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NVIDIA 790i Chipset and GeForce 9800 GX2 Launched

Posted by Zonk on Tue Mar 18, 2008 09:01 AM
from the don't-eat-these-chips-with-dip dept.
Graphics Software Hardware
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA has launched their next generation desktop chipsets for the Intel platform today, now known as the nForce 790i and 750i SLI families, along with a new high-end graphics card dubbed the GeForce 9800 GX2. The new motherboard chipset offering brings support for DDR3 to the NVIDIA platform for Intel's Core 2 processors with 1600MHz Front Side Bus support, as well as Gen2 PCI Express for multi-GPU graphics and NVIDIA's new ESA health monitoring/control functions. Performance with the new platform looks fairly impressive in both workstation and gaming scenarios."
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Submission: NVIDIA 790i Chipset and GeForce 9800 GX2 Launched by MojoKid (1002251)
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NVIDIA 790i Chipset and GeForce 9800 GX2 Launched 50 Comments More /

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  • New toys! (Score:4, Funny)

    by d3ac0n (715594) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:02AM (#22782718)
    And I still can't afford them. :(

    • Re:New toys! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nichotin (794369) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:08AM (#22782780)
      You are still getting a lot of bang for the buck by going 8800GT or 8800GTS instead. 9800GX2 performs much better, but I mean, the price seriously does not justify it this time. Heck, even the 9600GT will give you decent gaming performance these days, and that is a card almost anyone can afford.

      • How about a new numbering schema? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Chordonblue (585047) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:52AM (#22783242) Homepage Journal
        I don't know about you guys, but wasn't it AMD not too long ago who released a '9600/9800'? I think it might be time to come up with a new numbering schema - maybe a whole new marketing plan. It reminds me of how pinball manufacturers jacked up scores to make their pinballs look more impressive. They started out with targets and bumpers worth 1-5 points, and towards the end, a ball would hit a mumber and BOOM! 10,000 points was scored. Stupid.

        Please don't tell me we're going to have the Nvidia 10,000 or the AMD/ATI 1,000,000+...

        • It'll probably be the Xxxx series first, then who knows.. XIxxx? XIIxxx? And maybe even XIIIxxx. Those crazy Romans!

        • Re:How about a new numbering schema? (Score:5, Informative)

          by TheThiefMaster (992038) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @12:29PM (#22785148)
          It's simple, the number is XYY0, with X = series number (manufacturer specific), YY = performance number (within series, higher=better).

          ATI had a 9xxx series years ago (2002), because they didn't start with a "Radeon 1", instead it was the 7000 to match Direct-X 7.0. nVidia started with the "GeForce", followed by 2, then 3, then changed to the standard "thousands" naming with the GeForce 4000 series, also released in 2002.

          nVidia has overlapped ATI's graphics card numbers since the GeForce 7000 series a couple of years ago, but few people noticed because ATI's 7000 cards weren't that memorable. However pretty much everyone who has been building PCs for more than 6 years will still remember the ATI 9800, and how it beat nVidia's "GeForce FX" 5800 so soundly that they had to release a revised version called the 5900, and then ANOTHER revised version called the 5950 in an attempt to beat it.

          I don't yet see a need to get a GeForce 9800, I haven't found any games that my GeForce 8800 GTS r1 (320MB) can't run perfectly fine on high settings. Let me know if one turns up.
          • Actually the Radeon line did not start at 7000. The first Radeon (R100-based) was called simply that: "ATI Radeon". Later there was a "Radeon 32" and "Radeon 64". But yes, they did eventually settle on the 7000 series as their naming scheme.
            • Prefixes of competing nVidia and ATI graphics cards:
              GeForce Radeon
              1 -
              2 -
              3 7
              4 8
              5 9
              6 X
              7 X1
              8 HD 2
              9 HD 3
              • Oops, failed by html. this is what I meant to put:

                Prefixes of competing nVidia and ATI graphics cards:
                GeForce <=> Radeon
                1 <=> -
                2 <=> -
                3 <=> 7
                4 <=> 8
                5 <=> 9
                6 <=> X
                7 <=> X1
                8 <=> HD 2
                9 <=> HD 3
      • I'm still using an AMD 64 3500+ on an Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard with an AGP Nvidia 5600LE. An upgrade JUST to a low-end PCI Express system would still cost me over $1000.00 bucks.

        What with household expenses (new tankless water heater needed, finishing the basement, repairing the roof on the porch, Etc.) and all the other stuff that goes along with buying a house, plus having just spent money to start a new car lease (old beater was on it's last legs and I can't afford to buy the size vehicle I need wit

        • Re:New toys! (Score:5, Informative)

          by jandrese (485) <kensama@vt.edu> on Tuesday March 18 2008, @11:03AM (#22784128) Homepage Journal
          A $1000? Do you shop exclusively at Alienware? Assuming you can reuse your HDD, Optical Drive, Case, Power Supply (might be iffy depending on what you currently have), Monitor, Keyboard, and Mouse, and any other PCI cards you might already have; you can build a very decent Core2Duo system for $500. You won't be using a 790i or a 9800GX2, but there's no way you should be hitting $1000 if you make sane price/performance tradeoffs.

          I mean you're replacing the Motherboard (~$100), CPU (~$100), Memory (~$100), and Graphics card ($200). Those numbers are very rough too, you could play around quite a bit with them (Get a $175 graphics card to upgrade the CPU for example). Your system won't be a slouch either. It'll be something like a Core2Duo E4500, 2GB Memory, a motherboard with built-in ethernet, sound (unless you already have a sound card), firewire, etc... a Geforce 9600 and all of the peripherals you already have.
          • Your numbers are off.

            We may also be looking at different setups here. For me, "Low End" means that while it doesn't have the latest and greatest, it IS fully up to date as far as socket types, FSB speeds, and RAM speeds are concerned. In other words, that there is some upgradability built into it so I can hold onto it longer and upgrade a few times before it's completely outmoded.

            I recently spent some time at Newegg pricing out a new rig.

            Motherboard ~ $150 (at least. Unless you want to get a motherboard
            • If $500 is too much then it's probably not a great time to be trying to upgrade your machine anyway, at least not if you want a gaming rig. But I have to point out that if you shop around you don't have to pay top dollar like that. For instance, the Asus P5B is a perfectly workable motherboard equipped with Socket 775 (for your Core2Duo) for $120 [tigerdirect.com]. The lower end Core2Duos can easily be had for another $120 [zipzoomfly.com], Memory is cheap [newegg.com]. And you can even get a pretty good graphics card [newegg.com] for under $200. Granted, this i

  • in financial news (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lord Ender (156273) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:26AM (#22782940) Homepage
    NVDA shares are down over 50% and are trading at 14 times earnings. Their balance sheet is beautiful, though. No debt on the books!

    http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=nvda [yahoo.com]
    • No debt is not always a good thing. Healthy debt (good interest rate) is an indication of a stable company with a growth strategy. Most large companies have debt, even if they have lots of liquid assets (cash) lying around. Debt is the (usually cheap) way to raise capital without diluting ownership, and capital is necessary for growth, especially for a company like Nvidia that most likely has a lot of R&D.
      • Debt can be bad, especially if they borrow short like those poor suckers with ARMs. And in bankruptcy, shareholders get paid AFTER bond holders!

        You're right that it's not always bad. But there are some very good things about being debt free.
    • Radeons are produced by ati; the geforce is an nvidia product.
      • That's not the point. The point isn't "oh no somebody will mean to buy a four year old card from ATI but accidentally buy a much more expensive and new card from nVidia, even though GeForce/Radeon are the far more prominant parts of the name", it's that they gave it the same number as a four year old card from ATI! I'm just guessing 4 year old, I don't care to go look it up, but I'm sure I bought my 9800 PRO in 2004, and it wasn't the top of the line even then, I don't think. Seems kind of silly, you wou
    • What's the thermal output differences between the older chips and the new?
    • Has nVIDIA improved their cooling fans at all or will we still have to get third party [arctic-cooling.com] cooling devices?

    Seriously, I've have an overheated nVIDIA card blow up and take out a motherboard with it.

    • My latest nVidia card (GF 7950GT) actually came with a passive cooler. I think they've got the whole "adequate stock cooler" thing down.
    • I was under the impression that nvidia just made the chipsets and a variety of vendors made the boards with varying heatsink designs.
    • nvidia does not make graphics cards, they make chipsets. You're angry at the wrong company for your crappy fan.
          • There are a lot of lower-end GeForce cards that come with passive heatsinks.

            (I prefer to have as few moving parts in my servers as pratically possible. So motherboards with heat pipes and radiators are better then a tiny 40mm fan cooling a chipset.)
  • I remember a few months ago when information came out about the 9800GX2 it was claimed the MSRP would be $449. Now we know that was merely a pipe dream.. I wonder if Nvidia leaked that low price and changed their mind or if people were just pulling numbers out of thin air for their leak articles.

    Either way, $449 would have been a much nicer price, but I guess since they move so few units of these high end cards anyway (i've heard it is well less than 100k units sold for the high-end cards) they need to ha
    • I remember when the 8800GT came out at "$200-250"; in reality it was more like $270-320. Reviewers had to publish mea culpas for misleading prospective buyers.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by ironwill96 (736883)
        Are you looking at the same benchmarks I am?

        Go back and look at them again, 9800GX2 trounces the 8800GT as soon as you turn the settings up. It is very comparable to the SLI 8800 GTS 512mb which is 2 8800 GTS cards put together. That will cost you more to do then buying this card will.
            • Yeah if using Crysis as an example on a resolution no video card publicly available is playable on is your only proof that doesn't cut it. I really don't understand the fascination with Crysis as it sold very, very few copies because they targeted a market that doesn't have that many consumers. I love super uber graphics as much as the next guy, but I also want to be able to play it on my 1.5-2 year old "high-end" system and not have to upgrade every year to see the pretty stuff. The fact that Half-Life

  • New cards are great and all... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pathological liar (659969) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:35AM (#22783034)
    ... but hey NVIDIA, when can we get purevideo support for Linux? I appreciate you folks fixing the black window bug and all, but having accelerated x264 would be incredible.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by antdude (79039)
      The one for Windows doesn't even work correctly. :(
    • Purevideo support for MPEG2 is already available for Linux when using the libXvMC provided with nVidia's driver. It's closed source, though.

      I haven't read any word on the newer Purevideo features yet.
        • There is a lot of HD content that was still (regrettably) being compressed with MPEG2, including a lot of ATSC broadcast content. Being able to offload this to your videocard in your MythTV box means you can save a good amount of money on the processor.

          This is just answering the "Why would you?" bit. I still think they should update the library to support all the features of the new cards.
    • There are some performance bugs that need to get worked out in the current CUDA drivers. But for 8-series and higher cards, there is nothing stopping us from writing our own acceleration and postprocessing code that runs directly on the GPU.

  • As is the names of cards wasn't confusing enough.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ZipR (584654) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:38AM (#22783056)
    Now Nvidia has taken the name of one of ATI's best and most memorable cards, the 9800. Is it intentional?
    • the last gen of cards from nVidia carried the 8800/8600/8500 numbering system. It would only make sense that they'd introduce a 9-series GeForce card. usually the *800's are the top of the line. *600 are the mid-range gaming cards, the *500s are crippled but usable lower-end cards. God help you if they continue to release *200 versions (last one I had was a 6200, never again.)
  • Is this an all-new chipset, or merely two of their old ones in SLI mode on one package?

  • NVidia chipset? I would think twice (Score:4, Informative)

    by Godji (957148) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:42AM (#22783090) Homepage
    The last time I bought a high-end nVidia chipset (the 680i), the reference design came with an "optional" chipset fan, to be used when overclocking memory. Without the fan, and without overclocking memory, the system would die within 15 minutes of memtest86. With the fan, you get a noisy whine all the time, also because the fan can only be operated at 50% speed, not less. (At 100%, the fan is ridiculously loud.)

    Just sharing my experiences; don't listen to me if you don't want to. Other than the noise issue, the thing is very stable even with a slight CPU+memory overclock.

  • Wow (Score:3, Funny)

    by ShiNoKaze (1097629) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:42AM (#22783096)
    Wow Core 2 processors with 1600MHz Front Side Bus!! AMD watch out!! Wait... nvmd.

  • Sheesh, this took them a year and a half? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Marton (24416) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @10:02AM (#22783358)
    Seriously - the "new graphics card" is a joke. It's two 8800 GTx cards in SLI. There are two old G92 processors, on two separate PCBs, with a leafblower holding them together. I guess if you want SLI with the minimum amount of fuss, this is the way to go - but come on. Where is the new silicon?

    Same goes for the 790i. It's neat that it can do DDR3 (ho-hum) or that it can run 1600Mhz FSB CPUs (which you'd expect from a recent chipset). Let's face it - it's a very minor improvement over the 780i which itself did little to improve upon the 680i.

    Props to Asus for the nice motherboard - it's nice to see such an innovative northbridge/southbridge cooling solution. Other than that, I don't think there's much to see here.

    I don't mean to be a party-pooper but article sounds like the author got overexcited once or twice during the writing process. I just don't get what the enthusiasm is all about.
  • Yeah but will it run Crysis at full settings?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kelz (611260)
      50FPS at high settings with a resolution of 1920x1200. I'll bet it'll run decently on very high with 1280x1024.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pandrijeczko (588093)
        Even though some nVidia fanboi has modded you down, I fully agree with you.

        Go back 20 years when home computers were fixed boxes with minimal upgrade potential & limited memory/CPU power, truly smart programmers were doing things on those machines that weren't thought possible in order to get a bit more power for a demo or game on Commodore Amigas and C64s, Atari STs, etc. etc. because they didn't have the option of GPU upgrades and all that good stuff that they do now.

        Yep, I sound like an old git b

      • Yeah, but they are giving us a refreshing twist to the old and boring 'but will it run linux' jokes.

  • This is off-topic, I suppose, for discussing the article at HotHardware, rather than the video card.

    But anyway, here goes.

    Cinebench R10 3D Rendering This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The time it took each test system to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below, listed in seconds.

    So it took between 10852 and 10911 seconds to render the scene?

    Yet at the same time, the graph says "higher

    • Re:Zzzzzz! (Score:5, Funny)

      by pandrijeczko (588093) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @09:20AM (#22782906)
      Dear Slashdot Friends Thank you all for your wonderful support so far for my efforts in trying to get one of each Slashdot moderation type in a single day.

      So far today my posts have achieved several "+1 Insightfuls", two "-1 Offtopics", one "+1 Funny" and one "-1 Redundant".

      Keep them coming, we are almost there! This one alone must be worth a "-1 Troll"!

    • I still prefer AMD chips (even though I may be in the minority) and would like to SLI my cards

      The answer is, or soon will be, to "crossfire" your cards instead.

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