NVIDIA
Ah NVIDIA, what a nice booth they had this year. Do you see the shape and form of the two pictures below? It's based on the logo. The buildings in California are shaped the same by the way. You can have a tour of the HQ building here as we were there back in 2003. It's a nice browse, I can definitely recommend you have a look at that.
I had a meeting with Adam and quick greet with the Italian stallion, Luciano. Both are always really enjoyable to have a little chat with. Adam and Luciano are responsible for most of our tests here at Guru3D.com At NVIDIA we of course talked a little about the new GeForce 6800 Ultra, specifically the 512 MB version. The product should be available in April yet I expect it to be in very small quantities. Personally I think the 512 MB version still is a prestige thing, same as the x850 XT 512Mb from ATI. Hard to get, very expensive, but of course a superbly fast product. Me personally, I'd love to have that in a SLI combo huh? But I'll scare you now, expect a price of 800 USD easily! There's no way that this product is going to sell in large volumes unless the prices come down. It's not the chip itself that makes it expensive, but of course the 512 MB of gDDR3 memory.
In my haste I completely forgot to take photo's of the reference 512 MB sample that was going around in all meeting rooms and the NVIDIA bar, but I was able to spot one from XFX, see the image below.
After a nice cold coke the discussion went towards NVDIA's soon to be released Pentium SLI compatible NFORCE platform. Everything discussed however is still confidential material, expect the official release and availability in April. If things work out well we should receive a reference board paired with some faster then normal memory and that's basically the only hint I can get out to you guys. What yours truly can say is that the Pentium 4 NFORCE Platform looks absolutely amazing in terms of performance. I think it's going to be slightly better then the current AMD NForce boards and hey, our master graphics cards test system is based on nForce 4, that should say enough about my ideas on nforce 4 I guess.
I need to quickly say thanks to Jean-marc Ludwig here who in a very short time was able to tell me precisely where the key benefits are on the upcoming P4 nForce 4 series, a very smart and talented guy that can explain stuff in a way you and I can understand.
More on this in April as we hope to do a reference review for you guys.
Disclosed or not, everywhere at CeBIT we where able to find the P4 nForce mainboards already. Look at the photo's below as example. Here's another hint, how ready do you think the mainboard manufacturers are for this product? Poor VIA Technology ...
Gigabyte's GA-8N-SLI pro - NForce 4 - Pentium 4
MSI NForce 4 SLI - Pentium 4
Does my PC have TurboCache? Ah, real Guru's don't use TurboCache I guess.
