ToC Gaming News Blog : All The Latest PC Gaming News

It's not official until Microsoft says it is, but the image above of the rumored Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse was just snagged off a German online store. Amazingly, the mouse arches its back for comfortable mousing before packing flat for easy transport.

 The mouse features touch-scrolling, a battery indicator, the ability to track on most any surface, and a 2.4GHz nano transceiver that no doubt plugs into your laptop's USB port. Yours soon for €69.99 ($69.95 rumored)... right, €0.99 more than Apple's Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad sells for in Germany. Ships in 5 to 10 business days according to notebooksbilliger so expect this to get official real quick.

We've known that proper Xbox Live gaming (powered by XNA) was coming to Windows Phone 7 devices, but we'd yet to see any of that thumb-spraining goodness in action besides a brief demo and a few developer videos. Well, Microsoft has finally come clean with details about its launch strategy for the platform, and from where we sit, it's definitely looking pretty promising. First off, the company has announced a full list of launch titles for WP7 handsets, including some familiar names and franchises like Castlevania, Halo: Waypoint, Star Wars, Crackdown, and Guitar Hero, alongside a handful of newer properties like the ultra-cute ilomilo, produced in-house by Microsoft Game Studios. In total, the company will launch with over 60 game titles, with new offerings appearing every week in the Xbox Live Marketplace, just like its big brother console version. We've got all the details, a full list of the launch titles, and our hands-on preview after the break -- so read on to get the scoop!





Besides just announcing some games today, Microsoft has also shown off the full feature set of Xbox Live integration in Windows Phone 7, and users of the service should be pleased to discover that there's not much missing from the version they know and love. Live on WP7 will allow for full avatar integration (we're talking fully rendered, interactive avatars) along with customization (clothes, accessories, and more). The company has even crafted an avatar-centric version of familiar phone utilities like flashlight apps and levels, adding some whimsy to what would normally be pretty staid affairs. Additionally, messaging, friend lists / status, achievements, and leaderboards (with friend comparisons) are all here as well, making for a pretty complete mobile Xbox Live experience. And also just like the console, every game will have a try-before-you buy demo to check out before spending your hard-earned cash.

Sony Ericsson to introduce Android 3.0 gaming platform and PSP Go-like smartphone

There's no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it's all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson -- a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device -- is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google's mobile platform. We now know (via a trusted source) that the company is actively and heavily developing a brand new gaming platform, ecosystem, and device (possibly alongside Google) which are already in the late stages of planning. And we've got the goods on it. 

Here's what we can tell you about the hardware: if you're a gaming fan, this is exactly the kind of phone you've been waiting for. The device is described as cross between the Samsung Captivate and the PSP Go-- in other words, it's a landscape slider with game controls in place of the typical QWERTY keyboard. The D-pad is here, but instead of the small joystick, the device will have what was described as a "long touch pad" for analog controls, along with standard PSP buttons and shoulder buttons. The phone has a large display, described as being between 3.7 and 4.1 inches with WVGA or better resolution, a 5 megapixel camera that we're told might not be final, and it'll likely have a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU on board. The phone is mostly black with some silver highlights, and the gamepad area is white / silver in color. Apparently it's currently branded as a Xperia device, but it looks like it will carry PlayStationbranding as well. Those who've seen the phone say it looks "pretty damn sexy." The mockup above probably doesn't do the actual hardware justice, but it should give you an idea of what you'll be dealing with.





On the software side, it looks like the device will be running Gingerbread (Android 3.0) with a phone-specific skin, and there will be a new area of the Android Market specifically for the games. That content will be initially accessible only by the halo device, but from the sounds of things, these titles might be made available to other Android phones if their specs and button layouts meet requirements. Games will be graphically in the range of PSX or PSP games, meaning true 3D gaming is headed to Android. Titles currently being shown off seem to be focused around some older PSX as well as new PSP offerings, withGod of War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and LittleBigPlanet possibly on tap, and future plans for titles which incorporate augmented reality features.

In terms of release, it's possible that the phone and ecosystem could be introduced as early as October of this year, but we have yet to confirm.

Right now we're working on getting even more detail about the phone and partnership, but we can tell you now that this is not a random rumor -- we have reason to believe that what we've heard and seen is real and coming to market. It makes perfect sense in a way -- Google gets a much-needed push into the gaming and entertainment space for Android, while Sony (via its partnership with Ericsson) finally delivers the PlayStation phone users have been wanting. We see it as a major win for both companies and the consumer... and we always need another distraction. Stay tuned to this space for updates as we get them, and in the meantime, start socking away the pennies.

Source: Engadget

 

Minor updates and new PhysX
Nvidia has released a new version of its WHQL certified Geforce driver, the Geforce 190.62 WHQL. The new driver supports the entire Nvidia GPU arsenal from Geforce 6, as well as Nvidia's ION and ION LE chips.
In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, the new driver brings couple of minor optimizations for Batman: Arkham Asylum and Darkest of Days games, support for Microsoft's new DirectX GPU Computing API: DirectCompute, complete with WHQL certification.
The new 190.62 WHQL driver also brings a new version of PhysX system software which is now updated to version 9.09.0814 WHQL.
You can download it here.

Fudzilla - Nvidia rolls out a new 190.62 WHQL driver

http://www.guru3d.com/category/rivatuner/
http://downloads.guru3d.com/Rivatune...load-2185.html

Software Description

Vista Sidebar Gadget that uses Rivatuner's low level hardware monitor for stats

This application is a Vista Sidebar Gadget that uses Rivatuner's low level hardware monitor for stats. I've finally released it on Microsoft's site. If your Rivatuner install is reporting back values that you would like to see in the sidebar, then install this gadget and have it easily accessible.

Values will vary depending on the model card you have and its capabilities.

Values capable of being displayed include, but are not limited to:

• GPU Usage
• GPU Temperature
• Core and Memory Clock Speed
• Fan Speed
• Frames per Second
• AND MORE

** Add CPU, RAM, HDD and additional data with RivaTuner plugins

Version 2.0

General options and features:

• Colors: background, border, title text, default monitor title/value/units text
• Title: customize the text and icon
• Filter to remove RivaTuner's monitors from display in the gadget
• Flyout window provides additional information from RivaTuner and WMI
• Ability to reset min/max values
• Celcius/Fahrenheit

You can also customize each monitor's display individually:

• Colors: use default or override title/value/units text
• Bar: specify min/max limits as well as color change limits
• Choose from 10 different display styles
• Choose from 20 different icons
• Change displayed monitor title text
• Add a separator to help group similar monitors
• Copy settings from 1 monitor to another with control over what is pasted

Read the help tab in the gadget config for explicit instructions and configuration information. We have a thread open on this tool (visited by programmer) right here.

Please choose a download location:

Download (External)

GPS systems could crash next year

Washington, DC - The world's GPS systems could start to fail next year, according to a report presented to Congress. This could cause catastrophic problems for aviation, 911 services and ordinary drivers, as well as the military.

GPS devices calculate their position by comparing time signals from at least four satellites. Because the Earth is spherical, a minimum of 24 satellites is required at all times. There are currently 31 operating, but many are way past their design lifetime.

The GAO predicts a one in five chance that the number will drop below 24 at times in 2011 and 2012, hampering accuracy. This could lead to blackouts and even misdirection of people all over the world.

The US Government Accountability Office (GOA) blames mismanagement and lack of investment. In recent years, says the report, the Air Force has encountered technical difficulties and problems with contractors. As a result, the program has overrun its cost estimate by about $870 million, and  the launch of its first new IIIA satellite has been delayed until November - almost three years late.

Presenting the report, Cristina T Chaplain, Director of Acquisition and Sourcing Management for the GAO, said that both the military and civilian users could suffer. "The military could see a decrease in the accuracy of precision-guided munitions that rely on GPS to strike their targets," she warned. "Intercontinental commercial flights use predicted satellite geometry over their planned navigation route, and may have to delay, cancel, or reroute flights. Enhanced 911 services, which rely on GPS to precisely locate callers, could lose accuracy particularly when operating in urban canyons or mountainous terrain."

Subjective reviews are always the toughest to write, so when I got my hands on the NVIDIA's GeForce 3D Vision kit for wireless stereoscopic 3D gaming just days before launch I didn't want to rush it. After I came back from the Consumer Electronics Show I started to game daily with the glasses to see what they were all about. It also gave me time to see where the industry was going in terms of 3D Technology. Hollywood has already begun to make major efforts towards bringing 3D movies to consumers and if you watched Super Bowl XLIII you more than likely saw the 3D commercials. It looks like 2009 will be the year for 3D and it should be no big shock that companies like Intel and NVIDIA have started to run with the idea. In 2008 the big marketing push from NVIDIA was CUDA and PhysX and now that nearly every enthusaist knows about those two technologies it is time to roll out something new.

What exactly I will be looking at today is called the NVIDIA 3D Vision Bundle. The NVIDIA 3D Vision Bundle consists of a Samsung Syncmaster 2233RZ 22" 3D Gaming LCD Monitor and NVIDIA 3D Vision Stereoscopic glasses. This $599 bundle will give you an out-of-the-box immersive 3D PC Gaming experience as long as your system has a GeForce 8800 or higher gaming graphics card. The Samsung Syncmaster 2233RZ, in conjunction with NVIDIA’s advanced software, automatically converts over 350 games to stereoscopic 3D without the need for special game patches. That means you don't need to buy any more expensive game titles to play in 3D, but as you can tell 3D gaming is not inexpensive due to the bundle cost. GeForce 3D Vision uses game profiles similar to SLI profiles and since NVIDA has close relationships with developers they can ensure nearly all games will work and are as immersive as possible at launch. This means that you will not have to wait for weeks after a new game launches to be able to play it in 3D! Price aside, stereoscopic 3D will add a whole new level of realism to your gaming.

The heart and soul of the this bundle would be the high-tech active shutter glasses, designed with top-of-the-line optics, deliver double the resolution per eye and ultra-wide viewing angles than passive glasses. In addition, the new 120Hz LCD monitors unlock crystal-clear, flicker-free stereoscopic 3D gaming that provides 60Hz per eye.

Let's take a peak inside the box and see what GeForce 3D Vision is all about!

The 3D Vision Glasses

Opening the 3D Vision retail box you quickly find out that no expense was spared as it is very nicely put together. Included inside are the glasses, IR transmitter, cables and software. If NVIDIA wanted you to feel like you invested in something great they did a good job here as it is one of the nicest packages that I have opened for a while.

NVIDIA included a very nice green lens cleaning cloth that is actually needed to keep the glasses clean while gaming and a nice black carrying case to keep the glasses safe from scratches when not in use. The lenses on the GeForce 3D Vision glasses do contain real glass, so be sure to handle them carefully and store them properly.

I was shocked to find that not one, but four cables were included to hook up the glasses to the PC and then the TV to the PC. The cables included are a DVI-to-HDMI cable to connect your PC to a DLP 3D-Ready TV, two USB cables (one for charging the glasses, the other for the IR transmitter) and a VESA 3-pin stereo cable that is used to connect a DLP TV to the IR emitter. The good news here is if you are just playing on the Samsung Syncmaster 2233RZ 22" 3D gaming LCD monitor you just need the two USB cables as you won't be connecting it to a DLP 3D-Ready TV.

The bundle also included very nicely put together quick-start guide and tips & tricks book that were both super easy to follow. NVIDIA also included a disc full of drivers and a demonstration disc that show cases just what the NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision experience is all about.

Since there are more than one nose type NVIDIA included three nose bridge pieces that you can pick from to use with the glasses. These nose bridges are attached to the 'pegs' seen in the photo above and can be changed out quickly if more than one person will be gaming on the same computer. The nose pieces also lift the glasses away from your face, which means that if you wear glasses that you can indeed wear them under the NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses. 

The IR Emitter (transmitter) is how the wireless glasses get the signal from the PC and is the key to making stereoscopic 3D work. This little emitter should be located with direct line-of-sight between the 3D Vision glasses at a minium of 1.5 feet in order to ensure that the glasses know when to 'shutter' in order to give you 3D images. The button with the NVIDIA logo on it is the power button. The button always glows NVIDIA green, but when the on/off button is pressed it glows bright green.

The back of the IR emitter had has two I/O connectors; one mini-USB connection for communications with your computer and the other is a VESA stereo cable port for use with a 3D-Ready DLP HDTVs. As previously mentioned both connections are only required if you are using a  3D-Ready DLP HDTV. Since we are using the Samsung 120 Hz LCD panel only the USB connector is needed.
The thumbwheel seen in the middle of the emitter above is used to adjust the  stereoscopic depth (depth of the 3D image) while gaming. By turning this wheel you can adjust how extreme the 3D image is as everyone likes a different setting.  Using the deepest setting gives me a light headache, so I personally had to tone it back to be able to enjoy hours of gaming.  After using the glasses for a month, I also found that I liked different depths on differnt games, so I got to know this thumbwheel very well.  The green LED located directly below the thumbweel is the power indicator light and is only green when the power is connected (the USB cable). I'm not sure why NVIDIA included power indicator lights on both sides of the emitter, but i'm sure they have some logic to this.

Taking a closer look at the NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses we can see just how far we have come when it comes to looking good. These 3D glasses are hands down one of the better looking models that I have ever seen and while you'll never see them on the runway during Fashion Week in New York they will not leaving you feeling like a super geek. If they still do then keep in mind that you are using these for gaming and you can always close the door to make sure your 1337 glasses don't make your friends laugh. The bulge next to the left lens is the IR receiver and is what needs to make direct line-of-sight with the IR emitter.

To turn the NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses on you need to press the power button located on the left frame rail. Once the glasses are turned on an indicator light will start to glow and it is of course another green light. The GeForce 3D Vision glasses hold approximately 40-hours of gaming per full charge and once the glasses have less than two hours of battery life left the light will start to flash red. When the light goes out you need to hook it up to the USB cable to charge the glasses.

Speaking of charging the glasses the picture above shows where the mini-USB cable needs to connect in order to charge the battery that is located inside the frame rail. It takes roughly four hours to charge the glasses for 40 hours of gameplay, so be sure to top them off between gaming sessions and you'll never need to do a full charge.

3D Vision Driver Installation and Setup

Installation of the NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision software and drivers is a breeze and the process is nearly identical as installing a graphics card driver. The driver disc that came with the GeForce 3D Vision kit included a 3D-enabled version of the Detonator GPU driver and a 3D Vision software installer. During my 30-day test drive of GeForce 3D Vision three drivers were released, so be sure to check with NVIDIA to download the latest drivers for the kit. The most recent driver at the time this was written was called GeForce 3D Vision CD v1.04 (GeForce GPU driver v181.22, GeForce 3D Vision driver v181.25).

Once you start the install be sure to install GeForce Graphics driver first and restart the computer when prompted. When your system reboots, the GeForce 3D Vision Software Installation automatically restarts to continue the install.

Once system restarts you will install the GeForce 3D Vision driver and as soon as that completes the GeForce 3D Vision Setup Wizard begins. The Setup Wizard takes you through installing the IR emitter, setting up your display, and configuring the wireless glasses.

The first step tells you to use the USB cable that was shipped with your equipment to connect your IR Emitter to your computer. Once it connects the GeForce 3D Vision Ready light on the emitter glows green when the emitter is connected. When updating my drivers over the past month I found out that you need to unplug the emitter when updating drivers as on the last update it glowed red and I had to uninstall the 3D drivers and re-install them before it would glow green again.

The next menu allows you to select your gaming environment. Read through the three gaming environments listed on the screen and select the one that best fits your current hardware configuration. Our test system was a single gaming computer in a room with no other consumer IR devices, so we selected the first setting and moved on.

On this setp the GeForce 3D Vision Setup evaluates the display connected to your computer and identifies if it is a 3D Ready display. Your screen reflects the display you have connected. Our Samsung 3D 120Hz LCD was detected with no issues.

Now that the monitor is ready to go, we can synchronize the glasses to the IR emitter that you have already plugged in during the first step. Once you power on the glasses the dull green light on the IR emitter should turn bright green and that verifies that your glasses are working and communicating with the IR emitter.

This screen is used to verify that your hardware is properly configured to view Stereoscopic 3D effects and that your glasses and emitter are functioning properly. This test makes you close your right eye and look at the large image on the screen, then you have to select what image you see with your left eye. You repeat this for the other eye and them move on to the next step.

The flicker test is up next and while the glasses are still on, see if you notice any flicker in your peripheral vision. If you do, this is due to room lighting issues, and I had serious issues with flicker during the day-time with the blinds open. The first time I used GeForce 3D Vision it was on a sunny day and my blinds were unable to get the room dark enough to make the flickering go away. NVIDIA allows you change the refresh rate to reduce the flickering, but it didn't help for day-time use. You can then select from the following refresh rates:

• 120 Hz refresh rate: For use in North America when lights are on.

• 110 Hz refresh rate: For daytime and when lights are off.

• 100 Hz refresh rate: For countries with 50 Hz lighting and when lights are on.

You are now asked to look at a medical test image to verify that you can see stereoscopic 3D. If things are working correctly you should see a 3D box jump out of the blocky image.

If you successfully passed the medical test, the Setup complete screen displays and you are ready to start gaming!

NVIDIA Control Panel for Stereoscopic 3D

NVIDIA has provided tools for you to customize your GeForce 3D Vision experience and these tools can be accessed through the NVIDIA Control Panel.

In the control panel you can enable and disable stereoscopic 3D by checking or unchecking a checkbox. The next setting, and undoubtedly the most important, is the depth amount in a game. This is the is the depth that the farthest object is placed in a scene. When GeForce 3D Vision is first installed on your system, the Depth is set at the default of 15%. If you are new to 3D gaming, 15% is a good point to start with. Viewing depth at a higher setting can be uncomfortable to some users. As you use GeForce 3D Vision, your eyes will become more accustomed to viewing stereoscopic 3D and you can incrementally increase the depth amount without eye strain. After using the glasses for a couple of weeks I found myself set to ~80% for the depth scale, so don't worry about starting out at just 15%.  It should be noted that you can also change the depth amount by adjusting the thumbwheel on the back of the IR emitter or using the keyboard shortcuts. This means you have three methods of changing the depth of field, which is nice.

To configure a game in real-time you must be familiar with the keyboard shortcut keys. You can use the default setting or you can change the shortcut keys to suit your particular liking. To see the default keyboard shortcut key settings, go to the NVIDIA Control Panel and select the Set up stereoscopic 3D task in the left window pane. Click on the click on the 'Set Keyboard Shortcuts' button and you will see the menu that is shown in the picture above. To change a shortcut key combination, select an action and click in the adjacent box displaying the shortcut. Press your desired key combination. The keystrokes are displayed in the box. Click OK to save your settings and exit the menu. The driver saves the settings in the registry.

The cross-hair sight in a first-person shooter (FPS) game is usually positioned at screen depth when viewed in stereoscopic 3D, making it difficult to aim. In some games, NVIDIA has created a configuration that puts the in-game laser sight at the correct depth. For those games, no user configuration is required. For all other FPS games, NVIDIA provides a selection of 3D laser sights that appear on the targeted object. The laser sights work in properly configured first-person shooter games with screen-centered sights. To change the laser sight from the Set Up Stereoscopic 3D screen, click on the Change 3D Laser Sight button to display a list of possible laser sights.

During any fullscreen 3D application, you can capture stereoscopic 3D screenshots by pressing ALT-F1. The images are saved in the folder current Windows active user folder [Windows Vista Hard Drive] / [Active User ] / Documents and Settings > Documents > NVStereoscopic.IMG. In order to view a 3D photo, simply double-click the .jps file and you’ll be able to see the stereoscopic image using the picture viewer. When you first launch the image in the picture viewer, you’ll see the original 3D image, but if you click it again you'll see the left eye and right eye frames represented in the manner illustrated above. The stereoscopic 3D capture function seemed to work on all of the games that we ran in 3D, so you have a quick and easy way to save game images in 3D!

The Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ

The Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ 120Hz LCD display is the monitor that came bundled with the GeForce 3D Vision kit.

The Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ is the very first 3D monitor that Samsung has brought to market. The Samsung 2233RZ, which is obviously 100% compatible with GeForce 3D Vision and will be available for purchase in April 2009. This 22" monitor alone carries an MSRP of $399, so you can see the largest expense of GeForce 3D Vision is the monitor and not the gaming glasses or the software needed to make it work.

Samsung 2233RZ Monitor Product Specifications:

• 1680 by 1050 Native Resolution
• 300 cd/m2 Brightness
• 20,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio
• 170^o/160^o (CR>10) Viewing Angle
• GTG 3ms (3D) / 5ms(2D) of Response Time
• 120Hz Dual Engine
• HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection)
• DVI-D (Digital Interface)

The Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ is a 120Hz LCD monitor that is required for crystal-clear, flicker-free stereoscopic 3D gaming as it provides 60Hz per eye. You must have a 120Hz monitor that supports 3D for it to work with GeForce 3D Vision. The very first feature listed on the retail box is "3D Gaming Monitor", so if you want to go with a different monitor be sure that it supports 3D gaming! This monitor is also ENERGY STAR compliant, so if you do your part for the environment you have nothing to worry about here.

The Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ bundle comes with the stand, DVI cable, power cable, driver disc, installation guide and a cable holder/sorter to keep the cables looking good behind your desk.

I use a pair of Samsung SyncMaster 204B monitors in the office and I switched one of them out in order to test the Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ and I'm super impressed. The Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ makes my old Samsung 204B look weak and a few years back the 204B was one of the top of the line swivel monitors. In the picutre above you can see a difference over six feet away! Both monitors are on auto settings with nothing defined, so this is what you get when you turn them on for the very first time. After using the Samsung 2233RZ I want to get rid of both of my 204B, but for a $399 monitor it does lack a couple things I would like to see for a monitor coming in in 2009.

For starters is only has a single DVI input! For a $399 monitor I expected on seeing maybe something like an HDMI input, but who uses that right?  The second thing is that it is a 22" LCD monitor, which means that it only supports up to 1680 x 1050 native resolution. I would have much rather seen a 24" monitor with a 1920 x 1080 native resolution as at this price tag I'd like to have a monitor that can do more than just 3D games! With internal Blu-Ray drives now reaching below $80 on sale it only makes sense to invest in a monitor that can support true HD. My final gripe is that the stand is not four-way adjustable (height, pivot, tilt and swivel) like my old Samsung monitors could.  I have some more pictures and comments on this monitor in the forums, so check it out if you want more information on it.

All gripes aside the Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ is an amazing lCD monitor that blows away the image quality and brightness on anything I have ever seen before. You really have to see one of these monitors in person to believe it. If you are interested in looking at other monitors you might want to consider the Viewsonic FuHzion VX2265wm as it supports GeForce 3D Vision as well.

Game Performance - Left 4 Dead

Set in the immediate aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, Left 4 Dead  offers four expansive "movie campaigns" that challenge you and your fellow survivors to battle thousands of swarming zombies as you travel across the rooftops of an abandoned metropolis, through rural ghost towns and pitch-black forests. In addition to the movie campaigns, Left 4 Dead features a Versus mode that allows you to play as the Boss Zombies. Left 4 Dead  is also one of the first games to be developed with 3D features in mind, so this is one of the best titles to test out the GeForce 3D Vision glasses on.

Since our test system has an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX960 processor, 4GB of DDR2 1066MHz memory and an XFX GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 graphics card inside running Windows Vista 64-bit SP1, I figured that we could crank up the graphics to make the game look excellent.  With the Anti-Aliasing set to 16xQ CSAA and the filtering mode at Anisotripic 16X I was ready to see how running a game in 3D impacts performance.

The frame rate of the game took a significant performance hit when stereoscopic 3D was enabled in the control panel. I found ~60% performance decrease when steroscopic 3D was enabled, so if you like to play games with the image qualities cranked up you will need a high-end gaming graphics card as you can tell from the chart above. I also tested various depths to see if that impacted performance, but it didn't seem to have an impact. Just for fun I enabled double buffered vertical sync in Left 4 Dead and performance again took a dive, so be sure to disable this function for better performance as it is enabled by default in the game.

The 3D Experience and Conclusion

When it comes to gaming in 3D the experience is truly beautiful and I'm not trying to sugar coat it. I've been playing PC games since the late 1990's and this is by far the most significant advancement that I have ever seen. When AGEIA originally announced PhysX technology back in 2006 it was only available on limited number of game titles and demos. When the dedicated PhysX cards hit the street they retailed for close to $300 and for how much you paid it really didn't make sense to run out and buy the product. Now three years later PhysX software is widely adopted by over 150 games, is used by more than 10,000 developers of all types and is supported on Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PC. It takes time for developers to adopt new technology and what makes GeForce 3D Vision so impressive is that it is supported on over 350 game titles right now. NVIDIA was able to support an insane number of game titles right off the bat as they were able to make a driver 'wrapper' for their own drivers. Since NVIDIA makes their own graphics drivers they can quickly and easily come out with 3D game support. This should mean that stereoscopic 3D should take less time to catch on compared to previous technologies like PhysX.

"Unlike some other stereoscopic 3D solutions which rely upon a driver “wrapper” which can dramatically decrease performance and adversely affect compatibility, GeForce 3D Vision makes use of NVIDIA’s own graphics driver. In doing so, NVIDIA is able to leverage the same resources and relationships from The Way It’s Meant to be Played program to ensure the best possible stereoscopic 3D gaming experience.

In the same manner that NVIDIA’s driver has SLI profiles which have the ideal settings for a specific game, GeForce 3D Vision relies upon a custom profile for each game. Because no two titles are identical, NVIDIA has researched the optimal stereo settings for each game and made it a default within the driver. When you install a game and want to see what it looks like in stereoscopic 3D, you do not have to waste time configuring settings and trying to figure out what looks best. When gaming with GeForce 3D Vision, you simply start the game and begin playing in fully immersive stereoscopic 3D.

The NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D control panel includes a compatibility list that specifies the level of stereoscopic 3D compatibility for hundreds of games. In addition, this information will be available online at www.nvidia.com/ged3d" - NVIDIA PR

One other thing that really improved the gaming experience is that when you start-up a game for the very first time there is an on-screen text message giving you tips on how to adjust game settings to those known to give the best 3D gaming experience. In Left 4 Dead for example it tells you that setting the film grain to off provides a better stereoscopic 3D effect, which it does. By providing tips when the game launches, NVIDIA has improved the game play experience by just letting gamers know what works best.  NVIDIA has done a really great job at making stereoscopic 3D a complete package and it worked great on the dozens of game titles that I have tried it on over the past month. Some games are better than others, but it works on them all.

"The issue of having varying experiences with different games is easy to explain. Few (if any) games on the market today were designed with stereo in mind. As a result, when we identified an issue with stereo within a game we would have to lobby the developer to go back and fix the problem. In some cases, we're able to get the developer to make the fix and release it (along with other fixes) in a patch. However, in other cases the developer is already working on another title and doesn't have time to make the fix. In those cases, we have to work around the problem. These situations are why you sometimes need to disable a feature or lower a quality setting in order for stereo to work properly with a specific game. Moving forward, we have enabled all major developers with GeForce 3D Vision and are involved with a game's development at the earliest stages. In doing so, the game is ensured to work in stereo and the developer can also add stereo enhancements like out-of-screen effects. In the future, you'll be able to play these games without any degradation of image quality or features. Stereo will simply "work"...Developers are excited about stereo and there is some major gaming news surrounding GeForce 3D Vision coming in the near future. Note: Blizzard just released the World of Warcraft PTR Patch 3.0.8 that has all the new stereo goodness! http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html" - NVIDIA PR

As you can tell NVIDIA is really working with game developers to make GeForce 3D Vision get better as time goes on, so with every game patch and graphics card driver release it only means that 3D gaming will get better!

When it comes to pricing, NVIDIA is currently listing the GeForce 3D Vision kit for $199 direct from their site, or you can find it for $178 on Google Shopping. This GeForce 3D Vision stereoscopic gaming kit (NVIDIA item 942-10701-0003) includes everything inside the box, but does not include a monitor or HDTV. The GeForce 3D Vision kit that I reviewed here today includes the monitor and is sold under part number 942-10223-0000-000 which includes the kit with a Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ 22" widescreen 120Hz LCD monitor for $598. Once again you can find this same package at retailers like CompUSA for roughly the same price.

It is a shame that the economy is doing badly, but economies like that of America thrive off consumer spending and launching a product like this might be perfect to get people out and spend some money. You have to see it to fully understand how great gaming in 3D is, but I can honestly say that it is the best thing to happen in gaming in years. Hard to believe that PhysX technology came out three years ago and that not much has really happened since then.  If you want a game changer this could be what you have been waiting for.

Legit Bottom Line: NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D has come out with guns blazing and it looks good, real good!  If you are getting bored of PC gaming in general 3D gaming will invigorate your gaming appetite and make you wonder why it took this many years to come to market. 

Legit Reviews - NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision Review - Our Thoughts After A 30-Day Test Drive

Installation and Initial Thoughts...

For this quick preview, we used a Foxconn Bloodrage Caw i7 motherboard (review forthcoming), Akasa’s Nero cooler, a Corsair HX1000 PSU, two SATA hard disks (a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black and a 300GB WD VelociRaptor) and a SATA optical drive. As this is not the usual test kit (as is being used elsewhere), any cooling testing wouldn’t have been comparable and so we’ll leave that for another day.
Building a PC inside the Raven is a fairly frustrating process. For every welcome piece of design, there’s another to annoy. While we could neatly cable the front panel wiring around the rear of the case, the power cables just can’t be organised nearly as well for example.
The holes in the motherboard tray through which you can route some cables aren’t wide enough for the EPS12V plug or the 24-pin ATX plug so these can’t be tidied around the back. We were also annoyed that the drive bays and the motherboard tray are attached along their full length, which severely restricts how you can route and tidy cables in this area. You have to rely on the two small slot holes, which struggle to accept chunky or numerous cables.

Click to enlarge

Graphics card power cables aren’t well catered for either – they’ll always be on show, though we opted to tuck them toward the back of the main chamber. We also hit problems attaching our SATA optical drive, as it’s just too far away from the SATA ports on our motherboard. We shudder at the thought of trying to organise EIDE cables neatly in the Raven.
Similarly, there’s not much space to stuff excess cables from the PSU. We’ve opted for the small space above the PSU, though we risk cables falling lose and clogging the fan that’s directly above the PSU. The alternative is to shove the cables beneath the other intake fan, and risk clogging this should the cables come loose...
A little compartmentalisation here would have done wonders. As such, this is far from the best cable tidying job we’ve ever done.

Click to enlarge

The odd thing about the Raven is that it doesn’t even show off its innovation very well. The side window is modest, and not positioned well to show off your ‘crazy’, vertically aligned expansion cards. Given that this is an interesting and key innovation of the case, it’s rather odd that the window doesn’t make more of a big deal of the vertical card arrangement.
The problem could be that the case isn’t long enough, but it could do with being a bit longer anyway to allow better cable routing. And it’s not as if this isn’t a big, iconic, good-looking case – we won’t begrudge it taking up a little more desk space. We’ll have to wait to see just how cool the unusual orientation of the expansion cards keeps hot PC hardware, but we welcome your thoughts from this initial look on the comments below.

bit-tech.net | Preview - First Look: SilverStone Raven RV01

Nvidia and AMD planning to handle AI in 2010

Nvidia and ATI graphics cards to handle AI from 2010

Graphics cards are set to handle artificial intelligence (AI) processing in 2010, according to the latest news out of Nvidia and AMD.

The companies revealed that they are working on GPGPU-accelerated AI in games, and gamers might see the first results early in 2010.

Nvidia and AMD are working with games and middleware developers to take the most common AI routines - which spend over 90% of their time performing simple visibility and path finding queries – away from the CPU, and across to the graphics card to process instead.

Competing solutions?

Nvidia's director of product management for PhysX, Nadeem Mohammad tells Custom PCthat: "You can always imagine CUDA as loads of processors running the same program but not the same instruction, and ideally on the same data set but with different input parameters,'

"So, in the context of AI, the data set consists of the whole game world, and the parameters going into it are the individual bots – that's one way of neatly parallelising the problem. If you look at it in that context then any AI program could be accelerated."

An AMD rep added that: "some middleware providers are looking at this in terms of packaging up a GPU AI library for games, while some developers are looking to transfer their own existing AI code from CPU to GPU."

The only potential problem, as Kotaku so neatly sums up, "is whether ATI and Nvidia would bother to actually standardise this, or whether we'd end up with two competing solutions that would split the developer community and make the whole thing a royal pain in the ass."

Gaming AI to move to graphics cards | News | TechRadar UK

Over at hardware-infos they reported that some of the first batches, rather iterations, of RV790 and RV740 engineering samples have begun surfacing. Sources reveal bits and pieces of the new GPUs' specifications to Hardware-Infos. Being some of the first samples, these are merely iterations en route the development of the final product, though trend has it that preliminary information about AMD GPUs have a tendency of turning out true. We will exempt the RV770's final stream processor count from these.
The RV740, a mainstream GPU from AMD, is on course of becoming the first GPU in production, to be built on the 40nm manufacturing node. It carries 640 stream processors and a core clock speed of 700 MHz. It features a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory bus, churning out bandwidth that rivals equally clocked GDDR3 with double the bus width. The memory bus will be clocked at speeds between 800 and 900 MHz (3.2 GT/s and 3.6 GT/s). Products will carry 512 to 1024 MB of memory. The GPU houses 32 texture memory units (TMUs) and 8 raster operations pipelines (ROPs).
As for the RV790, surprise: it has the same clock speeds as the RV770XT: 750 MHz (core) and 900 MHz (memory). The samples were equipped with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory with chips made by Qimonda.

The memory bus width remains unchanged at 256-bit. With so much similarity with the RV770, the shader domain is all that remains to serve as the differentiation factor, apart from the newer manufacturing process that hypothetically facilitates larger overclocking headroom. There is no word on the remaining specifications.

guru3d

 

We already knew more or less all we needed to know about NVIDIA's GTX 295, however, despite being already on sale, the company has decided now is a good time to grace the model with a press release. The GTX 285 has been given the formal treatment too -- despite not being available until next week. If you missed the earlier specs, the $499(ish) 295 includes dual 55-nm GT200 GPUs and supports nearly 2GB of memory, while the $399 285 makes do with but one processor and an undisclosed RAM ceiling (though the upcoming Winfast, pictured above, comes with 1GB and one yellow robot). Again the 295 is up for order now, while slightly more budget conscious gamers will have to wait until January 15 for the 285.

NVIDIA makes GTX 295 official now that it's on sale, 285 too for good measure - Engadget

 

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 is only a week old at retail, but that hasn't stopped the company from turning around and releasing yet another card -- the GTX 285 -- today. The reviews for both are in and from what we've read, the GTX 295 seems to match or outshine its AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 counterpart in most performance tests. As for the GTX 285, the general consensus is that it's the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market right now. It's only slightly better-performing than the GTX 280, however, so if you've already got that, it's probably not worth the upgrade. We're not gonna pretend to understand every benchmark result, but we'll gladly point you in the right direction.
GTX 285
Read - TweakTown
Read - PC Perspective
Read - HotHardware
GTX 295
Read - TweakTown
Read - PC Perspective
Read - HotHardware

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 / 295 review roundup - Engadget

 

Design Partners, the company responsible for Logitech's G-series, has released a series of images offering a behind-the-scenes look at how the suite of wild gaming peripherals came to be. Interested to see the design process? Check out the galleries below -- we're particularly taken with the image showing a designer hand-crafting the G13's wrist rest.

Galleries

G35 Surround Sound Headset


G13 Gameboard

G19 Keyboard

The making of Logitech's G-series peripherals - Engadget

The first beta of Windows 7 is available for download. However, after the Vista-ready debacle, regular Windows watchers will be leery of downloading a new Microsoft OS without making absolutely sure that their PC hardware can stand the pace. PC Advisor has a free software tool that can do exactly that. Here's how to use PC Performance Monitor's Windows 7 Compatibility tool.

First, register as a user at PCAdvisor.co.uk. Go to PCAdvisor.co.uk/account/register (all the required links will open in a new window or tab so you can stay on this page), and complete the simple, three-stage process. Be sure to tick the box that enables you to use PC Performance Monitor. If you are already a registered user, you should log in and go to PCAdvisor.co.uk/account/update to update your profile and enable PC Performance Monitor.

Now head to PCAdvisor.co.uk/pc-performance-monitor, and hit the Monitor My PC tab. Your unique CustomerID should be displayed. Click the link and follow the instructions to download and install the PC Performance Monitor application: this is a small piece of software that collects performance data from your system.

Now you should see five performance monitors for your chosen PC - the one we're interested in is the Windows 7 Compatibility Testing widget.

See also: Windows 7 review

Before you can use it, however, there's a couple of bits of housekeeping I should cover.

1. Once PC Performance Monitor is installed, it takes the application roughly an hour to start sending back information about your system's performance, so all the boxes will remain blank for now.
2. You can install PC Performance Monitor on up to three PCs, but your data remains secret - neither the software makers, nor PC Advisor can access it.

See also: My weekend with Windows 7

The Windows 7 Compatibility Testing widget assesses the suitability of an x86 or x64-based PC for running Windows 7. You can use the Windows 7 widget to identify systems that will be incapable of running the next version of desktop Windows due to inadequate hardware, current stress levels or workload composition.

System information is extracted and analysed to determine Windows 7 compatibility. The tests look at three categories: Hardware Configuration, Current Stress Levels and Workload Composition. PC Performance Monitor collects counter data once every second and averages the collected values once every 60 seconds. The data points analysed by the Windows 7 widget represent a daily summary (average) of these one-minute averaged samples.

Once the PC's Machine Name appears in the System list, simply click the Results tab to see how it fared. The Windows 7 widget posts results in a simple Pass/Fail format. If the system meets the requirements for a given category, a green PASS appears. If your PC fails a category, explanatory text appear in the Notes box at the bottom of the Results pane.

if the requirements for Windows 7 change, we'll update our the tool, so it's worth checking back from time to time.

How to: is your PC ready for Windows 7? - Blogs - PC Advisor

We had a chance to briefly check out Sony's take on 3D gaming yesterday, but Sony wasn't the only company trying to get in on the action. Nvidia was showing off its own technology with its 3D Vision glasses, and unlike Sony's proof of concept display, Nvidia's setup was both playable and ready for purchase. The game on display? Left 4 Dead.

Unlike Sony's tech, which used passive glasses, Nvidia's rig relies on a combination of a relatively cutting-edge LCD monitor (with 120 Hz support), a compatible Nvidia graphics card, and a pair of $199 active glasses. It's a pricey setup, one that most modest PC gamers will be waiting on for quite some time until the price comes down substantially. Its undeniable, however, how cool the setup was in motion.

Like most stereoscopic 3D setups, there's a noticeable amount of depth and volume added to the scene, visible almost immediately upon donning the glasses. However, Nvidia's setup takes the concept a step further by allowing users to easily adjust the amount of depth perception with a small nob on the glasses' special dongle. With the knob turned all the way up, the game image seems to jump out at you, to the point where it can almost be distracting—especially in a game as fast-paced as Left 4 Dead.

As a bonus, here's a picture of Ben modeling the glasses:

We spent a few minutes oogling the in-game models and rotating the camera around our teammates slowly. What's so incredible about the glasses is that they take advantage of the pre-existing volumetric shader work coded into normal games to produce an uncanny volume and "heft" to the character models. One problem? The flat text above players' heads has a bizarre shimmering effect that proves distracting.

Despite that one flaw, though, Nvidia's setup is one to drool over. If the entry cost wasn't such a huge barrier, this would be a must-buy accessory. As it stands, though, this remains a lavish luxury that only the truly dedicated will be willing to purchase. This is the second piece of 3D technology that impressed us here; it works well, the glasses don't cause headache unless you crank the depth all the way up, and you can buy it today. 

CES 2009: Nvidia shows off 3D glasses with Left 4 Dead

PC startups, take note -- this is how you cut through the noise and get recognized. Rather than simply copying Alienware or some other boutique gaming outfit, BFG Technologies is introducing its first line of high-performance PCs with quite the unusual extra. Sure, the 3.2GHz Core i7 965 Extreme Edition is totally expected, and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 GPUs aren't all that shocking, but the complementary concierge service is certainly a step in a new direction. With each Phobos purchase comes six months of said service, which includes "expert in-home installation and a six month follow up maintenance visit." Check the full release after the break for all the deets, but you can count on spending at least three large to get in.

BFG TECHNOLOGIES UNVEILS PHOBOS™ -- STUNNING NEW HIGH PERFORMANCE GAMING/HOME THEATER SYSTEM
Phobos features innovative touch panel LCD with Performance Control, upcoming BFG NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Graphics Cards, Liquid Cooling Solutions from CooIIT, and Intel Core i7 Processors
Come by the NVIDIA Booth at CES to see Phobos: South Hall 4 #35352
Lake Forest, IL – January 5, 2009 – BFG Technologies, known as a leading supplier of premium power supplies and 3D graphics cards, is excited to announce its first line of complete gaming and multimedia PCs, called Phobos. These sleek hand-built, high performance machines were designed with the "Graduated Gamer" in mind. This audience is looking for all the performance associated with a high-end gaming system, but none of the hassle related to building and servicing such a system. As a result, Phobos is sold with complementary Concierge Service which includes expert in-home installation and a six month follow up maintenance visit.
"Phobos was designed for gamers and media enthusiasts who demand top of the line performance, but may not have the time, desire, or expertise to build or maintain a high end system," said John Malley, senior director of marketing for BFG Technologies. "Our Concierge Service ensures our systems meet those high expectations-delivering Unbelievable Performance without monopolizing our customers' time."
Phobos is designed with the highest-end components available, featuring the Intel® Core i7 965 Extreme Edition 3.2GHz Processor, two upcoming BFG NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 295 Graphics Cards, and CoolIt® Contained Liquid Cooling Solutions to keep both the GPUs & CPU cool during the fiercest of gaming battles. BFG Tech also outfitted Phobos to serve as a home theater command center by choosing Windows® Vista Ultimate with Media Center, including four hard drive bays, offering RF remote and TV tuner with DVR functionality, a front slot-loading Blu-ray Disc® drive, the option for 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound audio cards, and an integrated iPod®/iPhone® syncing dock.
FULL SPECS BELOW
Phobos is as impressive externally as it is internally, offering Refined Aesthetics and an innovative design. Its sleek black gloss finish and hidden cable management makes Phobos look at home in the living room, next to a flat panel TV and high end audio components. BFG Tech's ground breaking touch panel LCD with performance control further sets Phobos apart from every other system in its class. The panel provides users with a System Status Overview-a real time snapshot of the processor, memory, network, and storage data. Phobos owners can also make real-time performance adjustments based on desired use (Auto/Quiet/Max), monitor the capacity and health of internal storage devices, display and control audio and video files, and more.
For more information about Phobos, visit www.bfgsystems.com after January 8, 2009 or contact PR representative Mark Olson at 305.576.1171 x17 or markolson@maxborgesagency.com. For additional information about BFG Tech please visit www.BFGTech.com.
About BFG Tech
BFG Technologies is a privately held U.S. based supplier of premium power supplies and 3D video cards based on award-winning NVIDIA graphics technology, and a manufacturer of high end gaming/home theater systems. BFG Tech is dedicated to bringing the latest high quality, high-tech multimedia products to PC and gaming enthusiasts at competitive prices. Like the company's target customers, many of BFG Tech's employees are gamers and PC enthusiasts, and they strive to provide hardware and marketing that reflects the company's passion and excitement for the latest technology. www.BFGTech.com
Phobos™ System Specs
Phobos has three conveniently pre-configured high-performance systems that can be used as a starting point:
• Phobos Performance (from $3,000)
• Phobos Advanced (from $5,000)
• Phobos Elite (from $8,000)
Please visit www.bfgsystems.com after January 8, 2009 to see what specific options are available in each version.
'PHOBOS ELITE' STANDARD CONFIGURATION*
• Upcoming BFG NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 295 Graphics Cards (x2 for Quad SLI®)
• BFG NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 for Dedicated PhysX™ Processing
• Intel® Core i7 965 Extreme Edition 3.2GHz Processor
• CoolIt® Contained Liquid Cooling Solution (GPU&CPU)
• MSI® Eclipse SLI Intel® X58-based Motherboard
• Patriot® 6GB PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 Memory
• 4x Western Digital® VelociRaptor 300GB Hard Drives
• Slot Loading Blu-ray® Super Multi Optical Drive
• BFG LS-1200 1200W High Efficiency Power Supply
• Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 Sound Card
• Integrated iPhone®/iPod® syncing dock
• Unique 8" Interactive Touch Panel LCD
• In-Home Set Up Included with Every Phobos Purchase
*Based on current configuration at the time of printing. Specifications and available options subject to change. See www.bfgsystems.com for updates.

BFG Technologies' Phobos gaming PC packs Core i7, personal concierge - Engadget

Preliminary Tests on GeForce GTX 295 Run, Leads Radeon HD 4870 X2

A Chinese technology portal, IT168 has conducted a prelimnary performance evaluation of the upcoming GeForce GTX 295 graphics card. The card will be a flagship offering by NVIDIA. It will feature two G200b graphics processors. Also provided are the first pictures of the finished product, along with a burst-shot of the card and its cooling assembly. Across several game tests, the evaluation showed the GTX 295 to outperform the HD 4870 X2 by up to 80%, while providing superior power characteristics.

techPowerUp! News :: Preliminary Tests on GeForce GTX 295 Run, Leads Radeon HD 4870 X2

Puts on a red coat next year

We've managed to confirm that XFX will join the ATI camp at the start of the new year. XFX won't drop Nvidia products, either, but obviously, Nvidia won't be thrilled by this turn of events.
There's been a lot of talk of Nvidia partner defections and reshuffles in recent months, and some have already gone red. XFX is just following the trend and leaving Nvidia in a rather awkward situation of having just a single powerful Nvidia exclusive partner - EVGA.
We can't say we're surprised; after all, we've reported about strains in Nvidia-AIB partner relations on many occasions. Low margins, the lack of competitive products in several market segments, coupled with the economic slowdown which is exascerbating the situation further, are obviously pushing Nvidia AIBs to embrace ATI.
We will try to find out more and see how Nvidia reacts to this latest development, so stay tuned.

 

fudzilla

Maximum PC's laid hands on that Logitech G13 Gamepad we just saw a few days ago, and they've got plenty to say about it. They're fans of the gamepad's physical form and the layout of the keys, mouse buttons and the analog stick. The pad's got a color-customizable mini LCD and backlighting, and it's possible to bind up to 87 different macros at a time on it -- which the reviewer thinks will make this a totally sweet option for MMO-enthusiasts. The G13 is expected to run about $80 and to be released sometimes this month, but if you just can't wait until then for more glimpses of it, hit the read link.

 

http://www.engadget.com

Tired of ATI ruling the uberidiculous end of the graphics card space, Nvidia is apparently striking back with its own super-stacked GTX295—it's basically two GTX 200 GPUs hot-glued together.

Expected to be unveiled at CES, the GTX 295 (nee GTX260 GX2) actually is made up of two print-circuit boards, and each one has a GTX 200 GPU, 240 stream processors, 448-bit memory bus and 896MB DDR3 memory. It's totally outrageous, in other words, and requires 289W of power, so I hope you've got a behemoth of a power supply.

The price, while unknown, will be proportionately juggernaut-sized, crushing your wallet. Since it's designed to beat ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2, it'll likely fall in the same price range, probably around or slightly north of $500. It could swing cheaper though, since Nvidia's current high-end card, the GTX 280, is trending south of $400 at the moment. Guess we'll see, but I can't afford it either way.

Oh, and first person to ask "will it run Crysis?" is banned. I'm not kidding. [Expreview via X-bit Labs]

Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 Graphics Card Is Insane: Two GTX 260s Bolted Together

Stop. You had us at oil submersed motherboard, CPU and GPUs. You didn’t even have to dunk the SSDs, PSU or create a custom motherboard and bullet resistant tank too to convince us that you’re really hard core, umm, Hardcore.

Of course, if you stare too hard at the tank, you’ll miss all the heavenly glory that the Hardcore PC truly is. From its beautiful aluminum case, to its top port routing and the easy to access hard drives, every centimeter of the machine oozes custom computing. And we can honestly say that after tinkering with the most exotic PCs available on Earth for a decade now. What Hardcore is trying to do is so over the top that no one has ever tried it before on a production machine.

But before Hardcore can ascend to take its place among the top performance PC makers, there are an awful lot of questions to answer. Like can they really make and sell these babies for how much the company claims it can? Does it really work? To find the answer to that read on.

The future today! Switched on, the Reactor looks like a PC snatched from the future and placed on your desktop. Production machines promise to be quiet and as ominous as it looks here.

Fighting the heat

Since the PC was born, we’ve been fighting heat. Conventional PC’s use combination of fan/heat sink, chassis fans and ducts to try to keep the machine from turning into the oven. But as the heat continued to climb, enthusiasts turned to liquid cooling the CPU and GPUs. Others have used a combination of liquid cooling and thermal electric coolers to help move temperatures lower.

Both of these methods face one problem though. Conventional fan/heat sinks can’t move the thermals fast enough and create too much noise and liquid cooling key hot components doesn’t do enough to help the surrounding components. So what if you took all of the hot components, dunked them in a non-conductive oil and sold it?

Slimlines only: Hardcore decided to adopt mobile drives to save space in the machine. 

It’s also clearly no window: Up close you can see an occasional shimmer as a thermal layer of oil swirls in the tank but that can be changed by removing a plug that adds more gurgle to people know its full of oil and not just a fancy window.

That’s the concept that started Hardcore a few years ago. In fact, the company has U.S. Patent No. 7,403,392 for “Liquid submersion cooling system.” Submersing the components is far more effective than even the highest volume fans because liquid is a far better conductor of heat than air. With the oil that Hardcore uses, the company figures it’s about 10 times more effective than simple air cooling. Since the liquid envelops the entire videocard and motherboard, it also cools the voltage regulators, chipset, and RAM. A pump circulates the liquid through a custom radiator to keep the temps down. Simple circulation isn’t enough to keep the CPU and GPU cool, so custom blocks are fitted to the CPU and GPU to increase surface area and increase the flow of liquid over the hottest components. The result is a relatively quiet PC for the amount of hardware it packs. Hardcore estimates that the components in the machine should never really run higher than ambient room temperature if all is well. If it works in the real world the way it should in the scientific calculator, the liquid cooling should allow the machine to run at greater clock speeds for longer periods of time than more traditional cooling methods.

Of course, all this is meaningless if the company isn’t real. Which is the hard to believe part of Hardcore. With a custom, aluminum-cast case, aerospace transparent tank, mil-spec RAM and redundant power supplies, you’d expect such a rig to fetch into the low $10K range. Hardcore is spec’ing its lowest configured machine in the $4K. So we’re supposed to believe that a custom PC company just comes out of nowhere with an insane design at a surprisingly moderate prices? 

Gobble, gobble: To remove the core of the Reactor, you have to literally pull it out like you would yank a turkey out of a deep fryer.

Yes, sir says Darren Klum, president of Hardcore. The company is real, already has 30 employees and is about to be approved for its second round of financing from investors. When the company turns the switch on the web site, www.hardcorecomputer.com, (please don’t type just www.hardcore.com, it’s not work safe and probably not ActiveX safe either) it expects to start spitting out machines in Rochester, Minn. like Terminator T1000s coming off a Skynet assembly line.

Klum said it’s been more than two years in the making but it’s real. To make sure that Klum wasn’t about to rip off his mask to reveal that he was Ashton Kutcher and that Maximum PC and its readers had just been Punk’d, we did some legwork to verify the background on the company. The U.S. Patent Office does indeed show Klum, CTO Chad Attlesey and CEO Al Berning with a patent for liquid submersion. The Minnesota Secretary of State shows the company was incorporated in January of 2006 and credit checks with both Experian and Dun and Bradstreet check out too. If this is a rouse to create Internet hype for computers that will never be sold (gee have we heard that one before?), it would certainly have to be the most elaborate scam to date.

Drip, dry: You’ll have to wait a few seconds for the oil to drain off of the hardware before you want to touch anything.

The business background though, doesn’t mean the company will be a success, which is one our main concerns. With its heavy reliance on custom parts (which is the nice way to say proprietary) you would have an expensive paper weight if the company went belly up in a year and you needed a new motherboard two years later.

Klum said the $2.4 million funding the company just received plus the additional second round of funding it is about to receive ensures it’ll be around for some time. The city of Rochester also gave the company a low-interest $200,000 loan last year to create local jobs.

“This is not a Delorean,” Klum said in reference to the famed but failed stainless steel, gull-winged cars of the 1980s. “We’re backed by very good funding sources.”

Klum said the idea with the Hardcore is to break the standard mold of computing. He says the company tips its hats to Voodoo, Falcon and Alienware for paving the way, but the Hardcore is designed to take it to a level not seen before. More than any one, Klum said he and the others at Hardcore hold the big OEMs to blame for not pushing the envelope more since they have far larger budgets. Klum said Apple sort of gets it with its designs but he said it’s a closed off world. Although the Hardcore PC uses many non-standard parts, the nForce 790 SLI Ultra chip is no different than elsewhere and the three GTX280 are simply modified with the blocks to fit in the machine. Standard DDR3 modules will also fit but Hardcore worked with a vendor to meet Milspec ratings for the RAM and to hit higher clocks at lower voltage levels.

Hot chip: The super-hot Nvidia nForce 790i SLI Ultra chipset gets its own liquid block to increase flow over it. There’s also need for heat spreaders on the DDR3 RAM since it’s all bathed in oil.

As close as Hardcore is to selling its machine there are still some sticky detail questions to work out. Like how the hell do you ship an oil-filled PC a thousand miles? Because the machines will eventually leak if left on their side for a few hours, shipping filled can’t currently be done so initial boxes will likely be shipped empty with a method for filling them. The company expects to eventually seal the PCs so they will not leak even if tipped over for an extended period but right now they’ll have to go empty. How exactly will the service work? Top tier service contracts will have factory service similar to other companies that require you to ship the PC back. What about upgrades like GPU or even motherboard? Hard core expects to sell graphics cards outfitted for drop-in to the system (prepare to get a little oily) and even user-installed motherboard upgrades for those who would rather not ship it back for service. When the company introduces its dual processor design based on the chassis, it expects customers to be able to have the machines factory upgraded as well.

The end result of all this is a PC that looks like a prop from a movie set 25 years from now but it’s actually a PC that you can have today.

Inside the Reactor's Core

The Reactor’s chassis is a heavy duty aluminum cast as are the handles and the majority of the external panels. There’s easy access to two fan-cooled, 3.5-inch, SATA hot swap bays are located at the rear of the machine. These can be configured as separate drives, RAID 1 or RAID 0. A top panel also contains an easy to access CMOS reset button and the coin-cell battery. No more digging on the board for the battery.

Don’t put your coins here: A CMOS reset button and easy to access coin-cell battery are hidden under a trap door on top.

The panel on the right side of the case opens to reveal a custom radiator and fans that cools off the liquid. This folds out to give you access the notebook PC optical drive and some of the umbilical cables that connect the system together.

Opening the Reactor is not an easy chore. You’ll need a powered driver to unscrew the 20 screws that holds the Reactor’s core in place and a place that you won’t mind a mess in. You don’t need to it in your garage, but even the most careful person is going to need a roll of Brawny-brand towels after you’re done. Like a turkey in a deep fryer, you’ll need to pull the core out a few inches, disconnect several cables and then you can sling the entire core higher up for access to the board.

Almost there: Pulling the core out of the Reactor is similar to pulling an engine block. Just back out the 20 screws, open two chambers, back the core out a few inches, disconnect the cable umbilical cords and remove the core! Just what you’d do after a hard days work for fun.

This may sound like a two person affair, but Hardcore has it fairly well thought out. There’s a step cut into the chassis that allows you to rest the internals on after you’ve pulled it out a few inches. This allows just one person to pull the core, disconnect the wires and then pull it out further.

Proprietary power supply:  Hardcore uses a redundant server-class PSU in the machine. If one dies, the second one kicks in. It does, however, require the same funky server cable that Dell uses in its XPS gaming rigs though.

As you can guess, the board is not something you’ll buy at the Compu-Quik store. This iteration of the Reactor uses a custom board by Tyan. In a first, Hardcore also reached out to Creative Labs to integrate a full X-Fi core as well as a 64MB X-RAM chip on the board. Hardcore said it didn’t just jam it on the board either, it worked with Tyan and Creative to route the wires far away from the power lines in the machine to increase the SNR ratio. Since it’s a full X-Fi part, you’ll get the full EAX5 glory.

Audio ports galore: A full hardware implementation of a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi with added optical SPDIFs are run along one side of the machine.

Primary storage for the machine looks to the future as well. You can boot to either of the 3.5-inch drives in the box but power users will likely use SSDs so Hardcore has three 2.5-inch slots which it outfitted with three Samsung SLC-based SSD drives. These are also submerged and hidden behind a door on the back side of the motherboard. Since mechanical hard drives would not survive in liquid, it’s not recommend that you try to stuff a standard drive in these bays.

Don’t try this with your hard drives: The Reactor uses three Samsung SSD drives mounted behind the motherboard for the primary drives. These are also submersed in oil so we don’t think you should try it with a hard drive as the read heads would likely drown.

It’s like Wifeswap but for your hard drives: Two fan-cooled 3.5-inch bays are easily accessed from the rear of the Reactor. Note the funky server-style power plug that we dinged Dell for so many months ago.

The tank is a custom design which you submerge the motherboard, CPU, GPUs, RAM, redundant power supplies and SSD drives into. Hardcore doesn’t say what exactly the material is except that it’s an “aerospace” material and “bullet proof” (we prefer the term bullet resistant.) The oil is also somewhat of a secret but it is biodegradable and completely non-conductive. Hardcore says you can actually drink it but it obviously doesn’t recommend it. It is truly oily though and getting some on your hand will have you running for the sink and a bottle of Dawn. The oil is re-circulated twice a minute with higher velocity oil shot through the blocks on the CPU, chipset and GPU.

The Reactor in service configuration: Three GTX280 cards are stacked on the left  while redundant power supplies sit on the bottom right of the machine. 

With the submerged design, cooling will likely not exceed that of the best liquid cooling designs that focus on the CPU and GPU (the submerged design will keep all parts cool though and that prevents failures.) Hardcore’s next step is to integrate Peltier cooling to the CPU.

Peltier or TEC coolers a good for bring temperatures down but they have long had a problem with condensation and sweating which is dangerous in an air cooled machine. Submerged in oil, though, a TEC would not have any condensation issues. Hardcore is also looking at possibly building external auxiliary coolers.

Putting the Reactor back together is about a 40 minute chore the first time through and while you can do it, even some experts here felt that the Reactor is more of a closed box in the vein of an Apple PowerMac.

Radiation: The Reactor doesn’t have any radiation, but it does have a radiator – one big sucker. All of the oil and all of the thermals in the box are serviced by single large radiator.

Noise killers: One thing we can attest to in the Reactor is its exceptional acoustics. Multi-GPU machines tend to be sound like Saturn V launches. The Reactor isn’t silent, but it’s damned quiet for this much hardware.

Which is likely one of the biggest weaknesses of the entire concept. As we said, custom is a polite way to say proprietary. And one thing we’ve learned over the years is that enthusiasts shun proprietary like vampires shun sunlight.

And yet we can almost see some tossing that conviction aside for the Reactor. It’s not proprietary to keep you only buying from the manufacturer like Packard Bell or Apple once did, but apparently done for “engineering” reasons and frankly, because it’s cool.

Breaker, breaker, good buddy: An integrated, upgradeable 802.11n module and two antennas sit next to the dual-link DVI and HDMI port from the graphics card. The other ports can be upgraded or changed to connect for multi-monitor use.

It’s far from perfect though. We didn’t have final production machines for our hands-on time so it’s hard to ding them for issues. One thing that needs to be fixed are the SATA ports. We broke two SATA ports opening the box even being extremely careful. Hardcore said the issue is a last minute cable change that it’s going to go back to engineering over. While few people actually use their add-in slots for anything anymore, it would be nice to have some way to add and use a PCI-E add-in card. Right now, any add-in card (assuming you hadn’t filled all three PCI-E slots) would be dunked and accessing the connectors on the card wouldn’t be easy to do.

Even more ports galore: The starboard side of the Reactor features five USB 2.0, six-pin FireWire and two Gigabit Ethernet ports.

We’re also a little concerned about the amount of new hardware in play here. A system built around industry standard parts and designs is unlikely to have many surprises as the designs are well known. It’s a little like a Ford Mustang vs. a hand-built super car. The Ford Mustang may not be as exotic but it’s built on standard components shared with many other cars. With almost every single thing on the Reactor seemingly custom designed, there’s just a greater chance of something the engineer didn’t anticipate.

Tri-lateral: Thanks to its submersion technique, Hardcore says it can comfortably stack three overclocked GeForce GTX280 cards as close as possible. The company anticipates that customers would buy future upgrade cards directly from it after they’ve been modified with the heat sink and water block.

Custom designs also means it’ll be slower for Hardcore to have the latest and greatest available. One glaring problem with the two preproduction PCs we ran: where the hell’s Core i7? With Core i7’s launch so imminent, why even bother to make Core 2 Extreme? Hardcore says it does plan to offer the Reactor with a Core i7 but right now, the initial version will be Core 2 only.

Still, our experience with the Hardcore Reactor shows us that there’s plenty of promise. It’s easy to get jaded in this business but Hardcore’s design and what it is attempting to do is something that no true PC enthusiast can ignore nor dismiss easily.

Exclusive: Oil Immersion Cooling Goes Mainstream with Hardcore PC's Reactor | Maximum PC

DirectX 11 is on its way, but with the slow take up of DX10 in both the home and in the development houses what is it that we should be getting excited about with this new revision? Well, from the looks of things quite a lot, as we learned from Microsoft's Kevin Gee at the recent Nvision conference.

The link between Windows Vista and DirectX 10 is fairly universally seen as one of the big drawbacks to the last iteration of the ubiquitous graphics API. After all, the percentage of people with DX10 capable hardware is growing exponentially, but the percentage of people using that hardware in collaboration with Microsoft's latest OS is far smaller. The lack of backwards compatibility was a big problem for DX10 and something that has been tackled with DX11.

While you will still need to have Vista as the minimum OS, the package is being released with the next iteration of Windows – Windows 7 – and so will be compatible across both platforms. It's also going to be compatible across the hardware spectrum as well, working with DX10 and DX10.1 specced graphics cards, as well as the new SM5 cards to come. This means that right from the off there will be a large installed user base ready to use the new API.

Another positive feature from the development point of view is that as a continuation of DirectX 10 anyone familiar with coding for that platform will feel at home with DX11. Fingers crossed this should encourage more devs to pick it up and run with the new feature set for the PC.

New features in DX11

So what are these new features, though? One of the biggest and most relevant to today's PC is the improved multi-threading support. Originally, Direct3D was focused on performing on a single-core CPU, making the multi-threading support fairly limited. DX11, though, has been designed to more effectively drive the graphics card, using a system with a multi-core CPU at its heart. One of the ways it does this is by supporting multiple rendering contexts

The main computational work occurs in the primary immediate context. This dictates the timeline for work being submitted to the GPU; running alongside this are the new optional deferred contexts. These are developer-created and enables work associated with each deferred context to be carried out on a separate thread/core, then submitted to the GPU once it's ready for a new task. This is one of those backwards compatible features and so will benefit existing hardware, and should finally make quad-core CPUs more desirable for gamers beyond the willy-waving.

There's also a big change in the render pipeline, too, adding in three new stages: the hull shader, tessellator and domain shader. Listening to developers Microsoft has identified character models and animation as a key battleground in the graphics front.

Today's hugely dense polygon meshes are very memory intensive and the tessellation scheme should reduce this by allowing the work to be done in a single pass, meaning there doesn't need to be any memory in between the stages. According to Kevin Gee it should: "produce richer animations for less memory and less memory bandwidth."

Another boon for the memory consumption of today's games is the improvements in texture compression. The DX11 API gives developers two new compression formats to help with high-quality real-time rendering without sacrificing performance.

There are a host of other new features to the DX11 set, such as Shader Model 5 and Dynamic Shader Linkage, but the latter offers a taste of why DX11 should be the API to move people away from DX9 gaming that DX10 promised to be.

Does compute

The Compute shader is another new feature of DX11, but one that Microsoft was obviously not so keen to shout too loud about at a NVIDIA event, touting CUDA at every turn.

This part of the new API is designed to allow developers to easily access the new trend in general purpose computing on the GPU, something that's CUDA's raison d'etre. Gee didn't want to talk about direct competition with CUDA: "they're not going to be identical, but we do target all hardware that's in the market. So it depends what your application is and whether that's important to you."

Microsoft is keen then to point out that the compute shader will run across all the graphics hardware capable of running this latest Direct3D API. Obviously, there are reports of AMD cards capable of getting on the CUDA bandwagon, but Microsoft's version will be all ready to go out of the box.

So, essentially if you want your program to run on all the graphics hardware available use DX11's compute shader, instead of CUDA. Whether one is more efficient than the other we'll have to wait and see.

Sooner than you think, baby

An interesting part of the presentation was the ending where Kevin Gee explained just how soon developers were going to be able to get hold of the new SDK. A preview SDK of DirectX 11 is shipping to developers in November of this year, specced for use on Windows Vista and on DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware. As he explains: "if you start developing on DX10 and 10.1 today and you optimise your engine on those APIs then you'll be in great shape for DX11 when we actually ship the SDK."

The main software set is meant to be shipping with the next version of Windows: Windows 7. Could this rapid release to the development community mean that the rumours of Microsoft's newest operating system arriving before the touted 2010 timeframe are true?

Some people are speculating that we could be seeing Windows 7 as early as next year, with other insiders claiming an Easter unveiling. Microsoft certainly has been cagier about preview builds of the new OS this time around and there are definitely functional beta builds floating around with a few trusted system builders, but it remains to be seen if such rumours have any basis in reality.

Microsoft will certainly be keen to put the Vista fiasco to bed if Windows 7 is half as good as we've heard it may be…

Everything you need to know about DirectX 11 | News | TechRadar UK

We recently showed you how Intel was intent on upping the ante in Solid State Disk performance, with our evaluation and performance analysis on the release of their X25-M series SSDs.  Though offerings from other SSD manufacturers like OCZ and Samsung have come to market with better performance since then, there was no question Intel's SSD flat out smoked the competition in the cost-effective, consumer grade MLC (Multi-Level Cell) SSD market. With an average sustained throughput of ~225MB/sec for reads, around 74MB/sec observed write performance, and blistering fast sub-millisecond random access, we were left thoroughly impressed by Intel's first consumer-ready effort in SSD technology. However, at the time of launch, we only had access to one of these new SSDs from Intel and as such couldn't provide you with RAID performance metrics back then. 

Of course, that changed the other day when the local courier delivered another Intel kit to our door. As such, and with a bit of that "Friday on our minds" attitude adjustment going on in the lab, we decided to RAID a pair of these SSDs up to see what they could do.  Blinding speed in RAID 0 mode?  Yes, you could say that...
Test system specifications: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850, Asus Striker II Extreme (790i SLI Ultra chipset) motherboard, 2GB Corsair DDR3-1,333, GeForce 8800 GTX

Sandra HDD Read - Click for full view

Sandra HDD Write - Click for full view

IOMeter Results - 8K File Size, 80% Reads/20% Writes, 20% Random Access

Though there is a pronounced saw-toothed performance pattern here, you can see that a pair of these drives offers, you guessed it, up to double the IO throughput of a single drive.  For any standard SATA RAID 0 array we've tested to date, these are easily the fastest IOMeter numbers we've seen.  Interestingly, our Sandra tests show the drives offer 396MB/s for read performance and 130MB/s write performance, while HD Tune and HD Tach show peaks and valleys from 200MB/s to 300MB/s.  Regardless, we hope you enjoyed this quick-take performance test of what Intel's new SSDs can do in a performance-targeted RAID 0 setup.  As always, with RAID 0, be sure to back up your data since you're effectively doubling your available failure points.  Regardless, we're sure many of you have run RIAD 0 setups reliably for years now and there's no question a pair of Intel's X25M drives will make for a potent storage subsystem, especially as an OS volume.
Word is Intel's performance-tuned SLC drives are waiting in the wings too. So stay tuned here for our analysis as we get our hands on one of those beasts.

Intel SSDs RAID 0, A Case Study In Speed, Take 2 - HotHardware

Start the Game-O-Meter for Call of Duty: World at War

This service allows you to analyze the gaming performance of your PC. For this we use a PC performance analysis technology from Futuremark Corporation.

When you use this service for the first time a Java Applet will be installed on your computer. The initial download might take while, please be patient.

By clicking the "Start" button, you agree to your have your PC system data collected. No personally identifiable data is ever collected. YouGamers are committed to maintain the highest privacy standards. Please read YouGamers's full Privacy Statement here.

Lynnfield the Mainstream Nehalem CPU Pictures Emerge

Pictures of the mainstream Nehalem chips otherwise known as Lynnfield have emerged in the asian forum XFastest. Unlike the Bloomefield that has 1366 pins, Lynnfield has only 1160 pins and lacks the QPI link that the Bloomefield uses for triple channel DDR3. Instead Lynnfield uses DMI which only supports dual channel DDR3. Check out the link below for even more comparison images.

techPowerUp! News :: Lynnfield the Mainstream Nehalem CPU Pictures Emerge

DFI LANPARTY UT X58 Motherboard Pictured

One of our readers sent us the link to a TweakTown story that gives an exclusive look at DFI's latest LANPARTY UT X58 motherboard. I won't bother you with the Intel X58 specs you probably already know by heart. Pictures speak enough for themselves:

techPowerUp! News :: DFI LANPARTY UT X58 Motherboard Pictured

Retail Version of ASUS Rampage II Extreme Pictured

It appears that the ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard we spotted last week has been an early sample that was designed for testing only. Today pictures of the retail version, the one that customers will see from now on appeared. The retail version of Rampage II Extreme will ship with a whole new cooling system, well known from various other Republic of Gamers mainboards, but different from the one we posted earlier. Aside from the cooling changes, the motherboard will have the same features as we reported here. I can only add the SupremeFX 7.1 sound blaster and the ASUS LED poster to our previous information of extraordinary features.

techPowerUp! News :: Retail Version of ASUS Rampage II Extreme Pictured

Biostar T-Power X58 Mainboard Spotted

During the final weeks before Intel's Nehalem release date, we have covered almost any motherboard that will be simultaneously available as the platform launches. Today we'll accentuate on Biostar's T-Power X58, yet another LGA1366 mainboard that will help Core i7 buyers. The board is pretty much standard, it has a 12-phase power design, 6x DDR3 1333/1600/2000 slots, 3x PCI-E 16x SLI and CrossFireX capable slots, and 6x SATA + 2x eSATA + 1 IDE ports. The T-Power X58 also features a heat-pipe cooling system, on-the-fly power/reset buttons, and a LED POST code display. There's also a 7.1 integrated audio, two 10/100/1000 LANs, and two FireWire ports.

 

techPowerUp! News :: Biostar T-Power X58 Mainboard Spotted

New ASUS P6T DELUXE with Super Hybrid Engine Delivers Maximum Overclocking and Energy Efficiency

Taipei, Taiwan, September 29, 2008 – Fulfilling demand for users that require a motherboard able to achieve extraordinary overclocking capability, ASUS, world-leader in motherboard production, has unveiled the new ASUS P6T DELUXE amid high user expectation. This innovative motherboard utilizes Intel's latest platform, and features the exclusive ASUS Super Hybrid Engine concept that encompasses the TurboV and EPU technologies to deliver the twofold benefits of overclocking and power efficiency. TurboV is an advanced overclocking application that enables easy overclocking without the need to exit or reboot the operating system; while the EPU automatically provides users exceptional power efficiency. Equipped with Super Hybrid Engine, users will enjoy the best overclocking environment and address environmental concerns at the same time.

TurboV for Outstanding Overclocking and Easy Usage
The P6T DELUXE adopts the usage of TurboV—an advanced overclocking tool that utilizes a micro-controller to provide precise overclocking adjustments, and allow users to conveniently adjust the CPU ratio (multiplier)* for instant CPU upgrades for real-time performance enhancements. TurboV can also provide adjustments to the NB voltage, NB-PCIe voltage, CPU PLL voltage and DRAM voltage in 0.02V micro-intervals. These precise overclocking options make it easier for hardcore users to fine-tune their overclocking settings and strive for enhanced results with reduced failure rates. Furthermore, TurboV is able to do all this without exiting the operating system or rebooting! This unprecedented achievement allows users to achieve new overclocking records in real-time—allowing them to quickly adjust their overclocking settings “on-the-fly” and open a benchmarking program like 3DMark Vantage to obtain their scores immediately.

EPU for Extreme Power Efficiency
In lieu of the current trend towards power efficiency, the P6T DELUXE also utilizes the ASUS exclusive EPU technology. This hardware-based feature controls 6 major components: the CPU, VGA card, memory, chipset, hard drives, and the CPU cooler/system fan. Equipped with a database containing all of the Intel CPU profiles, the EPU intelligently identifies and selects the correct CPU profile and calibrates the best possible settings to ensure the best power management.

In terms of the Chipset and Memory, the EPU provides enhanced power efficiency – improving thermal capabilities, enhances system stability to provide longer component lifespan and higher overclocking capability. As for VGA cards, the EPU automatically detects system loading and adjusts the VGA card's voltage and frequency—saving up to 37%** VGA power during everyday computing. With clever monitoring of the hard disk and fans, power wastage is reduced during periods of idling data access—helping to minimize hard drive and fan noise for quieter acoustics.

Exclusive Features for Ultimate Overclocking and Storage
The breakthrough 16+2 phase VRM design present on the P6T DELUXE encompasses 16-phases for the vCore and an added 2-phase for QPI/Memory controller inside the CPU. With high quality power components such as low RDS (on) MOSFETs, Ferrite core chokes with lower hysteresis loss and 100% Japan-made high quality conductive polymer capacitors, ultimate durability, power efficiency and performance are ensured. Another helpful feature comes in the form of OC Palm***, which provides real-time overclocking even during gameplay or 3D design applications without the requirement to exiting their currently open programs. Last but not least, the P6T DELUXE will adopt the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) controller to allow users to utilize SAS hard disks. These hard disks will provide higher data transmission speeds and better data storage reliability in comparison to current SATA interfaces.

Notes:
* CPU multiplier adjustment in TurboV is supported by selected / specific Intel processor (unlock)
** Energy saving performances may vary with different graphics solutions.
*** OC Palm is an optional add-on hardware device available on selected motherboard models.

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.

 

It's been almost exactly a year since Razer introduced its Lycosa gaming keyboard and it looks like the company's decided to celebrate by rolling out a new, slightly updated model. From the looks of it, the Lycosa Mirror (pictured above) is identical in most respects to its predecessor, with the exception of a new high-gloss mirror finish on the keys (as opposed to rubber), and some "enhanced backlighting." Those looking to head in the opposite direction can also now opt for Razer's new Arctosa keyboard (check it after the break), which does away with the backlighting and non-slip rubber finish altogether but hangs on to the usual programmable macro and media keys. You can look for it to be available in both silver on black and black on black versions for $50 next month, while the Lycosa Mirror will set you back $80 when it lands in December.

Razer rolls out Lycosa Mirror, Arctosa gaming keyboards - Engadget

 

Another basket of pictures of X58 Mobo, but this time from Foxconn.

Foxconn X58 Mobo in Pics by UneIT

 

MSI is much renowned for its mid-range solid-quality mainboards, but this time it seems MSI want to shift its traditional look as a mainstream supplier to a enthusiast feeder.

MSI introduced a lot of new stuff with this X58 Platinum board, and this is the refined DrMOS cooling system.

Dual Giga NICs, though from Realtek.  

All around the board are these elegant blue LEDs. Beautiful.

Backplate from Foxconn and the LGA-1366 Retention kit.

Quick buttons are aboard. Neat design. Pay attention to the black one named OLED2. You can view all the cool functions it can bring to us. Below is the demonstration in real use.  

And how about this? The coolest startup screen I ever had seen.

Not only beautiful as this very luxury design MSI had defined Eclipse is, it can truly perform, and perform stunningly.

Prices for these super processors were reported here. Stay tuned for more test on Core i7’s performance.

3DMark 06 CPU score at 3.6GHz

Looks into Intel X58 Motheboard from MSI and Tests by UneIT

ThermalTake introduced Xpressar - world's first computer case with a DC inverter type micro refrigeration cooling system! According to ThermalTake, the Xpressar RCS100 case keeps your components 20°C cooler than a liquid cooling system.
The Xpressar RCS100 is a quite big supertower case, it measures 605 x 250 x 660mm and weighs 22.2kg. There's support for micro ATX and ATX motherboards, seven 5.25" devices, five 3.5" devices and 10 expansion cards. The case is made out of 1.0mm SECC steel and features an aluminum front door, the design of the case looks a bit like the Xaser VI and it has several nice features such as a removable motherboard tray, cable management, a sliding hood and an adjustable PSU bridge. Furthermore, the front also features a compartment with I/O ports, this includes 2x e-SATA, 4x USB 2.0, 1x FireWire IEEE 1394 and HD audio.
The most interesting thing about this case is the phase-change cooling system, the Xpressar features a micro vapor-compression refrigeration system, which is a method similar to the one used for air-conditioning. It has a compressor, condenser, expansion valve, evaporator and intelligent IC controller. The cooling system uses a circulating liquid refrigerant as the medium which absorbs and removes heat from the space to be cooled and subsequently rejects that heat elsewhere. The refrigeration cooling system is compatible with Intel LGA775 and LGA1366 (Nehalem) sockets and the compressor uses a max of 50W.

The scheme below explains how it works and more info can be read over here.

ThermalTake claims the Xpressar cooling solution performs significantly better than air cooling and liquid cooling. The firm ran tests on a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor and found the Xpressar kept the processor at a relatively chilly 35°C at full load with a noise level of only 20dBA. According to ThermalTake, that's 20°C better than liquid cooling and more than 40°C better than air cooling but I have some serious doubts about these results. It strikes me odd that a non-overclocked Core 2 Duo E8400 with a decent air cooler would reach over 75°C and shut down.

Phase-change cooling for computers isn't exactly new, but AFAIK this is one of the first cases that integrates it nicely. Besides the refrigeration cooling, the Xpressar also supports a 140mm front intake fan, 140mm top exhaust fan, two 140mm bottom intake fans and a 140mm VGA intake fan but those are all optional.

In short, XPRESSAR, this world first DC inverter type micro refrigeration cooling system customized for PC chassis, has minimized the compressor widely applied in air conditioners and refrigerators commonly seen in our everyday lives, and placed it inside the computer case to cool the extreme heating sources of your systems. The built-in intelligent IC controller, the part making this news valuable, will then be keeping the temperatures constant and stable to preventing condensations at the same time.

More details and photos can be found at the Xpressar website.
Unfortunately the case isn't compatible with all motherboards. Here's a list of compatible motherboards from ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI:

MSI: P45 Diamond / P45 Platinum / P45D3 Platinum / P7N Diamond (Only for one VGA card plug in 4th slot) / P7N2 Diamond (Only for one VGA card plug in 4th slot) / X48C Platinum (Only for one VGA card plug in 4th slot)

Gigabyte: EP45-DQ6 / EP45T Extreme (DDR3) / EP45 Extreme (DDR2) / X48T-DQ6 (DDR3) / X48-DQ6 (DDR2)

Asus: Blitz Formula / P5Q / P5QC / P5Q Pro / P5Q Deluxe / P5E Deluxe

ThermalTake Xpressar is the first micro refrigerated case

Sub US$60 for 512MB GDDR3 card

It seems like AMD is going to keep putting pressure on Nvidia in the graphics card market as Tom's Hardware Taiwan has scored some AMD slides which reveals the pricings of the RV710 and the most expensive card is expected to end up somewhere between US$49-59.
The cards will use GDDR3 memory, at least initially, with a 256MB version coming in at as little as US$39-49. A DDR2 version is expected to become available slightly later on for a sub US$39 price.
It doesn't seem like AMD is willing to give Nvidia any kind of head room and the company seem pretty sure that even its DDR2 version will beat the recently announced Geforce 9400GT.
The site is also suggesting that the retail names for the RV710 will be the Radeon HD 4550 and Radeon HD 4350, although we wouldn't put too much trust in this quite as yet, since there's no real reason for AMD to step away from its current naming scheme.
More here in Chinese

Fudzilla

 

Revised GTX 260 rumored to be coming this month.. GTX 270 ??

NVIDIA will be quietly beefing up the power of their GTX 260 cards later this month, suspects the website Fudzilla. Currently, the GTX 260 has a GT200 GPU core that has 8 banks of 24 shader processors enabled, leading to 192 shaders. The new GTX 260 is going to have one less bank disabled, so that means it'll have 9 banks of 24 shader processors, which adds up to 216 shaders altogether.

At this point, it is a bit too early to tell what the new naming scheme may be. Perhaps it is possible that NVIDIA will do what they did with the 9800 GTX -- to better compete with ATI's HD 4850, they added a bit of horsepower to the 9800 GTX, and renamed it the 9800 GTX+. So maybe we will have a GTX 260+ ?  However, the GTX 260 has not been out all that long though, so NVIDIA might be hesitant to rename the new GTX 260's to prevent annoying customers that have already purchased one. GTX 270? Who knows -- NVIDIA's naming schemes have been all over the place during the last six months, making it fairly difficult to anticipate their next name. 

Whatever the new name will be (or whether there will even be a new name at all), the revised GTX 260 will be selling for about $50 more than it is now. If the new GTX 260 sells for $300 or $350, it will compete well against the HD 4870 in both price and performance. If these rumors turn out to be true, it also seems reasonable that NVIDIA would further cut the price of the GTX 280 with the release of the new GTX 260.

As many of you know, the ball is in NVIDIA's court right now. The GTX 260 and GTX 280 came out in June, and where soon after upstaged by the launch of ATI's HD 4850 and HD 4870. While the GTX 280 was much more expensive than the HD 4870, it did out-perform the ATI card in a reasonable number of benchmarks, making it an attractive purchase to some willing to pay top-bucks for the best. The GTX 260 on the other hand, was less attractive, and less competitive -- it was more expensive than the HD 4850 and HD 4870, and in most games, slower than either of those ATI cards.

Revised GTX 260 rumored to be coming this month - Neoseeker News Article

 

Worried that retailers might be running out of utter crap to sell? Been looking for that perfect accessory to go with your "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps" sign? Enter the USB-powered, soda can-shaped anion humidifier. Not only will this magical and totally necessary device clean the air around you and re-energize your fat, lazy body, but it will look cool while doing it -- you know, just sitting there being all soda-can-badass. When you absolutely, positively can't find anything else to do with $24.99, the "Portable Can Shape USB Office Home Miniature Anion Humidifier" is there.

engadget

Saving the Biggest News for Last

NVIDIA has always been known for having a strong marketing team and the relative success of NVIDIA's first hosted trade show is evidence of that.  Apparently though the NVIDIA team was scrambling to come off the show with some hard news that would excite the core gamers and in a last minute move to save the opportunity of having hundreds of press at your disposal, NVIDIA dropped a bomb shell of a news story on us at the 11th hour.  
We have known for some time now that NVIDIA would not be producing a chipset for Bloomfield, Intel's consumer products based around the Nehalem architecture we detailed just this week.  This of course raised the question of where SLI would fit into what will obviously become the new de facto standard for high end gaming systems.  NVIDIA answered with the announcement they would allow the nForce 200 chip to be implemented by board manufacturers for SLI support in a similar fashion to how the original Intel Skulltrail boards were released.  From out talks with board manufacturers though, not many were planning on implementing the chip due to heat issues, board layout and design problems and it just in general being another headache to worry about with a new product launch.  NVIDIA took that feedback to heart it would seem and came up with this:
NVIDIA is going to allow the Intel X58 chipset to natively support SLI graphics configurations.
Let me let that sink in.  
No need for an nForce 200, no need for any special logic of any kind, no need for an NVIDIA product but the graphics cards themselves.  Obviously this is GREAT news for the gamer - now we can finally get high quality motherboards that are reasonably priced and will run both NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire GPU configurations.  We are very excited about the idea of unifying our platform selections for the hardware leaderboard, for using a single motherboard for all our graphics card testing and just excited about what it means for high-end PC gaming in the big picture.  
We should note that this SLI licensing arrangement will ONLY affect upcoming X58 motherboards - this will not be retroactive to motherboards using X48, X38 or any other chipset.  Why?  Because NVIDIA already offers SLI solutions for those processors and decided they wanted to maintain the control on that platform.  The driver that supports SLI on X58 chipset motherboards that meet the certified criteria will be available in time for the Bloomfield/Nehalem processor launch in late fall / early winter.  Expect to see reviews of the new Intel CPU using SLI technology as well.
But...it raised some interesting issues that needed to be addressed including the licensing of the SLI technology, the previously talked about "technical requirements" that required NVIDIA logic and much more.  Read below for my thoughts.  
What PCI Express Configurations are Supported
I am happy to report that with the Intel X58 chipset NVIDIA will supporting basically the entire gamut of PCIe division options.  Motherboards with as few as two PCIe x16 slots and as many as four PCIe x16 slots will be able to run SLI.  Interestingly, though NVIDIA doesn't have a four-card SLI option today, they are supporting 3-Way SLI + a four graphics card for PhysX in addition to standard 3-Way SLI, 2-Way SLI and Quad SLI with two dual-GPU graphics boards.

You can see in this diagram that pretty much all the options you expect to see on an X58 motherboard will be able to run NVIDIA SLI.  What is actually unsurprising is to see NVIDIA continue to try and push the nForce 200 chip as a "top speed" option that will allow for up to four full x16 PCIe slots.  Even NVIDIA admitted that PCIe bandwidth is only limited in a few CUDA applications and that consumers would like never know the difference.  But they were still adament that some board vendors would make boards with the nForce 200 chip as a way to differentiate their product - I hope not and think we'll only see the ASUS X58 motherboard that has already been developed with the nForce 200 ever be released.
The Certification Process - what your board needs to succeed
While this announcement is great news, do not think that every Intel X58 motherboard released will have SLI support.  To the contrary, NVIDIA will now be hand testing each motherboard model that a board vendor would like to enable SLI on for compatibility and approval before they can use the SLI logo or name.  While this at first seems like a positive thing to do (cutting down on user issues) in reality it is all part of business decision to continue to control the SLI brand.
Motherboards that wish to have the SLI technology enabled will have to submitted to NVIDIA's team and then the motherboard vendor will get a "cookie" - a piece of code that goes into the SBIOS on the motherboard that will be searched for by the NVIDIA GPU driver to enable the SLI technology.  This is an attempt to get around the issue of passing out completely unlocked drivers that could enable SLI on all motherboards by requiring a hardware verification of some kind.  It is likely that this cookie will be cracked within days if not hours of the platforms getting into enthusiast hands but NVIDIA is really only hoping to control OEMs and ODMs in this regard.  
Of course, nothing is free in NVIDIA-world: motherboard vendors and system builders that wish to make an SLI-ready X58 motherboard will be paying a fee.  Call it a licensing fee, a royalty, whatever you want but the fact is that NVIDIA wants some cash for the SLI name and they are going to get it; with or without selling you a physical chip like the nForce 200.  I am actually curious how close the price of the nForce 200 chip was to the price of the SLI licensing agreement...
The "Technical Requirements"
One question I asked was why we had been told for years that SLI required the special logic in the nForce chipsets and/or nForce 200 chip only now to find it working fine on a third-party's hardware?  Could it be that all this time the "magic" of the nForce and SLI technical requirements was made up and used to create a business model for their chipset division?  While the real answer is yes in my opinion, NVIDIA would never admit as much.  Instead we were told that NVIDIA had simply found a way around the two hardware "requirements" of SLI: PW Shortcut and Broadcast.  The PCIE Gen 2 standard implemented the PW Shortcut technology and the NVIDIA driver team apparently just now found a way to implement the function of Broadcast in software rather than hardware.  
Update (8/28/08): Apparently some people took this paragraph to mean that NVIDIA started SLI in order to create a chipset business - that is not what I meant.  Rather, I am simply saying that NVIDIA created the "technical requirements" for SLI in order to keep the technology solely on their own chipset platforms.

Our original 3-Way SLI test system

This announcement today basically proves my contention with the nForce and SLI "technical issues" from day 1 - if NVIDIA had just admitted that SLI was kept on its own core logic solely for business reasons they would have looked bad at the time but would have saved face today. p
How does this change nForce nGeneral?
One interesting thought from all of this discussion is how today's announcement paints the light on the nForce chipset in the long run.  Obviously we have talked in length about the chances of NVIDIA leaving the chipset market after their current cycle of already developed chipsets is out, and now the discussion is renewed.  While I still believe that NVIDIA will continue to make chipsets for Intel and AMD processors for the foreseeable future, all with integrated graphics cores in them, I think the day of the high-end chipset from NVIDIA is done.  We have known for some time that the only real reason NVIDIA's enthusiasts chipsets remained on the market was for SLI support and now that X58 will support SLI technology natively, and that NVIDIA has said they are not making a Bloomfield chipset of their own, it's hard to see this change reverting.  In other words, if NVIDIA expects consumers to accept a revoking of SLI licensing on future chipsets they are going to piss a lot of people off.  
Final Thoughts
I know this editorial is coming off in a rather negative light - and I don't really want that to be the case.  The fact that NVIDIA is finally willing to license the SLI technology and let it run natively on the Intel X58 chipset is tremenous news for gamers and the market and is a step in the right direction for the "ecosystem" that NVIDIA was promoting at NVISION08.  But it also raises a lot of interesting questions that are being addressed in this editorial and will be in debate for some time come.

PC Perspective - Bombshell of NVISION08: SLI goes native on Intel X58

Microsoft is planning to release "Windows Feature Pack for Storage" which will add support for master style optical burning on Blu-ray discs. The pack has been in non-disclosure laced beta testing for quiet some time, but can now be seen on the Microsoft Connect website. When released, the pack will upgrade Windows XP and Vista, as well as Server 2003 and 2008.
Currently there is no planned release date for the Feature Pack.

Source: Microsoft Connect

Blu-ray.com - Microsoft Adds Blu-ray Support to Windows

NVIDIA System Tools with ESA Support

Version:
6.02

Release Date:
June 17, 2008

Operating System:
Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit,
Windows Vista 32-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit

Language:
U.S. English

File Size:
74.3 MB

The NVIDIA System Tools installation package includes:
1. NVIDIA Performance Group (v6.02.08.01) add-on to the NVIDIA Control Panel

• nForce MCPs
  – Enables system tuning and profiles for clocks, voltages, timings, and fans
  – Includes support for Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) components
  – Displays detailed system information
• GeForce GPUs
  – Enables GPU overclocking

2. NVIDIA System Monitor (v6.02.08.01) standalone application

• nForce MCPs
  – Enables system monitoring for clocks, voltages, timings, and fans
  – Includes support for Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) components
• GeForce GPUs
  – Enables GPU temperature monitoring

3. NVIDIA System Update (v2.00.41.05) add-on to the NVIDIA Control Panel

• Automatically checks for nForce and GeForce driver updates
• Adds ability to update your system bios
• Includes support to update firmware of Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) components

  

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_system_tools_6.02.html

NVIDIA System Tools with ESA Support

Sure, it's all well and good to play around with the Folding@Home client on toys like the PS3, but if you're really serious about out-nerding the rest of the pack, you need big-boy hardware, like this 51-card NVIDIA-based rig built by nitteo of the overclock.net forums. That's 51 8800-series GPUs on 13 MSI P6N Diamond mobos, enough for an estimated 265,200 folding points per day when they all go online -- and we're guessing that number will go up when that new CUDA-based folding client released yesterday is installed.

What is Folding?
In the most basic of terms, Folding at Home is the mimicking and logging of the way a Protein Folds. A Protein that MIS-FOLDS produces an ab-normal cell which in turn can lead to a cancerous cell. Learning how a Protein SHOULD fold will lead us to understanding to how it MIS-FOLDS. Hence, Folding at Home.
Here is a link to Stanfords Main Page for more info. http://folding.stanford.edu/
Why I fold?
Cancer has had a big effect on my family, and folding is where I feel I can fight back.
I fight cancer on two fronts, my business and folding.
I own a Home Care Business where I send nurses to homes to care for the elderly AT THEIR homes. One aspect of my business is we take care of Chemo-Therapy patients at home also. We take care of their ailments while on Chemo.
In Miami, my parents own a Hospice Staffing Company, where they send Nurses to take care of patients on their last months of life. Those deemed to have less than 6 months to live.
This is where I get my passion for Folding from. Seeing/hearing/talking and interacting with people who suffer from all these diseases makes you want to do something about it.
How can I fold too?
Join us in fighting Cancer when you are surfing the internet, Download the program at:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download
Here is a thread about why members of our Team Fold also:
http://www.overclock.net/overclock-n...al-i-fold.html
Here are pics of the "farm" part of my folding farm.
Sorry they are not as cable friendly as I wanted them. When I have time I will cable manage better:

Lots of boxes (not all of them)

The Command Center.

Top Half of the shelf with 5 Rigs of 20 GPUs

Bottom Half of the shelf with 3 rigs of 12 GPUs

Closeup of Rig #1, 4x Gigabyte 8800GT 256mb / P6N-Diamond

Closeup of Rig #2, 4x MSI 8800GT 512mb / P6N-Diamond

Closeup of Rig #3, 4x Asus 8800GT 512mb / P6N-Diamond

Top 3 rigs into 1 HD Cage


(Middle Shelf) Rig #4, 4x eVGA 8800GS / P6N Diamond

(Middle Shelf) Rig #5, 4x eVGA 8800GS / P6N Diamond

Closeup of Rig #6 (#7, #8 are exactly the same) 4x eVGA 8800GS / P6N Diamond
I still have 1 more P6N-Diamond + 4x PNY 8800GT to build, when I have the time.

-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
EDIT: Just to clear the air. I have a total of 16 rigs:
- 4 rigs have 1x GPU
- 1 rig has 3x GPU
and 11 P6N-Diamonds currently:
> 8 have 4x GPUs (pictured below)
> 2 have 3x GPUs (waiting on the other 2 GPUs)
> 1 (un-built) with 4x GPUs, waiting on components
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
46/51 GPUs online.

nitteo's F@H GPU2 FARM - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net

With pure innovative strength, Cooler Master, the leader in enthusiast computer components, has unleashed yet another prevailing arsenal to compete in the full-tower chassis segment. Proud and robust in its appearance, the HAF 932 presents its sturdy sentinel housing and revolutionary High Air Flow structure to enhance and protect any hardware component that is worthy of the highest performance.

 

 

 

Manual

6.32MB
2008.08.12
HAF 932

Product Sheet

1.36MB
2008.08.12
HAF 932

Cooler Master - Ultimate provider of Computer Chassis | Cooler | Power Supply

This is a video of NVIDIA's GPU-accelerated PhysX technology in action. The GPU is calculating physics for thousands of spheres, each with their own individual physical properties, to create a dynamic fluid system.

With a little trick you can get up to 45 percent more performance out of the single-player mode of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. At least if you use AMD's Crossfire or a Radeon X2 card like the Radeon HD 3870 X2 or the future HD 4870 X2.

Radeon HD 4870 X2: Full throttle with the right profile.

To receive the benefit you just need to rename the single-player launch file "iw3sp.exe” to "iw3mp.exe”, which is the name of the multiplayer launch file of Call of Duty 4 - make sure to create a backup of the original multi player file first.
This enables the Crossfire AFR mode - in our benchmark level this is the case at least, since without it the Radeon HD 4870 X2 isn't much faster than a single GPU version. With this trick you can, depending on the settings and played level, receive up to 45 percent more fps in Call of Duty 4.

"Performance boost by renaming the "".exe"" file of Call of Duty 4"
4xAA/16xAF
8xAA/16xAF

1.680x1.050
34,80%
45,20%

1.920x1.200
38,40%
40,70%

2.560x1.600
42,50%
34,50%

Actually we cannot think of any reason why AMD doesn't activate the Crossfire performance boost for the single-player. Up to now we haven't received an answer to our inquiry about this matter from the Canadian GPU specialists.

Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Call of Duty 4 at 1.680x1.050 with 4x FSAA/16x AF; in the benchmark: HD4870, HD4870 X2 with and without renamed exe file.

Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Call of Duty 4 at 1.680x1.050 with 8x FSAA/16x AF; in the benchmark: HD4870, HD4870 X2 with and without renamed exe file.

Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Call of Duty 4 at 1.920x1.200 with 4x FSAA/16x AF; in the benchmark: HD4870, HD4870 X2 with and without renamed exe file.

Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Call of Duty 4 at 1.920x1.200 with 8x FSAA/16x AF; in the benchmark: HD4870, HD4870 X2 with and without renamed exe file.

Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Call of Duty 4 at 2.560x1.600 with 4x FSAA/16x AF in the benchmark: HD4870, HD4870 X2 with and without renamed exe file.

Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Call of Duty 4 at 2.560x1.600 with 8x FSAA/16x AF; in the benchmark: HD4870, HD4870 X2 with and without renamed exe file.

PCGH - Test/Benchmark: PCGH Tuning: Crossfire X performance boost for Call of Duty 4

AMD to Nvidia: Two chips are better than one

Advanced Micro Devices announced on Monday its most powerful graphics technology to date, going after Nvidia in the rarified--and closely watched--enthusiast game segment.

This also marks the current performance pinnacle of AMD's strategy to beat Nvidia at the high end by building comparatively smaller chips and then ganging them together for better performance.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics board houses two 4870 graphics processing units (GPUs) and competes with Nvidia's fastest board, based on the GTX 280. In chip-to-chip competition, Nvidia's GTX 280 generally beats a single 4870 in performance because it's bigger and faster: the Nvidia chip packs 1.4 billion transistors onto one chip, while ATI has about 950 million.

But because AMD puts two chips on one board and has improved chip-to-chip communication, the 4870 X2 is is expected to equal or exceed the Nvidia chip.

AMD has introduced a more advanced cross-GPU connection technology based on the PCIe Generation 2 standard. And the 4807 X2 can use two gigabytes of memory, compared to most high-end boards that use a maximum of one gigabyte. It also uses memory based on the new GDDR5 standard.

AMD says the 4870 X2 delivers over 3X the bandwidth of the its previous dual-GPU board, the 3870 X2

One of the central challenges for AMD is to make sure the performance scales up efficiently when more chips are added. This is the crux of AMD's strategy: instead of building large, power-hungry--albeit fast--chips like Nvidia, AMD is building somewhat smaller chips that can be ganged together for better performance.

To date, the results for multi-GPU performance have been problematic, typically another board will deliver only 1.5 times better performance. AMD is targeting 1.8 the performance with two chips running games in high resolution, and with four of them, about 2.5, according to earlier comments from Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.

Game PC vendors expect good things. "(The 4870 X2 is) more than a match for a single Nvidia GTX 280, and depending on the title sometimes a match for two GTX 280s," said Kelt Reeves, CEO of game PC maker Falcon Northwest, responding to an email query. "Drivers are now ATI's only weak area, so the 4870 X2's performance and scaling with two 4870 X2s (QuadFire) often varies widely from title to title," he said.

In September, AMD is also expected to bring out the HD 4850 X2, a dual-chip board with slightly lower performance. The higher-end 4870 X2 is rated at 2.4 TFLOPs (or teraFLOPs a common yardstick for raw graphics chip compute power) and communicates with memory at 230GB per second, while the 4850 X2 is rated at 2.0 TFLOPs and has a memory bandwidth of 128GB/sec.

Both boards will integrate 1600 stream processors, which do parallel processing on streams of data.

The 4870 X2 is priced at $549. Nvidia preemptively responded to this by cutting the price on the GTX 280 to $499 in July.

The lower-end 4850 X2 will be available in September for $399.

AMD to Nvidia: Two chips are better than one | Nanotech: The Circuits Blog - CNET News.com

AMD announced that it has started shipping the new 790GX graphics chipset targeted at gaming enthusiasts. The chipset features enhanced SB750 southbridge, ATI Radeon HD 3300 chip integration, scalable ATI CrossFireX graphics technology, and Phenom chips with higher overclocking thanks to the new 'Advanced Clock Calibration' technology. The 790GX is slotted below AMD's existing 790FX chip, which is targeted at the high-end gaming segment. AMD claims the 790GX chip is the world's fastest motherboard GPU (mGPU), with Mark 3D Vantage entry mode scores in excess of 2900.

The new Advanced Clock Calibration technology allows 790GX chipset to overclock Phenom CPU systems at clock speeds higher than 3.0 GHz by "significant tuning enhancements" on the new SB750 southbridge for better performance. The SB750 southbridge has been introduced to the 790GX chipset for optimum performance with Phenom processor based systems.
The 790GX chip has built-in ATI Radeon HD 3300 GPU chip which offers scalable high-definition gaming performance on the latest DirectX10 games. The chip's performance can boosted further when paired with one or two ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards to scale up to a higher performance configuration. In 790GX the ATI Avivo HD offers full 1080p HD on performance config systems with support for the latest codecs like H.264 and MPEG-2 for better HD visuals. This chip uses the AMD Unified Video Decoder, which redirects HD playback to the GPU, rather than the CPU, and delivers a better visual experience without frames drops or lags.
The chipset also features AMD's Sideport 'performance cache' memory technology to boost the performance by 10 to 15 per cent and enable the single memory chip to run at speeds of 400Mhz and 533Mhz with a top speed of 667Mhz.
Support for AMD 790GX has been confirmed by major industry players like Asus, Foxconn, ASRock, Biostar Group, Gigabyte and MSI computers. Check here for AMD 790GX's detailed chipset specifications.

Techtree.com India > News > Hardware > AMD Ships 790GX Gaming Chip

 

While Intel's Larrabee might not be a household name for consumers just yet, it's certainly at the table where Nvidia and AMD/ATI eat. The many-core (8 to 48, at least, according to that Intel graphic) x86 chip runs all your existing apps while tossing in support for OpenGL and DirectX thus eliminating the need for a discrete graphics chip. At least that's the plan. While the exact number of cores remains a secret as does the performance of each core compared to current GPUs, given the importance Intel places on Larrabee, it's reasonable to assume that an 8-core chip will launch in 2009 or 2010 with comparable performance to GPUs on the market at that time. Intel does say that Larrabee cores will scale "almost linearly" (read: within 10%) in games; that means that a 16-core chip will offer nearly twice the performance of an 8-core chip, 32-cores twice that of 16, and so on. Apparently this has already been proven in-house with Intel name-dropping Larrabee-coded titles such as Gears of War, FEAR, and Half-Life 2, Episode 2. It's no coincidence then to hear that Intel's first Larrabee product will target PC gamers. Click through if you're just dying to read about Larrabee's 1024 bits-wide bi-directional ring network and other bits of technical wonderment sure to create at least the hint of a silicon malaise.
[Via Engadget][Via CNET and Washington Post, Thanks Dan R.]

• Read

Conclusion

Nvidia has finally done its job thoroughly in the chipset market: its nForce 790i Ultra SLI is almost perfectly matched in both performance and overclocking to Intel’s X48 Express. The 790i Ultra SLI has a far greater number of features, however, chief among these three x16 graphics slots, two of which sport PCI Express 2.0 bandwidth.

You might have thought we’d say that the chief feature was SLI support, but that’s a driver restriction, not a chipset feature. If not for Nvidia’s persistence in withholding SLI support from other chipsets, the company might not have stayed in this particular market long enough to develop the extraordinary 790i Ultra SLI.

Some readers might be annoyed by Nvidia’s persistence, as the firm had formerly used SLI as a sledgehammer to force mediocre motherboards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/motherboard into the market. But the long-term benefit of improved features is undeniable, and the 790i Ultra SLI has become Nvidia’s first LGA775 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_T product that we’d consider buying even if we didn’t plan to use SLI.

Which 790i Ultra SLI motherboard would we choose? One product stood out consistently by being the best overall performer, with the highest stable CPU clock speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_rate , superior high-speed memory support, and the lowest VRM temperature. That product is the Asus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus Striker II Extreme.

Zoom Zoom

Asus deserves an award for its effort. And so, for its leadership among 790i Ultra SLI motherboards in every important category, the Striker II Extreme receives our highest honor, the “Best of Tom’s Hardware” award.

Another motherboard stood out not for class-leading performance, but instead for its lower price. At $350, the XFX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFX 790i Ultra SLI is a full $100 cheaper than the Asus Striker II Extreme. The XFX might not win any awards today, but nearly-matching the top model America's Next Top Model in features, performance and CPU overclocking with a product that costs around 25% less certainly deserves an honorable mention. The XFX 790i Ultra SLI could be the perfect motherboard for anyone who wants the Striker II Extreme but would rather put the price difference into other components.

Click Here to read the full review.

Conclusion - Tom's Hardware : 790i Ultra SLI Motherboards Compared

Dell customers are unhappy with the BIOS patch released by Dell to counter the problem with faulty NVIDIA GPUs, and quite rightly so! Here’s just a small selection of comments left by Dell customers on the Direct2Dell blog:

“IMHO having the BIOS activate the fans sooner to compensate for a defective chipset is a band aid solution.”

“Well, since this BIOS update won’t mysteriously change the die packaging material, the only real thing you can do is to extent warranty or premium support to the amount of years you wanna use the computer, and still then live with the fact that your computer could die on you any time.”

“So rather than replacing the faulty parts you are going to just turn up the fans, at the expense of battery life and noise.  I would rather just leave the bios as it is and get a proper fix if the problem occurs.  Even if the problem occurs out of warranty I think there is a strong case for Dell fixing it for free since there is an admitted manufacturing defect.”

“With this solution, you try to push the issue outside the customers warranty-time.. but what’s after that time? will you repair the notebooks for free?”

“nice to see that a hardware issue is fixed by software update.   how is a physical defect suppose to be fixed by software? time to step up to the plate dell and start offering a replacement device.”

“I tend to agree with some of the other comments. A bios update to turn on cooling fans is not the appropriate response when I have spent approx. $2000 on an XPS that I now fear will have a shortened life span.”

I think that customers are right to be worried. If there’s a problem with the GPUs in a range of Dell notebooks then a BIOS update is little more than a band-aid and isn’t going to fix the underlying problem. If I’d shelled out $1,000+ on a notebook and discovered that the GPU had a problem, with it where it could go dead at any time, I think it’d get pretty emotional about it.

Affected Dell notebooks are as follows:

• Inspiron 1420
• Latitude D630
• Latitude D630c
• Dell Precision M2300
• Vostro Notebook 1310
• Vostro Notebook 1400
• Vostro Notebook 1510
• Vostro Notebook 1710
• XPS M1330
• XPS M1530

Source: ZDNet Hardware 2.0 Blog

Available for pre-order, in the Czech Republic

It was due to happen at some stage, but the first Radeon HD 4870 X2 pricing information has made its way online thanks to an online reseller in the Czech Republic who has listed a Sapphire card as available for pre-order.
This is a 2GB card, so it's top of the range, and according to the Website, the GPU will be clocked at 750MHz with the memory at 3.6GHz. It doesn't look like we're in for any surprises with this first generation card, as it looks very much like a pair of HD 4870's stuck onto the same PCB.
Price-wise, you're looking at €429.50 including VAT (338.658 GBP), which seems quite reasonable considering the specifications of the card. The company doesn't list any expected delivery date, so it's anyone's guess when it'll be in stock.
You can pre-order one here

www.fudzilla.com

Creative fixes Dolby and DTS decoding for X-Fi

New drivers are out, pinch yourself !!

That sure took some time, but it seems like Creative has finally gotten its act together and fixed the hardware Dolby Digital and DTS decoding for its X-Fi cards. Creative has also added DVD Audio playback, a feature which worked under Windows XP but not Vista.
It's disappointing that it has taken Creative nearly two years to add this functionality in the drivers and the company has been very slow at releasing new drivers for its X-Fi range of card on a whole. The last driver update was back in March and that fixed issues with PCs having 4GB of RAM, among other things.
The new driver also addresses an issue that could cause your system to crash in the Audio Creation mode. Apart from this, there seems to be little else that's new in this driver release. The driver is intended for all X-Fi cards except the X-Fi Xtreme Audio.
You can download it here

Fudzilla - Creative fixes Dolby and DTS decoding for X-Fi

Today's samples are delivered by MSI and Zotac. Both companies offer overclocked GTX 280s, which run with 702/1,400/1,150 MHz. In theory this should allow for a performance boost of 5 to 15 percent. The candidates:
- MSI N280GTX-T2D1G-OC
- Zotac Geforce GTX 280 Amp-Edition
The announced Asus ENGTX280 TOP/HTDP/1G is still missing. It got a core clock of "only” 670 MHz but the shaders run at 1,460 MHz.
GTX 280 OC: Performance and Conclusion

Our Extrem FSAA Benchmarks already showed that the GTX 280 is really responsive to increased clock speeds. The slightly more decent tuning of the manufacturers results - depending on game and settings - in a performance boost of about 10 percent. If you overclock a card yourself anyway, you don't need to pay the higher price.

 

 

PCGH - Test/Benchmark: GT200 Review: Benchmarks of overclocked MSI and Zotac GTX 280 graphics cards.

In our PCGH Benchmark Review, we already put Nvidia's Geforce GTX 280 to the acid test. Now we run the most challenging FSAA modes.

Today's performance check deals with high quality FSAA. Starting with 16xQ, we go on with 16xS, 32xS and 16x OGSSAA. 16xS is a hybrid mode consisting of 4x Multi- (MSAA) and 4x Supersampling (SSAA). 32xS also contains 4x SSAA but combines it with 8xQ-MSAA. Among gamers paying special attention to quality, this mode isn't just seen as beautiful but also as extremely hardware hungry. That isn't really surprising. Because of 4x SSAA the whole scenery is calculated with four times the size of the actual resolution. The combination with the 8x Multisampling results in a setting that breaks the neck of graphics cards with only 512 MiByte video memory. On top of that we also activate Transparency Anti Aliasing based on Supersampling.
16x respectively 4x4 Supersampling forces the graphics card to calculate every axis with the quadrupled resolution. This results in an excellent texture and shader smoothing. Combined with 16:1 AF via the driver the anisotropic filtering is de facto done at a rate of 64:1. You might guess that even the GTX 280 gets into trouble there.
All the Supersampling modes can be activated via the tool Nhancer only.

Results
Yesterday's benchmark revealed the strengths of Nvidia's new graphics flagship: high resolutions combined with FSAA. With Supersampling FSAA already at 1,680x1,050 calculation is already more complex than with 2,560x1,600 and normal FSAA. Thus the GTX 280 can show off again. In every test the transistor monster can take place itself in front of the Geforce 8800 - the complexer the calculation the bigger the gap between them. Especially with 16x OGSSAA and 32xS the GT200 card is even able to get playable frame rates from time to time. The "time-honored” G80 board is out classed.

PCGH - Test/Benchmark: GT200 Review: Extreme FSAA benchmarks and overclocking

Nvidia’s latest graphics cards and chips throw down the gauntlet to Intel and AMD. Go behind the scenes with this guide to the big technologies including PhysX, CUDA, and games like Far Cry 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky.

To hear Nvidia tell it, integrated graphics just aren’t going to cut it, and a discrete GPU is still vital. They point to the 87% of top PC games with a recommended spec above the Intel integrated graphics specification to support their claim.
More than ever, a CPU and GPU work in concert, so that an optimised configuration of 256MB GeForce card and dual core processor will outperform a quad core with a 128MB GeForce card. In other words, the GPU doesn’t have to limit itself to gaming, and that’s where a whole raft of new initiatives from Nvidia step in to do a polished song and dance number.
A simple example of how the GPU can go beyond gaming is a little app called PicLens, by Cooliris, that displays Google, Flickr, Youtube and Deviantart image searches as an interactive 3D wall that you can visually skim, pause, play a video thumbnail, or flick back and forth within coverflow-style. A GPU adds piclens motion blur and antialiasing, as well as much more power.

GeForce GTX200 and beyond
The GeForce GTX200 series, launched mid- June, incorporate the second generation unified architecture from Nvidia, but they are also parallel processors with 1.4 billion transistors, providing just under a teraflop of power from 240 processor cores. The first two cards to be released – the GeForce GTX260 and GTX280 – won’t be cheap, but from what we’ve seen, they’re immensely powerful.

Far Cry 2 uses a new engine called Dunia, designed to take advantage of the new GTX200 cards.

Tony Tomasi, Nvidia’s Vice President of Technical Marketing says it’s the largest, most powerful and most complex GPU ever made by chip manufacturer TSMC. Its complexity is exemplified by its two distinct modes; one dedicated to computation, and the other to graphics processing.
Around 80% of the GPU is dedicated to parallel computation, and the processor is designed to maximise throughput. Each of the 240 single-instruction, multiple thread (SIMT) cores is scalable and can communicate on-die, rather than having to go out to the memory system. Eight cores are grouped into a streaming multiprocessor with 16KB shared memory. That shared local memory is available to the programmer, so that the GPU can be optimised for different tasks. Three of those multiprocessors, together with L1 cache, creates an array, and there are 10 arrays that make up the GPU, along with a thread scheduler to manage the threads, and a 512bit memory subsystem.
Curtis Beeson, engineer at Nvidia, demonstrated the second personality via a graphics showcase. The latest iteration is a story-based demo, featuring a warrior facing down a Medusa (and coming to a stony end). The key features for the GTX200 series processors are new lighting effects, more photorealism, more than three million triangles per frame, improved DirectX 10 features such as geometry shading, and – in the demo we saw – hardware-generated petrification and transformation effects.

The GeForce GTX280 may look unassuming, but it packs a powerful punch

Tony Tamasi says that for graphics processing, the same basic elements that make up the parallel processor then have, in addition, a variety of specialised shaders, improved texture performance, a 1GB frame buffer and increased shader to texture ratio – all of which should make for cinematic quality gaming. Tomasi says Nvidia is aiming to balance shading and textures with floating point detection: “Focusing on one without the other can lead to awesomely fast DirectX 9 performance, but no real improvement for DirectX 10, so we balance it.”
Another thing Nvidia has been working on is power efficiency, trying to ensure that when a feature isn’t needed by the GPU, it uses no power at all. The GTX200 series, as a result, has more gradations of power available, so that the cards consume about 25W when idle, 32W while playing a Blu-ray disc, and 147W while running an intensive benchmark such as 3DMark06. For comparison, the GeForce 9800GTX uses around 45W while idle, 50W for Blu-ray and 80W for 3DMark06.
Tomasi also points out that 25W usage while idle isn’t too much more than the motherboard GPU generally uses. “If we can get our power low enough,” he said, “then you’ll get to a point where the discrete GPU uses less power than the motherboard GPU.”
The games to come
Nvidia acquired PhysX only 4 months ago, but within a month PhysX was running on GeForce, and it’s now incorporated into the new GTX 200 series GPUs.
PhysX is currently the only API that runs on both CPUs and GPUs, and it’s programmable using CUDA (see opposite). For PhysX, being part of Nvidia has meant a massive increase in the number of games signing up – more in a single month than in the previous two years as Ageia. For Nvidia, it means they can offer more to game designers and level designers. In the works are tools that increase the consistency between the modelling environment and the final game engine, and to help the creation of in-game objects and behaviours. This should all lead to richer games, even from smaller studios without massive design budgets. The first drivers porting across to the GeForce will be for the Unreal Engine, so if you run games based on that engine, you should see the influence of PhysX straight away on GeForce GTX200 series graphics cards.
The goals for the team behind Far Cry 2 is to not just have great static screenshots, but also to have the best looking dynamic beauty. The new installment is set in Africa, with lots of exterior environs and unlike most games, you really can go anywhere. Everywhere within the game is high resolution as you step up close to it – not just the plot-related areas.

There’s a new engine – Dunia – which the developers describe as being ‘kickass enough’ for the environment they want to create and they intend that Far Cry 2 will be the first of many games to use it. The demo we saw at Nvidia Editor’s Day on the GTX280 showed fabulously high resolution, high frame-rate, high-quality gameplay. There’s not just a full world: there’s also weather, 24-hour changes over four hours of game time, levels of intersecting shadows in the environment and independent behaviours for fire, trees and movements. Everything is animated, rather than programmed, and it looks amazing.

The goal for the Far Cry 2 team is not just to have great static screenshots, but also to have the best looking dynamic beauty. (Click image to enlarge)

Other games we saw showed off aspects of the new PhysX inclusion, Morpheme – which allows completely interactive tackling in American Football game Backbreaker, for example, as each player behaves independently. RealTime Worlds, but the makers of Grand Theft Auto, looks to be particularly ambitious, boasting thousands of simultaneously physical objects, sychronised to the computers of millions of players around the world, each with independent behaviour, so if you kick a can on your screen, it’ll richochet through someone elses, too.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky showed off improved, more realistic shadows and dynamic wetting as well as incredibly realistic volumetric smoke and lighting in its demo.
Tegra – perpetual motion machine anyone?
We had a sneak preview of Nvidia’s new low-power platform Tegra at the Nvidia Editor’s day, fitted into the shell of a 12in laptop, showing a 720p video on-screen. The whole operation consumed three Watts – which Nvidia claims is around 10% that used by the new Atom-based Eee PC. The Tegra is built with portable devices in mind, much like Intel’s Atom, but where Intel opted for a CPU, Tegra has an inbuilt CPU, GeForce GPU and controllers for all other core operations in just 144mm2.
Tiny size doesn’t mean tiny performance, though. Both models of Tegra code and decode 720p for up to 30 hours of playback, play Quake 3 at playable framerates or play up to 130 hours of audio. The Tegra 650 can also play 10 hours of 1080p on a single battery charge.
Nvidia is planning Tegra II and Tegra III over the next couple of years to continue meeting consumer expectations of power and energy efficiency. By early 2009, we’re likely to see Nvidia’s first Tegra-based Eee-killer, sporting the next generation of Windows Mobile operating systems.
CUDA – the powerhouse behind the chip
Over the last 15 years Nvidia has focused on the graphics pipeline, but more recently its been concentrating on programmability to extend the use of the GPU beyond gaming. GPGPU (General-Purpose computation on GPUs) started out in universities, using the Cg programming language to program shaders and run programs deep inside the graphics pipeline. CUDA lets you write the same kind of program and run it outside of the graphics pipeline. That meant that it had applications outside gaming, for computational methods and database management.
Not only that, but CUDA’s programming environment can control both CPU and GPU cores for maximum processing power. CUDA is included with everything Nvidia ships, from GeForce through to professional level Quadro and Tesla GPUs, so developers can work on a laptop before porting the application to a larger scale.
If you have a series 8 GeForce GPU, it’s CUDA capable – giving you a free processor with your GPU. Over 60,000 people are using CUDA worldwide in just that manner.
For scientists, it’s meant that programs and tools run 100 times faster. An example of CUDA’s impact is The US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, which used CUDA to trim a week off the month-long weather research and forecast calculations (used to predict the weather 4-5 days in advance).
The programmable graphics of CUDA also has applications in future gaming. Traditonally, GPUs can be used to render and simulate complex light scattering, including subsurface scattering, to create very realistic shapes and surfaces.
However, with most of the traditional rendering techniques, objects like a hairball are very difficult to create because of the interaction of light with complex geometry, and because of shadows. To recreate that effect requires very small pieces of geometry that are very time-consuming to generate.
Nvidia’s view is that the next generation of high quality rendering will mix APIs and programming with CUDA and other C/C++ languages using rasterisation and ray tracing. Nvidia is putting a lot of money into ray tracing – in particular, it acquired University of Utah spinoff RayScale as part of its plans. The downside is that raytracing is computationally intensive, and until recently GPUs couldn’t manage it. In the envisaged scenario, the GPU does the rendering and physical simulation – the parallel supercomputer doing its work – while lighting and reflections are handled by raytracing.
We were showed a demo of a car and plane created entirely on GPU, with first pass all done with rasteriser and all reflections done using a raytracer coded in CUDA. The demo included interobject reflections, which gaming engines can’t do, but ray-tracing can. Nvidia aim to enable real time rendering and ray-tracing in their next generation processors.
The types of performance improvement that CUDA can add are useful even for desktop applications, such as transcoding HD video to H.264 for portable video. Nvidia claims, for example, that a 2hr HD movie transcode takes 10 hours using 1.6 GHz dual-core and integrated graphics, 5hr 33min with a 3GHz quad-core and integrated graphics, but only 35mins using a 1.6GHz dual-core and a GeForce GTX280.
The exciting range of upcoming games, and the ability to speed up video and audio encoding are just a few of the areas where we’ll reap rewards in the near future.

Graphics Superguide: GeForce GTX200, CUDA, Dunia, Far Cry 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky > Features > PC Authority

Nvidia and AMD's multi-GPU solutions, SLI and Crossfire respectively, are full of ups and downs and while their progress seems to be rather slow, one Israel-based company, Lucid is saying

that revolution is just one chip away. Backed by investors like Giza Venture Capital, Genesis Partners and Intel Capital, Lucid is saying that is has built a solution that will "radically improve graphics performance for any kind of PC."
Named Hydra, Lucid's real-time distributed processing engine is a system-on-a-chip solution that will be able to stay between the CPU and the graphics cards and will direct graphic processing traffic between the GPUs in a highly-efficient efficient manner, resulting in improved graphics performance in any application.
Set to work with both DirectX 10 and OpenGL software, Hydra is also planned to offer interoperability with all GPUs and chipsets, apparently enabling the combination of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. Able to be included either on motherboards or add-in boards, the Hydra is expected to arrive, in one way or the other during the first half of 2009.
"We're currently focusing our Hydra engine on improving everyday PC performance, but our vision is to bring more scalability, flexibility and power to all visual processing markets including graphics professionals, power gamers, design/engineering professionals and others," says Offir Remez, Lucid co-founder and president. "With strong venture backing, a superior patent portfolio and experienced leaders in all aspects of semiconductor and 3D computing graphics, we're a nimble team passionate about working with our partners to realize our vision of universally amazing graphics for all."
Assuming Intel Capital and the other investors behind Lucid are not wrong, next year could mark a major change in the multi-GPU market. Keep those fingers crossed.

http://www.tcmagazine.com

 

---

Samsung has begun mass producing 1.8- and 2.5-inch multi-level cell (MLC)-based solid state drives (SSD) with a 128 Gigabyte (GB) storage capacity.
Mass production of the Samsung MLC-based 64GB SSD also began this month.
"With the 64 GB and 128 GB MLC SSDs, we are satisfying the density requirements of most business users and many PC enthusiasts, who will appreciate not only the performance gains and added reliability, but also the more attractive pricing," said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

Samsung SSDs feature far greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives. Power consumption for the Samsung SSD is also very low in standby mode at approximately 0.2 watts and in active mode at 0.5 watts.
The Samsung MLC-based SSD has a write speed of 70MB/s and a read speed of 90MB/s ? performance levels that approach those of single-level-cell (SLC)-based SSDs now in mass production. Moreover, the new 128GB SSD will last approximately 20 times longer than the generally accepted 4-5 year life span of a notebook PC hard drive.
Featuring a 3.0 gigabit-per-second interface, the 128GB MLC-based SSD consists of 64 MLC NAND flash memory chips of 16 gigabits each, optimized single-chip controller technology and advanced flash-management firmware technology. Enclosed in a brushed metallic casing, it measures 100mm x 69.8mm and is only 9.5mm thick.
Samsung is aggressively expanding its SSD market offerings. It introduced a 64GB SSD in the second half of 2007, and plans to begin producing a 256GB at the end of this year.
Samsung expects sales of SSD units to increase 800 percent between now and 2010, keeping SSDs on pace to be the largest growth segment in the NAND flash market over the next few years

 

http://www.cdrinfo.com

Not all was quiet at Nvidia headquarters this July 4 weekend. The rumor mill wound up with news of forthcoming price cuts last week, and HotHardware reported on Thursday that Nvidia would push the GeForce GTX 280 from $649 to $499 and the GTX 260 from $399 to a lower figure. Those predictions didn't take long to come to fruition, as a cursory check through Newegg's listings confirms.

The online retailer already sells Palit, Asus, and MSI variants of the GTX 280 at $499.99, and the latter even comes with a $40 mail-in rebate that can take its price down to $459.99. Meanwhile, Newegg offers an Asus GeForce GTX 260 for $329.99 and a Gigabyte variant for $339.99, both dangerously close to the AMD Radeon HD 4870's home turf of $309.99 at the same e-tailer.

Nvidia doesn't usually cut prices for new cards barely three weeks after their launch, but folks who've read our review of the Radeon HD 4870 should be able to figure this one out. On the very day the GeForce GTX 260 hit stores, the 4870 joined it with a mix of comparable performance and a $100-lower price tag. In fact, the 4870 performs so well that it sometimes matches the GTX 280. With these cuts and the GeForce 9800 GTX's nose-dive to $199, it's no wonder Nvidia had to revise its revenue forecast for the current financial quarter.

Nvidia takes axe to GeForce GTX 260, 280 prices - The Tech Report

 

Always wanted to install a little computer into your home theater but none of the available options are cutting it, what with all the giant media files and HD displays you're rolling? Enter Acer's Aspire X1200, which for $450 includes on-board NVIDIA GeForce 8200 graphics, an AMD Athlon X2 2850e processor, and HDMI port. Acer promises full 7.1-channel audio support as well as the guts to work with H.264, VC1, and MPEG2 and the spunk to output 1080P. The whole shebang comes in a rack-friendly 10.6 x 4.0 x 14.4-inch enclosure. Of course, prices scale up to $699 based on your needs -- the latter coming with a 22-inch display -- but the base price will get you a 320GB SATA II drive and the start of what could be a sweet little home theater PC.

Acer rolls out the Aspire X1200 home theater-friendly mini PC for $499 - Engadget

Dual cores affected.
We don’t know the exact numbers, but we've received a notice that Intel will pull in the price cuts from July 20 to August 10.

The price cuts will affect both boxed and tray processors and we know that 45nm dual core models will be especially affected.
Intel plans to cut the price of the E8500, E8400 and E7200 and probably a few more CPUs. So if you were planning to update your machine you better wait a few more days to get these babies cheaper.

Fudzilla

 

Clearly, Acer's G24 monitor is the only monitor capable of matching your high-performance Predator gaming rig. It's orange... or "metallic copper" if you work in Acer's arts and charts department. Bounced around trade shows for the last month, the 24-inch LCD is now officially featuring a proclaimed 50,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio which, according to a Acer, is a world's first for monitors. Now the specs: 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, 2-ms response, 400-nit brightness, and a host of Acer image tweaking and color management tech meant to brighten images and avoid ambient light reflection. Around back you'll find PC-friendly DVI and game-console/Blu-ray friendly HDMI too. Unfortunately, it's dateless and priceless just like Britney's little sister.

Acer G24 debuts as world's first LCD supporting advanced 50000:1 contrast ratio

Full HD and radical design for extreme gaming enthusiasts

Acer introduces the world's first LCD monitor, the G24, that supports up to 50000:1 in contrast ratio. Designed to entice PC gamers, the G24 is dressed-to-thrill in an extreme contrast of orange-black colors and sleek contours, and supports high-definition (HD) graphics for intense gaming entertainment.

Radical design

The eye-catching exterior of the G24 with solid angled surfaces makes an immediate impression, while satisfying PC gamers' needs and imagination. For a complete gaming package, the G24 and the Aspire Predator desktop PC are both painted with uncompromising metallic copper and feature deeply carved line design elements. Blue rays of light emanate from the power button of the LCD and desktop to exude a polished, powerful look.

Superb contrast and image display

Staying at the forefront of technology, the G24 includes Acer Adaptive Contrast Management (ACM), and is the world's first LCD monitor supporting up to 50000:1 for outstanding contrast ratio. Acer ACM produces dramatic improvement in gradation and detail, especially for dimmer and brighter scenes, resulting in stunning picture quality. Acer ACM also enables the G24 to use less power and save energy.

Intense gaming entertainment

The 24" 1920 x 1200 resolution widescreen G24 is designed for graphics-intensive, win-or-lose moments of today's fastest HD games and multimedia applications. Featuring the Acer OD (overdrive) technology that significantly improves gray-to-gray levels by reducing deviation in transition time, the rapid response time (up to 2 ms) permits immersive 3D graphics and video display. Users simply connect the G24 to Blue-ray Disc™ consoles or DVD players for an awesome cinematic experience!

Featuring Acer CrystalBrite™ technology with 400-nit brightness, the G24 produces vibrant, brighter images via backlit diffusion reduction. The technology promotes clearer images and sharper edges without ambient light reflection.

Advanced multimedia connectivity

Supporting the latest technology standards, the G24 is optimized for Windows Vista® operating system and supports HDMI™[1] for instant connectivity to DVD players, set-top boxes and HD game consoles. Further, Acer Empowering Technology permits full access to display settings at a single button; Acer eColor Management enables color parameter adjustments with great simplicity; while Acer eDisplay Management allows powerful color enhancement and features smart display rotation software.

Acer's G24 gaming monitor with world's best contrast - Engadget

Over the last couple of days, there have been some rumblings around the web that NVIDIA is planning to drop the price of their recently launched GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 cards in response to AMD's potent, and more affordable, Radeon HD 4800 series.  The actual numbers quoted have varied, but today we heard some news directly from multiple NVIDIA board partners that pricing on the GeForce GTX 280 may actually be dropping to as low as $499--a significant drop from the $649 launch price. Unfortunately, we were unable to confirm a price for the GTX 260, but we suspect it will hover somewhere around the $299 - $339 price points to better compete with the Radeon HD 4870.

Upon hearing the MSRP for the GTX 280 could drop to $499 from one prominent board partner, we called others and, while not all would confirm the actual number, some said that it "may be a little higher, or potentially even a little lower" (than $499), but that something was definitely in the works.  We'll keep you posted if we find out anything more concrete.  In the mean time, you might want to hold off for another week or two, if you have an itchy trigger finger for that GeForce GTX 280 you've been coveting.  It could pay handsomely to have a bit more patience.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 Price Dropping to $499?! - HotHardware

AMD just pranced out its latest trio of desktop processors including its new 2.6GHz quad-core Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition ($235) -- AMD's top o' the line desktop proc. The Black Edition branding makes this processor ideal for tweakers and overclockers. HotHardware's already done the job of putting the procs through their respective paces. As you'd hope from AMD's flagship desktop CPU, the X4 9950 is faster across the board than the previous AMD title holder, the X4 9850, albeit, just 5%. That puts it about level with Intel's Quad Q6600 processor but no match for Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9650. AMD continues to lag Intel in terms of performance per watt as well. Hit up the read link when you're ready to sprinkle a little silicon speak onto your morning ritual.

Via Engadget.

We knew driver-enabled PhysX support was due for NVIDIA's line some time soon, but HotHardware's reporting that GeForce 8 and 9-series owners will finally have it when ForceWare 177.39 ships alongside the GeForce 9800 GTX+ in July. The preliminary benchmarks seem to show some serious GPU performance gains for PhysX operations, so with any luck you'll soon be rendering Independence Day fireworks at greater framerates than ever previously imagined.
[Via Slashdot]