Elite Bastards review: OCZ Vertex Series 60GB 2.5" SSDIn recent times, OCZ have been a prominent player in the SSD market, releasing offerings which cover a wide range of price points and performance levels. Today, we take a look at a drive that arguably occupies quite a sweet spot of price, performance and capacity from OCZ's Vertex series of parts, in the form of their 60GB unit. Is it worthy of consideration for just a shade under £200?
The underside of the drive gives us a peek at the Vertex's Serial ATA 3Gbps interface, with power also provided using the normal Serial ATA power connector of course. Underneath this outer shell, the Vertex's PCB contains a single 64MB chip for the drive's cache, and a handful of MLC (multi-level cell) Samsung NAND flash memory chips which make up the 60GB of storage offered by our sample. All of this is handled by Indilinx's "Barefoot" IDX110 controller chip, which uses an ARM controller to handle data between the Serial ATA interface and the flash chips upon the device itself. This particular controller is designed with enough bandwidth to maximise write speeds, particularly for small writes, while the controller's firmware is custom designed by OCZ themselves, and in its 1.5 revision (used for this review) TRIM is fully supported under Windows 7 alongside garbage collection routines to ensure that drive performance remains optimal no matter how much usage and punishment the drive goes through.
OCZ Vertex Series 60GB 2.5" SSD review
View or post comments.
Read More ...
XFX Radeon HD 5970 4GB graphics board unveiledAlongside the surprising news that XFX won't be releasing any graphics boards utilising NVIDIA's latest GeForce GTX 470 and 480 SKUs comes the more positive news that the firm will be launching a limited edition 4GB variant of AMD's flagship Radeon HD 5970. This follows in-line with other AIB partners announcing 2GB Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 cards, and it certainly makes sense to feed such a high-end board with more graphics memory as it's liable to need that 2GB per GPU at high resolutions.
This afternoon we received confirmation that XFX, a division of PINE Technologies, will not be releasing any GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards to the market when the cards become public next month. XFX was not listed as a launch partner for Fermi and did not issue a press release about the upcoming cards, which might come as a shock to many of our readers as they are one of the largest NVIDIA add-in board (AIB) partners in the world! XFX said that the decision not to carry this series of GF100 graphics card was their decision and that they will still be carrying NVIDIA products. It looks like XFX thinks that the Radeon HD 5000 series of graphics card is the right card for the high-end market. From our conversation with XFX they mentioned that they have "yet to see whether the fermented launch will reach an inglorious anti-climax" and that "they want to "Ferm up to who really has the big Guns". It turns out they do have something special that they have been working on. It turns out that XFX and AMD have partnered together and have designed a limited edition run of Radeon HD 5970 graphics cards with not 2GB, but 4GB of on-board memory.
Legit Reviews have all the details.
View or post comments.
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment