Sneaky AMD!

[Uriel]

Current NVIDIA and AMD video card generation doesn't even warrant a generation change. We should still be on Geforce 4xx and Radeon 5xxx IMO.

[Halk]

Mm, there's a reasonable difference in power consumption between the two. There's not a huge difference between them though, not as big as hopefully the difference we see at the end of the year with the new ones.

I'd still want their numbering system to account for the better power usage in the current 5/6 series compared to the 4/5 series.

[scaryjim]

Current NVIDIA and AMD video card generation doesn't even warrant a generation change. We should still be on Geforce 4xx and Radeon 5xxx IMO.

I'd query that for the 6950 / 6970, which have significantly changed AMDs architecture. It does sound like the rest of the 6-series will be fairly minor tweaks on the previous generation though (and yes, the 6770 / 6750 are direct rebrands of the 5770 / 5750, although to give AMD credit they're OEM only and haven't (yet) been released to retail...). But if we were going down that line that frankly AMD would still be on either the 2000 or 3000 series, depending in your point of view...

[Uriel]

My point of view could be summed up as I don't think there should be a new generation without a shader change. I guess that would mean the GTX 580 should be called the Geforce 9995 GTX or something .

[Halk]

They're not as bad as Nvidia, who just went crazy with rebranding old stuff as new stuff.

Regardless though not one of the lot of them can hold back from breaking their own rules when it comes to marketing something as something else. It just means that we need to find out what a product really is before buying it.

[Halk]

My point of view could be summed up as I don't think there should be a new generation without a shader change. I guess that would mean the GTX 580 should be called the Geforce 9995 GTX or something .

I take your point, but you're really just arguing tha they shouldn't change the first digit, they should change the second digit.

I'd agree with you too.

First digit - shader change
Second digit - revision
third digit - relative power model number

So they could have 1-9 as the last digit. 9 being dual GPU. 8 would be GTX. 7 would be GT. etc

Then when they moved from the 5870 to 6970 they'd just increment the second digit.

Then at the end of the year when they bring out the new core they increment the first one.

They won't do it, and if they do it they won't stick to it. The longer they stick to it, the more milage they would get from sneaking a product in with the wrong numbering system. So over time it gets more and more tempting for them to cheat.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

For £79 the Phenom II X4 840 does not look bad value TBH.

It seems to be slightly faster than a Q9400:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/6

The Core i3 2100 is around £100 to £105.