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
NVIDIA’s G70 at the Show
NVIDIA plans on sticking it to ATI with G70 and offering widespread availability of their new GPU very soon. Manufacturers at the show have already indicated that the first shipments of G70 boards will be in their hands by the second week of June.
Boards are on display at the show, behind closed doors of course. Of course, in Taiwan nothing is ever secret - and thus we’ve had the ability to play around with a number of G70 cards at the show. We can’t say much about the G70 as we are bound by NDA, but all of the cards at the show are single-slot solutions which is refreshing.
Only a handful of NVIDIA’s closest partners have been given G70 designs to show off at Computex, the rest are told to wait until further notice.
We also heard about a new ATI card, but not the R520 we’ve all been waiting for, rather a replacement for the X300 - the Radeon X550. Like the X300, the X550 is a 4-pipe GPU but now running at 400MHz. The GPU is also paired with a 128-bit 200MHz DDR memory bus, but little is known beyond those specs.
So far the R520 is no where to be found at the show; it’s looking like the rumors of a late release of R520 may be true. ATI’s focus at Computex 2005 seems to be their multi-GPU chipset that is due to be launched at the official opening of the show.
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dmctaggart - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
BTW where is the $50 ram card?Anandtech says:
Prices
Newegg.com $88.00
Amazon Marketplace $91.54
Monarch Computer Systems $87.00
dmctaggart - Thursday, July 14, 2005 - link
Since when do you need hardware to have a ramdrive?Hookup a ups to a ram drive? Why not just hook it up to your computer if you don't want to lose the ramdrive?
Buy the slowest ram you can for your hardware swap drive?
Why not have a ramdrive using the fast ram you have installed on your computer and aim your swapdrive at it?
I think everyone has gone buggy.
Danno
flloyd - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link
Accroding to this article, the PCI slot powers it up while the computer is off and therefore the battery is only for when it is unplugged or during a power outage.http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/01/HNxpwind...
drag0n - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link
how about this:1-set your PC to boot off SATA first as in:
no OS goto harddrive
OS goto SATA ramdisk
2-mirror your xp install to your 4G ramdisk
3-reboot
4-configured for ALL OS functions running off the SATA ramdisk (including swapfile, temps, etc.)
5-never leave your PC off for more than 16 hrs.
*grin*
MrHaze - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link
I'd really like to run the Gigabyte ramdisk for my pagefile.The key factor would be finding slow (cheap) RAM.
My thoughts on more system memory vs. ramdisk:
Yeah, more system memory is obviously better. But with system memory you're trying to milk every bit of speed you can--and that's expensive. Most folks top out around 2gb or even 1gb. 4Gb is troublesome.
It seems that a cheap 2-4 gb ramdisk for the pagefile would be an excellent addition to 2Gb of system memory.
Question:
Why don't DIMM manufacturers make something like this? Seems like they could build a big PCB with 4+ gb of appropriate and cheap RAM chips (instead of whole DDR DIMMS designed for a completely different application). One big-ass memory module. Wouldn't this be a more elegant and cost-effective solution?
Mr. Hayes
myne1 - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
Actually, nevermind my last comment.This is an absolutely awesome way of doing it.
Gigabyte; please pat your engineers on the back.
Any word on eta/avaliability?
I want one now! Now as in yesterday :D
myne1 - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
WOW!2 months ago I posted my ideas about a PCI-E based RAM card on OCAU and a couple of other forums. I even emailed a couple of big-name companies, but not gigabyte. My mistake it seems :/
(link to my post : http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t...
The concept drawing is crude, but I still hope that someone makes it. Even in 1x mode it'll have nearly 4x the bi-directional bandwith of PCI.
http://www.users.on.net/~jvizard/myne/RAMcard.JPG
Gigabyte, if you're reading this, pretty please :)
EODetroit - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
Because you can buy cheap ram for the board, and it won't hurt performance. The limiting factor will be the sata connection, not the ram speed.Whereas there's problems with 4GB of system memory, such as many OS' not liking that much, many motherboards not supporting that much, and if you want to run at DDR400 you're going to have to buy expensive ram.
Also some of that system memory would have to go towards the system and not the ram disk... in the end you'll probably max out at a 3GB ram disk or so. And finally with the add-in boards you could raid two of them together to create ram disks > 4GB in size, which would otherwise be impossible since no ram disk software seems to support sizes over 4GB, at least on Windows.
oupei - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
If you're willing to buy 4gb of ram to put on the ramdrive, why not just put it on the mobo and just have 4gb of ram?unless you want it for startup, i don't see why anyone would want it.
justly - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Also, thanks for the URL. I haven't read it yet (SFF is not a priority for me) but I will make sure to read it. thanks again.