[Review]XFX nForce 790i Ultra
Introduction
First impression: lots of non-solid capacitors looks bad, sharp corners may hurt one’s hand… All these just not suit 79i Ultra as a top board of NVIDIA
Gigabyte now going to war with ASUS…
You may seen the Quad NIC solution by Gigabyte P45-DQ6, and ASUS now also unveils their P5Q Premium: another mobo with Quad NIC. And now Gigabyte said that is their first idea, and seems angry with these..
What’s more, Gigabyte also pointing out ASUS EPU is fake, not only changing numbers without change its hardware, but its EPU control software is actually only “down clock”. Let pics speak for themselves.
Intel: upgrade GPU have no benefit to users
NVIDIA seems very unhappy with Intel, not only showed us upgrading CPU is useless and even hinted Intel’s upcoming graphic solution Larrabee will be a vaporware:
“Larabee is a PowerPoint slide,I haven’t met a product on my PowerPoint slide that I don’t like. You know, they’re floating Larrabee out there just to put a shadow over us, cast a cloud over us. They’ve already slipped it two years from the time they talked about. They would love to slip it another four years and leave a cloud over me.” (NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, CNET interview)
Click to read more.
Several Intel CPU will be EOL soon
We got infos from our sources that several CPU will become EOLed in few months, because new products have been launched, and they are no longer meet the needs of Intel’s strategic. These CPU not only Pamtium and Core 2 Duo, but also includes two Core 2 Extreme processors.
EDIT:
PDN: Production Discontinue Notice
EOL: End Of Lifecycle
Intel P35 will be EOLed in Dec
Intel’s new main stream chipset P45 will be officially announce in ComputeX this year. And the mobo will also come out soon. But the launch of P45 means P35 will finally facing EOL.
From Info we gathered, we know though P35 and P45 do not have much differences, but after P45’s launch, P35 will still last long enough to Nov.08. It will going EOLed at the end of this year. it is a little later than expected.
Intel’s first Nehalem mobo is X58
As we known, Intel’s next gen processor will be Nehalem, and desktop Nehalem will be Bloomfield. It is a 45nm process technology 4 core CPU, integrated with memory controller, SMT (Simultaneous Multi-threading) up to 8 processing threads, and w/ 8M cache. It has been revealed in IDF 08, but at that time no the supporting mobo is still being kept in secret.
Click to read more.
Galaxy unveils 9600GSO Black Edition
Galaxy told us that they are going to roll out a new product line, called Black Edition. Similar to AMD, Galaxy black edition means more OCbility and bigger graphic memory. The first product of Black Edition is this 9600GSO BE. Click over to read more.
ECS X48/P45 Black series mobo preview
Both ECS X48T-A and P45T-A are products of Black series, though we do not know what the price point is, but from the layout we guess it won’t be expensive.. The X48T-A features 6 phase VRM for CPU, four DDR3 slot, a not-so-appeal heatpipe cooling system and two PCIe X16 slot.
Heatpipe+water block, P45 Diamond first look
MSI have already post one P45 with loads of heatpipe, but this time they are going further, prepared a water block on the chipset. The design reminds us lots of ASUS boards. All these pics are from HKEPC.
Different from ASUS, MSI using flashion acrylic as part of the water block.
NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT with color red scheme going wild…
The 9500GT launch still have a month to go, but Chinese website ZOL have already got a non reference version 9500GT. The version of 9500GT using a Red color scheme, a aluminum cooler and a DisplayPort. We have just post a 9500GT review, so if you wanna know more of this mainstream card, please click here to jump.
Because it is for mainstream, so you can not expect it is a good looking card …
Review: NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT,first budget card in GeForce 9 series
GeForce 8600GTS/GT have been launched for more than a year, but till now NVIDIA did not push any new product to replace it. All NVIDIA doing is keep replacing product in the high end segment: 8800GT, 8800GTS 512MB, 8800GS, 9600GT, 9800GX2 and 9800GTX. All these cards are 140USD above, and What NVIDIA going to do is going a new GeForce 9 product to replace the 8600GT/8600GTS. That’s our today’s review card: GeForce 9500GT.
Before we post this review, other site have already make some news out of the card: (all in Chinese)
Because of some obvious reasons, we can not post any pics of GeForce 9500GT(except the core shot and cooler shot).
We must point out, PConline in their 9500GT review totally copied HD video playback part of our G98-8400GS review word by word, (of course they copy our Chinese versions so you probably can not read it) which totally mis-info their readers, because HD playback of 9500GT is not the same with G98-8400GS. now please click over to read our whole review.
Intel P45 mobo Going wild
Though Intel’s P45 chipset still have a whole month to wait for the official product launch, several companies’ P45 have already got previewed. Click over for preview for there mobo previews.
3DMark Vantage, new torture for your gaming setup.
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
3DMark Vantage will have four versions totally
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.)