AlexHopmann.com

Of course it looks like I jumped the gun a bit in some of my conclusions in my previous post about video cards. ATI also announced their new generation of cards, the HD 3800 and they look pretty impressive too. Of course at the moment it looks like a bit of a vaporware launch (to head off today’s NVidia announcements), with no benchmarks / details, but the real launch is less than 3 weeks away so it seems like a good time to wait a bit before deciding.

Lots of hardware news is out today. First of all an update on an older item. I bought the Gigabyte SilentPipe GF 8600GTS for the Media box a few months ago. I guess its not the end of the world since I did need something until now, but it turns out to have been a mistake. The Zalman HD135 case supports full height cards, but just barely. There is no room over the top of the connector but the heat sink on the SilentPipe card goes above the top and the top of the case doesn’t fit (although its very close).

Also this is hardly a totally silent case anyway- with the thing buttoned up I had some heat problems so I probably need better cooling on the video card and/or another fan anyway.

I’d been thinking about maybe picking up one of the AMD (ATI) Radeon HD2600 cards. They have great media benchmarks and I’m not really planning on using this machine for 3d. But today along comes details of the NVidia 8800GT which should be faster than the existing $399 8800GTS, and available for just about $200. Its built with a better process (65nm) so its lower power, and there are 1-slot versions so it won’t block the slot next to it. Hopefully even a normal fan-cooled version of these won’t be too loud, and I’m probably going to want the same thing in my workstation too (since it blows away everything in the AMD line for gaming and only the $600 card is any better and that isn’t by much).

Of course this card (especially at $200) makes the motherboard choice even more painful since using NVidia SLI starts to sound reasonable. But the Intel P35, X38 and X48 chipsets don’t support SLI, so you are left with some pretty painful choices.

On the processor front, it does appear that Intel is going to have an upgrade to the 3.0ghz 1333mhz bus Penryn chip in Q1 2008. The upgrade should be 3.2ghz with a 1600mhz bus. The clock is only 7% faster, but its one of those things where if you combined it with the faster bus AND fast DDR3 memory the whole thing might be good for a 20% improvement. But even with DDR3 prices coming down, they are still likely to be 2x DD2 in 3-4 months and its hard to imagine that you don’t end up paying $600 extra for that 20% improvement.

I wonder when NVidia is going to come out with a new chipset? Their 680SLI is feeling a bit old compared to the new Intel ones and given that they have a video-card coming out with PCI 2.0 I’d expect them to do a chipset to go with it.