The “Break it Down” Blog

Well it looks like nVidia’s next-gen part has been released and will be on sale shortly. Unfortunately this card is not going to be for the weak of heart. For those of you that have the mindset of “Chipset revision == new and smaller process”, you need to sort of throw out that expectation when having a look at these shots:

And yes, you are seeing what looks to be four power connectors comming off that card. I believe that means it needs two power inputs, and the other two plugs are just pass-throughts for low-power items like fans. My current 7800 GTX has this, so it’s not the end of the world, but does make me wonder why they don’t just throw an external power supply on it like the 3dfx team did with their last card before going bankrupt… after all for all intents and purposes, I believe these are the 3dfx engineers working on all these SLI designs anyway, it was no sercret nVidia hired them up and that is where the resurgance of SLI came from. I still don’t think it’s a great approach, it’s as obscure as SMP was to the non-server market. Useful to a very very small few, useless or too expensive to the remaining 90% of the market.

Dual-core is a different story, that is a good solution to the problem and I look forward to seeing this trend of multiple cores continue. Maybe we’ll all converge at cell-like design in a few years