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To: Oliver Hahn who wrote (13053)	5/31/1999 2:58:00 AM
From: Ben Wu	Respond to of 16960

Anyways, if the chip companies are making reference boards, then why and to what extent would one of the board manufacturers fiddle with it? (I guess to add other features) A board manufacturer usually creates several reference designs that implemnt different features of the card (e.g. TV-out). There are essentially two reasons a company would go through a board redesign. Cost reduction and performance increases. a redesign for cost reduction could allow for the use of "non-reference" (i.e. cheaper) parts, cut down on PCB costs (i.e. the board layout could be compacted or swithc to a 7 layer PCB vs. a 5 layer PCB), etc, etc. a redesign for performance generally comes from optimizing lines to reduce cross talk at higher speeds, to reduce the temperature footprint of the board (keeping hotter parts from degrading the performance of other parts), or allow for the use of non-standard/higher performance memory (SDRAM vs. SGRAM), etc. this type of redesign generally increases the success rates for overclocking the board. But considering the fact that Nvidia makes the chips, it would follow that the "reference design" should be among the top performing configurations. In fact there are usually marked differences between the "alpha" reference design that is sent to board makers evaluating the chip to the "final" shipping reference design (the chipmaker tweaks the board). Creating a "non-reference" design is a very time consuming and costly proposition. Generally it boils down to a ROI decision. For example, Canopus did a non-ref design for their original Voodoo design and sold bucketloads of cards (at a premium above others of course) because of the performance increase. I don't know if this is true, but the chipmaker may charge a liscensing fee for the use of the reference design, and considering the volume a board maker may encouter, it may make more sense to design their own board. I'm just curious, does anyone know if Hercules did a ref. design TNT2? I mean they're shipping at 175/200, while most card makers are shipping at 150/175. and re: the statement that chip menioned earlier about having too many board makers, I completely agree with that statement. with nvidia allowing for board maker to come to a "final" decision on what speeds to offer, they are essentially telling the board companies to fight it out amongst each other and that's got to affect the marketability of the TNT2 chips somewhat (look what happened to banshee). it also hanges the focus of branding from nvidia to the boardmakers (ie. "Creative makes better TNT2 cards than Diamond" instead of "all TNT2 cards kick ass"). -ben