The Best of 2007 Awards!

AMD Phenom quad-core processors 9500 and 9600 (2.2GHz and 2.3GHz) were released on November 19th with a black edition of the 9600 following shortly thereafter. If the delayed launch and lower clock speeds were not enough bad news, AMD then had to deal with the TLB erratum. We covered details of the TLB erratum in a quick article and also discovered that many reviews were posted with incorrect SiSoftware Sandra memory bandwidth scores as the benchmark was not optimized for Phenom. When things start to go bad it seems like everything starts to crumble and that is exactly what happened with Phenom. Last we heard AMD is still working on fixing the TLB issue and has not produced fixed silicon yet.

Biggest Shock: GeForce 8800 GT Video Card Series

The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card turned out to be the fastest selling card that NVIDIA has ever produced. The GeForce 8800 GT arrived on October 29th, 2007 and supplies were so tight we were only able to do a preview of the GeForce 8800 GT at the time. With 112 streaming processors operating at 1.5GHz, 512MB of video memory, a 256-bit memory interface, PCI Express 2.0, NVIDIA SLI, and the second generation NVIDIA PureVideo engine with full acceleration and post processing for HD DVD and Blu-ray it is no wonder why these cards sold faster than they could be made. ATI tried to spoil the crazy sales by leaking out a DirectX 10.1 whitepaper just before the reviews on the GeForce 8800 GT went live, but it didn’t seem to do the trick. When we finally reviewed the reference GeForce 8800 GT 512MB card it was without a doubt quick and priced to sell. NVIDIA then announced that they were coming out with 256MB version of the card at a lower price point, just before ATI released the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 video cards. Not to be out done ATI showed off their upcoming Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card to give enthusiasts a peak at what is coming next year. In the end it seems the GeForce 8800 GT video card series pulled ahead as they do have more muscle and it is obvious that gamers will pay more to get the higher frame rates. The marketing teams at ATI and NVIDIA are starting to heat things up again and that is great. It makes our job reporting the details to you more fun and our readers get to know the scoop well in advance of the product launches.