Video Cards & GPUs - Page 441

Computex Taipei 2013 - Some of you may know how much of a multi-monitor and high-resolution fanboy I am, well, I had to stop at AMD's booth at Computex to check out their 5-screen Eyefinity rig, which just looked amazing.

The five monitors were in portrait mode, another favorite of mine, and had Tomb Raider ready to play. I didn't play it myself, but I did take some video of another show-goer playing it and it looked incredible. The rig running it was powered by an AMD FX 8350 processor, 8GB of AMD Radeon DDR3 RAM, a Radeon HD 7990 dual-GPU graphics card, and the five monitors, pumping out a resolution of 5400x1920. Now that is my kind of setup!

And all of those monitors require some conversion, from miniDisplayPort that is provided on the back of the HD 7990 to DisplayPort.

Computex Taipei 2013 - You know what? This is the kind of technology that I live for; Sapphire are back in the spotlight once again with an insane new dual-GPU card, the Sapphire Atomic HD7990 6GB.

As you can see from the product name, we have 6GB of RAM which will be announced later (probably some insanely fast gear) and two Tahiti XT2 GPU's. Sapphire's Atomic range always goes crazy, so we have six miniDisplayPort outputs for some crazy multi-monitor goodness, something that gets the blood flowing through my body. Now, none of this is possible without some power, and just how much does the Atomic HD7990 6GB require?

Three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, yes, three! Sapphire have gone as far as offering water cooling with the Atomic HD7990 6GB, and it's quite the setup. We have a full copper water block, front 5.25-inch reservoir with one pump pre-installed with the option of upgrading to a dual pump, a 240mm radiator, and 2 x 120mm fans to keep it all going. Some full specs are below:

This morning, Palit released its version of the GeForce GTX 770 and unlike other GPU manufacturers, Palit chose to toss away the reference design cooler and add their own JetStream cooler into the mix. The result is said to be a 10 percent gain in overclockability as well as some snazzy good looks!

The Palit GeForce GTX 770 JetStream 2GB ships with a 10 percent higher core clock, which Palit says equates to 10 percent higher gaming performance. Like other video cards in Palit's JetStream line, the GTX 770 comes equipped with the company's signature JetStream 80mm,90mm,80mm triple fan bank that cools the GPU by 15 Celsius lower, and is 9dB quieter than the reference design.

Palit attributes these performance gains to several upgraded features on the GTX770 JetStream 2GB. These include:

Things are looking good for NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 770 this morning as new specifications and pricing information has leaked. The GTX 770 appears to be identical to the GTX 680 in hardware but will feature higher clocks and faster memory frequency. The leak comes from retailers located in Tokyo's Akihabara shopping district in the form of photographs taken of the sales sheet on a monitor.

The chip is said to be clocked at 1046MHz and will feature a massive 7GHz memory clock. If these specifications are true, then the GTX 770 will be the highest clocked GPU ever made, albeit with a power draw of 230 watts. The card will feature the same cooling solution used on the GTX 780 and GTX TITAN. Combining the speed with good looks and topping things off with a pricing point of $400 makes the GTX 770 the best bang for your buck GPU on the market.

Details of the next-gen GeForce GPU from NVIDIA are here, as well as a release date: May 23. Fudzilla were privvy to some leaked slides, which points to the GTX 780 featuring 2304 CUDA cores and an 863MHz base GPU clock. The GeForce GTX 780 will feature NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0 that will ramp the GPU clock speed up to 900MHz.

We should expect the GTX 780 to come with 3GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6000MHz coupled with a 384-bit memory bus. Power wise, the GTX 780 is going to require both 6- and 8-pin PCI-Express power connections and has TDP of 250W. Connectivity options include two dual-link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.

The GeForce GTX 780 reference card will use the same cooler that is featured on the GTX Titan, and should keep noise levels down to around 40-45 dBA. This means the reference GTX 780 will be much quieter than the GTX 680. We should expect the GeForce GTX 780 to be around 25% to 50% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, except for Tomb Raider, where the AMD will excel against most GeForce GPU's.

NVIDIA is set to release their next-generation GPUs in the form of the 700-series next month, with some sources stating that you can flash your GeForce GTX 680 to a GeForce GTX 770 with a BIOS flash.

If this is true, this means that the GTX 770 is going to be a simple rebrand of the current GTX 680, but we should be used to this by now. There's a post on Reddit with someone saying that they've uploaded a BIOS (.bin) file and the required driver information (.inf) file which will have a GTX 680 owner get a GTX 770 card, all for nothing. The post states: "The upcoming GTX 770 is a GTX 680 in disguise. NVIDIA has gently revised the GK104 architecture, mostly with process improvements, but the 770 is basically the same beast! Which is good for us enthusiasts".

But, don't get your hopes up just yet, as a post on TechPowerUp has said that the BIOS supplied to the Reddit user isn't a GTX 770 BIOS, but a "modified GTX 680 BIOS" that has increased clock speeds and the .inf file has been edited to change the card's descriptor string to 'GTX 770'.

We've been hearing a lot about the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 and GTX 770. Just within the past day, we posted about a CPU-Z validation that listed the GTX 780 as the card being used. So we have a feeling the card exists. And what do you know, pictures have leaked out!

Take a look at what is purported to be the GTX 780 and GTX 770. These cards share similar styling to the recently released GTX Titan and the GTX 780 is said to be positioned just below the Titan. It relies on the same GK110 silicon as the Titan and will likely feature a similar PCB. The GTX 770, however, is based upon the GK104.

We still don't have full confidence that these are the cards, but there are some signs that point to a legitimate leak. For instance, differences near the PCIe interface suggest that the picture is not a fake. As with all rumors and leaks, take it with a grain of salt until official information is released.

CPU-Z validations is great for a few things, first and foremost for validating your extreme overclock, but sometimes there are some leaks through the cracks and we find out some juicy goss on the upcoming next-gen GPU.

As you can see above, there's a tease of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 780 GPU, and while that should be enough to satisfy those GPU urges you feel, there's something else that is intriguing. Under the 'GPU Type' is 'DirectX Version', which states '12.0', or DirectX 12. Currently even Windows 8 is still in DirectX 11, and we have no news of a next-gen DirectX right now.

This is where we tumble down the rabbit hole, let's fantasize that this is real - DirectX 12 is coming. Why are AMD saying DirectX 12 isn't coming, considering they're working with all three big consoles makers - Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony - with Radeon GPU's in their consoles. AMD are working on the next-gen Xbox, which could feature DirectX 12, and Microsoft and AMD don't want to talk about it.

AMD are back yet again with the monster of Radeon GPUs, the dual-GCN rocking Radeon HD 7990. The Radeon HD 7990 features a number-busting 8.6 billion (that's with a B) transistors, 4096 stream processors and a total of 8.2 TLOPS of compute power.

6GB of GDDR5 is baked onto the HD 7990, four miniDisplayPort connectors and a dual-link DVI connector back it up to provide five monitor support through AMD's EyeFinity technology. There's three fans on the front of the HD 7990 to keep those two GraphicsCore Next GPUs cool, which it does so without making too much noise at all - 37.8dBA compared to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 (NVIDIA's dual GPU) which cranks along at 47.5dBA (tests used with sound pressure at 50cm running Furmark).

AMD's ZeroCore power technology is at play, where it switches off the second GPU when not in use to save power (and heat). You can check out our own review on the Radeon HD 7990 right here.

Yesterday I reported on a leak that showed off two new additions to NVIDIA's Titan line of video cards; the Titan LE and Titan II. This morning we are learning a little more about the Titan LE, as well as two other new video cards for 2013.

According to Bright Side of News, it appears that the Titan LE name will be tossed out in favor of the GTX 780 5GB, which follows the traditional NVIDIA naming scheme. The 780 is the consumer version of the Tesla K20C and sports 2496 CUDA cores and 5GB of GDDR5 memory.

We have also came across info on two other NVIDIA boards, the GTX 770 and GTX 760 Ti. The 770 is based off a GK104-425 die, which makes it nothing more than a higher clocked GTX 680. It is expected to perform 20-25% better than the GTX 670 and be on par with a GTX 680.