High End Graphics Update
The hardware scene certainly seems to be buzzing with all things 3D Graphics lately, as ATi has decided to make good and deliver both CrossFire and next generation X1K series video cards to the retail channel. New Egg specifically sent word today of immediate availability...
CITY OF INDUSTRY, Calif. - Newegg.com is pleased to announce the immediate availability of ATI Technologies' X1800XL Radeon and X850 Crossfire video cards. The X850 CrossFire card can be paired with any PCI Express Radeon X850 graphics card for multi-GPU rendering on all applications. The X1800XL Radeon is a high-end member of ATI's X1000 top to bottom family of video cards, all of which feature:
* 90nm process technology
* Shader Model 3.0 support
* Fulltime/fullspeed fp32 processing for floating point pixel formats
* New "Ring Bus" memory architecture with support for GDDR4
* Antialiasing supported on MRT and fp16 output
* High quality angle independent Anisotropic Filtering
* AVIVO and advanced decode/encode support
http://promotions.newegg.com/ATI/101105/index.html
What is a bit unclear is pricing for the X850 CrossFire cards, which are listed for $449, a full $100 higher than what we were told at launch but then there's mention at New Egg of a $100 rebate from ATi. However on the ATi site, the boards are listed at $399. In any event, we would advise that if you're in the market for an ATi based card, that you should instead consider one of the new X1000 series boards and the potential for CrossFire with that down the road. There you'll get SM3.0 support, better power characteristics and overall better performance across the board.
And speaking of HOT new 3D Graphics cards, behold what our friends at Asus have in store!
ASUS EN7800GT Dual
Dual GeForce 7800GTs In Single Board SLI!
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With a dedicated external power supply kit and 512MB of 1.6ns GDDR3 DRAM, this is going to be quite the board for the enthusiast. Check out the 3DMark05 score of over 11K and overclocking the cores at 489MHz and Memory at 1358MHz. Price? No clue but we'll be getting one of these puppies in for a solid beating, no doubt about it.
