ForceWare 177.98 WHQL VS 177.92 Beta |
ForceWare 177.98 WHQL may become the last driver of the 177 family. After this NVIDIA are going to roll out their Big Bang II. So this time how well the 177.98 performs?
Test platform：
CPU: Intel Core 2 QX9650 OC 400MHzX10
Mobo: Asustek Maximus Extreme
Memory: A-DATA DDR3 1066 1Gx2
Graphic Card: GeForce GTX 280
Driver: Forceware 175.19 and 177.92
OS: Windows Vista SP1
New? Old? three ways of GTX 260 Discriminations |
So NVIDIA decided that they are not going to change name of the new 216sp GTX 260, we’d better find a way to tell the new 260 from the old.
1. Shader
The new GTX 260 have 9 TPC, thats 24 shaders more than the old GTX 260, So the easiest way to see the difference is from ForceWare control panel’s system information．One of the improvement of ForceWare 177 is more info will be display in the system information page. So let’s see:
[review]13 VGA coolers Roundup |
Introduction
In nowadays, NVIDIA and ATI seem facing the same problem as what CPU industry faced 4 years ago: Too many transistors in a single core, huge power consumption and high temperature. For example, a Intel Wolfdale CPU has 0.41 billion transistors and features 65W TDP, while a NVIDIA GTX200 has 1.5 billion transistors and features 170W TDP. Even the smaller one, a AMD RV770 also has 0.956 billion transistors and features 160W TDP. In terms of number, GPU can easily beat CPU.
ELSA hints NVIDIA’s next step is 45nm(40nm?) GT212 |
Yesterday ELSA China held a channel meeting, talked lots of uninteresting stuffs there. But we noticed ELSA showed a new NVIDIA graphic card roadmap!
MCP7A delayed again,ECS & MSI nForce730i/GF 9300 shows up |
After NVIDIA canned the Hybrid Power on MCP7A and pushed back the release date to August, we did not heard about any updates of the chipset from motherboard vendors for a long time. But today we received new date change from our sources. One of our sources mentions that MCP7A will hit the market in the late September.
Dual core Atom 330 leak pics and bench numbers |
Intel mentioned many times that there will be a dual core Atom and here it is! It looks like another Kentsfield/Yorkfield, one PCB with two dies. This kind of design is not handsome at all but can lower production cost effectively. The dual core Atom(Formal name: Atom 330) also already have been benchmarked with Sandra 2009:
Galaxy G31 mobo under $50, but high overclocking capacity |
With falling demand for entry-level discrete graphics cards, several graphics card makers have taken steps to enter the IGP motherboard market including Powercolor, XFX, Gainward, Sapphire, BFG, Inno3D, Galaxy and Zotac. Galaxy entered this market much earlier and has introduced high-end 680i mobo in 2006. But now it introduces a new product for entry-level PCs.
Sex sells PART II – Gainward “lv bu” HD 4870(Golden Sample) |
Following HD 4850 for part I, Gainward also prepares HD 4870 for part II. As always, here we go…
Lynnfield on track for Holiday Refresh 2009, Havendale purposed delay to Jan 2010 |
Lynnfield is not only the simplified version of the next generation high-end bloomfield, but features some northbridge function integrated as well (such as memory controller and PCIe controller). According to Intel’s Roadmap, Clarksfield(laptop version) and Lynnfield:
More Pics of Gigabyte X58-EXTREME |
Special Thanks to windwithme
As Nehalem’s coming, Intel platform will transform to LGA1366 package. The first chipsets supporting LGA1366 is the upcoming X58 and Asus, Gigabyte, Foxconn, and MSI have shown up their motherboard based on the X58 chipsets and we have seen Gigabyte’s X58-EXTREME many days ago.
Good (or bad?) hardware propaganda |
Gainward just released some propaganda photos, to promote their HD 4850… Guys you like this kind of propaganda? I guess Gainward marketing team read too much I4U these days.
Asus announces non-reference HD 4870 with 4+2 phase power module |
It’s two month since RV770 announcement, and many manufacturers introduce their non-reference HD 4850. However, there are still seldom HD4870s with non-reference design for the GDDR5 memory. So it’s happy to see one more non-reference HD4870 comes out, and it’s from Asus.
