NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 to arrive in early June
We're still waiting for NVIDIA's first GeForce GTX 400 series offerings to hit retail shelves following their recent launch, but it appears that June should see a new addition to the company's high-end DirectX 11 family, with speculation suggesting that a GeForce GTX 460 SKU is on the way.
The third Fermi-based consumer-class model will employ the P1025 reference PCB design, and feature 1GB of GDDR5 memory as well as 256-bit of memory interface. We have no idea yet about the amount of stream processors or frequencies.
EXPreview has the story.
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Sub-£100 gaming sound cards reviewed
If you're looking for a new discrete sound card with gaming in mind, then bit-tech have taken a look at three of them for you, with two offerings from ASUS as well as an old classic in relative terms from Creative Labs.
Only Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi cards have full hardware support for Creative's own EAX 5.0 Environmental Audio Extensions standard, but this is no longer a major concern, as most games don’t use EAX. Creative has even admitted that EAX is now in decline, and is supporting the OpenAL EFX standard for implementing environmental sound effects. The quality of analogue surround sound is dependent on the quality of your card's components, as well as the source material being played, and the software used to play it.
Read their brief thoughts on all three parts over here.
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New AMD Catalyst application profile update available
As part of their new Catalyst application profile system, AMD are working hard to produce profile updates with added support and bug fixes for the latest titles wherever possible; today sees the release of a new profile, containing a handful of important fixes that might be of use to you.
- Battlefield Bad Company 2 Fix - flickering and black square corruption is no longer observed when running on single card ATI Radeon products
- Forcing on Anti-Aliasing through ATI Catalyst Control Center is now supported in the following titles: Supreme Commander 2, Dirt2, Avatar and Battlefield Bad Company2 (single GPU configurations)
- StarCraft(r) II: Wings of Liberty beta on ATI Radeonâ„¢ 5800 products running in an ATI CrossFireX configurations : moving units near the edge of a cliff no longer causes them to fall because the height field is corrupted
Rage 3D is hosting the profile update in question.
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Six-core Phenom II to feature Turbo Core tech, high frequencies
The rumours have been flying around for some time now regarding both the kind of clock speeds and technologies to afforded to AMD's forthcoming Phenom II X6 CPUs, but it appears that prior to the official launch of such parts the company have seen fit to confirm and expand upon much of the speculation that has been at large of late.
This may be a less sophisticated approach than Intel's Turbo Boost—and perhaps not as likely to wring every possible bit of headroom out of a given thermal envelope—but AMD cites the deterministic behavior of its Turbo Core-endowed processors as a positive trait.
The more cores at the same TDP feature that Intel delivers with the 980X, AMD is also promising with Phenom II X6. The difference is that these are still 45nm parts. While we’ll have to test them to be sure, AMD currently indicates that the entire Phenom II X6 lineup will be rated at 95W or 125W TDPs. It’s all manufacturing tricks that make it possible (good job GlobalFoundries). In theory you should be able to buy a Phenom II X6 and have it operate in the same power envelope as a Phenom II X4 965.
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NVIDIA solves multi-monitor temperature issue on GeForce GTX 480
While the temperature levels sported by NVIDIA's latest GeForce GTX 400 series graphics boards have already been widely commented on, perhaps the most alarming issue experienced by some reviewers was with regard to large temperature increases when using the card in a multi-monitor configuration. However, it appears that NVIDIA now has a new graphics BIOS available which purports to resolve this particular problem.
After flashing our GeForce GTX 480 with vBIOS 70.00.19.00.02 we noted that the temperature dropped down 10C thanks to the fan speed profiles being changed. Here we see how a fan speed increase from 45% (1700 RPM) to 50% (2000 RPM) can have a dramatic impact on temperatures with a little additional fan noise.
Legit Reviews has the full report.
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More Apple iPad reviews
While many of the initial full iPad reviews came from mainstream publications, recent days have seen some of the more technically oriented sites run the rule over Apple's latest device. Do their opinions of this new baby differ?
The A4 is a typical smartphone SoC. It’s got CPU, GPU and DRAM all on a single package. It also appears to be the same size as your typical smartphone SoC, meaning there’s a good chance we’ll see this thing in the next iPhone. The A4 has 256MB of on-package DRAM, just like the current iPhone 3GS SoC. Remember that memory is used for the OS, all applications as well as video memory. It’s a testament to just how lightweight the iPhone OS is.
For basic calendaring and e-mailing, the iPad does just fine, as we've noted elsewhere in the review. Working with actual documents, however, is more of a pain. Editing a spreadsheet, presentation, or word processing document requires that you purchase the iPad versions of Numbers, Keynote, and Pages from Apple. You'll also need to plan ahead, because, as we described above, there are only three way to get those docs onto your iPad: iTunes, e-mail, and iWork.com.
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AMD FirePro V8800 review
It was only going to be a matter of time before AMD's latest graphics architecture made the leap to the workstation market, and today has seen the launch of a part which achieves just this jump in the form of the FirePro V8800, complete with support for OpenGL 4.0, Eyefinity and the like.
PC Perspective has a full review of this board.
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