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5 Graphics Cards for Christmas

Christmas is almost upon us, and the present that we are most likely to get is games, and if you are a PC gamer then this could mean trouble. Someone might get you a game not knowing if your graphics card is up to the job or not. Read more

Hands-on: Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic Graphics Card

This is the Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic graphics card with some ramped up clock speeds; it’s a nice HD 4850 with a decent aftermarket cooler and a high clock speed. If only Palit did a bit more with the memory clock, there’s no doubt it would have been able to shine a bit brighter.

Tweak Town have given this graphics a 18 page hands-on review, and in their final thoughts they said “There’s no doubt that we’re going to see more and more HD 4850s with aftermarket cooling hit the market. The Palit is a nice little option that comes with a decent cooler, which helps keeps temps down whilst offering a decent overclock on the core Read more

Hands-on: ASUS GeForce EN9600GT Matrix Graphics Card

This is the ASUS GeForce EN9600GT Matrix graphics card that is an excellent performing 9600 GT, its packed to the brim with features like HDMI, Optical, Power Saving technology and an excellent aftermarket cooler.

Tweak Town have reviewed this 9600 GT card over 18 pages, and in their final thoughts they said “ASUS has managed add a few nice little tweaks to the card to make it stand out compared to other 9600 GT cards that we’ve looked at over the past few months Read more

Hands-on: ASUS Radeon HD 4870 TOP 512MB Graphics Card

This is the ASUS Radeon HD 4870 TOP 512MB graphics card that comes with a good out-of-the-box overclock. It’s a great option for people who are looking to get a bit more performance without taking the time to overclock the card themselves.

Tweak Town have given the card a full hands-on review over 18 pages and in their final thoughts they said “The HD 4870 continues to show its value time and time again and this time around is really no different. The good overclock on the core along with the slight memory Read more

Hands-on: GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 280 Graphics Card

This is the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 280 graphics card that’s fast and priced well. If you want to get into the GTX 280 without breaking your wallet, the GIGABYTE is a good choice.

Tweak Town have given this graphics card a hands-on review over 18 pages and in their final thoughts they said “As mentioned in another GTX 280 reviews, if this card was reviewed a few weeks earlier the overall thought process on the card would be completely different. But thanks to the recent price drop, the GTX 280 really begins to resemble a bit of value for money Read more

Extreme Liquid Cooling for ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Cards

CoolIT Systems, the leading innovator in liquid cooling technology, announces the Dual Drive Bay VGA Cooler designed to aggressively cool AMD’s new ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 Graphics card. The unique form factor enables extreme computing performance for PC Enthusiasts and Gamers.

In recent testing, the liquid cooled cards were stably clocked up to 880MHz (13.5% Increase) core clock speed and the GDDR5 memory pushed to 1GHz (11% increase) Read more

Hands-on: ECS GeForce 9600 GT Graphics Card

This is the ECS GeForce 9600 GT graphics card and it also includes a free game; Frontlines: Fuel of War. It’s an excellent 9600 GT for people living in the U.S. who are looking for a graphics card that comes with a game they might actually want.

Tweak Town have given this graphics card a hands-on review over 18 pages, and in their final thoughts they said “The 9600 GT really has become a great valued product for people who are gaming on older monitors capable of only 1280 x 1024 with high detail. If you’re happy to drop the detail to the medium levels, though, you should get a decent game experience as high as 1680 x 1050, which is great news for 22″ wide screen gamers Read more

New Catalyst driver for Radeon graphics cards under XP and Vista

There is a new Catalyst driver for Radeon graphics cards and if you are wondering how it will perform under Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, then you need to check out Tweak Towns 12 page review and test.

The ATI Catalyst 8.7 analysis under XP and Vista goes into depth to find out the real performance and in their final thoughts Tweak Town said, “While the new drivers don’t offer massive performance gains or anything like that, there are a number of nice little bumps on offer here today.

With the fixes implemented in the driver, they’re a good upgrade for most users. People who will be particular happy, however, are mid-range HD 3650 users who want an extra few FPS here and there.

There’s no doubt that the AMD guys are extremely busy at the moment with the HD 4800 series of cards, but with the X2 just around the corner, hopefully it begins to calm down a little bit and the team can get stuck into the drivers and try and get us some more performance from the new cards”.

Read the 12 page review and test.

Hands-on: ZOTAC 9600 GSO 384MB Graphics Card

This is the ZOTAC 9600 GSO 384MB Graphics Card and while this card is very good, it doesn’t help make buying a graphics card any easier. Only $20 separates the 9600 GSO 384MB / 768MB and the 9600 GT 512MB, making it all very confusing.

Tweak town have given the 9600 GSO 384MB card a hands-on review over 18 pages and in their final thoughts they said:

The 9600GT and 9600 GSO continue to remain extremely close in pricing. The thing is that while the 9600 GT is 20% more expensive than the GSO, it’s only $20 AUD more. However, the 9600GT for the most part is really only 10% faster than the 9600 GT.

The 9600GT does have the added advantage of extra memory, but you could get the 768MB version of the GSO that has more memory than the 9600GT and for roughly the same price; give or take $5.

It’s all very confusing really. If you throw overclocking into the mix, the 9600 GSO is able to outperform the 9600GT for the most part. So what do you buy? - On a whole, the 9600 GSO is actually a pretty good buy. Like we said, it’s 20% cheaper and only 10% slower than the 9600GT. If you feel like spending some extra dollars, however, you could go the 9600GT or even the 9600 GSO 768MB if you love lots of memory.

All in all, the 9600 GSO ZOTAC card is a good card and represents some excellent value for money. Performance on the most part is only just behind the 9600GT and availability on the model is good as well. If you want to do a bit of mid-res gaming and don’t have a load of money to spend, the 9600 GSO is going to be a good choice.

Read the 18 page review.

Quiet gaming with ASUS EN9600GT SILENT graphics card

This is the ASUS EN9600GT SILENT graphics card and if your after quiet gaming, then you should know that this card is one of the best silent cards money can buy.

The massive fan-less heatsink is the feature that separates this card from many others and Tweak Town has given it a hands-on over 17 pages to find out how good it really is, in their final thoughts they said, “The ASUS EN9600GT SILENT as far as performance goes isn’t something we haven’t seen before; it performs like it should.

What was surprising though was just how efficient the silent cooler is when compared to the stock active cooling solution. The design ASUS has opted for is nothing short of excellent.

While the card doesn’t come with a huge bundle, we get a HDMI convertor along with the loop back cable and all other standard cables and paperwork provided. The card is a good option for people who are looking for an extremely efficient silently cooled card.

If you’re looking for a stock clocked card that doesn’t heat up massively with a passive heatsink, the ASUS EN9600GT SILENT could well be the card for you”.

Read the 17 page review.

XFX GeForce GTX 280 XXX Edition: memory bumped way up

This is the XFX version of the GeForce GTX 280 XXX Edition and its had it’s memory bumped way up, XFX are known to be one of the aggressive graphics card overclockers and this version may not be the best value for money but the GTX 280 XXX Edition from XFX is still no doubt very fast. You will not be disappointed with its performance.

Tweak Town have given this card a hands-on review over 18 pages and in their final thoughts they said “XFX has done a good job with finding a very high clock on the memory, but it would have been nice to see the core be bumped to 700MHz out of the box. A little overclocking saw the card had no issue at 700MHz, so it does come as a little surprise that XFX didn’t aim for the 100MHz overclock on the core.

It’s good to see that XFX has also taken the time to include a recent full version game which makes it more appealing; the package on the whole is pretty standard with the normal cables and paperwork, but the little sign to hang off your door knob is a nice extra which we also saw in the XFX 9600GT Alpha Dog.

Unfortunately this all comes at a price, and the XXX edition from XFX is one of the more expensive GTX 280s on the market. That’s no real surprise though, since it’s also one of the highest clocked at the moment, but DIY overclockers will probably find themselves looking for a cheaper option. The good thing about the XFX offering, however, is that you’re guaranteed a 2500MHz memory clock, which is pretty attractive.

XFX has done a good job with the GTX 280 and the massive overclock gives it another speed bump. While we continue to feel disappointed with the fact that we don’t have a huge boost in performance over the last generation 9800 GX2, the fact remains that NVIDIA has been able to place the power of the two cores into a single one while adding new technologies such as CUDA and PhysX.

Hopefully we begin to see some games under NVIDIAs “Way it’s meant to be played” umbrella make use of physics and really begin to offer gamers a completely new gaming experience”.

Read the 18 page review

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.”

Hands-on with BFG Tech GeForce 9600GT OC2

This is the BFG Tech version of a GeForce 9600GT OC2 graphics card; the card is pretty good in most departments. Performance, availability and value for money are all ticked, and if you’re big on warranty then the BFG line is a good option.

Tweak Town have given this card a hands-on and in their final thoughts they said “BFG Tech; while always having been a brand that has pushed overclocked cards, the company never really pushes its cards to the limit. With the release of the new OC2 and OCX models we thought that this would change, and it’s a bit disappointing to see that BFG hasn’t gone for the 700MHz core and 2000MHz DDR memory clock configurations a lot of other companies have used who are pushing a bit of a serious overclock.

With that said though, BFG has done what they do best; create a mildly overclocked card that gives us a nice little performance boost while offering a lifetime warranty and 24/7 tech support.

Since we pretty much felt that the card wasn’t going to have any issues at 700MHz on the core and 2000MHz DDR on the memory clock, we thought we would just take the time to overclock it. As we expected, the card ran like a dream and continued to give us a few extra FPS here and there.

The good thing about the BFG Tech 9600GT OC2 is that we do get a nice little overclock while sticking with the single slot cooler. On a whole the cooler is pretty good and does a good job cooling our card. If you’re tight for space as well, then it’s an excellent option.

While we don’t have any games and the cable department is pretty light, you do pay for the warranty and technical support. While some enthusiasts who might find this unnecessary due to performing regular upgrades and generally just knowing what they’re doing, if you do keep your graphics card for a long time and want the peace of mind that you’ll be covered if something nasty happens in 3 or 4 years, you can still get warranty on it.”

Read the 17 page hands-on.

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.”

GeForce 9600GT everywhere: Overclocked, 512MB or 1GB, HDMI, Display Port, DVI & more

When it comes to graphics cards, some get made in many more versions than any other and that is so true for the 9600GT. This card is everywhere and each brand seems to make at least five different versions. These include DVI, Display Port, HDMI, single and dual slot, passive and active cooling, 512MB, 1GB, overclocked, stock clocked and much more.

This is the GIGABYTE GeForce 9600GT TurboForce 512MB graphics card that has a heat-pipe for those that like silent cards. This version carries the usual GIGABYTE quality and an excellent overclock. There isn’t much more you could ask for from a mid-range graphics card.

Tweak Town have given this card a hands-on review in and in their final thoughts they said “The GIGABYTE multi-core cooling setup seems to do a good job of keeping the card at a reasonable temperature while pushing out some decent FPS. The advantage it also has over the Sapphire HD 3870 Ultimate, which we looked at the other day, is that getting one is going to be a lot easier. While the card hasn’t hit the market yet, it’s only around the corner and GIGABYTE being as big as they are means that we should see most major retail stores carry it, or at least have access to the model.

With NVIDIA saying that the G92 core should be around for another 12 months, the driver support for the 9600GT should continue to be excellent and we should continue to see some more performance out of it over the coming months.

If you’re looking for a silent card, the 9600GT from GIGABYTE could be a good option. We’ve also heard that a 1GB model is announced and no doubt we’re going to check that out, too. So if you want to get a bit more RAM on your silent card, it might be worth waiting.

It would have been nice to see a game or HDMI adapter in the bundle, but on a whole the setup here from GIGABYTE is pretty good. The overclock is great for a passively cooled card and the performance is even better.”

Read the 17 page hands-on review.

AMD only partner Sapphire with Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate Edition

AMD only partner Sapphire release another stand-out graphics card with the Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate Edition, the cooler is top notch quality and the performance is still nothing to sneeze at, but with all good products…getting your hands on one will be the problem.

If you’re looking for a HD 3870 with something unique, then Sapphire’s passively cooled Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate Edition could be what you want. Tweak Town have given this card a full hands-on review and covered the results over 17 pages, in their final thoughts they had this to say “I really am quite a fan of the Sapphire HD 3870 Ultimate; the design of the cooling is excellent and hopefully they do something similar come launch of the 4K series of cards from AMD.

The HD 3870 is still a very capable card, and with the popularity of the Intel chipset Crossfire is a more likely dual GPU setup then SLI. You do have to feel a bit sorry for Sapphire; with AMD being so slow in the market at the moment, a company like Sapphire who makes some excellent products hasn’t really been able to shine. Fingers crossed that this all changes when the 4K series of cards start appearing later this month.

The only real problem with the Sapphire HD 3870 Ultimate; its kind of funny because it doesn’t really seem to show up much in the retail channel. The chances are that Sapphire got a bit bored waiting for new models to come out so they decided to do something different with the current line-up.

The HD 3870 continues to be a great card, but it’s probably something worth picking up second hand these days instead of being a brand new purchase. If you could hunt down the Ultimate version from Sapphire, we would say go for it. Silent performance is always a great feature.”

Read the 17 page review.

ATI Radeon 4800 series launch details revealed: Radeon 4850 codenamed Makedon

There is some good news and some bad news, the good news is that there are some new details about AMD’s next-generation graphics card line-up and it is getting very near to the launch date, the new graphic boards will come with physics processing capability and even better prices will be lower than $200 for a 512 MB board, the bad news is that the 4800 series will be launched after the Nvidia GT200.

NVIDIA no doubt have heard to much about the AMD ATI Radeon 4800 series to move up the launch date for its GeForce 9900 series cards, but the latest news from TG Daily are more launch details for the mid to high end cards. The first on the list will be the Radeon 4850 or simply codenamed the “Makedon,” this card will boast 512 MB of GDDR3 memory, CrossFireX support and single-slot cooling, the price for this card will cost $189 to $219.

Next up is a pair of Radeon 4870 cards which will be here in July codenamed “Trojan” one will boast 512MB of GDDR5 memory and the other will have full 1024MB, it will also come with a dual-slot cooler, these two will cost between $249 and $279. They all pack game physics processing capability plus 7.1 channel audio via HDMI support and DirectX 10.1 support.

For much more in depth detail please visit TG Daily

Source

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37453-135.html

NVIDIA helps PC users go Green with Hybrid SLI

PC users love the visual realism that high-performance graphics processors give their PCs, but would rather do without the noise and power consumption typical of modern entertainment and gaming PCs. Starting today, however, they can have the best of both worlds, thanks to the new NVIDIA® platforms based on the company’s Hybrid SLI® technology. These new platforms are the foundation for a new breed of PCs that deliver a richer visual experience while reducing energy consumption and costs, fan noise, and even heat. The new technology is available immediately with new NVIDIA nForce 780a SLI and GeForce 8 Series based motherboards.

“Hybrid SLI will give consumers the extra GPU performance they need for the increasing numbers of visual PC applications such as today’s PC games,” said Drew Henry, general manager of platform business at NVIDIA. “And it will give gamers and PC enthusiasts the quiet and power savings they demand. Hybrid SLI components could very well pay for themselves over the life of the PC.”

The visual capabilities of typical PCs are driven by either integrated graphics on the motherboard or by higher performance, discrete graphics cards, like NVIDIA GeForce® GPUs. Unfortunately, the most common integrated graphics chips lack the performance and features needed by many popular modern 3D applications, games, and movies. Discrete graphics cards deliver a far superior visual experience, but consume more energy.

Hybrid SLI-enabled motherboards eliminate this problem by putting a GeForce GPU directly on the motherboard. This GeForce GPU has better DirectX compatibility and HD movie playback capability than the most common integrated graphics chips found in today’s PCs, but consumes less energy than a discrete graphics card. But that’s only the start.

Designed for PC enthusiasts and hard-core gamers, the HybridPower™ feature completely powers down the discrete graphics cards and switches graphics processing to the motherboard GPU in applications where major 3D horsepower is not required, such as e-mail and Web surfing. Users will appreciate the lower energy consumption, quieter PC operation, and less heat. When additional 3D horsepower is needed, it can be manually transitioned back to discrete graphics cards using HybridPower technology, which are then powered up and ready to rock the 3D world. Hybrid SLI technology can save hundreds of dollars in energy costs over the life of the PC for high-end, enthusiast-class PCs, and deliver additional graphics performance for more mainstream desktops via these two features.i

For mainstream users, a Hybrid SLI technology feature called GeForce Boost allows the user to add an additional graphics card for even more graphics horsepower. By combining the performance of the motherboard GPU and graphics card discrete GPUs, GeForce Boost increases overall graphics performance up to 50% for today’s visually intensive applications and home entertainment.

“NVIDIA continues to deliver outstanding innovation for AMD CPUs. We are especially excited that HybridPower, a feature of NVIDIA Hybrid SLI, will be introduced exclusively on AMD CPU-based platforms,” said Leslie Sobon, director, product marketing, AMD. “The AMD Phenom™ X4 quad-core processors, together with this motherboard’s HybridPower features, deliver powerful performance and energy efficiency, an important combination for AMD.”

The Hybrid SLI-enabled desktop PC motherboards are designed to create a balanced PC with GeForce GPUs and AMD Phenom processors. Eight models, including a newly available nForce 780a SLI motherboard, are available:

• nForce 780a SLI, nForce 750a SLI, nForce 730a, and nForce 720a
• GeForce 8300, GeForce 8200, and GeForce 8100

Currently available Hybrid SLI-enabled discrete graphics cards include:

• NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 and NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX (both HybridPower-capable)
• GeForce 8400 GS and GeForce 8500 GT (both GeForce Boost-capable)

Hybrid SLI-enabled PC motherboards for Intel processors and Hybrid SLI-enabled notebooks will be available in Q3 of 2008. For more information about NVIDIA Hybrid SLI technology please visit www.nvidia.com/Hybrid_SLI.

20 page ASUS GeForce 9600GT 512MB Graphics Card hands-on

So how good is the ASUS GeForce 9600GT 512MB Graphics Card? This is what Tweak Town wanted to find out with a hands-on review and their 20 page report goes into details that some may never need to know, but it one of the best reviews you will find on this ASUS video card.

They summed up by saying “normally we see a premium when it comes to ASUS pricing, but with the competitive pricing and decent cooling here, the card offers very good bang for bunk”. They rated the ASUS GeForce 9600GT 512MB an overall rating of 89%. Read their full 20-page review here.

Alienware Area-51 ALX CFX: twin 1GB Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards (four GPUs)

This is Alienware’s Area-51 ALX CFX which gives you twin 1GB Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards (a total of four GPUs) thanks to CrossFireX technology. What is cool about Alienware is the fact that their Aurora ALX rig supported quad SLI support 2 years ago.

The Area-51 ALX CFX features a 1,000-watt power supply, optional Blu-ray burner, a load of HDD choices, up to 4GB of RAM, a 3.0GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor and of course the twin 1GB Radeon HD 3870 X2 video cards. Expect to pay at least $5,649 for a CrossFireX-equipped setup.

Source: Read | Via