ssj12 said: well all I know is when Intel's Gulftown is released I'll have a 6-core processor with 12 threads, Nvidia's GTX 300 series, a lower-end GPU for physx, and about 16GBs of ram which will be more than enough to run this game. |
Gulftown will be no cheaper than the current Extreme Editions, ~$1000. You may want to look at the cheaper i7s, or AMD's desktop 6-core which should be cheaper although not as fast.
Nvidia's graphics won't be good value. It's coming out March according to the optimists (Fudzilla, who have had an Nvidia bias for a few months now) and Charlie says May is Nvidia's official, internal date. Its new features won't increase game performance by a single frame, they only serve GPGPU. And reported yields and clocks are low. Let's take a reasonable scenario - 512 shader cores (confirmed), 600MHz core clock (based on Nvidia's public estimates of FLOPS) and 10% IPC boost (even RV770 didn't have that over RV670, and GT300 has no gaming-FPS-improving features as I said). That would put it 20% faster than a GTX295, so 25-30% faster than the 5870. Let us also assume the 5870 is in good enough supply to be at its RRP of $379 (if it isn't, then TSMC's 40nm is broken and Fermi will be affected too). Given the 5970 would be $599 and much faster than Fermi, that would put Fermi about $500 to be competitive. Now, Fermi's die size is just over 530mm^2, much bigger than 5870 and MUCH more expensive given yields fall much faster than linearly with die size. If 5870 is selling for $379, Nvidia has to sell for $600 to be equally profitable. $500 is going to put a huge dent in margins, and they won't go below that because it would be unprofitable. Same for the Fermi salvage part vs. the 5850. Regardless, Nvidia will lose in perf/mm^2 so they won't be better value than AMD; most likely equal value for money but less profitable.
There's no Fermi X2, it's impossible with Fermi's die size or else it would be $800 and exceed the PCI spec for power consmption (the 5970 is already on the limit at a much smaller die size and lower clocks).
And in May it will have been 8 months from Evergreen's introduction, which is when AMD normally does the refresh part. So Fermi may not be competing with the 5870 at all, probably Evergreen+1.