Re: How many low cost Nehalems are there? Answer a big fat zero. Not many are likely because of the MB costs amongst other things. It will be sometime next year for that to happen. And there will be Fusion raising the bar. Too bad Nehalem.
Please, tell me how Fusion will raise the bar against the desktop Nehalem CPUs next year when AMD has no desktop Fusion processor on their roadmap for 2009.
As to why not get a $150 discrete card, money, power and/or heat. 4850s and 4870s go into desktop gaming systems, not the cheap PCs offered at places like Walmart. Your original post stated "low cost" Nehalems.
Get real. No one buys, or will buy, a cheap AMD Walmart PC with the intent of making it a GPU video encoding and rendering machine out of it. And to reinterate the point above: AMD has no desktop Fusion processor on their roadmap for 2009.
If R800 class is used (HD5450 based IGPU), with a 5850 being about 2x (and it could be 3x again) a 4850, it would be about where a 4650 is or a current 3850. Thus it would be about where a $100-150 discrete card was in Q2/08.
That is not where Fusion wil be though. Its 3x to HD4200 and 2-3x again to HD5200. That's 6-9x a 780G. 8x of a 780G, is roughly the HD3850.
Please be realistic. Fusion is launching as a low-budget, low-performance mobile processor according to AMD. The chances of the Fusion integrated graphics reaching the performance of a Radeon 3850 is well under 5%.
Weren't you also claiming a few weeks ago AMD was going to give us two cores, PCIe and integrated graphics (now you claim with the power of the Radeon 3850) for a mere 8W TDP (or ACP)? You get funnier every day.
As to 780G not being able to do DX10 games at playable rates, it depends on the eye candy level desired. When most reviewers do a GPU test, they crank up the resolution and settings up as high as they will go. That is not what a casual gamer does with his laptop or desktop. They turn down the settings until playing becomes relatively smooth.
There is no "relatively smooth" for 780G in DX10 mode at native LCD screen resolutions, even when details aren't maxed. |
