3DMark Vantage has been released at April 28, bringing us a totally new way of gaming benchmark. In a gamer/reviewer’s view, the Vantage release is as important as a hardware company like AMD or Intel launch their new product lines. The software is not just make for bench current GPU, it is make for benching PC gaming hardware in the future. Our rig is not that future, so in our test you can see, even a GeForce 9800GX2 performs not so good in the most extreme setting of Vantage.
Before Vantage’s launch, NVIDIA has already prepared a new driver, 175.12, and AMD released a Hotfix for Catalyst 8.4 after the benchmark tool’s launch. It seems a competition base on 3DMark Vantage have already begin.
But 3DMark Vantage is not polished, some bugs have shown their signs in the software, still waiting for FutureMark to eliminate them. in the official FAQ there is some early answers. If you have troubles with 3DMark Vantage, you should check out the FAQ.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Testing platform
Page 3: 16 cards benchmark with Performance preset
Page 4: 16 cards benchmark with Extreme preset
Page 5: Card comparison
Page 6: 3DMark Vantage is torture for GFX cards
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3DMark Vantage of course will have a trail version for us, but FutureMark is going to release another three different paid versions of 3DMark Vantage:
The basic 3DMark Vantage (Basic Edition is what they called) will be only 6.95USD, it will be licensed for non-commercial and personal use only, functions include unlimited number of test runs using a single Preset setting, network connection required to view results. (It seems FuturMark really want to bind 3DMark users to their ORB.)
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NVIDIA plans a driver (175.12) release at 3DMark Vantage launch day, but it is leaked earlier. The inf file contains almost all GeForce product, but reveals no new product this time. For now it is only 175.12 for WinVista 64-bit, NVIDIA will release 32bit version later in here.
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Guys at Xfastest have already got their hands on with 3DMark Vantage. Let’s see their platforms and scores:
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Massages from our source, NVIDIA is going to release a new driver for 3DMark Vantage. The driver is 175.xx, will be release at 3DMark Vantage’s launch day. With the new driver, NVIDIA’s Flagship card, the 9800GX2 can score nearly 10K with 3DMark Vantage Performance Perset.
3DMark Vantage have several Presets, ranged from entry, performance, high and extreme. It will choose the most suitable Preset for current cards automatically. For more information about the Presets you can read these leak documents.
Matbe reported that they have spotted two ASUS mobo. The frist one is a mid range P45, called P5Q-E and the other is a entry level P5Q Pro. P45 chipset supports 1600MHz FSB and DDR3, but these two boards only support DDR2 memory.
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Today we have a hands on with this unreleased product of Galaxy, the MagicBox. At first sight we thought it is only a ordinary panel with card reader and RPM control slap together. But after some demonstrations from Galaxy dev we find out it is quite useful.
With all the features you can see in front of the panel like card reader, RPM control, USB, eSATA expansion and CMOS clear button. Thanks to a single chip micyoco built in the panel (they call it MPU, MagicBox Processing Unit), with it linked to a Galgxy mobo, it turn out to be a standard mobo debug card, or CPU turbo and automatic fan control.
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DFI will keep the partnership with Thermalright, release a X48-T2R+cooler bundle tomorrow in Taiwan area. IT IS MASSIVE, and will be expensive..let’s just let pics talk:
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In a previous post some day ago we have reported “the high utilization bar of MPEG2 decoding still shows us this GeForce 8200 is not a 100% decoding solution. We hope it is only a ES issue, they can fix the problem when it finally hits the market.”
And this time we managed to run the same HD video test on GeForce 8300, (or you can call it MCP78U). GeForce 8300 is a upgrade version of GeForce 8200, have a higher Shader clock(up to 1500MHz), and better GeForce Boost performance.
The mobo we ran is another ES, so the final number may differ from retail version. We find out the GeForce 8300 have some improvements of HD video playback, read the pic for details.
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We have been talking about 3DMark Vantage from FutureMark for a long time. The latest word from the company said 3DMark Vantage will be announce in April 28.
The new 3DMark Vantage is a 100% DirectX10 application, works with Vista only. But FYI, at first they scheduled to release the application at GDC this year but failed to launch. Hope this time they can make it.
With the release date, source also mentions the application requirement:
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Right after AMD officially release the Phenom X3, Korean website BrainBox have posted an review of Phenom X3 8750. Pervious reports from TGDaily said that Phenom X3 is expensive, even few bucks more than a Phenom X4 9750. But in the review (in Korean) X3 8750 performs quite well. Google translation is not good, but you can still reads the numbers from here.
Other reviews:
PC Perspective
TechReport
Overclockers Club
HotHardware
HEXUS.net
PCWatch (in Japanese)
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Western Digital released another Raptor, the name is VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS. The drive is 300GB SATA 2.5inch HDD, but WD placed the drive into a WD IcePAK cooling case and make it into a 3.5inch drive.
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Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more.
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The old time table said we can get our Hybrid SLI driver in Apr. 15, but…
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