Graphics Cards - Page 266

Expreview has spotted a picture and some brief info on AMD's mid-range HD 4650 Series graphics cards over at the Chiphell forums.

Many of us are in strong anticipation of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 4870 X2 (RV770) dual-GPU graphics card, especially now that we've seen what the HD 4850 and 4870 is capable of.

It's been mentioned that the 4870 X2 is expected to arrive towards the end of Q3 this year. Apart from that, we've heard or seen very little about the RV770 monster thus far.

However, the folks at Chiphell have a nice treat for us early on; some nicely presented nude shots of the card, revealing some of its inner talents.

We just found out about this now and we're not sure exactly what it does to be entirely honest with you.

If you've got your heart set on picking up one of NVIDIA's new GTX 260 or 280 graphics cards and you're mighty serious about your cooling, you may like to take note of what eVGA has designed specifically for these cards in the way of its new Hydro Copper 16 waterblock.

Charlie Demerjian over at the INQ also knows the pain of what it feels like for NVIDIA not to include you on a new product launch. It actually works out alright though as you get to post your scores early and have hundreds of thousands of readers come to your website.

Of course we know the same feeling too but during Computex we were suckered into signing an NVIDIA NDA, which means we have to play nice this time around or NVIDIA would quickly let its dogs out on us - even though we already have five different models in our hands - for the past week or so.

Charlie didn't sign an NDA and has been busy over the past while testing the GeForce GTX 280 against a factory overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX.

Go grab your early results over here. We love you Charlie and understand your decision to post early fully.

Our GT200 content will be online when the NDA expires in about two hours from now. Prepare yourself for it - we have three articles ready to go live!

While we got a first look at ZOTAC's GeForce 9800 GTX ZONE Edition at Computex in Taipei last week, it has now been officially released.

Donanimhaber is renowned for getting hold of official documents and picture before launch and posting it early. This time they managed to get hold of the official benchmark data compiled by AMD for its range of upcoming RV770 based graphics cards.

According to reports which have been posted online recently, Nvidia is set to launch its upcoming high-end GeForce GTX 280 (codenamed GT200) next month on June 18th just ahead of the launch of the ATI RV770 series of graphics cards from AMD.

PCPOP over in China managed to get a hold of a reference designed GTX 280 graphics card and strip it completely naked for public viewing.

From the pictures, it looks as if it will be roughly the same size as the current high-end GeForce 9800 GTX and you will need to hook up one 6-pin and one 8-pin power adapter to make it run at full speed.

Theo Valich over at TG Daily managed to get the scoop on AMD's launch plan details for its upcoming HD 4800 series of graphics cards. You can read it in its entirety over here.

In short, AMD plans to release the single slot cooled HD 4850 with 512MB of GDDR3 sometime in June followed by the dual slot cooled GDDR5 bearing HD 4870 and HD 4870 X2 in mid-July.

Palit were one of the first companies to let us know about its custom designed and factory overclocked GeForce 9600 GSO graphics card.

Before you get too excited though, Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GSO is not new and is nothing more than a relabeled GeForce 8800 GS. In default configurations, it carries the EXACT same clock speeds and specifications.

AMD released a Vista 64-bit hotfix for the new 3DMark Vantage benchmark a few days ago and has recently released it to the general public.

AMD told us that certain Radeon graphics card configurations have some issues under the new 3D benchmark using Catalyst 8.4 drives. 3DMark Vantage Hotfix promises to fix the bugs and also improve performance. Some media are claiming an 800 - 1000 point increase in 3DMark score but we haven't been able to confirm that with our own testing yet.

Keep in mind while the drivers supposedly offer big improvements, AMD say that corruption may still be seen in GPU Game Test 1 when running 3DMark Vantage on "High Settings" on certain ATI Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire configurations under Windows Vista 32-bit edition. Everything should be back to normal by the Catalyst 8.5 as the Futuremark lineup of benchmarks aren't just a two-bit collection of 3D tests.

Go grab your 32-bit or 64-bit Vista drivers over here. There is no Windows XP driver of course since Vantage is Vista only.

As well as gaining DDR3 support and many other refinements, Intel's upcoming Centrino 2 (known as Montevina) will also see some very serious GPU solutions released for it as both AMD and NVIDIA continue to fight it out for supremacy.

NVIDIA has had control of the high-end mobile graphics segment for quite a while, but some details and pictures of a (what looks to be) brutal piece of work from the AMD/ATI crew have shown up on the web and it may just get them right back into the swing of things in this sector.

Since the release of NVIDIA's 9800GX2 a couple weeks back, we've not seen anything too exciting in the way of vendors sprucing up the card over the reference design. I guess many felt it wasn't necessary to as the card boasts some pretty mean characteristics as it stands.

EVGA however have just come forth with a super duper offering they call the 9800GX2 SSC; this card's 1024MB of memory is set to run at 2100MHz with the GPU and 256 Stream Processors operating at 675MHz and 1674MHz respectively.

Word is circulating that just four short months after the launch of the 9800 GTX (set for launch tomorrow), Nvidia will welcome its new high-end graphics cards to the world.

ABIT was once a monstrous motherboard maker with an instrumental marketing machine and engineering team behind it who could do no wrong - except for of course, accounting.

Rumor has it that AMD is busily preparing a new graphics card in its Radeon HD 3800 series line-up.

Images have recently surfaced that pretty well conclusively confirm the specifications of Nvidia's upcoming GeForce 9800GTX graphics card.

The card which was exposed is called EN9800GTX and it features all the usual goodies - PCI Express 2.0, DirectX 10.0 (still not DX10.1) and OpenGL 2.0 support, 512MB of GDDR3 memory and triple-SLI. This specific card is based on the reference model from Nvidia which mean it carries default clock speeds. In Typical ASUS fashion, they will probably launch a factory overclocked "TOP" model sometime after the launch (April 1st).

At least on paper, it looks like nothing more than an overclocked G92 8800GT 512MB. The price tag is expected to be around $350 USD which is a reasonable price but if you were expecting a new card with ultra high performance improvements, it doesn't seem like that will be the case at this stage and from what we have seen and heard so far.

As you would expect, we have 9800GTX samples already on the way and testing will begin very soon!

Corsair were first up today to issue a press release announcing their newest DDR3 memory kit designed exclusively to work with Nvidia's recently released nForce 790i SLI Ultra based motherboards.

Corsair's DOMINATOR DDR3 TW3X2G2000 modules come in a 2GB kit and will work at 2000MHz DDR on 790i based motherboards and they also included EPP2 pre-loaded for optimal performance.

Shane sent me a link earlier showing that an EVGA GeForce 9800 GX2 has already popped up on eBay.

The seller has ended the auction now but had three units available for $629.99 USD plus $39.99 USD shipping charges.

"The seller ended this listing early because the item is no longer available for sale."

The lads at PCOnline have chosen to jump the gun a little on NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card, set to be launched in less than a week from now. They've posted up a whole bunch of benchmark runs with the dual-G92 monster in conjunction with an Intel QX6850 CPU at 3.0 GHz on ASUS' Striker II Formula motherboard and an early supported (ForceWare 173.67) beta driver.