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Written by John M
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Saturday, 14 April 2007 13:07 |
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Last month, the newly founded joint venture formed by Asus and Gigabyte was called off by the latter. More or less at the same time, at Cebit, Gigabyte showcased new technologies and products. Among them, the graphics cards related were most interesting.
As we receive more information, it becomes clear they're alive and kicking. Not only will they use solid capacitors, but Silent Pipe 3 will feature sintered powder structured heat pipes. Solid capacitors were incorporated to their "D" series of 965 and 945 motherboards, wich became very successful. Sintered powder structures allow the best "flowing" of the liquid inside the heat pipe. Neither is cheap to implement.
If you're a silencer who also wants to enjoy DX10, it's good to know that water cooling or big after market solutions won't be a necessity. We just hope they don't forget to cover the ram chips adequately this time. |
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Written by Maxit
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Friday, 30 March 2007 10:02 |
No Frills X1550 PCSTATS reviews the budget oriented Powercolor X1550 512MB PCI Express videocard for basic Windows Vista compatibility. You do not have to blow a lot of money on a new videocard if you don't play games. PowerColor has put together a package that allows you to fully take advantage of all the visual goodies Microsoft Windows Vista has to offer at a fair price. |
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Written by Maxit
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Sunday, 25 March 2007 12:43 |
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VR Zone saw some R600 cards at CeBIT but of course any form of official photography is restricted as AMD is keeping a close watch making sure nothing is leaked outside. Nevertheless, they still managed to get some shots on the retail R600XTX (Radeon X2900 XTX) card. Also they have some preliminary benchmarks figures of the R600 XTX card vs a GeForce 8800 GTX card.
The R600XTX retail card is codenamed Dragonhead 2. It is a 12-layer card at 9.5" long with a max TDP of 240W. It is clocked at 800MHz on 80nm process technology, 512-bit memory interface and has 1GB GDDR4 memories onboard. It has 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors but two 2x3 PCIe power can be used.
Initial 3DMark 2006 scores look to favour the R600. |
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Written by Maxit
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Thursday, 15 March 2007 19:35 |
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OCZ has been in the review spotlight for their excellent memory modules and high end power supply units, today we get a chance to test their latest product which reintroduces them into the graphics card area with a product based on the popular NVIDIA G80 Core. Our expectations are high, let's find out if it can deliver.
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Written by Maxit
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Sunday, 11 March 2007 14:26 |
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MadShrimps have been gaming away at high resolutions and quality settings to find you the best deal for the newly release Geforce 8800 GTS 320Mb card. They compare models from known manufacturers Sparkle, Gainward, XFX and PNY as well as two new comers Twintech and Zotac. Which one offers the most bang for the buck? Read on to find out.
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Written by Maxit
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Friday, 09 March 2007 20:54 |
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PC Perspective talks to the bigwigs at Nvidia to find out why Vista drivers are so complex and the problems behind Direct x10 and SLI support.
For Windows XP, NVIDIA simply needed to create two main driver components; really two separate drivers. One for DirectX rendering and one for OpenGL rendering. With Vista though, things have changed, and NVIDIA now needs to develop six separate drivers. One for DX9 single card, one for DX9 SLI, one for DX10 single card, one for DX10 SLI, one for OpenGL single card and one for OpenGL SLI modes. While you might just think the move from Windows XPs DX9 driver to Windows Vistas DX9 driver should be an easy port, the move to the new driver model changed all of that. Microsoft moved the driver stack into the user space in the operating system, effectively making the graphics driver a part of the external OS instead of the OS kernel. This keeps the kernel much more stable in the long run, but adds another layer of abstraction for NVIDIAs software to get through before directly accessing the hardware.
The DirectX 10 driver development has been delayed mainly because of the difficulties in being the first to develop such a piece of software (ATI has no DX10 parts available yet). NVIDIA also claimed that each of the six drivers that NVIDIA has to develop for Windows Vista is roughly 20 million lines of code long; about as much code as Windows NT 4! While I am sure there is some significant driver overlap between the six separate modules and the 20 million lines on each, projects of that magnitude are something most normal people couldn't even begin to wrap their heads around.
Sounds like we should all cut them some slack. Not! |
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Written by Maxit
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Wednesday, 07 March 2007 09:58 |
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VR-Zone reported that a
number of GeForce 7-series graphics cards would hit end of life status
on April 28, suggesting that Nvidia plans to release some GeForce
8-series replacements before that date. Well, the site now says Nvidia will introduce its first mainstream GeForce 8 derivatives on April 17.
Techreport.com heard various rumors regarding mainstream GeForce 8 cards over
the past few weeks, but VR-Zone claims that Nvidia will launch three
models on April 17: a $199-249 GeForce 8600 GTS, a $149-169 GeForce
8600 GT, and a $79-99 GeForce 8500 GT. All three cards will reportedly
pack 256MB of memory, and the GeForce 8600 models will have 128-bit
memory buses. The site even quotes core and memory speeds, although if
the launch is indeed a month and a half away, those specs are naturally
liable to change. According to VR-Zone, the GeForce 8600 GTS will run
at 700MHz with 1GHz memory, the GeForce 8600 GT will be clocked at
600MHz/700MHz, and the GeForce 8500 GT will have speeds of
450MHz/400MHz. |
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Written by Maxit
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Tuesday, 06 March 2007 10:23 |
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After the announcement last month by AMD postponing the launch of its new next generation graphics card, the ATI R600, until the second quarter, more bad news comes for those attending this years CeBit trade show. According to Digit Times the delay will mean that AMD keep the R600 low key and stop card manufacturing partners from giving live demos of the R600 graphics cards. AMD will authorize a few trusted partners to showcase AMD demo systems behind closed doors.
DigiTimes says some AMD partners are afraid R600-free show booths at
CeBit might turn off long-time ATI customers and reduce both confidence
in the brand and, ultimately, sales of all ATI-branded hardware.
Nevertheless, some partners are keeping hope, and DigiTimes adds that
there is now an increasing amount of speculation that AMD will unveil a
complete, "top-to-bottom" DirectX 10 lineup in the second quarter. |
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Written by Maxit
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Sunday, 04 March 2007 01:00 |
Before you get all excited, they are coming soon. Soon I tell you!
A new set of beta ForceWare graphics drivers for Windows Vista will finally bring SLI support for GeForce
7 and GeForce 6 series graphics cards. Also on the menu will be
performance improvements in OpenGL games, performance improvements for
SLI setups running at high resolutions, and fixes for the following
bugs. Bugs what bugs, this is Nvidia and Vista 
- Brief corruption (flickering, boxes) on screen at
Windows Vista login, CTR-ALT-DEL (Task Manager), or other function that
requires Vista User Account Control
- Playback issues when playing TV/DVD/video in Media Center with Aero enabled
- Outputting via TV-Out shows only a black and white display
- HDTV output does not keep HDTV resolution after restart
- Adjusting Video Color settings from the NVIDIA Control Panel are not getting applied.
- Change Flat Panel Scaling page does not correctly work in the NVIDIA Control Panel.
- Brightness, Contrast and Gamma values remain the same in Adjust
Desktop Color settings once closing and opening the NVIDIA Control
Panel.
- Corruption on DVI monitor while going to hibernation from standby
- Call of Duty 2 has no performance gain when SLI is enabled
- Madden NFL 07 while playing the screen will freeze, but the game will continue to run and you hear the in-game sounds.
This ForceWare release for Vista will improve support GeForce 8800, GeForce 7, and
GeForce 6 graphics cards.
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Written by Maxit
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Saturday, 03 March 2007 19:45 |
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Images of a prototype AMD R600 have surfaced on the net thanks to ZDNET writer David Berlind. He published some images of an AMD R600 graphics card captured at an AMD press conference. The pictures show the upcoming R600 GPU in all it's glory. Luckily he managed to snap five images before the bouncers at the AMD press conference roughed him up for taking low quality pictures of their new baby.
The size certainly looks enough to impress any 8800GTX owners out there. Check out the stock cooling. It must pump out some heat as it looks to be using a fairly heavy duty heatsink and fan.
The writer did have permission to take the snaps (we were just kidding about the AMD bouncers, they really are nice guys you know) so we must presume they are legit.
  
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Written by BiG K
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Thursday, 01 March 2007 13:35 |
 There will be a new Windows Vista Beta driver release available to download from NVIDIA in the next few days. This is a new driver which will support GeForce 6, 7 and 8 series graphics boards; it does not support GeForce Go mobile GPUs. Please continue to check with your notebook manufacturer for a new driver for GeForce Go GPUs. GeForce FX users should continue to use the v96.85 driver.
The Vista Quality Assurance homepage has up to the date information on when the driver will be available to download, so please continue to check this website: http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance.html.
Here is a summary of new features and bug fixes this new driver addresses:
New Features
- GeForce 7 series SLI support
- GeForce 6 series SLI support
- GeForce 7950 GX2 support (both GPUs are now operational)
More bug's have been fixed, please view the main article for more information. |
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!!! Go Console Crazy !!!