GeForce 7950 GT Launches With Passive Cooling

An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GT comes with great performance at an attractive $299/£225 launch price. Incredibly, XFX's pre-overclocked card comes with a passive cooling solution. From the article: 'There is no doubting that NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GT is faster and cheaper than the GeForce 7900 GT that launched at the same price point earlier in the year. There is a lot to like about the product, and there is even more to like about XFX's implementation. It's generally a match for ATI's Radeon X1900XT 512MB in popular games.'"

Video card related question

[the_humeister]

With the advent of video cards that are Turing complete in recent years and sites such as this [gpgpu.org], how feasible is it to run an actual operating system on the video card itself? It seems like it would be possible to write a kernel as a shader program, upload it, and just have it run.

cheaper at the same price point?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no doubting that NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GT is faster and cheaper than the GeForce 7900 GT that launched at the same price point earlier in the year.

say what now?

Re:Cooling can always be made active these days.

[jonnykelly]

Gee, ya think? But wasn't the point here that this card got these kind of stats WITHOUT active cooling (and thereby not requiring one to give up another slot as your advice puts forth).

Re:Cooling can always be made active these days.

[gEvil (beta)]

Cooling can always be made active these days.

I'm not entirely sure why you posted that. I think everyone here is aware that you can stick a fan on something to cool it. The point is that most people want passive cooling because it cuts down on the noise.

Re:Cooling can always be made active these days.

[Babbster]

I'm pretty sure the idea is that passive cooling is preferable to active cooling - less noise, less power consumption and no moving part to fail. It's of particular interest to those running HTPC machines - if their case is cool enough, they can have a "real" video card with which to do some serious gaming.

Performance Wise

[Deliveranc3]

There used to be the high end the mid range and the low end, (Radeon 9000pro, 9500pro and 9700pro Geforce 4Ti, 4600 and 4200) this was good the next generation of cards would have the performance of the old top card in it's mid level card and mid would be a bit above the new low end.

Then they moved to 4 levels 6000, 6600GT, 6800GT, 6800 ULTRA (The lineup was more full but these seemed to be the peaks in this particular generation, and the performance of subsequent generations would move one level up 1 became 2 and 2 became 3 etc losing about $50 - 100 a generation.

This addition provided something between high and middle when consumers really wanted something between mid and low.

As a result the high end got split while more and more people clung to the middle which was why the 9500 and 6600GT were so hugely popular as mid range cards.

High end buyers are starting to buy the mid range simply because game designers are realizing that the number of people buying $600 cards is going down and prices are going up as those consumers flee.

Hopefully they will return to the 3 price point system as that seems to be the best for consumers.

To card manufacturers, we're sorry about the press leaks but you better match last generations top model with a mid price card or you're going to get destroyed eventually.

price

[MindStalker]

great performance at an attractive $299/£225 launch price

Wern't we just complaining about the $250 Wii console this morning. And now applauding a $299 graphic card as affordable.

Re:Performance Wise

[imboboage0]

Spot on. I've taken to recommending the mid-range cards over anything. I have had a 6600GT for a little over a year and I couldnt be anything but satisfied. It even OCs well. I wasn't able to drop 500 bucks on a GPU, so I went with the 150 dollar solution: Mid-Range. I think this is where most of the market is (for anything but OEMs anyway) because people don't want to spend an assload on a video card, but they want bang for the buck. It's my belief that the market is concentrated around the mid-range, and it's going to stay that way.

Re:Oh good!

[gbobeck]

For those who just want to see a unit conversion, 110 degrees C is roughly equivalent to 230 degrees Fahrenheit.

Or in more practical (and painful) terms, roughly the same temperature as the coffee spills that burn you in the crotchal area when you hit a bump in the road whilst drinking coffee during your morning commute.

Re:Oh good!

[Zach978]

anyone who passes middle school chemistry knows 100 C = 212 F...even here in the states

Re:price

[evilviper]

Wern't we just complaining about the $250 Wii console this morning. And now applauding a $299 graphic card as affordable.

With a console, you'll actually be paying MSRP for it.

With computer components, it'll take a few weeks before it's selling for half-price, and less.

Re:Good for HTPC type setups

[psymastr]

/. is full of misinformation about 3D performance under linux. Yes, I have an nvidia card, yes, I have the latest drivers and no, id games are not faster under linux. I tried it because I'd read a million times in /. how 3D is better in linux because of better memory/disk management and all that bullshit.

This is certainly not the case. 3D performance is not better in linux than in Windows. It's actually quite a bit worse. Granted, it's probably not because of the OS itself but because nvidia spends more resources on developing drivers for windows than it does for linux.

If you truly get better performance with Q4 under linux, install the latest windows drivers and enable DMA or whatever weird thing you've messed up in windows. Because I did extensive testing with four different timedemos I recorded and they all say the same thing.