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Sparkle intros PCI GeForce 8 series cards (NOT PCI-E)

helmutcheese

helmutcheese

helmutcheese

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" With people still wondering if Nvidia would help bring some AGP version of its low- and mid-range GeForce 8 series cards, Sparkle has went even further down memory lane and has announced four new graphics cards two GeForce 7 and two GeForce 8 that feature PCI interfaces.

The new offer includes two GeForce 7300GT cards, passive cooled and with 256/512MB of RAM and, the starts of the announcement, two GeForce 8500GT cards.

With all the bells and whistles of the G86 marchitecture, the PCI-powered GeForce 8500GTs feature a core speed of 450MHz, 16 Stream Processors at 900MHz shader clock and 512/256MB 128-bit DDR2 memory. Who needs AGP right? "

http://www.tcmagazine.info/comments.php?shownews=15773&catid=2
 
There's a lot of market for moderate, but not too expensive, PCI cards. When you consider that a lot of retail bought pcs, especially cheaper ones, even up til about a year ago, sometimes wouldnt have PCI-E or even AGP slots on the mobo, even though the rest of the spec might be semi-decent (2-3GHz Celeron/P4, 1GB RAM etc), I can see thier being a market, although admittedly not a huge one, for graphics cards that are far superior to the Intel GMA/etc rubbish that these machines usually had built in.

It's never going to be a hugely fast set of cards, but it could well make the difference between people like these being able to play newer games, like Doom3, Quake, Oblivion etc, because I'd imagine if they have a machine without AGP/PCI-E in the first place, they're unlikely to want to spend a lot on a machine to play games.


I mean from personal experience,for rescuing some of my mate's gf's coursework from her broken family pc, and managing to transfer the harddrive and work into thier new pc, I was given the remains of the old base unit. Was only an E-machines Celeron 2.53GHz, 512MB RAM etc jobby, but would have been fine for a backup machine for some light/older gaming/WoW incase my main system went down, if it'd had a better graphics card than the onboard intel rubbish, which could barely run X2. If you coupled an extra 512MB ram, and a 7300GT/8500 Im sure it'd run pretty well at lower resolutions, on almost anything you could throw at it, bar games like STALKER, or as a HTPC machine if you replaced the PSU and some of the fans etc.
 
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I thought pci was going to be dropped and replaced by pci-e 1x but Im glad if its going to continue to be used. My PCI gfx card from 10 years ago is still usefull every now again, which is good considering I spent 70 quid on it at the time and its only got 1mb :o
 
im guessing vista has created this market for people who want aero 3d effects but all they need is a new gpu for it and not a whole new system.
 
Alexrose1uk said:
I mean from personal experience,for rescuing some of my mate's gf's coursework from her broken family pc, and managing to transfer the harddrive and work into thier new pc, I was given the remains of the old base unit. Was only an E-machines Celeron 2.53GHz, 512MB RAM etc jobby
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Similar situation here, one of my fiancee's friends PC was completely knackered (dead psu), she bought a laptop and said I could keep the base unit if I could burn off her documents, pics etc onto a cd. Celeron 2.6ghz, 256meg RAM with pretty much everything onboard (vga/sound/lan/modem etc).

There's load of shop-bought PCs around from the P4 era which don't have AGP slots - the CPU isn't that bad and with an extra stick of RAM they would be fine for gaming with a PCI gfx card.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
im guessing vista has created this market for people who want aero 3d effects but all they need is a new gpu for it and not a whole new system.
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i would say you have hit the main reason for that doing this.

not a bad idea like, i remember my friend having a p4, 512mb etc but not even an agp slot and having to get a completely **** pci card just cause he wanted to game a bit
 
No idea, but I'd have presumed they'd have done some optimisation and prior testing to make sure these things actually run properly, rather than just releasing them with a fraction of the performance of the normal card variants
 
Good for Media centers, with a 8500 you could build a blueray capable pc form your old crappy dell without any AGP.

Or maybe you want more that 2 screens for Vista, shuve on of these in a spare pci slot and presto!
 
We all know these damned PCI cards will be far too expensive for what they are tho, I mean if they were £20-30, it'd almost be tempting to pick up one to play with, but they'll probably come out completely overpriced compared to the more common variants, like £50-60 or something ludicrously expensive for what they are.

I mean whatever retard thought I'd pay £50 for a PNY 6200 PCI version should have gone and shot his marketting career rather than putting that out, there's no way I'd pay that for such a weak card, especially when the other versions could be found for £20 when I was looking.
 
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Alexrose1uk said:
No idea, but I'd have presumed they'd have done some optimisation and prior testing to make sure these things actually run properly, rather than just releasing them with a fraction of the performance of the normal card variants
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lol you'd think so

These cards probably wouldnt get released at all if wasnt for a desperate market who will pay more.
Just look how socket a cpu prices rose and no doubt something like that will happen with agp, I think it allready commands a premium and so on
 
I can't see this working very well for anything other then 2D, as PCI bandwidth is 127.2 Mb/sec. To compare AGP X1 is 254.3 Mb/sec, standard PCI-E X1 is 2.5 Gbps!

:eek:
 
ACESHIGH said:
Its suggested that none of the 8 series cards will ever go to AGP due to the fact that Nvidias AGP-PCIe bridge chip does not support the 8 series cards.
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It's not going to stop board partners having a go, however...if I remember correctly, quite a few cards that weren't meant to migrate to AGP did, courtesy of companies like Gainward and Gecube.

Believe it or not, outside the hallowed and somewhat artificial world of the high-perfomance computer enthusiast, people still use 800x600 monitors, Celerons, Semprons and computers with 256Mb of RAM (hell, I'm using an Athlon XP to type this) who - as stated above - just want to be able to run Vista with its effects, or speed up StarCraft/Knights of the Old Republic.
 
mrthingyx said:
It's not going to stop board partners having a go, however...if I remember correctly, quite a few cards that weren't meant to migrate to AGP did, courtesy of companies like Gainward and Gecube.

Believe it or not, outside the hallowed and somewhat artificial world of the high-perfomance computer enthusiast, people still use 800x600 monitors, Celerons, Semprons and computers with 256Mb of RAM (hell, I'm using an Athlon XP to type this) who - as stated above - just want to be able to run Vista with its effects, or speed up StarCraft/Knights of the Old Republic.
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maybe but it would bottlenexk it like hell not worth it
 
The Gainward 7800GS+ Rev1 (basically a 7900GTX PCB with a Bridge chip with full 24pipes/8vertex and 512MB 1.2ns Samsung RAM) was happy on the AGP8x, doubt a 8800GTX would be fully though.

AGP was to get a new version thats way faster than even PCI-E 16x, the downside was that its has more speed in 1 direction but as AGP really only need that 1 direction it was suited, but Nvidia wanted to sell you 2x GPU's so they revived a old tech called SLI, so they had to drop Paralell and go back to Serial.
 
helmutcheese said:
The Gainward 7800GS+ Rev1 (basically a 7900GTX PCB with a Bridge chip with full 24pipes/8vertex and 512MB 1.2ns Samsung RAM) was happy on the AGP8x, doubt a 8800GTX would be fully though.

AGP was to get a new version thats way faster than even PCI-E 16x, the downside was that its has more speed in 1 direction but as AGP really only need that 1 direction it was suited, but Nvidia wanted to sell you 2x GPU's so they revived a old tech called SLI, so they had to drop Paralell and go back to Serial.
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Amusingly enough, AGP 8X could be split between two AGP 4x ports (it was shown that running either 4x or 8x made very little - if any - difference to thecards at the time) effectively providing for SLI on AGP... but standards are what they are and no motherboard maker has done it.
 
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