Rumours of new ATI 3870 X2 surface

But that would also condemn you to eternal damnation called nForce chipsets

 

Nvidia's lack of consideration for their nForce customers - me, for instance - is the reason I decided to boycott the company (vote with your wallet), in spite of the technical merits of their graphic cards lately.

(Sorry for O/T post, but any mention of nForce makes my blood boil)

 

I've been out of the loop on mobos but what's wrong with nforce chipsets? I never had one, but I thought they were pretty popular with the performance crowd.

 

they drop off support for there products very quickly, many with known issues still unresolved.

 

I have a nForce 570 SLI platinum(AM2). Cost $50 more than my A8R-MVP crossfire(939), is one year newer, but has half the features and less stable. I'm pretty disappointed by it.

 

They were in the Nforce4 days but since then it's been downhill from what I can see (I went from NF4 to P35). The new stuff looks promising although it still is leagues behind AMD and Intel when it comes to power consumption. God knows why Nvidia's chipsets are on 90nm while AMD is crunching out 55nm chips.

 

So you guys are saying to stay out of the way of 780i and 790i chipsets as well?

 

Has there really been a decent STABLE nforce board yet? It seems like every new nforce chipset has some issue or another.

Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.

 

If you really desire SLI, then you really don't have a choice.

 

nforce3, and 4? even nforce 2s. But notice all these boards were mainly for AMD platforms. Also the current 790i is leaps and bounds ahead compared to its brother 780i especially when it comes to OCing.

AMD nforce boards has always been great most the time, providing a stable, good performing platform for AMD CPUs. However its always nVIDIA intel variants that has problems one after another. Compatibility for one. (Think its mainly because intel doesn't provide enough documents to nVIDIA. Hmm wonder why? )

This is OT but why is it that nVIDIA is still on the old 90nm process for its chipsets?

Not sure about the nforce 7 series for AMD though since its been delayed again i believe.

 

I'm actually looking more forward to the 48xx series that ATI will release in June than Nvidia right now, so x38 or x48 or the P45 will all do just fine for me I think, thankfully.

I really want to know what they mean by "release" and "available"... if its released in June, can I buy it in June? What is the likelihood that will be the case with either ATI in June or Nvidia in July this time around?

 

...

 

Aye, I had significant issues with consumer Nforce 2, 3, 4 boards also. At least when compared to Intel boards. However, since Intel didn't make AMD compatible boards that's a moot point.

Back with Nforce 1, 2, 3 there really wasn't much competition for STABLE MB's for an AMD platform. They were all pretty much a potshot as to whether your board would be stable for over a long duration (6-24 months). Via, ULi, SiS, AMD all had their own issues.

But at that point, it was the heyday of overclocking experimentation among both consumers and MB makers. So overclockability and speed was always held in higher regard than long term stability. As well price/performance/overclockability.

The poor capacitors used back then almost universally was another factor in stability. So even while the chipsets may have been relatively stable on their own, the components they were paired up with, often weren't very good over the long term.

If you wanted stability back then you went Intel. If you wanted speed/overclocking well that was a different story depending on what year it was.

Power consumption and noise also wasn't as high up on the list. Anyone remember those super loud 60 mm fans that were like 60+ DB used for overclocking back in the day? Yeah.

With the switch in focus in the past couple years, Nvidia just hasn't been as nimble at keeping with the changing times as either Intel or ATI/AMD.

Regards,
SB

 

I had an nforce2, it wasn't what I would describe as stable and the diver support was horrible. And lets not forget about the nforce4 data corruption issues...

Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.

 

My nForce 2 was horrible, terrible. Can not comment on other nForce chipsets though.

 

I had no trouble with my Abit NF-7-S 2.0. Loved it, especially the overclocking
Very stable and I could turn on my compouter via keyboard or mouse, a feature I some what miss with my msi neo 4-F. Infact my mobo has intermittent posting trouble(no display and beeps 4 or 5 times), something that made it so I no longer consider vista's hybrid sleep an option (as resuming from hybernation in the event my mobo woulldnt post is much slower than booting.. with every app closed too).

 

2, 4 and 6 have all been the highlights for me. It really depends on the mainboard implementation, too, as to whether you'll enjoy their core logic in the end.

Anyway, back to the X2....it's probably the most impressive single video card I've had the pleasure to use since 8800 GTX showed up. I've spent a lot of time with it recently and barring the usual driver headaches I have with Catalyst that still aren't gone in 2008 (*big sigh*), it's been pretty damn great.

If multi-GPU is something you're willing to put up with, something that's core logic agnostic and mostly 'just works', while supporting sensible display output options, is really what you want. Scaling to more than 2 GPUs is still just pants for the most part, so when you can connect 2 via one slot I'm usually fairly interested, as long as my displays work. The X2 has been the first card and driver combo to do that.

 

There are pictures of the mobility 3870X2 (M88) at Cbase. For those interested: http://www.computerbase.de/news/hardware/grafikkarten/ati/2008/april/ati_mobility_radeon_hd_3870_x2/

 

There's a couple of new Mobility Radeons on the way, but AMD lists them as using M76. Props to NotebookReview for the heads up.

 

well m76 seems to encompass a lot of numbers on that chart.

From 2600 all the way to 3870x2