Nvidia prepares GeForce Tree-Hugging Edition

Theo Valich — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:04:23 +0000

What happens if you sell cars, and the new model is coming at the time when your stock is full of old models? Well, what will happen is that you will put a nice sticker on it, advertise same standard features as “new ones”, “only in this special edition”, offer discounts and so on. You will also put a nice spin on what’s in the news and there you go. In the world of IT, we had the same thing happening over and over again. Nobody is immune to this basic car strategy, that being AMD with its renaming of Radeon X1K parts into “HD 2000″ (for low end and notebook parts”… etc.

Here comes Nvidia. The company is manufacturing GeForce 9600 chips in 55nm process, and the problem is that competing Radeon 4600 series is well, selling like hotcakes. The answer: GeForce 9600GT Green Edition (seriously, why the heck is this product not named 9600GE or just 9600 Green… who comes with these names, daamit?).

Anyways, 9600GT Tree Hugging edition is nothing else but lowering the voltage by 0.1V while keeping the same clock. In that way, Nvidia could even brand GeForce GTX260 and 285 and call them Green… but of course, if there wasn’t for all that clockspeed raising to get the performance lead over Radeon 4870. Still, GeForce GTX285 is a nice power saver… if you can call 200W eating card a power saving one.

Funky part is, nobody is reporting about materials used in production of graphics cards. AMD, Intel and Nvidia can say whatever they want, but massive majority of their chips is produced using Lead and other hazardous materials. Certain CPU manufacturer may have announced lead-free production, but it is only in selective lines and yeah, in order to build a computer with their lead free component, you need to buy two or three more chips from them that contain lead. And other “nicely-named” elements. IT industry is not green, sans the color of substrate used on 99.9% of flip-chip packages (FC).

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Nvidia relaunches 9600GSO, buyers beware

Theo Valich — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:00:04 +0000

During previous conference call, Nvidia let analysts know that the company is in the middle of the transition to 55nm and that the future will bring only 55nm GPUs with a transition to 40nm at the end of Q1’09.
First victim of this transition is GeForce 9600GSO. As you probably know, 9600GSO is without any doubt, best bang for buck – for as low as 50 bucks after rebate (where available), you can get a renamed 8800GT card with 112 or 96 shaders, and with a bit of cut-down memory controller (192-bits). These cards can overclock as hell, but just like previous GeForce4 Ti4200 and ATI Radeon 9500, their time is slowly coming to an end.
We’ve received word from Zotac that the company launched a new GeForce 9600GSO, based on G94 GPU. This GPU is the same one as in laptops featuring 9700M, so these cards feature 48 shaders (down from 112) and a 256-bit memory controller.

New one looks just like the old one...until you remove the heatsink

Spec-wise, Zotac did all that it could – the company launched its AMP! version of the card, raising the GPU clock by 50 MHz to 700 MHz. Shaders are squeezed all the way to 1.73 GHz (default: 1.63) and memory is clocked at 1.0 GHz DDR (2.0 “GHz”). This brings the available bandwidth to 64 GB/s.
All in all, a good looking card, but if you’re in for shader power, look around for old 9600GSO AMP! – that card was a killer.

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Nvidia prepares GeForce Tree-Hugging Edition

Nvidia relaunches 9600GSO, buyers beware