Ackadia’s Blog

Getting about that time so I’ve been mouching about looking for this years upgrades. Still not settled on my graphics card as the one I have (880O GTX) is fine and the alternatives from AMD and Nvidia seem to me a little too hot and noisy and relatively underpowered. That’s not to say they aren’t a great improvement on mine, more that given 2 generations the jump isn’t where I’d expect it to be.

At present, tentatively, I’m tossing up between Nivdia’s GeForce GTX 280 and AMD/ATi’s Radeon HD 4870×2. The 280 has Nvidia PhysX in it’s favour, but no Displayport and only supports HDMI via an adapter. It’s not a great issue but as my next monitor supports the standard I’d rather have a card I can use with it. Another reason for waiting, I guess. Plus, Nvidia doesn’t support DirectX 10.1 As it happens I refuse point blank to downgrade my XP to Vista, but on principal it irritates me, a little. Reckon I’ll wait a short while for the next generation which will be along shortly!

Intel Core i7

On the motherboard and chip side, on cost, I’m going with the Intels Socket LGA1366 Core i7 920, out next month, though I might bite the bullet and pay the extra for the 940. Not enough firm details on the motherboard versions at present, but Asus and Gigabyte have several offerings each ready for release.

Reasonably reliable trade gossip gives the release day as November 17th, but there is nothing official that I am aware of, but I did recently find this (blank) page at one of my suppliers, dated 4th October 2008:

Intel Core i7 940 2.93Ghz (Nehalem) (Socket LGA1366) - Retail

The source code had all the details stored in the meta data of the header.

Another (non-linked) page at Overclockers offered a motherboard:

Intel SmackOver Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

Details are scarce, but include: the fact that the memory slots on this board are closer to the CPU for increased performances (long at it doesn’t create hot spots and related issues!), an 8 layer PCB with the usual ports and with 4x DDR3 slots (supporting Tri-channel).

Doesn’t look right to me, but one overclocking site gave details of a dual cpu, dual memory bank (8x) Foxconn board too.

Personally I am waiting on the Gigabyte Extreme range, though I have pencilled in the Asus P6T Deluxe. More to follow.