Where do you stand with the FX

Right.

I question this move by Gainward. I'm sure the majority would much rather do without all the "extra crap", and just be able to get a "silent" FX Ultra for as cheap as possible.

 

In the poll you forgot: "Going to wait for PowerVR Series 5" !

CU ActionNews

 

Well, UK gets it for the price of £449!

 

I imagine the items given are "freebies", with near zero cost to Gainward. Good way to make up the cost on the silent cooler. (Which, I presume costs more than the fan based version)

 

Does anybody know what heatsink is used on those fanless R9700?

Zalman Z80-HP 1000 cm^2 cooling surface
or
Zalman Z80A-HP 1300 cm^2 cooling surface

They look pretty much the same.
If the smaller is the one used for the overclocked R9700PRO, then the larger could be enough for NV30.

 

9500 Pro ehhe it is DYNOMITE on my rig.....

 

Not if you already own an Nforce.

 

nVidia's never been praised for IQ, as far as I can remember. At the time of the V3 vs. TNT/TNT2 they were praised for going to 32-bit 3D support--whereas 3dfx was at 16/22-bit (and as usual the 3dfx product had the playable frame rates whereas the TNT/TNT2 didn't when running with 32-bit 3D support turned on.) In fact, to accuse nVidia of being an "Image-Quality King" sounds almost bizarre to me...

Truly, nVidia's never had what *I* would call good FSAA. In some games nVidia's FSAA at best I would characterize as "fair" and in some games when it is bad it is *really* bad...

In fact, when 3dfx shipped the V5 the most common words uttered by nVidia proponents at the time were, "FSAA? Who wants to blur the screen?" IE, most nVidia proponents wouldn't know "Image Quality" if it walked up and slapped them...

But...I will say that on my last nVidia card, a GF4 Ti4600, although I never used FSAA because I found it so very poor, I did use nVidia's anisotropic filtering at 8x, all the time--as it certainly contributed to image quality and made a nice difference.

But when I swapped out the Ti4600 for the 9700P last September I was amazed at how much better the ATI image quality was, FSAA and AF included, than anything I'd ever seen from nVidia. In fact, it was the first good presentation of FSAA I'd seen since the V5 (which FSAA tops anything nVidia's ever done, IMO.)

Although the 9700P is the first ATI product I've owned in years, I will say that I suspect the ATI image quality in general has long been a good bit better than nVidia's--but the products were always so far behind in performance that it didn't make a lot of difference. Until the 9700P, which leapfrogged so far out ahead of nVidia in both IQ and performance terms that nVidia's still trying to catch up. I just think that hearing the words "nVidia" and "image quality" in the same sentence is somewhat bizarre....but that's just from my perspective since I've never thought of nVidia in those terms....

 

Nope NVIDIA certainly added more than 32bit with the TNT, they also added large texture support 2048*2048 max. A few other things here and there NVIDIA compared to the rest (well Voodoo2) certainly did have the best IQ and that reputation remained for a short while... earned or not because the Matrox G400 had impressive IQ too and then we have the Radeon (original) that had the best IQ in games like Quake3.

But at the time of the TNT I would say they definitely focused on IQ features and compared to the little competition at that time NVIDIA were ahead.

 

I'm not too sure on UK prices, but from what I've seen, for the 650 euro, one could an nForce2 motherboard [Epox 8RDA+], ATI 9700Pro, and a new AMD XP+ cpu, and a few games too! That "bundle" would give you more: FireWire, 5.1 dolby digital encoding audio, better video image quality, and an overall faster system.

 

i never said it was a GOOD deal, just not as bad as it first appeared

 

http://uk.special.reserve.co.uk/rev...ARKLE_GEFORCE_FX_GRAPHICS_CARD_FOR_PC&af=cc80

329£ not a bad deal from what i understand :?

PS: Don't know the shop btw

 

Evildeus, that's a bit cheaper than I've seen elsewhere, but that's using the DustBuster deaf cooling. Wonder if they'll ever sell em. I think they'll never be delivered, or the specs are far wrong. They list 256M DDR2. This would be the first GF-FX card I've seen anywhere with more than 128M. Something smells fishy here...

I assume the 12/02/2003 date doesn't mean December 3rd, 2003, right?

 

In the specs they describe the card as having 500 MHz memory, but in the review they refer to 400 MHz?

 

Not with a card that can boost this spec:
• 48.0 GB/sec memory bandwidth

 

Marketing vs. Performance

 

Special Reserve have been around for at least 10 years.. I can remember seeing their ads in magazines when I was just a little nipper. However I cannot see them honouring that deal if everyone else is expecting the GFFX to be 650 euros. Anyone wanna try ordering it? I hear that Special Reserve take out money from your CC as soon as the order placed and therefore have to honour the price.

 

You're right about the IQ being better on ATi products for years. Although in fairness I can't judge the GF4 directly having never seen it. But the R8500 was equal to the GF3 Ti500, and Radeon was pretty close to GF2, so I disagree that the performance difference between them has always been so huge. The only difference is Nvidia comes out with their refresh overclocked version (aka GF2 Ultra and GF4). It will be interesting to see what happens with this current generation, since ATi is planning on refreshing, apparently, and Nvidia isn't in a very good situation to refresh.

 

I wonder where Special Reserve are getting their 256MB NV30's - cuz it's not from Sparkle themselves as they're only supplying 128mb versions.

I've never found SR very competitive - as can be seen by their 9700Pro prices ie.. Gigabyte 9700Pro £319.00 v typical £265.00

 

TBh I've nevr heard of them before, and I couldnt find a Sparkle GFFX on the sparkle site when that advert went up - well before the FX previews.

Have you read the reader reviews? Pretty funny stuff coming from people who've never seen the card and made their comments before and after the previews. The blind belief in nVidia is amazing.