Anyone want an 8800?

[hitchface]

Because it might get cheaper sometime in the near future.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/01/05/exclusive_nvidia_geforce_9800gx2/

[TwoRails]

Looks pretty sweet, hitchface ! - thanks for the tip :)

[Lespaul20]

Is there a reason the cards have to keep getting so much bigger? Is it cooling?

[Icyman23]

Cooling, transistor count, Nvidia trying to overclock their own gpu, then calling it a new name.....the fact that AMD and Nvidia feel that they are mad with power:)

[hitchface]

Also due to the fact that it is a GX2. The 7950GX2 wasn't small either. 2 GPUs on the same card needs a monstrous amount of cooling.

But you are right...those things are juggernauts. Looking at 2 of them in SLI puts it into perspective.

[Lespaul20]

So I'm assuming it's two physically separate GPU's and not a dual core GPU? That makes more sense for more cooling.

[Force Flow]

Basically, what it looks like is a mini-computer inside of another computer.

Heck, I wonder if it's possible to connect to PCs and use one as the host machine, an the other's CPU for rendering the graphics...doubt it would work though since convential CPUs aren't designed for it...

[catacon]

You could probably do that with a cluster, but I'm sure any OS that support clustering also support games.

[Lespaul20]

So are we going to see GPU's with sockets like CPU's soon?

[Force Flow]

So are we going to see GPU's with sockets like CPU's soon?

Once upon a time, there were cards with removable memory. The sockets and chips took up a decent amount of real estate on the card, not to mention, were more expensive to produce.

[Lespaul20]

I've seen some of those laying around where I work. Why not have another socket for the GPU on the motherboard with memory slots dedicated to video. Then upgrading would just be buying a GPU like a CPU. I'm sure that would be hard to develop also. It's something that todays GPUs are higher clocked than most peoples first computers. I just see the video 'card' concept running into limitations at the pace they are going.

[novie]

those look amazing ... really like a little blade server or something.

Isn't AMD working on cpu/gpu combined chipsets, or is that just for lower end graphics?

[TwoRails]

Once upon a time, there were cards with removable memory. The sockets and chips took up a decent amount of real estate on the card, not to mention, were more expensive to produce.I think the old Diamond Stealth was one, having the upgrade path to a whopping 4MB of onboard memory.

[Nuclear Krusader]

nVidia has already manufactured an external video card. And yes, Intel is working on integrating the graphics processing into the CPU.

The S3 cards had empty sockets for more memory, which was painfully difficult to find. The Diamond Stealth already had soldered memory that couldn't be upgraded.

[hitchface]

AMD is as well. That is the whole idea behind their "Fusion" plan.

[doubledragon5]

Heck I will buy a 8800 when the price is like $50 LOL...

[Dave21]

Does anyone remember how much the price of the 7950gx2 card dropped when the 8xxx series came out? I'm just thinking if its worth the wait to wait for the 9xxx series to come out so that the price of the 8800 will drop.