NV43 by the end of august ?

[msxyz]

So says TheInquirer. If it will be priced at $200 or less I might be tempted to upgrade ASAP.

[Dazz]

September really.

[Diamond_G]

with agp to be in october/november....

[retsam]

msxyz you set the title all wrong !!!

it should say "SLI BY AUGUST" ... :nanahump:




retsam

[Clay]

AFAIK... We shouldn't expect to see the 6600 series cards out (in PCIe versions) until mid-late September. The AGP versions will follow a month of so later. I would think that a lot of this is contingent on PCIe motherboard availability to OEMs.

[msxyz]

The more I think about PCIe the more I'm convinced it's just a marketing gimmick. It has no sensible use in desktop PCs. Especially now that almost all the integrated peripherals (Disk controllers, audio, lan) no longer use the PCI bus but rely on faster, dedicated connections provided by the northbridge.

[woz_mann]

The more I think about PCIe the more I'm convinced it's just a marketing gimmick. It has no sensible use in desktop PCs. Especially now that almost all the integrated peripherals (Disk controllers, audio, lan) no longer use the PCI bus but rely on faster, dedicated connections provided by the northbridge.

that is a slightly incorrect statement. All of the ingertrated peripherals still ruin via the PCI Bus. As that is the main role of the northbridge, control the PCI bus

[ynnek]

Plus, i hear the new mb has inherent design benifits, that make higher speeds possible.. My friend thats in the group that designs network cards say the whole PCIe arch in general is nicer.

I can imagine video encoding/decoding/capture cards itself would stress the PCI bus... Gigabit ethernet, highspeed RAID controllers..

I predict thigns will grown into it... It reminds me of the whole VLB/ISA vs PCI debate all over again

[nutball]

The more I think about PCIe the more I'm convinced it's just a marketing gimmick. It has no sensible use in desktop PCs. Especially now that almost all the integrated peripherals (Disk controllers, audio, lan) no longer use the PCI bus but rely on faster, dedicated connections provided by the northbridge.

For graphics PCIe has one big advantage over AGP, and that is GPU-to-host bandwidth. AGP is very asymmetric in this respect, decent bandwidth from host to card, crap in the return direction.

This may seem like a small point, but it's a real killer for some applications that need to read back render buffers from the card. This is a technique that will become increasingly important in gaming and other apps, which will start to offload some elements of game physics and other stuff onto the GPU.

As for the other stuff, PCIe is a serial-based bus, which is the vogue these days (like USB, SATA, blah blah blah). If this makes designing motherboards easier, all well and good. It means they can reduce the price, dunnit!

[msxyz]

The point is how many people will really need this. Looks like another imposed standard to push the sales up.

And about northbridge/southrbridge links, all Intel chipset since 810 and all Via since about year 2001 use a faster, proprietary connection. Devices inside the southbridge (ie disk controllers) are still seen from the OS/Bios like if they were on the PCI bus (because they still hook resources) but they rely on a dedicated connection

[nutball]

The point is how many people will really need this. Looks like another imposed standard to push the sales up.

Well if you want to look at it like that we should have stuck with ISA.

[msxyz]

It's not a matter of progress but a matter of perceived advantage in everyday applications. PCI had a distinctive edge over ISA in a lot of common situations. Have you seen any cross benchmark between AGP and PCIe platforms ? The increment in 3D apps is almost non-existant (same as from AGP4x to AGP 8x) and so is general system performance.

PCIe may be useful in some limited bandwitdh intensive situations, but so is PCI64 and PCI-X. What's the point of another technology? And what's the point of making it mainstream ? It looks only like a disguised way to milk the cash-cow. But it won't last forever. As the market reaches saturation and consumers become smarter the whole oversized IT market may come to a sudden downfall.

[ynnek]

Well, you really have to push standards, to get people to adopt them, so then you can effectively make and sell products to use them.


Obviosly something was wrong with PCI64 and PCI-X, cause it never made it made stream.. Perhaps techniaclly reasons. perhaps manufacturing.. perhaps just marketing.. Either way, PCI-e is becoming the next standard.


So looking toward the future, I believe PCIe will be able to flex its muscles and its advantages will be apparent, for future "common" situations..


Think about it this way.. you don't really "need" anything. but once its available, its hard to look back..

Yes I also agree its a part of another marketing scheme to generate more sales.. but it does have technical advantages, and I believe in the future, they will be put to good use.

Another example of all this: 64 bit desktop computing.