Scads of hot new video cards!
We're finally recovering from the analysis of the new video cards from AMD/ATI and nVidia! What a mess, but in a fantastic way. We're very happy to announce that AMD/ATI has finally shipped a product we can get behind. The Radeon HD 4850 costs $200, which is the same price that the 9800 GTX was dropped to, and it outperforms the 9800 GTX in almost every benchmarked game we've seen (except Unreal Tournament 3). Sometimes it wins by just a few points, but it's usually 20%-40% faster, which is a very pleasant surprise.
While this means it no longer makes a lot of sense to go with the 9800 GTX, we chose not to slot the HD 4850 as a replacement stock card for the Reactor, since the price point is closer to what we designed the Ion to use. Consequently, the Ion now offers a lot more bang for your buck than it did yesterday, thanks to AMD! In order to support Crossfire (the AMD version of SLI) we had to switch to an Intel chipset-based motherboard for the Ion, which suits us fine, since we've had our eyes on the Intel P45 chipset for a while now anyway. (The default Ion motherboard is a more affordable P35 version.)
On the Reactor front, things are even more exciting. nVidia's GTX-200 series cards are turning out to be almost everything we hoped for (and we were hoping for a lot!) The GTX 260 is our new "stock" card, with upgrades availible to the 9800 GTX (mostly as a path to quad-core, which we still hope will see performance increases as time goes on) and the pricy but undisputed new performance king - the GTX 280. We offer three of those in Tri-Sli mode, just in case you were wondering what to do with that mortgage payment this month.
Following in the Ion's footsteps, we've introduced a lower-priced baseline motherboard in the Reactor - the 750i SLI - in order to help offset the effect of switching to a more-expensive baseline GPU. The 750i is almost identical to the 780i, with a few reduced features:
1. SLI is limited to two-way at 8x, as opposed to up to three-way at 16x
2. One ethernet port as opposed to two
3. Memory speed is limited to 800 MHz (possibly 900, but not 1066)
4. Only four SATA devices, as opposed to six
5. Eight USB ports instead of ten
Otherwise, the overclocking capability is the same, and the gaming performance is nearly identical. And now I finally get to pass out. 'night!
While this means it no longer makes a lot of sense to go with the 9800 GTX, we chose not to slot the HD 4850 as a replacement stock card for the Reactor, since the price point is closer to what we designed the Ion to use. Consequently, the Ion now offers a lot more bang for your buck than it did yesterday, thanks to AMD! In order to support Crossfire (the AMD version of SLI) we had to switch to an Intel chipset-based motherboard for the Ion, which suits us fine, since we've had our eyes on the Intel P45 chipset for a while now anyway. (The default Ion motherboard is a more affordable P35 version.)
On the Reactor front, things are even more exciting. nVidia's GTX-200 series cards are turning out to be almost everything we hoped for (and we were hoping for a lot!) The GTX 260 is our new "stock" card, with upgrades availible to the 9800 GTX (mostly as a path to quad-core, which we still hope will see performance increases as time goes on) and the pricy but undisputed new performance king - the GTX 280. We offer three of those in Tri-Sli mode, just in case you were wondering what to do with that mortgage payment this month.
Following in the Ion's footsteps, we've introduced a lower-priced baseline motherboard in the Reactor - the 750i SLI - in order to help offset the effect of switching to a more-expensive baseline GPU. The 750i is almost identical to the 780i, with a few reduced features:
1. SLI is limited to two-way at 8x, as opposed to up to three-way at 16x
2. One ethernet port as opposed to two
3. Memory speed is limited to 800 MHz (possibly 900, but not 1066)
4. Only four SATA devices, as opposed to six
5. Eight USB ports instead of ten
Otherwise, the overclocking capability is the same, and the gaming performance is nearly identical. And now I finally get to pass out. 'night!
posted by Thomas Glen at
1:13 AM
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