Computex 2004 Early Bird Coverage: NV45 in the Flesh, New Chipsets, BTX Boards and more...
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 31, 2004 12:31 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
NVIDIA's NV45
The surprise of the show was a brief encounter with NVIDIA's upcoming NV45, NVIDIA's PCI Express successor to the strong performing NV40 (GeForce 6800 Ultra).
At first glance, the NV45 card looks like a normal 2-slot NVIDIA graphics card:
Upon closer look you'll notice that this particular card has a PCI Express x16 interface, but with no bridge chip. It looks like the rumors of a bridgeless NV45 were true.
Glare at the card even more and you'll see that the card only has one power connector and it's not a standard power connector at that. The new NV45 connector is a 3 x 2 power connector, definitely not one we've seen on any other component before.
Here's what we do know about NV45, it's currently running at a 450MHz core clock with 1.1GHz GDDR3 memory; this particular card uses Samsung chips. The 450MHz clock speed is a 12.5% increase in core clock speed over the GeForce 6800 Ultra, with memory speed remaining unchanged.
We're going to try to get much more information about NV45 tomorrow, so check back for more.
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Chuckles - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
It just makes some people's $150 cases become obsolete faster.I just find it funny that a pico (10^-12) BTX is larger than a nano (10^-9) ITX.
Also, what's up with the 24-pin + 4-pin power connectors?
GI2K - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Nice to see that MB based on the intel 9xx with AGP8x,PCI Express 16, DDR and DDR2, a must have for those that want to upgrade slowly...Xentropy - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
#7 - These are PicoBTX boards, meant for desktop rather than tower systems. So if you just think of the front of the desktop case as being on the right side of the board, with the board laying down in the bottom of the case, it isn't really upside-down.Just curious, what is "stupid" about moving the motherboard to the other side of a tower case? Doesn't seem to really change anything to me.
Araemo - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Hrm.. On motherboards with PCI-express and AGP...Will both be enabled at the same time in the bios? Will windows be able to handle both at once?
/me has dreams of dual head x800 + his current 9700 pro.. or would that be quad head?
I know it wouldn't be much use for gaming, but I LOVE high res + ultra high refresh rate, so I need decent cards to drive the big screens.
AtaStrumf - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Interesting stuff. Keep it comming :)Nighteye2 - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Interesting...but with the memory and the Athlon 64, there's one thing I really want to know: will the dual core Athlon's AMD is planning have dual memory controllers, too? Given the stellar memory performance of dual-opteron systems under a UMA-enabled OS (Longhorn will be UMA-enabled), it would certainly make sense to give each core it's own memory. And if they upgrade the memory controllers to support QBM by that time...>:)sprockkets - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Oh, and aren't those pico BTX motherboards upsidedown? One of the stupidest features of BTX is the fact that the case now opens on the right side, not left. So if it was facing right the I/O ports should be on the left, not right.sprockkets - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Yeah, but is that board from Asrock dual channel with just 2 slots? The only real advantage I see to getting a 939 processor is the fact you can have 2 more slots of memory.ZobarStyl - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
man that x600 is just silly...PCI-X and a mem clock boost isn't going to change the fact that it's only a 9600XT...anyone getting a PCI-X board is going to want to actually use that extra bandwidth for something worthwhile...at least, I hope so.thatsright - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
A great initial article to whet everyone's appetite. And it's nice to see Anand back writing again.