Another Sli-blog

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Enermax Galaxy DXX Series PSU

Today we are going to be looking at Enermax's current top tier unit the revised Enermax Galaxy, now called the Enermax Galaxy DXX (EGX1000EWL-01). This power supply was originally released as the Enermax Galaxy 1000w but has recently been revised to include an 8pin PCI-E adapter to support newer video cards that draw up to 300w of power. In addition to the 8 pin PCI-Express adapter modification we will see if Enermax has changed anything "under the hood" on the Galaxy DXX.
The Galaxy DXX is an interesting power supply in the way of our evaluations as most power supplies we have reviewed to date have at least paid lip service to the various iterations of the ATX specifications. The Galaxy DXX however, is designed to more closely follow the EPS/SSI design guide.

Design for the hard-core gamers that demand nothing less then perfect.

The Galaxy DXX is equipped to handle dual 300w video cards thanks to the new PCI E 2.0 standard. Enough juice to handle the meanest dual quad core CPU system and quad graphics card on the market today.

SLI Rig of the Month - April

Motherboard: SLI-Ready EVGA nForce 680i

Benchmarks: Highest 3dmark06 is around 17500 @ 4.2 ghz.

GPUs: 2X BFG Tech GeForce 8800GTX graphics cards

Case: Custom Mountain Mods 22" Cube built around Vapochill and 12" Elo TouchScreen LCD monitor

Cooling: Danger Den waterblocks on each GPU, Thermochill PA 120.3 Rad with 6 SilenX fans in push/pull, plus 7 other SilenX Fans mounted throughout the case

CPU: Intel Core2 Duo X6800 on stock Vapochill LS

Memory: 4 gigs OCZ 1066 RAM

Hard Drives: 750 gig Seagate

Friday, April 13, 2007

SLI using a PCIe + AGP card on ASRock 939Dual-SATA2

As we all know SLI is always said to meant for the PCI Express interface. In this experiment, we will find out if AGP can support SLI. In this test, we will use the famous ASROCK 939DUAL-SATA2 based on ULi chipset. It is the ideal test platform as it supports both native AGP and PCIe slots.

More

Again two contests

Hi people
Again I found some more contests...
To tell you the truth I hope on winning on one contest from vr-zone myself :-)
But we'll see in a couple of days...
Anyway, so be sure to join in, so you could win one XFX 680LT Motherboard or by forwarding Evga's newsletter you could win 7900GT KO

Contest link 1 - XFX 680LT Motherboard

Contest link 2 - Evga's 7900GT KO
Rules

GeForce 8800 Ultra - NVIDIA has one more hurrah on the "G80" processor

Shortly after the mid-range GeForce 8000-series launch, NVIDIA has another trick up its sleeve: the GeForce 8800 Ultra.
Roadmaps provided by NVIDIA reveal the 8800 Ultra will launch on May 1 with a price point of $999. The company would not reveal further specifications about the card, other than it is based on the same G80 core found in the GeForce 8800 GTX.
The $999 price point suggests the 8800 Ultra may actually be two 8800-series cards in one package. NVIDIA launched the multi-PCB initiative GeForce 7950 GX2 last year as the last high-end push on the GeForce 7000-series GPU.
The GeForce 7950 GX2 was actually two GeForce 7900 GT processors on two PCBs in an SLI configuration. Running two of these cards in a PC was essentially the same as running Quad-SLI.
More

Wall-Sized 3D Displays: The Ultimate Gaming Room

There is a term you may have heard in the 1980s and '90s. It held the promise of the ultimate handshake between technology and entertainment. The term defined an idea that became very popular and actually brushed against pop culture for a time - they even made a movie or two about it. But after its initial surge of popularity, it became obvious that the technology needed to bring this concept into the hands of the public wouldn't be available for some time. The term's popularity waned, and now it's gone out of style. The term was virtual reality.

Eight-Pin PCIe GPU connector updated

THE WORD AROUND CeBIT was that there is a problem with the new proposed eight-pin PCIe adapter we first told you about in January.
It seems that you could force the mobo eight-pin power lead into the PCIe one, or maybe it was the other way around.

Another web on this topic

High-End Quadro FX 5500 and 4600

NVIDIA has recently released a series of high-end Quadro FX workstation graphics cards. CGSociety was loaned a series of cards from a local supplier, LeadTek, and we will focus on the recently announced Quadro FX 4600. The new Quadro FX products Quadro FX 4600 and the 5600 are based upon the G80GL GPU and are aimed at high-end applications.

The NVIDIA Quadro products are sold at a price premium compared to their consumer-oriented GeForce products. According to NVIDIA, the Quadro FX range are ISV certified with the leading professional applications, support commitment of three years from release, guaranteed availability for 18 months from release, Quadro memory management optimization, fast pixel read-back performance, and additional workstation-specific OpenGL acceleration support.

INQ takes a dive and finds Black Pearls

BLACK PEARL IS the peak of EVGA graphics products and the product portfolio just expanded with water-cooled motherboards as well.
We heard about the process of selection for Black Pearl graphics cards and motherboards, so we decided to pay a visit to the European arm of EVGA's operation, in Grafelfing bei Muenchen. As it goes in Germany, this small city is reachable via a highway with no speed limit, even though the German government is thinking of dulling down with more and more speed restrictions.

Interview: NVIDIA's Keita Iida

Keita Iida, Director of Content Management at NVIDIA sat down with IGN AU to discuss all things Direct X 10 and the evolution of their Geforce graphics cards. Iida goes into detail on the differences between developing for the PS3's RSX graphics processor, and the latest development tools to hit the scene. We also pressed him for comment on Ubisoft's jaggy-infested PC versions of Ghost Recon, Silent Hunter and others.

Should A Graphics Card Match The Chipset?

Ever since Nvidia released its first chipset, PC building newcomers have constantly questioned whether these must be matched to a like-branded graphics card. Traditionally, however, Nvidia chipsets have had no problems supporting ATI graphics cards, and the inverse became true when ATI later introduced its own chipsets.
But why would anyone do this? The answer was easy two years ago, when Nvidia's clear lead in AMD-compatible chipsets was at odds with ATI's clear lead in graphics performance; such were the days of 9700 Pro and FX 5800 graphics. But while today's chipsets seek to "lock in" graphics buyers by offering unique brand-only features such as SLI or Crossfire mode, the majority of buyers will never use these features. And though a larger number of users may wish to add multiple cards to support an increased number of monitors, chipset brand doesn't affect the use of dual-independent cards.
More

Vigor Gaming's Force Recon QXN packs a quad core QX6800

We're always impressed with how fast manufacturers are able to incorporate newly-announced components into their products -- we think there's some black magic at play -- and sure enough, boutique gaming house Vigor is already offering a gaming desktop powered by Intel's new high end Core 2 Extreme QX6800. Besides the 2.93GHz, quad core processor -- which comes standard -- you can also stuff this box with as much as 4GB of blazing fast 1111 MHz DDR2 RAM, 750GB of storage, dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI, as well as the usual array of optical drives, wireless radios, and connectivity ports

Nvidia CUDA - preview

Graphic processors or GPUs have evolved much in the past few years. Today, they are capable of calculating things other than pixels in video games, however, it's important to know how to use them efficiently for other tasks. If AMD has been the first to present a concrete solution to this problem, Nvidia is the first to make this solution available. We'll have a look at it in this article.

During the last couple of years, GPU calculation power has improved exponentially and much faster than that of the CPU. However, this doesn't mean that GPUs have evolved faster. These two components face different challenges and for this reason they have evolved in different directions.

Overclocked XFX & Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS Review

Preceding the launch of the GeForce 8800 series, NVIDIA was having great trouble with “hard launching” its products. For many of its new graphics products the company simply ended up with humble “paper launches”—a launch in which there is no actual hardware available for sale. A number of factors contributed to these troubled launches. NVIDIA might have been facing manufacturing and fabrication problems, translating to a limited of supply of hardware for manufacturers. Manufacturers might have also received actual working samples just a few days in advance of the launch, meaning they weren’t able to get a product out in time.

Whatever the reason behind the paper launches, NVIDIA placed a lot of hard work into making sure its GeForce 8800 launch didn’t suffer from the same problems. This time around, manufacturers received working product samples weeks in advance of the actual product launch. These extra few weeks provided ample time for manufacturers to assemble the cards and create a large stock, effectively taking them out of a position in which they would be rushing up to the last minute to get a finished product out the door. The 8800 launch also focused on having products shipped to retailers in large quantities before the actual launch. This move meant that consumers were able to purchase cards immediately on launch day. For the GeForce 8800, NVIDIA had a total of 15 retailers, online and offline, which were launch partners.

Just my quick comment is that this article is great! It directly compares Nvidia 7900GTX in SLI, 8800GTS/X SLI and also Ati's Crossfire. And you can clearly see from benchmarks who is the winner. More