Jon Peddie Reviews

Review: Nvidia’s F104 - GTX 460 mini-fur-me

2010-07-20T00:28:44Z

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 also has more head room for over clocking.

Designated the F104 GPU by Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 460 AIB ships with 336 CUDA cores and 56 texture units; two memory configurations are available:

Clock speeds between both boards are identical. The graphics core clock is 675MHz, while the CUDA Cores run at 1350MHz. Memory speed is 1800MHz.

The GPU has seven of what Nvidia is marketing as PolyMorph Engines for tessellation. Nvidia likes to point out that their competitor’s architecture is only outfitted with a single tessellation engine.

Some of the early speculation on the (unnamed at the time) 460 was Nvidia would simply cut the GeForce GTX 480 GPU in half, however, Nvidia surprised folks and instead made some changes to the design of their Shader Modules (SM) for GF104, resulting in a product that’s Fermi-based but also notably different from GF100. The GTX 460 is equipped with 336 CUDA Cores (48 per SM) in order to hit the performance, and power requirements of the Performance gaming segment.

Designed for:	Enthusiasts	The Gamers’ Sweet Spot
CUDA Cores	480	336
Polymorph Engines	15	7
Texture Units	60	56
Board Length	10.5”	8.25”
Max Board Power	250W	160W
MSRP	$499	$229 ‐ $199

In order to feed the CUDA cores with data, Nvidia included four dispatch units per SM. As a result, two instructions can be dispatched per warp, for a grand total of four instructions per clock per SM. Along similar lines, the number of special function units (SFUs) and texture units is eight per SM.

GT in gaming performance, and speedups of up to 4.5x were found with PhysX applications.

The tests

The GTX 460 with 768MB frame buffer goes head to head with a ATI Radeon HD 5830, a product that for a similar price delivers a larger frame buffer (very important both for today’s games and even richer, more detailed DirectX 11 games to come); However, although the ATI AIB supports ATI’s Eyefinity and can drive three displays, two are DVI and one is either a Display Port (DP) or HDMI. And to use the DP the user will have to get a DP to DVI adaptor (~$25.) However, the GTX 460 only can drive two monitors, so the additional cost for a third monitor adaptor is not too burdensome. The Radeon 5830 also offers 7.1 HBR audio pass through.

The good news is there is no single test to use in evaluating a graphics AIB. The bad news is there no single test to use in evaluating a graphics AIB. It used to be if you wanted a rock solid test you used the application you wanted to run on the graphics AIB, in this case the game. Synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark, and Unigine’s Heaven benchmark can give you a very good idea of an AIB’s general performance and solid idea of its tessellation capabilities but the actual experience of your favorite application may vary.

That means folks like us have to run a lot of tests to get a feeling for how an AIB really performs. The problem is the testing is complex, compounding, and can be confounding due to the range of control that most games offer. Of course you can vary resolution, but you can also turn anti-aliasing off, or on, and when on you can choose between 2x, 4x, or 8x samples per pixel. You can turn on and off anisotropic filtering, some games let you turn on or off tessellation, and/or vary it by complexity (normal, extreme), and some games will run different lighting conditions. The combinations of conditions are staggering. Add to that Nvidia and AMD come out with new drivers almost weekly.

To make life a little easier on us (not the AIB) we in general choose the most sever conditions to test the AIBs. We ran three boards through a suite of tests: An AMD Radeon 5830 1GB, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 1GB, and a GTX 460 768MB. We ran four tests: Aliens vs. Predators, Resident Evil 5, Stalker Call of Pripyat, and Unigine’s Heaven at three resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200, and 2560x1600.

We ran the tests in the most extreme conditions we could and discovered as good as these mid-range priced AIBs are, they can’t quite drive a ultra high-resolution screen (i.e., 2560x1600) at useful frame rates (i.e., >25 fps) so for clarity we have not included those scores in this report.

The results are shown in the following charts.

For the tests we ran, on average the GTX 460 0.8GM board was 21% higher in FPS than the Radeon 5830, and the GTX 460 1GB was 32.6% and that seems significant. As the data shows the extreme conditions knock the AIBs down below 30 fps and so the user will have to be careful when selecting which features to turn on.

Extra memory

As the DX11 data shows, the added cost for a GB of memory is not clear. The difference in cost to add 232 MB of memory (~25%) will cost $30 or 15.1%. However, the average performance improvement was only 9%. In Stalker COP we saw improvements as high as 17.4%, but all the other scores were 10% or less.

Pmark

To calculate the Pmark which uses Price, Performance, and Power we have in the past used Futuremark’s Vantage test. However, Vantage only tests for DirectX 10. Since there is no standard synthetic benchmark, we took the average of all the DirectX 11 scores we observed (in frames-per-second) and used that for the Performance component of the evaluation. This gives a good overall expectation of the AIBs in general. Then for those who want to find something they can point to show their superiority they can pick the particular test that works for their objectives.

The Nvidia GTX 460 768MB AIB is the clear winner in the $199 to $229 category. The raw data that went into the Pmark calculation is shown in the table.

	HD 5830	GTX 460 768MB	GTX 460 1GB
Pmark	0.64	0.88	0.80
Power (W)	175	150	160
Price ($US)	$199	$199	$229
Performance (Ave Dx11 FPS)	22.16	26.34	29.22

Pmark

Where:

Performance is expressed in 3DMark Vantage score
Price is expressed in US dollars
Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

About the power consumption. Nvidia’s published power usage (which is the figure we used) is 150 to 160 watts. Several sites have said they measured the 0.8GB GTX 460 at 160W. This too is a variance of manufacturing like over-clocking range. We monitored the power of the system without an AIB in it to get the “tare-weight.” Then we put the board in and let it just sit with only Explorer running, that drew ~ 25 W. The we ran Heaven the most demanding program and found the power consumption (from the tare value) was 100 to 135 W - so much for empirical measurements.

Comment on the Pmark

The Pmark is designed to be a general consumer guide, and should be useful for people who want a balanced view of a graphics board. . An analogy would be the buyer of an automobile. For an average buyer with a limited budget and life style that involvs children, groceries, and pets, an automobile would not be purchased on its horsepower rating. That may be factor, but gas mileage, and cargo space would probably get equal if not greater weighting. However, for a more well off person, with either no kids, or the budget for an expensive second (or third car) performance may be the main criterion and so he or she will buy a high-powered sports car and look at gas mileage as a secondary issue.

The same holds true for the purchase of an AIB. For people with limited budgets other criteria may come into consideration such as power consumption (we all want to help the environment) and the subsequent noise a big fan will make. This is the buyer the Pmark is designed for. For enthusiasts where performance is the only criteria then the Pmark has little utility.

DirectX 10 results

There’s still mostly DirectX 10 games being sold and played and so a DirectX 10 score (Resident Evil 5) is shown for comparison.

Looking at the Resident Evil Test 1680x1050 4X AA (GTX 480 768) the test appears to be CPU bound – Nvidia observed a FPS score of 91, almost 10 frames higher, on Gulftown as opposed to the Phenom II – we confirmed these finding when we ran the test on the Gulftown based system as well.

As might be expected the new gen AIBs do very well on the older games, Direct X 10 as well and DX 9.

Over-clocking

We ran all the boards through all the tests with the GPU and memory clocks turned up. And although there was some improvement in FPS it wasn’t significant enough, nor universally reproducible to warrant a report. The GTX 460 has significant head room and can be cranked up to 850+ MHz but it’s an individual thing – that is, some parts may come out capable of that and some won’t so it can’t be guaranteed- it if could Nvidia would offer the part at those speeds.

I want to hear it too

Besides gaming, users who buy AIBs in this segment will use their computer for other tasks such as photo-editing, MP3 music, and watching movies with the computer possibly connected to a large screen HDTVs Nvidia provide audio pass-though via HDMI for such users. To satisfy the needs of this audience, the GeForce GTX 460 also features enhanced audio support over HDMI, this includes bitstreaming support for Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio over HDMI.

What do we think?

There one heck of a lot of bang for the buck in Nvidia’s $199 to $229 F104-based AIBs: good gaming scores, good overall capabilities, modest power consumption, and quiet running. The AIBs can be ganged up in SLI mode (but they have to be of the same memory size) for additional performance. Showing its Starfighter qualities, the F104-based GTX 460 0.8GM board scored on average 21% higher FPS than the Radeon 5830, and the GTX 460 1GB was 32.6% and that’s damn impressive.

Nvidia’s three-screen 3D Vision system

2010-07-08T16:58:57Z

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 v258.69 drivers which add support for 3D Vision Surround (S3D) and Nvidia Surround (2D view across three monitors).

So that puppy is shipping now and if you can get in front of one, make sure your seat belt is fastened. Oh, and if you’ve got 5.1 sound check that it’s turned up. This experience simply put is freakin awesome.

Nvidia dropped by last week and set us up with a test system As configured, the system was pre-loaded with Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium:

Black OPS Assassin Edition Chassis.
Digital Storm Certified (Dual/Triple/Quad SLI Compatible) 1000W PSU.
EVGA X58 FTW3 Edition 3X SLI (Intel X58 Chipset) motherboard.
6GB of 1600 MHz DDR3.
Intel Corei7 960 processor (4-core @ 3.2GHz with 3.9GHz Turbo capability).
Two eVGA Fermi GFX 480 1.5GB AIBs.
120-GB OCZ SSD (System Drive / OS installed here).
1.5TB HDD (Storage Drive), 7200 RPM.
Multi record DVD.
Blu-ray drive.
eVGA X58 sound card.
Three, 23-inch 1920x1080 120Hz Acer GD235 monitors.
Nvidia 3D Vision kit.

The system is amazingly quiet, very impressive looking with green lights inside to show off the plumbing which includes a massive passive LCS cooling heat sink for the CPU, and two 6-inch whisper quiet SilverStone fans on the bottom of the case.

The three monitors, with the left and right canted approximately 30-degrees outward, stretched five feet wide.

OK, now what?

We ran the system is widescreen (5760 x 1080) SLI S3D on and with S3D turned off. We also ran it on one monitor with SLI on and off.

The results for comparing S3D on and off across three monitors are shown in the Figure 3.

The average difference was an expected 50.9% which is totally reasonable and understandable given the huge workload and number of pixels that are being calculated. And although 12 FPS (in “Aliens vs. Predator”) wouldn’t be acceptable in game play, that can be improved by turning a few things down—we ran all the tests at max or extreme. We did see some ghosting in the Unigine benchmark when running in S3D mode, and it seemed it may be tunable.

We then ran a series of tests using just one monitor with S3D off.

The test results show very nice scaling and the impact of stereo and anti-aliasing on a single and dual-SLI AIB system. In a single monitor system, with stereo turned off, and using a single AIB, adding a second AIB in SLI give you a 77% increase in FPS, and it’s the same if 4XAA is turned on. In stereo on a single monitor with AA off and a single AIB you’d have a marginal experience at 25FPS, going to a dual SLI configuration gives you a gain of 54% and gives you 38.4 FPS, which is acceptable. With 4XAA the gain is 68% from a miserable 18.4 FPS to a tolerable 30.9 FPS.

We also ran the single monitor tests using “Stalker.”

Playing games in 3D Vision Surround is an immersive experience across the three screens, and fully exploits Nvidia’s technology: GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs, 3D Vision, and SLI. You may have previously experienced 3D, but you have never seen 3D like this. It’s one of those things that you need to see to believe!

As good as this system is it must be pointed out that Nvidia’s 3D Vision Surround will work on GTX 400 class as well as higher end GT200 class GPUs. In the next issue of Tech Watch we’ll show test results of the new GTX 460 running in S3D mode.

AMD on AMD with AMD - The platform company shows its stuff

2010-07-08T16:51:52Z

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.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor (6-core @ 3.2GHz with 3.6GHz Turbo CORE boosting capability).
ATI Radeon HD 5870 AIB.
60GB OCZ SSD (System Drive / OS installed here).
1TB HDD (storage drive), 7200 RPM.
Blu-ray drive.

The system RAM is a nominal 1066. However, the reason we went with this memory is because it is on AMD’s B.E.M.P. list (Black Edition Memory Profile), so you can use AMD Overdrive to auto-tune (overclock) easily since there is a memory profile for those particular DIMMs. Audio is on-board on the Asus mobo.

So it’s a high-end AMD processor, a high-end AMD chipset, and a High-end AMD graphics AIB—AMD on AMD with AMD.

OK, now what?

We did everything but kick it off the roof for a shock test. We ran a single AIB through a suite of tests, then we ran the same AIB in over clocked mode, then we cranked the AIB back down and ran it Crossfire mode.

First observations were that we had to check that it was turned on, it’s one of the quietest (at idle) systems we’ve ever had.

We ran Unigine Heaven benchmarks on it for DirectX 11 tests as they are the most thorough.

We also ran “Stalker Call of Pripyat” in DirectX 11 We used three resolutions (2560x1600, 1920x1200, and 1650x1080), with tessellation and 4XAA on, in Extreme mode—about as tough a test you could run. We ran the same set of tests using an Intel Core i7 980 processor (6-core @ 3.2GHz with 3.9GHz Turbo capability) with X58 chipset system and compared the results on the four tests We used all four test modes (day, night, rain, and sun shafts.)

Both systems had an AMD Radeon HD5870 AIB with AMD’s Catalyst 10.6 driver.

This was a surprising set of results and one that will no doubt delight AMD. It suggests that AMD has tuned the chipset and CPU to run well with the 5870, and that’s an advantage a total platform supplier has.

“Singularity”—first impressions - game review

2010-07-08T16:35:28Z

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.

As you progress through the game you pick up bigger better weapons and at a certain point (trying not to be a spoiler) you get a hand-arm mounted time manipulation device that lets you warp time—which is convenient for going back in time and straightening things out. Nate (the hero—you) now discovers the island is constantly shifting between 1955 and 2010.

The game was developed for the Xbox 360 and then re-ported to the PC and Playstation3. It uses the Unreal 3 engine and because it was targeted at the 360 originally it is only DirectX 9.0c—but, that’s good enough, in fact its fine. The graphics are good looking and maybe they don’t have the bump-map and lighting nuances afforded by newer versions of DirectX, but the game is well lit, has shadows and reflections, lots of bumps, and other than CG geeks like me, no one stops to admire the scenery in a FPS.

What do we think?

The game is fun. If you like FPSs you’ll like this. It feels a little like “Stalker” with the nuclear aspect and the subsequent mutants. It’s got interesting firepower like “Wolfenstien,” and lots of surprises like “FEAR” and others. I’m running it on an Nvidia 285 and the S3D came up perfectly. Although Nvidia hasn’t rated the game yet, it works, and looks good in stereo.

I highly recommend the game (so far) and think it’s going to give me and you many hours of fun and surprises.

The Specialist Headphone from Nox Audi

2010-06-23T18:17:21Z

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 well with phones—cutting off the tunes when a call comes in, and resuming when the call is ended. The same idea works for telephoning over IP, gaming, etc.

Designed primarily for gaming, the Specialist is compatible with the Xbox 360, PS3, as well as PCs. It also works with handheld gaming systems, iPods and iPhones. The headphones are available with an optional Optical gaming adaptor.

How does it sound? Really, surprisingly great. The sound quality is “brilliant,” with good depth and bass. I have become so conditioned to expect noise cancellation and large pads that I wasn’t sure what I’d be getting with these headphones, but the Specialist is comfortable and I get really good sound through them. The company says they use custom 26mm Mylar drivers for the headphones. On calls and gaming, voices come through perfectly. On a voice over IP call, the Nox voice quality was described as slightly clipped but good.

The headphones have style, at least if you go for the ones that add a little color to the wheels on either headphone. They come in red, blue, and green. Black is available for people who are looking for a more discreet profile.

The company’s spec sheet puts the headphones’ noise reduction capability at 6 dB @ 1 kHz. Not huge but I’m realizing that I really do not like the noise cancellation effect of the slight hiss and I do believe I hear some sound distortion as active noise cancellation ear phones decide what I want to hear or not. Frequency response comes in at 20 Hz to 20 kHz, sensitivity at 104 dBSPL @ 1 kHz, THD: <0.5% @1 kHz, <2% from 40 Hz to 20 kHz, input impedance at 32 ohms.

Where these babies get a lot of points from me is the fact that they’re lightweight, very comfortable, they work very well with the phone. I appreciate audio control—not enough mid-range ear phones include them. And most of all, they fold up and are easy to pack. These are all the right plusses for me. The people at Nox Audio are low key, they let their headphones do the talking. It’s not a bad strategy, I came to these ‘phones expecting little and they are now my favorite, and official headphones for office and travel. (I’ll let you know how they perform on the plane in an update.)

The Specialist’s retail price is $79.95 and the company is selling them now through online retailers and Amazon.

Testing Tessellation on the GeForce 480

2010-05-28T12:50:00Z

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 a look at Nvidia’s in-house benchmarks designed to measure DX11’s key ingredient for gamers. In the following Island benchmark developed by Nvidia the test is able to measure “Static” and “dynamic” tessellation rendering.

Now what does that mean? Static tessellation according to Nvidia is that the tessellation ration is equal for every polygon in the scene “This method does give equal amount of geometry detail for objects at any distance from camera.” This obviously will be more taxing on the GPU and really take no advantage of programming.

Dynamic tessellation calculates tessellation ratio depending on distance from polygon to camera. The closer the object is to the camera, the higher is tessellation ratio, details on objects that are near, and save GPU resources on objects that are far.

Nvidia developed two tests, Hair and Island. The test we used was Island. The test-bed was: 64-bit Windows 7, Corei7 3.3 GHZ, 3GB RAM, and a GF480.

We ran the test with various parameters on a GeForce 480 and an ATI Radeon HD 5970, and got the results shown in Figure 4.

From the testing we can see that Nvidia performed quite well. We would expect this considering it was test designed by Nvidia for Nvidia—either way the numbers are impressive. However we must keep in mind that the tessellation produced in these benchmarks far and away exceeds anything that would need to be rendered during optimal gameplay.

We asked ATI to comment on the results and we were told by a spokesperson who was obviously speaking off the cuff: “Any vendor can bake homegrown demos in such a way as to favor their products. That is exactly what is happening here. It is a demo Nvidia is seeding in their efforts to lead media and analysts to the conclusion that the 480 outperforms the 5870 in tessellation, with the follow on being that tessellation defines DX 11 (at least that is what they have been suggesting in some regions with a review program they are affectionately calling Real vs. Fake DX 11.

Yes, AMD’s view is harsh and we expect no less. We think the tests looked great, and “probably” create a situation that will not be found in a game for quite some time. So the value of comparing one AIB against the other with that test may not make a lot of sense for buyers looking for real world situations, but it does (nonetheless) show that Nvidia has a very powerful tessellation engine that can in fact handle outrageous models.

Seeing more, doing more; a guide to putting multiple monitors to work, or play

2010-04-16T19:28:35Z

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 buffer into a long display. Since introduction, Matrox has expanded the TripleHead2Go to support 3 x 1680 x 1050 with their DP Digital Edition for $279, plus the cost of an AIB with adequate memory (min. 1 GB).

We’ve used multiple AIBs to drive four screens and even experimented with combinations of AIBs and IGPs in the same system for driving multiple screens. They all worked and for the most part were satisfactory. A couple of combinations lacked the update speed needed for FPS high-resolution game play.

Nvidia has taken their stereographic 3D (S3D) technology, which they call 3D vision, and they have allied it to two Nvidia AIBs running in SLI mode to deliver three monitors in S3D. They demonstrated that at CES with three high-resolution projectors and a really wide projection screen. You could set up such a system using three 22-inch Samsung 120 Hz monitors on your desktop. The Samsung 120 Hz monitors only display 1680 x 1050 and have pretty wide bezels, and Nvidia hasn’t yet come out with a bezel adjustment (although they have the people in house from Appian who certainly know how to do that.)

Using multiple monitors can be challenging in several ways:

Desk space. It can take up space—three 30-inch monitors in portrait mode will require 81-inches—almost seven feet (6.75), and a more modest use of three 22-inch monitors will still require five feet. However, if you have the height (20 to 27 inches plus a couple inches for the stand, three display in portrait configuration only needs 54 inches or 4.5 feet, which is close to the size of most desks albeit with a little overhang. Twenty-two inch monitors can be setup vertically in portrait mode and use just 36-inches or three feet of desk space. It’s a lot more tolerable today with flat-screen displays than it was when we were using CRTs that were often deeper than they were high or wide, three of those would eat your whole desk.
Mounting hardware. If you go for more than three monitors sitting on a desk, and/or if you want the monitors to be correctly aligned with each other physically, you’ll need to invest in VESA mounting brackets.
Power. A 30-inch monitor draws 170 watts. Three of them need 510 Watts. A 22-inch display needs 40 watts and six of them will require 240 watts. Add to that about 150 watts for the PC and you’re straining the delivery service of the circuit breaker of a U.S. three-pin socket. You’ll also need a power distribution assembly—i.e., an extension cord or “power strip” for all the monitors, PC and probably your sound system. Here is a place not to cheap out, and a multi-three pin strip with multiple and individual circuit breakers is ideal, it’s somewhat difficult to find (although Monster has some interesting gear).
Price. This has become so much more manageable with the rapid drop in monitor prices. A 1920 x 1080 22-inch monitor can be bought in the U.S. for just $170 with DVI ($239 with DisplayPort). Three would be $510 ($717), and six, if you couldn’t negotiate a quantity discount, would set you back $1,020 ($1,434). Add to that the graphics processor(s).
Graphics processors. The AIB(s) will cost from $60 (ATI Radeon HD5450 with one DVI port, a VGA port, and a DisplayPort) to $479 (for an ATI Radeon 5870 Eyefinity6 with six DisplayPorts.) Other combinations of multiple graphics AIBs (e.g., two Nvidia AIBs in SLI mode, or two ATI AIBs in Crossfire mode, or two of almost any AIB in a LucidLogix system), and/or such a combination with the VGA/DVI/HDMI output of a modern IGP.

So we’ve dealt with all those things several times and in several ways. And our latest adventure was six 22-inch, 1920 x 1080 60Hz LCD (Dell) DisplayPort monitors, powered by an ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6. We’ve reviewed the Radeon HD 5870 previously (Tech Watch September 29, 2009 • Volume 9, Number 20, p.44 ) and the Eyefinity6 version is basically the same AIB with two notable additions—six DisplayPort connectors on the rear panel and 2 GB of DDR5 memory.

The specifications are exactly the same, but the power consumption a little higher for twice as much memory. And so ATI has had to go from 6+6 to 8+6 pin connections.

Engine clock speed: 850 MHz.
Processing power (single precision): 2.72 TeraFLOPS.
Processing power (double precision): 544 GigaFLOPS.
Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec.
Data fetch rate (32-bit): 272 billion fetches/sec.
Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 68 Gigatexels/sec.
Pixel fill rate: 27.2 Gigapixels/sec.
Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 108.8 Gigasamples/sec.
Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz.
Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps.
Memory bandwidth: 153.6 GB/sec.
Maximum board power: 228 Watts.
Idle board power: 27 Watts.

The AIB, which is being referred to as the ATI Radeon HD 5870 E6 sells for $479 (the ATI Radeon HD 5870 for $399).

More—I want to see more

We’ve been playing with a six-screen EyeFinity system for the past month, testing games on it and beta drivers. If you’re a big fan of big displays and have the room to accommodate them, this is the system for you. An ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition AIB with 2GB of GDDR5 memory drives the displays. The system is going to be even more ideal when Samsung’s new monitors with thin bezels ship later this year (see page 19).

Physical. Setting them up was challenging because of the size involved. We used 22-inch 1920x1080 Dell displays and I could barely imagine what it would have been like to have 30-inch monitors. The monitor type and mounting apparatus is critical. We learned the (hard way) that COTS monitors aren’t designed for stacking and in fact, they’re downright hostile to the idea. That’s because the outside surfaces of the bezels are not square nor flat for most monitors as they try to use a sleek rolled off design. The six 22-inch monitors occupy a space that is 61 x 25 inches, plus whatever height off the table you allow—we put ours right on the desktop’s surface.

The system starts up with all six displays in clone mode.

You use the ATI Catalyst control panel to setup a group, and there is just about every combination imaginable, 1x3, 3x1, 2x3, 3x2, etc. The physical setup pretty much dictates the choice and so we went with 3x2. After a few clicks the system will ask you if the correct monitor is lit for the physical layout (it usually isn’t and you work your way around a 3x2 matrix setting up the positions, it’s a nice tool. When you’ve finished that operation (a onetime thing, but must be done any time you change the configuration) you’re ready to go. One last question is asked—do you want to do a bezel adjustment? This is a choice that can be useful if you are playing games and would prefer the effect of looking through six windows—with the bezel (the window frame) obscuring part of the image. That gives you a more accurate geometric result, but can cause you to move the image back and forth to see what’s hidden by the frame. Once all the setup is done, you can (should) reboot and then you get a full, extended single surface screen.

The first time you see the system boot up like this it’s really quite breath taking.

Raw resolution

A single 22-inch monitor has the characteristics shown in Table 1 (in inches).

In a 3x2 landscape mode the characteristics become the measurements shown in Table 2 (in inches).

Table 1: Single 22-inch monitor’s specifications. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Monitor	H res	V res	Width	Height	Bezel	Visible Width	Visible height
22-in	1920	1080	20	12	0.75	18.5	10.5

Table 2: 3x2 multi 22-inch display system’s specifications. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
H res	V res	Width	Height	Visible Width	Visible height	Area DPI	Area Pix	Phys area
5760	2160	60	24	55.5	21	10675	12,441,600	1,440

Modes of operation

With a multi-display system there are two basic uses—productivity and entertainment. We’ll look at the trade-offs and benefits of each case
separately.

Entertainment

In entertainment there are three possible uses, maybe more: watching movies, editing video or photos, and game playing. For this issue of Tech Watch, we’ll look at game playing and will review watching movies and video/photo editing in a future issue.

First off, let me say looking at a favorite game for the first time with 55 x 21-inches of screen space and 5760 x 2160 resolution is simply thrilling. There is truly nothing like it. And when you are playing cinematic big story games you really are in the movies. But, there are trade-offs. Some (maybe most) games have a preamble video. Often it is used for benchmarking, if the game engine was used to render the video. However, the developers never anticipated such screen sizes and so the video, machinema, etc., is not scaled to full screen and so the opening scenes fall to one screen, typically the lower middle one. Some of the videos will scale a little to the available lines and fill 2/3rd of the bottom of the top middle screen and 2/3s of the top of the bottom middle screen. This is not a pleasant way to watch the videos because of the distortions of the scaling (not really sure which engine is doing the scaling—the game engine or the video scaler on the AIB, but suspect it is the game engine).

POV in a FPS

If you take full advantage of the six displays, the point of view (POV) of the gun sight in a first-person shooter will fall right in the middle of the bezels between the two middle screens. You can play the game this way, but it’s difficult, you can’t fire very fast because you are unsure of where the target really is.

I tried to find tweaks in the setup and .ini files to offset the sight with no success. However, I found a suitable compromise. In Stalker I was able to set it up so it didn’t run in full resolution of the screens and set the game resolution to 4800 x 1800, this gives you 83% of the image size and resolution as the full screen 3x2. Also, I set the desktop background to black so you get one large bezel to the right and bottom, and visible gun sights with pretty high resolution.

Not all games offer these intermediate resolutions. Some, especially the games ported from consoles like Bio Shock 2, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, will fill to the resolution available—there is no adjustment.

3x2 not ideal

Because of the POV issue and the variances between games and tier options for resolution setting, a landscape 3x2 configuration isn’t the best choice, although it certainly is the most impressive. Our experiments indicate a 3x1 in landscape is better for FPSs. A 5x1 in portrait is the ideal solution for POV and maximum resolution in a FPS (Table 3).

Comparing the 5x1 to a 3x2 the ratios look quite acceptable (Table 4).

Table 3: 5x1 multi 22-inch display system’s specifications. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
H res	V res	Width	Height	Visible Width	Visible height	Area DPI	Area Pix	Phys area
5400	1920	60	20	52.5	18.5	10675	10,368,000	1,200

Table 4: 5x1 configuration compared to 3x2 configuration. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
H res	V res	Width	Height	Visible Width	Visible height	Area DPI	Area Pix	Phys area
93.8%	88.9%	100%	83.3%	94.6%	88.1%	100.0%	83.3%	83.3%

We’re still wrestling this configuration so there’s no photo to illustrate it. We’ll have that in the next issue.

An odd number of displays puts the POV right in the center of the middle display. And setting the displays in portrait mode gives the maximum vertical resolution. Mounting the displays and getting them physically aligned is the major issue.

Wrapping vs. wall

Another physical issue is the horizontal placement of the displays. Although it’s very impressive to see a video wall layout of six monitors, in practice it’s not very convenient to use them that way. We have found turning the left and the right monitors outward (toward the user) by about 30 degrees, gives a much better, and more natural feeling.

Part of this is due to the way perspective is set up in the game engine. Some games will allow adjustment of the perspective. With exaggerated perspective (which is normal for games) an angle toward the viewer setup gives the best visual results.

Seeing double

The next logical step in this development (for ATI) will be to run S3D. That will require three to six 120 Hz monitors and some frame buffer management work on ATI’s part. Because of the need to generate two images two AIBs may be needed.

Productivity

Using multiple displays for productivity creates a whole different set of issues. In this case you want as much screen real-estate as possible, and a 3x2 is an ideal choice.

And of course, one of the applications opened can be a game, set to a single screen’s resolution. (Admittedly, this begs the question of how productive you are really planning to be, but the situation does come up from time to time.)

The game will always default to the upper right hand corner.

Nvidia GTX 480 benchmarks

2010-04-16T19:17:07Z

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 1600 monitor or a DVI-to-DP adaptor, we’ll run more tests at higher resolutions such as those discussed in the “Seeing More Doing More,” article in this issue.

We ran five tests: Metro 2033, Stalker—Call of Pripyat, Unigine Heaven, Vantage, and Battlefield Bad Company 2. We ran frames-per-second (FPS) tests using FRAPS, and when the benchmark had its own score such as Unigine and Vantage do, we used that also, so we ended up with seven sets of scores.

We ran three ATI boards against the Nvidia GTX 280, the ATI Radeon HD 5870, 5870 Eyefinity6, and the 5970. Giving us four scores on seven benchmarks for a total of 28 values.

We also calculated the Pmark not just using Vantage but for Unigine, Vantage, and the average FPS of all five programs.

Pmark

Where:

Performance is expressed in 3DMark Vantage score
Price is expressed in US dollars
Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

When Performance is expressed in FPS then the FPS score is multiplied by 1000 to put it in the same range as the 3D Vantage scores.

The test system: an Intel Core i7 x980 3.33GHz 6 cores (12 logical processors), DX58SO X58, 3GB DDR3 1.07 GHz system with two 160 GB SSDs, running Windows 7 (32-bit Ultimate, build 7600).

The tests were run at 1920x1080, with AA set to 8x when we could set it, and AF set to 16x, and extreme tessellation when we could set it.

Frames per second

Whenever a GPU supplier brings out a new chip, they always like to compare it across a lot of games using FPS and normalizing to either their own last GPU or the competition’s. So we did the same thing and normalized to the GTX 480.

In terms of raw power measured using FPS, the Nvidia GTX 480 is a clear winner. When power consumption and price are factored in, the GTX 480 only does well in one benchmark (Unigine). Nvidia will have to wait for more games to come out that will exploit its hardware; ATI had a similar problem with its last generation of parts. However, ATI won’t stand still and as new games are developed ATI will tune and tweak their GPUs to exploit the new games as well. That’s when we’ll see the real differences and values between the two GPUs.

Reviewing the Boxx 4850 Extreme workstation

2010-04-02T15:54:44Z

... 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. Boxx doesn’t build workstations like everyone else; it can’t afford to and knows it. The company’s always trying something different, and in the case of the 4850 Extreme, it takes a few very different, noteworthy slants on workstation design, most notably with its choice to integrate liquid-cooling to achieve best-in-class single-socket performance.

Yep, our 4850 Extreme lived up to its name with a Core i7 CPU clocked at an impressive 4.15 GHz, thanks to a liquid-cooling system from CoolIT, a vendor with lots of experience in the field. The fastest single-socket CPU we’ve seen is complemented with a capable 6 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 memory, a fast 250 GB SATA drive and topped off with AMD’s top-of-the-line professional graphics card: the FirePro V8750.

Table 1: Configuration specifications for our 4850 Extreme review machine. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
	Component
CPU	Intel Core i7 quad-core, over-clocked and liquid-cooled to 4.15 GHz
Memory	6 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3
Disk	250 GB 7,200 RPM SATA
Graphics	AMD FirePro V8750 with 2 GB memory
OS	Windows 7

Aesthetics and ergonomics

With OEMs looking for every possible way to differentiate, and with Apple’s obvious success due at least in part to marketing style, aesthetics is no longer overlooked when it comes to workstation design. Consider how much coin HP must have dropped in its outsourcing the styling of the recent Z series to BMW.

The clear trend lately has been leaning toward the beefy, industrial look, showing grill work and—cost allowing—more metal than plastic, for example brushed aluminum enclosures. Boxx isn’t winning business by being the price leader, so it can afford to spend a bit more on the metal, including a very burly 1/8th inch alloy plate fastened securely to the enclosure’s top.

Offering plenty of I/O with the right subset cleanly accessible isn’t just a nicety, it’s become essential, and perhaps especially so in digital content creation environments which demand connectivity to a broad range of media devices. The front panel offers accessibility, with dual USB 2.0 ports, audio mic in and mini-jack stereo, along with one 1394 port. And the rear panel offers the plentiful, with two Gigabit Ethernet ports, one 1394 and six USB 2.0 ports, two external SATA ports to expand storage, and the full breadth of audio I/O, including S/PDIF coax and optical output.

Running counter to big OEMs’ offerings, less attention to tool-less

Big-name workstation OEMs have recently been highlighting tool-less hardware maintenance to differentiate their wares from the competition. The convenience of opening up the chassis, installing video cards, swapping drives or even power supplies without so much as a screwdriver is no doubt an appealing feature. This reviewer loves the convenience and has generally been happy with the tool-less solutions we’ve come across. Recently, HP’s Z series workstations upped the ante even further by virtually eliminating cables (not completely, but getting closer).

So how does Boxx approach the idea of tool-less? Well, to simply match what other OEMs are doing wouldn’t serve Boxx’s aim of differentiation. The company recognizes that reasonable-cost tool-less options can sacrifice reliability, and—to be blunt—often look cheap and flimsy. So when putting together a water-cooled, no-compromise performance machine with unquestioned reliability, well a weak, me-too solution isn’t going to cut it.

So no, the 4850 Extreme isn’t tool-less. But it is not a difficult to work with system, either. A simple twist of thumbscrews opens the side panel, and swapping a video card can be accomplished with removal of two screws on an L bracket that grips the card’s edge.

Sure, the burlier retention device is mostly about ensuring that that $2,000 card—without secure mechanical fixing points—stays solidly in place. But it also ties back into the aesthetics. Like a loyal customer of Apple’s Mac Pro, the Boxx workstation buyer is paying a premium, and they want to see it and feel it in the style and strength of the design. With the 4850 Extreme, they get just that.

And relaxing the design requirement for completely tool-less hardware maintenance really isn’t much of a trade-off, either. Boxx customers tend to look for complete solutions, purchasing workstations packaged with all the hardware (and often software, for that matter) that they need. Boxx users won’t have as much of a need to be opening up the chassis at all.

Liquid-cooling makes the ultra-fast clock achievable ... but you’ve got to have the Watts to drive it

Besides, when you can brag about an exotic water-cooled motherboard, do you really need to be worrying about a screw here or there? Like we’ve said many times, credit Boxx for doing in workstations what others haven’t. The 4850 Extreme is one of the few (and the first we’ve tested) branded workstations with an overclocked, water-cooled CPU.

No doubt, it’s CoolIT’s system that’s first to catch the eye when opening up the 4850 Extreme. But of course, the liquid-cooling isn’t there just for show, but to allow Intel’s Core i7 CPU to be cranked up to 4.15 GHz (as compared to the 3.2 GHz frequency, where Intel’s standard specs top out). While the clear trend in processor design is multi-core, remember that the degree to which applications can take advantage of multiple cores varies. And sometimes, faster, fewer cores deliver the goods more than slower, more plentiful cores can. It’s a premise we explore in benchmarking further ahead.

Now, the idea behind any thermal dissipation scheme, be it a car or a workstation, is to transfer the heat from where it’s produced, and where it could interfere with system operation, to some other place where it won’t. In a car, coolant circulates through the engine and then to the radiator which transfers the heat to incoming cooler air. Well, the principle behind computer system liquid-cooling isn’t very different, though the implementation sure is.

CoolIT’s system circulates liquid coolant from the CPU to a radiator on the system’s front grill. Two fans pull in outside air to cool the liquid which in turn cools the CPU. In the 4850 Extreme’s implementation, only the CPU gets the liquid cooling. Two rear fans complement the front to help push air back out, creating enough airflow to cool the rest of the systems’ components that don’t have the benefit of liquid-cooling.

But of course in today’s workstation market, noise levels can matter just as much as performance. So blowing all four fans full blast all the time won’t cut it. Accordingly, the 4850 Extreme can dynamically adjust the air flow both through the front radiator as well as the out-bound fans in the rear. A thermal couple in the rear measures the exiting air and cranks up the out-bound fans if and when necessary. Similarly, a monitor embedded in the liquid cooling system tracks coolant temperature and dials up (or down) the intake radiator fans’ speed accordingly.

Lot and lots ... of slots

Following Boxx and reviewing their products, a consistent theme quickly emerges: differentiate noticeably and differentiate often. That means not simply making a splash in one particular area, but look for every possible avenue to separate your workstation from the crowd. So no, the 4850 Extreme doesn’t stop with the industrial styling and overclocked water-cooled CPU. This workstation also stands out for the number of graphics-capable x16 (mechanical) PCI Express slots it houses: six in all.

Just a few years ago, it was hard to find more than one x16 mechanical slot, limited by Intel’s chipsets and lack of strong demand for more than one graphics adapter. But while multi-GPU schemes like Nvidia’s SLI and AMD’s CrossFire have created pull in pockets of client computing markets (more so in gaming than professional spaces), it’s the demand for more monitors, more display space, that’s driven the need for OEMs to support more than one card. Intel’s chipsets have slowly, but surely, complied, and now two x16 PCI Express slots is pretty much the norm in the workstation space.

With its recent X58 (Tylersburg) chipset for Nehalem-generation processors, Intel’s upped the ante further, incorporating 36 possible PCI Express 2.0 lanes for I/O use. That improved the manner in which OEMs could provide dual x16 interfaces, as many prior designs had to build mechanical x16 interfaces with fewer (e.g. x8 or x4) electrical lanes, thereby trading off bandwidth to get the extra slot.

But the X58 and dual x16 slots were enough for Boxx. The company’s designers went off and populated the NF200 PCI Express bridge from Nvidia as well (that’s the device hiding under the blue alloy plate with the “Workstation” label in the preceding figure). The NF200 bridge accepts 16 of the X58’s PCI Express lanes and creates three back-side links, one of 16 electrical lanes and two of eight. That provides the total of six possible interfaces, as illustrated in Figure 5.

Of course, without full x16 electrical links associated with each mechanical connector, there are bandwidth trade-offs to accept. But to ease those trade-offs, Boxx designers have managed to allow two of the x8 electrical slots to be disabled, adding those extra x8’s to the two existing x8’s. That provides three x16 slots with 16 electrical lanes underneath available, with a fourth at reduced (x4) bandwidth.

With a 4.15 GHz CPU, 6 GB of fast DDR 3 DRAM and up to (in theory) six graphics add-in cards, there’s a lot of potential power being consumed. Thankfully, Boxx complies with a 1000 Watt supply from a proven provider, Zalman (ZM1000-HP). Now, we say in theory six cards, because even 1000 Watts wouldn’t be enough to allow six high-end cards, assuming thermal dissipation needs could be met, and assuming the user is willing to share PCI Express bandwidth (the Nvidia 200 bridge can’t pull bandwidth out of thin air—its secondary PCI Express interfaces will have to share what the primary 2.0 interface can provide).

First off, most high-end cards are dual-slot, and second, they are typically in the 150+ Watt range (the FirePro V8750, for what it delivers, is relatively low at around 154 Watts). So six cards would essentially consume all the system’s power, and of course there’s plenty of other consumption going on, not the least of which is a 4.15 GHz CPU.

But three or so high-end cards could be accommodated, and that alone is more than what most high-end dual-socket Xeon workstations could pull off (more like two). Boxx is keenly aware it can’t just match the competition; it has to constantly raise the bar.

Spurn convention: an array of drive bays on the backside

We spent so much time examining the fans and liquid-cooled processor and all those slots that we almost forgot to check out the system’s drive bays. In fact, we almost missed them completely. Why? Because again Boxx spurned convention, and instead of stacking them in the corner of the main chassis interior, Boxx engineers created an entire separate mechanical partition, accessible from the opposite side panel.

It’s a different layout than we’re used to seeing, and we liked it: no stack, no rack, but instead arranged in a flat array. The bays are clean and easily accessible, which is no small feat when you’re designing in six bays, two more than most mid-range and high-end Xeon-class workstations provide. Boxx is always going to take the road less traveled, and the 4850 Extreme’s storage subsystem is no exception.

Benchmarking the 4850 Extreme and FirePro V8750

To assess the performance of Boxx’s 4850 Extreme, we employed the same basic tools we have in the past: SPEC Viewperf to stress the graphic subsystem, in this case the AMD FirePro V8750, and SPECapc tests to get a handle on whole-system performance. We find SPECapc tests to be some of the better—though far from perfect or conclusive—indicators of how a system will perform in professional applications, and SPEC’s Viewperf tests effectively isolate the rendering load on the cards themselves. Viewperf performs relatively little in the way of CPU computation (basically just making a bunch of OpenGL calls), with the goal of making sure that it’s the video card that limits performance, rather than the CPU, memory or I/O.

As luck would have it, we had just recently benchmarked the V8750 in another system, Lenovo’s dual-Xeon D20. So we had an opportunity to both: a) sanity-check graphics performance numbers for the V8750, and b) compare system throughput for key digital content creation applications (to represent Boxx’s target demographic)—namely Maya, Lightwave and 3ds max— for a fast-clocked single processor system relative to a slower-clocked dual processor system. More on the second task ahead, but first the graphics.

Benchmarking the V8750 with Viewperf 10

We ran Viewperf 10 in single, dual and quad-thread modes, three iterations a piece, averaging results. We made sure we had the latest, blessed driver from AMD.

Given that we’d already witnessed the V8750 in action just a few months prior (on the Lenovo D20), we didn’t expect to learn much running the V8750 on the 4850 Extreme. We were wrong. Neither the experience nor results of the testing were quite what we expected.

First off, we had a consistent system failure running Viewperf’s Maya viewset in dual-thread mode. Impossible for us to diagnose (based on what the system reported), we couldn’t point the finger at any one thing. And the fact that the Maya viewset seemed to run fine in quad-thread mode added to the mystery. However, despite that bump in the road, we were still able to collect results across all the other viewsets and thread corners.

Now, a major premise of Viewperf is that the test attempts to isolate the stress on the graphics subsystem, removing application overhead. The test makes a sequence of OpenGL calls to render the viewset. But while it removes the effect of the application—which might bog down the CPU, memory or other system components—it doesn’t mean that those other components have no impact on the test results. Most significantly, the driver receives and processes the calls, so a faster CPU will improve the speed somewhat.

But we didn’t expect the 4850 Extreme’s faster, liquid-cooled CPU to have nearly the impact it appeared to.

For all four thread corners, the V8750 running on the Boxx system trumped the V8750 running on the Lenovo machine three months prior. It didn’t just nudge them out, which we would’ve anticipated, but it beat the numbers by a considerable margin for many viewsets.

Now, the caveat here is that not only is the 4850 Extreme’s CPU considerably faster, but it’s got a bit more memory and the FirePro driver is more current. Perhaps the latter two factors had a bigger impact than we’d envisioned, but we doubt 6 GB of memory versus four would have such an impact running Viewperf. And while we would of course expect a more recent driver to offer some incremental performance improvement, it’s not like the previous driver was alpha or beta level; it had been out for months, supporting the V8750 (and other FirePro cards).

As the number of threads increased, the margin between the V8750-on-Boxx and V8750-on-Lenovo did shrink, which would make some sense to us, as the bottleneck should shift more toward the graphics card, reducing the effect of a faster-running driver. For some viewsets, the delta was quite low, and we disregarded an anomaly here or there (e.g. the drastic difference in tcvis-01 viewset).

Of course, assuming the 4850 Extreme’s faster CPU was responsible for the V8750’s significantly faster performance doesn’t mean the test wasn’t fair. Remember even in the “real world,” driver performance is critical in determining graphics throughput. Depending on the application and viewset, it can be the bottleneck. So a faster CPU making for faster rendering is fair to acknowledge, though it shouldn’t disparage either the V8750 or Lenovo D20.

4850 Extreme CPU’s GHz superiority shows up in SPECapc for Maya

Those users of Maya, who represent a big chunk of Boxx buyers, would have a special interest in the 4850 Extreme’s performance in the SPECapc for Maya 2009 test. Does the blazing speed of a liquid-cooled CPU translate into superior performance over a similar, but slower-clocked machine?

The answer is yes, at least in part. We were able to find a similarly equipped, single-socket Nehalem-class workstation among those for submitted results appear on SPEC.org. With its Xeon 3.33 GHz W5590 CPU, the Dell Precision T7500 works well as a measuring stick for the 4850 Extreme. The 4850 Extreme’s CPU sub-score for SPECapc for Maya was 28% higher than the T7500’s, a very sensible result, given its CPU runs about 25% faster.

But remember that the SPECapc tests try to assess the full system performance, not just the CPU. The T7500 houses a Quadro FX 4800, similar in price to the AMD FirePro 8750, but yielding a superior Graphics sub-score of 3.43 versus the 4850 Extreme’s 2.64. Factor in comparable I/O sub-scores, and SPECapc’s weighting results in a slight edge for the T7500 on overall score.

Boxx’s damn-the-power-and-crank-the-GHz single socket, an interesting contrast to the power-conscious Xeon E series in dual sockets

As pointed out in our review of the dual-socket Lenovo D20, there are different rationales behind the OEMs’ choices in speed and number of CPUs. For the D20, the goal was to provide more processors (dual) and cores at a reasonable price point, sacrificing maximum GHz in the process. By contrast, the 4850 Extreme’s overclocked Core i7 Nehalem processor represents the other end of the spectrum. Give up half the processing cores compared to a dual-socket system, but run those cores much faster, courtesy of water-cooled overclocking that adds some cost.

So how differently would a common DCC application perform on a faster-clock, single-socket workstation versus a slower-clock, dual-socket machine? We used SPECapc for Lightwave v9.6 to provide one sample point, with results as shown.

As we’ve seen before, Lightwave isn’t inclined to reward the population of multiple processor sockets. Though it may be taking advantage of the four cores per processor, it’s not efficiently exploiting the D20’s second processor. For both the Multi-task and Interactive sub-scores, the single-processor 4850 Extreme beats out the dual-processor D20. Now granted, the D20’s 2.53 GHz clock rate lags the 4850’s 4.15 GHz by a wide margin, but two 2.53 GHz Nehalems still offer significantly higher theoretical performance (i.e. with all processors and cores busy). Nope, at least in the way SPECapc exercises Lightwave, a faster single CPU is more effective than two slower ones.

Note that the Lenovo D20 did edge out the 4850 Extreme for SPECapc for Lightwave’s Render sub-score, indicative of modestly better performance from the D20’s Quadro FX 4800, relative to our 4850 Extreme’s FirePro V8750. Remember of course that Boxx is a long-time partner of Nvidia, and offers a wider range of Quadro FX cards (580, 1800, 3800, 4800, 4800G, 5800 and 5800G) than we’ve seen from any competing vendor. So a 4850 Extreme buyer could certainly opt for more graphics horsepower, if desired. See the review of the Lenovo D20 for more on the head-to-head comparison of the Quadro FX 4800 and FirePro V8750.

The verdict: Boxx has secured itself a healthy niche, thanks to products like the 4850 Extreme

Be the cheapest, or be the best: advice we’ve heard—and often said—many times. Lead in price, or lead in performance and innovation. Boxx can’t compete with Dell and HP on price, so it wisely chooses to be measured on other grounds: performance, aesthetics, features, service and dedication to the special needs of the digital media industry. And the 4850 Extreme is yet another product we’ve seen from the company that wins on those criteria.

The liquid-cooled CPU means that for many applications and tasks that don’t adequately scale performance with processors and cores (or at least not yet), the system can win on speed. With stylish looks, media-focused I/O and above-and-beyond support for more graphics cards than mainstream users would ever care about—but an artist might demand—the 4850 stands even further apart from the crowd.

Benchmarking Nvidia’s GTX 480 Fermi AIB

2010-03-30T22:43:21Z

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 1.07 GHz system with two 160 GB SSDs, running Windows 7 (32-bit Ultimate), and also with 32-bit Vista.

Testing the Nvidia GTX 480

We ran benchmarks on the new Nvidia AIB and compared them to an ATI HD5870 and calculated corresponding Pmarks.

Pmark

Where:

Performance is expressed in 3DMark Vantage score
Price is expressed in US dollars
Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

When Performance is expressed in FPS then the FPS score is multiplied by 100 to put it in the same range as the 3D Vantage scores.

ATI beats Nvidia in the Pmark on price and power consumption and comes within 2.5% of the Vantage score.

Vantage

We ran the two boards at four resolutions in Vantage with AA on.

Nvidia did better at the low resolutions with AA turned off, but that’s hardly a configuration an enthusiast gamer would use with an AIB that costs almost $500. Nvidia has made a big investment in geometry processing in the GGF100 GPU and so Nvidia and its fans will be looking for tests that bring out that capability. Unigine is one such test.

Unigine’s Heaven

Unigine gives the tessellation engines in direct 11 a workout. You can see the added detail in the models as the benchmark runs, and it is a beautiful benchmark.

The high-resolution and filter loaded (8X AA, 16X AF, all lights on) is a real stress test.

The Nvidia GTX 480 beats the ATI HD5870 on average by 13% if you don’t include the hi-res 8X AA scores. The ATI HD5870 almost wouldn’t run at the extreme resolution with AA at 8X, here is where Nvidia’s additional memory (1536 as compared to ATI’s 1024) comes into play.

Resident Evil

Another popular DirectX 11 test is the benchmark scene in resident Evil

Similar to the Unigine results, The Nvidia GTX 480 beats the ATI HD5870 on average by 11%, and you can see the GTX 480 pull away at the higher resolutions making good use of its larger frame buffer.

Is Windows 7 faster?

Yes, when using Vantage.

We ran Vantage on the ATI HD5870 and the Nvidia GTX480 under Windows 7 and Vista and Windows 7 outperformed Vista by an average of 2.1% across all tests and both boards.

However, Windows 7 ran faster than Vista on the ATI HD5870 than it did on the Nvidia GTX480 -2.6% average across all tests as compared to 1.5% across all tests for the Nvidia GTX 480.

AMD’s new/last IGP motherboard—the 890GX

2010-03-20T01:04:18Z

AMD has continued to impress us with their chipsets and the new ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 is one of their finest. The 890GX represents the last IGP chipset from AMD before the move to Fusion. The basic specs are formidable. It has an AM3 socket for a Phenom II (and several other processors). It can run up to four 1333 MHz DDR3 memory DIMMs (dual in-line memory module), has a VGA, DVI, and HDMI video outputs, as well as 1394, SATA, and 12 USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports—one of the first boards to embrace the new specification.

The 890GX is under the long blue-finned heatsink, with the southbridge SB850 fitted under the square heat sink behind the PCIe card slots.

The 890GX is at 55nm and SB850 is at 65nm. ASICs are in full production now and AMD’s partners did a worldwide launch on March 2nd. The usual suspects will launch a mobo: Asus, MSI, Asrock, ECS, Jetway, Biostar, Foxconn, and probably others. The average price will be around $140.

Testing the 890GX

We ran benchmarks on the New/last AMD 890GX IGP and compared them to similar tests we ran on Intel’s i5 Clarksdale, and on two older systems with Vista, an Intel Icedale and an AMD 780GX.

The Pmark for the AMD-based 890GX system is compared to the Intel i5-based system for the Pmark score.

Pmark

Where:

Performance is expressed in 3DMark Vantage score
Price is expressed in US dollars
Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

When Performance is expressed in FPS then the FPS score is multiplied by 100 to put it in the same range as the 3D Vantage scores.

The components that go into the Pmark are as follows.

Price. The two systems are priced very closely with the AMD motherboard, processor, and 4GB of 1666 DDR3 coming in at $409, and the Intel coming in at $405. A visit to Newegg for a price sample reveals that the 890GX boards currently range from $119 to $149 and the site reveals that lower priced boards are expected in the future. The same site reveals that the Intel DP55WP Media Series P55 micro-ATX i7 Core LGA 1156 Desktop Motherboard is $125.
Power. Measuring the two systems at the wall while running Vantage, the AMD drew 75 Watts and the Intel drew 65 Watts.
Performance. The Futuremark Vantage chart shows the relative performance of four similar systems.

There was some discussion on the web about Futuremark not approving Intel’s drivers because they had game—and supposedly Futuremark—sensing in them. Intel refers to that as load balancing, and although that’s not against any rules (and can in fact be a good thing), Futuremark doesn’t allow it. However, in Intel’s notebook driver there is no detection.

What do we think?

It’s difficult to make simple comparisons between the AMD Phenom II/890GX and the Intel i5 because the graphics are so dramatically different. AMD has 40 graphics shaders, and Intel has 12. The problem (for AMD) is that the benefit of those cores doesn’t come into play unless you are running a full screen 1080p Blu-ray movie, or using a 30-inch 2560 x 1600 monitor. Intel’s i5 can only drive a screen resolution of 1280 x 800, and so it was impossible to get an apples-to-apples comparison, and the lowest common dominator does not show AMD off well.

Lenovo’s new light-weight notebook—a road warrior’s delight

2010-03-20T00:55:01Z

Lenovo made the mistake of letting us play with their new X201s. It was a mistake because they’re going to have to pry my cold dead fingers off it to get it back.

The specs: Core i7-620LM 2GHz; 4GB DDR3; 160GB hard drive; Bluetooth spacer, Intel HD graphics; Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit; 802.11n; 1yr warranty, stated battery life 12 hours with (optional) 9-cell battery. Price: $1,349

The specs I care about: The screen is 12.1-inch with resolution of 1440 x 900 (WSXGA) LED backlit. It weighs a mere 2.7 pounds—1.22 kg. When on the road weight and screen size mean everything, to me at least. I’ve tried a lot of laptops and netbooks looking for the right balance of performance, screen res, size, and overall weight. I love the screen on my HP DV900 (which has been given to Robert Dow), but its 7 pounds just about killed me after a long day at CES. Currently the Vaio Netbook is the best of the lot and Kathleen Maher has written about it in this issue. And in a future issue Alex Herrera and I will be looking at Dell’s new 15-inch workstation notebook.

The machine I’ve been carrying (after CES and until this Lenovo X201s came in) was the HP 2510p, and it’s the closest one to compare to the Lenovo X201s.

When introduced the HP 2510p could be found for as little as $1,550 and get as high as $2,478 with various IT features.

The Lenovo X201s has additional features that make it a desirable machine such as a built in 5-in-1 Media Card Reader (for MMC, MS, MS PRO, SD, SDHC) and an ExpressCard 34 slot. There’s also Bluetooth v2.1, and a fingerprint reader.

The Core i7-640M 2.13GHz Processor has Intel’s new Turbo Boost feature which will let any single core run at speeds up to 2.93GHz.

The extra screen resolution is helpful. Look at how much of Tech Watch can be seen on the Lenovo screen (left) compared to the HP.

The document is opened to the same page and the zoom level is 100% on both screens.

Table 1: Lenovo x201s vs. the HP Compaq 2510p. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
	Lenovo x201s	HP Compaq 2510p
Screen	12.1 LED	12.1 LED
Res	1440 x 900 (WSXGA)	1280 x 800 (WXGA)
Weight	2.7	2.8
CPU	I7-620 2.13 GHz	Core2Duo 1.2 GHz
Graphics	Intel G45	Intel 965
Introduction	February 2010	August 2007

The Lenovo also has a built in lamp just above the display that can light up the keyboard enough to see it in a dark room, this save the road warrior from having to carry a USB lamp.

It comes with a system diagnostic toolbox that checks for backups, virus checkers and other system components and has a counter on the top that tells you how many days left in the warranty.

We downloaded a video from NetFlix and watched it. It was fine. There was a very little frame jump on some very busy fast action scenes, and I’m not convinced that it wasn’t already there.

What do we think?

I think this is the exact right size for a notebook. For one thing, although I loved that 17-in HP for its big display, I could only use it if I was lucky enough to get upgraded to business class—the screen is too large to get open in a coach seat. And, if I tried putting it on my lap to get further away from the seat in front of me, it got too hot on my legs.

The Lenovo fits nicely even in coach, and if I had to put it on my legs (say I was in a bus or train with no table) I wouldn’t get third-degree burns on my leg.

The 12-inch notebooks, AKA thin & light, can’t fit an optical drive so they aren’t going to satisfy the traveler who wants to watch DVDs. Of course, an external USB DVD can be connected but that’s just more gear to carry and battery drain. So if you want to watch a movie you’ll have to load the movies ahead of time.—JP

Corel Photo & Video Bundle

2010-03-20T00:49:20Z

True to its heritage, Corel has released a powerful set of tools for photo and video professionals in its Photo and Video Pro bundle. Corel disrupted the drawing and illustration market by adding a broad range of tools in Corel Draw including raster to vector tools and most recently dimensioning and other tools for professional users (we’ll talk about CorelDraw in an upcoming review).

In the case of the new bundles the company has been releasing for its video and photo products, you can argue that Corel is late to the party but the Photo & Video Pro Bundle is a deceptively modest package jam packed with some of the best technology in Corel’s portfolio. It includes tools from Paint Shop Pro products, Ulead products, Painter, and for good measure it’s added a simple application for creating photo books, calendars, cards, slideshows and uploading creations to Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. It follows on Corel’s Digital Studio 2010, a similar product for the consumer market introduced in October 2009.

Although the company has had this technology in its portfolio a long time, the Digital Studio and the Photo & Video Pro Bundle are first products for the company in the way the tools have been put together, and because of Corel’s brave new work on its Interface design. Corel has tried to give its users the best of both worlds—easy to use, push button tools for fast edits, creating projects, uploading files, sharing, etc. but all the depth needed for professional photo management, editing, and image processing.

Overall, Corel has done a good job. However, some tools don’t work as expected and the job of integration seems incomplete. Corel has added plenty of information sidebars that offer users clues about using a tool. The effort is to be applauded, but all that text is daunting, and it’d be nicer to have tools and interfaces that are predictable. As an example, the Organizer window shows information about a file in a right hand dialog, but you can’t actually change the file’s name there. You can change the file’s name by right clicking on the image. Well, hello? There’s no dialog about that little surprise underlining the fact that you can’t anticipate every question a user might have but you can do a better job of anticipating what they might obviously want to do. This is the sort of thing that can easily be improved with user feedback and we have no doubt that Corel will continue to fine tune. The company has a history of paying close attention to its users.

The professional photo software market almost requires the addition of organization tools, but now that everyone offers one, which one do we use? Corel automatically catalogs images and it references the images where they are—it doesn’t move anything. The process takes a while if you have a lot of photos, but once everything is cataloged the program starts up fast and is responsive.

The organizer is the heart of the Photo tools with tabs that jump quickly to Express Lab or the Full Edit tool. There are suggested changes and plenty of sliders to fine tune changes. Corel has added some favorite tools to the Express Lab tab from its consumer products. It has added the Makeover Tool that gives you brushes to improve skin tones, whiten teeth, and even a “thinify” button to discretely take away a little Christmas poundage. (Oh, if only there were such a button in real life.)

Once changes have been made you can capture an edit and apply it to other images in the organizer, which brings up the question of non-destructive editing. Corel saves the original file so that even if you save edits you don’t lose your work. You can always revert to the original. You can unless you capture edits and apply the script to other photos. Then, for some reason they’re burned in and you can’t go back. Corel warns you that you’re heading down a one way street but it’s an awkward workflow. Really, you want to be working in a non-destructive environment or you want to be aware that your photos might change forever. One tends to lose faith if you can’t count on total non-destructability.

One thing Corel has not fixed is its annoying habit of making itself the default viewer for video and photo files. I had to go back and fix this after installing the Corel Media Studio and now I have to do the same with Photo & Video Pro. Let me make myself clear, Corel does not offer a choice, it just changes all your preferences so that image files open in Corel Instant Viewer even if you have set up Adobe Bridge, Google Picasa, Adobe Lightroom or some other product as your viewer of choice. Professionals may use several products because they like certain filters or a particular interface for a task, but they never, ever want programs to mess with their default viewers and settings.

The inclusion of Painter Essentials is a nice touch but it’s too bad that it’s not better integrated with the Photo Pro product. It’s separate and it doesn’t show up in the Photo Pro organizer window in a tab like the Express Lab and Full Edit tools. It would be nice to work on a photo in Photo Pro and then switch to Painter Essentials to add some painterly touches or create a full-blown painting with the product. You can edit images you’ve painted over in the Photo Pro tool and it shows the original file and the painting in separate layers, so the integration at least works in one direction.

I love Painter Essentials. As I have written in these pages before, I’m just not talented enough or patient enough to painstakingly paint a photo and make it amazing in the way many professional users are—there’s even a business creating faux paintings using the Painter technology with good printers and textured paper. So, for the untalented, the tools in Painter Essentials offer the best of both worlds—the ability to choose settings and paint over an image using tracing paper until you get the desired effect and also an automatic feature that lets you choose your settings and just press start—then you have the fun of watching your “painting” emerge. You can stop the automatic process at any stage and you can go over areas with a brush to strengthen the effect and put your own stamp on it.

In the coming weeks we’ll provide a review of the Video tools from Corel as well. The Photo & Video Pro Bundle sells for $149.99.

Pros: Corel has brought together some of its most useful tools and features in one convenient bundle and at a very attractive price point.

Cons: In spite of a friendly-looking interface, some features don’t work as you’d expect. It really seems like a 1.0 product and we have high hopes for the updates.

Sony Vaio VPCW2

2010-03-19T22:28:27Z

The smaller the computer the better as far as I’m concerned; and the new Sony Vaio VPCW2 line of computers is pretty darned small. It’s an example of the newest netbooks coming out based on the new lineup of Atom processors. This computer weighs 2.9 lbs and it’s 2 inches thick.

It’s basic. The Atom N450 is a dual-threaded processor that runs at 1.66 GHz, it has integrated Intel 3150 graphics, a 667MHz frontside bus, a 512 L2 cache and 1GB DDR2 memory. It features a 10.1-inch display, 1366x768, with web cam and microphone. The video technology includes face tracking. It has Bluetooth. The Microsoft Performance score for this baby is 2.4 and that’s because the Atom processor for this machine gets the lowest score. The integrated graphics is rated at 2.9. The battery life is rated at around 8 hours and that’s the kind of performance we’ve been getting so far.

This is a machine that goes to the coffee shop with me when I have to get out of the office and it’s the machine that goes with me on the road. Its primary purpose is word processing and Web browsing. I have some monster spreadsheets and some giant word documents—these run but you have to remember you’re on a netbook—it will slow down when you pile up a bunch of stuff on it. The processing time for photos is reasonable.

Since I’m a generally optimistic person I’ll tell you what I like about the computer first. It’s small, it’s light. It has a Windows 7 operating system that gets up and going with no waiting—that’s not to say that it’s fast in all it does, but Microsoft has improved the operating system so that start up is considerably less painful. The computer I’m using has a nice, pale green finish and it came with a matching bag.

This being a Sony machine and all there are nice touches in addition to the attractive finish. Sony has added multimedia player tools that add to the usual Microsoft player features with network utilities and Sony has teamed with ArcSoft to provide cute toys for playing with video and photographs. This is the sort of thing you play with when a computer is new and then you never look at it again. Still, it’s fun and if you have a child that must be amused, you’ll be grateful for these tools.

Now, after I’ve told you all the good stuff, I’ll tell you what I don’t like so much. The keyboard is small—that’s okay, really. I’m an adaptive creature but because the keyboard is small, the placement of familiar keys has been changed—in the most diabolical way you can imagine. The shift key has been moved down and it’s right next to the up key. If you’re like me, you will have some initial moments—even hour or so—of thinking you are going to completely lose your mind because every time you try to shift you either hit enter or the up key. I have to be on the keyboard a while to get used to it and I have to watch where my fingers go—not an ideal usage model for a fast touch typist. I have to remind myself to slow down and hit the keys deliberately. I’ve used small keyboards before but this is the first that surprised me so much on the key placement. I thought at first this problem would be a deal-breaker. It’s not, I have gotten used to it and the computer’s size and general responsiveness makes me forgive this problem. However, I’m not sure that everyone would agree.

The Atom N450 and the Sony VPCW2 line represent big improvements over the first generation of netbooks. The dual processor is a help if you tend to open up a bunch of programs and ask the computer to do more than it’s designed to do. However, it is still a true netbook designed for casual computer use, web browsing, photo management, etc. I find it to be a great productivity tool allowing me to take a computer along in situations more often and have it on hand whenever and wherever I am.

$479.99 online

Pros: small, light, cute, nice bag, long battery life and solid functionality

Cons: small keyboard with keys in unexpected places.

Review: ATI Radeon HD 5830 graphics AIB

2010-03-02T13:12:09Z

ATI-AMD continued to roll out products in its Evergreen line this week, adding to the Enthusiast segment with the HD 5830. The HD 5830 fits in the lower end of the Enthusiast segment in between the HD 5850 and the HD 5770 with a $240 price point.

The following chart puts the new board in perspective with its peers from AMD.

HD 5770	HD 5830	HD 5850	GTX 260 Core 216
1.36 TFLOPS	1.79 TFLOPS	2.09 TFLOPS
850 MHz	800 MHz Core Clock	725 MHz	1.2 GHz Core Clock
800 Stream Processors	1120 Stream Processors	1440 Steam Processors	240 Processor Cores
108W	175W Max Power	151W Max Power	182W Max Power
40 NM	40 NM	40NM	55 NM
1.04 Billion Transistors	2.15 Billion Transistors	2.15 Billion	1.4 Billion Transistors
13.6 GPixel Fill Rate	12.8 GPixel Fill Rate	23.2 GPixel Fill Rate	16,128 MPixels
GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	DDR3
1.2GHZ Memory Clock	1GHZ Memory Clock	1GHZ Memory Clock	1GHz Memory Clock
$170	$240	$300	$230

Comparison of ATI Radeon 5830, 5850, and Nvidia GTX260 AIB’s specifications

As with all Evergreen GPU’s the HD 5830 is equipped with ATI’s Eyefinity Technology. In the case of the Evergreen line, that means the board can power three monitors at resolutions up to 1920x1080. And the entire Evergreen line provides full Direct X 11 support. The Maximum Board Power for the HD 5830 is about 25 W higher than the HD 5850, this could be attributed to the Core clock speed which is 75 MHz higher than its big brother. This disparity difference definitely influenced the PMark score of the HD 5830.

We tested the HD 5830 on an Intel i7 based machine running at 2.93 GHz, with 32-bit Windows 7. We matched up the HD 5830 against the Nvidia GTX 260 Core 216. Even though the GTX 260 is an older board it is comparable in segment placement and price. W with the GTX 260 Core 216 available for $230.

As we have seen in previous rounds of benchmarks Nvidia’s counterpart to the HD 5830 performs admirably side-by-side by side until we really start to tax the boards. As you can see in the Unigine Tropics testing once we turn up resolution the AA to 8X and turn on the Ambient Occlusion the quality of the ATI architecture really starts to come through.

The HD 5830 will no doubt come in a variety of different looks and clock speeds, many of which are already hitting the market. Our board was the standard elegant ATI design with 2 DVI ports, and HDMI and display port out.

ATI was looking to fill the gap between the HD 5570 and 5850 and that is exactly what they did in terms of performance and price. The HD 5830 is a quality product at the lower end of the Enthusiast segment.

The HD 5830 rounds out the Evergreen Enthusiast Segment, which includes the dual GPU HD 5970 ($750), The HD 5870 ($400) and the HD 5850 ($300).

What do we think?

The ATI Radeon HD 5830 AIB is a lot of graphics board for not too much money. However, in terms of the Pmark the HD 5850 is a better choice. The 5850 uses less power, gets better benchmark scores, and doesn’t cost that much more.

Once again, although the Pmark shows the best case condition, if a buyer is only using one parameter in his or her shopping decision, then the 5830 wins on price.