With three new Radeon HD 5000-series cards launched last month, older models being put out to pasture.
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Best Graphics Cards For The Money: March 2010
News and rumor site Fudzilla managed to snap a few pics of Arctic Cooling's upcoming Accelero Xtreme series graphics cooler, and boy is this thing big.
Designed for AMD's HD 5870 and dual-gpu HD 5970 videocards, the latter comes with a long heatplate to accommodate two GPUs. On the front sit three white-bladed fans on top of a massive aluminum-finned heatsink. Several heatpipes are visible making their way through the fins, 5 of them in all.
According to Arctic Cooling, the Accelero Extreme 5970 punishes thermals by lowering temps by up to 44C, a massive improvement made even more impressive considering this is an air cooler, and probably quiet (if Arctic Cooling's past products are any indication). The HD 5870 version also offers impressive performance, according to Arctic Cooling, who says you can expect temps to drop by up to 36C.
No word yet on price or availability.
Image Credit: Fudzilla
Dutch website Tweakers.net posted what they claim are honest-to-goodness pictures of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480 videocard, otherwise known as Fermi.
The pictures were taken during the CeBIT exhibition and show Fermi unmasked. The site says it's an A2 revision GPU, though identifying marks have been blacked out. You'll also notice 12 memory chip, 128MB each, for a total of 1.5GB of memory.
While the cooler has been removed and is visible from the underside in just one of the pics, you can see heatpipes extending upwards. Tweak.net says this will be Nvidia's standard cooler, adding that you'll likely see AIB partners add their own cooler to cut costs.
Image Credit: Tweakers.net
Nvidia yanks GPU from live-running computer system.
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Nvidia Optimus Allows ‘Hot’ Removal of GPU
Nvidia has been talking up their new Optimus system as of late. An Optimus enabled notebook will be able to seamlessly switch between a low power integrated GPU to a higher power dedicated GPU. The power savings are said to be significant, nearly doubling rated battery life. Optimus can do this by completely powering off the GPU when using the on-board. To prove this, Nvidia went ahead a pulled the GPU from a running computer causing no interruption.
The real trick of Optimus is that the switch will happen automatically whenever the GPU is needed. For example, if you use the GPU acceleration in Flash 10.1 and open a Youtube video, the GPU would turn on to render the video. Close the Window, and the GPU powers down. This demo is meant to stress that when an Optimus system turns off the GPU, it is totally electrically off.
We’re excited about the possible energy savings this system could bring. Switchable graphics in notebooks have long been available, but poorly implemented. If Optimus is really as seamless as Nvidia makes it look, count us in.
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If we're to believe the pre-release hype, Fermi will be the fastest single-GPU videocard on the planet when it ships, leapfrogging ahead of ATI's HD 5870. But all that power is going to come at a cost, including a beefy 600W power supply, according to reports from CeBIT.
We've often seen inflated power supply requirements, as GPU vendors have to take into account lower quality units and how the all-important +12V rail distributes amps. But in this case, it looks like Nvidia's talking about a 600W PSU "with a minimum 12V current rating fo 42A," which would indicate a higher quality unit.
By comparison, AMD's dual-GPU 5970 requires a 650W power supply and is rated at 294W TDP. In single GPU territory, AMD's HD 5870 requires a 500W PSU, or 100W less than Fermi.
We've been talking about it for quite some time now, and at long last, Nvidia today officially announced its next generation Ion graphics processor. According to Nvidia, Ion 2 "will supercharge netbooks" in a big way, offering 10 times the performance of standard netbooks and enabling up to 10 hours of battery life courtesy of Nvidia's Optimus technology.
What exactly is Optimus? Put simply, this is Nvidia's intelligent hybrid graphics technology. Without any user intervention, Optimus-equipped netbooks will select the appropriate graphics engine for the task at hand, switching between the integrated Intel chipset and discrete Nvidia GPU.
Nvidia says there are more than 30 products equipped with Ion 2 expected to launch by this summer. This will not only include netbooks, but small form factor desktops, barebones setups, motherboards, and discrete add-in cards.
The first Ion 2-based system will be Acer's Aspire One 532G netbook, which will be available in April.
Image Credit: Nvidia
Nvidia’s “Fermi” GF100 GPU is just over the horizon. With it, comes new technology as well as a new host of cards all vying for your dollar
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High-Resolution Die Imagery Of Nvidia GPUs
Asus today launched a pair of Radeon HD 5000 series videocards -- EAH5870 and EAH5850 -- the company claims will accommodate extreme levels of overclocking thanks to an "innovative thermal design."
Both cards come equipped with specially-flattened copper heatpipes Asus says helps dissipate heat up to 20 percent better while playing games, while also offering up to 35 percent quieter operation when idle.
Similar to what was so successful in Cooler Master's Hyper 212 Plus CPU cooler (see review here), Asus looks to have gone with a direct contact solution, squashing the 5.8-ounce heatpipes at the base. Combined with the company's exclusive "Voltage Tweak" technology, which allows users to ramp up the GPU voltage through the included SmartDoctor application, Asus says users can expect up to a 50 percent performance gain (when overclocking).
No word yet on price or availability.
Image Credit: Asus
For those of you holding out for Nvidia's Fermi architecture, the good news is your wait is almost over. The graphics chip maker said it plans to launch a pair of Fermi-based videocards on March 26, just a month away. The bad news, however, is that these will likely be in short supply and carry a premium price tag (see here).
Ready for some more good news? Comments made by Nvidia's CFO seem to suggest that less expensive (read: affordable) Fermi parts will likely be made available by mid-2010.
"Fermi will show up as the GeForce and Tesla first and it will definitely show up first in the highest-performance configuration. Sometime in the mid-part of the year we will see a lower-cost version of that come out both for Quadro and Tesla," said David White, Nvidia's CFO.
White stopped short of detailing what these parts might be or exactly how much they'll cost, but assuming he's right, we won't have long to wait to find out.
