Today’s launch (and review) of Nvidia’s latest enthusiast cards staggered me. The GeForce GTX 280 is fast, blisteringly so; but it’s also mind-bendingly, incomprehensibly, ball-achingly expensive. It’s certainly not the first - every new launch seems to have such prices attached - and it won’t be the last. But £430 for a graphics card?

Let me set my stall out right from the outset: I once spent in excess of £300 on a Radeon 9800 Pro with a fancy blue cooler just to play Far Cry in all its glory. Being a student, I had no money and even less sense, but it just seemed like something I had to do - how else would I experience something so beautiful?

A launch like the GTX 280 should be like technological Viagra to me, then, shouldn’t it? (more…)

You may have seen a while ago that we examined a new chunk of hardware that - and this may be something of a blessing - will never make it to retail: the Asus EAH3850 X3 Trinity.

We were surprised and, dare we say it, a little impressed: Asus packed three 3850 chipsets onto one PCB and, remarkably, made it work. With water cooling and enough electricity to power Bill Gates’ cash machine - almost 300W for the card on its own, in fact. It didn’t really increase frame-rates much when compared to a single 512MB HD 3850 - adding 3fps to our high benchmark in Crysis - but it was certainly an interesting experiment.

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So, after finding out that Intel were planning to release its own graphics card - the mysterious and, at the moment, practically mythical Larrabee - the Nvidia boardroom must have been a fun place to be. The GPU market is, after all, where the Californian company has ruled the roost for the past few years thanks to the strength of the 8000-series and, now, the emergence of some decent 9000 series cards like the 9600 GT and 9800 GTX.

Evidently, it’s decided to come out on the offensive: Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang recently lambasted Intel’s integrated graphics, which have long been a staple of PCs that don’t need to play games and edit demanding videos, as ‘a joke’. He also boasted of his plans to ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ onto Intel, which must be quaking in its boots - after all, its CPUs haven’t done that well, and they certainly not market leaders with no real competitors. Ahem.

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