Graphics Cards - Page 251

A surprise from AMDs beta drivers has arrived today. No, not some incredible performance jump that causes it to smash the 680...or is it? The new beta drivers make reference to 16 previously unseen device IDs and their codenames. These new device IDs could (read: likely) belong to the upcoming HD 8000 series GPUs.

The codenames, 4x "Venus", 3x "Oland" and finally 9x "Mars", should flesh out the HD 8000 series nicely. The Venus will most likely be the top end card due to the LE, Pro, XT and XTX suffixes. Oland will probably end up being the 8800 series and Mars will most likely flesh out the lower end and mainstream market.

The cards will likely launch near the end of 2012 or very early 2013, if previous AMD launches are anything to go by. There have been zero rumors about performance, although with this new finding, I'm sure they will start flowing. In case you're curious, the device IDs are listed below:

Computex 2012 - Over the past few months since the launch of the GTX 680 we've seen companies add their own touch of flavor to the model. There continues to be a number of companies, though, we haven't seen anything from with one being ECS.

Over at their Computex booth, though, today we got a peek at the ECS GTX 680 Black edition card which carries with it a dual fan setup surrounded by a gold shroud that looks pretty good. We weren't in the best position to take snaps but we can see that the core has been bumped from 1006MHz to 1040MHz while the 2GB of GDDR5 has been left alone.

Hopefully we'll see a sample out of ECS sometimes soon and give you our impressions on the latest GTX 680 variant from the team over at ECS.

Computex 2012 - I'm sitting here in the famous house of our reviewer Shane Baxtor (who is one of the best guys you'll ever meet btw) and I look to my left, I look to my right, heck, I can walk into his kitchen and there's SAPPHIRE gear everywhere. More exciting is seeing some gear in person, at Nangang today we checked out SAPPHIRE's huge demos where multi-monitors and GPUs were being shown off.

I'll keep the details low on this, and just let this post make itself with pictures - check out the 5-screen portrait mode setup. This is something I want to crank at home. There's also a 6-screen portrait setup, and wait for it... a 12-screen setup. Yes, that's 12, as in 2 more than 10 and 11 more than 1. 12 screens in portait, I put my finger to my wrist to make sure blood was stil pumping through my veins and I had not died and gone to heaven. SAPPHIRE, I bow to you.

Another thing that caught our eye was SAPPHIRE's HD 7770 Ultimate, which is a passively-cooled GPU. Yes, no fans so this thing is completely, 100-percent silent. Apart from the screams of joy you'll do when you're using this thing.

Computex 2012 - Around about an hour ago HIS showed off its brand new AMD Radeon HD 7970 X2 video card to a select group of media including TweakTown.

This is as far as we know the world's first dual GPU Radeon 7970 video card. The sample we were shown is an engineering sample and it still a little while off going on sale, but it shouldn't be too far away. With AMD's Radeon HD 7990 not all that far away, HIS would want to speed things up and deliver their X2 to the market as soon as possible.

The video card features a new and improved IceQ X2 cooler to cool the two onboard GPUs. The cooler is massive, one of the biggest we've seen for a while and that's saying a lot with the latest batch of video cards hitting the market with big and impressive coolers. The cooler will take up three slots, but obviously offer a crazy amount of performance.

Computex 2012 - ASUS had a few amount of goodies to show off at their Republic of Gamers event, with the AMD-based MATRIX HD 7970 GPU. In usual ROG and MATRIX fashion, this card kicks some serious ass for those serious benchers and gamers. Sporting some very nice features, it can rule your game, as ASUS put it.

The MATRIX HD 7970 features VGA Hotwire, which lets you accurately read and control voltages all at the hardware level, backed up with TweakIt which offers real-time voltage adjustment and full-speed fan cooling, all at the press of a button. DIGI+ VRM with 20-phase Super Allow Power technology is featured on the MATRIX HD 7970 which delivers 'superior efficiency, reliability and performance'. Lastly, GPU Tweak utility can be used to tune those clock speeds, fan performance, GPU load line, PWN frequency and voltages, all from a swanky UI.

The center of the MATRIX HD 7970 is the GPU itself, AMD's GraphicsCore Next-based Radeon HD 7970, featuring 3GB of RAM on a 256-bit wide bus. Cooling is the usual MATRIX-featured DirectCU II which should keep the card nice and chilled under hardcore conditions. 3 or 4 of these in CFX would be quite the sight to behold. Nice work, ASUS.

Computex 2012 - Yesterday we managed to sneak into the Nangang hall at Computex and what follows is first of the many exclusives we managed to find during the Day 0 setup of Computex.

We walked around the hall as everyone was busy setting up for the show and our first stop we walked into the MSI booth where on display was their upcoming NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 680 Lightning video card. It features some wicked MSI workmanship including an unlocked BIOS to disable everything, that is all the protections that hinder overclocking and allow you to go for your life. Things such as disabling Over Current Protection, disabling Active Phase Switching and an increased power range limit is included.

Not only that but the GTX 680 Lightning features a digital PWM controller along with what MSI calls an enhanced power design which allows for "2X power output for maximum OC potential".

It would seem that PowerColor is the first GPU manufacturer to spill the beans on the upcoming 7970 X2. The new GPU will be based upon two 7970 Tahiti cores, which is the top chip made by AMD. This card is being designed to compete with the NVIDIA GTX 690, which is the current king of the video cards.

The new GPU will be cooled by PowerColor's new monster Vortex III. This new cooler was designed specifically for the new Devil 13 7970 X2 and is huge as you can see by the picture above. It features three fans blowing onto a massive heatsink and takes up 3 slots, as seen by the picture of the backplate.

The new GPU is adorned in red and black and looks beautiful. But it's not all about beauty as the card appears to have some monster stats to go along with the beauty. It will feature a total of 4096 stream processors across the two chips and have a total of 6GB of memory available. The cores will be clocked at 1GHz and require a ton of power. The card is outfitted with three 8-pin PCIe power connectors and has a TDP of 525 watts. The card should make an appearance at Computex early next month. More should be known then.

We talked about NVIDIA prepping two more GPUs, but at the time we thought they'd be GK104-based. New reports have surfaced, where it might seem like the GEFORCE GTX 660 would be a GK106-based part.

The GTX660 based on the GK106 architecture would sport 768 CUDA cores, 4 SMXs, 64 texture units, 2GB of memory with an interface of 256-bit. Pricing isn't too bad, where we should expect the GTX 660 to hit $349 or so. But, in this market, with this much competition, is that too muhc to pay?

Would you grab one of these GPUs at $349? Or would you be looking at something from Team Red if you were getting into the $350-ish territory? Thoughts?

ASUS and ZOTAC have already been here, whizzing by with triple-slot, triple-fan GPU cooled cards. PowerColor are the next ones out of the gate, showing off a triple-slot, triple-fan GPU cooling solution in the form of Vortex III.

Vortex III will be slapped onto the company's upcoming Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. The teaser picture gives us an idea of what to expect, where we can see the black and red color scheme, black-colored PCB, it takes up three slots, sports three fans, and a large aluminum fin heatsink below them.

PowerColor will most likely show off Vortex III-powered GPUs at Computex in just over a weeks time, we will be on-hand with our new competition winner, Roshan.

It appears that TSMC and NVIDIA disagree whether or not NVIDIA's new Kepler architecture has a fatal flaw or not. On one had, we are hearing reports from TSMC that the new Kepler video card "chips may be suffering from serious performance degradation over long periods of heavy load" and could be the cause of a future recall by NVIDIA.

On the other hand, NVIDIA is saying all is fine. Bryan Del Rizzo, spokesman for NVIDIA stated, "There is no truth to this." NVIDIA denies that there will be any sort of recall over this report from TSMC. NVIDIA has, however, not provided any further details other than the previous statement denying that there is an issue.

EVGA has already had to recall all of their GTX 670 SC cards due to a hardware issue, so the idea of a recall could be correct. Is this the hardware fault that has caused the recall? Additionally, this could be the reason that the 670/680/690 are not in stock anywhere, even after TSMC promised NVIDIA a majority of its manufacturing resources.

VideoCardz.com is reporting that NVIDIA is set to launch their flagship mobile GPU based on the Kepler architecture during Computex in Taipei next month. The NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 680M is not a full GK104 Kepler GPU, nor does it even sport half of the CUDA cores of its desktop version.

The GEFORCE GTX 680M features just 744 CUDA cores, with some listings showing the GPU to have 768 cores, so this should be confirmed during Computex itself. Are you wearing socks? You mighr want to take them off in advance so they don't get blown off: the GPU has much higher GDDR5 memory capacity of.. 4096MB! 4GB of RAM on a notebook-based GPU!

It shares the desktop model's memory interface of 256-bit, and rumors swirling around put its power consumption at 100W. The chip is a second revision of N13E-GTX 680M chip - A2 silicon. The card will support SLI (!) and of course, DirectX 11.1. Performance numbers, that's what we all want, right? We're looking at it being 37-percent than the GEFORCE GTX 670M, with the first leaked benchmark coming from a Chinese website. The GPU hits 4,905 points in 3DMark 11's Performance Preset.

Today NVIDIA has announced a new line of graphics cards for professional applications. The new Tesla GPUs are called the K10 and K20 and are designed to perform exceptionally for high performance computing (HPC) scientific and technical applications that use GPU-accelerated computing. These Tesla's were designed to be high performance and extremely power efficient.

Kepler is three times as efficient as the Fermi architecture which had established itself as a new standard for computing when released 2 years ago. The Tesla K10 features two GK104 chips which produce 4.58 teraflops of performance and 320GB/s of memory bandwidth. The K10 is optimized for oil and gas exploration and the defense industry.

The Tesla K20 is where the GK110 makes its first appearance. The K20 is the new flagship product for the Tesla line of GPUs and provides three times the compute performance of any Fermi-based Tesla product and supports the Hyper-Q and dynamic parallelism capabilities. The K20 is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2012.

NVIDIA right now own the performance crown for their GEFORCE GTX 680, and GTX 690 GPUs, but AMD aren't just going to lie down and take it. The latest rumor spinning onto the Internet is that we should expect AMD to ramp up the Radeon HD 7970 reference core clock from 925MHz to 1GHz so that they can reclaim the single-GPU performance spot.

We already have cards clocking in at over 1GHz on the core from various partners, but a reference design from AMD would make this much easier. The rumored cards would launch as "GHz Edition" cards, which we already see in the 7800-series range. Why are AMD doing this now, and not at launch?

AtomicMPC had AMD explain that "yields are now better, their average voltage required to hit 925MHz is much lower than it was on early ES revisions, and most chips are happily hitting 1250MHz now". Is this enough for AMD to win back the performance crown? Or would NVIDIA just do the same thing and crank up their clock speeds once AMD do it? The competition is about to heat up, peeps.

The GEFORCE GTX 670 action over the weekend has been entertaining to say the least. I was busy for most of the weekend and only had my smartphone to check the going ons of the Internet, our site, our Facebook page, and to keep up with news.

If you didn't already know, Shane has posted up a glorious preview of the GTX 670's performance, Cameron smashed out an awesomely written piece on why we didn't receive the GTX 690 for review, and now we have news that GALAXY has a single-slot GTX 670 that will launch shortly.

Now we're staring down the barrel of a single-slot GTX 670 which sports the NVIDIA reference design PCB. The VRM area looks to be located near the front of the card, and the PCB appears to be cutting off at two-thirds the length of the card. Since the GTX 670's PCB is shorter, the fan being longer has to mean something, right?

Some ships are more leaky than others, just like some companies are more leaky than others. NVIDIA, at least with the Kepler launch, has been one of the more leaky companies of late. Pictures and benchmarks of the GTX 680 were surfacing weeks before the product launched and it seems like the same is holding true for the GTX 670.

That picture above is claimed to be the upcoming GTX 670. Accurate specifications such as CUDA core count, frequency, etc are still unknown. Based upon the picture, the GTX 670 will still require two 6-pin PCIe power connectors, which seems a bit excessive. It also features two SLI connectors. The board itself is small, but still appears to use a dual-slot cooler.

The new card produces some respectable numbers in both 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark 11. The leaked benchmarks show the GTX 670, GTX 670 OC, GTX 570 OC, and HD 7950. Vantage performance sees the 670 earn 29471 whereas the 7950 earns only a paltry 24035. Moving to 3DMark 11, the 670 earns 7353 and the 7950 gets only 6418.

*** Our GEFORCE GTX 670 review has been posted! ***

AnandTech described the beasty and impressive new NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 690 dual-GPU video card rather well with just three adjectives in its review yesterday - Expensive, Rare and Fast. They along with a bunch of other websites like ours got a review sample directly from NVIDIA. We didn't, but that was no surprise to us at all.

We have attempted for years to work with NVIDIA, but it hasn't worked. Some years ago we started breaking NVIDIA GEFORCE launch dates and posting our reviews early on purpose because NVIDIA would not support us properly. We didn't expect any more or less than the treatment that other media get. They would never send us review samples of new video cards. Our response was simple - you don't play nice with us, we won't play nice with you. We posted many GPU reviews well ahead of the launch time. Some will say you broke the NDA, but let's make it very clear - you have to have an NDA to begin with to break it. We haven't signed an NVIDIA NDA for a very long time. They'd have to firstly communicate with us for that to even happen.

Overclocking guru K|ngp|n has managed another incredible feat. It wasn't too long ago that he managed to take an NVIDIA GTX 680 up to 1957MHz with the help of some extreme cooling. This time he has managed to push an EVGA GTX 680 up to 1442MHz on basic air cooling alone. That is quite the feat and proves just how great the Kepler architecture is.

K|ngp|n used an EVGA GTX 680 SC, which features a default frequency of 1058MHz (1124MHz at Boost). He pushed 1.212V through the core of the GPU to achieve this feat. That voltage is at the very top of the voltage limit set by NVIDIA. The memory was also overclocked to 1812MHz which is also a big improvement.

Of course when you are running a card like that, especially at those clocks, you need a strong system to run with it so that it doesn't bottleneck. In this case, K|ngp|n used i7-3960X CPU (overclocked to 4.98GHz)and memory clocked at 1245.7MHz (2490MHz effective). This achieved a 3DMark 11 scoring of P12745.

NVIDIA are on a roll, nothing can stop them right now it seems and now we have the first pictures of MSI's GEFORCE GTX 670. The GTX 670 will be NVIDIA's third SKU based on the GK104 GPU, and is set to compete directly with Team Red's Radeon HD 7950 GPU.

The card looks to be pure reference design, and only sports two 6-pin PCI-e connectors. I know you want to get into the specifications of the card itself, so lets do that, shall we? The GTX 670 sports 1344 CUDA cores, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface with 2GB of RAM and clock speeds on the Core of 900MHz, 1250MHz or 5GHz effective on the memory.

Non-reference cards that come through in the next few months should sport much shorter PCBs thanks to slim VRM requirements, and just 8 memory chips. DIsplay outputs include two dual-link DVIs, one DisplayPort and one HDMI. The box does state "OC Edition", which means it should come out of the box with overclocked speeds. Also, I'm interested to see what this new technology "DispalyPort" can do, you'll know what I mean when you see it.

Word on the street is that NVIDIA is extremely happy with the 28nm yields of the Kepler architecture and so they decided to launch two high-end cards before stripping down the chip and releasing more value-priced cards. Even with the good yield of the 28nm architecture, the GTX 680 is out-of-stock almost everywhere.

Apparently, even with the good yield, it appears that there is quite the selection of chips that aren't performing up to snuff. NVIDIA is, according to sources, preparing to launch two new, cut-down versions of the GK-104. The GTX 670 (670Ti) will be powered by the GK104-335-A2 whereas the GTX 660 (660Ti) could be powered by a different revision.

The 670 is said to feature 1344 CUDA cores with a 256-bit memory bus and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Clocks for the chip should be somewhere around 915-950MHz for the core and 1.25GHz for the memory. The 660 should feature a fully disabled GPC (Graphics Processing Cluster) disabled. This means it will feature 1152 CUDA codes with a cut-down 192-bit memory bus. This memory bus would force 768MB or 1.5GB of memory.

We've all been salivating at the mouth for it, well, maybe not you, but I sure have. What are we salivating for? NVIDIA's answer to the question "who is your Daddy?" Well, their answer? The GEFORCE GTX 690.

Kepler has had an interesting launch, where NVIDIA just dumped the GTX 680 onto the market and pretty much said "have at it, everyone" and it was a great contender to the already fast Radeon HD 7970. But how good does the dual-Kepler GTX 690 need to be? Usually we get two decent cards with built-in SLI, but NVIDIA have opted for dual GTX 680s for the GTX 690.

This time round, we get two fully enabled GK104 cores bursting at the proverbial seams. NVIDIA are also setting some high targets on performance per watt, where NVIDIA are able to leverage the GK104's cores onto a single GPU without having to worry about it requiring super-cooling, or sucking down serious power. The GEFORCE GTX 690 also has something else high-end up its sleeve, it's price. It will launch at $999, but did you really expect this beast to be cheap? Didn't think so.