Category: ATI

Another graphics card company having some problems with faulty cards. Nvidia recently had some issues with many of its GPUs and now AMD is having some troubles as well.

In this case there are thousands of Radeon 3800 cards affected by this issue (around 15,000 to be little more exact). This isn’t nearly as huge as the Nvidia debacle but it is an issue in its own right.

Who is to blame isn’t exactly clear, the problem could have originated from ITC/GeCube, Diamond, Alienware, or AMD but no one really knows for sure. I’ve seen around the internet that Diamond will replace a card if it is problematic but I don’t know if that is specific to this issue or not.

I’m glad that this wasn’t a wide spread issue or the fact that no one really knows who to place blame on would have been a much bigger issue. It will surely be resolved soon and blow over much faster than the whole Nvidia thing which seemed to drag on forever.

TG Daily

Amazon.com accidentally put the AMD Radeon 4850 graphics card on sale earlier then it was supposed to and because of that we now have some more information on the specs for the card.

The Radeon 4850 will be priced at around $200.

Amazon’s technical specifications:

“ASIC: RV7000, 512MB Memory, GDDR3 Memory Configuration, 256-bit Memory Interface, Display Formats:x2 Dual Link DVI + HDTV-out with built-in HDMI, PCI Express 2.0 support, 480 Stream Processing units, Direct X 10.1 / Shader Model 4.1,OpenGL 2.0, ATI Crossfire X Multi-GPU Support for highly scalable performance (Up to four GPU support with an AMD 790FX based motherboard), High-speed 128-bit-HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering, 55nm process technology, ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Technology, Game Physics processing capability, Up to 24X Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing, Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for Blu-ray and HD DVD, ATI PowerPlay energy conserving technology.”

As you can see above the cards are promoting “Game Physics processing capability,” which is most likely going to be using Havok. Amazon also says that it requires a 450 Watt or greater power supply and the card will ship with two DVI to VGA adapters, an S-Video cable, a Crossfire bridge interconnect, a component adapter, and a DVI to HDMI adapter.

Overall the graphics card looks like it will be a step in the right direction for AMD but I’m still worried that the only thing that will let AMD truly compete in the GPU space is integrating the GPU and CPU on one die.

TG Daily

I’ve talked about the 3800 series before but it is now officially out. AMD is launching the product with 10 partners for a total of 24 different available cards.

I mentioned earlier (here) that ATI has two different 3800 cards ready, the HD3850 and the HD3870. The cards will be available immediately and the 3850 should be priced around $179 while the 3870 will be about $219.

According to AMD, these are the world’s first graphics cards to support DirectX 10.1. The GPUs are made using 55nm process technology and have tri and quad multi-GPU support with ATI CrossFireX. 3850 has 256MB of GDDR3 memory while the 3870 sports 512MB of GDDR4.

The cards look pretty good and are priced pretty nicely, but, you’ll have to wait to see how the card does in the benchmark department.

ATI RAdeon HD 3800 Series

MadBoxPC got their hands on what seems to be a marketing presentation for the ATI Radeon HD3800.

The presentation confirms information that has only been rumored until now. The price is set at $150 for the 3850 and $250 for 3870.

Both of the graphics cards are DirectX 10.1 compatible, DirectX 10.1 will be shipping with Service Pack 1 of Windows Vista.

With the release of these two cards the 2900XT will be discontinued. CrossfireX is mentioned in the presentation and Quad Crossfire will be the first DirectX 10.1 QuadGPU setup.

I am pretty confused as to why the 3800 cards aren’t really being talked about that much on the sites that I follow, usually when new graphics cards are coming there are rumors and so on going on all over the internet.

Check out the rest of the slides of the presentation here.

The Radeon HD3850 will be coming to market soon and will feature a single-slot cooling setup that only outputs 31 dBA.

The cooler on this card is much quieter than the 8600GTS and 8800GT video cards from Nvidia.

ATI will also be debuting the HD3870 which will have a dual-slot cooling setup that outputs 34dBA.

These two cards output significantly less noise than the 2900XT and the 8800GT. Just for comparison the 8800GT ouputs about 43dBA.

I’m excited for these upcoming graphics cards, it’s nice to know that ATI is actually competing with Nvidia. Everyone likes a quiet computer and hopefully this will help push computers quieter and quieter.

If you’d like to see some pictures of the upcoming cards you can find them here and here.

It’s always funny when a company leaks its own products before they come out. In this case the release notes of the most recent graphics card drivers list these cards as being supported:

Radeon HD 2900 Pro

Radeon HD 2350 Series

Radeon HD 2600 X2 Series

Well, these cards aren’t out yet. theInquirer says this about the story:

“We can fairly easily guess what the first two are – low-clocked 2900 XT, low-clocked 2400 – but what the 2600 X2 constitutes we’re really not sure. A higher-clocked version of the 2600, or even the much-rumoured CrossFire-on-a-card version?”

It seems that this is about the time that new graphics cards start to come to light, graphics cards are getting much more powerful for the money you pay for them which is great for consumers like me that enjoy playing games occasionally but don’t need to have all of the eye candy.