IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 12/11/2009

Galaxy GeForce GTX 260+ Razor Edition review

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have noticed that it's becoming ever-more difficult to find high performance graphics boards that only employ a single slot cooling solution these days, which can be a real problem if you only have limited chassis space or expansion slots to work with.آ Enter Galaxy's GeForce GTX 260+ Razor Edition, which uses the admittedly slightly ageing GeForce GTX 260 at its heart but does at least feature a single slot cooling solution.

The Galaxy GTX 260+ Razor gets its name from its slim appearance – though not quite razor thin it is the first single slot design we have seen on an air-cooled GTX 260+.آ The style on the card is definitely nice as well combining a copper heatsink with a painted grey aluminum casing and a fairly high speed fan.

The external connections include only a single dual-link DVI connection, and HDMI port and a TV output as well.آ I am sure that the lack of dual DVI outputs will be a bit disappointing to some enthusiasts looking for dual monitor configurations – keep in mind that there are HDMI-to-DVI adaptors for secondary monitors but they are limited to 1920x1200 resolution screen.

This is still a GTX 260+ and thus requires a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connections.آ We did notice that the aluminum shell on the card did make installing the power cables from our PC Power and Cooling 1200 watt power supply a bit annoying – the clips didn’t want to easily go under the aluminum.

PC Perspective has the full review.

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AMD's Dave Baumann on Radeon HD 5800 series availability

By this juncture, I think it's fair to say that the effect of TSMC's continuing 40 nanometre production yield issues upon Radeon HD 5800 series availability is pretty obvious, but what are both this foundry and AMD themselves doing to get boards into the hands of eager buyers?آ AMD's Dave Baumann has the latest.

- While currently there are thousands of video cards shipped on a weekly basis, we will likely see this weekly number reach into the "tens of thousands" come late November or early December. This hinges on whether or not AIBs keep air freighting video cards. The likelihood of air shipments to continue is very high, but AMD does not directly control this.

- Expect "well into the hundreds of thousands" of 5800 video cards to be shipped into the channel by year’s end.

- Expect no issues with 5700 stocks.

- TSMC is still having some 40nm production issues, but as you can see from the points listed above, production is not close to a standstill and has ramped up greatly in the last 30 days. TSMC also has new 40nm machines as of September and that capacity is starting to now come online.

[H]ard|OCP have the full details.

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