Nvidia GeForce 7 Series -Finally!
One year, two months and 1 week. 434 days. 10,416 hours.
Anyway you look at it; this is the amount of time between Nvidia's public announcement of the GeForce 6 series and yesterday's introduction of the GeForce 7 series.
After purchasing my HD monitor and workstation last year, I foolishly decided to wait for the next-generation of video cards. A long wait indeed! During that time, Nvidia made the decision to break their grueling but reliable schedule of 6 month product releases. (This schedule was actually broken with the GeForce FX (5 series) but I mostly blamed that as a result of switching to the 0.13 micron die process.)
So why not just buy a GeForce 6 series? Well I would have, but the nasty paper war between Nvidia and ATI made waiting for a genuine, on the store-shelves-now, PCIe version seem like an eternity. And when they finally did arrive, vendors were charging a hefty markup way above MSRP- bump that!
So as you can guess, I was a happy camper when yesterday morning I checked Nvidia.com to read about the introduction of the GeForce 7800 GTX, immediate product availability (shocking) and the $599 price tag (gulp).
Normally, being of sound mind and body, I would read the specs, watch the video demos and say “Cool, I’ll just wait for the lower performing but lower cost version to come out and pick one up then.” But then I met Luna.
Creepy yet enticing. Luna struts her stuff.
Like Nalu, Dusk, Dawn and even the Wolfman before her, Luna serenaded me with her siren song of HDR, subsurface scattering and PureVideo decoding, dashing my common sense onto the rocky cliffs of graphics envy. So after quickly checking the system requirements, I bought the BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC at ZipZoomFly with free 2nd day shipping.
Did I regret the purchase? Sure I did! I got cold feet just a few minutes afterwards on the way to work. But like anything I suppose, I justified the purchase as still being way less expensive than any “Pro” card ($799 for the slower, half the RAM, last-gen, Quadro FX 1400). Plus I get the added benefit of a pure digital DVI connection and maybe some decent frame rates on Doom 3 now. ;) Maya should run much snappier too.
Well I’ll let you guys know when I receive it and if I hadn't decided on E-Baying it for a quick profit. (Some people are trying to sell their cards for as high as $850. Nobody’s currently biting at that price.) My biggest concern will be the noise factor after I install it but thankfully some reviews I’ve already read say that the 7800 consumes less power and is less noisy than the 6 series. Is that saying much though? ;)
Anyway you look at it; this is the amount of time between Nvidia's public announcement of the GeForce 6 series and yesterday's introduction of the GeForce 7 series.
After purchasing my HD monitor and workstation last year, I foolishly decided to wait for the next-generation of video cards. A long wait indeed! During that time, Nvidia made the decision to break their grueling but reliable schedule of 6 month product releases. (This schedule was actually broken with the GeForce FX (5 series) but I mostly blamed that as a result of switching to the 0.13 micron die process.)
So why not just buy a GeForce 6 series? Well I would have, but the nasty paper war between Nvidia and ATI made waiting for a genuine, on the store-shelves-now, PCIe version seem like an eternity. And when they finally did arrive, vendors were charging a hefty markup way above MSRP- bump that!
So as you can guess, I was a happy camper when yesterday morning I checked Nvidia.com to read about the introduction of the GeForce 7800 GTX, immediate product availability (shocking) and the $599 price tag (gulp).
Normally, being of sound mind and body, I would read the specs, watch the video demos and say “Cool, I’ll just wait for the lower performing but lower cost version to come out and pick one up then.” But then I met Luna.
Creepy yet enticing. Luna struts her stuff.
Like Nalu, Dusk, Dawn and even the Wolfman before her, Luna serenaded me with her siren song of HDR, subsurface scattering and PureVideo decoding, dashing my common sense onto the rocky cliffs of graphics envy. So after quickly checking the system requirements, I bought the BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC at ZipZoomFly with free 2nd day shipping.
Did I regret the purchase? Sure I did! I got cold feet just a few minutes afterwards on the way to work. But like anything I suppose, I justified the purchase as still being way less expensive than any “Pro” card ($799 for the slower, half the RAM, last-gen, Quadro FX 1400). Plus I get the added benefit of a pure digital DVI connection and maybe some decent frame rates on Doom 3 now. ;) Maya should run much snappier too.
Well I’ll let you guys know when I receive it and if I hadn't decided on E-Baying it for a quick profit. (Some people are trying to sell their cards for as high as $850. Nobody’s currently biting at that price.) My biggest concern will be the noise factor after I install it but thankfully some reviews I’ve already read say that the 7800 consumes less power and is less noisy than the 6 series. Is that saying much though? ;)
posted by Robert at June 23, 2005
1 Comments:
Congratulations brother! Looks like you will be able to play the upcoming Half-Life 2 expansion level "The Lost Coast" in its full HDR glory. The link shows a nice video of it.
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/629/629148p1.html
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