Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"It looks like BFG has finally received the final nail within its coffin and is officially "....winding down and liquidating its business" in their own words. Some of their customers who have recently sent in BFG video cards for RMA have begun receiving the following letter from BFG..."

It's a fairly rare thing to see a major technology brand name go down in flames; more typically they get bought up by another brand and the customers are taken care of. Not this time! I happen to own two BFG 9800GT passively cooled video cards, and both of them died on me (likely due to heat issues). I knew that BFG had exited the graphics card market earlier this year, but when talked to tech support about six weeks ago, I was told that even if they didn't have the exact model of graphics card in stock that I needed, they'd send me the equivalent product. Imagine my surprise when I got both of my broken cards send back to me with a note that basically said "Sorry we couldn't fix this - we're going out of business". Kind of sucks! I guess I should be glad they were relatively inexpensive video cards and not $600 monster cards. Anyone else get bitten by the BFG liquidation bug?

"Let's get the hard data out of the way first: 480 CUDA cores, 700 MHz graphics and 1,401MHz processor clock speeds, plus 1.5GB of onboard GDDR5 memory running at 1,848MHz (for a 3.7GHz effective data rate). Those are the specs upon which Fermi is built, and those are the numbers that will seek to justify a $499 price tag and a spectacular 250W TDP. We attended a presentation by NVIDIA this afternoon, where the above GTX 480 and its lite version, the GTX 470, were detailed. The latter card will come with a humbler 1.2GB of memory plus 607MHz, 1,215MHz and 1,674MHz clocks, while dinging your wallet for $349 and straining your case's cooling with 215W of hotness."

Like the Engadget guys, I was in the audience for this presentation and I can tell you first-hand the card has some serious firepower. It's almost enough to excuse the forehead smack-inducing "Crank that S#!t Up" tagline—almost. Nvidia's Drew Henry showed off the new card's ability to run games in 3D just about as smoothly as their 2D counterparts. And he showed them on 3 humungous screens in the main auditorium. Henry stated that the general direction of the entertainment industry was heading towards 3D as evidenced by the recent popularity of Avatar, and he said he wanted Nvidia to lead the PC graphics industry down this path. He also showed off the GTX 480's ability to do ray tracing in near-real time. I say near-real time, because the card couldn't always keep up with the gloss it was asked to render. In the included application, Design Garage, the user is given a number of cars to customize and explore in a variety of lighting conditions using ray tracing. But setting the bloom to full and the details to high or, ahem, cranking that s#!t up, produced amazing photo-realistic results after a short re-render. Read more...