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NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX Hits The Ground Runningby Derek Wilson on 6/22/2005 9:00 AM EST
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- GPUs
127 Comments
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multiblitz - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - linkIt would be great of you could do a comparison between the 6800 and the 7800 in video /DVD-playback-quality similar to the comparison betwenn the X800 and the 6800 you did last year. Reply
at80eighty - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - linkOMG! I've never seen so many bitching whiners come outta the woodworks like this!!
You A-holes oughta remember that this site has been kept free
The editors owe YOU nothing. At all.
AT team - accidents happen. Keep up the great work!
/#121 : well said. Amazing how these turds dont realise that the knife cuts both ways... Reply
mrdeez - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link#124
You can stfu too...j/k..point taken .
I guess the real issue for me is that this card is a beast but ill never have it in my sli rig......i want all settings maxed at playable resolutions thats just me.........and i will not go back to crt...lol crt thats was lame dude Reply
Momental - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link#122 The problem with your solution regarding "all of us just getting two 6880U's" works perfectly for those with an SLI-capable board, yes? Some of us, like myself, anticpated the next generation of GPU's like the 7800 series and opted to simply upgrade to one of those when the dust settled and prices slid back a bit.
Additionally, telling someone to "STFU" isn't necessary. We can't hold a conversation if we're all silent. Knowhuddamean, jellybean? Hand gestures don't work well over the internet, but here's one for you.......... Reply
SDA - Friday, June 24, 2005 - linkLCD gamers shouldn't be bothering with new graphics cards, they should get new monitors.
kidding, I have nothing against LCDs. The real advantage of showing the card run at 2048x1536 is that it lets you see how well the card scales to more stressful scenarios. A card that suddenly gets swamped at higher resolutions will probably not fare well in future games that need more memory bandwidth.
On a side note, you can get a CRT that will run 2048x1536 @ a reasonable refresh for about $200 shipped (any Sony G520 variant, such as the Dell P1130). The only things that would actually be small in games are the 2D objects that have set pixel sizes, everything else looks beautiful. Reply
mrdeez - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link#121
lol ty for your insight....anyway like i said this card is not for lcd gamers as most have a 12x10 or 16x12.....so what purpose does this card have??answer me this batman and you have the group that should buy this card -otherwise, the rest of us should just get 2 6800u....this card is geared more for workstation graphics not gaming.....unless you game on a hi def crt and even then max res would be 1920 by 1080i..or something like that..... Reply
SDA - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link#116, if people in the comments thread are allowed to give their opinions, why shouldn't #114 give his too? Surely even an illiterate like you should realize that arguing that everyone is entitled to his or her own argument means that the person you're arguing with is too.
#119, some people have different requirements than others. Some just want no visible blur, others want the best contrast ratio and color reproduction they can get. Reply
bob661 - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link#188
Oh yeah. The monitor goes up to 16x12. Reply
bob661 - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link#118
I play BF2 on a Viewsonic VP201b (20.1") at work and it's very good. No streaking or ghosting. Video card is a 6800GT. I play at 1280x960. Reply
Icehawk - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkWell, I for one think 1280x1024 is pretty valid as that is what a 19" LCD can do. I'd just want to see a maxed out 12x10 chart to see how it does - I know a 6800 can't do it for every game with full AA and AF. Otherwise I agree - a 12x10 with no options isn't going to show much with current games.
See, I'm considering swapping my two 21" CRTs for two 19" LCDs - and they won't do more than 12x10. I'd love to do two 20-21" LCDs but the cost is too high and fast panels aren't to be found. 19" is the sweet spot right now IMO - perhaps I'm wrong?
Thanks AT for a nice article - accidents happen. Reply
mrdeez - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkalso:maybe gaming in hi def......ona big screen Reply
mrdeez - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link#114
Dude just stfu......we are here to comment what we want and say it freely......minus threats and name calling....as i said before this card is not for gamers...maybe elite gamers that have a monitor that does these resolutions but most gamers i know have went to lcd and i have yet to see any lcd[im sure there are some]do these resolutions so this card really is a card for crt elite gamers......lol with those resolutions on a 21 inch monitor you would need binoculars as glasses to play the game....the tanks on bf2 would be ant like small.... Reply
bob661 - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link#114
I am SO glad that Anand remains in business despite all the bitches that are in these comment sections. Reply
Locut0s - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkThose who are complaining that they should have reviewed at lower resolutions should think for a minute. First of all you are talking about a 600 buck card, most people who have that kind of money to spend on a card also have a monitor that is capable of 1600x1200 or better. Also benchmarking at any lower resolution on a card like this in todays games is almost pointless as you are almost entirely CPU bound at those resolutions. Do you really want to see page after page of 1024x768 charts that differ by only 4-5 percent at the most?
Also give the editors a break when it comes to writing these articles. As others have said this is not a subscription site and given the number of visitors and the quality of the articles I'm amazed, and gratified, that the people of Anandtech keep putting out article after long article despite all the winning that goes on over spelling mistakes and graph errors that more often than not are corrected within a few hours. Reply
SDA - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkThat's a really great comparison, #112, especially seeing as how we pay for AnandTech and any problems with it could leave us stranded in the middle of nowhere. And so witty, too!
Jarred, ah, thanks. Reply
Questar - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link"Our Web Editor is on vacation and we are all doing our own HTML and editing for the next 10 days. In our usual process, the article goes from an Editor to the Web Editor who codes the article, checks the grammar, and checks for obvious content errors. Those steps are not in the loop right now."
" do know Derek as a very conscientious Editor and I would ask that you please give him, and the rest of us, a little slack this next week and a half"
Dear Mr. Fink,
I am sorry to hear about the problems you have had with your vehicle breakdowns. You see, our quality inspector was on vacation that week, so we just shipped our vehicles strait off the assembly line. Please cut us a little slack, as we usually build much better vehicles.
Buncha Crap,
Crappy Moters Inc.
frisbfreek - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkmy question is how did they do hi res 2048x1536 when the card is only single-link DVI? Shouldn't either an analog connection or dual-link be necessary? Reply
yacoub - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link#108 - what do you want, a $2000 CPU to go with your $1200 in GPUs? =P Reply
CtK - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkso dual display is still not available with dual 7800s?!?!?!?!? Reply
smn198 - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkCome on Intel & AMD. Keep up! Reply
WaltC - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkI found this remark really strange and amusing:
"It's taken three generations of revisions, augmentation, and massaging to get where we are, but the G70 is a testament to the potential the original NV30 design possessed. Using the knowledge gained from their experiences with NV3x and NV4x, the G70 is a very refined implementation of a well designed part."
Oh, please...nV30 was so poor that it couldn't even run at its factory speeds without problems of all kinds--which is why nVidia officially cancelled nV30 production after shipping a mere few thousand units. JHH, nVidia's CEO went on record saying, "nV30 was a failure" [quote, unquote] at the time. nV30 was [i]not[/i] the foundation for nV40, let alone the G70.
Indeed, if anything could be said to be foundational for both nV40 and G70, it would be ATi's R3x0 design of 2002. G70, imo, has far more in common with R300 than it does nV30. nV30, if you recall, was primarily a DX8 part with some hastily bolted on DX9-ish add-ons done in response to R300 (fully a DX9 part) which had been shipping for nine months prior to nV30 getting out of the door.
In fact, ATi owes its meteoric rise to #1 in the 3d markets over the last three years precisely to the R3x0 products which served as the basis for its later R4x0 architectures. Good riddance to nV3x, I say.
I'm always surprised at the short and selective memories displayed so often by tech writers--really makes me wonder, sometimes, whether they are writing tech copy for their readers or PR copy at the behest of specific companies, if you know what I mean.
JarredWalton - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link98 - As far as I know, the power was measured at the wall. We use a device called "Kill A Watt", and despite the rather lame name, it gives accurate results. It's almost impossible to measure the power draw of any single component without some very expensive equipment - you know, the stuff that AMD and Intel use for CPUs. So under load, the CPU and GPU (and RAM and chipset, probably) are using far more power than at idle. Reply
PrinceGaz - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkI agree, starting at 1600x1200 for a card like this was a good idea. If your monitor can only do 1280x1024, you should consider getting a better one before buying a card like the 7800gtx. As a 2070/2141 owner myself, I know that a good monitor capable of high resolutions is a great investment that lasts a helluva lot longer than graphics cards, which are usually worthless after four or five years (along with most other components).
I'm surprised that no one has moaned about the current lack of an AGP version, to go with their Athlon XP 1700+ or whatever ;) Reply
Johnmcl7 - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkI think it was spot on to have 1600x1200 as the minimum resolution, given the power of these cards I think 1024x768, no AA/AF results for 3Dmark2003/2005 which have been thrown around are a complete waste of time.
John Reply
Frallan - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkGood review... And re: the NDA deadlines and the sleapless nights - don't sweat it if a few mistakes are published. The readers here have their heads screwed on the right way and will find the issues for soon enough. And for everyone that does not do 12*16 or 15*20 the answer is simple - U Don't Need The Power!! Save your hard earnt money and get a 6800gt instead. Reply
Calin - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkMaybe if you could save the game, change the settings and reload it you could obtain images from exactly the same positions. In one of the fence images, the distance to the fence is quite a bit different in different screenshots Reply
Calin - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkYou had an 7800 SLI? I hate you all
:p Reply
xtknight - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkEdit: last post correction: actually 21-page report! Reply
xtknight - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkJeez...a couple spelling errors here and there...who cares? I'd like to see you type up a 12-page report and get it out the door in a couple days with no grammatical or spelling errors, especially when your main editor is gone. Remember that English study that showed the human brain interpreted words based on patterns and not spelling?
I did read the whole review, word-for-word, with little to no trouble. There was not a SINGLE thing I had trouble comprehending. It's a better review than most sites have done which test lower resolutions. I love the non-CPU-limited benchmarks here.
One thing that made me chuckle was "There is clearly a problem with the SLI support in Wolfenstein 3D". That MS-DOS game is in dire need of SLI. (It's abbreviated Wolfenstein: ET. Wolf3D is an oooold Nazi game.) Reply
SDA - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkDerek or Jarred or Wesley or someone:
Did you measure system power consumption as how much power the computer drew from the wall, or how much power the innards drew from the PSU?
#95, it's a good thing you know enough about running a major hardware site to help them out with your advice! :-) Reply
mrdeez - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - linkDerek-
Please post benches with resolutions that are commonly used or this article becomes a workstatin graphics card article and not one for gamers....I mean really 2046x3056 or whatever the hell...lol...#1 who games at that res??? While this card is powerful it should be mentioned that unless you use a res over 1600x12000 this card is unnecessary.......lol those were some ridculous resolutions though.......and again post some benches with 1280x1024 for us lcd'ers..... Reply
Shinei - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link#95: Did you pay to read this article? I know I didn't...
#94: I guess you missed the part where they said that all resolutions below 1600x1200 were essentially identical in performance? If you only play in 1024x768, why are you reading a review about a $600 video card--go buy a 6600GT instead. Reply
jeffrey - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#83
Has the staff at Anandtech not ever heard of "Vacation Coverage"?
The excuse of your Web Editor being on vacation is, in reality, an admission of improper planning.
A major hardware site that is dedicated to cutting-edge technology should have planned better. New high-end GPU launches happen by NVIDIA only about 2-3 times a year at most.
This was one of the HUGE launches of the year and it was messed-up becuase the team didn't feel it was important enough to get some help for the article. There was damage done to Anandtech today due to the article errors and due to the casual admission in post #83 about not caring to properly cover a "Super Bowl" type of product launch today.
Save your apologies to the message board, give them to Anand. Reply
geekfool - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkHow about benchmarking some useful resolutions? This review was essentially useless. Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link86 - Trust me, most of us other editors saw the article, and quite a few of us offered a helping hand. NDAs a a serious pain in the rear, though. Derek was busy pulling all nighters and functioning on limited sleep for several days, and just getting the article done is only half the battle. Getting the document and results into the document engine for a large article with a lot of graphs can take quite a while and is an error prone process.
The commentary on the gaming benchmarks, for instance, was written in one order and posted in a different order. So please pardon the use of "this is another instance" or "once again" when we're talking about something for the first time. Anyway, I've got a spreadsheet of the benchmarks from early this morning, and other than non-functional SLI in a few games, the numbers appeared more or less correct. The text also didn't have as many typos. Crunch time and getting the final touches put on a major article isn't much fun.
Thankfully, I'm just the SFF/Guide man, so I'm rarely under NDA pressure. ;) Reply
robp5p - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkI would love to see someone start benchmarking in widescreen resolutions! 1920x1200 begs for a fast video card like this. As was pointed out, the only real benefits of the 7800 come at high resolutions, and many people buying high resolution monitors these days are getting widescreen LCD's
and btw, my 2405fpw is sitting in a box right next to me in the office, begging me to open it up before I get home...this thing will be fun to get home on the subway Reply
patriot336 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkWhere is the Monarch and Tiger love?
TigerDirect http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtool...
Monarchcomputer http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant....
Both are 599.00$ Reply
BikeDude - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link$600 for a card that only features single-link DVI outputs? Yeah right, pull the other one nVidia!
Rune Reply
ta2 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkAs a player of eve-online, I can tell you that the game is entirely CPU dependent. On that matter, it will 100% any CPU you have. I mean ANY CPU. Also for the testing, you should use 1600x1200 max AA and AF and go into an area with many player ships on eve-online. I guarantee you will not get 60 FPS. Impractical and unscientific, but would still give better results than this review. Reply
TinyTeeth - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkI am very impressed of the performance of the new chip. Nvidia seems to have fixed the problems SLI had during the 6800 generation.
I am also pleased they have managed to deliver the cards so quickly. That also puts some pressure on ATI. Reply
Alx - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkFace it, this launch isn't gonna hurt anyone except people with minds too small to accept that there is simply one more option than there was before. If you liked pc gaming yesterday, then there is no reason why this launch should make you stop liking it today. Unless you're a retarded buttbaby who can't handle choices. In that case please get a console and stop coming to this site. Reply
mlittl3 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#82, Wesley
Well that sucks that ya'll have lost your web editor for awhile. Especially when there is so much cool hardware coming out around now. In our research lab, we pass around our publications and conference posters to others in the group so that a fresh pair of eyes see them before they go live or to the journal editor. But of course, everyone else at AT is also busy so oh well.
Good work guys and I look forward to the "new CPU speed bump" article (or FX-57 for those not under NDAs).
PS. If ya'll have an opening for another web editor, you should hire #84 (ironchefmorimoto). I hear he can cook really well. Reply
AtaStrumf - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkNicely corrected Derek, I think there are just a few typos left, like this one (**):
Page 20
Power Consumption
We measured power consumption between the power supply and the wall. This multiplies essentially amplifies any differences in power draw because the powersupply is not 100% efficient. Ideally we would measure power draw of the card, but it is very difficult **determine** to determine the power draw from both the PCIe bus and the 12V molex connector.
AND a few double "Performances" in the title (Performance Performance) starting with page 10.
Nice card nVidia!!! I hope ATi isn't too far behind though. Crossfire --> cheap SLi ;-) I need a nice midrange product out by September when it'll be time to upgrade to a nice E6 stepping S939 A64 and something to take the place of my sweet old GF2 MX (I'm not kidding, I sold my 6600GT AGP, and now I'm waiting for the right time to move to PCIe).
IronChefMoto - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkAmen -- you guys work hard on your articles. Keep up the great work. And don't f*cking bother the web editor. We...er...they don't get enough vacation as it is.
(another web editor who needs a break) Reply
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkDerek was too modest to mention this in his comments, but I think you should know all the facts. Our Web Editor is on vacation and we are all doing our own HTML and editing for the next 10 days. In our usual process, the article goes from an Editor to the Web Editor who codes the article, checks the grammar, and checks for obvious content errors. Those steps are not in the loop right now.
The next thing is NDA's and launches. We are always under the gun for launches, and lead times seem to get shorter and shorter. Derek was floating questions and graphs last night at 3 to 4 AM with an NDA of 9AM. Doing 21 pages of meaningful commentary in a short time frame, then having to code it in HTML (when someone else normally handles that task), is not as easy as it might appear.
I do know Derek as a very conscientious Editor and I would ask that you please give him, and the rest of us, a little slack this next week and a half. If you see errors please email the Editor of the article instead of making it the end of the world in these comments. I assure you we will fix what is wrong. That approach, given the short staff, would be a help to all of us. We all want to bring you the information and quality reviews you want and expect from AnandTech.
IronChefMoto - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#79 -- But why wouldn't it be a high quality article, mlittl3? I thought you told me that AT was infallible? Hmmm? ;-) Reply
Houdani - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkThanks for the refresh, Derek. I went back and took a peek at the revised graphs. I have a couple of comments on this article before you move on to the next project.
>> When the Splinter Cell page was refreshed, the graph for 20x15x4 apparently disappeared.
>> When you removed the SLI's from the Guild War page, it looks like the 7800GTX changed from 50.5 to 55.1 (which is the score previously given to the 6800 Ultra SLI).
>> Several of the pages have scores for no AA benches listed first, while other pages have scores for the 4xAA listed first. While the titles for the graphs are correct, it's a little easier to read when you stay consistent in the ordering. This is a pretty minor nit-pick, though.
>> Thanks for updating the transparency images to include mouseover switches ... quite handy. Reply
fishbits - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link"They priced themselves into an extremely small market, and effectively made their 6800 series the second tier performance cards without really dropping the price on them. I'm not going to get one, but I do wonder how this will affect the company's bottom line."
The 6800s were "priced into an extremely small market." How'd that line turn out? I don't imagine they've released this product with the intention of losing money overall. Why do you think retailers bought them? Because they know the cards won't sell and they're happy to take the loss? It's already been proven that people will pay for you to develop and sell a $300, wait $400, wait $500 video card. It's already been proven that people will pay a $100+ premium for cards that are incrementally better, not just a generation better. Sounds like this target is a natural, especially knowing it'll eventually fall into everyone else's purchasing ability.
Being able to say you have the bar-none best card out there by leaps and bounds is certainly worth something. Look at all the fanboys that are out there. Every week or month you're able to stay on top of the benches means you get more people who'll swear by your products no matter what for years to come. Everyone you can entice into buying your card who sees it as a good product will buy your brand in the future as a preference, all other options being equal. I could be wrong, but suspect Nvidia's going to make money off this just fine.
"I am proud that our readership demands a quality above and beyond the norm, and I hope that that never changes. Everything in our power will be done to assure that events like this will not happen again."
See... that's why I'm a big fan of the site.
mlittl3 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#78, I bet you didn't even read the article. How do you know it demonstrated editoral integrity? Reply
IronChefMoto - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#23 (mlittl3) still can't pronounce "Penske" and "terran" right, regardless of the great editorial integrity demonstrated by the AT team today. Thanks! Reply
BenSkywalker - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkDerek-
I wanted to offer my utmost thanks for the inclusion of 2048x1536 numbers. As one of the fairly sizeable group of owners of a 2070/2141 these numbers are enormously appreciated. As everyone can see 1600x1200x4x16 really doesn't give you an idea of what high resolution performance will be like. As far as the benches getting a bit messed up- it happens. You moved quickly to rectify the situation and all is well now. Thanks again for taking the time to show us how these parts perform at real high end settings. Reply
blckgrffn - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkYou're forgiven, by me anyway :) It is also the great editorial staff that makes Anandtech my homepage on every browser on all of my boxes!
Nat Reply
yacoub - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#72 - Totally agree. Some Rome: Total War benchs are much needed - but primarily to see how the game's battle performance with large numbers of troops varies between AMD and Intel more so than NVidia and ATi, considering the game is highly CPU-limited currently in my understanding. Reply
DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkHi everyone,
Thank you for your comments and feedback.
I would like to personally apologize for the issues that we had with our benchmarks today. It wasn't just one link in the chain that caused the problems we had, but there were many factors that lead to the results we had here today.
For those who would like an explanation of what happened to cause certain benchmark numbers not to reflect reality, we offer you the following. Some of our SLI testing was done forcing multi-GPU rendering on for tests where there was no profile. In these cases, the default mutli-GPU mode caused a performance hit rather than the increase we are used to seeing. The issue was especially bad in Guild Wars and the SLI numbers have been removed from offending graphs. Also, on one or two titles our ATI display settings were improperly configured. Our windows monitor properties, ATI "Display" tab properties, and refresh rate override settings were mismatched. This caused the card to render. Rather than push the display at a the pixel clock we expected, ATI defaulted to a "safe" mode where the game is run at the resolution requested, but only part of the display is output to the screen. This resulted in abnormally high numbers in some cases at resolutions above 1600x1200.
For those of you who don't care about why the numbers ran the way they did, please understand we are NOT trying to hide behind our explanation as an excuse.
We agree completely that the more important issue is not why bad numbers popped up, but that bad numbers made it into a live article. For this I can only offer my sincerest of apologies. We consider it our utmost responsibility to produce quality work on which people may rely with confidence.
I am proud that our readership demands a quality above and beyond the norm, and I hope that that never changes. Everything in our power will be done to assure that events like this will not happen again.
Again, I do apologize for the erroneous benchmark results that went live this morning. And thank you for requiring that we maintain the utmost integrity.
Derek Wilson
Senior CPU & Graphics Editor
AnandTech.com Reply
Dmitheon - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkI have to say, while I'm am extremely pleased with nVidia doing a real launch, the product leaves me scratching my head. They priced themselves into an extremely small market, and effectively made their 6800 series the second tier performance cards without really dropping the price on them. I'm not going to get one, but I do wonder how this will affect the company's bottom line. Reply
OrSin - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkI not tring to be a buthole but can we get a benchmark thats a RTS game. I see 10+ games benchmarks and most are FPS, the few that are not might as well be. Those RPG seems to use a silimar type engine. Reply
stmok - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkTo CtK's question : Nope, SLI doesn't work with dual-display. (Last I checked, Nvidia got 2D working, but NO 3D)...Rumours say its a driver issue, and Nvidia is working on it.
I don't know any more than that. I think I'd rather wait until Nvidia are actually demonstrating SLI with dual or more displays, before I lay down any money. Reply
yacoub - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#60 - it's already to the point where it's turning people off to PC gaming, thus damaging the company's own market of buyers. It's just going to move more people to consoles, because even though PC games are often better games and much more customizable and editable, that only means so much and the trade-off versus price to play starts to become too imbalanced to ignore. Reply
jojo4u - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkWhat was regarding the AF setting? I understand that it was set to 8x when AA was set to 4x? Reply
Rand - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkI have to say I'm rather disappointed in the quality of the article. A number of apparently nonsensical benchmark results, with little to no analysis of most of the results.
A complete lack of any low level theoretical performance results, no attempts to measure any improvements in efficiency of what may have caused such improvements.
Temporal AA is only tested on one game with image quality examined in only one scene. Given how dramatically different games and genres utilize alpha textures your providing us with an awfully limited perspective of it's impact.
swatX - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkTHE SLI is meant to played on high res.. if you got money to brn on SLI then i am damn sure you got money to burn on a 19" monitor ;) Reply
CtK - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkcan Dual Display be used in SLi mode?? Reply
Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkIn general 6600GT SLI performance seems a bit random, in some cases it's really good as with BF2 but in others not as good as a 6800GT.
John Reply
bob661 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkAnyone notice how a SLI'd 6600GT is just as quick as a 6800 Ultra in BF2? Reply
R3MF - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkgive me some details on the 7800 and 7800GT
what, when, and how much? Reply
bob661 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#59
I am more eager to see how the new midrange cards will perform than these parts but if I had a spare $600 I would jump all over this. Reply
bob661 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#56
LMAO!!!! Reply
bob661 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#44
And I thought paying $350 for a video cards was too much then or even before than there was the $200 high end and before that the $100 high end. I balked at all of those prices but I understood why they were prices as such and didn't bitch everytime the costs went up. The bar keeps being raised and the prices go with it. Inflation, more features and the fact that most of us here can afford $350 video cards pushes the cost of new PREMIUM cards higher by the year. It's only going to go up unless either people quit buying the high end cards or the manufatucrers find a magical process to reduce costs dramatically. Reply
Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkYou're quite right, there's always a premium for the best, I don't see any difference here, no-one is being forced to buy this graphics card. As usual, I'll wait until something offers me a better price/performance ratio over my current X850XT/6800 Ultra duo.
John Reply
Avalon - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkSeems to be a problem with the last Knights of the Old Republic 2 graph. Both 7800GTX setups are "performing" less than all the other cards benched. Despite all the mistakes, it still seems like I was right in that this card is made for those who play at high resolutions. Anyone with an R420 of NV40 based card that plays at 16x12 or less should probably not bother upgrading, unless they feel the need to. Reply
CrystalBay - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkDoes this card play Riddick smoothly @ shader 2++ ????? Reply
fishbits - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link"In aboot 5 years i figure we'll be paying 1000 bucks for a video card. These prices are getting out of control, every generation is more expensive then the last. Dont make me switch to consoles damnit."
Funny, I can't afford the very best TVs the minute they come out. Same for stereo components. But I don't cry about it and threaten "Don't make me switch to learning the ukelele and putting on my own puppet shows to entertain myself!" Every time a better component comes out, it means I get a price reduction and feature upgrade on the items that are affordable/justifiable for my budget.
Seriously, where does the sense of entitlement come from? Do these people think they should be able to download top-of-the-line graphics cards through BitTorrent? Do they walk around Best Buy cursing out staff, manufacturers and customers for being so cruel as to buy and sell big-ass plasma TVs?
On second thought, get your console and give up PC gaming. That way you can stop being miserable, and we can stop being miserable hearing about your misery. Reply
tazdevl - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkFunny how the single card deltas here are higher than at any other site.
Unwhelmed for the amount of money and lack of performance increase.
Have to commend nVIDIA for ensuring retail availability at launch. Reply
archcommus - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkImpressive, but I'm still happy with my X800 XL purchase for only $179. For what it seems, with a 1280x1024 display, I won't need the kind of power this card delivers for a very long time. And less than $200 compared to $600, with still excellent peformance for now and the forseeable future? Hmm, I'll take the former. Reply
Lonyo - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkI would have liked some 1280x1024 benchmarks with 8xAA from the nVidia cards and 6xAA from ATi to see if it's worth getting something like a 7800GTX with 17/19" LCD's to run som esuper high quality settings in terms of AA/AF. Reply
segagenesis - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkI'm not disappointed. For one thing the price of current cards will likely drop now, and there will also be mid-range parts soon to choose from. I think the transparency AA is a good idea for say... World of Warcraft. The game is loaded with them and too often can you see the blockyness of trees/grass/whatever.
#44 - Actually are you new to the market? :) I remember when early "accelerated" VGA cards were nearly $1000. Or more.
Everybody lambasted NVIDIA last year for the lack of product (6800GT/Ultra) to the market, so them actually making a presence this year instead of a paper launch should also be commended. Of course, now what is ATI gonna pull out of its hat? Reply
KeDaHa - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkThe screenshot shows very clearly that SSAA provides quite a quality improvement over no AA
The difference is bloody miniscule, perhaps if you used an image SLIGHTLY larger than 640x480 to highlight the difference? Reply
L3p3rM355i4h - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkWowzers. Time to get rid of teh 9800... Reply
shabby - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkIn aboot 5 years i figure we'll be paying 1000 bucks for a video card. These prices are getting out of control, every generation is more expensive then the last.
Dont make me switch to consoles damnit. Reply
Xenoterranos - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkHell, for the same price as an SLI setup I can go out and get a 23 inch cinema display...And since these cards can't handle the 30" native resolution anyway, it's a win-win. And yeah, whats up with the quality control on these benchmarks! I mean really, I almost decided to wait for the ATI next-gen part when I saw this (GeForce man since the GeForce2 GTS!) Reply
Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkIf they're too busy for the article, that's fair enough, the point is they should put it up when they've had time to check it over, rather than rush an article up that isn't ready to be published.
John Reply
IronChefMoto - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkRegarding the "shame on Anandtech" comments -- y'all ever think they were too busy sh*tting themselves at the performance of this card to really pay that much attention to the article? ;-)
IronChefMorimoto Reply
Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkThe prices I've seen here in the UK for the 7800s here are around 400 pounds, the 6800 Ultras are currently around 300 pounds. So quite an increase over the NV40s but not unacceptable given the performance, I'm sure they'll come down in price once the early adopters have had their fill.
John Reply
yacoub - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#26 - You must be new to the market, relatively speaking. I remember quite well the days when high-end new videocards were at MOST $400, usually $350 or less when they debuted. It was more than a year or two ago though, so it might have been before your time as a PC gamer. Reply
rimshot - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkNot sure why the price is so high in North America, here in Aus you can get a 7800GTX for the same price as a 6800GT ($850AU).
nitromullet - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link"What no Crossfire benchies? I guess they didn't wany Nvidia to loose on their big launch day."
Ummm... maybe because CrossFire was paper launched at Computex, and no one (not even AT) has a CrossFire rig to benchmark? nVidia is putting ATI to shame with this launch and the availability of the cards. Don't you think if ATI had anything worth a damn to put out there they would?
All that aside... I was as freaked out as the rest of you by these benchmarks at first (well moreso than some actually, becuase I just pulled the $600 trigger last night on an eVGA 7800GTX from the egg). However, these graphs are clearly messed up, and some appear to have already been fixed. I guess someone should have cut Derek off at the launch party yesterday. Reply
blckgrffn - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkVery disapointed at the fit and finish of this article. Anandtech is supposed to have the best one, not a half baked one :( I even liked HardOCP better even with their weird change the levels of everything approach - at least it has a very good discussion of the differences between MS and SS AA and shows some meaningful results at high res as well.
Shame on Anandtech :( Reply
fishbits - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkGood release.
Can we get a couple of screen shots with the transparency AA?
"Maybe this one of the factors that will lead to the Xbox360/PS3 becoming the new gaming standard as opposed to the Video Card market pushing the envelope."
Yeah, because the graphics components in consoles don't require anything but three soybeans and a snippet of twine to make. They're ub3r and free! Wait, no, you pay for them too eventually even if not in the initial console purchase price. Actually I think the high initial price of next gen graphics cards is a sign of health for PC gaming. There are some folks not only willing to pay high dollars for bleeding edge performance, they're willing to pay even higher dollars than they were in the past for the top performers. Spurs ATI/Nvidia to keep the horsepower coming, which drives game devs to add better and better graphics, etc.
"They only reveresed a couple of labels here and there, chill out. It's still VERY OBVIOUS which card is which just by looking at the performance!"
Eh, I use benchmarks to learn more about a product than what my pre-conceived notions tell me it "ought" to be. I don't use my pre-conceived notions to accept and dismiss scientific benchmarks. If the benches are wrong, it is a big deal. Doesn't require ritual suicide, just fixing and maybe better quality control in the future. Reply
Thresher - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link2x6800GT costs almost the same amount as this single card and gives up nothing in performance.
The price of this thing is ridiculous. Reply
rubikcube - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkJust wanted to say thanks for starting your benchmarks at 1600x1200. It really makes a difference in the usability of the benchmarks. Reply
VIAN - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link"NVIDIA sees texture bandwidth as outweighing color and z bandwidth in the not too distant future." That was a quote from the article after saying that Nvidia was focusing less on Memory Bandwidth.
Do these two statements not match or is there something I'm not aware of. Reply
obeseotron - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkThese benchmarks are pretty clearly rushed out and wrong, or at least improperly attributed to the wrong hardware. SLI 6800 show up faster than SLI 7800's in many benchmarks, in some cases much more than doubling single 6800 scores. I understand NDAs suck with the limited amount of time to produce a review, but I'd rather it have not been posted until the afternoon than ignore the benchmarks section. Reply
IronChefMoto - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#28 -- Mlittl3 can't pronounce Penske or terran properly, and he's giving out grammar advice? Sad. ;) Reply
SDA - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkQUESTION
Okay, allcaps=obnoxious. But I do have a question. How was system power consumption measured? That is, was the draw of the computer at the wall measured, or was the draw on the PSU measured? In other words, did you measure how much power the PSU drew from the wall or how much power the components drew from the PSU? Reply
Aikouka - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkWow, I'm simply amazed. I said to someone as soon as I saw this "Wow, now I feel bad that I just bought a 6800GT ... but at least they won't be available for 1 or 2 months." Then I look and see that retailers already have them! I was shocked to say the least. Reply
RyDogg1 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkBut my question was "who," was buying them. I'm a hardware goon as much as the next guy, but everyone knows that in 6-12 months, the next gen is out and price is lower on these. I mean the benches are presenting comparisons with cards that according to the article are close to a year old. Obviously some sucker lays down the cash because the "premium," price is way too high for a common consumer.
Maybe this one of the factors that will lead to the Xbox360/PS3 becoming the new gaming standard as opposed to the Video Card market pushing the envelope. Reply
geekfool - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkWhat no Crossfire benchies? I guess they didn't wany Nvidia to loose on their big launch day. Reply
Lonyo - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkThe initial 6800U's cost lots because of price gouging.
They were in very limited supply, so people hiked up the prices.
The MSRP of these cards is $600, and they are available.
MSRP of the 6800U's was $500, the sellers then inflated prices. Reply
Lifted - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#24: In the Wolfenstein graph they obviously reversed the 7800 GTX SLI with the Radeon.
They only reveresed a couple of labels here and there, chill out. It's still VERY OBVIOUS which card is which just by looking at the performance!
WAKE UP SLEEPY HEADS. Reply
mlittl3 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkDerek,
I know this article must have been rushed out but it needs EXTREME proofreading. As many have said in the other comments above, the results need to be carefully gone over to get the right numbers in the right place.
There is no way that the ATI card can go from just under 75 fps at 1600x1200 to over 100 fps at 2048x1535 in Enemy Territory.
Also, the Final Words heading is part of the paragraph text instead of a bold heading above it.
There are other grammatical errors too but those aren't as important as the erroneous data. Plus, a little analysis of each of the benchmark results for each game would be nice but not necessary.
Please go over each graph and make sure the numbers are right. Reply
Regs - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkYikes @ the graphs lol.
I just came close to pushing the button to order one of these but then I said...what games can't play on a 6800GT at 16x12 res? There is none. Far Cry was the only game that comes close to doing it.
Bravo to Nvidia, his and boo @ lagging game developers. Reply
bob661 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link#19
Are you new to this market or do you have a short memory? Don't you remember that the initial 6800 Ultra's cost around $700-800? I sure as hell do. Why is everyone complaining about pricing? These are premium video cards and you will pay a premium price to buy them. Reply
Barneyk - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkYeah, not a single comment on any of the benchmarks, what is up with that?
There were alot of wierd scenarios there, why is there NO performance increase in SLI some of the time?
And why is 6800Ultra SLI faster then 7800GTX SLI??
Alot of wierd stuff, and not a singel comment or analysis about it, I always read most new tests here on AT first becasue its usually the best, but this review was a double boogey to say the least... Reply
Dukemaster - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link@21: The score of the X850XT PE in Wolfenstein still looks messed up to me... Reply
shabby - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkYa some of the scores dont make much sense, 7800 sli loosing to a single 7800? Reply
yacoub - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkHey, looks great! $350 and you've got a buyer here! Reply
Lifted - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkGuys, they simply reversed the 6800 Ultra SLI and 7800 GTX SLI in all of the 1600 x 1200 - 4x AA graphs.
Now everthing is kosher again. Reply
Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkTo 18 - I have to admit, I didn't bother looking closely at them, seeing the X850XT supposedly beating all the other cards by such a margin at those resolutions showed they were completely screwed up! I didn't notice the performance increase as you go up the resolution, maybe it's something I missed on my own X850XT? ;) I wish...that would be a neat feature, your performance increases as your resolution increases.
I agree it needs pulled down and checked, not to be harsh on AT but this isn't the first time the bar graphs have been wrong - I would rather wait for a review that has been properly finished and checked rather than read a rushed one, as it stands it's no use to me because I have no idea if any of the performance figures are genuine.
John Reply
RyDogg1 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkWow, who exactly is paying for these video cards to warrant the pricing? Reply
Lonyo - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkTo #14, the X850XT performance INCREASED by 33% from 1600x1200 to 2048x1536 according to the grahics, so to me that just screams BULLSH!T.
I think the review needs taking down, editing, and then being put up again.
Or fixed VERY quickly.
AT IMO has let people down a bit this time round, not the usual standard. Reply
Diasper - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkoops posted before i wrote anything. Some of the results are impressive, others aren't at all. In fact results seem to be all over the board - I suspect drivers are something of the culprit and are to be blamed. Hopefully, as new drivers come out we'll see some performance increases or at least more a uniform distribution of good results Reply
Diasper - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkReply
Live - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkDerek get cracking, the graphs are all messed up! And the Transparency AA Performance section could use some info on what game it is tested on and some more comments. I also think that each benchmark warrants some comments for all of us that have a hard time remembering two numbers at the same time. Keep it simple folks…. Reply
Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkI agree something is wrong with these results, I thought they were odd but when I got to the Enemy Territory ones they seem completely wrong - at 2048x1536 and 4xAA the X850XT is apparently getting 104 fps, while the 6800 Ultra gets 48.3 and the SLI 6800 Ultras are only getting 34.6 fps! Especially bearing in mind it's an OpenGL game.
John Reply
rimshot - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkThis has got to be an error by Anandtech, all other reviews show the 7800GTX in SLI at those same settings hammering the 6800Ultra in SLI. Reply
Lonyo - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkThe benchmarks are all a load of crap it seems.
Check the Wolfenstein benchmarks.
The X850XT goes from 74fps @ 1600x1200 w/4xAA to 103fps @ 2048x1536 w/4xAA
A 33% increase when the res gets turned up. Good one.
There also seem to be many other similar things which look like errors, but they could just be crappy nVidia drivers, or something wrong with SLI profiles.
Who knows, but there's definately a lot of things which look VERY odd/suspicious here. Reply
Dukemaster - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkMy Iiyama VMP 454 does 2048 no prob so i'm game :p Reply
vanish - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkoh and in several of the benchmarks, the 6800U SLI more than doubles the performance over the single 6800U. Is that normal? I thought SLI gains were generally about 45% or so. Reply
rimshot - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkIs it just me or is it a little strange that the 6800Ultra SLI outperforms the 7800GTX SLI at 1600x1200 with 4xAA in every benchmark ??? Reply
PrinceXizor - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkNo comment on the fact that in virtually every game it LOSES to the 6800 SLI at 1600x1200 at 4XAA.
All other scores look very impressive. But, in this particualar group of settings, the 6800 SLI eats it for lunch.
P-X Reply
vanish - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkFrom what i'm seeing the 6800U SLI beats the 7800GTX[SLI] in most normal resolutions. I don't know, but usually when a new generation comes out it should at least beat the previous generation. Sure, it works wonders on huge resolutions, but very few people actually have monitors that can display these types of resolutions. Most people don't have monitors above 1200x1000 resolution, much less 1600x1200. Reply
Live - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkWhat's up with the BF2 graphs? The 6800u SLI scores more at 1600x1200 4xAA (76,3) then it does at the same resolution without AA (68,3). That doesn't make sense does it?
Sorry for the extremely poor spelling…
Dukemaster - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkOver 2,5 than a 6800 ultra in Battlefield 2 and Splinter Cell, how the hell is that possbile?? Reply
vortmax - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkGood job Nvidia with the launch. Now lets see if ATI can match the performance and availability. Reply
ryanv12 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkFrom what I see, the 7800GTX is really of benefit to you if you have a monitor that is higher than a 1600x1200 resolution. Fairly impressive though, I must say. I also wasn't expecting double the performance of the 6800's since it only has 50% more pipes. I can't wait to see the 32 piped cards! Reply
Live - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkLooks good. to bad i ahve to wiat a few month until ATI releases the competition. Reply
bpt8056 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - linkFirst post!! Congrats to nVidia for pulling off an official launch with retail availability. Reply

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Corsair's Force SSD Reviewed: SF-1200 is Very Goodby Anand Lal Shimpi on 4/14/2010 2:27 AM EST
63 Comments
Back to Article
Carleh - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI don't want to be PIA, I've asked this before, but there was no reply, so, here it goes:
Would it be possible to add some left and right margins to print page layout? I know it's meant to be printed, but I guess a lot of readers use it to read the whole article at once (me included), and it is slightly inconvenient to read without margins.
Thank you. Reply
taltamir - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkinteresting use of the print option.
i haven't considered it before but i will definitely use it now...
problem with giving it margins is that it will not print correctly.
but it would be great if there was another option to display the article all at once with margins like the print command does. Reply
taltamir - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkactually, you just need to NOT maximize, instead stretch to a comfortable size that doesn't touch the edge of the monitor Reply
vol7ron - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThat's wrong, CSS has the capability of having a few different stylesheets. Most notably, there is one for "screen" and one for "print", which would apply here. All AT has to do is create a margin for that page in the screen css and set that margin to 0 in the print css. Reply
deputc26 - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkAnand SSD reviews create deeper understanding than anything else I've found on the web, your investigative approach is awesome. Thanks! Reply
teohhanhui - Friday, April 16, 2010 - linkTry to read what the original poster has said. The discussion is about the print stylesheet. Reply
Visual - Thursday, November 18, 2010 - linkNo, it is not. It is about the printer-friendly version of the page, which can still have both screen and print stylesheet as vol7ron suggested.
Try to have a clue about web development before engaging in a conversation about it.
To the OP: you can use Greasemonkey or some equivalent (or even just make a javascript bookmarklet) and "fix" such minor things by yourself on any sites that you want. Reply
donjuancarlos - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkWhy not just change your settings in Page setup on the File menu to get the margins you want when you print an article? Reply
donjuancarlos - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link$#!7 ! Ignore that last comment. Reply
romansky - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkIf you are using firefox, you can open Firebug and change the style of the DIV under the BODY tag to the following:
Original: div style="width: 100%; overflow: hidden;"
To: div style="overflow: hidden; margin: 0px 40px;"
Should work :) Reply
Carleh - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThanks for the tip, I'll try it. Reply
bstowe94 - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkYes the idea of using the print to read the whole article at once is quite nice. I will be doing this from now on. Reply
therealnickdanger - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkIt's also very nice for bathroom breaks. Some men read the paper. I read AT! Reply
dgz - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThat's what I do.
You can also to this in Chrome and Opera, too. Reply
Spivonious - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkRemember that the Print view doesn't have banner ads. That's the major source of revenue for this site, so I doubt Anand is going to make the Print view more attractive for on-screen reading. Reply
nsiboro - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link... then insert a few adverts between pages, I personally don't mind. AT can feed me Ads and Tech, anytime! Reply
chrnochime - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkHate to break it to you but not everything in life can be bent to your pleasing. Reply
Carleh - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkBefore redesign, print layout used to have margins, so it's not really "bending to my pleasing", I'm not asking for something new.
BTW, what's the point of your comment? Reply
mariush - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkFile > Print Preview > Page Setup > Margins & Header/Footer
Set the values you're comfortable width and print.
No need to mess with the site for such things. Reply
nilepez - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThe site makes money based on either ad views or ad clicks. Clearly, they'll get less of both if everyone reads the text on a single page that has no ads.
I was going to suggest page zipper (FF plugin), but it doesn't work with this site, and even if it did, since they have feed back directly below each page, you'd have to get through every singe post to get to scroll to the next page (rinse/repeat for each page of text).
I think it'd be smarter for Anand to put the feed back after the last page and setup pages to work with page zipper.....we get a single page with all the text, but we also see all of the adds.
With that said, I don't really mind the current set. Reply
JohnQ118 - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - linkJust in case if you are using IE8 - open the Print view; then simply from the View menu select Style - No Style.
You will get some small margins. Then adjust the window size as comfortable for reading. Reply
remosito - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkHi there,
thanks for the great review. I couldn't find from the article what kind of data you are writing
for the random 4k read/write tests. Those random write numbers look stellar.
Which might have to do with the data being written being not very random at all and allowing for big gain coming from the sandforce voodoo/magicsauce/compression??? Reply
Mr Alpha - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI believe the build of IOMeter he uses writes randomized data. Reply
shawkie - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThis is a very important question - nobody is interested in how quickly they can write zeroes to their drive. If these benchmarks are really writing completely random data (which by definition cannot be compressed at all) then where does all this performance come from? It seems to me that we have a serious problem benchmarking this drive. If the bandwidth of the NAND were the only limiting factor (rather than the SATA interface or the processing power of the controller) then the speed of this drive should be anything from roughly the same as a similar competitor (for completely random data) to maybe 100x faster (for zeroes). So to get any kind of useful number you have to decide exactly what type of data you are going to use (which makes it all a bit subjective). In fact, there's another consideration. Note that the spare NAND capacity made available by the compression is not available to the user. That means the controller is probably using it to augment the reserved NAND. This means that a drive that has been "dirtied" with lots of nice compressable data will perform as though it has a massive amount of reserved NAND whereas a drive that has been "dirtied" with lots of random data will perform much worse. Reply
nafhan - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkMy understanding is that completely random and uncompressible are not the same thing. An uncompressible data set would need to be small and carefully constructed to avoid repetition. A random data set by definition is random, and therefore almost certain to contain repetitions over a large enough data set. Reply
jagerman42 - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkNo; given a random sequence of 0/1 bits with equal probability of each, the expected number of bits to encode the stream (i.e. on average--you could, through extremely unlikely outcome, have a compressible random sequence: e.g. a stream of 1 million 0's is highly compressible, but also extremely unlikely, at 2^(-1,000,000) probability of occurrence).
So onwards to the entropy bits required calculation: H = -0.5*log2(0.5) -0.5*log2(0.5) = -0.5*(-1) -0.5*(-1) = 1.
In other words, a random, equal-probability stream of bits can't be compressed at a rate better than 1 bit per bit.
Of course, this only holds for an infinite, continuous stream; as you shorten the length of the data, the probability of the data being compressible increases, at least slightly--but even 1KB is 8192 bits, so compressibility is *hard*.
Just for example's sake, I generated a few (10 bytes to 10MB) random data files, and compressed using gzip and bzip2: in every case (I repeated several times) the compressed version ended up larger than the original.
For more info on this (it's called the Shannon theory, I believe, or also "Shannon entropy" according to the following), see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_... Reply
shawkie - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI'm also not convinced by the way Anand has arrived at a compression factor of 2:1 based on the power consumption. The specification for the controller and Anand's own measurements show that about 0.57W of power is being used just by the controller. That only leaves 0.68W for writing data to NAND. Compare that with 2.49W for the Intel drive and you end up with a compression factor of more like 4:1. But actually this calculation is still a long way out because 2MB/s sequential writes are 250MB/s on the SandForce and only 100MB/s on the Intel. So we've written 2.5x as much (uncompressed) data using 1/4 as much NAND power consumption. So the compression factor is actually more like 10:1. I think that pretty much proves we're dealing with very highly compressable data. Reply
HammerDB - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThat should definitely be checked, as this is the first drive where different kinds of data will perform differently. Due to the extremely high aligned random write performance, I suspect that the data written is either compressible or repeated, so the drive manages to either compress or deduplicate to a large degree.
One other point regarding the IOMeter tests: the random reads perform almost identical to the unaligned random writes. Would it be possible to test both unaligned and aligned random reads, in order to find out if the drive is also capable of faster random reads under specific circumstances? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkCorrect. The June 08 RC build of Iometer uses randomized data. Older versions used 0s.
Take care,
Anand Reply
shawkie - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkAnand, do you therefore have any explanation for why the SandForce controller is apparently about 10x more efficient than the Intel one even on random (incompressible) data? Or can you see a mistake in my analysis? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThat I'm not sure of, the 2008 Iometer build is supposed to use a fairly real world inspired data set (Intel helped develop the random algorithm apparently) and the performance appears to be reflected in our real world tests (both PCMark Vantage and our Storage Bench).
That being said, SandForce is apparently working on their own build of Iometer that lets you select from all different types of source data to really stress the engine.
Also keep in mind that the technology at work here is most likely more than just compression/data deduplication.
Take care,
Anand Reply
keemik - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkCall me anal, but I am still not happy with the response ;)
Maybe the first 4k block is filled with random data, but then that block is used over and over again.
That random read/write performance is too good to be true. Reply
Per Hansson - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkJust curious about the missing capacitor, will there not be a big risk of dataloss incase of power outage?
Do you know what design changes where done to get rid of the capacitor, where any additional components other than the capacitor removed?
Because it can be bought in low quantities for a quite ok retail price of £16.50 here;
http://www.tecategroup.com/ultracapacitors/product... Reply
bluorb - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkA question: if the controller is using lossless compression in order to write less data, is it not possible to say that the drive work volume is determined by the type of information written to it?
Example: if user x data can be routinely compressed at a 2 to 1 ratio then it can be said that for this user the drive work volume is 186GB and cost per GB is 2.2$.
Am I on to something or completely of the track ? Reply
semo - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkthis compression is detectable by the OS. As the name suggests (DuraWrite) it is there to reduce the wear on the drive which can also give better performance but not extra capacity. Reply
ptmixer - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI'm also wondering about the capacity on these SandForce drives. It seems the actual capacity is variable depending on the type of data stored. If the drive has 128 GB of flash, 93.1 usable after spare area, then that must be the amount of compressed/thinned data you can store, so the amount of 'real' data should be much more.. thereby helping the price/GB of the drive.
For example, if the drive is partly used and your OS says it has 80 GB available, then you store 10 GB of compressible data on it, won't it then report that it perhaps still has 75 GB available (rather than 70 GB as on a normal drive)? Anand -- help us with our confusion!
ps - thanks for all the great SSD articles! Could you also continue to speculate how well a drive will work on a non trim-enabled system, like OS X, or as a ESXi Datastore? Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI commented on this in the "This Just In" article, but to recap:
In terms of pure area used, Corsair sets aside 27.3% of the available capacity. However, with DuraWrite (i.e. compression) they could actually have even more spare area than 35GiB. You're guaranteed 93GiB of storage capacity, and if the data happens to compress better than average you'll have more spare area left (and more performance) while with data that doesn't compress well (e.g. movies and JPG images) you'll get less spare area remaining.
So even at 0% compression you'd still have at least 35GiB of spare and 93GiB of storage, but with an easily achievable 25% compression average you would have as much as ~58GiB of spare area (45% of the total capacity would be "spare"). If you get an even better 33% compression you'd have 66GiB of spare area (51% of total capacity), etc. Reply
KaarlisK - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkJust resize the browser window.
Margins won't help if you have a 1920x1080 screen anyway. Reply
RaistlinZ - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI don't see a reason to opt for this over the Crucial C300 drive, which performs better overall and is quite a bit cheaper per GB. Yes, these use less power but I hardly see that as a determining factor for people running high-end CPU's and video cards anyway.
If they can get the price down to $299 then I may give it a look. But $410 is just way too expensive considering the competition that's out there. Reply
Chloiber - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI did test it. If you create the test file it compressable to 0 percent of its original size.
But if you write sequential or random data to the file you can't compress it at all. So i think that iometer uses random data for the tests. Of course this is a critical point when testing such drives and I am sure that anand did test it too before doing the tests. I hope so at least ;) Reply
Chloiber - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkJust to show you what I mean.
I created an 512kb seq. write IOMeter test pattern which writes to a space of 1GB. When you use IOMeter for the first time, it creates that 1GB file to reserve the space. I then stopped the test as soon as the 1GB file was written and before the actual test even began. I then used 7-zip to compress the file, that's the result:
It's in german and it says to the right that the uncompressed size is 336MB (I paused at that point) and the compressed file size is 404KB. So the level of compression is nearly 0%.
I aborted then and did the above test again. This time, I let the harddisk write data for about 11 seconds (HD does about 100MB/s) so the complete 1GB file has been used.
I used again 7-Zip and this is the result:
Uncompressed size: 138MB (paused earlier here), compressed size: 138MB. So it cannot be compressed at all.
That leads to the conclusion that IOMeter uses indeed a completely random pattern for its tests. Reply
darckhart - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linki didn't see listed physical dimensions. is this 7.5mm or 9mm height? also sata 3gb/s i assume? Reply
GDM - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkDo you feel a noticable difference between this new Cosair Drive and say the Intel X-25M 160 GB? Benchmarks are nice, but I wonder how much of the speed difference can you really feel? Reply
shin0bi272 - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkIve noticed this quite a bit on reviews here. When a benchmark is low and the text of the result doesnt fit in the bar the text gets squished into the text of the name of the item being tested. Could you please move those results to the outside of the bar off to the right? Since the bar is so small you will have plenty of room out there to put the result and it will be legible. Other than that thanks for a great review and thanks for still including a spindle disk or two as well (though I do question the decision to use a 5400rpm drive unless you were trying to throw that in for laptop users or something). Reply
Kary - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkAny chance of comparing the drives using compressed NTFS. I tend to do this to my SSD drive anyway and probably wouldn't see a difference on a drive that was trying to compress data internally that was already compressed).
Oh, my drive is only 30GB and I needed the space..quad core CPU, figured I wouldn't notice a difference speed wise. Reply
Lazlo Panaflex - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThe Force is strong with this one. Reply
Exodite - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkOuch.
I'm old enough to appreciate bad puns, well done Sir! Reply
Lazlo Panaflex - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkhehe..thanks. I couldn't resist ;-) Reply
Exodite - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkVery nice review, it soothes some of my fears regarding these drives.
I'm curious as to whether you know at this point if there's going to be reviews of the OCZ Vertex 2 and Agility 2 as well?
Seeing as these drives are based on the SF1500 and SF1200 as well it'd be interesting to see the performance difference from drives from the same vendor, using the different chips. There's the Vertex LE of course but it seems it's more or less the bastard child in this comparison.
Thanks in advance. Reply
vol7ron - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI was curious if it's possible to overclock these SSDs either through the SF1200 or the RAM in some way or another?
I know pencil modding has been dead in recent years. This is due in part to smaller components, but also to the fact that manufacturers have both (1) implemented in-place safeguards to reduce problems from overclocking and (2) started encouraging overclocking by providing more options through the BIOS.
I'm just curious if anyone's figured out how to do it on these SSDs. I know the average shouldn't - you typically don't want to fiddle with the sole thing that stores your data - but I suspect some tweaking could take place by enthusiasts to really up performance, if wanted. Anyone know a place to look into this?
vol7ron Reply
hybrid2d4x4 - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThanks for the power consumption charts, Anand! Any chance you can throw in a typical 2.5" 5400RPM HDD that usually comes stock in most laptops as a reference point for those of us who are thinking of upgrading? Also, could keeping Device Initiated Power Management disabled account for the significant discrepancies between your numbers and the recent article on Tom's HW? (ie: Tom's got an idle of 0.1W for the intel drive- a lot better than the competition)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/6gb-s-ssd-hdd,... Reply
Impulses - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkThe Nova seems to do surprisingly well under Anand's heavy workload test, compared to other Indillix-based drives... Altho it's performance is just average (and similar to other Indillix drives) in most other tests. Isn't the Nova essentially the same thing as the OCZ Solid 2? (and the G.Skill Falcon II) That drive has been priced VERY competitively from what I've seen, I'm surprised there isn't more buzz around it. Looking forward to Anand's review of the Nova.
I might be buying soon as a gift for my sister, she really needs more than 80GB for her laptop (80GB X25-M is still the best bang for the buck out there imo), so a $300 120GB is right up her alley. Reply
_Q_ - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkSorry for being a little off-topic (still SSD though)...
Are there any news on when is the Indilinx JetStream going to be released in some drive from any vendor?
Cause as far as I know, this was initially going to be out in end of 2009, then there was a delay... but no further info that I could find more recently.
Thanks for any help. Reply
Hauraki - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - linkI'm thinking to buy a SSD for system drive and the v+ 2nd gen appeared to be a decent choice for home use. Only got review on X-bit and Hexus so far, would like to see an Anand review.
Thanks. Reply
IvanChess - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link"The Mean Time To Failure numbers are absurd. We're talking about the difference between 228 years and over 1100 years. I'd say any number that outlasts the potential mean time to failure of our current society is pretty worthless."
Well said! Reply
Rindis - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - linkBut think of the future!
In a couple thousand years, when very little is remembered of this time, entire dissertation papers on early 21st century culture will be written based on the contents of your hard drive!
(And if that isn't a scary thought, I don't know what is....) Reply
stalker27 - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - linkWas wondering if the charts could be fixed to correctly display the HDD values for random ops?
Something like if the value doesn't fit in the bar it should be displayed after the bar, to its right... and not to its left as it does now colliding with the name of the HDD.
BTW, that was actually a factor I'm looking into seeing in SSD reviews... how good are they at the really useful operations, not that sequential doesn't matter, that much. Reply
zzing123 - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - linkGiven the SandForce controllers effectively compress data on the drive, I'm just curious about precisely how much data you can write to the drive...
For example, if data is say text, and you create a 1MB text file, how many of those 1MB text files can you physically store on the drive versus another non-SandForce drive? Just a curiosity. Reply
xilb - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - linkthe OCZ LE isnt using the SF-1500
only the vertex 2 pro is using the SF-1500 and the vertex 2 is using SF-1200
the LE has a chip that sort of in the middle of the 2 .........look it up on the OCZ forms you will see Reply
paulpod - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - linkNeedless to say the author is completely wrong about what a MTBF number means. That number has nothing to do with infant mortality rate nor with life expectancy. It is the statistical failure rate over a large number of units operating in their prime life period. Reply
marc_soad - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - linkIf I'm not wrong, what the author means is 2 000 000 hours = 83 333 days = 228 years.
So the drive is meant to fail after 228 years if it's powered on all the time, or more if the computer is powered on only for a portion of the day.
Thanks for the review by the way! :) Reply
p05esto - Friday, April 16, 2010 - linkHey, I COMPLETELY agree with the printing thing....I hate articles that have "pages", I'd rather view a 10 page long single document....yes, I'm that frickin lazy. You shouldn't remove the pages, but offer a FULL view option? I use the print option sometimes as well just to read an article all at once. Reply
poee - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link"Performance is down, as you'd expect, but not to unbearable levels and it's also pretty consistent."
Why is performance down? Why should we "expect" this? Do I have to read every SSD article you've written previously to understand new articles? Or is there one big article that has all the info that you obliquely allude to in subsequent articles?
Where can I find the current recommendations for SSDs (SandForce vs Indilinx vs Intel vs Micron vs Samsung, latest firmware updates, etc.)? Is there a central repository of SSD information that is assimilated and arranged categorically (for easy research), or must all this info be followed like a blog? Reply


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DxOMark review for the Pentax K5Friday November 05 2010 Sensor Review
From the outside, the new Pentax K5 looks exactly the same as the K7. The main differences lie inside: the K5 uses the brand-new 16.3 MP sensor (able to operate between ISO 80 and 12800, extended to 51200), an improved SAFOX 9 AF system, a higher burst speed, and a much better video mode that can record 1080p footage at 25 fps.
The best APS-C in all tested fields
No need for suspense: this new 16.3 MP sensor is simply the best APS-C we have tested so far, sometimes able to compete even with very high-end full-frame cameras.
The overall score of the K5 puts it in the lead with 82 points — more than 9 points better than the D90 or the Alpha 55, and 16 points ahead of the Canon 7D or 60D. The K5 is literally the best APS-C performer for each segment, even in low ISO.
Wonderful Dynamic Range performance
Dynamic range is clearly where the K5 struts its stuff. The scores it reaches at ISO 80 are simply impressive: at 14.1 Ev (print mode), even the D3X's full-frame sensor is not that good. Smoothing appears at ISO 3200 but does not impact the metrics.
Improved high ISO performance ...
The biggest weakness for the K7 was its average high ISO performance. The K5 addresses this by reaching a solid 1162 ISO.
… But full-frame sensors remain the best for high ISO operation
While the K5 may be the best APS-C competitor, its excellent "small" sensor does not manage to close the gap with the good 24x36 models in area where size still matters.
As good as it is, the K5 sensor isn't still quite up to its solid full-frame competitors, being roughly one stop behind a D700 or a 5D MkII.
But just imagine how promising the K5 technology could be in a full-frame body: increased picture quality associated with solid high ISO performance —a dream!
Disclaimer: This dxomark review evaluates only the selected camera's RAW sensor performance metrics (i.e., Color Depth, Dynamic Range, and Low-Light ISO), and should not be construed as a review of the camera's overall performance, as it does not address such other important criteria as image signal processing, mechanical robustness, ease of use, flexibility, optics, value for money, etc. While RAW sensor performance is critically important, it is not the only factor that should be taken into consideration when choosing a digital camera.
Further readings for the DxOMark review for the Pentax K5
To provide photographers with a broader perspective about mobiles, lenses and cameras, here are links to articles, reviews, and analyses of photographic equipment produced by DxOMark, renown websites, magazines or blogs.
To website
Pentax K-5Read the article
To website
Pentax K-5 Detailed ReviewRead the article
To website
Pentax K-5 ReviewRead the article
To website
Pentax K-5 Review : first imagesRead the article