by Anton Shilov
07/16/2003 | 04:24 AM
It really becomes trendy among manufacturers of graphics cards to make their products using graphics processors from both leading developers of such chips: ATI Technologies and NVIDIA. Earlier this year a long-time NVIDIA supporter MSI made hundreds of thousands graphics cards based on ATI RADEON 9600 TX technology, SUMA started to sell Powered by ATI devices, while Creative Technology and Club3D and some others have been selling products on both ATI and NVIDIA processors for some time now. Last week we also told you that Gigabyte planned to offer NVIDIA-based graphics cards (see this news-story). Looks like Triplex is also going the same road, as the company has just introduced its Mohoch GeForce FX 5900 graphics card.
<%BANNER[article]%>Triplex Mohoch GeForce FX 5900 is equipped with 128MB of Hynix 2.2ns DDR SDRAM memory functioning at 850MHz and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 graphics processor working at 400MHz. The product is made fully according to reference design and even boasts with reference cooling-system featuring one 6500rpm fan and occupying an extra PCI slot. Unlike a lot of other graphics cards from Triplex, the Mohoch GeForce FX 5900 is not made using silver, but blue 10-layer PCB.
We will continue to track the companies who use graphics processors from various developers in their solutions. I think this year a lot of vendors will try to form their product lineups in order to sell as many graphics cards as possible and not to depend on only one source of graphics processors. This seems to be a very positive for end-users, as competition always means more interesting products and lower prices.
Unfortunately, there are only two really strong players on this market now: ATI and NVIDIA; keeping in mind that XGI (SiS) and S3-VIA are very slow in terms of product announcements, I do not expect any of them to grab a substantial market share this year. As a result, we will not experience a situation like in 1999, when there was 5 relatively strong players in the discrete consumer graphics market and all of them tried to offer us something really powerful and feature-rich.