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9
February 2001
Revised:
17 February 2001
eVGA
Responds
Finally, a
little light broke through the darkness. Keith Rochford, a
senior engineer at eVGA, emailed me with the following explanation:
The GeForce2
GTS chips have been changed for the PRO chips by nVidia.
However, you need to know that there is NO difference between
the chips except that the PRO passed a higher speed sort
test. The pin outs, etc are identical - this holds true
for the Ultra cards as well.
The board
that you got was based entirely on the GTS design, memory,
resistors, etc. the only change was the PRO chipset. This
is because all the other components were ready to be built
for the GTS cards - and the only substitution was the PRO
chipset.
It made
no sense to re-work the cards to change the id numbers when
it would bring no real improvement and cause the entire
batch of cards to be scrapped. So, despite the increase
in the cost of the PRO chip, we decided to sell them at
the same price as the GTS because they were in essence a
GTS - albiet one with a PRO chipset. You can up the clock
on the chip to a faster speed, much more easily than on
a GTS, however that is really the only advantage.
I hope
that this will explain a little bit of what is going on.
We are certainly not out to cheat or trick our customers
- that is why the disclaimer on the site about it having
only 6ns memory. The card is essentially a 32MB GTS.
Well, it does
a very good job of answering most of the questions that people
asked me. It also reaffirms what others emailed me about ;-)
There's just one remaining question, just one little thing
- if the card is "essentially a 32MB GTS", then
why are they selling it as a PRO?? I asked Keith this question
and am awaiting his reply. Why don't they call the card a
PRO LE to avoid any confusion? Stay tuned...
UPDATE:
I spoke again to Keith Rochford today and he answered my final
two questions.
Q1.
Since the card is "in essence a GTS", do you think it is
fair to call the card a PRO even though you have a disclaimer?
I think that will mislead many consumers who might not be
as tech savy. Couldn't you have called it a PRO LE?
A1.
eVGA has decided to rename the card. They will be
calling it a GTS once again. It was too confusing to consumers
to call it a PRO even though it came with a PRO GPU. This
name change should be in place by the end of the month.
Q2.
What is the possibility of offering a "true" PRO with 32MB
of 5ns memory?
A2.
While it is physically possible [ed note: see Derek's
comments on page 2] to offer a true 32MB PRO card, it would
not be a cost effective product.
Keith also
mentioned that they will be launching new products next month
that are additions to existing product lines. They will be
clearly labeled to prevent the kind of confusion that occurred
with the PRO cards.
In the end,
consumers looking for a GTS card may get a little more
headroom in the GPU clock speeds with this card...and as soon
as I finish setting up my machine, I intend to find out!
Agi
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