Nvidia cards are bigger but there overall design is more efficent. The way the ram is laid out provides reduced latency for one by having the traces all the same length. The Power circutry is laid out well and away from other parts to cause less signal interferance. These are things i care about. The 3870x2 doesnt take into account such things and for that one problem it does not interest me. Id rather have Nvidia's option simply because it also contains proven realibility and design where as AMD skimped and went cheap, look at how there ram is arranged and how the power circutry is for one. No id rather keep proven tech and go with what works and what was changed for a reason not the slap job AMD did.
your honestly grasping at starws to prove that Nvidia is unable, trust me the worlds biggest add in board GPU maker could but its very clear there engineers are approcaing this to give the best overall benifits and not sacrafice quality. Sure get an AMD its a fine card but at the end of the day the GX2 will out preform it hands down
*sniffs air* i smell fanboi.........nvidiot fanboi at that........
ok first off, nvidia and ati have both used the weird memory layout on their cards, its not that big an issue, i know you think its ungoddly important, but really its not.
second, nvidias design is HOT and cant be effecently cooled the 7950gx2 couldnt eather, because it was such a horrible design, traps the head inside between 2 pcb's.
3rd, the design of the 3870x2 is a first gen card and dispite that its very well made, no matter what you think, ati/amd have a long trackrecord of making very sturdy products, nvidia has a spotty record in my experiance.
examples, the fx line, what a pile of crap they where, some models of 6800/7600/7800 cards had HIGH fail rates on NVIDIA build pcb's, my buddys been thru 8 7800gt's and is about to have to rma another one, because it keeps artifacting, its a design error on the spicific model he has, he thankfully got it from a supplyer with life time warr.
the company even admits that theres not much they can do to fix the problme because its a known issue with that perticular model, the volt ciructes arent cooled properly or something.
ati has had some CRAPPY cards in the distant past, but i havent seen any large numbers of any one card/model returned that used the ati/amd pcb's, seen a good number of reports of the pcb's on the 1950gt/pro cards made by a 3rd party design having problems and being returned
oh and i wasnt trying to make nvidia look unreliable, hardware wise they are just fine for now, other then that first shipment of 8800gt's that had high rates of fails or issues, where nvidia isnt reliable is in the driver dept, they have a horrible reputation for removing fetures to new drivers when they dont work(dissabled tv out on some drivers under vista for example) because they are to worried about getting 5extra fps in some stupid game.
or the yv12 color spacing bugg that has been around since the begining of 2007 and is still not fixed on all systems/drivers, nvida has KNOWN about these things for YEARS and hasnt spent the time to fix it because they are to fucking busy making their drivers just a few fps faster in whatever the top benching game is this week..........
on the other hand i have never had that problem with ati/amd, my 9600/9800/x800/x1900 all got monthy driver fixes that didnt just boost perf in a couple games but also fixed buggs that where found and reported in older drivers, if you found a color spacing issue with an ati card, reported it, they would get back to you, ask for details, then many times give you a beta driver to test to see if that fixes it.
try that with nvidia, report a bug via email, you at best get back an formletter email that will lead to NOTHING, no fix, hell no real responce...........
and mind you my systems got an 8800gt in it at the moment.
Ati
