Published on Tuesday, June 29, 2010 by admin It is time for HTPC enthusiasts to rejoice! Videolan announced the availability of VLC 1.1.0 a couple of days back. VLC's popularity soared in the mid-2000s when standard definition videos were all the craze, and CPUs were powerful enough to easily decode them. Over the last few years, many people have built up a big library of high definition videos, and one of ...

Published on Tuesday, June 29, 2010 by admin While Nvidia developers see a 100x speed increase, Intel only sees 14x with some kernels using CUDA. ZoomA recent paper written by Intel and presented to the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in France claims that Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 GPU is only 14x faster than its Core i7 960 processor. The paper attempts to debunk claims made by Nvidia dev...

Published on Friday, June 25, 2010 by admin With a TDP of around 61W, Sapphire is reaching an upper limit on what passive cooling can do in a still-air environment. Any more, such as a passive cooler on the 5750 (86W TDP as standard), would require significant engineering of the cooler and heatpipes to keep it passive - such as the dual slot Gigabyte HD5750 Silent Cell, which is a passive 5750, but has a m...

Published on Sunday, June 13, 2010 by admin The fastest single GPU can be made even faster Just about everyone knows that Nvidia’s hot new Fermi graphics chip is literally hot. So, when Asus bundled its new ENGTX480 card with a custom voltage tweaker for overclocking, we wondered if it was such a good idea. After all, do you really need the card to run hotter? And with the speed of the ENGTX480, you p...

Published on Tuesday, June 1, 2010 by admin In recent years it’s become customary to have 3-4 high-end cards on the market at the same time using the same GPU. For the GTX 200 series we had the GTX 260, GTX 275, and GTX 285, while for the Radeon HD 5000 series we have the 5830, 5850, and 5870. With the launch of NVIDIA’s GTX 400 series last month NVIDIA filled in the first 2 spots in their lineup with ...

Published on Monday, May 31, 2010 by admin Our inbox quickly lit up this morning when we received notice about this NGOHQ article, discussing how NVIDIA had removed the heterogeneous GPU restriction on PhysX in their latest beta drivers. This struck us as a bit of an odd reversal of positions from NVIDIA, and now that we've had a chance to chat with them we finally know what's going on. As a quick ...

Published on Monday, May 24, 2010 by admin NVIDIA's plans for their upcoming drivers: the 256 series of drivers (don't ask us why they jumped from 197 to 256). Today, NVIDIA has released the first beta of the 256 drivers. We'll keep this short as our previous article already covered what this release entails, but you can read the full press release or just grab the drivers from NVIDIA and start testing. If you...

Published on Thursday, May 20, 2010 by admin Power and heat output are often issues which stride the minds of graphics card enthusiasts. Sufficient cooling and a beefy power supply are often a prerequisite if one wishes to invest in NVIDIA’s latest Fermi offering. So what happens when we catch word of a single slot graphics card containing a Fermi GPU? Hot on the heels of Galaxy’s custom GTX470 GC, the ...

Published on Monday, May 10, 2010 by admin The Fermi cards have now been out (and only just available) for the just over a month.  Like the AMD 5xxx series, the first cards used reference PCBs and reference coolers - the only way you could distinguish between the different companies was by the branded sticker on the large chunky cooler.  Given time, and knowledge of the system, custom coolers were just aroun...

Published on Saturday, May 8, 2010 by admin Galaxy have pleasantly surprised us, and the folks at vr-zone. To the table, they bring their GTX 470 GC, a 100% non-reference design graphics card utilising an NVIDIA GeForce Fermi 470 GPU. Measuring 9 inches (compared to the reference 9.5 inches) and featuring a blue PCB, Galaxy have essentially mated a graphics card with a robot figurine. This 470 uses a qu...

Published on Friday, April 30, 2010 by admin Today, Sapphire have announced the latest in their lineup of ATI 5xxx series graphics cards - the passively cooled HD 5550, dubbed the 'Ultimate'. The party piece of this hardware comes in the form of the wrap around heatsink - the passive design and the low power usage (10W in 2D or idle mode) is destined to appeal to HTPC and quiet systems enthusiasts who yearn...

Published on Thursday, April 29, 2010 by admin Detailed graphics card specifications and reviews are great—that is, if you have the time to do the research. But at the end of the day, what a gamer needs is the best graphics card within a certain budget. So, if you don’t have the time to research the benchmarks, or if you don’t feel confident enough in your ability to pick the right card, then fear not. ...