Intel Larrabee Chip Update

We learned yesterday that Intel is to launch something new to the graphics market by 2010. The product is codenamed Larrabee and will be all set to go head to head with some of the other big names in graphics cards.

Not much is known at the moment about Larrabee however: Intel will address that at SIGGRAPH 2008 on 12th August. Intel will give us an update and more details about Larrabee, while there they will describe some of the features and its capabilities.

Many are saying that it is a mistake to say that Larrabee is a GPU, but Intel does claim that it can do it all. We will just have to wait until Intel gives us more information and show off Larrabee.

Intel will find it hard to make a dent in ATI and NVIDIA’s market place, as they own about 98 percent of the graphics market. Intel does have something going for them though, deep pockets and great resources.

What do you think we should call Larrabee, a GPU or a GCPU? That stands for capable processing unit, bit of a mouthful though.

Source

Hands-on Review: ASRock P43 and P45 Motherboards

First off, we talk about the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi. In all, it’s a board that while having all the bells and whistles you could want, some of them come at a price. This for instance is the dual memory support. While great for the up-graders in us, the placement of the power connectors suffer; not good at all for over-clockers.

The other major gripe is that if you want to use eSATA, you have to run two cables from the bottom of the board to the top left of the board. This not only gives you two less SATA ports internally, but again, you’re getting more cable clutter. With digital switching readily available, why wasn’t this used? - Or better yet, a two port SATA controller to run the eSATA system independently?

Last on the list of complaints is again the lack of digital switching for the PCI Express slots. If you want to use Crossfire, you have to use an old style paddle card that splits the bandwidth.

The P43R1600Twins-WiFi board, while almost a mirror image of the P45R2000-WiFi, it lacks Crossfire support. So this is eliminated for dual GPU users unless you settle on a HD 3870X2 or HD 4870X2 (when it arrives). Next; again due to the dual memory controllers, you lose out on power connector placements. And the routing of the SATA cable to run the single eSATA port means more cable clutter and the loss of one internal SATA port.

Read the full 17 page review over at TweakTown

Visiontek ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB Graphics Card

When it comes to some gamers they tend to spend a lot of money upgrading their computers, from motherboards to CPU’s just so that they can get the latest PCI-e cards. Well some go for the cheaper route and that is to purchase the latest and fastest AGP solution available.

One such solution is the Visiontek ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB, this card also has AGP support.

The GPU has a lot of life in it, so is perfect for future gamers. If funds are limited, then this is a cheap alternative to getting the ultimate gaming experience.

When you first unpack the Visiontek ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB, you will find it is a little on the heavy side. The main reason for this is the oversized fully copper heatsink which has been mounted to the board. Hopefully this should keep things running cool.

The normal price for this graphics card is $300, but Woot have it for the special price of just $79.99 + $5 shipping.

ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 AMP Edition Overclocked: 50% faster than 9800 GX2

We all know how great the old 9800 GX2 GPU was, but there is now a big boy on the block and that is the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 AMP Edition. This Graphics card has been overclocked and is thought to be at least 50% faster than 9800 GX2. As with all GPU’s that state they are a 50 percent faster than another model, this does not always seem to be the case so the guys at TweakTown have decided to put the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 AMP Edition through its paces, they have even pitted it against the top of the range AMD HD 3870 X2.

TweakTown’s thoughts on the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 AMP Edition are “So, that’s the GTX 280. There is no doubt that you’re probably left as underwhelmed as myself at the moment. The rumors that the card was going to be 1.5x faster than the 9800 GX2 were clearly un-true, which is disappointing. But at the same time, it’s probably a bit optimistic.

There are definitely some good things about the card; the performance we got in World in Conflict with AA and AF on is extremely impressive and does show that the card has massive potential.

The other thing that is worth noting is that we still don’t have a PhysX driver for the card, which is a bit of a joke I must say. It seems that NVIDIA these days is so rushed to get the cards out the door that the drivers aren’t yet ready to make full use of the card. This was also seen with the release of the GX2 were the Quad SLI driver wasn’t available at launch.
The other thing is that unlike the 9800 GX2 we tested with today, the GTX 280 is overclocked out of the box from ZOTAC, making the card a little faster than the stock clocked offerings that we will no doubt see.

So what are my actual thoughts on the card? – Okay, yes it’s nice that we’ve got the performance of two GPUs on one card that takes less power, but at the moment an immature driver doesn’t give us the gains that we probably expected to see with a 512-bit memory interface and an increase in stream processors. Do I think that the GTX 280 is going to be performing significantly better in a months’ time? - Absolutely! Will it be too late? - We’re not too sure.

The other thing I have to say before I wrap this all up is that I’ve tested the HD 4850, and I’ve tested it in Crossfire. Now, if I hadn’t tested those cards I may have been more impressed with the GTX 280, but I have. I’ve seen the performance figures the cards put out. We also know the price on a pair of HD 4850s is going to be under $600 AUD, while the new GTX 280 in stock form seems to be launching at the absolute cheapest in Australia in the low $700 AUD area. Ouch.”

TwinTech overclocks the GeForce 9600GT XXT

TwinTech has decided to overclock their GeForce 9600GT XXT GPU; it has been a while since the company have given us an overclocked graphics card. The OC is not the best on the market, but it is not that bad, TweakTown have decided to take a closer look at the GPU and see what it has to offer.

TweakTown have gone in to detail here are their final thoughts of the Twintech GeForce 9600GT XXT OC Edition “It’s been a while between cards from Twintech; and like the last one we looked at, this one also seems to be quite impressive. While there isn’t a whole lot going on in the package department, the aftermarket cooler is quiet and performs well. To top it off, the performance from the card on a whole is pretty good. It manages to give us a pretty consistent 10% performance increase over a stock 9600GT while keeping temps down by almost 10c as well.

While Twintech aren’t that well known in Australia, or even the USA for that matter, they are quite large in Europe. While availability for some parts of the world isn’t great, in other parts getting a hold of the XXT 9600GT from Twintech shouldn’t be an issue. With so many graphics card manufacturers around these days, you can’t expect every brand to be in every country.

The 9600GT continues to impress with companies doing all kinds of things to the card. We’ve seen everything from active to passive cooling and single to dual slot. With the card being so popular and sitting at an excellent price point, it seems that a lot of companies are choosing to experiment on it. What this means is that we end up with a heap of 9600GTs, all with different clock speeds and features.

You couldn’t go wrong with the Twintech 9600GT which offers a good out of the box overclock and a quiet yet efficient cooling solution.”

Nvidia slips up: we now have DX10 mobile GPU specs

It seems as if Nvidia is slipping a bit as they have let slip about the specs of their upcoming DX10 mobile GPU. The graphics cards in question is the GeForce 9300M and 9500M, both are DirectX 10-compatible.

Firstly we have the 9500M GS has 32 stream processor and will have a running speed of 950 MHz, the core has been clocked at 475MHz. The graphics card itself will have a 512MB of GDDR 3.

The 9300M G only has 16 stream processors; it has been clocked to 800MHz and has a core that runs at 400MHz. The GPU has 256MB of ram.

Source - NVIDIA

First reviews of the Nvidia 9600 GT Graphics Card: is it any good?

Well the wait is finally over as today will see the first reviews of the Nvidia 9600 GT Graphics Card, and the one thing that gamers would like to know is, is it any good? The GPU will use Nvidia’s G92 technology, and for the first time Read more

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 not official revealed but set for launch March 11th

The all new NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 launch has been pushed back by a few weeks with a set launch now of March 11th, even though NVIDIA has not Read more