into nvidia's machine. I don't think nvidia's high price policy will work anymore. Just like intel's broke up after athlon came out, now everyone is after amd cpu and nvidia's nforce2. Looks like the nforce2/9700/9500pro is the combo to get this christmas. Very tempting