ASUS Launches the Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP Graphics Card

Ushering the finest and most capable graphics card based on new AMD "Tahiti" 28nm GPUs, the ASUS HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP uses a factory-overclocked core and 3 GB of GDDR5. It is cooled by the exclusive DirectCU II, a dual fan thermal design with six copper heatpipes and a large dissipation area that leads to the lowest temperatures and quietest operation of any HD 7970 card. 

ASUS DIGI+ VRM 12-phase digital power delivery comes to graphics cards improved with Super Alloy Power components, while overclockers are bound to appreciate the inclusion of exclusive VGA Hotwire hardware overvolting and GPU Tweak software tuning. The new cards further support adapter-free AMD Eyefinity 6. 

More AMD Radeon HD 7000 OEM Products Surface

Apparently, HD 7670 OEM isn't the only product that couldn't survive the prying eyes of the media, there are more. AMD's lineup of HD 7000 series OEM solutions extends downwards way beyond the HD 7670 OEM, it includes HD 7570, HD 7470, HD 7450, and HD 7350. There's no reason to cheer, though. First, these products are available only in the OEM channels, to pre-built system manufacturers so they could spice their specs sheets up; and second, they're complete re-brands of previous generation HD 6500, 6400, and 6300 families, down to the clock speeds and feature-sets. There are absolutely no HD 7000 series features, no DirectX 11.1, ZeroCore, new media-processing capabilities, nothing. The fineprint of their specifications is tabled below.

From : techpowerup.com

HD 7970: Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge vs. Nehalem

Just one week ago AMD released their new Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards which introduced a new shader architecture and a new manufacturing process. The company's new flagship is the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world, and reviews across the Internet were generally favourable. Today, we test the Radeon HD 7970's CPU scaling, pitting AMD's recently released Bulldozer-based FX-8150 CPU against two formidable Intel opponents.

According to the reviews online, AMD's latest processor architecture delivers surprisingly underwhelming performance, which quickly made it one of the biggest disappointments of the year according to some users. Loyal fanboys despise terms like "Faildozer" and have kept faith in AMD's promise to deliver a competitive high-end gaming capable processor.

Despite disappointing reviews, Bulldozer has gone on to sell quite well and has amassed a certain cult following with enthusiasts who would like to own this CPU regardless of benchmarks. Their purchasing reasons range from supporting the underdog, to setting records with its impressive overclocking abilities (8 GHz+ on LN2) and everything in-between. This has led some of these enthusiasts to clamour for a review of AMD's best in GPUs (Radeon HD 7970) and CPUs (FX-8150) to be compared working together against the Intel CPU competition to see just how well they do, as this seems to present an unknown variable in many end-users' buying decision.

In this review we will pit three CPUs from the popular ~$250 segment against each other using the Radeon HD 7970:

• AMD FX-8150: This is the company's current flagship Bulldozer processor. It features four execution units that show up as eight cores in Windows, its Turbo clocks up to 4.2 GHz and it has plenty of cache, the processor is priced competitively at $270.
• Intel Core i5-2500K: The processor most gamers and overclockers use. Thanks to its "K" suffix it enables significant overclocking unlike the cheaper Sandy Bridge processors, yet comes at an affordable price of $220. Actually this makes it the cheapest processor in today's test group.
• Intel Core i7-920: While it does not use a sexy 32 nm production process and is based on Intel's last generation Nehalem architecture, it still packs a punch especially when overclocked. It is also an affordable choice if you are looking to run a multi-GPU gaming rig at full 2x PCIe x16 without breaking the bank (LGA 2011)

 

                 Market Segment Analysis

	AMD FX-8150	Intel Core i7-920	Intel Core i5-2500K
Number of Cores	8	4 (8 threads)	4
Core Codename	Zambezi	Bloomfield	Sandy Bridge
Socket	AM3+	LGA 1366	LGA 1155
Core Speed	3.6 GHz	2.67 GHz	3.30 GHz
Turbo Boost	up to 4.2 GHz	up to 2.93 GHz	up to 3.7 GHz
L2 Cache	4x 2048 KB	4x 256 KB	4x 256 KB
L3 Cache	8 MB	8 MB	6 MB
Process Size	32 nm	45 nm	32 nm
Die size	315 mm²	263 mm²	216 mm²
TDP	125 W	130 W	95 W
Price	$270	$270	$220

 from : techpowerup.com

Club3D Radeon HD 7970 Graphics Card Pictured

Although AMD's Radeon add-in board partners (AIBs) are still "under oath" (read: NDA) not to disclose their products before the 9th of January, Club3D's Radeon HD 7970 press-shots still made it to the web. Pictured below are the Club3D Radeon HD 7970 graphics card and its box-art. The box art is typical Club3D, nothing exceptionally new there. The card, too, sticks to AMD's reference board design, till the point where it uses a red-colored PCB instead of a black one (found on AMD's HD 7970 press samples).

Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, Radeon HD 7970 is the first DirectX 11.1 compliant graphics card, it packs 2048 GCN cores, and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface. The core is clocked at 925 MHz, and the memory at 1375 MHz (5.50 GHz). It is expected that this card will stick to the price AMD disclosed, around US $550.

from : techpowerup.com

Radeon HD 7950 Specifications Leaked

Last Thursday, AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 graphics card based on its new 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, but it remained tight-lipped about the specifications of the more important SKU that will be based on it, the Radeon HD 7950. The HD 7970 will carry a launch price of US $550, making the HD 7950 an SKU to watch out for. According to details released by XTReview, the "Tahiti Pro" or HD 7950 will be carved out this way:

• 1792 stream processors, 28 GCN compute units
• 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs (derived)
• 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface
• 3 GB memory, memory clock around 5.00 GHz

The core clock speed, the exact memory clock speed, and more importantly, the target price-point, remain unknown. The Radeon HD 7950 is expected to be launched on the 9th of January.



from : techpowerup.com

Radeon HD 7970 Tessellation Performance Figures Surface

Among the bits and pieces (read: slides) of AMD's press presentation that we're getting, a slide that's definitely missing is performance against competitive or previous generation graphics cards across a range of applications/games. Instead, there's a slide detailing tessellation performance improvements of the Radeon HD 7970 over the previous-generation HD 6970. On average, AMD is looking at about 1.5x (50%) improvements in the tests that it run. One has to also take in to account that the HD 7970 is a faster GPU overall, compared to HD 6970, and of course, that these are AMD's figures.

from techpowerup.com

Radeon HD 7970 Raw Specs Leaked

If slide leaked on Orb-Hardware is to be believed we GPU consumers are in for a pretty big treat in the next month or so. The slide shown below states that the AMD 7970 will have a default core clock speed of 925MHz and a whopping 3GB of GDDR5 memory.

It also sports a 3.5 TFLOPs precision floating point. Which would put it well beyond the NVIDIA flagship single GPU solution. The slide states the a ROP count of 32, against an earlier speculated count of 48. This could be because AMD may have delinked ROP clusters from memory bus. The cooler itself is under the trademark AMD black shroud so there is no way to see if it uses the rumored "vapor chamber" as seen in after market solutions.

Radeon HD 7900 to Introduce Eyefinity 3D, HD 7970 European Pricing Surfaces

Reliable sources among AMD add-in board partners told DonanimHaber that the upcoming AMD Radeon HD 7900 series will introduce a new feature that other SKUs based on Southern Islands GPUs could also include. It's called Eyefinity 3D, and as the name might suggest, it's the next major update to Eyefinity, a technology that lets you span a single display head across up to six physical displays, and gives you the ability to use your available physical displays to accommodate multiple such display heads.

Eyefinity 3D adds support for 3D-optimized (120 Hz) displays, and lets you create large stereoscopic 3D display heads using a number of physical 3D displays. The technology behind this might not be as simple as it sounds, because the driver has to take into account the viewing angles of the displays in perspective to the user (as entered by the user), and calibrate the 3D image output. The same sources also hinted about the pricing of Radeon HD 7970.

January 9 Launch Date for AMD Radeon HD 7900

Ladies and Gentlemen with graphics card upgrade plans, circle the date January 09, 2012, for this is going to be the day AMD will launch its next generation high-performance graphics cards in the Radeon HD 7900 series, according to reliable market sources DonanimHaber spoke with. On the 9th, AMD is expected to unveil at least two new SKUs in the HD 7900 series, most likely, HD 7970 and HD 7950. These will be based on the new 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon that will use completely redesigned number-crunching machinery, and a very wide memory bus.


From : techpowerup.com

AMD Tahiti (Radeon HD 7900) Graphics Card Seen in the Nude

Today may be a Fringe-less Friday but worry not, there are plenty of thing to do like contemplating the two recently-leaked images of an AMD Tahiti-powered graphics card. Tahiti is a 'next-gen' GPU built on TSMC's 28 nm process that's supposed to be at the heart of the Radeon HD 7900 series models (the HD 7950, HD 7970, and then probably the dual-GPU HD 7990).

The card seen below comes with one Tahiti chip protected by a heatspreader/shield (only the die is exposed) and has a red PCB, a 5+1-phase PWM, two BIOSes, two PCIe power plugs, CrossFire connectors enabling quad-GPU configurations, and 12 memory chips which support previous reports of a 384-bit memory interface.

The Radeon HD 7900 series cards are rumored to debut in January at CES 2012 (January 10-13) so we still have one month of leaks to look forward to. Oh, and the winter holidays.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores Launched

NVIDIA released its newest graphics card model specifically for the winter shopping season, the limited edition GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores. Not only is this a limited edition launch, but also targeting only specific markets in North America and Europe. This includes the United States and Canada in North America; and the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and the Nordics in Europe. The new card is based on the 40 nanometer GF110 GPU instead of the GF114 that the regular GTX 560 Ti is based on. This allows NVIDIA to add 64 more CUDA cores (448 vs. 384), 25% more memory (1280 MB vs. 1024), and a 25% wider memory bus (320 bit vs. 256).

EVGA Gives GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Classified and FTW Treatment

EVGA kicked off its limited edition GeForce GTX 560 448 cores graphics card lineup with a bang, with models boasting of two of its top-end brand markers, Classified and FTW. The EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Classified (model: 012-P3-2068-KR) features a premium design that makes use of a dual-fan cooler by EVGA, and high clock speeds of 792 MHz core, 1584 MHz CUDA cores, and 975 MHz (3.90 GHz effective) memory. Its display outputs include two DVI and a mini-HDMI.

Galaxy GeForce GTX 550 Ti Display4 Graphics Card Pictured

Here are the first pictures of Galaxy's GeForce GTX 550 Ti Display4 graphics card, designed exclusively for Asian markets. As its name might suggest, it is a GeForce GTX 550 Ti based graphics card designed to support up to four displays. The card uses an IDT VMM 1403 display output logic chip that lets it effectively make use of the total resolution the GPU supports.

The redesigned display logic supports a total resolution of 5760 x 1080. Spread across four displays, you get 1440 x 1080 per display, or spread it across three displays to get 1920 x 1080 per display. Apart from four DVI connectors, its output logic makes room for a mini-HDMI connector.

ZOTAC Announces GeForce GTS 450 ZONE Edition Silent Graphics Card

 ZOTAC International, a leading innovator and channel manufacturer, today debuts the silently quick GeForce GTS 450 ZONE Edition for users that demand stunning Microsoft DirectX 11 visuals and noise-less cooling. 

The ZOTAC GeForce GTS 450 ZONE Edition takes the award-winning GeForce GTS 450 graphics processor with 192 high-performance shaders and passively cools it using a ZOTAC-exclusive dual-slot fan-less cooling system that features copper heat-pipes and aluminum fins to keep the graphics processor cool while operating silently.  

“ZOTAC listens to the demands of silent computing users and their needs for more graphics power, which is why we created the GeForce GTS 450 ZONE Edition,” said Carsten Berger, marketing director, ZOTAC International. “With the ZOTAC GeForce GTS 450 ZONE Edition we struck the perfect balance of 3D performance and energy-efficiency to eliminate the cooling fan, as well as the external power connector.”

Galaxy GeForce GTX 580 with Multi-Display Support Pictured

Here are some of the first pictures of an unreleased custom design GeForce GTX 580 graphics card by Galaxy, given out by the good folks at HardOCP. It may look like yet another GTX 580 graphics card with a beefy cooling solution, but it's a little more than that. To begin with, it has a redone display logic that gives it a total resolution of 5760 x 1080. This means that three 1920 x 1080 displays can be connected to it without needing another card. Its display outputs include three mini-HDMI and a full-size DisplayPort. Display management is backed by Galaxy's in-house EZY display setting software. 

The card uses a massive heatsink to which heat is fed by a number of heat pipes, and ventilated by three 80 mm fans. The frame around these fans is made of clear acrylic, and is studded with LEDs, to give the card a groovy blue glow during operation.

From techpowerup.com
 

KFA2 Launches GeForce GTX 570 MDT X4 Graphics Card

The KFA2 GeForce 570 MDT X4 is designed to play the latest DirectX 11 games in full 1080p. Whilst the KFA2 GeForce 570 supports up to 4 monitors its main feature includes ‘Virtual single monitor mode’ which shares one desktop across 3 screens, producing surround HD game play.

The card features 4 DVI ports to support digital PC displays natively, and also has one Mini-HDMI port with digital audio for use with HDTVs. Like the GTX 560 Ti MDT X5, the GTX 570 MDT X4 also allows you to connect an additional display for the Windows desktop to use for chats, playlists, video, supporting all the latest features such as DirectX11 and PhysX.

Another new KFA2-exclusive technology featured in the GTX 570 MDT X4 is the KFA2 HT-Engine, the 1st KFA2 in-house designed chipset to manage, monitor and over-clock your graphics card. The HT-Engine includes the Power Meter to view the entire card’s status and monitor consumption, Voltage Setting for extreme over-clocking enthusiasts, and Dual Bios which acts as a fail-safe backup for Bios customization and updating.

Point of View and TGT Announce POV/TGT GeForce GTX 560 1 GB Series | the witcher 2

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Point of View, the leading European manufacturer of an exclusive range of NVIDIA based 3D processor boards, advanced netbooks as well as fancy 7” and 10” Tegra tablet computers, and additional enthusiast PC products, announces today that it is first to market with a high performance NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 3D processor board family featuring 1 GB of fast GDDR5 memory, the POV/TGT GeForce GTX 560 1 GB series.

The POV/TGT GeForce GTX 560 1 GB series consists of two performance levels, “Charged” and “UltraCharged”, and is based on a proprietary high-performance/wide-bandwidth hardware design. Hand-selected and carefully tuned by TGT in Germany, the POV/TGT GeForce GTX 560 1 GB series offers an optimized balance of enhanced core clock settings and supreme stability even beyond shipping specifications.

Sapphire HD 6790 Sets New Standards

SAPPHIRE Technology, the largest manufacturer and supplier worldwide of graphics solutions based on AMD technology has just announced a new graphics card delivering all the key features demanded by the latest games and applications - but at an exciting new price point.

The new SAPPHIRE HD 6790 shares many all the capabilities of the successful SAPPHIRE HD 6800 series, including multi-screen gaming with AMD Eyefinity, support for all the advanced graphical features of Microsoft DirectX 11 and delivering spectacular video clarity, speed and visual effects, including 3D stereoscopic displays.

The SAPPHIRE HD 6790 uses the latest AMD GPU architecture, with a total of 800 stream processors and 40 texture units delivering massively parallel computing power for graphics and other accelerated applications. Its core clock speed of 840MHz, together with a dedicated 256-bit high speed interface to 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1050MHz (effective 4.2Gb/s) delivers class leading performance.

PowerColor Announces A Balance Between Performance and Price

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphic cards, today announced an affordable full HD gaming video card: the PowerColor HD6790. Announced at a great price, the PowerColor HD6790 clocks in at 840MHz core speed and 1050MHz of memory speed, easily accelerating your PC with 1.34 TeraFLOPs of computing power, delivering an exciting gaming experience that won’t break the bank.

The PowerColor HD6790 takes advantage of its unique cooling design, with 3 ultra large heat pipes and intensive heat sinks design, easily dissipating the heat through its upper 92mm cooling fan, cooling down the temperature efficiently in a low-noise environment.

Sparkle Announces GeForce GTS 450 1 GB, 2 GB DDR3 Graphics Cards

SPARKLE Computer Co., Ltd., the professional VGA card manufacturer and supplier, today released SPARKLE GeForce GTS 450 1GB/2GB DDR3 Graphics Card, providing unparalleled levels of price/performance to a ideal product for mainstream users.

SPARKLE GeForce GTS 450 1GB/2GB DDR3 Graphics Card features SPARKLE exclusive designed Sun Flower Cooling Fan, which replaces NVIDIA reference cooling fans on ordinary GeForce GTS 450 graphics cards. This exclusively designed Sun Flower Cooling Fan uses SPARKLE patented technology known as "aluminum extrusion production processing", transferring heat from the bottom of the radiator to the cooling fin efficiently and fast. It also uses a "pressure casting" process, to make the entire cooling radiator at once, this process can not only brings sufficient cooling fins, but also bring heat from the bottom to the fins rapidly and efficiently, thereby improving the overall thermal efficiency, coupled with the design of solid thermal conductivity, heat from centre bottom can be brought even quickly to fins.