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Newsletter 3-10-2008
I have some tech updates for you. We all should be aware of a video card known as the 9800GTX+, as we´ve been selling it for quite a while now. Found out late yesterday that it went EOL, and there are almost none left in stock. It was quite a shock, as I didn´t expect it so soon. Never fear, we have a fix. The new GTS 250 video card is the direct replacement. It´s ever so slightly faster, a bit cheaper, and essentially the exact same card with a different name. It´s ready to go in TV and MAS, and I will be rolling out BOM updates over the week.
The new Intel Nehalem based Xeons are now available as well. These are the 55XX series of processors, and I do NOT have a good source for these yet. I can get the boards already, they are listed as the X8 series on the Supermicro site. The only one I can easily get is the X8DTN+, for $xxx. All of these boards require the appropriate xeon series and ECC Registered DDR3. None of this is added to TV yet, as everything isn´t readily available. As soon as I can nail down all the particulars, all will be available in TV and I will have some templates to quote off as well.
In the world of cheap AMD processors, our trusty AMD64 X2 4200+ has been unavailable for quite some time now. This entire time I´ve been doing free upgrades to AMD64 X2 4400´s, which cost an additional 50 cents. I expect this trend to continue. Just know that whenever you quote a 4200, the customer will receive a 4400 (unless we get a 4200 back from a disassembly system). Phenom II pricing is slowly dropping, making it an even better competitor to Intel. AMD still has no answer to the i7, but from a price point of view the Phenom II is a real winner.
In the world of video cards, there are some newer models coming out. AMD/ATI has released the Radeon HD 4890 1GB video card for $xxx, which is currently the fastest one they got (not counting the dual-GPU cards). Certain models of the nVidia Quadro now officially have SLI support. The downside is that they are ridiculously expensive FX3800 and up. There is a whole new generation of Quadro´s now, expect a Tiger update within a quarter or so. The next upcoming models are the ATI 4770 and GeForce GTX 275. More details to follow as I get them. One trend that is showing up for sure is that everyone is moving towards 1GB of video memory as a standard.
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