We review and test the MSI Radeon HD 6850. Today the first customized Radeon HD 6850 makes an entry, it comes with custom cooling which definitely is a notch better. Now remember, the R6850 is clocked at 775 MHz right ? We'll take it towards 975 MHz today by applying some tweaks. The memory as well, standard you'll need to work with a 4000 MHz (effective data rate) memory clock frequency .. we'll take that to 4800 MHz on this product.
Guru3D Rig of the Month - October 2010
Each month here at Guru3D.com we feature one of you guys, your PC, your DIY project. It is quite honestly amazing how much detail and dedication you put into an PC, and every now and then it really shows. This months was particular difficult as we have received many entries, and the build quality was so very fine that we had a tremendous task of picking one winner.
This months winner is Josh Sniffen, at the age of 24 he is an artist who designed a Rig for Sapphire. The end result is a stunning looking PC.
Check out this months winner right here.
The popular Xigmatek Asgard and Asgard II enclosures, with their classic , discreet design and exquisitely understated looks, along with a long list of useful features which have proven themselves in the market, are now available with windowed side panels. Each of the successful Asgard and Asgard II versions are now available with the x-shaped windows pre-installed.
Both the Asgard and the entire Asgard II range of enclosures continue to be very popular. The combination of useful features, elegant looks and attractive price remain unattained in the case market. Xigmatek has responded the steady demand of these enclosures and will now be offering the Asgard and all three versions of the Asgard II with a modified side panel featuring their signature x-shaped window. For those who want to upgrade their normal Asgard or Asgard II, this side panel will be available for purchase separately.
The Xigmatek Asgard with the side window is available immediately for 39.90 Euros , while the Asgard II with the pre-installed side window are also in stock with immediately availability for 41.90 Euros. The separate, windowed side panel can be purchased for 12.90 Euros.
Galaxy announced today the Galaxy GeForce GTS 450 Hall of Fame graphics card, the fastest GTS 450 graphics card on the market.
OCZ announced the RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD, a blazing-fast storage device that uses the PCIe x4 interface to deliver transfer speeds of well over 700MB/s and random 4K write performance of 120,000 IOPS. The disk is available in 480GB to 960GB capacities and can be used as primary boot drive. OCZ provides a 3-year warranty and the specifications list a MTBF of 2 million hours.
OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and memory modules for computing devices and systems, announces the launch of The RevoDrive X2 PCI-Express SSD, a follow-up to the successful launch of the first RevoDrive, with increased performance and capacity to serve high-performance computing consumers. The RevoDrive X2 upgrades the original architecture to deliver unprecedented speed up to 740MB/s and up to 120,000 IOPS, nearly triple the throughput of other high-end SATA-based solutions with a substantial reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) to the consumer. The product is available now through OCZ's global channel.
"The original OCZ RevoDrive SSD was designed to be the first high-performance, bootable PCIe SSD solution and has become a popular choice for demanding computing applications that require faster, more reliable storage," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "Building on the success of the original design, we are excited to introduce the RevoDrive X2, which delivers both increased performance and capacity, making the RevoDrive X2 a viable option for a wide spectrum of applications that include professional graphic design, multimedia rendering, and workstations. With our recently announced new state-of-the-art SSD manufacturing facility in Taiwan, OCZ will continue to be at the forefront of developing and deploying game-changing solid state storage solutions."
The RevoDrive family gets its edge by eliminating the SATA II (3Gbps) bottleneck and leveraging a PCIe x4 interface to exploit the full potential of current flash technology. Like the original RevoDrive, the X2 uses an onboard RAID 0 design, but it also employs four SandForce-1200 controllers versus two in the original to maximize data access and bandwidth. In addition to promoting a faster, more responsive PC experience, the RevoDrive X2 is bootable, unlike competing PCIe solutions, to ensure quicker start-ups and load times compared to mechanical hard drives, a major plus for workstation PCs. The RevoDrive X2 thrives in a wide range of computing environments including demanding database and server applications as well as multi-media creation and management. Available in 100GB to 960GB capacities, the OCZ RevoDrive X2 provides ample room for data warehousing, applications, multimedia files, and operating systems. Additionally, the X2 provides the superior durability, energy efficiency, and reliability of SSDs.
Photo's appeared of what could be the GeForce GTX 580. The GTX 580 is unleashed next month to compete with the upcoming Raderon HD 6970 (Cayman). According to rumors the GTX 580 would be 20% faster then the GTX 480. The product would be based on the GF110 silicon which has 512 active shader processors. Furthermore you can expect a 512-bit memory bus.
Anyway, once we know more we'll be sure to inform you, have a peek at the two photo's.
Over in the NVIDIA developper section a new driver was spotted. As such consider this a beta driver please. We have a discussion thread open here.
New and Improved CUDA Libraries
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CUSPARSE, a new library of GPU-accelerated sparse matrix routines for sparse/sparse and dense/sparse operations
CURAND, a new library of GPU-accelerated random number generation (RNG) routines, supporting Sobol quasi-random and XORWOW pseudo-random routines for in both host and device code
CUFFT performance tuned for radix-3, -5, and -7 transform sizes on Fermi architecture GPUs
CUBLAS performance improved 50% to 300% on Fermi architecture GPUs, for matrix multiplication of all datatypes and transpose variations
H.264 encode/decode libraries that were previously available in the GPU Computing SDK are now part of the CUDA Toolkit
CUDA Driver & CUDA C Runtime
Support for new 6GB Quadro and Tesla products
Support for debugging GPUs with more than 4GB device memory.
Integrated Tesla Compute Cluster (TCC) support in standard Windows driver packages
Development Tools
Multi-GPU debugging support for both cuda-gdb and Parallel Nsight
Added cuda-memcheck support for Fermi architecture GPUs
NVCC support for Intel C Compiler (ICC) v11.1 on 64-bit Linux distros
Miscellaneous
Support for malloc() and free() in CUDA C compute kernels
NVIDIA System Management Interface (nvidia-smi) support for reporting % GPU busy, and several GPU performance counters
New GPU Computing SDK Code Samples
Several code samples demonstrating how to use the new CURAND library, including MonteCarloCURAND, EstimatePiInlineP, EstimatePiInlineQ, EstimatePiP, EstimatePiQ, and SingleAsianOptionP
Conjugate Gradient Solver, demonstrating the use of CUBLAS and CUSPARSE together
Function Pointers, a sample that shows how to use function pointers to implement the Sobel Edge Detection filter for 8-bit monochrome images
Interval Computing, demonstrating the use of interval arithmetic operators using C++ templates and recursion
Simple Printf, demonstrating best practices for using both printf and cuprintf in compute kernels
Bilateral Filter, an edge-preserving non-linear smoothing filter for image recovery and denoising that is implemented in CUDA C with OpenGL rendering
SLI with Direct3D Texture, a simple example demonstrating the use of SLI and Direct3D interoperability with CUDA C
Windows developers should be sure to check out the new debugging and profiling features in Parallel Nsight for Visual Studio at www.nvidia.com/ParallelNsight.
Please refer to the Release Notes and Getting Started Guides for more information.
In CUDA Toolkit 3.2 and the accompanying release of the CUDA driver, some important changes have been made to the CUDA Driver API to support large memory access for device code and to enable further system calls such as malloc and free. Please refer to the CUDA Toolkit 3.2 Readiness Tech Brief for a summary of these changes.
Download
GeForce Forceware 261.00 Windows XP 32-bit
GeForce Forceware 261.00 Win 7 | Vista 32-bit
GeForce Forceware 261.00 Win 7 | Vista 64-bit
Nokia Siemens Networks has become the latest to prove that existing copper phone line infrastructure is far from dead. It has demonstrated a DSL technology that can deliver "super-fast" broadband download speeds of up to a staggering 825Mbps (Megabits per second) over a distance of 400 metres, or 750Mbps over 500 metres.
The feat bests Chinese firm, Huawei, which last month used its SuperMIMO technology and "four twisted pairs" (i.e. technically four phone lines bonded together) to boost the maximum speed of DSL to 700Mbps (Megabits per second) over 400 meters (here).
Prior to that Alcatel-Lucent's research arm, Bell Labs, achieved a broadband DSL download speed of 300Mbps (here) via DSL Phantom Mode at identical distances of up to 400 meters (or 100Mbps at 1km). However this method only bonded two telephone lines together (i.e. 150Mbps each).
By contrast Nokia's solution also uses a similar Phantom DSL method, which creates a virtual (phantom) channel to supplement the two physical wires that are the standard configuration for many copper transmission lines. In theory this might make it more adaptable to UK networks, although BT already has a big contract with Huawei that might give their tech precedence.
Nokia's Head of its Broadband Access Business Line, Eduard Scheiterer, said:
"Laying down new optical fiber to the home remains costly, though it is capable of delivering very high speeds and is a definite solution for long-term bandwidth requirements. However, the innovative use of technologies such as phantom circuits helps operators provide an efficient last mile connectivity with existing copper wires."
It's certainly quite a leap above BT's current UK best of 40Mbps via Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC). FTTC delivers a fast fibre optic cable to BT's street level cabinets, while the remaining connection (between cabinets and homes) is done using VDSL2 (similar to current ADSL broadband but faster over short distances) via existing copper cable. BT FTTC speeds are expected to be boosted to reach 'up to' 60Mbps in the not too distant future.
As a result Nokia claims that its new solution (hiX 562x/3x DSLAM) promises a bandwidth increase of 50-75% over existing bonded copper lines, which could prolong the life of copper networks and delay the need for full fibre optic rollout's (i.e. protecting the operator
Pfffrrrrt, yet another Catalyst hotfix was reelased by AMD. The new update is named Catalyst 10.10c Hotfix and it's a bit more exciting than the usual hotfixes as this edition adds OpenGL 4.1 beta support and a new Morphological Anti-Aliasing feature. Additionally, the update also offers a couple of performance improvements for the Radeon HD 6800 series, a new CrossFire profile and CrossFire performance improvements for some games.
AMD Catalyst 10.10c Hotfix Features:
The folks of Engadget published a couple of photos of a prototype of Sony Ericsson's elusive PlayStation Phone. The device is likely based on Android 3.0 "Gingerbread" and features a custom Sony Marketplace that enables you to purchase and download games.
The device snapped up top (and in our gallery below) is sporting a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 (a chip similar to the one found in the G2, but 200MHz faster), 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM, and the screen is in the range of 3.7 to 4.1 inches. Looking almost identical to the mockup we hit you with this summer, the handset does indeed have a long touchpad in the center which is apparently multitouch, and you can see in the photos that it's still bearing those familiar PlayStation shoulder buttons. For Sony buffs, you'll be interested to know that there's no Memory Stick slot here, but there is support for microSD cards.
Check the thumbnail.
For the audiophiles amongst us, Sennheiser has rolled out four new headsets for gamers (with some money to spare).
Audio specialist Sennheiser Communications introduces a new line of headsets designed for hardcore gamers. Heading up the line is the PC 360-the new flagship headset for pro gamers featuring Sennheiser's acclaimed Open-Aire
