IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 02/03/2010

Colorful's box spills more details on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 GPU

I remember something colourful spilling out of my box once... anyhow, I digress. As part of the pre-CeBIT ramp-up, naturally some of the journalists have been on the hunt of the mysterious beast known as the GeForce GTX 480, and it appears that as a result we've learned at least a little more about the specifications of NVIDIA's forthcoming flagship part.

NVIDIA remains tight-lipped over the card's specifications, but we can confirm from the box that it will have 1,536MB of GDDR5 memory.

The rear outputs will comprise of twin dual-link DVI-I connectors and a mini-HDMI port (v1.3a). No provision for DisplayPort, then?

The power requirements are such that it needs more juice than twin 6-pin plugs can supply, and the setup is the same as a Radeon HD 5970's.

A chunky PSU is recommended, pitching in at 600W - 42A on the 12V line - for a single-GPU system. Add at least 250W for a second card.

HEXUS has more on this particular story.

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ASUS Ares graphics board spotted at CeBIT

Tomorrow sees the CeBIT event in Hannover, Germany start officially, but it seems as though some juicy images, benchmarks and snippets of information are likely to start creeping out even today. One of the first stories comes courtesy of PC Games Hardware, who have spotted ASUS' Ares graphics board in the wild, sporting 4GB of memory and two full-speed Radeon HD 5870 GPUs to power this behemoth.

At the Cebit Asus presents the Ares, a dual GPU card with two full-fledged HD 5870 GPUs which have access to 2 GiByte each - an overall VRAM amount 4 GiByte. This means that in contrast to the common HD 5970 the frequencies are not reduced. In difference to the Mars (Asus' dual GTX 285) the Ares won't be limited and is going to be produced and sold as long as there is a demand for the card. But given the expected price of 750 to 1000 Euros the card still transfers a feeling of exclusiveness.

For the full image gallery and some initial 3DMark Vantage results, make your way over here.

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Intel Core i7 930 CPU reviews

Intel's Socket LGA 1366 Core i7 920 can hardly be considered long in the tooth, but it's about to get a refresh from Intel in advance of the launch of the company's first six-core parts. A couple of UK web sites have taken a look at the successor to this particular processor, the Core i7 930, to see what it brings to the table.

While Intel has recently been busy launching Core i3 and i5 CPUs, it hasn't done anything new with its range of LGA1366 Core i7 processors for several months.

However, Intel seems to have finally found time to tweak its flagship CPU series by introducing one new model - the superb Core i7-930.

Both CPUs have the same 133MHz QPI bus, the i7-930 runs at a marginally upgraded 2.8GHz compared to the 2.66GHz for the now-classic i7-920. Just like the entire i7 desktop range, the i7-930 is made from the same 45nm transistors and it also shares the same enthusiast loving D0-stepping design as its i7-920 brother.

bit-tech

The chip looks no different to any other quad-core LGA1366, either, and it will fit into any X58 motherboard without requiring a BIOS update. CPU-Z identifies it as a D0 stepping, much like all new Core i7 LGA1366 chips.

Under-load speed jumps up one multiplier as the Turbo Boost feature is activated. Having a 21x multiplier will help in overclocking, because a 200MHz BCLK, if reached, will lead to a mouth-watering 4.2GHz clock-speed. If the Turbo Boost is kept active in the BIOS, which is not recommended for overclocking, the chip could hit a potential 4.4GHz at 200MHz BCLK.

HEXUS

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