What kind of performance could we expect by March?

Just the thought of everything coming out makes me all giddy. I'm psyched about my X800 XT that is coming in. But, the system that would be top of the line in this upcoming year would look down upon my rig now and laugh without pity.

BTX
DDR2
dual core 90nm processors (4.5 GHz?)
twin GeForce gards in SLI
PCI Express motherboards

I can see systems hitting up to 40,000 in 3DMark03. Anyone else care to drool over the upcoming hardware that will require the biggest unloading of "old" PC hardware ever?

 

Sorry, I meant 3DMark 01, not 03.

 

Yup, and then by then hl2 and d3 will be out (hopefully ) and all the games based off theyre engines will be out, we havnt had a time like this for a loooong time.

 

I don't think BTX will be all-around so soon, AMD cpu's don't need it and more importantly, can't use the BTX mobo layout effectively as the lines to the memorybanks are too long thus the latency goes up, which is one thing all Athlons dislike.
Also, there aren't alot of BTX-ready cases out yet.

 

I have seen rumors that screen splitting (this will not be SLI) will be a part of PCI Express. If so any pair of vid cards will work.
Let the price/performance wars begin!

BTX is a clone of the Mac optomized MB layout, I kinda figured the PC world would catch up. Directly routing outside air to the CPU with planned air flow across the MB was introduced by Apple in 2001 with the Quicksilver. Quicksilver also featured a very quiet (for the air moved) 120 MM exhaust fan. Not perfect, but 4 years ahead of BTX for mass production. BTX will come, but slowly as modders and some manufacturers already have better solutions to cooling using ATX cases.

 

Yea, i'm actually surprised apples stuff isn't a lot faster then pcs stuff, I mean, they build all the hardware AND the software, they can do anything they want and they dont have to wait for people to adopt it or the other companys to make things (IE Windows XP 64bit, new BTX cases, ect).