Technically it's not delayed since we're not at those five weeks yet.macgeek2005 said:
Phil Schiller, sounds like people don't want cards that either suck, don't meet their mid-range criteria, or take a month to ship!Lord Blackadder said:
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Theory on X1900 XT shipping delays...
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Mr. Mister said:
I agree, and hope someone from Apple is reading this.
Right now in the PC world, a "mid range" card is a GeForce 7600GT, 6800GT, Radeon X800XT/X850XT/X1600XT. The X1900XT is a great high-end card , but out of most people's price range. The 7300GT that comes with the Mac Pro is a "budget" card, which would be OK if you could easily upgrade to a midrange card. But you can't.
I think Apple needs to fill that midrange gap in price/performance with one of the mid-level cards I listed above, and make it available. They should have XFX, ASUS, BFG or one of the other big video card manufactureres make them in quantity, since those companies are already cranking out said cards like hotcakes - all Apple needs to do is email them a damned ROM file and we would all be happy.
Pretty much the only way you could get a midrange card in the Mac Pro right now would be to buy a PC Radeon X1600XT, put a 128k ROM chip on it and flash it with a ROM file from the iMac's X1600XT...maybe.
I was tempted to say that mine has just to spite you, but not to my knowledge is it even being 'built'.
Some guy over here says his order can't be canceled, therefore it might be shipping soon. This could be for other reasons but we can hope.
Only for half a year or so.MacRumorUser said:
The reason I'm suspicious is because it says "items cannot be individually canceled", suggesting that the order as a whole can be canceled.
Mr. Mister said:
Yeah that's usually the sign that your order is in the process of being prepped ready to ship alright.
Mr. Mister said:
I thought so. It still begs the question why the delay then? You would think they would have stockpiled enough of them by now, is it all down to the mac specific bios?
The happy theory was that they were waiting for the soon-to-be-officially-released X1950 XTX, but not that seems doubtful with no official announcement from them.
MacRumorUser said:
Which makes me nervous now, since I ordered on the day of the keynote... and mine hasn't been locked down yet. Strange. You would think that an order placed on Aug 7th would take priority over one placed on Aug 23rd... or hopefully they are just really, really random on which orders are getting updated throughout the day.
MacRumorUser said:
The firmware is really the only thing I can think of... that and a UGA firmware flash is 128KB instead of 64KB... meaning that different firmware chips might have been needed if they were penny-pinchers (which I am willing to bet).
I'mAMac said:do you think apple will add the 1950xtx to their configuration options?
NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
I don't really care either way since both the X1900 XT and X1950 XTX are cards on the edge of the precipice before we fall into ATI X2900 XTXs and Nvidia 8800GTXs. Any money you spend on these cards is just going to be wasted on something that in November or December is going to be wiped away with the arrival of incredibly fast next-generation cards.
Mr. Mister said:
Well, fortunetaly for us, the Mac Pro's graphics card is upgradeable. And since we aren't moving away from PCI-Express quite yet, we can put ATI X2900XTX's into our machines, given apple makes it an option in the Mac Pro, and offers an upgrade kit.
No problem. Nobody panic. These machines are UPGRADEABLE!
Even better, if ATI and Nvidia offer marginally more expensive cards that we don't have to pay 50% more for.macgeek2005 said:
the x1900's are not dx 10 compatible right? if theyre not, will they be completely obsolete when dx10 and vista come out? i dont know whether i should wait or not!!
No sir, nothing really is right now. It's unclear to me whether it's purely a software difference of not, in the former case there could be some way of running DX10 natively on pre-Vista cards. U believe Nvidia was claiming DX10-compliancy on their 7900GTX for a while, not sure what's going to become of that.I'mAMac said:
Overall, I wouldn't worry about it since the onslaught of DX10 photorealistic games will probably be better experienced with one of the a new-generation cards coming out this winter, and because there's going to be a great long period of DX9 legacy support.
7300 = $40, upgrade to 1900 = $350, adds up to be almost $400 and those cards are $320 on Newegg right now and will probably dive even lower with the X1950 XTX official release.macgeek2005 said:
So you're paying roughly 33% more for the BTO upgrade, but that's not even mentioning the upgrade kit, which is the format in which future GPU upgrades from Apple will come. When you talk about the upgrade kit, you're looking at paying more than 50% more than Newegg price for the same card, maybe even underclocked.
Mr. Mister said:
Well whatever. As soon as the X1900XT is replaced by the next generation card in the Mac Pro, i'll sell my X1900XT on ebay, and buy the new card's upgrade kit.
Well, I'm guessing the next Mac Pro update, accompanied by GPU updates that will probably include DX10 cards, will be in January. So from a "grand scheme of things" perspective, it's terribly dumb since you're buying the last of a generation soon to be superceded. However, if you want decent graphics performance whatsoever until then, it's your only choice. I'd personally say go for it, you can easily sell it off for maybe even more than you bought it for to a 7300GT user who doesn't want to pay $500 for their X1900 XT upgrade kit.