Bennett Ring06 June 2008, 5:00 PM
Computex Taiwan | With AMD and NVIDIA both making major announcements in the coming weeks, your current high-end graphics card is about to get old rather quickly.
With Computex now in full swing, the news is flowing thicker than frozen treacle and faster than an APC journo on deadline. Hot off the blocks is the rumour that AMD’s Radeon 4850 card has been delayed.
It’s a late low blow for the company’s partners, with the original release date set as the 18th of June, a mere fortnight away. The company has decided to release the card a week later, most likely to separate it from the hubbub of NVIDIA’s June 17 announcement. In the meantime, AMD partners have thousands of 4850 cards ready to go, but instead of powering through World of Warcraft dungeons, they’ll be gathering dust for another week.
Speaking of NVIDIA’s announcement, the centrepiece of this has already been seen in the flesh by a few lucky Computex attendees. Website VR-Zone captured some
happy snaps of the GTX 280 in the wild, and as expected it’s a whopper. Even though the GPU is built using a 65nm process, the GPU must be pumping out some serious heat. Why else would a dual slot cooling shroud be necessary?
Expected to retail for over a thousand Aussie dollars, the shots of the GTX 280 surprisingly lack one important detail; there’s not a HDMI port in sight. The inclusion of two SLI connections prove that Tri-SLI support is included, but here at APC we’d have much rather seen HDMI than this gimmicky feature.
VR-Zone has some more juicy gossip on the GTX 280; it’s not as fast as AMD’s 4870 card. According to unnamed sources, the 4870 beats NVIDIA’s flagship in 3D Mark Vantage. Even more interesting is the fact that AMD will not be enforcing clock speeds for manufacturer’s to set the chipset at – it’s up to the manufacturer to decide how fast the cards will run. Off the back of this news we’re anticipating a large performance difference between vanilla 4870 cards and those equipped with exotic nitrogen-fuelled cooling solutions.
Bear in mind that most of these rumour are still hearsay, but we’ve only got a couple of weeks before the two launches to find out if the truth is out there.