Review: Nvidia’s F104 - GTX 460 mini-fur-me
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 19th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Hardware Review
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A $200 board that packs a lot of wallop One of the fastest airplanes ever made was the Lockheed F104 clocking in at 1.7 mach with a 48k ft/min climb rate it was called a missile with a pilot in it. We’ve been testing another F104 - the new F104-based Nvidia AIBs, the 1GB GTX 460 and the 768MB GTX 460 both units configured with GDDR5 memory. These are consumer derivative versions of the famous Fermi chip, minus the super computer parts like EC memory management, smaller caches, and a larger number of texture units per FP unit. The new GPU…
Nvidia’s three-screen 3D Vision system
Posted by By Robert Dow and Jon Peddie on July 8th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Hardware Review
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nvidia
graphics
gaming
To do more you gotta see more—it’s the law As you all know (and if you don’t we’re going to send you to your room and make you write it a hundred times), Peddie’s 2nd law is—The more you can see the more you can do. And as you may know we’re pretty big fans of stereo games (S3D.) And, some of you may have seen at CES, or GDC, or PAX, or Computex, Nvidia’s three-screen S3D system. You could see it, but you couldn’t touch it—it wasn’t really a shipping product yet. Last week Nvidia officially released their GeForce Beta…
AMD on AMD with AMD - The platform company shows its stuff
Posted by By Robert Dow and Alex Garovi on July 8th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Hardware Review
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amd
graphics
gaming
review
After too many years of being criticized for not tooting their own horn enough, the technical marketing folks at AMD sent us a Vision Black machine to put through the paces. I think we may have to toot their horn—this is one impressive machine. As configured, the system was pre-loaded with Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate, all the drivers already installed, and pre-loaded with AMD’s Fusion Media Explorer and the Fusion Utility software. Here is the system configuration: Antec Six Hundred Chassis. Corsair 750W PSU. Asus Crosshair IV motherboard based on AMD’s 890FX chipset with four PCIe slots. 4GB of OCZ DDR3.…
“Singularity”—first impressions - game review
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 8th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Software Review
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review
games
fps
We got a copy of Activisions’s “Singularity” (developed by Raven) and started playing with it. It’s a FPS set on a island where the Russians built a research facility in the 1950s to test a newly discovered element E99. Things didn’t turn out quite the way the scientist had hoped and the Russians (Soviet Union at the time) shut down the research center and abandoned the island. Rediscovered by a satellite scan in 2010 a U.S. special ops force is sent in to investigate, find the E99 and well, I’m not sure what they are supposed to do with it yet.…
The Specialist Headphone from Nox Audi
Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 23rd 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Hardware Review
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gaming
games
audio
audiophile
sound
headphones
While strolling the aisles of E3, we ran across some compact headsets from Nox Audio. The new design includes an integrated 4 mm omnidirectional microphone slickly tucked by the left ear pad. It rolls out when needed and rolls back up discreetly to avoid the geek factor that gamers might as well give up worrying about because they’re a lost cause. The other side has a similar knob that turns up the volume. The earphones don’t have noise cancellation but they do employ noise reduction strategies in the construction of the headphones—meaning that they’re designed to block sound. The earphones work…
Testing Tessellation on the GeForce 480
Posted by By Robert Dow and Alex Garovi on May 28th 2010 | Permalink
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Tessellation represents one of the key benefits of DirectX 11 for gamers. By enabling Tessellation during gameplay the GPU is able to “dynamically subdivide the wireframes of 3D objects.” By subdividing the wireframe the detail of all objects in the game is exponentially increased. Images that once took on a box-like look with tessellation become more naturally rounded. Tessellation can be programmed so that objects in the background that appear far away from the gameplay can be rendered with less detail while objects up close can take full advantage of the dynamic tessellation process providing max detail. This week we took…
Seeing more, doing more; a guide to putting multiple monitors to work, or play
Posted by Jon Peddie on April 16th 2010 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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amd
gaming
production
multiscreen
We have been proponents of multi-screen displays forever, and have run almost every combination there is for over two decades now. Possibly the largest monitor in a cluster we ever had was a Sony 24-inch CRT Trinitron that weighed over 300 pounds. We’ve cabled notebooks to external monitors and built really powerful workspaces of three and four displays with effective resolutions of 4800 x 1200. We’ve tried the various Matrox Dual and TripleHead2Go combinations, and for the money we were pretty impressed, but the burden of driver tweaks limited the range of applications. The TripleHead2Go maps the GPU’s external display frame…
Nvidia GTX 480 benchmarks
Posted by Robert Dow on April 16th 2010 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Benchmarking is very time consuming and we have great admiration for those websites that get so much of it done right after an AIB is released. This is our second series of tests on the Nvidia GTX 480. Since it’s Nvidia’s flagship product, and has taken so long to get to market, we wanted to make sure we gave it the best tests we could do. As it was, due to monitor frustrations with DisplayPort, we were constrained to test at 1920 x 1080. However, as soon as we can get an active DP-to-DVI adaptor, or find a 30-inch 2560 x…
Reviewing the Boxx 4850 Extreme workstation
Posted by Alex Herrera on April 2nd 2010 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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amd
review
firepro
... and another look at the AMD FirePro 8750 At JPR, we get several opportunities over the course of a year to check out OEMs’ new workstation models. And while we always see or learn one or two new things, by and large, the differences are usually relatively minor. After all, they’re all built from similar IHV-based components from Intel, Nvidia and AMD, so companies designing workstations with similar goals of price and price/performance are going to more often than not end up with similar results. And that’s precisely why we were eager to review the 4850 Extreme workstation from Boxx.…
Benchmarking Nvidia’s GTX 480 Fermi AIB
Posted by Jon Peddie on March 30th 2010 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Last week in Boston at the PAX conference Nvidia officially announced the GTX 480 and 470 AIBs based on the GF100 Fermi GPU. We’ve written it up in this issue of TechWatch (see page 1.) The board is unremarkable in its appearance, and we could not find any wood screws. As you might have heard, some who saw early versions of Fermi AIBs claimed to have spotted wood screws holding the thing together – evidence that the boards were mock-ups. We tested the Nvidia GTX 480 in an Intel Core i7 x980 3.33GHz 6 cores (12 logical processors), DX58SO X58, 3GB DDR3…
