PCWorld: Wait for nVidia Ion

Strong combination headed our way next year:
nVidia Ion

 

Ehh...What's the point of posting this. Just makes people regret buying things early...

There'll always be newer tech that outdoes the older ones. If you say wait for the nVidia Ion, why wouldn't we wait for the next thing?

 

I didn't say wait, the guy who wrote the article did. I like to know what is coming up and this sounded pretty significant to me. Also, it could be helpful to people who want to buy but not just yet. I followed the AAO and other netbooks for months before buying it (i.e. when XP wasn't available).

 

Its simple. Wait till the new tech is about to come out, then sell your last gen shit on Craigslist or something before the masses realize theres the new tech out.

 

Every day you wait for new tech that may or may not make your dreams come true, you miss out on using what's available. I honestly don't see why I would regret buying my One, it's been serving me well for three months now. I can always sell it to someone who doesn't need to play "latest first person shooters" on a 9" screen and get something more powerful, but I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future.

 

I wouldnt touch anything that nVidia makes for the next 6-12 months if I was you guys.

 

Why do you say this?

 

Because seeing the mess they did with their improper use of obsolete technology as an underfill for their production process, I really do not want to help them unloading their (faulty or imperfect) stock.
And with the past experiences I have with nVidia, they tend to abandon their user base (nForce 2 and 3 anyone?). Their drivers are nothing to write home too (xxxx stopper working .. in Vista). I would never touch an intel integrated card either, but I think this in one exception to that rule.
As a matter of fact intel has improved on that front, and MUST improve in the next few months as it faces dire opposition from the other manufacturers that at the moment perform much better.
The best solution at the moment is an ATI card.

 

That certainly is an interesting post, though I confess to not having understood much of it. Is ATI moving in the netbook zone as well?

I have a pretty good nVidia card on my 17" laptop which I paid extra for. I must admit that its performance has been less than stellar. Watching video via Slingbox and Tivo is actually better on the AAO which cost a quarter the price. I'm not at all the expert on graphics cards though, and it may be that I need to go through a special configuration process for each thing.

 

Sorry I should have pointed out that no, for the moment ATI is not in the netbook market, however my post was more general than that. In the absence of ATI's offers I would go with intel.
The issue with nVidia's production has been reported on several occasions. Basically they have used a cheaper solution as substrate for manufacturing their processors. This makes is MUCH more likely to have a BSOD or general freeze/artifacts etc as the cheaper substrate deteriorates with temperature. This has been observed in many desktop cards, but seems to be affecting also some notebooks (as the chip itself is the same, only packaging changes).
To add to this, nVidia has taken a 200mil hit to cover this all up thanks to the help of HP (majorly impacted by this), another company that I could not define ethical at all (and I worked for them, trust me).
So now they are in the position to have to shift a certain amount of stock, quick as they do not have much aligned in terms of new products.. and here it comes the contract with Apple, and now this announcement for the netbook.
Again, this issue may come up or not, the fact stays that nVidia has been saving money lowering reliability of their components.
Having said that, I would rather go for an nVidia on my netbook rather then on my laptop. You can heat that thing up with a laptop, but paired with the Atom you cant really play crysis can u..

 

Thanks for the clarification. Now that you mention it, I vaguely recall that they also had a problem on the Dell XPS, at least a friend of mine was baffled and quite distressed by it until they released a patch. I suspect that the issues that you refer to may be even more serious. Perhaps not coincidentally, the laptop which I mentioned was an HP. Maybe I should look a little further into this while it's still on warranty (several problems on that machine).

 

The 'patch' that you are referring to, is such just on paper, and it only proves that companies like these should be voted out of the market by not buying their products. Infact the patch was meant only to make so the fan on the gpu would spin at a higher rate. The result? Sure your laptop wouldnt probably BSOD as much because it would take it more time to reach that certain temp. But the battery gets sucked more and all in all you can forget a quiet laptop experience.
On top of that, this makes so that you're only actually delaying the premature death of your laptop, most likely until... the warranty is over.

To finish, I ALWAYS bought nVidia cards, and mobos with nVidia chipsets. I have been left out to hang, so to speak, with tons of users of nF3 chipsets. Their video cards were a PITA in Vista and their drivers ridiculous. I can take a product that has problems. What I will not tolerate is companies that lie to their customers.
I now have a nice ATI 3850 which works a treat.

 

Well, thanks for the additional input. Things are becoming more difficult in general and people expect so much (myself included). For example, in the case of the netbooks, for under $400 some of us expect not only top quality hard and software, but first rate support as well. From my personal perspective, I believe I understand what you are saying, but I don't want to appear that I'm not considering the problems that the other side may be experiencing. There is a point however, where the computer business becomes just as irresponsible as the banks.

 

Yes of course, however the graphic card market is an expensive one to be in, contrarily to the netbook market.
And yes also to businesses becoming irresponsible, it is happening but i think now consumers are not that blind anymore and start asking for the value their money paid for.

 

i thought that nvidia ion was inicially intended only for desktop solutions such as htpcs. According to nvidia, the netbook version of the ion plataform would take much longer

I really doubt that it will cost almost the same as the atom with gma950. I think it will be sold like a high end product and intel will release another low cost (and low power consumption) chipset to replace the 945 to be avaliable at $450

 

nVidia notebook boss discusses the new Ion platform
nVidia, Intel and the Netbook Market

 

Lol, this cracks me up... for a few reasons... Well, look at what netbooks have become now, gaming machines huh? Lol im sorry, but if you are to believe that guy that said in that interview to expect ONLY a 50 dollar increase between what we have today and what they are planning on bringing out, I am very sorry but that will not be the case. Also, the reason why the netbook market is doing so good is due to the price of these things. Noone wants to buy a tinnnny PC to play COD for a tag of around 500 to 600 bucks... Hell I have a hard enough time playing World of warcraft on this thing, let alone a FPS... [BTW if yall didnt know, netbooks of today can run Vista just as good as they can xp, and can also play games such as World of Warcraft...] You can just about find a new 15" PC that can game as good as this new nvidia netbook, not even bringing up buying used...

All im saying is, people can talk you into buying stuff better than what you could ever believe. If you think that you can get this new Nvidia based netbook for 50 bucks more "at the most" than what you can now, and play COD4 at 30FPS, then by all means, keep dreaming for it. I doubt it will be as nice as they make it sound though...

 

So what exactly can you do with the NVIDIA ION platform?

 

Aw man I want one, now they tell us once Christmas already came and I just got my AAO.

 

Be glad you got one now, even if they were to make a new AAO lappy like that, its still going to be months in the making. as it sounds from those articles, Intel isn't about to let them move in just yet.