There is a great test of the XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra on this http://www.hardware-tweaker.de/HTML/Home_4/Overclocking/Artikel_Teil1/XGI_Volari__duo_V8Ultra_Part1/xgi_volari__duo_v8ultra_part1.html page.

An english review will be come soon there!

Hmm...

Unfortunately, it currently doesn't look good for XGI there.

I'd say let's wait a few weeks so they can polish their Drivers.

nevertheless, it's a good beginning..just a first step. let's see what their next gen boards can handle (if they'll earn enough from the first gen)

Hmm...link seems to be down at this time? ???

Dang it! I wanna see that review! >:(

Oh well, I'll try again later... ::)

this card  seems to be a new FX5800 Ultra : kick ass in directX 7 but impotent in Pixel Shader 2.0
PS 1.x are'nt tested but maybe they suck too

Still, it's going to be an exotic card, maybe I'll buy one nevertheless for my Collection (despite possible performance issues)...

..but for now, certainly not at the current Retail Price.

Given enough time, though, I'm confident that XGI will put its big VRAM bandwidth to a quite good use. The rest is only the right placement into the right market segment (pricing).

...we could need a 3rd player in the Graphics Market.

KyroX isn't on the horizon yet, and DeltaChrome may take some time to come around.

However, as I've heard, the card is using waaaaay too much power, given it's technology (microns) and actual performance. Perhaps for some users, having a secondary 400W ATX power source is not a funny thing (the Volari is not using 400W, but who knows what might follow)...

wrote on 10.12.03 at 09:43:35:

However, as I've heard, the card is using waaaaay too much power, given it's technology (microns) and actual performance. Perhaps for some users, having a secondary 400W ATX power source is not a funny thing (the Volari is not using 400W, but who knows what might follow)...

Remember: the same discussion rose up when the Voodoo5 was released...only some recognized the power connection was implemented to relieve the mainboard's power supply. i bet you won't need both connectors on the volari when your mainboard's strong enough.

Given the fact that a P4 is already using 100W+ power, it is obviously that you will need a separate power connector for Volary. Also, if someone noted, the Radeon 9700 pro, is using a separate ATX power connector for the consumption it needs.

So, the separate connector will continue to be a reality, unless all the motherboards will be designed to supply and regulate 300W+ power. It will make the boards twice as costly, and perhaps 1/4 bigger than they are now. Actually no use for making "strong" boards to cope with the big consumption of Video cards. Keep a free AT 5/12V connector free. You'll never know when you might actually need one!

Heh, just don't use too many of 'em or you'll kill your PSU! :o

Ooh lookit, there's funny smoke coming from the PSU! ::)

Heheheheh! ;D

right, damn...but i use a 'be quiet!' 400W PSU and this one doesn't care! *lol*
the volari ultra v8 duo uses (2d/3d engine) 55W/130W, right? that's pretty much, but i won't care if you're not using a P4..  ;D

This whole discussion about power usage, brings to memory the VIA C3 processors, which use 11W for 866Mhz. Even if the C3 is using no SSE or 3DNow!Extended, it is amazing how it can be that efficient, when a P3 at that frequency (which were actually less power consuming at the same frequency as the P4 at 1.4Ghz), is using estimatedly 40W.

If the CPU's and GPU's were build as efficient as possible, and given the fact that actually the thing that really counts today(as it counted yesterday), is still pure Mhz power, no matter what "superset" is added: SSE,MMX, 3DNow.
A fast enough CPU, with lots of cache, would cope amazingly well, and it must be a winner at least for laptops. But even there you see no C3 and no ProSavageDDR on the specification.
Speaking trully, I guess noone bothers too much about consumption, as long as power supplies are manufactured to take the load. The "green" (ecology/efficiency/environment) spirit is obviously kind of dead anyway...

Well, that Efficiency (in the example of the VIA C3 Design) unfortunately had a price :

Performance

The Performance of the VIA C3 CPU (given the MHz) is absolutely underground. That still leaves it Power-efficent and good enough for basic Office Productivity, but for anything beyond that it is outperformed even by 3-4 year old Processors, running at much lower MHz.

wrote on 15.12.03 at 10:14:52:

A fast enough CPU, with lots of cache, would cope amazingly well, and it must be a winner at least for laptops.

have in mind that cache is the cpu component which produces most heat --> the more cache you got, the hotter your cpu runs...

wrote on 15.12.03 at 16:44:52:

have in mind that cache is the cpu component which produces most heat --> the more cache you got, the hotter your cpu runs...

Use of a large L3 cache (1 or 2Mb), on the motherboard, that was the main idea, not a large on-die CPU cache.

Indeed, large on-board (Motherboard) Cache is actually something I really miss...

That would be a nice buffer between the slow RAM, and the (comparably) lightning fast CPU's.

(I can only speculate that the CPU manufacturers do not want this, because it would tend to 'blend' the effective performance of their different CPU lines, which they so far carefully placed into their respective price segments)

see, i'm just happy there's no cache anymore on mobos...that was so slow. indeed, l3 cache on the mb wouldn't make a real sense since the main ram has at least synchronous frequencies..

Hm ?

Whenever I disabled the L2 (or L3) Cache of Super7-Motherboards, performance would always drop by as much as 25-40%...

With fast L3 Cache, you can still increase performance quite significantly, and all professional Workstations or Servers for example always sport very large Caches for that reason (not neccessarily located on the CPU itself).

I operate 2 DEC Alpha 21164's, one with 4MB Cache (on Motherboard), while the other has none.
The Result is, that the machine with the 4MB is about 90% (!) faster than the one without it in Memory-intensive Situations...

The old rule is still valid :
Cache is life ! ;)

The more, the better, since Memory still remains by far the slowest Link in all modern machines, drastically hampering the CPU...

Since you mentioned "synchronous" Frequencies :
That's true for the (slow) FSB, but even at 200MHz DDR (400MHz effectively), a 2000MHz CPU is doomed to spend more than 4 out of 5 cycles waiting for the Memory to deliver.

In terms of Programming, a single "Cache Miss", or (even worse) a pipeline Stall, forcing it to re-aquire alot of Data directly from RAM, is regarded as the worst performance catastrophy possible for a CPU.

Also, Latencies are still a major factor, since even the best PC400 Modules can barely deliver more than a short burst of Data at its maximum speed. The remaining time, it has to waste time itself to Refresh Cycles, CAS latency, RAS-to-CAS delays etc. etc...
------------
Bottom line is :
For as long as a 2000MHz CPU cannot access RAM clocked at 2000MHz, CL0-0-0, there will always be the need for Cache.

PS.
If your BIOS allows to disable L1 and L2 Cache, try to have some fun disabling both. Then, the CPU is entirely limited to RAM performance...
You will be in for a big surprise, no matter what CPU you test, and no matter how fast your RAM is ;)

That's a really nice eye-opener about actual, true RAM performance, compared to what the CPU could actually do if this limit wouldn't hold it back all the time *g*

you're right in most cases.
and yes, i can disable l1&2 cache by my bios but i don't have do so 'cause i know what'll happen  ;)
about l3 cache: would be useful at least on the die. remember amd's k6-3 which had 64kb l1 and 256kb l2 on die? you may know, it wasn't necessary to this cpu if you had 512 or 1024 kb l3 cache on board, there wasn't any (real) performance boost (so it doesn't seem to depend on the l3 cache size).
here we come to the heat problem again - as we know, a cpu with much cache runs very hot..i wonder how the intel xeon/p4EE both with 2mb l2 cache (as they have simply the same core  ;) ) don't run too hot to cool 'em.
nevertheless, it would be more useful to run l3 cache at higher frequencies than FSB/HT-Link, that'll bring still better performance.

I did own a K6-III System, and (as I said) the Performance would drop significantly without the L3 Cache.

Of course, this is only valid for Application Routines that don't fit inside the Cache, but most Applications are really happy to have 512k to 1024k nowaday's, and more Cache doesn't hurt either.

I agree, though, that having it run On-Die is the ideal way of doing it, yet it's the most expensive way, making CPU's more difficult to build...

If there was any Athlon Chipset with L3-Cache, I would immediately buy it !