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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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.