Graphics Cards - Page 260

In warm-up phase for Computex MSI gave folks in Holland a bit of a tease on what they plan to hit the VGA market with when NVIDIA breaks the chains on its GTX 465 at the beginning of next month.

MSI's well regarded Twin Frozr II cooler will be implemented in a non-reference version of this card, and they have plans to include it on GTX 470 and 480 cards as well.

With ATI's mighty HD 5970 still standing up proudly on the graphics card performance podium after more than six months, it's been a long time coming for NVIDIA to answer and while many were hoping the top dog single GPU GTX 480 would bring the goods, it falls short in many cases which isn't surprising given it's only a single GPU card.

The folks over at bit-tech have been digging hard to find out what sort of things we can expect to see at this year's Computex from the big names in the biz and has got hold of some exclusive details and pics on what MSI has planned for the event.

There are very few times in life where getting something that's supposedly worse that what you ordered is a good thing. Receiving a video card that has not even been released yet could be one of those times. Imagine the surprise of the guy who was possibly shipped a Galaxy GTX 465, which is not slated for release until June 1st, instead of the GTX 470 he ordered.

Remember that modified HD 5970 from Power Color we first heard about back in April which gave not six, not eight, not even 10, but 12 mini-Display ports for 'Eyefinity12' lovin' ? - A bunch of new images released from PowerColor themselves today let us know it's definitely a reality and is coming to market very soon; most likely being prepared for launch during Computex early next month.

The third and cheapest member of the GTX 400 series of top-end graphics cards from NVIDIA is launching when Computex gets underway; that being the GTX 465.

The first images of a final retail version of the card have leaked out from ASUS, including a box shot and also confirmation of specs. NVIDIA were quick to have the information and images pulled by the source, but thankfully other sites got hold of the good stuff before this occured.

A chinese website has leaked details of a significantly revised version of AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics card coming out very soon. Whilst existing HD 5670's are based on the 40nm redwood core, the new ones will use the larger Juniper core that is used on the faster HD 5750 and HD 5770 cards. It's anyones guess at this stage as to why AMD felt the need to do this to an existing model in its HD 5000 series lineup rather than making it a separate SKU. Too many defective Juniper cores, perhaps?

After finding out yesterday when NVIDIA plans to officially release its third GTX 400 series graphics card in the GTX 465 (when Computex kicks off), a sample has already made its way into the hands of some Chinese folks over at eNet.

As such, they had shared out some interesting info about the card with screenshots of the NV driver control panel that reveal some of the key specs as well as taking it for a spin in several benchmarks to give an idea of expected performance.

Our VGA gun Shane has learned that the upcoming GTX 465 that gets you a top end NVIDIA DX11 capable graphics card for less dollars will be officially launched on June 1, the day Computex makes its 2010 splash.

GALAXY is one of several companies looking to bring out modified versions of the GTX 400 series cards from NVIDIA and below you can see the worlds first 100% modified GTX 470 which GALAXY has been working on.

Multi-monitor mad users who are addicted to connecting as many monitors as they can to a single PC would have been foaming at the mouth when AMD announced its Eyefinity6 technology (giving the ability to connect six monitors to a single video card).

However, while this in itself seems like it would only be fully harnessed by a niche crowd looking to go all out with gaming simulation setups or advanced (overkill?) levels of productivity, Power Color seems to think there are people out there who still feel it's not enough.

Take a look at this picture below :-

Following AMD's recent decision to provide more regular, consistent Catalyst Mobility driver support for mobile GPUs, NVIDIA has now focused attention on giving better support for its mobile GPUs.

In the past notebook users have had to depend on notebook OEMs to make available mobile graphics driver updates for NVIDIA GPUs residing in select models, of which the timeframes between each of these updates was most always significantly longer than the rate at which GPU makers can make driver updates available to the public.

Not so long ago an ingenius fellow going by the name of GenL over at the NGOHQ forums came up with a working Hybrid PhysX mod for NVIDIA's GeForce drivers that gives the ability to enable hardware level PhysX support for NVIDIA GPUs even if one's primary display device is not NVIDIA made.

MSI has made the first step in giving GTX 400 series owners more flexibility in obtaining higher than stock clock rates with its latest Afterburner software (1.6.1 Beta 4). The installation of this software together with a GTX 480 gives the ability to start tinkering with the voltages.

Shane has confirmed that the software is not restricted to MSI-only branded cards either; you can see in his latest article here that he used a GIGABYTE branded GTX 480 to test with and it worked a treat.

The folks at Nordic Hardware share a report from reknowned overclockers Kinc and Elmor this week in which they had hold of 4k worth of ASUS' suped up ARES video cards that have been hyped up for a while now and for good reason. But we're still yet to be assured of any form of mass production worldwide (possibly never to be).

The gaming and computer tech circles were aflutter when NVIDIA went official with its GTX 480 and 470 video cards based on the new Fermi architecture. The video cards promise some big performance for gamers.

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When the cards started hitting market and specs were unveiled, some were aghast at the amount of power the GTX 480 consumed and how much heat the thing puts out. This lead to some worrying that the GPU might have a shorter life because of all the heat it creates.

NVIDIA has posted on its official blog that gamers and enthusiasts need not worry about the GPU. Big green says that the GTX 480 GPU was designed to operate at high temperatures and the power consumption was a concession to the performance wanted from the GPU.

Today our moles were hard at work. They have uncovered a couple of rumors for you to gobble up with your chocolate bunnies and peeps. The first concerns our old friends at NVIDIA. The rumor here is that they have decided to take Fermi GPU's that do not pass QA at any acceptable speeds and resell them to Matel for their new model of Easy Bake Oven.

Jen Sun Haung, NVIDIA's CEO was quoted as saying they felt that by using a Fermi over the traditional light bulb new owners would be getting a 50% decrese in cooking times. The new program will be dubbed TWIMTBB (The Way it's Meant to be Baked). Easy Bake Ovens with Fermi inside will hit the stores sometime in June. There was no word on pricing, but some sources are saying they expect the new Fermi based "nuclear" Easy Bakes to be over $200. An ASUS engineer was also quoted as saying "we can overclock it, too" while a source at GIGABYTE referred to needing more copper in the design.

Any chance it gets, NVIDIA will take a stab at Intel and push the importance of the graphics processing unit over the traditional CPU for a whole range of computing tasks with modern computing. Especially when it comes to Intel's low-cost Atom processor platform, NVIDIA will jump through hoops on fire to bring the big Intel down whenever, wherever and however they can.

That is business though, don't mistake it and in this particular case, we like it - a lot. Microsoft just released its Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview and if you didn't know, IE9 will support GPU-accelerated HTML5, JavaScript and Direct2D technologies. Chris Pederson from NVIDIA in a video recently uploaded to YouTube, discusses the performance of a next-generation ION netbook compared to a standard netbook without ION graphics.

In a side by side presentation, Pederson shows off a few examples of how in the future consumers will want to have a system with adequate graphics to improve the changing Internet experience. Demonstrations are displayed such as map rendering and some test games from Microsoft and puts a very good light on ION equipped netbooks.

NVIDIA's new Fermi (GTX 470 and GTX 480) graphics cards have caused a fair bit of a stir in the video card market leading up to and post release last week; some in awe of their performance whilst others in disgust for a number of reasons.

But who would have thought one of NV's own partners, XFX would be so negative about the launch of these new cards that they'd go so far as to tell NVIDIA 'where to go', abandoning this new line-up of high-end cards altogether and refusing to give support; because that's apparently what's just happened!

With the lift on NVIDIA's GTX 470 and 480 graphics card taking place a couple days ago, AIBs were quick to show off their own variants of the cards, although as expected, 99% of them were all identical beneath the unique sticker/color choices on some of the cards to separate them apart.

However, eVGA is one such mob who has gone all out right off the bat and introduced no less than six models; three based on the GTX 470 and three on the 480 :-

• EVGA GeForce GTX 480 (015-P3-1480-TR): 700/1401/924 MHz, reference air-cooled, US $499.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 480 SC (015-P3-1482-AR): 725/1450/950 MHz, reference air-cooled, US $529.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 480 FTW Hydro Copper (015-P3-1489-AR): 750/1500/950 MHz, Hydro Copper water-block pre-fitted, US $649.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 470 (012-P3-1470-TR): 607/1215/837 MHz, reference air-cooled, US $349.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 470 SC (012-P3-1472-AR): 625/1250/850 MHz, reference air-cooled, US $369.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 470 FTW Hydro Copper (012-P3-1479-AR): 650/1300/950 MHz, Hydro Copper water-block pre-fitted, US $499.99