Computex 2005 Early Bird Coverage: NVIDIA's G70, Athlon 64 BTX and more
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 30, 2005 8:53 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Affordable SLI Motherboards?
NVIDIA is very curious about ATI’s upcoming multi-GPU solution, as it will mark the end of NVIDIA’s exclusivity on multi-GPU platforms. In order to help expand the SLI market, NVIDIA appears to be ready to drop the price of their nForce4 SLI chipset. While currently priced at around $80, the chipset will drop in price to close to $40 later this year. The goal is to enable SLI motherboards to be priced at $100 or less. We have even heard some very aggressive motherboard manufacturers are looking to offer sub-$80 nForce4 SLI motherboards by the end of this year. At $80, it would be senseless not to buy a SLI motherboard; which is exactly what NVIDIA wants.
Epox has already demonstrated a concept board to be released later this year; the board is a Socket-754 motherboard but uses NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI chipset.
The idea is that the money you save by going with a Socket-754 CPU goes towards buying a better pair of graphics cards, which will give you better overall gaming performance in the end.
The board is only made possible by NVIDIA cutting the price of their nForce4 SLI chipset. Note that NVIDIA isn’t cutting the prices of their nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipsets nearly as much, only the AMD version.
The biggest reason for NVIDIA dropping the price of their SLI chipsets? ATI.
ATI’s new multi-GPU chipset will be priced on par with NVIDIA’s nForce4 Ultra chipset, not the nForce4 SLI. Need any more explanation?
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justly - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I never really understood the use of a riser card to make a motherboard compatibile with other processors. Well I guess it could be used by review sites to compare processors using the same platform, but other than that what reason would any sane person have for this feature?Anand, I am also curious as how you can still claim that Anandtech has no bias, yet in every Anandtech (or any other sites) articles featuring a SiS chipset, the SiS chipset allways seems to have good showing (please realize I'm talking chipsets not motherboards) yet tou make this comment.
"There are some limitations to the technology; first and foremost, you are stuck with SiS chipsets"
"STUCK WITH SIS CHIPSETS" doesn't that look like bias to you? If you really where unbiased I think you would have worded this differently.
Larso - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Very interesting that solid state. I wonder if you the standby 5V line from the powersupply would have enough juice to keep the memory alive?Adding a rechargeable battery seems like a rather expensive way to fix the problem... And using a programmable FPGA for controller? What is this, still a prototype??
mlittl3 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Yes #20, #27 is right.Read the article a little closer. The PCI slot ONLY provides power. All transfers go through the SATA connector in the upper right of the PCB to your motherboard SATA connector. That will be 150MB/s. The PC recognizes the drive as a SATA drive on startup.
I wonder if they will come out with a SATA II 300MB/s version. That would rock even more. MORE DROOL!
MDme - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
#20it is not limited by the PCI bus since the transfers actually occur over the SATA controller of the mobo.
i think though that it is just SATA 1 so that would limit it to 150mb/s (if it were SATA II then that would be 300mb/s.
Avalon - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
That ECS board is very cool. I don't understand the hoopla over the solid state ram drives, though.Dubb - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I wonder if you could setup one of those cards as a second OS installation, and have it sync'ed with one on a HD - point being that you could boot to the HD if the ramdrive wasn't available/wiped after 16 hours.I'm going to have to wait for reviews + stories of people using the card, but I very well could end up using 2-3 of these things depending on how well they work. the productivity increase would probably be worth whatever they cost.
DDR max? can you even buy that anymore? what about 2gb modules? hmmm.
Brian23 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I will be the first one to own one of these ram-drive cards.Googer - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I love the concept here, but for the amount of money that I would end up spending here I would rather have a couple of 74gb SCSI drives.The one advantage that this card has over installing extra ram on your system is that data stored on this card is bootable and does not have to be dependant on a HDD. Where as adding ram to your PC the data will be gone as soon as you shut down your PC. Also Windows does not treat ram the same way it treats a HDD, but I know there is software that can take care of that.
semo - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
goddamn #21 and all the rest. stop it. i'm running out of drool heredavecason - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
#17 has a good point, you can use a solid-state drive for all kinds of things. In addition to a great swap file:1. Website Hosting: You could store your websites on the fast solid-state disk to improve delivery performance.
2. Database: You could put your database files (logs or data) on the solid state disk to improve request times. You could probably even use a file-based database like Access or FoxPro with some efficiency.
3. Video editing: half the time you spend doing this work is waiting for data to be read from or written back to the hard drive.
4. Dumb Terminals: you could set up a simple BART PE boot image on the solid-state disk to allow a client workstation to boot quickly and access a mainframe, web application, or Terminal Server. They would be expensive but fast. Any data loss could be recovered by simply booting to a CD to reinitialize the drive from the CD's contents.
5. If you had a good backup process, you could put your system boot files on it. Imagine how fast you could hibernate your computer to and from one of these solid-state devices.
You could even make a RAID1 or RAID5 mirror out of these things for some redundancy if you had enough slots and cash.