RSS Feeds
|
US Edition
Babblebaby
|
Defamer
|
Gizmodo
|
Kotaku
|
Lifehacker
Results for posts tagged "nvidia" on Gizmodo Australia.
One of the more eyebrow-raising rumours in the scramble of them about Apple's upcoming MacBooks is that they will switch from Intel chipsets to someone else's. It seemed odd on its face, since Intel and Apple are fairly tight, and there's not a very apparent reason to switch. Jon at Ars lays out a fairly solid case for why Apple is sticking with Intel though.
Dell isn't the only laptop maker offering its customers help if they have laptops with certain Nvidia chips that are prone to overheating. HP has issued a list of laptops of its own that feature the chipset and states that it's been a known warranty issue since late last year. While not offering to swap for new laptops, HP has made it known that if your laptop meets certain criteria then you may be eligible for a free repair. This is good news for those of you with fried portables in your closet, so check out the list on HP's website to see if you're affected. [HP via Nanotech]
Even after Nvidia downplayed their original report that GeForce 8400-8700 cards were failing in large numbers due to overheating, Dell has issued a BIOS update for all of its machines running the affected GPUs anyway. The update tweaks the fan settings to "regulate temperature fluctuations" to keep the maybe-faulty-maybe-not chips cooler. So who do we believe here?
A graphics card can cost you almost as much as a bona fide Batman gadget, especially when you get up to ridiculous amounts of power and performance, but that ludicrous price is actually less ludicrous than it could be, because of the cutthroat competition between ATI and Nvidia, right? Not so fast. An email Nvidia sent by Nvidia senior VP of marketing, Dan Vivoli, to ATI's president and COO, Dave Orton made public by the judge in an ongoing anti-trust suit against the two companies reveals that they both see eye-to-eye on prices. Namely, that they should be higher:
Took a little longer than I expected, but Nvidia has come around to denying that basically every GeForce 8400-8700 graphics card powered by the G84 and G86 chipset is a flawed, ticking timebomb, waiting to die from overheating issues. They say that the problem affects "only a very small percentage of the notebook chips that have shipped" and that "the problem depends on a combination of environmental conditions, configuration, and usage model."
Intel and Nvidia's cold war over the discrete and integrated graphics chipsets that sit inside our computers seems to have at least partially thawed. Nvidia's announced that "it will be bringing the power and performance of its SLI® multi-GPU technology to Intel's upcoming line of Bloomfield CPUs." Upcoming SLI motherboards will have the nForce 200 SLI processor alongside Bloomfield CPUs, and Tylersburg (X58) chipsets, which should come as good news to gamers with top-end gaming PC setups. Nvidia's press release below (including some interesting "customer viewpoints")
Nvidia's top end GeForce GTX 260 and 280 graphics cards--whose power borders on sorcery--launched for US$399 and US$650, respectively, less than a month ago. But pressure from ATI has driven Nvidia to already cut the price, hard. The GTX 280 is now only US$399, while the GTX 260 is US$299, the same price as ATI's HD 4870. Good to see ATI back in the fight. Anyone already buy this and feel hosed though? Competition is a lovely thing. [CNET]
It's been a while since we've heard anything about memory maker Rambus, but the company has come back into the light to sue Nvidia for patent infringement. Rambus thinks that Nvidia's use of SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3 SDRAM in their products violates 17 (count 'em... 17!) patents that Rambus owns. Those chips sit inside all sorts of Nvidia gear, and apparently Rambus has been trying for a settlement for years. Now it's using the legal system to claim cash for the damages. Bad news for Nvidia, but Rambus is still apparently trying "to continue discussions with Nvidia to reach a negotiated settlement." I bet. [BusinessWire]
Those overheating Nvidia laptop graphics cards that are dying en masse? The Inquirer is reporting that "all the G84 and G86 parts are bad. Period. No exceptions," on mobile and desktop. Those chipsets are in pretty much every GeForce 8-series graphics card below the 8800s (here's a complete list of cards and chipsets). Notably, that means every MacBook Pro since the Santa Rosa update has the bad cards, which fail at a "higher-than-normal" rate.
Remember those modders from NGOHQ who were swolling out ATI's Radeon graphics cards with Nvidia's PhysX physics engine? Surprise, Nvidia loves the idea of their physics engine running on rival ATI's graphics cards, so they're giving Eran Badit and his crew total support, with access to documentation, SDKs, hardware and actual engineers. AMD, on the other hand, isn't being so cooperative.
