ShaneBaxtor.com

There’s good news and bad news; the bad news is that the GTX 400 series has been pushed back to April 6th. The good news is that it’s only in reference to retail supply and not the actual NDA; so come the 26th of March we’ll all know what performance will be.

If you thought that you were going to pick one up retail that day though you where wrong, the original date for stock to be selling was the 29th but now it seems to be April 6th.

This morning we heard that NVIDIA had changed the strategy for sending samples; instead of partners sending them out NVIDIA are taking charge and sending out themselves. We’re not 100% sure why they’re doing this but it could be because NVIDIA doesn’t want any leaks on the results until the 26th. Quite often we see NVIDIA push a driver to us at the last minute and it’s possible that this could happen with the GTX 400 series.

If performance numbers come out on an older driver it’s possible that performance won’t be as good and in turn could seal the fate of the new series before it’s even officially released. Holding cards back from its partners though until launch means that it’s going to take a little longer for the cards to hit retail.

So while it’s not great news in the event you want to pick up a GTX 480 on the 26th it doesn’t change the fact that come 10 days time we’ll know how the model performs.

The other day I heard that the Eye6 card was going to be delayed from ATI; if you’re not sure what the model is it’s the one that carries with it 6 DisplayPort connectors but more importantly 2GB of GDDR5. The card is essentially a 2GB HD 5870.

Word is though that there seems to be issues with the drivers for 6 monitor setups at the moment. This is actually really surprising considering the card has essentially been floating around now for months, it just never got launched.

As far as I’m concerned ATI are on a deadline for this model, it needs to get released before the GTX 400 series card from NVIDIA. If it doesn’t the card could easily just got thrown into the middle of a huge amount of GTX 400 reviews giving it only a small piece of attention.

Hopefully the delay isn’t far away and we’re sure that the ATI driver team are working their butts off to find the issue and fix them.

Word getting around as of late is that the HD 5830 is due to be released February 5th.  Originally the NDA date was the week of the 25th of January. What that means is that the NDA was going to come off the card between the 25th of January and the 31st. This seems to have been officially pushed back due to an issue with ASIC.

At the moment we’ve been told that a new one has been resent and the launch has been postponed to a new day. As for that new date we’re not sure yet. At the moment it seems unlikely that an exact day has been given like February 5th which is a Friday. The next day we’ll hear for the launch of the card will be a week of one, be that the 1st of February, the 8th or later.

Once we have the week of date as we draw closer to the launch date we’ll receive an exact day. This isn’t the first time ATI have done this, the same happened with the HD 5670, I received my sample the second week of January, with a launch date of the week of the 11th of January. On the 8th that date was updated to the actual release date being the 14th.

It make sense that ATI will begin to move their launch strategy to this as it takes a lot of pressure off the company. Instead of working to a day they now only have to work towards a week, it also allows the company to get a last minute driver update out in the event reviewers are seeing a major issue.

With ATI set to launch the new Radeon HD 5500 and 5600 series at CES which starts on the 7th of January and the HD 5400 series later that month, the company is about to flood the market with a huge amount of low-end cards.

Word has come through that in the HD 5600 series alone ATIs partners will have the option to use as many of the six variances they want. Why we don’t know 100% what the different variances include we’ve been told it’s a combination of connectivity and memory. It’s probably fairly safe to assume that we’ll end up with an Eyefinity version along with 512MB and 1GB versions. Within the series we’ll no doubt see two model names which should consist of the HD 5650 and HD 5670 simply by going off past trends. 

As for the HD 5500 and HD 5400, we have been told that ATI will offer between two and three variances which means a total of six variances in those bottom two series and another six variances in the HD 5600 series bringing us to a grant total of 12 new video cards.

While I had planned to get stuck back into reviewing early January it has becoming extremely clear that the option to be a bit slack is quickly fading away.