Gamers, could you handle this? An Aurora ALX with a Core i7 975 processor, X58 microATX motherboard and two ATI Radeon HD 5870′s in CrossFire. Is it fast? Pfft. Whaddyareckon?
Confusing, meaningless name? Check. Ostentatious styling added by a third party, completely unsuited for a component that you often can’t see? Check. Bizarre, irrelevant marketing claims? Oh, check.
From the Voodoo1 in 1996 to the wallet-and-pixel crushing Nvidia GeForce GTX 285, Maximum PC recounts the entire history of 3D graphics in ultra-gory detail. A fantastically nerdy way to kill 30 minutes. [Maximum PC]
No, I didn’t stutter: GPGPU—general-purpose computing on graphics processor units—is what’s going to bring hot screaming gaming GPUs to the mainstream, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Finally, everbody’s face melts! Here’s how.
At 1GHz, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 is the fastest-clocked graphics card in the planet—a world’s first. It’s not a new chip, however, just a “factory-overclocked” air-cooled 4890 that looks like a Ferrari.
Fujistu-Siemens has released their Amilo GraphicBooster. It seems like a rather good idea. A powerful graphics card and two-USB port that you can have permanently attached to three displays. It look amazing in action.
ATI has been hitting Nvidia hard with its 4000-series big guns like the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and they’re starting to feel it, with ATI successfully clawing away marketshare from Nvidia. Which has Nvidia skurred. So, sources say, Nvidia’s readying a barrage of price cuts to keep the territory loss to a minimum. If it pans out, we should be in for some sweet deals—last time Nvidia played hard ball with ATI, they threw bricks, cutting their top-end graphics cards by $US200 just a month out the gate, and let loose its GeForce 9800 GTX for around $US200 as well. It could be a Merry Christmas after all. [Digitimes via Maximum PC]
Just on Monday we were talking about ATI’s monster new 4870 X2 graphics, perhaps the most powerful around, and already Asetek have come up with a liquid cooling system for it. The LCLC is designed to either let you run the card nearly silent (the heat exchanger fan on the cooler runs at just 30 dB(A), which is pretty quiet) or overclock the ATI board for even more extreme performance. Either way, it’s capable of lowering the GPU temp by 28 degrees, and takes up only two more slots. Price and release date not available, but read on for the press release.
ATI’s Nvidia-slaying Radeon HD 4870 X2, previewed last month, will get official tomorrow at SIGGRAPH says the WSJ, who notes that some reviewers are calling it the most powerful card around. It’s an interesting test of ATI’s graphics card strategy: Cheaper, less power-hungry GPUs that can be easily strapped together (like the dual-GPU 4870 X2) versus Nvidia’s penchant for obscenely powerful single GPUs. The best part? Whoever you go with, you can’t really go wrong anymore. [
ATI fanboys, your time may have come with the R700-based Radeon HD 4870 X2. It’s a US$500 multi-GPU card that basically straps together a pair of Radeon HD 4870s with 2GB of onboard memory to create ATI’s fastest single card ever. (It’s not your imagination, they’re really stepping with the Nvidia-killing, which is sweet.) Benchwise, it actually beats Nvidia’s monster GeForce GTX 280 running in SLI in a couple of games, like Age of Conan.
