Despite the utmost attention to detail, meticulous planning, and a positive initial reception from heavy hitters in the industry, product launches in the hardware world don’t always go according to plan. Whether their track record shows it or not, no company is safe from this inevitability. Although it would be oh so fun to go back over the last two years with a fine-toothed comb and point out with a condescending air the product launch failures from companies of all different shapes and sizes, it is far easier and just as meaningful to go back just one year and point out some disappointing releases from a few of the “Big Four” companies in computer hardware. NVIDIA, AMD, ATI, and Intel have, over the past year, not been immune to the poor product launches that so often plague companies with far less experience and resources.

In early November 2006, NVIDIA launched their latest foray into the enthusiast motherboard market with their nForce 680i platform. As the only viable competition to Intel’s rather strong 975X chipset, the nForce 680i would have to be a pretty good product to wrestle away some of Intel’s hold on the LGA775 market. After reviews went up on several prominent hardware websites, it was pretty clear that not only was the nForce 680i a strong product, it seemed to beat the living daylights out of even the very best 975X offerings. However, once the boards based off NVIDIA’s reference design started hitting the market in large quantities, complaints centered around SATA corruption started pouring in. It was not until a few weeks after these problems surfaced that they were fully resolved via BIOS updates, but by then the damage had been done and the nForce 680i chipset had been forever marred by a nasty little flaw that didn’t quite make it into the initial reviews of the product. Although now we can safely say that the 680i platform is the most feature-rich and high-performance LGA775 option on the market, that most certainly was not the case in the weeks after its launch.

The end of November 2006 was about 1 week’s worth of buzz and speculation in hardware forums the world over, and one or two days of mass disappointment. The highly-touted, technically superior, and rather innovative Quad FX platform from AMD launched on November 30,2006 to a pretty substantial thrashing from basically every site AMD chose to sample. The dual-socket, dual-core processor concept was certainly not at the base of the negative discussions, nor was the fact that AMD had delivered on its promise of “..Redefin[ing] High-End Computing for Megatasking Enthusiasts”. Heat dissipation problems, tremendous power consumption, and inferior performance across the board were the main perches from which reviewers hurled their abrasive words unto AMD’s poor Quad FX product. Unfortunately for AMD, a product with all the potential in the world is still a lousy product if its performance is also subpar. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the Quad FX platform for gamers interested in peak performance is that it makes a wonderful base on which to build a computer that consumes enough power to actually test some of the ultra high output power supplies available on the market these days.

Should our list of hardware manufacturers at the end of the first paragraph be considered prophetic in any way, it would follow that the next company to be stricken by this product launch disease would be ATI. Given that ATI is now a subsidiary of AMD, you might consider any product launch issue it encounters as that of its parent company. However, as certain to-be-unnamed AMD partners have confirmed, we believe that what ATI was working on before the acquisition was their own responsibility and was mostly independent of influence from AMD. We are, of course, talking about the highly-anticipated and rather disappointing debut of the Radeon HD 2900XT R600-based graphics card that took place last month (March 07). Not only did the R600 take many months longer than most of the enthusiast community expected to come to fruition, it didn’t really deliver the hopes and dreams of ATI fans the world over, who expected big red to produce something that would finally end the tyrannical reign of big green on the ultra high-end. There was lots of upheaval in the hardware circles after previews of the card were published. Most people accepted the benchmarks in these previews as somehow biased or based on immature drivers, and said they would wait for full reviews before they passed judgment on the card. While the latter was indeed the case, that did not affect the end result – that the HD 2900XT was by all accounts a video card that failed to usurp NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTX, a card that had been dominating the high-end graphics arena for more than 6 months prior.

On June 14th, word came through the pipes that perhaps R600 wasn’t finished yet. AMD/ATI seemed to have one last card to play that would hopefully be what ATI fans everywhere were looking for. The HD 2900XT 1GB GDDR4, called the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT 1GB GDDR4 – because Diamond Multimedia is the exclusive distributor of the card – brings an extra 512 MB of RAM to the table and upgrades to GDDR4 over GDDR3 from the previous model. Other than that it seems to be about the same card. Does the extra memory make a difference? We take a quick (2 sleepless nights of testing that is) look at this new card in a GotFrag Hardware: Exclusive Review.