The Inquirer has an article and pictures showing a next-generation video card equipped with a water cooler and two power plugs.
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
Wonder how much more expensive that will make the card?
This doesn’t prove that water cooling will be required (imagine the language OEMs would have to use to sell them and avoid lawsuits if one ever leaked), but if water cooling is considered a really good idea, just imagine what an air-cooled system would sound like? Remember the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, aka Dustbuster? That video card was cold compared to what’s coming.
An air-cooled Dustbuster2. Wonderful. Just wonderful. Just the thing for HTPCs!
Stop The Whining!
I bet at least some of you are thinking, “Why is Ed whining so much about this? Video cards have been hot and getting hotter for some time now, so slap a waterblock on it and shut up!”
Well, yes, one could do that, and anyone who wouldn’t think twice about doing that is quite right in considering this whining.
Could I get a show of hands? Hmmmm, there’s some out there, definitely more than a few, but definitely less than a majority. And that’s the overclocker’s audience, which is know to be much less perturbed about these things than . . . everyone else.
Remember Prescott? What happened to it in Overclocker land? Did everyone start dragging radiators and refrigerators from the junkyards and into their PCs. Some did, but for most, Prescott became AMD’s strongest selling point.
That’s what we think is going to happen again, this time in video land. Except that this time, there is no Athlon 64 to buy instead.
We think that these products are going to be the Prescotts of the video card companies, and end the Era of Speed for them, too. We believe that the video card companies are going to have to change direction just like the CPU companies had to.
That’s very important; it will probably be the biggest story of 2007, and that’s why we have and will continue to “whine” about this.
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