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Posts Tagged ‘nvidia’

The not-quite GTX 570

When is a GTX 560 Ti not really a GTX 560 Ti? When it’s almost a GTX 570.
Nvidia’s latest GPU, the GTX 560 Ti 448 is really a GTX 580 (originally dubbed the GF110) with two functional blocks disabled, reducing its CUDA Core count from 512 to 448. The GTX 570 is a GF110 with one functional block disabled, endowing it with 480 CUDA Cores. The original GTX 560 Ti is a completely different chip, with different power requirements, but all 384 of its cores are fully functional.

Priced at $290, The 560 Ti 448 … [Read More...]

990-series board offers modern mobo amenities

To be honest, between Z68 this and Sandy Bridge that, we haven’t had much time to check out AMD’s latest motherboard offerings.

It’s not that we don’t care; it’s just that the fire is burning on the other side of the fence these days. That’s not to say that the 990X chipset in Asus’s midrange M5A99X Evo is a slouch. As a real AM3+ board, it’s guaranteed to work with the upcoming Bulldozer line of CPUs from AMD. On the other hand, plenty of older 890FX boards will also work fine with Bulldozer, so … [Read More...]

Cut yourself a li’l slab o’ Honeycomb

A slew of hardware makers that didn’t start out as online bookstores—including Acer, Samsung, and Toshiba—debuted 7-inch Android Honeycomb tablets just in time for Amazon’s Kindle Fire to steal their thunder. The apparent goal: to discover if anyone is actually interested in 7-inch tablets. Acer’s Iconia Tab A100 serves as our guinea pig for this form factor.

Like most Honeycomb tablets to date, the Iconia A100 is based on Nvidia’s 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor, coupled with GeForce graphics and 1GB RAM. The multitouch LCD retains the 16:9 aspect ratio that other Android … [Read More...]

AMD and Nvidia driver teams have been putting in some pretty serious overtime trying to keep up with the flood of new titles hitting the market just before the holidays, and a third profile update just went live for AMD’s less than one month old Catalyst 11.11. Just in-case you’d lost count, in addition to the three profile updates, AMD has also released three separate beta drivers to fix various other issues with specific titles. If you like to be on the bleeding edge, make sure you have Catalyst 11.11C, along with the just released CAP3.

CAP3 includes the following … [Read More...]

A glasses-free 3D laptop

We have a term for technology like Toshiba’s Qosmio F755 laptop. It’s “demo cool.” It wows you in a demo, but after some serious testing, you’re not quite sure you’d want to use it day in and day out. Though we’re impressed by the technical achievement of Toshiba’s glasses-free 3D technology, it’s just not developed enough to earn our recommendation.

Unlike most stereoscopic 3D displays, which require you to wear a pair of 3D glasses, Toshiba’s lenticular display creates a stereoscopic 3D illusion with the naked eye. That illusion did impress us. Watching a 3D Blu-ray … [Read More...]

A barely there home-theater PC

PCs make great Blu-ray players, but Acer’s Revo RL100-UR20P is the first Blu-ray-equipped PC we’ve seen that’s thinner and smaller than most purpose-built Blu-ray players. If it played high-definition audio discs such as SACD and DVD-Audio, it would be one of the most powerful Blu-ray players on the market, but this machine isn’t that ambitious.

It is, on the other hand, considerably less expensive than very high-end Blu-ray players that are capable of playing those high-definition audio formats. The Oppo BDP-95, for example, sells for $999 and is almost never discounted.

Acer’s Revo RL100-UR20P is … [Read More...]

NVidia’s founder and president Jen-Hsun Huang was on hand at this years AsiaD conference, and as usual, he put on quite the show. In addition to reconfirming the companies future plans for the Tegra platform, he offered up sage advice for Microsoft on how to manage Intel during the transition to arm, how much his company is spending on R&D, and even openly fantasized about getting his chips in future versions of the iPad. 

When asked about his feelings towards Windows on ARM, Huang was quite specific, don’t call it a PC.

“It’s important for [Microsoft] not to position these … [Read More...]

It’s easy to build a gaming machine on a budget if you’re playing at 1650×1080 or 1920×1200, but if you’re rocking 2560×1600, you need a little more oomph

As Maximum PC senior editor Gordon Mah Ung puts it, building a budget gaming rig for a 30-inch panel is the metaphorical equivalent of slapping a Ferrari engine into a crappy Ford car. If you can afford a display that rings up north of $2,000, then why the heck are you trying to cut corners on the system you’re connecting it to?

I can’t answer that one for you. But what I … [Read More...]

Over the course of millions of years of evolution, the human race has come quite a long way. We’ve created mountains of sophisticated literature, skyscraping architecture, and the collected works of King Crimson. Sometimes, though, we can’t help but slip into Old Ways. Which is all to say, “Ooooo, pretty picture!” That’s pretty much how we felt looking at screenshots of id Software’s megatexture masterwork RAGE. Sadly, the game in motion tells an entirely different story – at least, on PC.

Early buyers have reported – and posted video evidence of – texture pop-in issues that render RAGE nearly unplayable. … [Read More...]

The ultimate GTX 580 is one big muthah

The Asus Matrix GTX 580 Platinum is quiet, fast, and really, really easy to overclock. It’s also massive.

How massive? When we got the box, we thought Asus had shipped us a motherboard by mistake because the box was so large.

The size of the pacage is a clue to the size of the card itself. Asus builds a variant of its DirectCU II dual-fan technology onto the GTX 580, resulting in a card that’s fully three expansion slots wide. If you ever plan on running two of these in SLI mode, … [Read More...]

There’s a new version of GPU-Z available for download (version 0.5.5) that now fully recognizes AMD A-Series Fusion processors. In addition, the latest build adds support for numerous videocards not previously recognized, fixes a shader count detection issue for Blackcomb (mobile AMD Cayman), adds a PowerColor hardware giveaway, and more.

Support for a dozen Nvidia GPUs were added to the latest build, including Nvidia GeForce GT 560 Ti OEM, GT 545, GT 530, GeForce GTX 580M, GT 555M GeForce 520MX, GT 520M, 510M, 305M, Quadro 5000, Quadro 4000M, and Quadro 400. On the AMD side, the list isn’t quite as … [Read More...]

LG is not really a name associated with laptops, but that isn’t stopping the Korean company from taking its new LG A530 15-inch gaming laptop on a worldwide tour. Why take it on tour? This device has a high-resolution HD 3D screen, and that just doesn’t come across in pictures. So what can you expect?

The A530 will come with your choice of Core i3, i5, or i7 CPUs. A Nvidia GeForce GT 555 mobile GPU will be pushing pixels around that 3D screen. Buyers can add up to 8GB of RAM if they like. There is even an option … [Read More...]

Someone tell the boss we need an in-house masseur. Maingear’s Titan 17 is the third supersize notebook we’ve reviewed in the past few months, and our backs are paying the price. We’re so beaten down by these behemoths that the sight of the enormous power brick alone makes us cringe in terror. The graphics performance of this SLI powerhouse, however, makes all the hardship worth it.

The philosophy behind the Titan 17 is simple. Take a complete high-end desktop PC and cram it into a notebook form factor. Price and weight and size aren’t the limiting factors—all that counts, in … [Read More...]