ATI and NVIDIA Availability

Despite what ATI promised, none of the Radeon X850 line are available, even as we start 2005. The Radeon X850 XT will be available at the end of January with the X850 XT PE available a week later in February.

There is no word on the Radeon X850 Pro, which confirms our suspicions that ATI hadn't thought their positioning through on that part before announcing it.

Even after the X850 line is officially launched, we are told that availability will be extremely limited.

The Radeon X800 will be available in the first week of February, with the X800 XL following a week or two later. These dates were all provided by ATI's partners and not ATI themselves, so hopefully the accuracy will be higher than what we were told by ATI.

As far as AGP versions of all of these cards go, it looks like it won't be until mid-March before we see AGP versions of ATI's latest GPUs. On the low end, ATI's answer to NVIDIA's Turbo Cache will be shipping in around 6 - 8 weeks.

NVIDIA's PCIe 6800 series will still be limited in availability for the foreseeable future, we were even told by one manufacturer that the availability problem wouldn't be resolved until the 2nd half of this year.

A Single BTX Motherboard Creative's Wireless Headphones
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  • quanta - Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - link

    Isn't DLP design rather unreliable? After all, it involves mechanically moving millions of microscopic mirrors to create brightness, and there is no easy way to oil these tiny joints when the chip gets old. Since each mirror is moving thousand of times a second, dead pixels can develop rather quickly. As a side effect of moving all these mirror, won't the chips get noisy as well?
  • PrinceGaz - Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - link

    Heh, as soon as I read the bit about mobo manufacturers confirming what most of us already know; that nVidia has abandoned SoundStorm and it will not be returning in anything like its original form (DD encoding) in the forseeable future.

    Just because the Inq reports on something doesn't make it gospel truth, much of what they post is rumours and they have been known to be wrong in the past ;) As for the nVidia chairman saying SS is returning in a surprising form, that could mean just about anything except what some people here are hoping for. A return of the original SS or an updated version of it would be totally unsurprising so he is effectively ruling that out.

    Could one of the SS zealots who believes it will make a return with PCIe please explain to me why it needs more bandwidth than what PCI can provide? Surely if the card is doing all the encoding, all that needs to be sent to it is the raw audio data which is minimal. Even the very highest quality 8-channel 32-bit 192khz sampling-rate uncompressed audio needs under 6MB/s of bandwidth which is easily handled by PCI, so I fail to understand why PCIe would make a difference. If there were sufficient consumer demand for a DD encoder, somebody would have already made one for PCI, so you're deluding yourself if you think the only reason they aren't available is that it needs the increased bandwidth offered by PCIe. Unless of course you have evidence which suggests otherwise and I'd be interested in reading it.

    Rather than waiting for the return of SS, I suggest you buy a few decent cables and hook up your soundcard to your amplifier the normal way. Provided the soundcard has decent DACs, you'll enjoy higher quality sound than anything SoundStorm's dolby-digital output could provide.
  • linuxOwnzIfUrLeet - Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - link

    #44,45...

    It's at sam's club:

    It's made by infocus.

    The web shows "InFocus® ScreenPlay 4805" but I'm not sure the 4805 was the one. Their web is not the same stuff as what you have in the store.
  • bob661 - Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - link

    #44
    I was going to ask the same thing.

    #39
    SS is dead. Move on, nothing to see here.
  • OrSin - Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - link

    14# Where can I get a 76 DLP for 1400.
    Shit where can I get decent 76" HD of any kind of for $1400. I live in the USA. I really want to know. My 42in Toshiba HD is not cutting it and it cost me $1000.
  • xxeper - Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - link

    I love how you talk about how "bulky" the Windows Mobile [PocketPC, MPx] are while at the same time basically petting and licking the Windows Mobile smartphone [C500]. Did you even bother to pick up the BENq or iMat Jam phones? or were you too busy whispering sweet nothings to your P.O.S. Audiovox?
  • Live - Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - link

    #13

    The X800 you are linking to costs 450$ when its supposed to sell for 250$. and only that brand is available.
  • Zebo - Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - link

    AMD was curiously quiet throughout the show,
    ----------------
    Speak Softly and carry a big stick.:)
  • RyanVM - Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - link

    #9, I read the exact same thing in Maximum PC three months ago.
  • shinotenshi - Monday, January 10, 2005 - link

    The design team was disbanded, however many sources have already reported that the team was reconstitued. The design won't be finished by luck would have it, at the time the sony ps3 is done. As i said before, i don't this is a coincidence. the interest of sony(ps3,blu-ray) and nvidia(pushing pci-e, other markets, consumer, pci-e sound cards), are converging. If they can build a chip that can encode either DD++ or DTS+++ it would be an econnomic windfall.

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