Anyone else dissapointed in x600?

U

Unoid

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 4, 2003
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I was kind of expecting this card to be .11u with 8 pipelines, to be a real midrange card for their new lineup.

hell I would been almost happy if it was a .11u with lowK and some 900+mhz memory.

I was really hoping ti would be a kick ass overclocker up to 900mhz core on par with 9600 products.

I suppsoe they'll end up releasing a card I have described with prolly 8 pipelines instead for their refreshers in october /nov
 
.11u is just an optical shrink of .13u, it's made for value-oriented applications at TSMC. As such, they don't offer lowK on .11u. Thus, any speed gains from the shrink are negated by the lack of lowK, and you'll probably get about the same performance out of each of them. The real savings is that each die takes a smaller percentage of the wafer, and thus you can fit more onto each wafer, which cuts costs.
 
Hard to be excited about a barely refreshed 9600XT. Still dont have a mainstream card that beats the 9700 pro. Notice the 9800's are being castrated about the net to 128 bit mem cards too. Ati really hates selling a good card for more than a few pennies under $200. I think some were expecting a 8 pipe X800 part which would essentially be up to snuff spec wise with a 9800pro but instead not only the mem was set to 128bit but 4 measly pipes! At least with 8 pipes it could have been repectably better than a 9500pro! :eek:That was apparently too much to ask. I'll have to keep doing what Im doing and getting former flagships or similar with the clockrate weaknesses. Maybe when they go on there tear of two years of rehashes with nothing much better than now, we'll have good cards on the cheap. Like in 6 to 8 Months. Looks like you have to cash in on when they decide to clear up old stock like they do now with 9800pro's. I thought with 9800 pro's at $200 something decent would come about for that point. Like I said they even found a a way to foil picking up one of those now. Yes it sucks and it sucks bad. You have to be an educated consumer to come away with something decent.

I dont expect something for nothing but 4 pipe cards of the last gen have sucked all along. You'd think with flagships up at 16 they would have somethnig better. Everyone will go on and on that they are a business. Of course they are, and I keep up enough that I will get a good card in the 200-300 range but it's disgruntling when companies do crap like this like use a new product name on something considerably much older than that. They double there former flagship power, yet stick with there already weak cores and there memory bottleneck. Then go out and neuter there older flagship because they'd rather stick you with some weak crap. Pre-emptively I must say save the Wall Street talk for people that care and leave it up to people who actually know what they are talking about but..... business or not, we as enthusiasts certainly do not owe them a pat on the back for this. Throwing a new sticker on an old turd is undoubtedly unimpressive. Turning older but still shiny kit into turds in the hopes of castrating your $200 line completely is bad.

For all the wall-street jockeys, hey I can make wild financial analysis as well, nV will do well in the midrange sector. Ati was getting weak there, have progressed VERY little (even taking steps BACKWARDS ahem 9500pro), taken more moves than I've EVER seen to obsolete a former flagship, have weakened there image with the same cheating and crap, they're simply not going to keep going with the whole "people's champion" card maker for long. When the 9800pro 256bit is gone the ONLY thing decent will be the X800Pro and XT. The 9600XT was a bit weak last year though not that far off, not a bad option... now its just downright silly. It seems like it must have been before the coming of Jesus when I got my 9700np for $235 and we still have this.

People think intel is evil. Imagine if your choice was a 3.2Ghz or 3.4GHz or 3.4EE GHz P4 and well if you dont like that here have this shiny celeron. Oh, thinking about getting the old 2.8 P4's... better hurry...we're whacking the cache and bus on them so they will be as undesirable as possible. Maybe because its a business you shouldn't be mad, but there is certainly one other thing you shouldn't do... and thats buy these turds on a pcb.
 
texuspete00 said:
People think intel is evil. Imagine if your choice was a 3.2Ghz or 3.4GHz or 3.4EE GHz P4 and well if you dont like that here have this shiny celeron. Oh, thinking about getting the old 2.8 P4's... better hurry...we're whacking the cache and bus on them so they will be as undesirable as possible.
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I don't really agree with that analogy. Intel really makes only a couple of different chips. The different speeds are determined after a chip is made by testing it and seeing what speed it will reliably run at. The main thing is, they don't make different designs for each chip speed.

Graphics cards, on the other hand, are all designed differently. Changing the number of pipelines or the bus width is a significant thing, and requires a redesign of the GPU and/or graphics board. It's nowhere near as easy as speed-binning chips, and nowhere near as cheap.

Of course, if you feel that they have too wide of a performance gap between cards, that's a different thing, as they could use any design they wish for the x600. I'm just pointing out that each different card takes quite a bit of time and money to develop, unlike Intel's different CPU speeds.
 
dont expect something for nothing but 4 pipe cards of the last gen have sucked all along. You'd think with flagships up at 16 they would have somethnig better. Everyone will go on and on that they are a business. Of course they are, and I keep up enough that I will get a good card in the 200-300 range but it's disgruntling when companies do crap like this like use a new product name on something considerably much older than that. They double there former flagship power, yet stick with there already weak cores and there memory bottleneck.
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I agree. I would never recommend a 9600 pro-class card to anyone wanting a mainstream card for the present. They were adequent for last year, but they are quickly becoming obsolete.
 
Everything I've read in the past 6 months, including hardocp.com, stated that the 9800XT will function as the midrange card. Theres not much of a difference feature wise, just speed, so theres no reason to do anything less, and technically theres also the X800 Pro in the mix.

So really what we have is a 5 tier DX9 lineup. Witht he x300 and the x600 being the 2 cheapest, just available for those buying AMD64-754 pci-e type budget systems. The 9800XT and 9600XT won't be leaving retailers anytime sooon, likely to still be available en masse through the end of this year...if you're up to speed with a ddr2 or dual channel DDR system (anything from nforce2-400gb to 865pe in the low to midrange agp8x type market) then you're not in the market they're aiming at to begin with, go pickup a 9800XT 256mb for $300, or the 128mb for $250.
 
personally i wish they had put in the 3dc and ps2.0b support that is in the x800

nvidia is gonna have sm 3.0 support from value - enthusiast eventually with the geforce 6 series
 
But the cards are still too slow...especially at the low-enthusiast level...Only rich boys get a card fast enough to make the feature a compelleing addon.
 
I love my 9600 Pro; it has served me far beyond what I could have imagined (especially in Far Cry). But, ATi rehashing this old tech like this is just unbelievable. The mainstream market has hit an all new low :( .
 
Yeah, I was hoping for a nice release of a castrated x800 core. 128-bit bus 8pipelines. on .11u, or maybe just lowk .13. I don't like having ot buy the former champs 9800pro etc for a replacement mainstream. The reason I bought a 9600pro was becuase it was new tech chip (r350) and could overclock like no other at the time.

Like i said I think we'll just have to wait another 6-7 months for their refresh of the x800 core to get out nice .11u 8 pipeline new midrangers.
 
Im fine with it just being a slight refresh.

Theirs the X800SE's which is probably the card your looking for (pretty similar to the 9800). That'll be like £150 or such so not much. Same as 9600pro when they came out...
 
damn right im dissapointed! if you read my other thread, i was hoping to wait until july to get the mainstream X600. It sounded so promising. Now that i've found out that it's basically just a souped up 9600XT, im either going to buy a 6800 or a 9800
 
I think ATI's gone a little too far to insure anthor 9500 -> 9700 thing doesn't happen again.

what will fill the gap between 200 and 500?
 
This is almost funny...I have a 2 year old performance card and have no compelling reason to upgrade unless I lay down $400-$500 for the new "top end."
 
Basically...Sad isn't it? I'm in the budget market from 3 years ago and the X800 is the first thing to make me care...the 9600 really isn't much faster, just DX9, in the games I play. My cpu hurts more...
 
Warriorprophet said:
Basically...Sad isn't it? I'm in the budget market from 3 years ago and the X800 is the first thing to make me care...the 9600 really isn't much faster, just DX9, in the games I play. My cpu hurts more...
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If I were you, a 9800 pro for $200 seems like a good buy.
 
the thing is, i still haven't seen any reviews on the X600 or the 6800. Maybe the X600 will suprise us by setting some pretty fast results. My money is still on the 6800 though. Lets remember that the X800 can also be called a souped up 9800 so we'll have to see the performance figures first
 
I was really hoping the X600 would be an 8 pipe card, but i guess not... still just a useless 9600XT rehash. Wouldnt an 8 pipe card sell much better?
and Warriorprophet, we have almost the same exact system, sans the videocard.
 
come on people, you are all saying
"I want power and I want it cheap!"

I don't have the money to spend on the high-end cards right now, so I'm using a 9600xt. Don't blame ATI for not having a really awesome, affordable card.
I think NVIDIA and ATI are both having enough trouble making their high-end cards as it is.
 
Sandman said:
The real savings is that each die takes a smaller percentage of the wafer, and thus you can fit more onto each wafer, which cuts costs.
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Which cuts thier bottom line a bit while not passing on the savings to you. : /
 
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