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October 11, 2006 GeForce 3 LAN in November - Josh Well, it appears as though November 7-8 will be the time that NVIDIA introduces its next architecture in the G80. As they have done for the past several years, NVIDIA is holding a GeForce LAN for about 400 to 800 gamers in the Bay Area (location still not disclosed). Interested gamers can check it out here. Lots of prizes, free food, and a lot of gaming are being included for the $30 entry fee, but gamers must be 18 to participate. So if you are in the Bay Area (or will be traveling there), and happen to have that Tuesday and Wednesday off, then this would be a very fun deal to go to. I went to the original one when NVIDIA released the NV40 (GeForce 6800), and it was a very good time for everyone involved! I have not been briefed about the new architecture yet (G80), but there have been some very interesting leaks as of late. It appears as though it is essentially a massively parallel stream processor comprised of 128 floating point units. Originally it had been thought that NVIDIA would pursue a more traditional architecture with separate pixel shaders and combined vertex/geometry shaders. Now it appears that these 128 units are in fact unified in their functionality. This will undoubtedly be a very large chip (500 million+ transistors) with a greater than 256 bit pathway to memory. These first products also appear to only use GDDR-3 at this time, but eventually GDDR-4 versions will be released once supply of that memory is not so constrained. SM 4.0 functionality is of course supported. Nobody is quite sure where the performance of such a GPU will end up, but many are betting that we will see a nearly 2X increase from the current top of the line single GPU card. I would also bet that NVIDIA will have improved SLI functionality with this release, and the first thing that will be addressed is more bandwidth through the over-the-top connector as well as improvements to SLI-AA. Again, these are mainly guesses based on the leaks that look to be legitimate. Anyway, our questions will be answered in less than a month, and with NVIDIA sending out review boards later this month, we will probably start to see a few more hints pop up here and there. AMD Releases More Info on Rev. H Core At the CPU Forum this week AMD has taken quite a few journalists aside and given them the low-down on the improvements of AMD's next generation core based on the Athlon architecture. The changes are many and significant, and should lead to a nice performance boost over the current 90 nm designs. These will be quad core products based on AMD's 65 nm process. Shared L3 cache, multiple memory controllers, enhanced floating point/SSE unit, improved branch prediction, larger prefetch, and a host of other improvements should make the upcoming Barcelona (and derivatives) far more capable performers in a variety of situations. Whether or not these parts will overcome Intel's performance lead with Core 2 Duo will be another question that is left unanswered. One thing that AMD is really excited about are these products' performance in virtualization situations, where the integrated memory controllers, exclusive L1/L2 cache, and quad cores should really provide an outstanding experience. Intel will be releasing their quad core products this November, so AMD will be quite a few months behind in that area. Still, AMD is not standing still, and is releasing products as fast as they can. Hopefully (for consumers) AMD can advance the timetable for these parts. Apparently AMD is going full bore with their 65 nm production as we speak, and we should see the first parts come out in December with wide availability in January. Loyd over at Extremetech gives a very good overview of the material discussed at the Forum for those interested. October 2, 2006 AMD, ATI, and GP-GPU - Josh The last several months of announcements from both ATI and AMD have finally helped me to understand what appears to be the path that the combined company will be pursuing. The addition of the GP-GPU announcement from ATI today really got the wheels cranking, and I think I have an idea where AMD may be in the next three years. If this information is close to being correct, then we could see AMD truly overshadow Intel in the world of high performance computing, as well as desktop computing when applications are tuned to utilize the technology described herein. Here is a quick quote:
You can read the entire article here. September 21, 2006 Athlon X2 EE's Available - Josh Several online retailers now have the X2 Energy Efficient processors in stock, and you can pick up both the X2 3800+ and X2 4200+. The interesting thing is that Newegg has them in stock, and are listing them as the Brisbane core. Brisbane is supposed to be one of AMD's first 65 nm cores on the market, but is not expected before December at the earliest. AMD's first 65 nm products are about as close to an optical shrink as can be had in the business. AMD has had to do a lot of design work to get the products to work on their new 65 nm process, but mainly it was some cleaning up and getting the chip to electrically work. The initial products on this process will not clock significantly higher than current parts, and their performance per clock will probably only get a very small boost (1% to 5% in some cases). This is very reminiscent of the Newcastle to Winchester transition. Voltage will not go down much at first, and overclocking will reach the same limits as what is available now. These first products are apparently at "full flow" right now at Fab 36, which means that there are lots of wafers with these chips being processed and on their way to becoming complete. AMD will be stockpiling these until it is time to release in December (or possibly November if things are going really well for AMD). All of this is setting up AMD to introduce their Rev. H cores (sometimes referred to as K8L) which will be their primary product to compete against the mighty Core 2 Duo. Rev. H samples appear to be running as we speak, but they still need work to get them ready for full-scale production. These will be AMD's first quad core products with the shared L3 cache. We can also assume that these products will also come in dual core variants as well. So, the question is, are the EE chips on Newegg really Brisbane cores? It is doubtful, as they also list them as being 90 nm chips. Not only that, but the product SKU# corresponds to the Rev. F EE chips, which are still 90 nm. One very interesting thing is that they are listed at 1.2 to 1.25 volts. That's pretty low for a 90 nm Rev. F, but not exactly a smoking gun as many users have been able to successfully undervolt their processors at that level. I do have one on order though for testing, and hopefully I will see that soon and perhaps get a solid idea if it is in fact the chip it is supposed to. Unfortunately with the heat cover on it, it is awfully hard to judge die sizes... I do have some emails out to folks at AMD to confirm this, and as soon as I hear anything I will let you all know. September 14, 2006 Bluegears Gets Back in the Sound Business - Josh Over a year ago Bluegears released their X-Mystique card which was one of the only standalone soundcards that could encode a Dolby Digital 5.1 stream. The card received many good reviews, and I personally took a look at it here. It was a good piece of kit, but the card was actually being made by HDA of Korea, which later was renamed Auzentech. Once Bluegears made a name for itself, it seems there was some strife between the companies, and Auzentech decided to enter the North American market and sell its own cards. In the past nine months after that happened, Bluegears worked hard to bring their own product to market. They have finally been able to show of the fruits of that labor. The b-Enspirer soundcard is based on the capable C-Media 8788 chip, which enables a load of encoding and playback options. Not only does it encode DD 5.1, but also DTS Interactive and a host of other Dolby and DTS playback features. The card does not feature the swappable OPAMPS that the X-Mystique or X-Plosion has, but instead Bluegears opted to include good quality OPAMPS integrated onto the circuitboard. So there really is no reason to swap them out in the first place. The best part about this card is the price. Bluegears has a MSRP of $109.99 US for this very capable card, and it is $20 cheaper than the less feature packed Auzentech X-Plosion (the only other card that can do DTS Interactive). It is currently available at Newegg. I have the card in my possession, and it is a pretty solid number. Expect the full review soon! NVIDIA Refreshes the Line Last week NVIDIA released the 7900 GS series of cards, which are priced at $199 to directly compete against ATI's latest midrange offerings. Its specs are very similar to the old 7800 GT, but it has faster clocks and is a pretty nice bargain at its price point. 16 ROPS, 20 pixel shaders, and 7 vertex shaders running at 450 MHz core and 660 MHz memory (1320 MHz effective) should give the average user a lot of video card for the price! NVIDIA has also improved the reference cooler so it is no longer as shrill as it used to be when at full speed. It is also temperature controlled, so in daily use it is fairly quiet. Today NVIDIA has released the 7950 GT which slots into the $299 price range, and bumps the older 7900 GT down a notch. This card is identically clocked to the old 7800 GTX 512 (550 core and 700 memory), and it also features 512 MB of GDDR-3. It features dual dual-link DVI outputs and HDCP as standard. The performance sits right between the 7900 GT and 7900 GTX. With all of these changes, the 7900 GTX is now around $399, with the 7950 GX2 starting to hit the $499 price point. Things are getting quite competitive this fall between NVIDIA and ATI, and this whole slew of new SKU's are sure to keep buyers happy during the back to school season. August 24, 2006 Tyan Transport GT20 Review - Josh In the past several years Tyan has made a push into the barebones server market, where their primary competition appears to come from SuperMicro. When I first received this product, I was simply amazed at the overall featureset, value, and performance that Tyan offered in their introductory offering. I take a very in-depth look at the features, build, and performance of the GT20. For a budget rackmount, the GT20 offers an amazing value. Here is a quote:
You can read the entire review here. August 9, 2006 Quad SLI WHQL and Other News - Josh Today NVIDIA released their much anticipated DIY Quad SLI driver for owners of 2 x 7950 GX2's. Support is not universal yet, but there are some significant improvements with these setups. One of the big things is that 4 frame AFR is not supported under current DirectX 9c, but users can select SLI-AA modes to improve the appearance for little to no performance hit at higher resolutions. Quad SLI works with nForce 4 SLI, nForce 4 SLI X16, and the latest 570 SLI and 590 SLI motherboards for both AMD and Intel processors. Due to the scalable nature of PCI-E, the GX2's work on both 8X and 16X PCI-E connections. Hot Hardware and PC Perspective both have good articles covering this. Support will continue to grow from here on out with Quad SLI, but it is now officially supported for the DIY crowd. Users can find these drivers here. Super Talent has announced that they are releasing low latency DDR-2 1000 memory which features EPP (Enhanced Performance Profiles). These run at PC 8000 speeds with 4:5:4:15 latencies, which are pretty damn quick for that speed. Using EPP tech allows users to easily overclock these DIMMS without worrying too much about specific memory timings which could cause instability. I have been using Super Talent's PC6400 stuff since I first got the AMD AM2 testbed, and it has been nothing short of phenomenal in its performance. It was also the featured memory in the Multi-GPU World Tour. I'm still in the middle of trying to sell my house, find a new place to live, and deal with a handful of not-so-fun issues at work (technical stuff). Once I get my daily dose of all of that, I am far less inclined to write and test than I usually am. I do have some testing done on a couple of different products, now I just have to find more time to sit, think, and write. Heh, good luck with that! July 31, 2006 The Final Barrage of Multi-GPU Articles - Josh On Friday Legit Reviews released their part seven, followed by Rage3D with part eight, and finally Guru3D wrapped things up on Sunday. This has been an exhausting, but exciting experience for all of us involved. This was an incredibly long process. We started talking about it in April, got things rolling in May, and throughout most of June and July we dealt with what turned out to be a logistical nightmare. I am very happy with the results, and I believe that we were able to show people a pretty good, in-depth look at current Multi-GPU setups. As with anything tech, we are starting to see some big changes already, namely Conroe, Quad-SLI, and the latest Catalyst 6.7 drivers that allow more flexibility and user control. This was an ambitious project to begin with, but I believe it all came out pretty damn good. Could it have been better? Sure, but this is the first time that something of this scope and scale has been attempted. Were there lot's of lessons learned? You bet! If this is attempted again, we will certainly know how to handle it a lot better. After reading all of the articles, I really can't complain about the effort that everyone put into this. While initially I had my doubts about some, in the end I am very pleased with the amount of work (and teamwork) that it took to get this series off the ground, and completed in a timely manner. Of course we had hardware snafus (ironically enough it was NVNews that had issues with ATI AM2 boards, and Rage3D with the NVIDIA 590 SLI), but overall everything come out pretty good. I would like to thank all of our sponsors for their support in this endeavor. abit really came through with the motherboards on both sides of the fence, AMD (Bubba and Damon) were incredibly generous with helping the guys with processors, ATI (Will, Chris H., and Andrew D.) for helping with spare hardware and software support, BFG (Scott, Dean, and Michael) for providing video cards on demand, ECS for rounding out the ATI AM2 motherboards, Gigabyte for hardware support for our European members, NVIDIA (Brian and Bryan) for helping provide hardware, manufacturer support, marketing ideas, and motherboards, Sapphire for providing boards for our European members, and finally Super Talent (Joe James) for providing the really excellent DDR2-800 memory for high end testing. This has been one hell of a process, and if you are curious you can actually start at the introduction and link your way through the end (each site has a "next" link to the following article). Have an hour to spare and are interested in a multi-GPU setup? Start here. July 27, 2006 NVNews Posts the Uncommon Benchmarks - Josh Mike over at NVNews.net has posted his portion of the Multi-GPU World Tour. This covers some of the more commonly played, yet uncommonly benchmarked applications. Unfortunately, Mike was unable to get his hands on the ECS KA3 MVP motherboard to complete the high end CrossFire benchmarks. He was also unable to purchase one here in the States, but they are available in Europe. So once Mike gets that board, he is going to update his article with those results. In an ironic turn of events, Ratchet at Rage3D had his high end Foxconn 590 SLI board fry on the workbench, so he is unable to complete the high end SLI results at this time! Go figure. Anyway, Mike does an excellent job in his article, and he also covers the AA quality settings for both ATI and NV products, and it is a really nifty java app that handles that. Quite fun and impressive to play around with to say the least! Here is a quote:
You can read the entire article here. July 25, 2006 SteelPad 5L Mousing Surface Review - Josh While mousepads may not be nearly as exciting as a new video card or processor, it is a product we use everyday, and if it's doing its job we don't even notice that it's there. SteelSeries has produced quite a few surfaces that have defied convention, and their previous S&S pad received high honors here for performance and durability. Can the new 5L surpass the old standard? For a cloth based pad, it surely surprised me. Here is a quote:
You can read the entire review here. Neoseeker Unloads Most Played Article - Josh Last Friday Neoseeker released their "Most Played Games" contribution to the Multi-GPU World Tour. In this article Neoseeker explores the performance of SLI and CrossFire in many of today's most played games. These titles may not be graphics powerhouses, but for those wishing to invest in a Multi-GPU setup it is good to know what scales and what does not. Here is a quote:
You can read the entire article here. July 20, 2006 Moving Right Along with HARDiNFO - Josh Jon from HARDinFO spent many a sleepless night working on the common benchmarks article for the Multi-GPU World Tour. In it he covers an amazing amount of bench's, resolutions, and of course the six setups. Something of interest appears when using 3D Mark 2006 with anti-aliasing enabled in both ATI's and NVIDIA's control panel. While it seems that AF is enabled and applied to the scene when using the CP, AA gets disabled. The only way to enable AA in 3D06 is to do it from the launch panel of that application. That aside, here is a quote:
You can read the entire article here. Some New Product Releases - Josh The AGP crowd now has a new contender for their money. NVIDIA and its partners are releasing the GeForce 7600 GS AGP. This is identically clocked and spec'd to the PCI-E 7600 GS. These should be available quite shortly, and a much welcome addition for AGP users everywhere. Albatron contacted me, and they will have their version out soon. Mushkin is expanding their power supply offerings with a 550 watt version that complements their already excellent 650 watt product. It is currently undergoing evaluation by both ATI and NVIDIA for CrossFire and SLI certification, and they don't expect any issues with that process. You can find both of their power supplies here. July 17, 2006 Bjorn Covers Motherboards - Josh For the third installment of the Definitive Multi-GPU World Tour, Bjorn of Bjorn3D gave up his vacation in the Balmora Highlands (if you would call that a vacation) to test 6 motherboards in non-stop action. Obviously his wife was not terribly impressed, and I am sure she had some very choice words in describing us. Getting past that bit of nastiness, Bjorn has done a fantastic job in covering a really tough subject. Here is a quick quote:
If that doesn't catch your attention... well, then maybe a lot of other things would. By the way, Bjorn really didn't give up a vacation to the Balmora Highlands. His vacation was in Sweden, but he took all of his testing stuff with him. Amazing. You should give it a read here. July 12, 2006 Bit-Tech Unleashes The Next Chapter! - Josh Today Bit-Tech has released the next episode of the Definitive Multi-GPU World Tour. This article covers the multi-GPU offerings from both NVIDIA and ATI, as well as a nice overview on how it all works. Here is a quick quote:
You can read Bit-Tech's article here, or if you have missed the introduction by myself, then go here. July 10, 2006 The Definitive Multi-GPU World Tour Kicks Off! - Josh This is the introduction to a nine part series covering the multi-GPU space from both ATI and NVIDIA perspectives. Nine sites around the world have combined to work together to achieve what we feel is the definitive Multi-GPU roundup of products and technology. We look not only at the cards being presented, but of the entire ecosystem of parts supporting this technology. We compare 6 full multi-GPU systems from ATI and NVIDIA, and try to expose the strengths and weaknesses of each setup. Here is a direct quote from my introduction to the series.
On Wednesday we will see the next installment from Tim Smalley at Bit-Tech.
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