Affordable Modern Graphics Cards 484
EconolineCrush writes "If graphics cards that cost more than a mortgage payment make your wallet quiver, it's worth checking out ATI's Radeon X700 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 series. Both are based on cut down versions of latest and greatest graphics chips, but at under $200, they sell for a fraction of the price of high-end cards. What's more, these $200 wonders outperform last year's $500 cards, sometimes by embarrassingly large margins. The Tech Report has in-depth reviews of both the GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 XT if you're in the market for a next-gen graphics card that's a little more affordable."
What about the $100 range? (Score:5, Informative)
These are good $200 cards, no doubt. But it looks to me as if the sub-$100 cards haven't made as much *relative* progress as the more expensive ones.
Still no AGP version (Score:3, Informative)
Somewhere later in October or November.
ATI Linux driver "push" (Score:5, Informative)
This Inquirer [theinquirer.net] story says that ATI will be beginning a big "Linux driver push" in the next couple of weeks - a driver based upon their Catalyst drivers, supposesly giving a speed boost to DoomIII.
Personally, I'd just like drivers that don't segv under Xorg 6.8.0
Re:A mortgage payment!!!???? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Beat last years cards? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mac perspective (Score:2, Informative)
From the Quadro FX Features and Benefits page [nvidia.com]:
I suppose they included this feature on the GeForce 6800 for the Mac because they don't make "workstation" Quadro GPUs for the Mac. As you probably know, there is not much difference between their workstation and desktop GPUs. The only big differences (besides price) are which features are enabled/disabled and drivers. I'm sure they can include this feature on the 6600, but I'm sure they won't.Re:What about... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why just PCI-E (Score:2, Informative)
120W for an idle video card is quite high. I'm considering a mobile ath64 3400+ powered desktop system, and the CPU only draws 85W. Eventual goal is a fixed mount solar/wind powered watercooled mobile visualization workstation in a camper... because it can be done and because the winters are too long and cold up here in Canada.
$100 is my price point (Score:2, Informative)
I'll go a bit over that if I need to, but that's my target price range.
I paid $109 for my DVD Burner. I paid like $208 for my Processor + Mobo(In my mind about $104 for each of them). I paid about $150 for my HDD.
I got my GeForce 4MX for about $25. I'll probably be getting a new video card some time next year, but whatever I can get in the $100 range is what I'll get. These things depreciate so rapidly, I can't justify spending $200 for a video card.
LK
Re:A mortgage payment!!!???? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sell for a fraction... (Score:3, Informative)
My son just replaced his 8500le with a 9700pro and he is running an old k7s5a mobo with sdram and an underclocked XP2400. He just get Rome total war yesterday and it runs great at 1024x768 with all the eyecandy on.
Financially, it's a good thing to stay a generation or two behind on graphics cards. With these new cards, 9800 pros will be under $150.
Re:I don't know what they are thinking. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rats (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A mortgage payment!!!???? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A mortgage payment!!!???? (Score:2, Informative)
Below is the US INCOME distribution. The asset distribution is even crazier, with the top 1% owning about 43% of US wealth, and the bottom 40% owning less than a 1%. If you go below the bottom 25th percentile, most of those people have what we call negative ownership, where they owe more than they own. Many in this bracket will pay substantial portions of their income in interest. Go to the top of the income distribution pile, and you'll find that quite a few make most of their money from interest and other dividends off what they own.
From the Census Bureau [census.gov] [census.gov] for 2001:
Re:Heat? (Score:5, Informative)
If you make a chip, and then you improve your chip-making technology so that you can draw thinner traces, you can perform a "die shrink": you produce a similar chip design, using the smaller traces, and the whole chip takes up a smaller amount of space. You can buy some graphics cards that are basically an older GPU with a die shrink; they dissipate very little heat and are inexpensive. A GeForce4 MX (budget card) was basically a GeForce 3 with a die shrink, IIRC.
Chips are made from silicon wafers. One whole wafer is "fabbed" (made in a chip fabrication plant), then cut up for individual chips. The more chips per wafer, the cheaper each chip is. (This is all the more true because flaws can happen during the fabbing process; if one flaw means one dead chip, then more chips per wafer means a similar number of flaws results in a lower percentage of dead chips made, and thus lower costs.)
A smaller trace size makes it easier to push the clock rate higher. But GPUs are definitely clocked lower than CPUs, so that helps them dissipate less heat. If you are pushing a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, and the GPU is only doing 0.7 GHz, clearly that helps the GPU dissipate less heat.
Smaller trace sizes make it harder to make the chip work right; the smaller the traces, the more problems you might have electrically (I don't fully understand the details). Also, you need to be more careful with cooling; a hot chip with a tiny die size needs a really good heatsink, and there is less margin for error. The old, relatively large chips like the 486 family were easy to cool in comparison with today's chips.
Summary:
Smaller trace size means less heat
Lower clock rate means less heat
steveha
Re:Why just PCI-E (Score:3, Informative)