Firefox X58 is the name of the system, since I have quite a large network, I find it easy to name my systems, so they are easier to find on my Local Network, the reason why I named it Firefox was because it is one of my fastest systems, I got the name from Clint Eastwood's Firefox movie, this system's speed can be compared with the Mig 31 Firefox, that is how I got to ths systems name.
Here a vid of Firefox X58 in action:
Settings used were:
Max in game settings @ 1440 x 900 x32 + FSAA x32, AF x16 + TAA x4 Supersampled.
The reason why I went for these card's is that they have a very interesting history, also as being NVIDIA's first DirectX 11 & OpenGL 4.0 achievement.
At first these cards were first going to be named as Geforce GTX 380's the GPU's history began with the GT212, then the GT300 and then NVIDIA gave it the final name, since the architechture was so much different to that of GeForce Tesla which GT meant for, they gave it the GeForce Fermi naming which suited morely the the entire newconcept and this name was given Q2 of 2009!
The first operational Fermi Engineering Samples were made in Q2 of 2009, these had a lot of hand done reworks, like external trace reowrks and such, as seen of early GTX 480 card shots in previews and rumor articles, the first cards looked like spaghetti on the rear side of the PCB's heh, this were the Rev.A0's and the Rev.A1's, the Rev.A0's were the first functional Fermi boards, these did run at very low clock speeds, but it was a step in the right direction.
The Rev.A2 was the GTX 480 with 512 Cuda cores that could operate at a much higher speed than the rev.A0's and Rev.A1's, although these were the first to have seen daylight outside the labs, some previewers still have a few of the Rev.A2 boards the most famous one is the Rev.A2 5009 [ Week 50 year 2009, this was a late Rev.A2, but also one of the last RevA2's made.
The Rev.A3's began from week 51 2009 and onwards, the first 2 batches also had 512 Cuda cores, the Rev.A2 and A3 Engineering Samples also had them GeForce Logo leds:
Them Leds were located here which I encircled in red:
Later production bioards did have 2 holes on that exact location as can be seen here:
The GeForce logo's were made from Transluent Acrylic material , just like this closeup of a GTX 580 Engineering Sample's GeForce logo, although these had no GeForce Logo's leds which GTX 480 Engineering Samples 's did have:
Even that they were maybe planned, it does seem that GTX 580's have these holes on the PCB, look left from C171:
Just before production of the Rev.A3's we all know today NVIDIA had issues with the company that was going to produce these leds, so that was called off and to increase the core speed on the GTX 480 and to greaten the yields 1 cluster of all 16 32 coreéd clusters was locked, this also proved much more stable perfromance at higher speeds and greater yields were achieved for mass production.
Which lead to the GTX 480's we all know of today, so this is the main reason why I went for the GTX 480, it's this history and this is how NVIDIA made their first DX11/OpenGL 4.0 GPU to the world.
post edited by Gold Leader - 2010/12/20 13:45:51