Category: Graphics Cards

Nvidia Plans 9800GT Green Edition

Nvidia is going to quietly launch a GeForce 9800GT “Green Edition” in mid-March. The “Green Edition” has a lower GPU voltage, and consequently slower clockspeeds. The core clock looks set to be reduced from 600 to 550MHz, while the shader clock will be decelerated from 1500 to 1375MHz.

Sounds like Nvidia is in the renaming mood. I hate when they do this, but if it means we end up with eventually better priced graphics cards I’m happy with it.

Nvidia Plans 9800GT Green Edition, More Renaming Adventures – VR-Zone.com: News and Reviews.

Thousands of Radeon 3800 Cards Found to be Faulty

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

Nvidia Geforce 9400 GT

Nvidia has just released another low end graphics card, the Geforce 9400 GT shares many of the same optimizations as the rest of the 9 series, the chipset has 16 visual effects cores but is fast enough to double the performance of the Geforce 8400 from just a year ago.

The GPU has a 550MHz core clock speed and 800MHz effective memory clock letting these boards have smaller cooling fans than other GPUs.

This new card also supports Nvidia’s CUDA language for running general purpose computing on the graphics cards processor.

Although there will be variations from different manufacturers a stock 9400 GT will have 512MB of memory, a single dual-link DVI connector and VGA. This card should set a new benchmark for low end graphics cards and is targeted at a price point of $59.

Cards should be available starting immediately.

Nvidia

Photos of the Upcoming Radeon HD 4670

Not a whole lot to say about it, but it is definitely something to drool over while you wait to spend some cash on it. The Radeon HD 4670 is clocked at 750MHz core and 2GHz GDDR3 memory. The card will be able to get a P35xx under 3DMark Vantage, compare that to P32xx for a 3850 or P19xx for a 9500GT.

VR-Zone (with 5 more images)

All G84 and G86 Mobile Chips Defective

Nvidia has announced that “significant quantities” of previous generation GPUs and mobile communications processors were defective and that it would take a $250M charge against earnings to repair and replace affected chips.

Nvidia didn’t say specifically what chips were faulty or how many are faulty but according to The Inquirer every single G84 and G86 GPU is affected. Both chips share an ASIC and the core design suffers from a heat related issue.

This is a pretty big deal for Nvidia and I’m worried that this combined with the recent release of ATIs 4800 series of graphics cards will end up with them taking a back seat to ATI again.

“Multiple analysts also told us that NV specifically told them that this problem is confined only to HP. I wonder why Dell is having failures in huge numbers for their XPS lines and replacing them with ATI parts? Why is Asus having similar problems? Go check the message boards, any notebooks that came with G84s and G86s have boards filled with dead machine problems. Most of these, especially on the NV forums are being quashed and removed by admins, so act quickly and take screenshots of your posts.

Basically, NV seems to have told each analyst a highly personalised version of the story, and stonewalls everyone else who asks. Why? The magnitude of the problem is huge. If Dell and HP hold their feet to the fire, anyone want to bet that $200 million won’t cover it?”

The Inquirer

Nvidia Introduces Geforce GTX 280 and GTX 260

Nvidia has officially introduced its new Geforce GTX 280 and GTX 260 graphics cards. The GTX 280, which will be Nvidia’s new high end GPU, is supposed to be 50% faster then the 8800GX2 when in its overclocked AMP! Edition.

The GTX 280 has 1GB of GDDR3 memory with a 512-bit memory interface, this means you’ll be getting about 142GB/s memory bandwidth. But, with all that power means you have to pay a price, a high price, $649 to be exact.

The mid-range GTX 260 will have 896MB of memory and go for $399.

Both of these GPUs will be released on store shelves on June 26.

Press Release

AMD Radeon 4850 Details Show Up on Amazon

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

Turn Your Geforce 9600 into an 8800GTS With Bios Modding

If you have a certain kind of Geforce 9600 like this one, all you have to do is flash the BIOS and it will unlock the unused shader units and the 2 memory units that Nvidia has deactivated. To simplify this you are adding 128MB of RAM and some extra hardware pipelines only by modifying some software.

Unfortunately the graphics card that this hack works on isn’t very common but if you can manage to get a hold of one you can save a lot of money and get a huge performance increase over the 9600.

Original Guide

Nvidia Changing the 9900s Name to GTX 200… Why?

Nvidia recently informed its partners that they would be changing the name for the upcoming Geforce 9900 series to the GT200 series. I don’t know if this was to confuse us but it surely will.

So now, what was previously referred to as the Geforce 9900 GTX is now the Geforce GTX 280 (oh, how wonderful *sarcasm) and the Geforce 9900 GTS is now the Geforce GTX 260 (even more confusing because of the dumb GTX).

Nvidia has also decided to release these new GPUs a little earlier to coincide with the RV770 which will launch sometime around the third week of June.

I don’t know why these companies (Nvidia, AMD, Intel) seem to think that it is a good idea to change their naming scheme, why can’t these idiots come up with some kind of naming convention that will last a little longer than 5 or so years?

VR-Zone