[geeks] Sun to adopt newest Intel Xeon chips for upcoming servers (link)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> Phil Stracchino wrote:
>>>>>> Believe it or not, there are a bunch of gaming fanboys who are dumping 
>>>>>> single 7950GX2's so they can upgrade to dual 8800GTX's.  Hence, I'm 
>>>>>> beginning to see used 7950GX2's for something approaching reasonable money.
>>>>> Damn.  Have to keep my eyes open on eBay.  ;)
>>>> People are installing dual X2's in SLI mode, which gives you four GPUs.
>>>>
>>>> Amazing.
>>> The problem is that a single 8800GTX is faster than the dual-GPU 7950GX2.
>> The used 7800s and 7900s are still selling on eBay for more than I can
>> justify as gamebox budget.
> 
> If it comes below $175 for a 7950GX2, then I can probably justify it.  I 
> would pay it off over a couple of months and I wouldn't have any problem.

I ended up getting my 7900GS KO for $150: it was $30 off and then I got 
a rebate.

I figure that in a few months I'll have more money collected in my toy 
fund and maybe I'll upgrade.  It's not a priority or I'd have gone ahead 
and done it.

Drifting a bit to talk about software-crippled GPUS:

Even in the 7xxx series, a few manufacturers are putting high end GPUs 
in low end cards, sometimes due to limited supply of GS versions, or 
just to make manufacturing simpler.

It used to be very common in the 6xxx series nVidia GPUs, but almost 
stopped with the 7xxx series.

You can get a 6600 or 6800 and turn it into a GT card with a simple 
software program.

A 7900 GS has 20 pixel pipelines and 7 vertex units.  The 7950GT version 
has 24 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex units.

Lately, several EVGA and BFG 7900GS owners have removed their heatsinks 
and found that they had GT GPUs, same as the 7950/7950GT units.  They 
were able to enabled the software masked pipeline and vertex units.

I wouldn't mind doing that, but I don't want to remove my heatsink.

Does anyone know if there is a way to tell exactly what GPU you have in 
software without a physical check?