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Posted by Hanners
on Tue 6th Jan 2009
We first saw Sapphire's TOXIC brand taking on its Radeon HD 4870 form courtesy of a 512MB part back in October, with an offering which rather impressed us, but today sees the launch of a Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC sporting a 1GB frame buffer by the company - Can it carry on where its predecessor left off?
As per Sapphire's 512MB TOXIC variant, Sapphire have chosen to up both core and memory clocks to the same degree on the Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC 1GB. The board's RV770 core gets a very modest rise of just 30MHz to leave us with a core clock speed of 780MHz, while the board's GDDR5 memory gets more attention lavished upon it, increasing the clock speed from 900MHz to 1GHz, giving us an effective speed of 4GHz considering the properties of GDDR5 memory.
Once again, this Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC offering rolls out Sapphire's dual-slot, vapour chamber cooling technology, coupled with three heat pipes to handle the heat from the board's RV770 core and memory, while hot air is exhausted from the rear of the card to keep it out of your chassis. |
As always, your thoughts and comments on this review are very welcome, and can be left in our forum using the link below.
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Posted by Hanners
on Tue 6th Jan 2009
There have been a few rumours blowing around NVIDIA's next high-end part, codenamed GT212, of late, with a number of sites picking up on the same story. PC Perspective has one of the better looks at what the current speculation is suggesting we'll see from the graphics giant.
| What peaks my interest here is the idea of the GT212, that we previously thought would be a pretty simple refresh and simplification of the GT200 architecture, getting a 60% increase in shaders - moving from 240 to 384. Another important feature change listed here includes a move from a 512-bit memory bus to a 256-bit bus. While this might at first seem like a dramatic shift backwards the table also lists GDDR5 as the memory format used and that would help alleviate any bandwidth drops with the 256-bit bus while allowing NVIDIA's engineers to keep the chip design smaller even if transistor counts go from 1.4 billion to 1.8 billion. |
Read all of the proposed specifications here.
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Posted by Hanners
on Tue 6th Jan 2009
When we took a look at GELID Solutions Silent Spirit CPU cooler for Intel's Core 2, LGA 775 socketed systems, we really rather liked it when all was said and done. As promised at the time of that review, GELID have now released an LGA 1366 mounting kit for this part, allowing the Silent Spirit to be used on the latest Intel Core i7 systems.
Thermal Solutions specialist GELID Solutions launches a LGA-1366 mounting clip which enables the quad heatpipe silent mid-range CPU cooler Silent Spirit to fit Intel's LGA-1366 socket.
Thanks to the light weight of just 370g the Silent Spirit will not strain the socket and will allow for safe transportation.
The Top-flow cooler Silent Spirit follows an open frame concept whereby both design and dimensions have been improved to eliminate humming and buzzing noises while maintaining a compact overall size. Precise software calculations were made during the development stage to simulate both airflow and cooling performance in order to create a prototype that would live up to the expectations of a true silent aficionado. In order to cool down the Northbridge heatsink (chipset) and surrounding voltage regulator module close to the CPU, the heatsink has been tilted specially to an angle for this purpose. |
You can find the full press release regarding this here.
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Posted by Hanners
on Mon 5th Jan 2009
Speculation has been rife throughout 2008 regarding Steve Jobs' health, but the head honcho at Apple has finally admitted these problems himself today. It'll be interesting to see what happens to Apple's share price as the days go on, considering how it's dropped whenever any rumours to this effect have surfaced. Perhaps they can diffuse any worries by announcing the iMortal at this year's MacWorld?
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is being treated for a "hormone imbalance" but is staying on as the firm's CEO. In a statement, Jobs said he had been suffering from ill health for a number of months.
"I have been losing weight throughout 2008...doctors think they have found the cause: a hormone imbalance that has been robbing me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy," said Jobs. |
BBC News has the full story, and you can read Mr. Jobs' letter in full on the Apple web site.
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Posted by Hanners
on Mon 5th Jan 2009
We featured a bit-tech review of a 22", 1920x1080 LCD monitor on our front page recently, which took in an Iiyama part that we've since had a look at ourselves as part of another full desktop system (with a review coming soon) - Today, they've taken a look at another similarly specified monitor, this time from Viewsonic.
At first glance, there's little to chose between it and the new Iiyama. Both use cheap and cheerful TN panel technology, have similar proportions and specifications and largely the same feature set including dynamic contrast and colour enhancement circuitry.
But the VX2260WM does have a few extras to help justify its slightly stiffer pounds-sterling sticker. For starters, there's a game console-friendly HDMI port to go along with the default DVI and VGA sockets. With HDMI, of course, comes HDCP and hence support for playback of protected content including Blu-ray movies. This Viewsonic, therefore, is that little bit more flexible. |
Read their thoughts in full here.
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Posted by Hanners
on Fri 2nd Jan 2009
It appears that a new set of beta NVIDIA GeForce drivers have leaked out onto the web (as they are want to do), but rather interestingly this latest set supports an additional feature in the driver control panel labelled "ambient occlusion". What's it all about?
| Ambient occlusion is a shading method used in 3D computer graphics which helps add realism to local reflection models by taking into account attenuation of light due to occlusion. Ambient Occlusion attempts to approximate the way light radiates in real life, especially off of what is normally considered non-reflective surfaces. For example, in the way light through a small crack in the curtain in an otherwise darkened hotel room can slightly illuminate the entire room, and not just the path of light passing through the crack itself. |
PC Perspective's forum has more information (and download links, although of course you should only use them at your own risk) surrounding this driver set.
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Posted by Hanners
on Fri 2nd Jan 2009
Creative Labs are teasing us with a new advertising campaign, but what does it all mean? Only time will tell I suppose...
Creative Technology, a leading designer of audio processors as well as portable digital media players, has launched a teaser web-site that advertises "Zii" and "stemcell computing".
Creative promises a revolution with its Zii and claims that that everything ever known "is about to change", however, it does not reveal what exactly Zii is. Considering the fact that Creative Technology is mostly known for audio cards and portable digital media players, it is highly likely that Zii is a new audio chip, but keeping in mind that the company touts "stemcell computing", the new product may be aimed at something more than just audio processing. |
X-Bit Labs carries the story.
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Posted by Hanners
on Thu 1st Jan 2009
As 2008 progressed, we found ourselves talking more and more about GPGPU computing, although this was largely confined to NVIDIA's CUDA technology. However, towards the tail end of the year the first revision of the OpenCL specification was finalised, bringing us the possibility of an open source, cross-platform GPGPU programming API. Anandtech takes a look at what OpenCL is all about, and why it's important.
What if we had not only a pool of hardware resources hundreds wide that could handle thousands of threads in flight at a time with no software overhead? Well, we do: it's called a GPU. And if we could use the GPU for processing, then we could spawn a bunch of threads and really chew through the matrix multiplication we talked about earlier (or whatever). We might still have to be concerned about how many hardware resources we have in order to best map the problem to the specific device in the system. And we still have the problem of actually spawning, managing and running threads on the GPU hardware.
But what if we could write a special function, called a kernel, that can instantly be spawned hundreds or thousands or millions of times and run on different data all without needing to handle creating and managing all the threads ourselves. And what if we didn't need to worry about how to break up our problem and left actually determining how to handle allocating threads to the runtime? Well, now we have a solution: that's OpenCL.
The GPU is the vehicle for exploiting data parallelism. But before now our vehicle has run like a train on a track called real-time 3D graphics acceleration. OpenCL removes the track and the limitations and builds in a steering wheel developers can use to take the GPU (and other parallel devices) anywhere a programmer can imagine. |
You can read the full article here.
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Posted by Hanners
on Wed 31st Dec 2008
Uh-oh, this can't be good news...
Right, so this is a weird one: we're getting tons of reports - tons - about failing Zune 30s. Apparently, the players began freezing at about midnight last night, becoming totally unresponsive and practically useless.
The crisis has been dubbed by Zune users 'Z2K9', due to the apparently synchronized faceplantings across the country. According to tipster Michael, the Zune users experienced something like this:
"Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and... freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them" |
Gizmodo has the story, including an update from Microsoft themselves.
EDIT: It appears the problem should have resolved itself. Sort of.
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Elite Bastards review: Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC 1GB