NVIDIA releases GeForce 9800 GX2 and nForce 790i
Thursday 20th March 2008, 09:25:00 AM, written by Arun
The products have been received positively by just about every reviewer we could find, although honestly given the lack of viable alternatives in both markets right now we're not sure that's much of a surprise either. The Quad SLI NDA hasn't expired yet, but obviously whether you prefer that setup or a Tri-SLI alternative will depend on your latency tolerance. When scaling is good, more GPUs doesn't really increase latency for a given benchmark, but it does increase it for a given FPS which risks making more GPUs less attractive as the perceived advantage would diminish.
Compared to the Radeon HD3870 X2, the GeForce 9800 GX2 (600MHz core/1500MHz shaders/1000MHz memory/128SPs) does particularly well with 4xAA/16xAF, although compared to G80 the lower amount of video memory is sometimes felt at 2560x1920-like resolutions. This factor may also make Tri-GPU configurations (with 1GB/board) more attractive to those with 30" monitors, unless an AIB comes out with a 1GB/chip [G]X2 product.
Regarding the 790i, there are three big surprises: first of all, it's on 90nm while it was widely expected to be on 65nm. Secondly, it's a B1 chip: that means a standard respin wasn't enough and it needed a completely new tape-out with all the associated costs and delays. And thirdly, the C55 northbridge in the 780i/680i/650i chipsets was best for single-threaded or lightly-threaded workloads on dual-cores, while the 790i northbridge shines best with multi-threaded workloads on quad-cores!
Regarding pricing, well, requiring two full tape-outs and lots of extra engineer man-months doesn't come cheap (and greed doesn't help), so The Inquirer reports that NVIDIA is selling the chipset for $110 while X48 sells for $70 (presumably that's northbridge+southbridge in both cases). And that shows in the MSRPs too: $350 for the 790i Ultra SLI and ~$250 for the 790i SLI, while X38s sell for $195-$350 on Newegg with most slightly below $250.
The GeForce 9800 GX2 is NVIDIA's first product to support HybridPower, but the 790i doesn't have an integrated GPU so it doesn't support it. The technology which will actually debut on their AMD chipsets shortly, and then follow on their Intel chipsets 1-3 months later according to the latest rumours. It is unclear whether there will be a version with DDR3 support at this point, or if we'll have to wait for the Nehalem sockets to get that functionality in the ultra-high-end.
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