Written by Andreas G 21 March 2008 21:55
In the East you can find a card called Radeon HD 3690. Unlike the other cards of the Radeon HD 3600 series, 3690 is based on the RV670 core, but the memory bus has been cut in half, to 128-bit and it has only 256MB of memory. Other than that they are identical to the regular RV670-based cards. But Radeon HD 3690 is not an official card by AMD and the naming was something partners came up with. Industry sources has now told HKEPC that AMD will launch an identical card next month, but it will instead name it Radeon HD 3830.
The card is suppose to go up against the GeForce 9600GT, which we find a bit amusing as Radeon HD 3850 is several tens of dollars cheaper and 3870 costs pretty much the same, and they both perform quite similar to 9600GT.
However, overclocked versions with more memory might be able to do better, something sources have been saying should arrive shortly after the launch. MSRP will be in the $120 range, the same as GeForce 9600GT.
Without a doubt, this is a way for AMD to dump more RV670 chips onto the market. We can imagine that the fabs have been pumping out chips at high fields for some time now and that AMD is now trying to figure out the best ways to hurt NVIDIA and get rid of excess stock at the same time.
http://www.nordichardware.com/news,7541.html
Written by
Andreas G 21 March 2008 20:06
Tempest is the latest creation from case manufacturer NZXT. NZXT is known for its gaming-oriented case and focus on building cases that can house the most powerful hardware. The Tempest is no exception as NZXT proclaims it to be The Airflow King. Two 120mm fans in the front, two 140mm in the roof, one on the side and one in the back is the reason for this. This is further strengthened by the predrilled holes for better cable management to eliminate any unnecessary obstruction of the airflow.
Written by
Andreas G 21 March 2008 17:31
Nehalem is Intel's next microarchitecture and it should arrive sometime before the end of the year. Intel has displayed Nehalem-based systems at IDF and even though no specific performance indications have been released, seeing a dual-core workstation with two native quad-cores running sixteen simultaneous threads is simply impressive. Even though we still don't know much more since Intel decided to unveil
more details on Nehalem a few days ago, we now have
pictures of a pre-production motherboard codenamed Smackdown.
Perhaps not the most exciting pictures of a motherboard, but it's nice to see that things are moving forward at Intel.
Written by
Andreas G 21 March 2008 16:35
There has been a lot of buzz around the web regarding an article published by W1zzard over at TechPowerUp. He found an
irregularity when testing the just launched GeForce 9600GT. It seemed that the card would perform exceptionally better when it was running with an overclocked PCIe bus, which isn't normal under these circumstances. He investigated it further and found that it seemed like the card used the PCIe frequency as a reference crystal, instead of the on-board physical crystal. A
follow-up investigating the oddity was also posted.
The problem with this isn't so much that the card overclocks with the PCIe bus, it's actually quite nifty, but that the increased frequency wasn't reported by the drivers. The card seemed to operate at default frequency when it was not. People have been wondering why NVIDIA didn't reveal this to people reviewing the card, as they may have been lured into making the card look better than it was. That would be the paranoid angle of it, but right now it's the one dominating the discussions.
We still don't know why this information was omitted. It might just have been some sort of miscommunication at NVIDIA, because it has now made an official response saying that the card does indeed have two crystals. One on-board 27MHz crystal and one
crystal which is connected to the PCIe bus. The things is, GeForce 9600GT isn't the only card that behaves this way. TechPowerUp discovered that
GeForce 9800GX2 behaves the same way, and chances are that the rest of the GeForce 9 series cards do too.
