3D Card Review: VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB

Phoronix have reviewed a sweet performing Radeon HD 4870 X2 on their website.

 

In a majority of the benchmarks -- including those with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering -- the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 was within frames of the dual Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire configuration. However, in some tests such as running Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at 2560 x 1600, the R700 had fallen about eight frames behind, or about 6%. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 isn't quite as far as two Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics cards linked together via CrossFire, but it's darn close.

[Phoronix] VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB Review

3D Card Review: Palit Radeon 4850

TweakTown has reviewed the Palit Radeon 4850.

 

The good thing about Palit is the aggressive pricing, which means you can actually get your hands on one of these cards for similar prices, or sometimes cheaper than what some brands charge for the stock model, which makes it quite an attractive purchase.

Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic Graphics Card :: TweakTown

Intel's 'Larrabee' to Shakeup AMD, Nvidia - Tom's Hardware

 

Performance wise, rumors have it that Larrabee is expected no earlier than 2009 and shall be only as fast as todays current generation of GPUs upon release. According to a recent paper from Intel, simulated Larrabee performance would have us believe that with 25-cores, each running at 1GHz, we would be able to run both F.E.A.R. and Gears of War at 60 FPS. Speculating that Larrabee will be released with 32-cores, running at over 2GHz each, it is possible that Larrabee could actually be faster than rumored. Other than performance, another concern for Larrabee is its drivers and support. Even excellent hardware can be tainted by poorly written drivers and lack of support in the industry. There has been a lot of criticism of Intels past ability to write quality drivers, adding to the concern, but Intel still has time to address this matter properly. Larrabee has a really rather flexible and programmable design that ultimately depends on the drivers and supplied compilers for it to be useful.

 

Intel's 'Larrabee' to Shakeup AMD, Nvidia - Tom's Hardware

More Info on Lucid's flexibele multi-gpu-technology

More info on this "Bridge' chip was presented at IDF. This might even be a revolution in the high-end gaming segment. Lucid is building a new "real-time distributed processing engine" system on a chip called HYDRA, which can mix and match any GPU from any manufacturer and work with any chipset, and piles it all together for performance scaling that Lucid claims is "near-linear" or even "above-linear."

More Info on Lucid's flexibele multi-gpu-technology

ATI Radeon 4870 X2 Review: AMD is back on top!

HotHardware has put up a review of the latest ATI/AMD Radeon 4870 X2 and looks like AMD is on top of the game again!

Make no mistake, the new Radeon HD 4870 X2 marks ATI's return to the top of the 3D graphics food chain.  It took a few years, but through steady improvements in multi-GPU software support, and a new strategy regarding the design and manufacture of high-end graphics cards that utilizes two mid-sized chips in lieu of a single monolithic one, AMD was able to produce a graphics card capable of outpacing the best NVIDIA currently has to offer.

Read the ATI Radeon 4870 X2 Review here.

Nvidia licenses Transmeta

Saw this news over at TomsHardware

According to Transmeta, Nvidia has been granted a “non-exclusive license to Transmeta’s Longrun and Longrun 2 technologies and other intellectual property”. Nvidia paid a “one-time, non-refundable license fee of $25 million”.

You can read the full story here.

Geforce GTX 200 Architecture Review

XBitLabs has put up an architecture review of the new Geforce GTX 200 series. Take a peek at what they have to say!

New Nvidia chip codenamed G200 was supposed to top the traditional approach to GPU design: the most complex, the most expensive, the most powerful and of course the fastest of all. Everything was at stake here: the company didn’t stop at anything trying to prove to the world who the real king of consumer 3D graphics was.

To read the full article, click here.

BFG 9800 GX2 Review

TheTechLounge has reviewed the BFG 9800 GX2 1GB version.

It would be very, very hard not to covet this video card. I know I recently said that the 9800 GTX was the sexy card, but this one might actually look nicer, eye of the beholder and all. And it's not just skin-deep, this card is faaast, and because of that, we can overlook its frightening heat production and power consumption.

To read the full review, click here.

Gigabyte HD 4850 Review

Overclockersclub has posted a review of the new Gigabyte HD 4850.

The Gigabyte HD 4850 is just your average Radeon HD 4850 with the exception of its overclocking headroom. The card performed almost exactly the same as the competing 4850. When I overclocked the card, I wasn't expecting it to go far since the temperatures were quite high as it was (the card was idle at 70 degrees Celsius!), but this Gigabyte 4850 still pumped out some pretty good clock speeds. I was able to raise the core GPU clock of 625MHz up to 675MHz and the memory from 990MHz to 1075MHz, but I couldn't go any further due to temperatures because they were approaching almost 90 degrees Celsius! With an aftermarket heatsink and fan, I have no doubt in my mind that this card can be pushed even more because it's hard to overclock with a video card that idles at 70C without any aftermarket parts. However, a 50MHz increase on the GPU clock speed is good headroom if you ask me. If you look back at our first 4850 review, you'll notice that this Gigabyte HD 4850 was overclocked twice as much as that card.

To read the full review, click here.

Galaxy silent heat pipe 9600 GT review

Guru3D has reviewed the new Galaxy silent heat pipe 9600 GT. If you are looking for a completely noiseless budget gaming card, this is it!

Galaxy's GeForce 9600 GT 512MB Silent heatpipe graphics card is once again a fine product to own. I like the somewhat customized design and I definitely am charmed by the cooler. Even on a hot day, it performed good enough in our test-environment. You however will need decent airflow inside that PC of yours to get that residual heat from the innards of your PC and you need to remember that the cooler is pretty bulky. Bulky or not, it will only eat up one slot, as the big heatink was placed on the rear-side of the card, in some cases at that position a x1 PCIe slot is located but not really a big deal. Pretty clever really, it has Galaxy written all over it as they really do think about these things.

To read the full review, click here.

Best video cards for money, August 2008

TomsHardware have posted their best picks for the month of August, 2008.

They include,

PCI Express Interface: $0 To $130

 

PCI Express Interface: $150 To $300

 

PCI Express Interface: $350 To $400

 

Best Gaming Graphics Cards For The Money: AGP Interface

 

Yup, those people still running on AGP cards can also have a go at this.

To read the full article click here.