Q9300 & 9800 GTX shipping! (and a mini rant)
The 9800 GTX launch gets pushed back with no explanation to April Fool's Day? I'm half-expecting our orders to be cancelled tomorrow ;-)
Well, I must say that I'm not disappointed with these two products, but they haven't knocked my socks off.
With respect to the Q9300 finally showing up, we're evaluating it as a replacement for the Q6600. As a 45nm chip, we expect to be able to overclock it further than the Q6600, and I'm sure that will prove true, but it has a smaller L2 cache than its predecessor (6MB instead of 8MB.) I think the 12MB cache-equipped Q9450 is going to be our true replacement, but we're still waiting for that to show up. We're offering the chip in the Reactor as of today, and simply promising a significant overclock - a firm target speed will follow once we've worked with enough of them to establish some baselines.
As for the 9800 GTX - the bottom line is, it's very similar to the 8800 GTS 512MB card from an engineering standpoint. That it can perform close to the 8800 Ultra at half the price is impressive. Having said that, it has a smaller memory bandwidth than the 8800 GTX/Ultra (256-bit instead of 384) and comes equipped with 512MB of VRAM - a shocking suprise considering the 8800 GTX had 768MB. That means some games with lots of textures to load will play better on the 8800 GTX than the 9800 GTX. From a marketing perspective, that should never happen. Ever.
It confuses things, and leads to weird situations like the one we have right now on the Reactor's build page. Namely, that it's more expensive to buy a Reactor with an 8800 GTX than the 9800 GTX. Normally we'd quietly remove the 8800 GTX and move on, but the truth is, there are some of you out there who would probably enjoy your gaming experience with the 8800 GTX more, and would benefit from paying a bit more for an older card. I don't remember this ever happening before. In any case, we'll be working very hard to lay out some guidelines in choosing between these cards. For the time being, there are some good articles on Anandtech and Tom's Hardware.
One last thing: we'll also be giving you some advice when considering one or two 9800 GX2s, but I want to point out again because the hype is so omnipresent out there - THIS IS NOT A 1GB CARD! There are 1GB versions of the 8800 GT and 8800 GTS which are true 1GB cards - if you SLI two of them, you get 1GB to work with. The 9800 GX2 is essentially a pair of 8800 GTSs in SLI mode, each with 512MB to work with. Since they are SLI'ed by default, you get 512MB to work with. If you then SLI a pair of GX2s, you get...512MB to work with. It's really incensing me that so many vendors are billing this as a 1GB VRAM solution.
/Soapbox off
Well, I must say that I'm not disappointed with these two products, but they haven't knocked my socks off.
With respect to the Q9300 finally showing up, we're evaluating it as a replacement for the Q6600. As a 45nm chip, we expect to be able to overclock it further than the Q6600, and I'm sure that will prove true, but it has a smaller L2 cache than its predecessor (6MB instead of 8MB.) I think the 12MB cache-equipped Q9450 is going to be our true replacement, but we're still waiting for that to show up. We're offering the chip in the Reactor as of today, and simply promising a significant overclock - a firm target speed will follow once we've worked with enough of them to establish some baselines.
As for the 9800 GTX - the bottom line is, it's very similar to the 8800 GTS 512MB card from an engineering standpoint. That it can perform close to the 8800 Ultra at half the price is impressive. Having said that, it has a smaller memory bandwidth than the 8800 GTX/Ultra (256-bit instead of 384) and comes equipped with 512MB of VRAM - a shocking suprise considering the 8800 GTX had 768MB. That means some games with lots of textures to load will play better on the 8800 GTX than the 9800 GTX. From a marketing perspective, that should never happen. Ever.
It confuses things, and leads to weird situations like the one we have right now on the Reactor's build page. Namely, that it's more expensive to buy a Reactor with an 8800 GTX than the 9800 GTX. Normally we'd quietly remove the 8800 GTX and move on, but the truth is, there are some of you out there who would probably enjoy your gaming experience with the 8800 GTX more, and would benefit from paying a bit more for an older card. I don't remember this ever happening before. In any case, we'll be working very hard to lay out some guidelines in choosing between these cards. For the time being, there are some good articles on Anandtech and Tom's Hardware.
One last thing: we'll also be giving you some advice when considering one or two 9800 GX2s, but I want to point out again because the hype is so omnipresent out there - THIS IS NOT A 1GB CARD! There are 1GB versions of the 8800 GT and 8800 GTS which are true 1GB cards - if you SLI two of them, you get 1GB to work with. The 9800 GX2 is essentially a pair of 8800 GTSs in SLI mode, each with 512MB to work with. Since they are SLI'ed by default, you get 512MB to work with. If you then SLI a pair of GX2s, you get...512MB to work with. It's really incensing me that so many vendors are billing this as a 1GB VRAM solution.
/Soapbox off
posted by Thomas Glen at
3:21 PM
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