11.16.2006
it's good to be a gamer...
Posted by Kate Ashley - Executive Director, Marketing & Retail Channel

It’s been a great week to be a PC enthusiast. Last Wednesday, NVIDIA launched their new GeForce 8800 series of graphics processors. This past Tuesday, Intel announced the immediate availability of their first quad core processor.

I went out to San Jose last week for NVIDIA’s launch. It was a great event. They kicked it off with a massive 36 hour LAN party and a case modding contest , among all kinds of other craziness. The highlights of the event for me: the immediate immersion into a hard core gaming environment, the up close and personal opportunity to see the gamers’ passion and enthusiasm, the onstage demos of the 8800’s power (more on that in a second), and the chance to spend a few minutes talking to Jen-Hsun Huang (alas I missed the chance to get a picture with the new model for the 8800) . And although I already knew it, this event and Jen-Hsun convinced me all over again that NVIDIA is truly dedicated to the gamer and the ultimate gaming experience.

The new GeForce 8800 will really deliver significant performance gains for gamers and other PC enthusiasts. Orders for these have been pouring in at Velocity Micro and with good reason. The GeForce 8800 is based on an entirely new architecture than previous generations with a core that dynamically allocates processing resources depending on the application’s demands. It’s also the first GPU with DirectX 10, which introduces new geometry shading for heightened realism. The net result of all these new developments is that PC users with the GeForce 8800 will see increased graphics performance and never before seen levels of realism and beauty.

And on that note of performance gains, the Intel quad core processor (Intel® Core™ 2 Duo QX6700) offers significant performance gains for power users. Although there are not a plethora of applications available today that will be able to take advantage of the four processing cores, that time is soon approaching. For today, the QX6700 will be a smart choice for users looking for a long-lived system that excels at cpu intensive tasks like digital media editing.

[11.16.2006 @ 5:13 PM]  [Digg it]