Nvidia has been pretty tight lipped when it comes to Fermi's performance numbers, but as the March 26th launch date approaches, a few additional details are starting to leak out. This time it's a video documenting some early benchmarks, giving us our first real peak at Fermi's performance. Of course we would be remiss if we didn't mention that the Heaven benchmark utility demonstrated in the video was administered solely by Nvidia themselves, and as such, the results should be taken with a grain of salt until we've had our own opportunity to put it through its paces.

The demo shows the GTX 480 pushing out some pretty impressive frame rates, even besting the ATI 5870 results they claim to have run earlier, but it certainly doesn't look like as big a margin as we were hoping for. The GTX 480 as you might recall is going to be the companies new high end offering, and although no pricing has yet been announced, rumors have put it somewhere in the $700 USD range. The Radeon 5870's by comparison can be found starting at around $380. If the rumored pricing ends up being true the more realistic comparison would be the Radeon 5970 vs. the GTX 480.

Only time will tell if the GTX 480 & 470 cards are as hot or as expensive as we fear, but one thing is for certain, the silence and vague details isn't helping their cause. Scroll down to check out the video for yourself. Did the demonstration win you over?

Let us know what you think. 

The USB 3.0 rollout is long overdue and the overwhelming popularity of external drives as a backup medium is part of the reason why. Sure, those fancy new ports will work with your mouse, but if that's what you're waiting for, your kind of missing the point. If however you have access to an eSATA port for your external drive, you might want to hold off on USB 3.0 upgrades, at least for now.

A new benchmark released by the crew over at CrunchGear has revealed that USB 3.0 leaves a bit to be desired speed wise, at least in its early iterations and needs a bit more time to mature. Transfer speeds so far have been much slower than the theoretical maximum, but hopefully this will improve over time.

Of course USB 3.0 isn't all about speed. The new bus specification is also intended to accommodate the next generation of power hungry gadgets and drives, and also holds a pretty healthy advantage over eSATA when you start looking at long cable runs. The point here is not to rag on USB 3.0, rather it is simply intended as a friendly reminder that eSATA isn't obsolete just yet.  

In Part 1, we showed you how to optimize the settings of your Cool’n'Quiet-equipped processor and what sort of power benefits you could expect as a result. Now it’s time to run the benchmarks and see how our optimized settings actually perform.

Original post: 
Tuning Cool’n'Quiet: Maximize Power And Performance, Part 2

If you have a shiny new DirectX 11 card taking up space in your case, this may be of interest to you. The first DX11-specific benchmark has been released by Unigine Corp. The demo is called “Heaven” and runs on the company’s proprietary Unigine engine.

Unigine have released two previous GPU benchmarking demos called “Sanctuary” and “Tropics”. Like those programs, the new DX11 benchmark is available for free. Heaven has support for OpenGL, DirectX 9, 10, and 11. So regardless of your hardware, it should run as long as you have at least 256 MB of VRAM. There’s even support for AMD’s new Eyefinity technology.

You will, however, need .NET framework 2.0, OpenAL, and your card’s latest stable drivers. If you want to take your card for a spin, you can get the Heaven demo here.