Current ATI Card vs. new NVIDIA for a non-gamer

Hi Tony,

I had the old NVIDIA and the 9860's display was perfect. But it's output quality for an external second monitor was very poor and the DVI couldn't drive 1600x1200 without thousands of bad pixels flickering on and off. The VGA output was very poor (fuzzy) as was the S-Video. Perhaps I had a bad card.

I haven't received my replacement 9860 with the ATI card yet, but my experiece (with desktop cards) has always been that ATI have much better signal quality than NVIDIA.

So if external monitors / XGA projectors / etc matters to you the NVIDIA might not be the best bet. If you only care about the 9860's own display, that's another issue.

- Crunch.

According to a sager reseller:

"Now the tech's are saying the new NVIDIA card will be about the same performance level as the X800, but might actually run a bit cooler."

She didn't reveal who her sources are for the information, but based on the old card, (and the need for thermal modification for the 9860 to run the ati card), the nvidia will definitely be the power saving chip between the two.

Another thing to watch out for concerning power in the 9860's - Intel's new 6xx chips launch the 20th of february, with EIST (enhanced speedstep), the same thing that keeps thier older pentium 4 M chips running cool... I haven't recieved word from anyone if it will be included in the 9860s or when, but i do know it's compatable with the motherboard, and also designed to run within a 115 watt thermal design (just like the 5xx chips)

correct, the question is when they will be available on the 9860 after the chip launches. i sure hope they let us know soon.anyways i found this:

The very forward looking stuff on Intel's roadmap, Q1'06, shows more promise than we had also originally anticipated. First off - get used to the names Presler and Cedar Mill. We had mentioned Cedar Mill before as a single core Pentium 4 evolution. While probably not a direct NetBurst revision, don't be surprised if some of those wonderful projects scrapped with Tejas show up in Cedar Mill instead. Cedar Mill utilizes 2MB of L2 cache, Socket 775 architecture and a 65nm process. On the enterprise portion of the roadmaps Intel is very careful to separate Cedar Mill from the rest of the Prescott 2M SKUs so perhaps there is more to meets the eye for this little processor.

Presler is a whole different animal. On the roadmaps Intel marks Presler as the eventual dual core replacement for Smithfield albeit with an extra megabyte of cache per core. Since this is the first we have heard of the processor in official circles, details were pretty light.

We talked real casually in the past about Dempsey - the dual core Xeon. From the roadmaps Dempsey doesn't look similar to any Pentium 4 or Xeon processor we know about. For starters, expect 1066FSB, dual core, and HyperThreading. If four logical processors per socket didn't seem to catch your attention the addition of Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) and iAMT will also show up on the chip platform. Intel also refers quite often to its "Diamond Peak" technology - which they loosely describe as:

Platform level LAN acceleration based on improvements in processor, MCH and ESB-2

Like the desktop platforms, the next generation server core logic will also feature Vanderpool Technology. This leads to a real lot of promise for those who rely on User Mode Linux or VMWare for their enterprise solutions. Rather than placing separate operating systems in different machines, VT opens the door to putting different operating systems on the same processor. The roadmap stresses this sort of configuration makes sense for high availability; if one OS crashes, its OK because we have 2 running.

"Blackford," the E7520 replacement for Xeon, will utilize ESB-2 and will become Dempsey's chariot in the server market. A cheaper, stripped down version of Blackford dubbed Bensley will perform the task of Dempsey's value platform, Greencreek is the workstation variant.





Intel Single Core Performance Desktop Lineup LGA775
Processor Speed L2 Cache FSB Launch
Pentium 4 670 3.80GHz 2MB 800MHz Q2'05
Pentium 4 660 3.60GHz 2MB 800MHz Q1'05
Pentium 4 650 3.40GHz 2MB 800MHz Q1'05
Pentium 4 640 3.20GHz 2MB 800MHz Q1'05

The card has nothing to do with dead pixels, it's purely a display manufacturing issue. I have the 4750 equivalent with the 9700 and the secondary output is also horrid.

I'm eager to hear if people with DVI outputs have good quality going to external LCDs.

-BT

I have the 9860, external LCD as a second monitor, the GeForce 6800 card and use DVI to get the signal to the external and frankly, it is AWESOME! There are several threads on here with this topic and it would appear, from my reading (which means nothing) that a lot of people are having great success with secondary monitors via DVI out. I have yet to try my s-video out.

If you aren't going to be gaming the the 9860 with either card is a waste of money.

Hi all, new here. I'm also a non-gamer (not primarily anyway). Patiently waiting to order the 9860, preferably with an Nvidia card and WUXGA...I might break down early though

I'm also interested in the performance of DVI output on either the ATI or Nvidia cards. Although the current available screens native res is 1600x1050, both can output nice clean 1920x1200 correct? I could be convinced to skip the WUXGA since a second monitor with this res would suffice. Has anyone successfully used the Apple Cinema Display monitors with these cards?

How easy is it to upgrade or replace the gpu that the notebook ships with? I'd be very interested in upgrading to an Nvidia Quadro card if they became commercially available. Any rumors on this as well?

In response to Atonic, the fast GPUs can be used for computer graphics/animation work which is what I would primarily need it for. Gamers aren't the only ones that want fast 2D/3D! (although I'm sure much time would be spent doing that as well)

you trying to suggest, that ppl tthat actually do sth useful with computing power wasting their money???