Radeon 9700 & 9000 launch

[Buback]

I bought my old processor for $89 three years ago. 400mhz celeron. I just bought a new one for $88. athlon 1800+.

now consider that i bought my g400 for $150 at the same time.
But now the new card is $400?

why have processors advanced so much and cost the same, yet graphics cards are much more expensive?

How much more expensive can we expect them to get?

[Wombat]

why have processors advanced so much and cost the same, yet graphics cards are much more expensive?

Because people will pay for them, mostly. The G400 came out near $200. $200 now will still get you a nice card. You can easily spend $400+ on an x86 processor, but that doesn't make it 2x the speed of a $200 processor. Graphics companies just figured out how to price along the exponential curve, as most other technology has been doing for years and years.

[Buback]

I just noticed that something peculiar. Nvidia's logo is mostly green.
ATI's logo is mostly red.
and Matrox's logo is mostly blue.

What's your favorite color? :-]

[Montanan]

As long time matrox 2d fan, I migrated to Nvidia when the overpriced and slow Parhlia came out.

I too was hoping matrox would again lead the video card market, but check out that anand review and tell me that matrox is old news already.

With matrox not supporting windows 98, showing sluggish 3D performance, and card price to make a gurly boy dance, the ATI Radeon 9700 will be the new king.

Quality, Speed, & Future use-ability will be what makes the Radeon 9700 the best. I havnt owned an ATI card in years, but if even half of what the review sites claim is true, Nvidia has been swept into second place, and Matrox bringing up the distant rear.

[Wombat]

No need to cross-post. Your FUD was old and worn out even when you posted the first time. Go away.

[KvHagedorn]

why have processors advanced so much and cost the same, yet graphics cards are much more expensive?

Because the economy sucks and AMD has an inferiority complex and a lame marketing department. Also, the Parhelia is a top of the line card, at least as positioned by Matrox. If you got a G400 3 years ago for $150, it was a 16meg single head. If you want to compare Intel with Intel, do it like this: the P3-600 was $700 at launch 3 years ago, and the P4-2.53GHz is $680 now.. The Parhelia is only $150 more than the G400MAX at the time, so it's only $150 overpriced.

[Indiana]

Helevitia, I fully agree with you. The R300 seems to be everything I expected the Parhelia to be and even have a few additional sweeties.
I really like those new desktop video features (indepence from overlays for video-playback, the whole FullStream and VideoShader technologies truely seem impressive,...)

Personally I don't care for triple-head. I do use DualHead, tough and there Matrox still seems the only one with full abilities in Win2k - albeit through a system "hack". I do care about 2D quality, and this could be a very good reason for me to buy a Herculs R9700 card, as the Hercules cards at least with the 8500 have better IQ then ATIs own 8500 cards. ATIs "professional" FireGL cards, however, seem to have the best IQ of the pack, which tells you that they deliberately spared the few dollars on their Retail 8500. Shame on them! (but then if I think about it , it's more like "shame on all those f*cking kiddies with their TV-like image quality monitors that are buying all those NVidia cards")

[frankymail]

PiaxVirus: What are you talking about??? The Heatsink on the R9700 is attached using plastic push-pins to the board with thermal paste between the two... Nothing stops you from putting a bigger heatsink/water/phase-change cooling.

That's what I'm gonna do for sure.

[dneal]

I picked up my Radeon 8500LE from Newegg.com for a whopping $98. They still have them going for that price too. The kick of it is that the card has 3.3ns RAM. I hacked the BIOS to run 280/320 clock speeds, well above stock 8500 retail speed.

Bargains are out there.

[borat]

well for anyone who is interested the uk magazine pc pro has a new reveiw of parhelia and place it in there "a-list" as ultamate graphics cared above radeon 8500 and gf4 ti 4600 they also record a 5% 2d performance increase with p over the compitition

[PowerHungry]

I remember seeing the R300 was a 'flip chip' design, while the Parhelia is in a more traditional GPU package. What kind of durability can one expect, for example, during shipping with a heatsink on? Is one more likely to fail if the HS is not installed quite right or there is too much pressure on one side of the HS? Especially with the R300's core larger than any CPU.

[dneal]

I wouldn't say Parhelia is all that traditional. It has that nifty metal heatspreader over it. I have a feeling the core is right under that. I don't know if it's flip chipped though. It certainly isn't your standard ceramic chip though.

ATI really went all out though. The fact that they can get such amazing core speeds out of a chip that big while Matrox can't MUST mean ATI has some more talented engineers.

[PowerHungry]

One does not logically follow from the other. Matrox is going for more than speed, and it is not violating the AGP spec with power, while the R300 HAS an external power connector. Matrox is clocked lower, and thusly requires less power. The R300 is clocked very high, and with a large transistor count, requires more power than the AGP bus can supply, so it has a different connector. Props to Matrox who can keep a chip within the spec of this power, and props to ATI who can clock something so big so fast.

*NOTE* My data on power requirements came from other more informed people than I on this forum.

[piaxVirus]

frankymail, I now see the plastic pins. After looking at the chip pic and seeing them leave the paste on. I thought that it could be epoxy. Having an easily damaged core will surely mean a lot of RMAs. Epoxying the HSF on would prevent that. I guess seeing the core cracked would point out that it was a user fault instead of a card fault.

The Parhelia uses a BGA packaging while the R300 uses a FCBGA package. The Parhelia core is not exposed, but the R300 core is exposed like on the Athlon/Duron and P3. There is a high risk of damaging the core. It would be best to use a copper shim if you are replacing te stock HSF.

[Wombat]

ATI really went all out though. The fact that they can get such amazing core speeds out of a chip that big while Matrox can't MUST mean ATI has some more talented engineers.

It means absolutely nothing of the sort. Clock speed is a useless number between two designs. It's more likely that ATi just has more latches in there