12.05.2008, 16:27
Just so you know, the clerk either lied to you or was merely an ignorant clerk who believes marketing hype. All that advice I gave you about avoiding SLI was totally destroyed by buying one of the only single card SLI solutions available. Amazing. In case you haven't figured this out yet, the 9800 is an "SLI in 1 card" solution with 2 8800 cores and, while faster than a 8800 for some games, is -identical- in speed with most (including il2) because SLI is not supported by most games out there, and 4 of every 5 games that do support it do not benefit from it in any meaningful way. There is little nvidia can do at this point to make the 9800 GX2 a better card, either, because games must be coded to specifically take advantage of multiple cores. Do some more research if you really value your money. There were many choices you could have made, and this was rather near the bottom of the list.
In fact, the 9800 series was such a ponderous market slog (similar to that video of the Saddam statue falling in Iraq that just sort of slowly, ever so slowly crumbled to the ground) that nvidia is planning to phase it out by summer. It will completely disappear leaving only that vaguely salty taste some of you may remember from the previous GX2 fiasco (the 7900GX2). Don't remember? I didn't think so. That's how little of a splash it made and how quickly it was forgotten. At the time it was hyped as the second coming of jesus, just like the 9800 GX2 was this time around. I had a 9800 GX2 to play with, ok? I have used it, I played with it for a while, and I know exactly why it was a failure. I don't suppose you noticed that you could have bought 2 SLI 8800s, saved yourself a lot of money, and gotten identical or better performance, performance that, as I said above, is not significantly better than a single 8800 (and WORSE, in some cases!).
Sorry to be a killjoy, but the technical world is still one of the few places left in the world where hype alone is not easily spun into success.
In fact, the 9800 series was such a ponderous market slog (similar to that video of the Saddam statue falling in Iraq that just sort of slowly, ever so slowly crumbled to the ground) that nvidia is planning to phase it out by summer. It will completely disappear leaving only that vaguely salty taste some of you may remember from the previous GX2 fiasco (the 7900GX2). Don't remember? I didn't think so. That's how little of a splash it made and how quickly it was forgotten. At the time it was hyped as the second coming of jesus, just like the 9800 GX2 was this time around. I had a 9800 GX2 to play with, ok? I have used it, I played with it for a while, and I know exactly why it was a failure. I don't suppose you noticed that you could have bought 2 SLI 8800s, saved yourself a lot of money, and gotten identical or better performance, performance that, as I said above, is not significantly better than a single 8800 (and WORSE, in some cases!).
Sorry to be a killjoy, but the technical world is still one of the few places left in the world where hype alone is not easily spun into success.