(Excuse me, Tea, I think I better take over now. This is all getting a bit too rational for you to cope with, I think.)
(No problem, Tannin, I get confused when people come over all rational on me. You know, I think they do it deliberately.)
OK, this looks like the Gforce 2 & 3 to Gforce 4 changeover all over again, Jan. I think that's what you are saying.
Low-end FX (i.e., GF4MX equivalent) is outperformed by high-end old product (GF4Ti at present, equivalent to the old GF3).
So I can regard the FX 5600 as the "new GF4 MX-420", the FX-5900 Ultra as the "new GF 4 MX-440".
That seems to be telling me to carry on with the Ti4280 and Ti4800 as the "standard fast cards", on the grounds that the FX 5600s are too dear and offer little. Later on, the 5600s will drop to near-GF4 prices (just as GF4MX cards dropped to near GF2 prices a while back). At around the same time, DX9 might become more important than it is at present, so that should fall into place nicely.
Meanwhile, there is the question of what to sell people who want more than the Ti4800s can offer. FX 5900s are too dear and I have doubts about any card that needs to be that big to function - it smacks of fundamental design problems, and the FX 5800 fiasco only deepens the impression. On the other hand, I really don't like ATI's history of driver problems and general weirdness. With a Nvidia card, you load the dets and forget about it.
(I like forget-about-it!)
(Yes, Tea. So do I. Just go and play on the road a moment, like a good little ape.)
Maybe I'll just tell them to buy more RAM and a CPU upgrade and come back in 3 months when the water is not quite so muddy.
As for our own machines, the G450s are overkill, honestly. The old G400s and G200s were perfectly capable. I think I have one or two G450s lying around - they are getting traded in every now and then these days - so they should do me for quite a while yet. After that, I guess I'll use whatever gets traded in - a Gforce III would do it nicely. But in reality, the stuff I do runs just fine on a 4MB PCI card. I like fast hard drives, plenty of RAM and a whopping great CPU, the rest of it doesn't really matter.
BTW, I stuck a Barton XP 2500 in the office server the other day, replacing an XP 2200, and it really cooks along. An instantly noticable difference. Given my very positive experience with K6-IIIs, I have come to the conclusion that OS/2 doesn't much care about clock speed (though more is always better) but it loves big caches. I suspect that, if I wanted to go really stupid with the chequebook, one of those big Intel server chips with the ridiculously large caches would absolutely cook along. No matter - it's plenty fast enough, and the old G450 can stay a year or two longer.
Errr ... except that my picture quality is not quite what it was. Is it my old eyes? Or the 21 inch Mitsubishi showing its age? Or possibly the G450? Dunno.
