New NVIDIA cards just like old NVIDIA cards, but with an overclocked name.
When sales hit a mild hiccough, and your partners are up to their eyeballs in parts you stuffed into the channel to make earlier numbers look good, what do you do?
You rename the parts aging like a bucket of dead snails to create a new and shiny product.
Enthusiasts fall for this every time, but sadly so do average consumers. Genius. Or not actually.
NVIDIA is doing it with chipsets - the G92, soon to be the GT250 et al, then the rest become GT1xx.
The firm is telling OEMs that all they need to do is update the BIOS to milk the unknowing.
Someday, people will catch on, but for now, it is working so well, or they are so desperate to clear inventory, that they are doing it to chipsets as well.
According to the always-spot-on VR-Zone, the Nforce 780a SLI chipset is now called the Nforce 980a SLI, 200 better! They didn't even have the decency to change the stepping number but, then again, we hear decency is dead and buried.
In any case, you can read about it here. And remember, 200 more of anything is no trivial matter.
theinquirer.net (c) 2009 Incisive Media
Issue: 111 | April, 2010