Posts filed under 'Graphic Cards'
The new HD 5770 cooler is better
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| Written by Slobodan Simic | |
| Monday, 07 December 2009 12:31 | |
For GPU and PCB We already wrote a lot about the new cooler that AMD decided to slap on the HD 5770. The “older”, blower fan was probably more expensive, but it looks like that the new one also does a better job in cooling both the PCB and the GPU itself. As we wrote before, the new cooler only has the HD 5750 shroud while the heatsink below has a Zalmanish design with two 8mm heatpipes. Due to the fact that it blows air downward, the new cards don’t have RAM or VRM heatsink either. The only drawback is that this one keeps the hot air inside the case which can easily be fixed with additional fans, which most users have on their chassis anyway. The guys at Expreview.com tested both versions and have published some interesting results as the GPU is up to 9 degrees colder under load and 4 degrees colder in idle when compared to the old blower fan. Even the PCB is cooler by few degrees, but of course the case temperature rose a bit. Although the new cooler might be cheaper and should bring a bit more money to AMD considering the fact that it will not change the price of the HD 5770, it also does a good job, despite the fact that it keeps the hot air in the case. Of course, you can always wait for those non-reference cards with custom cooling which should show up pretty soon. You can find the review here. Also read New design HD 5770 has the same price AMD finally gave chips to partners
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Add comment December 7, 2009
Sapphire’s HD 5770 Vapor-X pixellized
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| Written by Slobodan Simic | |
| Monday, 07 December 2009 13:03 | |
Same cooler as on HD 5750 Vapor-X We managed to get our hands on some pictures of Sapphire’s HD 5770 Vapor-X card which has been listed for pre-order as of last week. The new card is quite similar as the HD 5750 Vapor-X and uses the same cooler. Since the card hasn’t been officially announced we still don’t know the clocks of it but we suspect that the card will have reference clocks since the same thing happened with the HD 5750 Vapor-X, and all of the listings are showing reference clocks. The card will, of course, be much colder and even less noisy, but it is also the most expensive HD 5770 on the market as well. The card is currently listed with a lowest price tag of €144,80 for lite retail version and €151,68 for full retail version. The price climes all the way to €189,90 at Alternate.at, while Overclockers.co.uk list it for pre-order with a £139.99 inc VAT price tag. Here are the pictures of the new HD 5770 Vapor-X.
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1 comment December 7, 2009
Nvidia partners discontinued GTX285 and GTX275
| Written by Fuad Abazovic | |
| Monday, 12 October 2009 11:32 | |
 And GTX260 Several Nvidia partners have confirmed that they had to decide to cancel GTX 285 and GTX 275 based products, as availability was simply disastrous. We still don’t now if this is Nvidia’s strategy to keep the market hungry for Fermi or they simply didn’t order enough wafers, but availability of GTX260, GTX275 and GTX285 was so bad that many decided to drop these products and wait for Fermi. The lucky ones can sell Radeon HD 5870 and 5850, as they are selling good, but the 5870 is mainly on allocation and that doesn’t really help a lot. The GT200 generation is slowly but surely running towards its retirement and if you want one, simply grab it while you still can, or get RV870 or Fermi when it comes out. Source: |
1 comment October 12, 2009
Nvidia releases Geforce 191.07 WHQL driver
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| Written by Slobodan Simic | |
| Tuesday, 06 October 2009 13:42 | |
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Performance boost for games and OpenGL Nvidia has released a new set of WHQL certified drivers with support for all Geforce GPUs ranging from Geforce 6 to Geforce 200 series, as well as the ION IGP. The new driver mainly brings performance boost in various games and the most important new feature is the support for OpenGL 3.2 on Geforce 8, 9, 100, 200 series and Nvidia’s ION GPUs. The performance boost includes ARMA 2, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood with SLI, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Prototype, and of course, Batman: Arkham Asylum when GPU PhysX is enabled. The performance boost ranges from eight percent in Batman to up to 50 percent in Call of Juarez. The performance boost results are taken from the 191.07 vs. 190.62 comparison. The new driver also brings SLI support for Aion, Darkfall, Dawn of Magic 2, Dreamkiller, Fuel, Need for Speed: Shift and bunch of other titles. In addition to these performance boosts, the new driver also brings numerous bug fixes. The new driver can be downloaded at Nvidia’s website, here. |
Add comment October 6, 2009
Nvida disables PhysX support
| Written by Nick Farrell | |
| Thursday, 01 October 2009 09:53 | |
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If you use ATI cards Nvidia, which once said it would enable processing of physics effects made using PhysX API on any GPU, is now doing the opposite.According to Xbit, the company recently started to disable PhysX support on systems that use ATI Radeon graphics cards for rendering and Ageia PhysX or Nvidia GeForce processors for physics effects computing. While it was not easy to make both ATI Catalyst or Nvidia ForceWare drivers or Nvidia PhysX system software work on the same system, apparently some people had managed it and this annoyed the Green Goblin. PhysX is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it. An Nvidia service person was quoted as saying that while for a variety of reasons, some development expense, some quality assurance and some business reasons Nvidia will not support GPU accelerated PhysX with Nvidia GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non-Nvidia GPUs. All this is strange as it has pushed PhysX as an open standard that can be used even by its arch-rival ATI. In fact there is an element of cutting its nose off to spite its face. PhysX support seems now to be limited to the installed base of the GeForce and does not allow to use it on machines featuring even other graphics accelerators. Those who need PhysX should only upgrade to Nvidia graphics boards if keeping the old card for PhysX we guess. source: |
Add comment October 1, 2009
XFX Radeon HD 5870 first glimpse
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| Written by Fuad Abazovic | |
| Wednesday, 23 September 2009 16:34 | |
Preview: Much faster than last gen We got a chance to do a quick preliminary round of tests on Radeon HD 5870 and since our samples only arrived today, we didn’t have the chance to test it out as meticulously as we would’ve liked. We will of course soon come out with a full-blown review but for now here is a glimpse of what the XFX HD 5870 1GB is capable of. Thanks to XFX we can show you at least a bit of what this card is all about. Since it has 2.15 billion transistors, the HD 5870’s ticker we like to call RV870 offers twice as much Shaders – 1600 in total. TMUs got a boost to 80 and the ROPs got up from 16 on the 48×0 generation to 32. In a way, the RV870 chip can be viewed as a single chip that has the power of two RV770 cores inside. This is not all though, as the chip is 40nm, the transistors are smaller, it supports up to three Eyefinity multi-displays with one regular card, and of course it comes with Shader model 5.0 and DirectX 11 support. This is a lot of innovation indeed but it still leaves a feeling that this chip is more evolution than revolution. Microsoft plans to launch Windows 7 in just about a month time and this will be the DirectX 11’s official birthday. The card supports the not-so-successful Stream parallel computing from AMD as well as OpenCL, open standard computing language. AMD is however still a lot more concentrated on gaming and will continue in that direction. XFX HD 5870 1GB card runs at default 850MHz core clock, 1200MHz GDDR5 256 bit memory and it packs one serious punch. XFX ships the card with Dirt 2 voucher, one Crossfire Interconnect Cable, DVI to VGA Adaptor and two 6 PIN to 4 PIN Power Cable. The suggested retail price in the US is $379 while in Europe it is €329 and UK around £300 if not more.
We had just enough time to test FarCry 2 game and a couple of Futuremak tests.
You can see the advantage of HD 5870 over HD 4870 X2 in the Vantage Extreme test, but note that the older dual GPU card is still better in most of games.
At certain resolutions in Far Cry 2, the new fastest single GPU Radeon 5870 leaves the best single GPU Nvidia’s offering, the GTX 285 in the dust and wins with up to 21fps better results.
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Add comment September 23, 2009
Asus has the first OCed HD 5800 cards
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| Written by Slobodan Simic | |
| Wednesday, 23 September 2009 16:43 | |
 With Asus Voltage Tweak Technology Asus is the first AIB partner that will alter the reference frequencies on the HD 5800 series cards. Asus has decided to use its Voltage Tweak feature on these cards, which allow them to achieve higher clocks by raising the GPU voltage. It is a nice add-on and it looks like Asus found out that these cards overclock nicely with a bit of additional voltage to the GPU. Asus will launch a total of four cards, two HD 5870 and two HD 5850, where the only difference between the models is the bundle. One will come with the Dirt 2 game voucher while other one will be shipped without it, and will thus end up cheaper. With no voltage changes applied, Asus’ graphics cards are running at reference 850/725MHz for the core and 4800/4000MHz for the 1GB of GDDR5 memory. When Voltage Tweak comes into play, the HD 5870 can be overclocked to 1035MHz for the GPU and 5200MHz for memory by just raising the voltage from 1.15V to 1.35V. With the HD 5850 it gets even better as it can be overclocked via Voltage Tweak to 1050MHz for the GPU and 5200MHz for the memory by raising the voltage from 1.088V to 1.4V. By the looks of things and the figures, the HD 5850 is quite a jewel, and this might be a great card if you are into overclocking. According to Asus, this overclock raised the 3DMark Vantage Extreme Preset score from 8,087 to 9,252 for the HD 5870 and from 6501 to 8987 for the HD 5850. This also means that an overclocked HD 5850, which has less stream processors, might be capable of beating the higher priced HD 5870 at reference clocks, at least when talking about 3Dmark Vantage. Of course, we need not remind you about the price difference between these two cards. AMD might not be happy that Asus offers a voltage change option to its customers, but Asus will of course do anything to get an edge against the ever-tough competition on the market.
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Add comment September 23, 2009
MSI shows its HD 5800 lineup
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| Written by Slobodan Simic | |
| Wednesday, 23 September 2009 14:22 | |
Two cards with a simple design MSI is yet another AIB partner that will, and has announced its HD 5800 series cards today. MSI has decided to go with the simplest design with big white letters on the card cooler, which is probably the best way, as those pictures are just meaningless unless you come up with an unique solution, at least until non-reference cards start to show up. The newly announced cards will have R5850-PM2D1G and R5870-PM2D1G model names will have 1600 and 1440 stream processors and will both be equipped with 1GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface. The HD 5870 works at 850 for the core and 4800MHz for the memory, while the HD 5850 is clocked at 725MHz for the core and 4000MHz for memory. The HD 5870 card should hopefully show up in retail sometime during this week, while the HD 5850 will have to wait for October.
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Add comment September 23, 2009
Leaked GeForce GTX380 / GTX360 Benchmarks Are Fake
December 15th, 2009
by Sue
Everyone is anxiously waiting for NVIDIA’s next-generation flagship graphics cards based on Fermi architecture, so the recently leaked performance slides of the GeForce GTX 380 and GTX 360 did cheer us up a lot.
However, Nordichardware contacted NVIDIA trying to confirm about this, and the company who usually doesn’t comment on unreleased products suggest that the benchmarks are not real and just based on templates from old NVIDIA presentations.
It seems we have to wait a little bit longer to see what Fermi has to offer.
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Add comment December 15, 2009