The SLI Slide and Phasing Out Old Pups
PC Geek Alert -- if you care not about PC gaming or hardware, this will bore you to tears. Apologies!
Recently, and by recently I mean in the past half-year, both the_antipiode and I made notable upgrades to our PCs. Al completely rebuilt his machine, upgrading to a dual-core proc and an 8800 GT, while I upgraded my video card to an 8800 GTS 512 (which also required a motherboard swap). As some of you may be familiar, the motherboard I got was a refurb -- no motherboard in stock could handle my older processor while offering the PCI-express slot required for today's video cards. It chugged along alright for awhile -- the random rebooting didn't really affect me much, other than proving irritating -- but finally the crashes became too much to handle and the whole Trigames.NET Podcast Episode 113 debacle happened. So I switched to a new platform (the quad-core AMD Phenom 9850 and an SLI motherboard).
Thanks to the wonders of...
1) Holiday season deals
2) An open SLI slot
3) nVidia trying to phase out its old product line to try to pimp us on its Geforce GTX 200 line
...Al and I have both spent bucks on a second video card (a second 8800 GT for him, a second 8800 GTS 512 for me) that we probably wouldn't have otherwise.
Here's the logic:
- The 8800 line was a REALLY good product line -- at least, when nVidia moved to the G92 chip. (The original 8800 boards were pretty good too but not until they changed the underlying architecture from the code-named G80 chip to the G92 chip did they really start killing the competition with price-performance values.) For the prices Al and I got them at ($190 for Al's 8800 GT and $220 for my 8800 GTS 512... before rebates!), they were absolute steals. Both run Crysis competently on "High", and that's pretty much been our benchmark.
- Our cards were available for even better prices this past week, most likely due to it being the week after Black Friday. Al's would be $130 and mine came out to $160. If there were ever a time to upgrade to SLI, it would be at these prices, especially because...
- ...I checked Newegg and my card is discontinued. The only model leftover in stock is a refurbished one. The $160 price tag I saw was at Best Buy, which NORMALLY sells the card for $399.99 (which is a complete rip-off). As for Al, there was only one model left that was selling on Newegg. Usually I find that when Newegg starts discontinuing an item, that means that other stores will soon follow suit and options will quickly run dry. Just as a quick precaution, I checked Allstarshop.com and they were out of my model too. Amazon had one model in stock, sure, but it ran for $270. I checked for Al, and Amazon was selling his for $180. Soon, the only place we'd be able to turn to in order to SLI it up would be eBay and other auction / secondhand sites. I'm through dealing with second-hand computer parts.
- Doubling our performance for significantly under $200 right now made more sense for both of us, to keep us "future proof" for the next few years (quotes emphasized since you can never be future proof in PC gaming), as opposed to waiting until the new models come out for like $300 and then throwing away our old cards. Nothing pisses me off more than upgrading and then having to toss an old but still-serviceable video card. (That's why SLI is awesome -- you can still make great use out of your old dog by pairing it up with another old dog.) Most likely in those few years we'd be playing PC games that exploit the power of these cards anyway, as opposed to playing the latest and greatest games that require us to leap up to whatever newfangled toy nVidia or ATi release at that point in time -- yeah, our backlog is like that. Our cards are both DirectX 10 compatible anyway, and I don't foresee Microsoft releasing a hardware-crippling DirectX update any time soon (in other words, I don't see the DX9 to DX10 leap happening). I could be wrong, of course... fingers crossed.
It just kind of annoys me that the video card industry is marked by 6- and 12-month refresh cycles and the card manufacturers respond to it by quickly phasing stuff out, even when the product lines are great. I understand the need for them to compete in order to better the graphics landscape, but it's frustrating when two really great products in the 8800 GT and the 8800 GTS -- cards that still run games quite fast today -- are phased out simply to usher in the new era. (Protip: Word on the street is that the newer 9800 GT cards aren't even as powerful as 8800 GT cards. Go figure, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but just be aware of that possibility.)
It wouldn't be nearly as annoying if we weren't given the opportunity to pair two of the same card together; at that point we'd just upgrade to new stuff. But consumers ARE being given this great chance to make pair up old but solid hardware for incredible performance gains, and yet they're being given much fewer options during the time when it makes sense to do so -- that time being when the older cards have been out on the market and are cheap enough to buy on a near-whim. When SLI first came along, people were sold on the idea that, "Hey, I can buy a medium-priced card today ($250 let's say). In about 18 months, instead of upgrading to a new card for the same price, I can spend 60% to 70% of that and double my performance." Except, 18 months later, you'd have to search high and low to nab that old model. (Hell -- it's barely been 12 months in my case! The 8800 GTS 512 was released on December 10, 2007, and already it's a scarce find at the appropriate price. And anything above $250 for the card is NOT the appropriate price at this point.)
Again, I understand about the need to move forward, and yes, this is how they make their money. I just wish they'd let the old dogs hang around just a little bit more. Either that, or I wish they'd find some technology that allowed you to pair up video cards from different generations to increase performance.
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