Matchless Muscle: Overclocked 8800s

Nvidia has its rump comfortably nestled into the performance driver's seat with the only DX10-enabled graphics card available to consumers. One can argue, though, that there aren't any applications yet that can make use of the new API. However, the benefits of using a unified architecture with streaming processors for current applications clear.
There are many models on the market-maybe too many, some say. But regardless of whether or not you are a fan of sorting through the various models numbers and specifications, more choice for the consumer is a good thing. The only problem is the lack of competition in the performance space, which at least partially accounts for why prices remain at $600 for GTX models and $400 for GTS devices. Last month, we saw a 320-MB version of the GTS usher in a lower price of $300 for DX10 hardware.

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Dell XPS 710 And 710 H2C Still Installed With XP (With NVIDIA SLI)

Last January at CES, Dell made big news with its introduction of its XPS 710 H2C system which allowed massive overclocking of the system due to its new cooling technology. At the time both the XPS 710 and XPS 710 H2C were being installed, like every other PC at the time, with Windows XP. Now it's early April and nearly every new PC system comes with Microsoft's Vista OS installed, except for the high powered and highly expensive Dell's XPS and XPS H2C systems.
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Inno3D iChiLL 7950GT Accelero S1M 256MiB

Inno3D has slowly been transforming itself from a homogeneous producer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards to a company that takes the enthusiast market seriously whilst still providing ye olde reference SKUs. The attempt to woo the enthusiast is best represented by the current iChiLL series, which adds custom cooling, pre-overclocked core and memory speeds, and the use of higher quality components. The end result is a range of premium graphics cards that offer something new. We first took a look at the company's iChiLL 7900GS ACS 6, and were suitably impressed by its impressive performance and attractive street price.

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NVIDIA G80 more than just a new GPU

When NVIDIA announced its first DirectX 10 hardware, I could not have been more excited. I knew this new generation of graphics cards would be a huge leap in the development of the GPU. What makes the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series special? First, we have to understand the architecture (and how a GPU works) before we can really talk about the benefits of the G80.
When word of the G80 and its basic specifications were leaked, tech sites lead the world to believe NVIDIA was going to turn its focus away from a unified architecture to a non-unified one. Let's examine the difference between the two.
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OCZ PC2-8500 SLI-Ready Memory review

These heat spreaders do an excellent job of keeping the modules cool and look amazing. Each module has a cool looking NVIDIA SLI-ready sticker at the center and memory information on a sticker at the left. When overclocking please remember to have excellent case air circulation. I would recommend actively cooling the memory with the OCZ XTC Cooler. Having active cooling on the memory means better overclocking results. Speaking of overclocking, let's get to it...


Just my quick comment about this, is that the benchmark didn't include any results (in comparision to others). There's just a short info on how much those modules are clock-able. But the worst part of this whole review is that author of it missed one important point! Those are S.L.I. capable DDR2 modules, while he tested those modules with a single card. And that's not all, he tested them with Ati graphic card!!

Oh my god, what people do reviews....
Ah well what can I do about that?? :-(

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Nvidia's MCP68 headed for touchdown

NVIDIA'S MCP68 chipset is due to be officially launched on the 19th of this month.
The chipset is a media-centric integrated graphics part, designed to compete with DAAMIT's 690G silicon. The 690G is notable for being one of the first integrated graphics chipsets to support HDMI out with the HDCP content protection infection, and this makes it good for living room PCs running Media Center.
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A Look at "The Quadfather" from Vigor Gaming

We recently received a sweet gaming rig here at Tom’s Hardware Guide. Vigor Gaming, based in City of Industry, CA, sent us a brand new model called “The Quadfather.” We haven’t finishing testing this QuadFX beast yet, but here are some pictures of the system along with a few of the specs. This SLI-enabled rig looks hot and we can’t wait to get it going on some Doom 3 and Oblivion tests. More details coming soon. Stay tuned for some benchmark tests on Tom’s Hardware Guide.

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EPoX 5P965+ GLI — a Motherboard Based on Intel P965 Chipset

EPoX hasn't presented new products for Intel for a long time: in fact, the manufacturer made a pause after i945-based models. Indeed, these models provided support for dual-core Pentium D processors. And hard-driving enthusiasts (the traditional target audience of motherboards from this company) were much more interested in AMD solutions, so EPoX launched all new models for this platform. The situation has changed drastically with the release of Core 2. Now this segment of the market is of most interest. The announcement of several i965-based motherboards looks only natural. In future we can expect the chipset base to expand — in particular, to use cheap products from the NVIDIA nForce 600i series.

5P965+ GLI has three PCI slots (quite a lot for these days). Access to them may be blocked only by a large video card installed into the second PCIEx16 slot. As this motherboard does not officially support SLI, all the three PCI slots will be accessible in most cases.

Just my quick comment is that this board is first of it's kind that has second PCIEx16 slot. And it seems that it supports second PCIE graphic card, it's just that in scope of that test nobody tested this board either in SLI or Crossfire mode. Well maybe they will do it in the future. I think it's just great that it's possible to connect second PCIE card to Intel chipset motherboard, without having to be an Ati type of card.

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nVIDIA Certifies Thermaltake Armor as SLI Ready Full Tower Case

Thermaltake has proven again to be the No.1 choice for enthusiasts worldwide with nVIDIA certifies Thermaltake Armor chassis as one of the only two Dual GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Ready chassis in the world.

SLI is known to be the essential of a hardcore gamer or enthusiast and GeForce 8800GTX is the newest graphic card from nVIDIA. Unfortunately, with hundreds of chassis in the market to choose from, it’s very difficult to select the most suitable chassis for user’s SLI system. nVIDIA review all its qualified partners and their chassis, then carefully select and certify chassis which meet SLI requirement and provide specification/environment that can bring out the best performance of SLI system.

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Dual-Core Processors in 3D Games

As dual-core processors have been actively spreading in the market for the last years, multi-processing features are appearing in games and other non-professional applications. Dual-core processors have been rarely used in desktop computers up to now. They were mostly employed by professionals and rare enthusiasts, who worked with such applications as 3D modeling and rendering, as well as media processing and encoding, which were initially designed to support several CPUs.
Games offered weak support (or even no support) for two and more processors, because multi-processor systems were not popular among gamers because of their high price. A couple of years ago there started to appear mass-scale dual-core processors, but their price was too high for a common user for some time. So they were again bought by enthusiasts, only on a larger scale. With the launch of Intel Pentium D, as well as Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 X2, both companies that manufacture desktop x86 CPUs significantly dropped prices for their processors and still do it from time to time. As a result, dual-core processors are only a little more expensive than single-core models. Besides, x86 processors develop towards multi-cores.

Test include:
Processors: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ and AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Socket 939
Motherboard: Foxconn WinFast NF4SK8AA-8KRS (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI)
RAM: 2048 MB DDR SDRAM PC3200
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
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CrossFire on a Stick - 'Just Say No' To Four GPUs

"Double your pleasure, double your fun." Well that is what Wrigley's stated about its Doublemint Gum. When 3DFX launched Scan Line Interleave for the Voodoo 2 it proved to be true as 1024x768 never saw such amazing frame rates. Later on the world was wowed with SLI once again with Scalable Link Interface. Nvidia pushed the envelope again for more performance but ran into the same proverbial brick wall that 3DFX did with the Voodoo 5 6000. Two cores were awesome but four was a bit too much to handle.

Not to be left out of the excitement (or the profits from selling 2 cards instead of one), ATI joined the party late in the game. While the first version of CrossFire with Radeon X850s was not a crowd pleaser, later versions were much more user friendly and pack some punch. Although AMD, Intel and Nvidia started toying with quad processor configurations ATI decided to steer clear.

Just my quick comment is that this card received a good review on TH, but I really don't see what is the reason for this. Since that dual graphic card got beaten my single 8800GTX and even in some benchmarks by 8800GTS. Not to mention that this product in not finished yet, but still TH hopes to see that this type of cards will work in Crossfire combination, and they expect that it will outperform SLI configurations. Nvidia has a solution that works, and Ati? Well you be the judge for yourself.

Ah well speculations, speculations (or better to say marketing gimmicks)....

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NFORCE 650I Ultra overclocking result

We already introduced the fundamental characteristics of standard motherboard on base of chipset nForce 650i Ultra . It was possible to note that this new chipset has some limitations in comparison with elder . In any case, if support SLI does not interest you, then the chipset nForce 650i Ultra is a good choice.

Associates published one of the first motherboard review on base of chipset nForce 650i Ultra with standard design. Such motherboard have four-layer design and passive chipset cooling . The authors of this review recommend focusing attention on improvement in the cooling of the north and south bridges, to gain stability with high fsb frequency

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Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB vs. 320MB - is BIGGER really BETTER

Okay, so the cheaper 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS alternative has been out in force for a little over a month now and at just $300 US it is a great buy. Realistically in this price bracket the GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB) runs somewhat unopposed, though the Radeon X1950XT cards are now very cheap. However, those looking at purchasing a GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card have to make the tough decision to spend either $300 US or $400 US. Of course if you are limited to a $300 US budget then the 320MB version of the 8800 GTS becomes an obvious choice.
Generally when a new graphics card such as the GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB) is released, there is much more to talk about such as increased pipelines, additional memory bandwidth, different clock frequencies for both the core and memory. However as I mentioned earlier, there is absolutely no difference between the 320MB and 640MB versions of the GeForce 8800 GTS, other than the onboard memory capacity of course. Both GPU’s are based on the G80 architecture which features a 90nm design process.
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Budget PSU Roundup with HardwareCanuck

Well here we are on my first PSU review here or anywhere else for that matter and this one is going to be a big one. This roundup will focus on four budget-minded power supplies which range in price from $45 to $75 with one power supply being included in the price of a $120 case. I will give all these units a thorough going-over and put them through a battery of tests. I suggest you read this whole review as in many places I will refer to performance differences between the units. You should also know that these are all on an even playing field as they were all purchased by me so I do not want ANY of them to fail.

Just my quick comment that this review is good because it includes two EVGA 7900GTO cards in test! So you can see how much quality and reputation of PSU is important in setting up SLI comp. So here it goes Sparkle, Nmedia, Enhance and Antec go head to head....

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AM2 SLI-capable Main boards - 2*Asus and 1 MSI

In the today's Review we regard now today three Main boards with NVIDIAs current chip corroding of the 500-Serie, which have at present a not insignificant portion with sold Main boards for AMD CPUs. ASUS made us available with the model Crosshair a copy for the Over the Top Enthusiast, which flanks the M2N32-SLI Deluxe already mentioned. Both use NVIDIAs Top model nForce 590SLI, while the third Main board in the federation, a K9N SLI Platinum of MSI, which nForce 570SLI represents smaller brother.

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