Video Cards & GPUs - Page 470

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.