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!

The new high-end cards from nVidia were "launched" today: the GTX 260 and the GTX 280. Here's a chart of the most important specs, compared to the 9800-series cards they're effectively replacing. We also included the 8800 GTX, which until now was a better choice than the 9800 cards for gamers with 24" or larger monitors:


The G92-based 9800 cards were a bit disappointing - the GPU was faster than the previous kings of video (the G80-based 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra) but the memory bandwith and video memory were smaller, resulting in older technology beating out the newer in many cases.

That isn't going to happen this time around. The new cards have higher bandwidth and more video memory than either the 9800 or 8800 cards, along with a beast of a GPU that doubles the number of transistors. At $400, the GTX 260 is a clear choice over the 8800 GTX (finally) and unless Quad-SLI suddenly picks up a huge burst of effectiveness out of the blue, there's no reason to buy a 9800 GX2 any more either. (Don't be fooled by the 256 stream processors on the GX2 - half is dedicated to each GPU, and the net effect is less than a single card with that many SPs.)

In fact, the $400 GTX 260 is probably going to outperform the 9800 GTX by a wide enough margin that saving $100 won't justify choosing the latter, but we'll post benchmarks along those lines as soon as we get one.

Which brings us to availability. The GTX 280 is up to bat first, supposedly shipping in the next few days. Time will tell if this card is simply overpriced, which is a definite possibility. The GTX 260 should follow sometime in the next two weeks. We'll post some more information shortly.

New high-end video cards coming soon!

nVidia is (thank god) going to release some new video cards later this month which will finally be an obvious choice over the aging but astoundingly long-lived 8800 GTX. The two cards being announced are what might have been called the 9900-series, but now go by the term GTX 200-series:

GTX 260 - 896MB of GDDR3 VRAM $450ish
GTX 280 - 1GB of GDDR3 VRAM $650ish

The larger amounts of memory and bandwidth in these cards are going to make them exactly what we'd hoped the 9800-series would be, but wasn't. Launch day is the 18th, but we don't know how quickly the cards will actually show up. If the 9800 launch was any indication, we won't have to wait long. Also, ATI's new RV770-based video cards will launch about the same time, and is aimed at the same market. It's too early to say if they will be worth considering yet, but June/July is getting interesting.

This news doesn't affect Ion sales, but if you're looking at our Reactors, you might want to wait a couple of weeks.