- Saturday, 28 November 2009
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Gerrymander: To re-draw the boundaries of districts to give a party an undue advantage
ATI HD 4870 X2 Nvidia-buster is here
WE ARE QUICKLY running out of screen real-estate to cater to the performance of mainstream and high-end graphics cards. It’s true. Unless you can fork out $1500 for a 30-incher, you won’t enjoy the performance on ATI’s latest battleship… and even then we wonder…
HardOCP has nabbed two (yes, two) HD 4870 X2s from the ATI stable, dismantled them, snapped some pics, put them together again and benchmarked everything Brent could get his hands on. Oh, and he got a couple of OC’d BFG GTX 280 and tied them down on the railway line.
Nvidia puts up a fight in Crysis, but that’s about it. The ATI card is ahead of its competitor the rest of the time. However, we should warn you that you have to be careful when looking at the numbers, as ATI’s best is a dual-GPU setup, drawing a lot more power than a (single GPU) GTX 280, and offers 20-30% performance gains over the latter. This is a mixed bag of goodies, as the fanboi crowd will rapidly gear into turbo and start throwing 2 GPUs vs. 1 GPU arguments around. The bottom line will come down to pricing, wethinks. QuadFire gets you ridiculously-high-yet-playable AA settings, by the way.
So here it is, HardOCP’s preview (we won’t call it a review, ‘cos officially it isn’t retailing) of the ATI HD4870X2, QuadFire included.
On a totally different note, Silent PC Review is getting it on with Nvidia’s 8300-series chipset on an Asus M3N78 Pro motherboard. We haven’t seen nearly enough reviews covering this chippery, but Lawrence says there’s a bit of a shortage of these mobos on the market. This is an AMD solution, and once again, excels at low power computing and home entertainment tasks. It really looks like a clean design from the photos, and you will be happy to be able to have room for air circulation, if you want an HTPC case for it. Look it up, here.
Hexus is looking at the Enermax MODU82+, a 625W power supply that claims very high efficiency. It’s semi-modular, with the 12-pin PCIe, SATA and molex sockets being fully modular. You’ll probably stumble on that one. 12-pin PCIe sockets. Yeah. It’s a 625W power supply with a “future proof” cabling system – although we’re afraid 625W isn’t likely to be running you QuadFire or TriSLI any time soon. Still it’s a good design with over 85% measured efficiency according to Tarinder. Pricey, tho’. Read on.
Corsair’s XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600 EPP2.0 memory is targeting very high end PCs, at least from what we read here at Technic3D (click here for Googlenglish). You know… the kind you stick extremely expensive CPUs in. Its overclocking potential and memory timings are quite good and surprisingly they don’t cost an arm and a leg (at least by €uropean standards). €245 for the kit at a prominent Austrian e-tailer. Remember these look like really big combs and you’ll need some headroom to install them. Don’t go shoving them into any old case.
With Bastille Day comes a small trickle of Iphone 3Gee reviews. We’ve only managed to find a few, that’s for sure, as most plaices are afraid the local Apple rep will take away their toys if they don’t have prior consent. The courageous chappies at APCMag defied the establishment and got an iPhone anyway, proceeding to thoroughly review it and rub it in Apple’s face. Gizmodo and Engadget, the Yin and Yang of gadgets have also posted their own reviews, at their own expense, we believe.
Here’s the short list, in no particular order
… and the Holy Trinity that got into the action before everyone else…
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better get Paul in line with Charlie's program. Calling an Nvidia product good? Charlie will have your head mate. You're praising the ebil green giant for a motherboard. Obviously you're on some sort of sauce.
charlie has a program?

naaahhhhhh
Or they aren't giving us much. I can pick up a GTX280 for $445 at newegg (ASUS after rebate). Since this card won't be out for another month or so by then Nvidia will have a die shrunk chip out that speeds up GTX280 a bit and makes it cheaper to produce. Something tells me this card will be $600. Which will make a faster GTX280 (die shrunk/sped up 10-15%?) look pretty good at $460 or less. Sure ATI will still be faster (20-25%? after nvidia speeds up GTX280) but if it's more than $525 you end up just getting what you paid for over NV but not much else. On top of that what happens if NV throws two on one card also? We know they can do the same as AMD, they already have with 9800GX2 etc. Something tells me ATI's crown is short lived. I'll be shocked if AMD sells this 4870x2 for less than $550. 

Then we have the problem of GDDR5. There's nowhere near enough GDDR5 for any of us to buy these in quantity. So NV will still sell a ton of GTX280's no matter how you look at it if you're considering $400+ cards. By the time GDDR5 ramps, NV will surely have GTX280X2 model not to mention the die shrink on GTX280 done. The landscape hasn't changed much methinks. AMD's about to post another Billion loss, and NV is about to post a break even or 20mil loss or so (due to the 200mil charge for crappy manufacturer choice...which they'll get back later anyway from whoever made them). 

ATI is completely written down now (I think...they wrote off 40%, which is about what they overpaid for it...stupid RUIZ!) but these vid cards won't bail out the cpu sinking ship so no profit next quarter either. When will AMD fire hecter? Cramer has him on the wall of shame for Christ's sake! How much further down can their stock go before nobody will give them a loan to stay afloat? Shanghai better be REALLY good and ON TIME or we won't see DAAMIT's next vid card. On another note: Charlie should give me whatever he's been smoking, cause AMD has no easy ride ahead. They have to stay afloat to sell these cards ya know? They can start by charging more for 4870. It's better than GTX260 why charge so little? I love the price as a buyer but hate that these prices won't help them stay alive.
I just want a card that can give me a solid 30 FPS at 1920x1200 for every game I play (or will play) over the next 2 years and it looks like the X2 will deliver that.
the people at hardocp use more AA (24x CFAA) on the ATI card and it still performs 30% better. i think the author of this article should include that and also how the ati card would give more than 30% increase in performance than a GTX280.
A lot of people will think I'm nuts for saying that, so I'll explain. First of all, I'm a firm believer in the philosophy,"The crowd is always wrong." This goes double for investors. If a stock is going up, people will jump on it like it's candy. If it goes down, people will abandon ship. The trick is, and I'm not saying I'm an expert on this trick(definitely not) is to jump onto a company that seems to be in a horrible position and hope they recover. If they go bankrupt, that's unfortunate, but if you purchase after everyone has abandoned the stock, and then they recover, HOO BOY!!! It's the exact same thing that was done during the Great Depression, everyone was selling their stocks(yes, I know that some had no choice), but anyone who was able to ride it out and have a little left over had the potential to cash in BIG TIME!!!

That's the reason I'm investing in AMD. Everybody thinks they're a down and out company. They've always been a small player in the market, but that means they have more potential, for the company AND the stock. Nobody in the their right mind believes Intel could double their sales in a year or two, but for really high gains in sales, AMD has a chance, however small, where Intel may have almost none.

I may lose my shirt(It's about 3 months worth of my labor invested in that stock), but I believe that if AMD makes a comeback, they're going to make a HUGE comeback.

And that's the kind of thinking that differentiates the millionaires from the 9to5ers. If you're trying to win big, you need to be prepared to lose big.