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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KayKay - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
G70 in second Week of June??! Take That ATI! ;)ryanv12 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Yeah, it doesn't seem there's enough capacity to make it worth getting one of these. Even if you got 4x1GB, with the cheapest 1GB sticks on newegg costing ~ $80, You're looking at $320 for 4 Gigs. I'm sure there'll be will uses for this, but it's not enough space to put an OS or Games. With that said, I wonder who's going to be the first person to buy two of these, fill them up with 4GB each, and then run a Raid 0 :Pmrwxyz - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
#2 and #5you would need a lot of memory to install games and windows or whatver you wanted onto it, and even then its limited to 4 slots. How much memory would you be willing to buy for that? Awsome idea...but i can't see how someone could actually use it (unless u were willing to get 4x1gb modules)...
Dukemaster - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I think Ati is playing it smart here. I wouldn't be suprised if the G70 is a 24 pipes gpu and when their almost on the shelve then Ati announces it's R520 is a 32 pipe gpu.davecason - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
That Gigabyte DDR RAMDISK looks a lot like an updated/improved version of the Cenatek Rocket Drive:http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm
The advantages are a much lower price and no OS/driver dependency.
mjz - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
#2.. just have a batch file run during the shutdown.. i soo want a solid state drive too!Visual - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
ECS are nutsxsilver - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
$50 for the cpu upgrade card when a whole nforce 4 board can be had for under $100? surely they must be joking.... needs to be nearer $25 to have some real useCrassus - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
if you could put that Gigabyte card in tandem with a harddisk, so that data would be written to the HDD at power-down - or that battery could get a direct connection to a power socket - that would truely transform computing. Imagine having your OS on that one instead of a Raptor :c)Is there any info on its intended availibility for retail?
shabby - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Yay g70 :)