nVidia's GeForce 8800 & Intel's Quad-Core Chips

It is official now. The GeForce 8800 GTX will be released somewhere in November though sources say the date is November 8. The specs will be the revolution of new technology and totally surpass the cards that we can buy now. The GeForce 8800 GTX will be the flagship of the 8 series as there will be another card which is much lower (8800GTS) performance for affordability. Though lower performance, the performance still outperforms any card available today (not counting SLI of today's cards)

The new cards will support DX10 and shader model 4.0. To cut the long story short, here are the specs of the GeForce 8800GTX

Core clock: 575MHz
Pixel pipelines: 128 @ 1350 MHz
Memory: 768MB DDR3 @ 900 MHz
Memory interface: 384-bit
Memory bandwidth: 86GB/s

And the GeForce 880GTS

Core clock: 500MHz
Pixel pipelines: 96 @ 1200 MHz
Memory: 640MB DDR3 @ 900 MHz
Memory interface: 320-bit
Memory bandwidth: 64GB/s

After looking at the specs, with the pipelines exceeding whats possible today with 48 pixel pipelines from ATI and 32 from nVidia, it is really a big leap forward. Though some of the cards today have clock speed higher than what is shown here, but I doubt there is any single card which has more memory on it than what is shown up there (does not count 7950GX-2, thats 2 cards in 1). Lemuel was right in saying that it is really best to wait till at least a DX10 card is released.

The manufacturer claims that for someone to run these cards, one must need a minimum power supply of 450 Watt for the GTX and 400 Watt for the GTS. If you were to SLI any of it, you must find a power supply of 800Watt at least or it might have complications.

The question is, DX10 games won't be out till at least 2007 or so. So, is it really worth to purchase now where nothing supports DX10? Or should one wait till Windows Vista is release which provides support for DX10? That all depends if you have the money or if you are really desperate for a new card like right now.

---

On other news, Intel has announced plans to reveal its quad-core chips in Q4 2006. Hewlett Packard has released its dates of its Quad-Core chips PC on November 13 with the Xeon 5300 chips. There won't be a chip for mainstream desktop till Q1 2007 when the Core 2 Quad chips will be released. Gamers would surely want to get their hands on the Core 2 Extreme version of the Quad-Core chips.

AMD, Intel's rival though are lagging behind in their Quad-Core chips claims that when their chips are released in Q2 2007, it will be far superior than Intel's. They claim that Intel is getting Quad-Core chips by connecting 2 Quad-Core chips together in 1 chip. AMD claims that their architecture is different and it would totally be better than what Intel did. However, these claims cannot be clarified till both quad-core chips are out and compared side by side.

---

Now, is it worth it to wait for all these to come out first before purchasing a new PC? :)