New 8800GTS variant arriving in Feb.

C

cantankerous

Gawd
Joined
Nov 15, 2006
Messages
655
According to VR-Zone a new variant of the 8800GTS is to arrive in February. This release is to counter sales of the popular bang for the buck X1950 series from ATI. The card is identical to the currently released GTS however it has half the memory. It will have 320mb as opposed to the currently released cards 640mb. The great thing is the memory bus is still being kept at 320bit and 320mb of ram is still more than 256 right?

The card is expected to be $100 cheaper than current GTS cards making this one hell of a deal and a great bang for the buck DX10 card.

The following is snipped right from the article itself. http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4472

VR-Zone has learned that NVIDIA will release cheaper GeForce 8800 cards next month to increase pressure on current ATi X1950 lineup targeting at X1950XT 256MB mainly. The new cards will based on the same 8800GTS GPU (96 unified, 24 texture processors and 20 ROPs). It has the same core and memory clock speeds but half the memory size of the current 8800GTS cards. The card will still be known as GeForce 8800GTS but comes with 320MB GDDR3 memories in 10 x 8M*32 array so the memory bus width remains unchanged at 320bit. The card length is the same as the current 8800GTS card at 9 inches and it is still a dual slot. The performance is close to the current 8800GTS 640M but it is US$100 cheaper. Does a price tag of US$299 sounds good to you?
 
skindogg said:
Who wants to buy my 8800GTS? /cry
Click to expand...

Why would you want to sell yours? You've already got one and with twice the memory. You always pay the price when you adopt early. You should know this.
 
Heck- I'd pay the extra $100.00 and "step down" to 2 8800GTS 320 cards in SLI over one 640 card. Wonder if they will be released before Feb 8th?
 
Dan_D said:
Why would you want to sell yours? You've already got one and with twice the memory. You always pay the price when you adopt early. You should know this.
Click to expand...

It never ceases to surprise me how many people get huffy when prices go down. It will be interesting to see how performance scales with memory on this card, if the only difference between them is truly the amount of memory.
 
Mark_Warner said:
It never ceases to surprise me how many people get huffy when prices go down. It will be interesting to see how performance scales with memory on this card, if the only difference between them is truly the amount of memory.
Click to expand...

Yeah it would be. If they are released soon enough, I'll consider one for my LAN box.
 
Nice idea but I can't help feeling like they ought to cut the MSRP a little more.
 
Blue Falcon said:
Nice idea but I can't help feeling like they ought to cut the MSRP a little more.
Click to expand...

More than likeley after a few weeks they'll be selling online for $250ish. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

GMoney42392 said:
does this mean the card will be smaller than a normal 8800gts???
Click to expand...

No, if you read the original post, it states that the card will be the same dimensions as the current 8800GTS. The only difference will be that the card has half the ram. That is provided the report is true at all. Cutting down the size of the card might sound like a nice idea, but that won't drop prices on the card, it will increase them. It will take considerable effort to redesign the PCB to accomplish the same function as the standard 8800GTS. It makes far more sense to cut down the amount of ram, which is one of the biggest expenses in the cards construction as it is. Bear in mind the GTS is long, but it's not rediculously long like the 8800GTX is.
 
GMoney42392 said:
does this mean the card will be smaller than a normal 8800gts???
Click to expand...


I'd bet not. If they are smart, they will just use memory with half the density. That way, they wouldn't have to change the PCB, except maybe to make some corrections for the biasing for the particular memory chips they choose.
 
I must be more out of touch than I thought.

320MB of GDDR3 is worth $100
I love the price cut if performance suffers less than 10% but is Nvidia getting the shaft on mem prices?
 
The Gonz said:
I must be more out of touch than I thought.

320MB of GDDR3 is worth $100
I love the price cut if performance suffers less than 10% but is Nvidia getting the shaft on mem prices?
Click to expand...

What, they aren't allowed to make a profit?
 
I hope this pushes down the prices on 7900 series cards, I'm still waiting for the 7900GT to stop hovering at $200.
 
Unknown-One said:
I hope this pushes down the prices on 7900 series cards, I'm still waiting for the 7900GT to stop hovering at $200.
Click to expand...

It won't. It'll get knocked off the market by the 7950 GT. It'll be $200 one day, and the next day, you won't be able to find it.
 
Diseaseboy said:
Heck- I'd pay the extra $100.00 and "step down" to 2 8800GTS 320 cards in SLI over one 640 card. Wonder if they will be released before Feb 8th?
Click to expand...

What an awesome idea, I never thought of that! Two of these in SLI would perform very sweet I would imagine and I can't see the decreased memory posing a problem as you will be back up to 640mb again. The savings in money is nice too especially if these come down even more than the originally $100 deduction from current 8800GTS cards. I doubt it but do you think the power consumption will go down a tad due to less memory?
 
cantankerous said:
What an awesome idea, I never thought of that! Two of these in SLI would perform very sweet I would imagine and I can't see the decreased memory posing a problem as you will be back up to 640mb again. The savings in money is nice too especially if these come down even more than the originally $100 deduction from current 8800GTS cards. I doubt it but do you think the power consumption will go down a tad due to less memory?
Click to expand...

Of course it will come down. Not much, but a little. Less memory = less transistors. Less transistors = less power consumption.
 
cantankerous said:
What an awesome idea, I never thought of that! Two of these in SLI would perform very sweet I would imagine and I can't see the decreased memory posing a problem as you will be back up to 640mb again.
Click to expand...
Thats not how SLI works; each card keeps the same information in vRAM so that the cards don't need to access each others vRAM over the PCIe bus. What this means is that you still only have 320mb of space to work with.
 
seeing what ATI/amd offers in terms of a "budget" card Ill see if i want to go sli or not
 
I was just crying about the cheaper version because it'll probably be about the same performance for less money. Nvidia could have done this from the beginning and I bet more ppl would have got one of these than bought the original GTS. They are only doing this (if it's true) in response to ATI which is the part that bugs me.
 
Wow, this is something I need to consider :)
My 7800 GTX is still holding on its own, but this 8800 GTS 320, for about $300, is very appealing.
 
skindogg said:
I was just crying about the cheaper version because it'll probably be about the same performance for less money. Nvidia could have done this from the beginning and I bet more ppl would have got one of these than bought the original GTS. They are only doing this (if it's true) in response to ATI which is the part that bugs me.
Click to expand...

It shouldn't bug you. That's how competition works.
 
Probably wont work.. but can we SLI a 640mb GTS and a 320mb GTS? :D

Pretty please? :D
 
Zinn said:
Who wants to bet it's called an 8800 GS?? Anyone? Eh? Eh?
Click to expand...

I hope it is. I don't want them to do what they did with the 7800GTX 256MB and 512MB cards. The two were very different, and had the same name. That kind of thing is just confusing.
 
My new build is being put on hold until the week before supcom ships. If I can get a better(or cheaper) card by then Ill be a happy guy.
8800GS vs GTS vs GTX...vs ATi's offerings which I probably will avoid because they lesser support an OS I dont use. What a crazy world.
 
If this is true, and i'm not saying it is or isn't, IMO the memory size will be a bit limiting for the power behind the 8800 GTS GPU, especially at 1600x1200+ with AA. In SLI there will be tons of shader power, but, it will be even more limited by the memory size since that doesn't change with SLI. 1600x1200 and under may be the sweet spot, so if you don't have a big widescreen LCD or game at greater than 1600x1200, this could be pretty sweet.

We'll see...
 
Brent_Justice said:
If this is true, and i'm not saying it is or isn't, IMO the memory size will be a bit limiting for the power behind the 8800 GTS GPU, especially at 1600x1200+ with AA. In SLI there will be tons of shader power, but, it will be even more limited by the memory size since that doesn't change with SLI. 1600x1200 and under may be the sweet spot, so if you don't have a big widescreen LCD or game at greater than 1600x1200, this could be pretty sweet.

We'll see...
Click to expand...
i hope this isn't the case but if it is, oh well. we can only wait to see the numbers and then decide if its worth it.

i just got a Dell 2407wfp and my X1900XT256 can't do CoD2 with all in game settings maxed. :(
 
Dan_D said:
I hope it is. I don't want them to do what they did with the 7800GTX 256MB and 512MB cards. The two were very different, and had the same name. That kind of thing is just confusing.
Click to expand...

It may have been confusing at first, but I think since it was already done, it makes more sense.
 
Sounds very very good for those with monitors that max out @ 1600x1200 and below. I wonder, though, would you still be able to turn on AA at high levels or would it suffer from lack of memory?

Personally, I wouldn't want to get an 8800 of any flavor and not be able to turn on AA. $100 less doesn't make sense to me here, unless it is pretty much the same as it's older brothers in lower resolutions. In any case, I'm excited to see the benchmarks.

I'll be very glad when we see any DX10 solution come out in the $250-$350 price range. Very exciting.
 
aiya said:
i hope this isn't the case but if it is, oh well. we can only wait to see the numbers and then decide if its worth it.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how it could not be worth it given the competition it's up against. The X1950XT does ok with 256MB and less bandwidth and the 512MB on the 7950GT doesn't seem to help it much.
 
Kliter said:
It may have been confusing at first, but I think since it was already done, it makes more sense.
Click to expand...

I can't agree. The 512MB version needed to be further differentiated from it's 256MB counterpart as the 512MB version had a memory speed increase, higher core clock and more ram on a different PCB. It more resembled the 7900GTX that replaced it. I think the 7800GTX 512MB should have been called a 7850GTX personally.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top