Typically I'd say fashionably late Inno3D today announced their GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB but this card has 48 stream processors, 650MHz core, 1625MHz shaders, 256-bit memory bus and 512MB memory clocked at 1600MHz. Meaning they changed the chip as suggested earlier. Pretty much it's now based of a GeForce 960 GT silicon.

Hong Kong 28th October, 2008 - Inno3D

The Taiwanese based company G.Skill just launched two new SSD drives. They will be available in volume sizes from 64 and 128 GB and come with that lovely SATA2 interface.  Speeds on paper certainly don't sound that bad with 155 MB/sec read and a 90 MB/sec write speed.

Debatable can be the use of MLC based flash chips but G.Skill estimates an MTBF is 1.5 Million hours. We are not sure how fast these products will reach the EU market and what exactly the prices will be.

We land at the blue colored premises of Gigabyte, they just launched this particular product with the 216 shader processors as well, but under yet another name, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 260 OC. And it's interesting when you think about it really, these are thus the 216 Core versions of the product, offering 10 maybe 15% more performance, yet Gigabyte didn't overclock the product at all.

Which is kind of weird if you tag a product as OC right ? That doesn't mean though there's no room for overclocking, in fact far from it, you'd be nuts to not overclock it yourself. 

Read the full Guru3D review right here.

Developed by Warner Bros. Entertainment's Monolith Productions for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, Windows PC and the PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment system, and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin fans in North America will be able to download the game the same day the retail version hits store shelves on February 10, 2009.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, the highly anticipated sequel to the 2005 smash hit game, F.E.A.R., is a blend of advanced visceral combat mixed with seamless game pacing set inside a sinister and paranormal universe that begins shortly before the ending of F.E.A.R. A Special Forces squad is on a routine mission when the city of Auburn is rocked by a supernatural explosion. Alma, a girl with immense power and a thirst for revenge, has unleashed her wrath upon the city and thrown it into chaos. The squad must combat enemy forces and the supernatural as they struggle to find a way to stop Alma and uncover the mysterious forces arrayed against them before it's too late.

Good stuff has been surfacing about Windows 7 for quite some time now and as information leaks out, we

Yesterday we reported that a small batch of HIS graphics cards has a faulty BIOS, disabling a shader cluster on the GPU. Please read about that here. I retreived the serial numbers of the boards effected so you can check it out for yourself wether or not you need to flash a new BIOS.

Step 1: Verify the serial number

H081001881-H081001930
H081002871-H081002880
H081002881-H081002920
H081018911-H081018960
H081023731-H081023750
H081031791-H081021890

H081032991-H081021995
H081035691-H081035788
H081036931-H081037010
H081037451-H081037560
H081037761-H081037820
H081038371-H081038410
H081038821-H081038840
H081038841-H081038940
H081041271-H081041360
H081042081-H081042130

Upgrade the BIOS:

Download the latest BIOS from here: http://download.hightech.com.hk/bios/HD4830_SJ3G01.ZIP

• Boot up the HD4830 into Windows XP / Vista. 
• Unzip the HD4830_SJ3G01.ZIP into a directory 
• Go to that directory and run  SJ3G01_00R_01.exe 

After the BIOS update is complete, reboot the system and you are set to go, this time with 640 Shader units.

The lads over at GIGABYTE are debuting the new GIGABYTE GA-E7AUM-DS2H motherboard powered by the latest NVIDIA Geforce

Remember last week when we told you about Australia's rediculous plan to endorse an internet filter on all Australians ? Well, it seems the AUS press finally is on it, yet some very bothersome stories are starting to surface, check out this one from theage.com.au:

The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography.

Internet providers and the government's own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent.

Documents obtained by us show the office of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, tried to bully ISP staff into suppressing their criticisms of the plan.

Senator Conroy has since last year's election victory remained tight-lipped on the specifics of his $44.2 million policy but, grilled by a Senate Estimates committee this week, he said the Government was looking at forcing ISPs to implement a two-tiered filtering system.

The first tier, which internet users would not be able to opt out of, would block all "illegal material". Senator Conroy has previously said Australians would be able to opt out of any filters to obtain "uncensored access to the internet".

The second tier, which is optional, would filter out content deemed inappropriate for children, such as pornography.

But neither filter tier will be capable of censoring content obtained over peer-to-peer file sharing networks, which account for an estimated 60 per cent of internet traffic.

Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia said: "I'm not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world."

Critics of the ISP-level filtering plan say software filters installed by the user on their PC, which are already provided by the government for free at netalert.gov.au, are more than adequate.

Mark Newton, an engineer at Internode, has heavily criticised the Government and its filtering policy on the Whirlpool broadband community forum, going as far as saying it would enable child abuse.

He said the plan would inevitably result in significant false positives and degrade internet speeds tremendously. Those views were subsequently widely reported by technology media and blogs.

On Tuesday, a policy advisor for Senator Conroy, Belinda Dennett, wrote an email to Internet Industry Association (IIA) board member Carolyn Dalton in an attempt to pressure Newton into reining in his dissent.

"In your capacity as a board member of the IIA I would like to express my serious concern that a IIA member would be sending out this sort of message. I have also advised [IIA chief executive] Peter Coroneos of my disappointment in this sort of irresponsible behaviour ," the email, read.

It is understood the email was accompanied by a phone call demanding that the message be passed on to senior Internode management.

Newton said he found the bullying "outrageous" and Senator Conroy was "misusing his influence as a Commonwealth Minister to intimidate a private dissenting citizen into silencing his political views".

A spokesman for Senator Conroy said Newton's accusation that the Government was promoting child abuse was "disappointing and irresponsible". He said the purpose of the email was "to establish whether Mr Newton's views were consistent with the IIA position".

Ironically, Senator Conroy has himself accused critics of his filtering policy of supporting child pornography - including Greens Senator Scott Ludlam in Senate Estimates this week.

MSI's upcoming Eclipse Series motherboard IS equipped with the industry's exclusive second-generation DrMOS power supply design. In order to maximize the performance and provide a stable and adequate power supply in the latest generation of platforms, MSI Eclipse Series motherboard is equipped with the 2nd generation DrMOS which is recommended by Intel and most suitable for the processor

AMD had a bit of a goofup on their hands. Last week this news already reached us yet seemed limited to press members (samples). Apparantly a batch of their cards has received an improper bios disabling a shader cluster on the Radeon 4830 graphics card. Some members of the press have actually published a review with the wrong shader amount (560 Shaders out of 640). Next to that an early batch from HIS technology also seems to have this issue (our review sample was okay by the way).

AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card's performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation.

Through consultations with AMD board partners, it has been determined with a high degree of certainty that fewer than 400 ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards from one AMD board partner, HIS, have reached the market with the pre-production BIOS incorrectly provided by AMD. As only a small number of HIS-branded ATI Radeon HD 4830 cards are impacted, we ask any customers that purchased an HIS-branded ATI Radeon HD 4830 to test the board using the GPU-Z utility (available here). If the GPU-Z utility reports fewer than 640 shaders, please visit the HIS website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility.

HIS is preparing a new BIOS for those effected by this week. Thanks Watcher for the initial info on this. But now the real question remains, since everybody expected the shader limitation to be a on die laser-cut ... can we alter the BIOS to enable all 800 shaders ? ;)

Recession, financial crisis .. around the globe there's a lot happening. But apparantly it does not effect GPU sales at at all, in fact .. there was a slight increase in overall sales. Jon Peddie Research announced estimated graphics shipments and supplier market share for the third calendar quarter of 2008.

GPUs are used in industrial and medical systems, point of sale terminals, kiosks, digital signs, and PCs. More than one GPU is being used in over one third of all PCs being shipped today. In Q3'08 over a 111 million GPUs were shipped. During the same quarter last year, only 91 million GPUs shipped, and 94 million units shipped in the previous quarter.

 That's an annual increase of 22.5 percent and a quarter-to-quarter increase of almost 18 percent, as shown in Table 1.

It's the largest increase in quarter to quarter shipments in six years.

Table 1: Growth rates from Q2 to Q3 from 2001 to 2008

Market shares shifted for the big three, AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, and put pressure on the smaller three, Matrix SiS and VIA/S3, and still almost everyone showed an increase in shipments as indicated in Table 2.

Table 2: Total Graphics Chip Market shares for Q3'08

DESKTOP
For desktop GPUs Intel increased its first place position to 43.9% share while Nvidia's position slipped to 32.6% and AMD climbed up to 20.3%. Desktop GPUs saw an increase of 4.7% this quarter to 61.9 million units. if we focus on NVIDIA for a second we see that they had more volume, yet did loose market share to AMD.

If you are somehow bothered by a reported widescreen FOV issue recently identified in Far Cry 2. Far Cry 2 is actually a cropped version of the 4:3 video, reminiscent of a similar problem, or design decision, from BioShock. Good news, a fix was created by Racer_S over at Widescreen Gaming Forum, who also created a homebrew fix for similar problems in BioShock.

Note: The fix only works with Far Cry 2 v1.00.

1) Run Trainer/Hack
2) Edit options if needed
3) Start Far Cry 2
4) Press Numpad * to enable new FOV settings
5) You can safely Alt-Tab from Far Cry and change settings at any time (defaults are X FOV = 1, Y FOV = 1.333)

Download: Click here.

AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card's performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation.

Through consultations with AMD board partners, it has been determined with a high degree of certainty that fewer than 400 ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards from one AMD board partner, HIS, have reached the market with the pre-production BIOS incorrectly provided by AMD. As only a small number of HIS-branded ATI Radeon HD 4830 cards are impacted, we ask any customers that purchased an HIS-branded ATI Radeon HD 4830 to test the board using the GPU-Z utility (available at http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz. If the GPU-Z utility reports fewer than 640 shaders, please visit the HIS website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility.

The PC version of Grand Theft Auto 4 is due to be released on November 18th and 21st in North America and Europe, respectively. We have the launch trailer to show you today.