[H] 680i & Yorkfield Support Statement from NV

Caliche said:
I find it hard to believe that Intel could just jump in the Graphic's market! It took Nvidia years or research and development to get where they are. With that said, does Intel has a patent sharing technology agreement with Nvidia, because they must have, if Intel believe's that they can get in the Graphics market and have a competitive solution over the Big 2!

If Intel has the business concept and strategy of "Doing what is good for Intel but not doing good for the Group also"....fella's than we are in for a rough future!
Click to expand...

Intel ships WAY more GPU's than either AMD or nVidia. At one point in time, not that long ago Intel sold more than both ATI and nVidia combined.

They have hardware T&L engines. They have gpu's already that can do DX9 PS2.0 and 3.0 stuff. I'm not sure, but they either have or have in the works GPU's that are fully DX10 PS4.0 capable.

The only difference is. Intel's GPU's are all low power, high efficiency in order to be integrated with the Northbridge on motherboards. They bring that out to a dedicated card, bump up the number of pixel pipelines, clock speed, memory bus width to the level that nVidia now has. Upto the 100-150W range that AMD and nVidia GPU's are running now on dedicated cards. Who knows what kind of performance Intel may or may not have. And what market segment Intel wants to target. All is speculation at this point. But it's certainly feasible.

low-end performance?
Mid-range performance?
high-end, fully blown enthusiast?

Too early to tell Intel's plans and what they are capable of when they scale up.
 
Actually, I found out this information through eVGA! I called asking about support for 1333fsb quad core processors. eVGA mentioned that my current board, the 680i SLI AR board was not fully supported but that the 680i SLI A1 is. At that time, I also asked about future support for the yorkfield processors and they noted that the A1 revision WILL support these CPU's.

It's also worth mentioning that eVGA did a RMA on my older board to the newer revision for free!

~AuxNuke
 
yea multi-core != quad i guess it means anything > single core


damnit I was planning on getting a 9450 or w/e the $300 chip was, Well it settles my decision, i guess I might get a phenom setup if they have anything decent then
 
Dan_D said:
I wasn't aware that any of the Yorkfield Engineering samples worked on 680i SLI boards. If that is indeed the case then perhaps I was wrong concerning the hatred between Intel and NVIDIA.
Click to expand...
I think it's perfectly feasible that all Quad core Yorksfield will work on a 680i motherboard. ES and commercial.

I think it's perfectly believable that early review sites paired these two together for some reviews and brief testing and they worked great.

Semiconductor companies often have very strict requirements for eye patterns. Measuring noise, ringing, overshoot, crosstalk between differential signal pairs. They may work fine 98% of the time. But that extra 2% where a crash may occur may not satisfy corporate quality standards so they fail qualification and cannot officially support them.

This could be a simple matter of trace routing, trace lengths, trace widths. When your talking 1ghz+ signals, trace routing is very critical.

I don't think this talk about microcode changes, or changes from ES -> commercial launch is likely very valid. It sounds entirely like a motherboard design issue. In the early stages when P965 motherboards were designed, I doubt even the Intel engineers working on that, or the ASUS engineers working on it had the full, final specifications for the 45nm cpu's, or even had samples to test and qualify. It's down to better engineering practices, over engineering on ASUS's part for better than standard signal quality?, better tolerances in board design, and maybe a bit of luck.

ASUS seems to be able to qualify quad core across their P965 family. But I see no others making that claim. I looked at some Gigabyte boards, and it seems hit and miss. Only the later revisions of some of their boards will they officially support to 1333mhz bus speeds for example.
 
Everyone should have seen this coming ever since the whole AR/A1 revision fiasco.

The 680i boards have never been good at quads from a vreg design standpoint.
 
InorganicMatter said:
People actually buy NVIDIA chipsets to run Intel processors?
Click to expand...
But if you have the cash to burn to SLI a pair of GTX's or Ultras, it's about your only option unfortunately.

If you have no intention of going the SLI route, 680 is a poor choice IMO. Single videocard is plenty :)
 
I made my first major purchase this year and built a computer for the first time from scratch. Even though I did the research, in retrospect I would never have gone for the 680i LT that I bought. I don't think that I will ever use the SLI on it, given the price-performance problem. Also, this whole Yorkfield thing has pissed me off greatly enough to move to an Nvidia free mobo/GFX solution when Nehalem comes around. Lesson learnt.

I think Intel can definitely be a major player in the discrete GPU sector especially given their recent acquisition of Havok, and the move to multi-core and GP on CPU.
 
I found the 680i chipset to be better then the 965P at everything except RAID, the raid seemed faster on my 965p(could be my imagination)

I don't know why everyone knocks it so much.
 
Its funny how people thinks that intel with no previous expertise in DX10 video will manage to release a video card that will doom nvidia.
 
Stoly said:
Its funny how people thinks that intel with no previous expertise in DX10 video will manage to release a video card that will doom nvidia.
Click to expand...

Huh?:confused:

Nvidia and AMD/ATI barely have any expertise in DX10 video cards. They are on there first gen of cards and so far it seems like the first gen of cards just have enough power to run DX10 at reasonable framerates. I wouldnt call this expertise, they are still learning how to tap the power of Direct X 10 and make it run well on there cards.

Like other people said, Intel is certainly no stranger in the graphics market. Intel has both the resources and money if they are serious about entering the video card market. Time will only tell, but if Intel is serious about this they can defenetely proove to be competition.
 
Stoly said:
Its funny how people thinks that intel with no previous expertise in DX10 video will manage to release a video card that will doom nvidia.
Click to expand...
What the hell are you talking about?
X3100 and X3500 are DX10, PS4.0 GPU's.
 
Intel is not stupid. They will move as needed to maintain market share in the areas critical to their business strategy success. I think this means a return by Intel to the video card market with high end and midstream cards; high end for street cred.with enthusiasts and midstream for profitability.

What I wonder is if they would be taking this route if Nvidia had played nice with SLI support from the beginning? Granted giving that up would have meant no one would need to buy nvidia Intel motherboards as they clearly can't compete with Intel in terms of stability.

From a business standpoint, it doesn't make sense to enter a new market against strong competition unless you can create a product that is either clearly superior and blows them away OR that comes close in performance but costs much less. (I think the latter is ATI's current strategy against Nvidia) I think Intel is definitely capable of the latter, and may be capable of the former. A few posts Time will tell.

While I would hate to see Nvidia go away, I can see them ultimately failing like 3dfx did if Intel does get back into the market and creates a competitive videocard.

I don't think Nvidia can survive a battle where both its main competitors are CPU/Chipset/Graphics(discrete cards) suppliers without getting MUCH better at creating stable chipsets and I don't see AMD or Intel rushing to help them with design information on their new CPU's.

As someone said, 2008 should be an interesting year.
 
Im guessing Intels target is mainstream graphics, and low power graphics, currently the X3100 sucks for mobile platforms that require any gaming

sooooo imagine this!

low power 2 / 4 core cpu, + chipset + low power graphics card to compete with nv / ati for mobile platforms too = a more complete "centrino" platform to offer now centrino can't be used without an intel graphics card =p?
Cpu
Chipset
Wireless
and later on! Vcard too ^^

5 years down the line, maybe SSD drives are required too
 
Menelmarar said:
What the hell are you talking about?
X3100 and X3500 are DX10, PS4.0 GPU's.
Click to expand...

AFAIK only the X3500 supports DX10 and I wouldn't call that expertise, and taken from Lazy_Moron if Nvidia nor ATI have DX10 expertise much less Intel
 
Dodger02WS6 said:
Intel is in the graphics business, granted, none of us think about this much because it's only integrated graphics, but it wasn't so long ago that Intel tried to become a player in the high-end segment. Doesn't anybody remember the i740 graphics card? It was availible at the same time as GeForce2, Ati's Rage, and 3DFX's Voodoo.
Click to expand...

Oh, how could I forget the 740i video cards from Intel? What a PoS. Not only did they NOT achieve the framerates Intel advertised, but they were notorious over heaters.

Intel could do a discrete graphics on a CPU solution, but most hard core gamers will balk at that solution. The problem with this though is we make up less the 6% of the market as a whole, and by "we" I mean hardware enthusiasts. There is a lot more revenue for Intel with solutions like the x3100 vs stand alone graphics cards. If Intel decides to stay in the graphics business, I doubt Nvidia will have a problem short term (1-3 years). If Intel's position changes on stand alone graphic solutions, then Nvidia will have a serious problem/competitor on its hands.
 
Not to imply I think this situation doesn't suck, but did you all really think this wouldn't happen? Seems like every CPU upgrade Intel does for socket 775 requires a new board.
 
Volkum said:
Not to imply I think this situation doesn't suck, but did you all really think this wouldn't happen? Seems like every CPU upgrade Intel does for socket 775 requires a new board.
Click to expand...

Da Nile (denial) isn't just a river....

I surprised we've been OK with Kentfields working as Intel usually ships a new chipset/socket solution for each rev. of their CPU enhancements.
 
AuxNuke said:
It's also worth mentioning that eVGA did a RMA on my older board to the newer revision for free!

~AuxNuke
Click to expand...

Now that is some nice customer service! Thumbs up to eVGA for going that "extra mile" for a customer.

InorganicMatter said:
People actually buy NVIDIA chipsets to run Intel processors?
Click to expand...

Some of us don't care for the Jmicron 3rd party crap on the Intel chipset boards... I love my 650i SLI chipset board, no Jmicron crap to deal with over the IDE channels! Got a pair of 8800GT's that will be finding a nice home on the board soon. :p
 
ir0nw0lf said:
Some of us don't care for the Jmicron 3rd party crap on the Intel chipset boards... I love my 650i SLI chipset board, no Jmicron crap to deal with over the IDE channels! Got a pair of 8800GT's that will be finding a nice home on the board soon. :p
Click to expand...
Wouldn't think most enthusiasts are still dealing with legacy pata crap anymore. Even my old man's system is all sata by now.
 
First off I'm not not happy with the 680i mb, at best its a less than average mb. Nvidia has enjoyed to much power in the video card market. I for one am glad Intel is stepping up and I hope they will truly provide major improvements in the video cards power and ability. (Havoc) I'm also dissatisfied with my Nvidia 8800's DX10 usefullness. I feel Nvidia sand bagged on this design and limited the cards ability to deal with the demands DX10 needs.
They have driven prices for highend cards to crazy prices and not delivered enough value for the product. This greed for the lack of a better word will prove to have bitten them in the south side.
 
Dodger02WS6 said:
Intel is in the graphics business, granted, none of us think about this much because it's only integrated graphics, but it wasn't so long ago that Intel tried to become a player in the high-end segment. Doesn't anybody remember the i740 graphics card? It was availible at the same time as GeForce2, Ati's Rage, and 3DFX's Voodoo.
Click to expand...

I bought one of those back in the day, what was it the StarFire or StarFury that they called it. It was good, but not great. I'm in the camp that they can put something in the mid range, but have a ways to go for the high end market.
 
Menelmarar said:
Wouldn't think most enthusiasts are still dealing with legacy pata crap anymore. Even my old man's system is all sata by now.
Click to expand...

You are kidding, right? There are still a lot of people out there who bought multiple large IDE drives when they were on sale/clearance. Some of those people would like to still use those drives -- they are still perfectly good and such, why spend extra $$$ now to "upgrade" them to SATA? For some, it's a lateral move, esp. if the drives are simply being used for storage of um, "stuff." ;)

PS, sorry to run the thread another direction. I'll hush up now. ;)
 
I don't get it.. Now that ATI and AMD have gotten into bed together, then got married, how does it help NVIDIA or Intel not to work together instead of shooting each other in the foot? Sure, NVIDIA and Intel have the best products right now, but that won't matter much if they piss off the consumers by fighting each other ffs.
 
ir0nw0lf said:
Some of us don't care for the Jmicron 3rd party crap on the Intel chipset boards... I love my 650i SLI chipset board, no Jmicron crap to deal with over the IDE channels! Got a pair of 8800GT's that will be finding a nice home on the board soon. :p
Click to expand...

Wait....people still buy IDE parts? You must be joking.
 
UrielDagda said:
I don't get it.. Now that ATI and AMD have gotten into bed together, then got married, how does it help NVIDIA or Intel not to work together instead of shooting each other in the foot? Sure, NVIDIA and Intel have the best products right now, but that won't matter much if they piss off the consumers by fighting each other ffs.
Click to expand...

Nvidia wouldn't sell chipsets nearly as well if they "gave" Intel SLI. That is really the only thing their motherboards have going for them. When you take all the emotion out of comparing Intel and Nvidia motherboards Intel has a track record of stability and performance that Nvidia really can't touch.

I look at Nvidia chipsets the way I used to look at Via back in the day. Yeah, once in a while Via put out a good chipset, but look at the crap you had to wade through to get there!
 
Zok said:
I guess I've been living under a rock - since when did Intel announce / someone leak information that Intel would be producing dedicated graphics cards? I can't find any info on the net either... Someone help me out here please.
Click to expand...

Do a google search for larabee, this is the code name of the gpu for their upcoming discrete graphics cards. I've heard it mentioned at least since Computex back in June.
 
InorganicMatter said:
Wait....people still buy IDE parts? You must be joking.
Click to expand...

Optical drives. I probably won't upgrade my NEC 3540A drives until an affordable burner with a new format is available. Kinda a waste of $30 to buy a SATA burner when you have a perfectly good IDE burner. In the event I was building a whole new PC, I would buy a SATA burner, though.

As far as IDE hard drives go though...get rid of those piece of ....
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Seriously, all you nv chipset haters, WHY? specially with the 680i?
Click to expand...

Not a hater by any means. I just found a lot more favorable reviews, user reviews, etc. for the Intel based motherboards than the Nvidia based ones when I was looking for a new motherboard. It reminds me of the days when you had to buy Via to get certain features Intel wasn't offering and I had plenty of problems with their stuff.

When you're googling for information on good motherboards to buy for specific CPU's, and you see a lot of problems with a certain vendor/chip maker, etc. it tends to make you stay away from their products. I don't hate Nvidia by any means, but they have definitely had issues with the 680i in the enthusiast community.

I am an early adopter of hardware like video cards, but when it comes to the motherboard, I'm more cautious now and like to wait to upgrade until the chipset is proven before I jump.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Seriously, all you nv chipset haters, WHY? specially with the 680i?
Click to expand...

ahahaha

As an asus striker owner that is waiting for this 400$ 680i POS to die i'll answer this.

The 680i is a poorly designed , rushed to market chipset.It runs hot.It eats ram.the bios just dies.The mobo's just die.

From what I've heard from my local reseller ;The asus striker has a 6% failure rate inside 10 months.Thats outrageous.

Personally , I don't care even slightly what 680i boards are capable of supporting....I won't be using it anyways.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
I found the 680i chipset to be better then the 965P at everything except RAID, the raid seemed faster on my 965p(could be my imagination)

I don't know why everyone knocks it so much.
Click to expand...

You aren't imagining things. The NVRAID isn't as good as the Intel Matrix RAID provided by the ICH7R, ICH8R or ICH9R south bridges. They do have slightly more flexibility though.

MrE said:
Oh, how could I forget the 740i video cards from Intel? What a PoS. Not only did they NOT achieve the framerates Intel advertised, but they were notorious over heaters.
Click to expand...

I thought I was the only one that remembered those pieces of crap.

MrE said:
Intel could do a discrete graphics on a CPU solution, but most hard core gamers will balk at that solution. The problem with this though is we make up less the 6% of the market as a whole, and by "we" I mean hardware enthusiasts. There is a lot more revenue for Intel with solutions like the x3100 vs stand alone graphics cards. If Intel decides to stay in the graphics business, I doubt Nvidia will have a problem short term (1-3 years). If Intel's position changes on stand alone graphic solutions, then Nvidia will have a serious problem/competitor on its hands.
Click to expand...

I agree with your assesment here. Intel has the money and probable ability to design a card to compete with ATI and NVIDIA, but I have doubts that they'll do it anytime soon if they ever do.

Volkum said:
Not to imply I think this situation doesn't suck, but did you all really think this wouldn't happen? Seems like every CPU upgrade Intel does for socket 775 requires a new board.
Click to expand...

To a degree this is true. We had to replace our boards for Smithfield support if I recall correclty, but not for Presler. Most Presler boards wouldn't support Core 2 Duo, but since the introduction of the Core 2 Duo, we've been fairly fortunate. 1333MHz FSB parts have for the most part been backwards compatible, but 45nm Penryn support is another matter. Remember that NVIDIA never claimed that they would support 45nm CPUs. That's what many on forums claim, but they only ever said they'd support 1333MHz FSB CPUs. Because the 45nm CPUs are naturally 1333MHz FSB parts, people automatically assume that NVIDIA's statement meant the latter when in fact it did not. AMD compatible motherboards have been no better though. Socket 754, Socket 939, were both very short lived.

ir0nw0lf said:
Now that is some nice customer service! Thumbs up to eVGA for going that "extra mile" for a customer.



Some of us don't care for the Jmicron 3rd party crap on the Intel chipset boards... I love my 650i SLI chipset board, no Jmicron crap to deal with over the IDE channels! Got a pair of 8800GT's that will be finding a nice home on the board soon. :p
Click to expand...

Who cares about IDE support? At this point all the modern system should be built with SATA optical drives. Especially as cheap as they are.

HWF said:
First off I'm not not happy with the 680i mb, at best its a less than average mb.
Click to expand...

At the time the 680i SLI came out, it was very competitive. The biggest problems with it are high failure rates and poor quad core overclocking.

HWF said:
Nvidia has enjoyed to much power in the video card market. I for one am glad Intel is stepping up and I hope they will truly provide major improvements in the video cards power and ability. (Havoc)
Click to expand...

ATI has enjoyed the same position and did for quite a while. I seriously doubt we will see anything majorly competitive in the high end market from Intel any time soon.

HWF said:
I'm also dissatisfied with my Nvidia 8800's DX10 usefullness. I feel Nvidia sand bagged on this design and limited the cards ability to deal with the demands DX10 needs.
Click to expand...

This is an odd opinion considering ATI has done just as poorly here if not more so.

HWF said:
They have driven prices for highend cards to crazy prices and not delivered enough value for the product. This greed for the lack of a better word will prove to have bitten them in the south side.
Click to expand...

I disagree. The 8800GTX offered a huge jump over the 7950GX2 and provided more than double the performance of the 7900GTX. Image quality has never been better and I've had less driver problems resulting in image corruption with the 8800GTX and GTS than I have out of any earlier ATI or NVIDIA products. Sure DX10 support isn't the best, but if you'll pay attention that seems largely due to implementation. Some games do better in this regard than others.

BrainEater said:
ahahaha

As an asus striker owner that is waiting for this 400$ 680i POS to die i'll answer this.

The 680i is a poorly designed , rushed to market chipset.It runs hot.It eats ram.the bios just dies.The mobo's just die.
Click to expand...

The BIOS problems are unique to ASUS. EVGA boards do not do that. The memory frying issue and early death are something that all brands of 680i SLI motherboards seem to experience. After owning 11 EVGA boards and assembling EVGA 680i SLI systems for several of my friends, I think I've had a large enough sample of EVGA boards to say that they do not have random BIOS deaths. As for the 680i SLI being rushed to market, well that's the conclusion many of us reached when all the SATA corruption issues came up along with the audio crackling issues with all 680i SLI boards, not just the reference design.

BrainEater said:
From what I've heard from my local reseller ;The asus striker has a 6% failure rate inside 10 months.Thats outrageous.
Click to expand...

That's twice the industry standard if I remember my statistics correctly. Even if that is true, I would imagine that many of those boards that "die" are capable of being repaired by the installation of a new BIOS chip, or other means.

BrainEater said:
Personally , I don't care even slightly what 680i boards are capable of supporting....I won't be using it anyways.
Click to expand...

I can understand your frustration. Believe me no one is more frustrated with 680i SLI boards than I probably am.
 
AFAIK the striker was a "non" reference design right? so why blame the 680 :p

I've been through 2 EVGA 680i boards, a TR and an A1, and both ran perfect, and have been pretty flexible for ocing with diff mem configs(4x1GB @ 800 4-4-4-12).

0.0
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
AFAIK the striker was a "non" reference design right? so why blame the 680 :p

I've been through 2 EVGA 680i boards, a TR and an A1, and both ran perfect, and have been pretty flexible for ocing with diff mem configs(4x1GB @ 800 4-4-4-12).

0.0
Click to expand...

The Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6, ASUS Striker Extreme, and P5N32-E SLI were the only non-reference designed 680i SLI boards I can recall. There were other non-reference designed SLI compatible boards like the DFI board and the P5N32-E SLI Plus, but I wasn't talking about those. Just full blown 680i SLI chipset based boards. In any case the reference designs have their share of problems too. Including short life span, poor quad core overclocking and the problem of memory frying.

Also all of the 680i SLI boards have problems with some modules in a 4x1GB configuration. This isn't theory or fact. Remember just because you aren't experiencing these problems doesn't mean that they don't exist. I'd also like to add that I've found that all the 680i SLI systems I've built from others including one for myself, are running dual core CPUs and aren't experiencing problems even though they are nearly a year old. I've had the most problems with quad core processors and A1 revision EVGA 680i SLI boards.
 
One thing to remember about Intel, though. they have throughly bought into the "platform" approach to selling their products. Centrino, Viiv, VPro, etc. are all heavily pushed by Intel. I think adding discrete video cards to the platforms makes sense. AMD/ATi are heading that way and Intel does pay close attention to them.

I agree with Dan that Intel probably won't immediately threaten the high end market with a release, but if they come out with a midrange card and keep the cost down, they may well steal decent market share from ATI/Nvidia in the mainstream segments which is their bread and butter. This would gain them the experience needed to make a run on the high end segment. Intel certainly has the resources to do this and I think Nvidia is giving them a reason to want to.

I see only good things coming out of an Intel entry in the GC market. If Nvidia doesn't survive, it won't be the end of the world. Look at how we survived 3dfx demise!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top