Not being able to think of a better sentence, I think nVidia shit in their pants when AMD released the 4850 at the price they did. The performance of AMD’s little card certainly raised the standard for a medium-end card and nVidia swiftly reacted by announcing the 9800 GTX+ GPU which is, simply put, a die-shrunked and overclocked version of the 9800 GTX. This 55nm GPU runs at stock speeds of 738MHz for the core and 1836MHz for shaders.
With nVidia done with its high-end product launches for this generation, it was obviously time for AMD to fire back. Now most of you would remember that AMD’s previous generation of GPUs were less than stellar and about the only product that got anyone excited was the X2. Now since the new RV770 is based on the same R600 roots, we wondered what AMD was able to do to the core to turn it around.
The Original EeePC 701 by ASUS became one of the most popular products of last year and created an entirely new market for ultra-portable notebooks that cost less than a no-frills budget notebook. ASUS sold almost 700,000 units which obviously was a wake-up call for other manufacturers and we saw products being announced left and right based on a similar form and price factor.
We’ve already looked at nVidia’s flagship product- the GeForce GTX 280 and today we have the more affordable GTX 260 card- two of them actually. Both these cards are overclocked out of the box giving better performance than your stock card would. Like most of their previous overclocked cards, ASUS called their product the TOP edition while Zotac sticks to its own terminology- the AMP! Edition.
We take a quick look at the Corsair Dominator CM3X1024-1800C7DIN DDR3 memory modules today. Corsair rates it at 1800Mhz frequency with timings of 7-7-7-20 at 2.0.
The nVidia GTX 280 is easily the fastest gaming GPU at the moment and we thought we'd find out how well it does in a dual card setup. From past experiences, we've seen that SLI or Crossfire add quite a bit of overhead (SLI especially) and doubling the GPUs certainly doesn't result in doubling the performance- far from it actually. We already had nVidia's reference card and thus, when we received the ASUS GeForce GTX 280, we wanted to see how fast can it get with an SLI setup.
ECS’ Black Edition motherboards give a reasonably high end motherboard factor with a price that is extremely affordable. Its certainly a step-up from their usual low-priced motherboards and today we look at their recently launched Intel P45 chipset solution modeled as the P45T-A Black Edition.
Today we take a look today at ASUS’ new power saving motherboard with silent operation for daily use along with high overclocking capabilities. The P5Q3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP @n is an Intel P45 chipset based motherboard with DDR3 2000 overclocking speed support and ATI CrossfireX links.
Although its always nice to occupy the highest performance position, AMD knows very well that the mainstream sector is what sells a lot more. They surprised everyone with their 3850 card last year which performed decently for a mainstream product. Today, they’re shaking the foundation one more time with the launch of the mid-ranged 4850 graphics card.
With the release of nVidia’s latest GTX 200 platform today, we see a possibility of tremendous change one more time- although its more on the lines of evolutionary than revolutionary. The GPU continues its war against the CPU with nVidia delivering the CUDA platform that allows your graphics card to offload a lot more stuff from the CPU in a much easier fashion. And its bitchin fast for gaming as well. Lets say hello to the two lovely ladies- the nVidia GeForce GTX 260 and the GTX 280.
Today. we take a look on MSI’s upcoming P45 Diamond motherboard that is equipped with Intel latest EagleLake chipset aka P45. The new chipset brings official support for 1333MHz FSB along with the option to use DDR3-1333MHz. We say option as the chipset also supports DDR2-800MHz and the motherboard manufacturer can decide which way to go. In MSI’s case, the P45 Diamond is their highest-end P45 board and thus, it’s no surprise to see it equipped DDR3 slots.
