NVIDIA Releases new Budget GPUs 108
Dennis Law writes "I was just checking out the latest GPU releases from NVIDIA. Non-gamers will be delighted to hear that NVIDIA also released a budget-edition of their new 7300 series, namely the 7300 LE. 'Targeted at the X1300 LE, this card will be priced lower than the GeForce 7300 GT at a price range of $49 to $69.' Now that's cheap enough for me to afford."
Sounds good (Score:2)
Re:Sounds good (Score:2)
Re:Sounds good (Score:2)
Re:Sounds good (Score:2)
Re:Sounds good (Score:1)
There is no need to be paranoid about this. The grandparent was simply correcting the great grandparent's assumption that this card would have "DX9/10 support".
Admittedly, I had to go re-read the original message to see why the coward said this.
Cheap but not free (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that's cheap enough for me to afford.
It might be cheap enough for you, but it certainly isn't free enough for me.
I use NetBSD and I doubt they'll be porting the proprietary drivers anytime soon.
Re:Cheap but not free (Score:2)
Re:Cheap but not free (Score:2)
I haven't been keeping up. What card/chipset can you get the fastest "non-proprietary" performance out of these days?
It used to be Matrox's line ... a long time ago. I saw a posting elsewhere on this site claiming the radeon r200 chipset drivers were pretty sharp.
Re:Cheap but not free (Score:1)
cheap cards cost more (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree (Score:2)
Re:I disagree (Score:2)
Or - is this card a
Re:I disagree (Score:2, Insightful)
So why not buy a $50 card now and then buy the lowest DX10 card when it comes to market? That would be the smartest penny pincher plan in my book. Since I assume Aero runs better with atleast some kind of DX10.
That is assuming you go for Vista and aren't one of t
Re:I disagree (Score:1)
Re:I disagree (Score:2)
Re:I disagree (Score:1)
It doesn't matter what kind of card you buy, or how cheap it is. If you intend to use its 3d capabilities at all, it's going to cost you AT LEAST 50$ a year. That means the crappy Radeon 9250 you bought for xmas will need to be replaced by next xmas with another
Re:I disagree (Score:2)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
What's the difference between paying $50 per year over three years, or paying $150 once every three years?
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
(And, yeah, it may be fun to poke inside a machine...)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:1)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
I have a GeForce4 MX440 I bought 3 years ago. I've never had to replace it. The thought hadn't even crossed my mind. I've got dual head tv out, opengl scaling for Zsnes, it's fast enough to run epsxe. So wtf are you talking about?
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:1)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
But seriously, I'm in pretty much the same boat. Epsxe is the benchmark for my MX440 too.
I have actually considered an upgrade, but then looked at the prices and thought about how much RAM I could get for the price and how much more that would improve my computing experience.
If these cards come in under AU$100 I might think about it, just to get second head and DVI capability.
If you pretty much only like classic games (like I do) then budget cards are great value.
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:1)
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:2)
In my experience that's not true. First off, lots of potential PC gamers are pretty damn poor. Students, kids, etc. The onboard card doesnt cut it for a variety of reasons. Too laggy in "low," not enough video RAM, etc.
A midrange to low card can give these players enough power to run a lot of games at medium to high (at certain resolutions) for a long time coming. Even when it becomes the equivalant of a geforce2 today it still may beat the onboar
Re:cheap cards cost more (Score:1)
Faulty assumptions (Score:1)
Nobody is forcing you to upgrade. You can quite happily live with cheap cards without having to upgrade all the time. The games system that I am currently in the process of upgrading has a 32MB TNT2 card! As you can imagine, even this 7300LE would be a dramatic upgrade for me.
I can use this low end system because I don't buy the latest games. I can load up an old game like No One Lives Forever without any problems. Now I am finally getting through my backlog of old games that I bought cheap or second hand
Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Something I've been wondering since the first 'celeron'
Re:Why? (Score:2)
but seriously, the cost of fabrication has nothing to do with anything. Jeez, you know what the difference was between a 486DX and 486SX? The last guy in the assembly line would BURN OFF the math coprocessor of the DX's, making them SX's.
What if it cost just as much to manufacture a Civic as a Corvette? There's value in the difference between the cars that people are willing to pay for, and thats the key.
Re:Why? (Score:1)
This is a legend that i wish would die out. Yes, the first 486SXs were DXs with a disabled or (more likely the case) defective math co-pros. After Rev. A, SXs they were different pinout, different case (plastic vs. ceramic), different connector type (BGA vs. pins).
That said, I will admit the 487SX was a bit odd (a 486DX with one pin different). Then again, computers cost a lot more back then.
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:1, Informative)
The wikipedia entry is a good primer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination [wikipedia.org]
Marketing (Score:4, Informative)
It may also be that they have multiple shader units and the ones that have more shaders fail get down-graded and sold at a lower price. Thus increasing process yields since they have to throw out fewer chips. Sort of like the difference between a 386/33 and a 386/25 in the old days.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Working on the assumption that, like some other chips (AMD comes to mind), the features on a chip are enabled after a set of tests are run on it, or are enabled in-chip after passing some internal test, it is reasonable to assume that these are from the same silicon as the high end chips, but are faulty in some way, but not faulty enough that they can't be used. I imagine thats the difference between the 7800 GT/GTX - the GT had several (but not too many) failed shader units, and/or operated stably at a bit less speed than the minimum required for GTX classification.
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Doesn't it cost about the same for them to make a 'cheap chip' as it would an expensive one?
Not necessarily. Chip manufacturing costs are mostly about die size. How many chips can you fit on a single wafer? It's also about yield. That is how many chips per wafer will run at the speed you're shooting for? If you have a small die size, and a lower ghz goal you're going to get a lot of functional chips per wafer. That translates into lower costs.
Nvidia can certainly design a chip that takes up less die s
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Market segmentation [wikipedia.org].
The practice is quite a bit older than the Celeron even in the CPU industry, e.g. the 486SX was basically a 486DX with the math coprocessor disabled (sometimes they were really flawed math cos, but many times they were just disabled).
They do it simply because they maximise profits that way. The general reason they can do it is that the higher end markets are smaller and less price elastic (e.g. if you really need a fast CPU or GPU for what you do, you kinda have to accept the market's
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Lets say the low end GPU can be put on a PCI card and sold for $50 at $10 profit. You can sell a lot of these because they are cheap, but your margins are low.
Now put the high end GPU on a slightly more expensive PCI card and sold for, lets say, $300. Profit is what, somewhere around $200-$250? Sure you won't sell as many, but the margins are quite impressive.
Now it's not quite this simple, but that's the general id
Why (Score:2)
Re:Why (Score:2)
Re:Why (Score:2)
Re:Why (Score:2)
If you don't like it, don't buy an OEM system, but build your own. I might be more expensive, but at least you're not paying the Intel graphics "t
Re:Why (Score:2)
Re:Why (Score:2)
(or at least part of a legal OS. How much is the MS tax nowadays?)
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, believe it or not, most people do not use their PCs for high-end gaming. They may occasionally try to run some hot new resource-sucking game without a clue about the hardware needed to get a good framerate, but for the most part, a Flash app inside their browser counts as the most graphically-intensive app they run.
Now, on the opposite side of that, you have people who will blow $400 on a video card t
Re:Why (Score:2)
Re:Why (Score:2)
Re:I'm gonna get myself an ATidia 666FU (Score:1)
While the reviewers and some lucky people got a 6600 with some barely masked pipes that was labeled a 6200.
Same here, it sucked.
How about some meat? (Score:1)
Oh, I'm wrong am I? How would anybody know? There's no performance comparison given! How fast is this thing? Should I dump my Geforce 2 MX400?
Re:How about some meat? (Score:2)
Re:How about some meat? (Score:1)
Re:How about some meat? (Score:1)
Re:How about some meat? (Score:1)
Wow, I MUST be getting old.... For me, the ideal video card for a server is still the old S3 Trio64+ PCI card. Servers typically run text only or at best have very basic graphics needs, so what in the world would you need someth
Re:How about some meat? (Score:2)
LOL, the first PC system I built had a Trio64 in it. And I did actually end up using it in my linux server a few years back. Did the job just fine.
-Eric
Re:How about some meat? (Score:1)
Re:How about some meat? (Score:2)
Older 3D cards will still eat up electricity and generate heat. I don't really see the point of drawing an extra 20-30W 24/7 so I can have a GeForce card in my headless server.
Re:How about some meat? (Score:2)
Re:How about some meat? (Score:2)
Re:How about some meat? (Score:2)
Foolish salesfolk assume that if you have a cluster you must be doing movie special effects for LOTR and that a 32 inch widescreen LCD monitor will be connected to each node. Even when you tell the salesfolk that it will never need to do more than text they don't believe you. A lot of the recent dual processer server boards have better graphics hardware than what I'd consider a mid end graphics card - which effectively leaves me with a room full of 1U gaming godboxes
Re:How about some meat? (Score:2)
Of course they know. They also know that you have to argue with them, for the look of the thing, and that what you really want is the super-duper 3D card.
The reason? So that the BOFH can swap out the GeForce 64000 GTi 512MB Ultimate
Re:How about some meat? (Score:2)
When? (Score:2)
budget card is on second page of article (Score:2)
7600GS Performance (Score:1)
Any chance for some benchmarks soon?
Re:7600GS Performance (Score:2)
Re:7600GS Performance (Score:1)
Re:7600GS Performance (Score:2)
A...G....P...!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Jeez, VL-Bus got better support after PCI than AGP is after PCI-Express.
the problem is that it is more expensive now (Score:2)
The first PCI-E cards were more expensive because they had to use a bridge chip to make them work. They used AGP-based GPUs. Now, since the majority of new cards b
Re:the problem is that it is more expensive now (Score:1)
If I could afford to blow lots of cash on all those bits, I'd buy a decent midrange graphics card. Or an XBox 360.
6600 AGP (Score:2)
So I figure that there isn't a huge need for AGP in the latest, greatest video cards, since relatively few new AGP motherboards are being produced these days.
7800GS (Score:2, Informative)
Uh, just run agp cards (Score:2)
Re:A...G....P...!!! (Score:2)
If you're that worried about the cost of replacing your whole MB, CPU etc at once, get a PCIe MB that has builtin video. Some of the built in chipsets these days compete quite well against the cheaper cards.
Good HTPC Card? (Score:2)
I basically don't care about 3D features/performance. The questions I have are:
- AGP Version Available?
- "PureVideo" features available in Linux?
MAC?? (Score:2)
Some old benchmarks I found with Google (Score:2)
PCIE (Score:2)
SLI? Give me my chop sticks! (Score:1)
Fanless (Score:2)
The last time I bought a video card I went out of my way to find a fanless one, and it's good to see they're still be made with passive coolers.