AMD Reviews, NVIDIA Interview, and More

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, August 01, 2005, 01:31 PM EDT

Good afternoon folks! Things are a bit hectic this morning, and I've got to head into NYC to meet an associate post haste (Perhaps we'll be taking next-gen graphics? Who Knows!), so I'm just going to jump right into the news today. Here goes!

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800 Reviews:

The Tech Report
Legit Reviews
GamePyre
Techware Labs

Interview with NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang @ Beyond3D:

"There's long since been elements of graphics research which haven't made their way on to consumer PC graphics products yet, one of them being geometry compression and another being hardware tessellation - which could be seen as another form of geometry compression..."

"Higher Order Surfaces, Procedural Textures, they are all forms of compression and we're a big fan of high order surfaces. I don't know if you remember NV1, but is was based on higher order surfaces because there was a concern that the PC would not have a floating point unit and that the PCI bus that came to be wasn't going to be available and we'd be stuck on the local bus, which is why we invented curved surfaces."

ECS KN1 Extreme Motherboard @ Motherboards.org:

"Being based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset, the KN1 Extreme supports all current AMD Socket 939 CPUs. The CPU support list includes listing for the Athlon 64 X2 dual core CPUs. One thing about the AMD platform is support for CPUs on the same interface. Intel dual-core CPUs require a separate chipset (945 or 955) from the previous ones (925X and 925XE or 915). The nForce4 Ultra chipset supports HyperTransport speeds of up to 2GHz."

Sapphire X800XL Ultimate Edition @ Got|Apex:

"When ATI released it's X800 line it also released a whole host of chips going across the spectrum of X800 - X850 XT PE. I haven't been able to look at any X800 XL chips until now. The Sapphire X800XL Ultimate Edition places itself on the lower end of the X8xx series, just above the vanilla X800 card. With its 1GB/s memory, 400 core, 16 pipes and .11u fabrication process it is supposed to be the lower priced but middle performance card. Sapphire has put together their usual bundle for this card. The Sapphire X800XL Ultimate is a PCIe interface with 256MB of ram. The card also supposed Composite and S-Video out along with HD-TV component out. Sapphire has been including the HDTV dongle with it's cards lately, something that definitely helps when trying to hook up your system to get some widescreen gaming lovin."

Tags: Nvidia, AMD, Reviews, Interview, review, view, eviews, IE, WS, id, AM, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com