Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 313

NVIDIA's mid-range of GeForce GPUs have always been the most popular, recently we've seen the GTX 460 and 560 cards soar through gamers' wish lists, as well as the Ti variants. But, with the Kepler-based GPUs, we haven't seen a mid-range card released.

According to Sweclockers, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti will arrive in mid-August carrying an MSRP of $299. This will make it a direct threat to AMD's Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition, which just received a new price last week. The GTX 660 Ti would be based on the same core as the GTX 670, the GK104 core architecture, with 7 SMX units enabled giving us a total of 1344 CUDA cores.

Memory specifications, and clock speeds are expected to be changed also. The GTX 670 sports two different choices in memory, either 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus. The GTX 660 Ti will reportedly put on offer, 1.5GB or 3GB of GDDR5, on a 192-bit memory bus.

If video cards these days weren't built crazily enough, Gigabyte's newest kid on the block sure is. Gigabyte's upcoming Super Overclock version of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 is looking like it'll stand out from the crowd, sporting five 40mm fans mounted on top of a triple-slot radiator.

Gigabyte's GV-R797SO-3GD is surely going to be one of the hottest cards (and not in the temperature sense) when it hits, sporting a Tahiti XT-based GPU running a 384-bit memory bus backed up by 2048 stream processors. The overclocked model comes with a core clock of 1080MHz, up from the stock clock of 925MHz, and 3GB of GDDR5 memory clocking in at 5500MHz. Output-wise we find ourselves being offered two mini DisplayPorts, one gold-plated HDMI port, a single dual-link DVI port, meaning the card is capable of running four displays simultaneously.

Gigabyte's SOC card uses the five fans mounted at the top of the GPU to "pul" the heated air off the radiator, which the company says reduces "hotspots" on the bottom of the card due to minimal airflow created with traditional cooler designs. What this means is that the HD 7970 SOC is totally silent below 30C, with Gigabyte's Anti-Turbulence Pull Airflow System hitting 53dB at 57C, almost 9dB quieter than a standard HD 7970 running at 64C.

It looks like Team Red have just taken a pair of scissors to the pricing of some of their high-end Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs. Three of the cards have just received a price cut, with the new pricing to go into effect on Monday morning with online retailers. Here are some details:

But, it seems that a few online retailers are already doing these AMD GPUs cheap. Newegg only charges $289.99 for their cheapest HD 7870, and just $339.99 for the cheapest HD 7950. So one would think that this "new" pricing from AMD, is not that "new", and that maybe something else might happen.

Maybe a larger variety of cards, from more graphics card makers will receive cuts thanks to AMD's cutting of the pricing from the top? Whichever way you look at it, price cuts are win-win for customers.

AMD's dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 has been quite elusive until now, but "New Zealand" is now rumored to be hitting sometime late this month. It will sport two Tahiti XT GPUs and 6GB of GDDR5 memory, with special editions of the 7990 reaching an amazing 12GB of RAM on-board.

VR-Zone cites some of their sources saying that the boards are being sampled right now, with it all ramping up to a product launch before the end of the month. Pricing is one of the details that has been left out for now, and AMD are known to change pricing at the last minute.

Do you think we need a Radeon HD 7990? So there can be more broken 3DMark records? The only time these bad boys would really stretch their legs is for multi-monitor gaming, or when games really ramp up their graphics engines in the near-future, hopefully. I would love to see what one of the 12GB cards could do, CrossFired up with another HD 7990 12GB card, on 6 screens, oh the pants-wetting would be glorious.

Hazzan, an Indonesian overclocker has broken the world record for overclocking graphics cards, using 3DMark 11. Hazzan used a 4-way GEFORCE GTX 680 setup, pushing a score of P33190, 39 points ahead of the previous record.

In order to get the record-breaking score, Hazzah had to go to some pretty serious lengths, as you can see from the pictures. He stood over his PC with an open bottle of liquid nitrogen (as you do), and kept pouring some in every few minutes or so, just to keep those pesky temps down. His entire rig consists of:

The platform included Core i7-3930K processor (oc'ed to 5784MHz), 8GB quad-channel GSkill DDR3 memory (oc'ed to 2480MHz), Antec High Current Pro 1200W power supply, ASUS Rampage IV Extreme mobo and ASUS GTX 680 DirectCU II graphics card. The CPU and graphics adopted liquid nitrogen cooling.

Creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, has slammed NVIDIA for their lack of drivers/support in a public presentation. During the talk, Torvalds called NVIDIA "the single worst company we have ever dealt with" and ended it in a positive note with "NVIDIA: F*** YOU!!", I'm sure you know what are behind those *'s.

Torvalds made the colorful comments during a speech at the Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland. Nearling the end of his hour-long speech, he was asked by one of the attendees about NVIDIA's hardware support and lack of open-source drive enablement/documentation, where he mentioned those colorful words. Torvalds did start off by stating that NVIDIA is an exception to Linux support, rather than the rule in terms of their lack of friendliness towards open-source drivers, and the Linux community.

Then things get better, Torvalds said he was happy to publicly point them out and their problems, where his statements toward NVIDIA continued. He said that NVIDIA is "one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers", continuing with "NVIDIA has been the single worst company we have ever dealt with". He ended his NVIDIA tirade with "NVIDIA: F*** YOU!" and flipped them off toward the camera.

In addition to showing off AMD's future roadmaps, Mark Papermaster showed off a cool triple-fan professional graphics card called the FirePro W9000. The card is detailed in the slide shown below and is meant to be a professional version of the 7970. Curiously enough, however, is the fact that the card he held up and the card in the slide appear very different.

Cyril Kowaliski of TechReport noticed the difference as well and put a call into AMD's Dave Erskine to get an answer. Erskine would only say that it was a "dual-GPU product that will be released later this year." Taking a good educated guess, I would say that the card is most likely a 7970x2 (7990?), or in other words, two 7970 chips on one PCB.

After all, AMD has to compete with NVIDIA's dual-Kepler beast, the GTX 690. AMD has been making dual-GPU consumer cards for something like 4 generations now (3870x2) and were rumored to be debuting one at Computex. That debut never occurred, but it seems unlikely that they wouldn't produce a dual-7970 card. The release time frame also indicates that it should be of the Tahiti flavor.

AMD has just announced the immediate availability of the FirePro W600. The FirePro W600 is the first professional-level graphics card to released by AMD that leverages the 28nm manufacturing process along with the Graphics Core Next GPU architecture. This card is designed to be used for large, dynamic screens that are easily updated with new content.

"Whether we are checking flight times at the airport or watching the latest ads on massive screens in city squares, digital signage has quickly become an important and ubiquitous part of our lives," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD Graphics. "To enable these displays, the digital signage industry demands technology that can be regularly refreshed with new, feature-rich content. With the launch of the AMD FirePro™ W600 professional graphics card, AMD is helping advance the digital display wall industry by providing suppliers and developers with impressive display density, performance and exceptional value."

There are many new screens being built that are leveraging the latest in HD LED, LCD and plasma technologies. These screens, in turn, are being installed together to create giant video walls. The AMD W600 was designed to power these huge, multi-monitor displays which are often used for advertising and video conferencing.

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.