Cebit 2007 Editorial

Guru3D events and tradeshows 19 Page 2 of 26 Published by

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Page 2 - NVIDIA

NVIDIA

So in light of less stand-holders being present on the CeBIT, there was one absolutely missing... NVIDIA !

Interestingly NVIDIA only had a small business unit with a limited number of meeting rooms and quite honestly did not have anything out of the ordinary to show. I spoke briefly with the always kind Jens Neuschafer and was only able to receive a little information about NVIDIA's new desktop graphics products. So yes it's confirmed the 8600 series of products will be released on April 17th. Obviously it'll be the 8500 GT, 8600 GT and GTS cards. Specs have leaked everywhere, photo's have leaked everywhere. So why NVIDIA were not not showing them off at all was a rather big mystery.

I really do think it's a big missed opportunity as the press of the world is flying into Germany to attend the CeBIT. Thousands of members of the press are present so marketing wise this did not make any real sense. Even all board partners were forbidden to display the new graphics cards at their booths while pretty much everybody has sampled already. The generic consensus among board partners was disappointment not being able to show their upcoming Series 8 products.

So nobody was showing them as all board partners were afraid of repercussions from NVIDIA... and then I walk to the MSI booth. What's displayed behind plexi glass for everybody to see?  NVIDIA DX10 graphics cards. I'll show them later on.

Could this be part of the big marketing game? To create illusion and momentum? To create a little shock and awe effect ?

I honestly do not know the real reasoning, I do know that if MSI can do that then why shouldn't we be reporting about it? Therefore my primary mission for CeBIT this year was to get at least three photo's of reference boards from the new 8500/8600 line of products. Don't make me drive hundreds of kilometers for nothing and well, it took me 30 minutes to achieve.

Now I have photoshopped the images a little to make sure the board partners who showed them to me (and there are quite a few of them) are not recognized.

I'm only showing information that is widely available on the web already, and nothing more than that. I mean reference photo's and info have already been spotted in many places. I did Photoshop the cooler shims and serial numbers as I do not want to put board partners at any risk.

CeBIT 2007 Editorial - Guru3D.com

So above you can see the GeForce 8600 GTS. This seems to be reference board model P401; will have 2 Dual Link DVI / HDTV / HDCP; 256MB GDDR3 128bit and clocks will be roughly 700 MHz for the core and 2000 on the memory.

CeBIT 2007 Editorial - Guru3D.com

This little beauty is the GeForce 8600 GT. You're looking at reference board P402. It also comes with 2x Dual Link DVI / HDTV ; 256MB GDDR3 128bit. Core and memory frequencies will be 600/1400 MHz.

CeBIT 2007 Editorial - Guru3D.com

Now this photo is what I think a GeForce 8500 GT; I'm not 100% certain though as I have so many photos that I might have mixed this one up. I'm pretty certain though. Anyway the board is based on PCB model P403 also comes with Dual Link DVI / VGA/ HDTV ; 256MB DDR2 128bit and this puppy's clocks will roughly be 450/ 800 MHz. VR-Zone recently hinted that this card alone will perform as good or slightly better then a GeForce 7600 GS.

All cards are obviously a spin-off  based on the G80 architecture. The one thing that nobody could confirm were the number of Unified shader cores on the products. I'm hoping 48, but likely it'll be 32.

Despite the 128-memory bus the cards do look promising for sure. I did hope to see NVIDIA move onwards to 256-bit in the mid-range segment, but on the other hand look at the GTS memory clock. So opposed to 256-bit memory it's still 2 GHz clocked memory (which bandwidth wise you can translate to 1GHz 256-bit). And since 128-bit memory is dirt cheap that's a great way to save money.

It'll be exciting to have these cards out on the market for sure. But what we really need are DX10 games to make it happen for real.

What about the GeForce 8800 Ultra then ? Well forget about it for right now, it's to be released after the introduction of AMD-ATI's R600 release. Obviously as clever as NVIDIA is they will adapt the performance curve based on the R600 performance; for ATI that means the product needs to be released once and for all.

In other news; the rumors about some Series 7 products going EOL (End of Life) are correct. Expect the the low to mid-range product to life on for a while, yet say the 7900 series to phase out (which makes total sense).

For Guru3D.com one of the bigger problems was the fact that AMD ATI really had nothing new to show desktop graphics wise and NVIDIA didn't feel like it either. Shame really, as that really is why we visit the CeBIT; me and many other members of the press.

On the mainboard front we can expect some new released quite soon. NVIDIA is launching their nForce 680i LT mainboard pretty soon. Which basically will be a high-performance yet stripped down SLI mainboard based on the magnificent 680i.

Secondly was NVIDIA is showing the new GeForce 7050 Motherboard GPUs for AMD platforms. Available next month and later this year for Intel processors as well.

CeBIT 2007 Editorial - Guru3D.com

Once released we'll bring you some more info on that. Board partners were showing this model, which I'll show you some more later on in this report.

Jens was able to show some DX10 content, one demo based on the DX10 version of the Unreal 3 engine, really cool. But very impressive was a playable level of Crysis. Yes, it's downright gorgeous. I must say that a GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB was able to push barely acceptable framerates at 1920x1200, and no AA was enabled!

Crysis will push the way we look at games to a completely new level. The detailing is amazing, but if you want that rich and high detail level at higher resolutions then you better get prepared for some serious DX10 gear.

Thanks to Jens for taking the time to talk to Guru3D, and I sincerely hope that NVIDIA's presence on the CeBIT next year will be a tad bigger.

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