9800GTX, ehhh WRONG NAME

New king in town will be 9800 GTX GX2, until nVidia will release it's next monster called GT200 (Source Fudzilla)

Here is their quote;
CES 2008: The biggest chip ever
We've learned that the next generation Nvidia is going to have more than a billion transistors and if made in 55 nanometers it will be the biggest chip that was ever built.As we've said yesterday, 45nm simply won’t be possible this year, and as far as we know GT200 will be 55nm or, in worst case, 65nm. We have received mixed information on this particular matter.It will be an interesting chip to compete with and it is scheduled for the second half of the year. It will definitely be significantly bigger than R700, but only when you understand that R700 is two, rather than one, chip.

So much for 9800GTX :)

What hardware components to buy in the end of 2007

There are a lot different build it your own guides online. Most of them are linked to online hardware stores so you can build your new PC as you read the article.

In the past years i made some recommendation for my friends regarding hardware, and has also build a lot of systems. And more are asking me to either build a PC for them or recommend what to buy right now.

In this article i will come with recommendation about a good, not top of the line, gaming system. When someone asks me for recommendation, i usually ask them what are you going to use PC for. Some are just surfing, typing documents and so on, some are playing games, but in my head you are going to play some games even if you are just using your PC as a word proccesor or just for surfing. So i'm going to recommend to build a cheap gaming system in this article, cause as long as you play modern games on your system, you will be able to run simple internet explorer og word proccesor, or even to edit your family pictures on it.

For pricing i'm going to use www.newegg.com, cause i have good experience with that service.

So first of we're going to start with a case, case is something that houses all your components, as well as must be something that looks good compared to other components in your room. It's also have to be quiet.
For that i recommend Antec Sonata III Black, cause it's black,quiet and comes with a 500W PowerSupply.

Next is motherboard, since i'm going to build my system around nVidia video card and Intel Core2 CPU cause they give a good combination together, i'm not going to go for SLI combination
cause that will add more power requerment to this system and i'm not that fan on nforce 6 series motherboard.
So i'm goind to use ASUS P5K-E a good alround motherboard with plenty of upgrade possibilities.

For CPU i'll choose Core2 E6550 cause of it performence for price rating.

Now Memory, i'll need fast RAM and a lot of it, so we will use Mushkin PC8500 4x1GB sticks. Good price for performance.

Harddrive, you will need space if not now, i'll guarntee you will need it later, we going to use 2 of Seagate Barracuda 7200 500GB, i hvae good experience with it, quiet and fast. We will set up a Raid 0 (striping) What it does is that system writes to both drives, and that adds speed. Lets say you are copying a file om 10MB, system will put 5MB on one drive and 5MB on another. You will however loose everithing if one drive gets bad, but thats why i choose Seagate. Allways have your backup stored on multiple locations!!!

Now i will need a cd/dvd player recorder, i'll use a blu ray burner, Philips SPD7000BD, it's expensive, but in one drive you get, CD/DVD burner and Blu ray DVD reader/burner.

Now the last and most impotant component, video card, nvidia released a new version of 8800GTS 512MB this fall, it's a good card, fast,cheap and good performer. eVGA 8800GTS G92.

Now since we are building complete system, you will also need, keyboard/mouse and screen.

Keyboard/mouse combos are great, we'll use Logitech diNovo combo, it looks as good as it performs.

Screen, you will need a good display, fast and big. Nothing beats BenQ 24Inch, it's huge and fast.

So there you have it a good, fast allround gaming system, Price as of today: 2530$ without shipping.

9800GTX True or Hoax?

Well, I should have done my research better, i'm sorry if anyone got angry reading my first post.

After crawling the web for several hours today and yesterday i've come to a conclusion that nvidia 9800GTX will most probably never exist. And if nvidia is to release a succesor to 8800 series it will most probably be called something else.

Look at it this way, ATI/AMD does not have a worthy opponent to 8800 series, even the newly released ATI 38XX series. As long this remains nvidia have nothing to gain from releasing a new product, they still earn a pretty chunk on 8800 series. And for the love of free market i hope AMD/ATI release something powerfull pretty soon, or we will see nvidia xx00 something at price of over 1000$.

If we are to see new product from nvidia why will not be called 9800GTX? Well here is my thought about that one. AMD released 9000 series based on R300 in 2002 to deal with nvidia TI4xxx series, and they did a good job until nvidia released new product. That again resulted in ATI releaseing an upgraded version R350 which was called 9800, surely they didnt call them GTX or GTS or even GT, they called them SE, SE Ultra, XT, PRO etc. But even so I don't think nvidia will choose 9800 name, partly for the reason that their main competitor has allready used it or partly because of the marketing.

just to be frank, i'm tired of numbers, and if nvidia stick to numbers use roman numbers so 9800GTX could be something like XCVIII or call it GeForce 9 series. It will be harder to pronounce, but i think people will be more interested. I will at least.

By the way, any one knows than Assasins Creed will be realesed for PC platform?

New King of the Benchmarks? Probably.

I've had mine eVGA 8800GTX ACS3 KO edition since it came out (almost a year now), it was supplemendet by another GTX ACS3 KO, this autumn, and man do i really notice improvement.

It's not until Crysis and World In Conflict came out, that i was really able to see the RAW power og eVGA 8800 GTX ACS3 KO running in SLI on my beatiful Aplle 30" Screen. Running at beatifull 2560x1600 resolution. Awesome.


But now there a rumors about a new king comming to town, i first heard about 9800GTX in october, and release date was predicted to be around November 2007, now its soon january 2008 and nothing happend. I don't blame nvidia not releasing 980GTX that soon, there is no need to do it, cause 8800GTX and 8800Ultra are still kings, and 8800GTS 512MB edition is a good value for money card.

I still hope that they will release it soon, for a equipment junkie like me, i really need something new, so i can build a new system.

Here are specs for 9800GTX vs. 8800GTX (G92 specs are still just rumors):
G92
- 65nm process technology at TSMC.
- Over one billion transistors.
- Second Generation Unified Shader Architecture.
- Double precsion support (FP64).
- GPGPU native.
- Over one TeraFLOPS of shader processing power.
- MADD+ADD configuration for the shader untis (2+1 FLOPS=3 FLOPS per ALU)
- Fully Scalar design.
- 512-bit memory interface.
- 1024MB GDDR4 graphics memory.
- DirectX 10.1 support.
- OpenGL 3.0 Support.
- eDRAM die for "FREE 4xAA".
- built in Audio Chip.
- built in tesselation unit (in the graphics core"
- Improved AA and AF quality levels

G80

	GeForce 8800 GTX	GeForce 8800 GTS
Stream (Shader) Processors	128	96
Core Clock (MHz)	575	500
Shader Clock (MHz)	1350	1200
Memory Clock (MHz) x2	900	800
Memory amount	768 MB	640 MB
Memory Interface	384-bit	320-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	86.4	64
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)	36.8	24

So as you can see, as long as you have appropriate platform to support it, and by that i mean New Dual Core or Quad Core CPU, DDR3 Memory and a motherbord that supports PCI.X ver 2.0, it will probably be an ass kicker. Until than, i hope nVidia holds it back.



For whose who are interested here is my current setup:

Case: Lian-Li V1200BPLUSSII
Mainboard: Asus Striker Extreme s775
Power Supply: Enermax Galaxy 1000W
Memory: 4 GB Mushkin XP2-9200 4x1GB DDR2
CPU: Inter Core 2 Extreme x6800 (I know it’s old, but it damn good)
VGA: 2x eVGA 8800GTX KO ACS3 running in SLI
HDD: 2xWD RaptorX 150GB in Raid 0 SATA
HDD1: 2xSeagate 1TB (ST31000340NS) in Raid 0 SATA
Screen: Apple Cinema 30" + EIZO ColorEdge 24inW

OS: Dual boot Vista Ult. 64Bits and WinXP Pro 32Bits

It is still a damn good setup, but i experience FPS drops in Crysis below 30FPS everything set on ultra. So i think it's soon time to upgrade.