I thought the 8800 was quite a big card. I’ve had a couple of them, and they seemed to get a little stockier each time, such that the term ‘card’ seemed a little disingenuous - ‘brick’ would have been a more accurate term. A beautiful looking brick admittedly, shiny and black and with Lambourghini-esque tailorings, but still more cuboid than you might ideally desire.
However, due to the near insatiable demands of a project I’m working on at the moment, the second-generation 8800 GTS that has sat in my main dev machine for all of about 2 months has now been replaced again, this time with a shiny new 9800 GX2. And boy, this sucker is big - a good 1.5 inches longer than the 8800 GTS, and even more brick-like. I almost couldn’t stop myself humming Strauss to myself as I took it out of the box. My case isn’t what I would consider small, but if it had been literally 1mm shorter, this beast would not have fitted - as it is, the back of it is touching the edge of the lower drive bay, which I had to reorganise a bit to ensure adequate airflow, such that either the GX2 or the drive bay has to be inserted / removed precisely vertically to avoid the sort of grinding that makes you wince when you’re dealing with several hundred quids worth of electronics.
Being basically 2 cards glued together, it also requires 2 dedicated power connections too, one 8-pin and one 6-pin. Thank goodness for the new modular PSU I bought a couple of months back!
Despite dominating the inside of my case like an ominous black tombstone, once everything was back together I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t really notice any noise difference. Or maybe I’m just deaf to fan noise by now, having sat next to several whirring boxes for far too long. It’s given me a nice hefty speed boost though, clocking in at just over double the speed of the previous card in the most favourable of cases. As Vader would say: impressive.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Dammit, now I have that “duuun, duuun, duuuuuuun… DUN DUN” bit stuck in my head.
I might be in the market for an 8800… or a 9600, depending on how it compares. I need something quiet, though… I don’t want to end up like those astronauts who fall over clutching their heads…
May 20th, 2008 at 2:09 am
According to rumors Nvidia will release new high-end GeForce GTX 200 family between June 16th and June 20th. Initially GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 will be released. They also say for the high end there will be 240 stream processors. Sigh, technology
May 20th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Yeah, I’ll savour this brief moment of having the fastest single card on the market, I know it won’t last
May 21st, 2008 at 2:32 am
Sounds like it’s time to run the Crysis demo again and crank the graphics to high. Let us mere mortals know it looks will ya?
May 21st, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Running Crisis on high at 1920×1200 is barely playable on 8800 GTX SLI … (25-30 fps)
At this point, I don’t think there is a combination of hardware that can run this game at comfortable speeds at high resolutions.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:26 pm
I’m pretty sure it’s been reported that the 9800 GX2 1GB GDDR3 can run Crysis on High at 1900×1200 around 40fps. Sounds playable to me. Although, I’m not sure if Steve has a monitor at that resolution anyway.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:46 am
voodoo volt comes to my mind. dracula never dies.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
I have a GeForce FX 5600 because my motherboard doesn’t support any of the later ones.