AMD  Radeon HD 4850 Crossfire review

With the Force3D Radeon HD 4850 and PowerColor Radeon HD 4850.

A pretty hectic day today as AMD moved forward the launch of the Radeon HD 4850 (initially to be released next week). Today Guru of 3D will review both the PowerColor and Force3D graphics cards in a full fetched review. As the tests will show, this little 199 USD gem will pack an awful lot of performance.

Not only will we put it though the benchmark paces, Guru3D will also have a look at Crossfire performance among these two cards combined. The results are pretty surprising.

You can read the 20 page article right here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-ati-radeon-hd-4850-review-force-3d--powercolor/

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So in case you have heard the rumor, it's correct.

AMD decided to pretty much piss off any editor today by lifting the NDA for the Radeon HD 4850 which was supposed to launch next week. For yours truly this means havoc, AMD had a press-meeting on Tuesday which we flew into. We returned yesterday with a card and started benchmarking. Normally it takes us 4-5 days to finish up a reference review so you can imaging that the press is pretty surprised to see the NDA being lifted today, completely out of the blue.

Luckily I did start working on the article yesterday already and pretty much I am half way through writing the review. At the earliest maybe tonight I'll have the Radeon HD 4850 review ready for you, including Crossfire results.

Bare with me, I'm doing my best to get you guys a full review and not some half-baked quickie stuff. BTW forget all the numbers you have seen leaked, the new driver issued yesterday shows the real performance of this product.

Check in regular as again, I hope to be able to finish and publish this review today, if not tomorrow.

But let me just state that it is absolutely insane what has happed today.

 

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Two days ago the GeForce (CUDA) series Folding@Home client was released. And I already predicted we'd yield some good results as a team in total. The new folding client runs in the background over your graphics card / GPU, you can use your PC completely normal and once a 3D application kicks in, the folding client jumps into the background.

So you just won't notice that it runs, which is so great as yesterday we logged the biggest folding score in the history of Guru3D. We literally jumped from an average of 44.000 points per day towards 118.000 points yesterday ! That's just insane to observe, and so cool.

So if you have a GeForce series 8 or newer graphics card and like to help fighting diseases, please join our team, we have ID number 69411.

What do you need to have your GeForce card computing and folding:

• For GeForce series 8/9 - Forceware 174.55 drivers 
• For GeForce GTX 260/280 - Forceware 177.35 drivers
• And the Folding @home GeForce GPU Client 6.12 beta 6

Should you need help / want info check out our Folding support forums here. Come on people, team 69411.

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BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC edition review

Today a review on BFG's GeForce GTX 280 1024MB OC edition. It had to go something like this; the minute BFG finished designing this product they got all giddily and figured .. ooh we gotta send Guru3D one. Sure thing, hey bring it on.

So a couple of days ago, prior to the actual GTX 200 series product launch, we received that OC model from BFG. BFG figured, hey for the same launch price we can introduce a slightly overclocked version, fire off a life-time warranty at it and slap an OC label on there.

Read the full review here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/bfg-geforce-gtx-280-oc-edition-review/

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Some people just relaly dig their games and gaming experience. This guy for examples clearly likes Battlefiled 2 :)
And yeah .. that's his modded PC folks. Aside from the extremely detailed tank, there's also a matching keyboard, complete with dirt and scratches

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Meet the Sniper is now available to the public.

In his former life as a tracker of dangerous game in the unforgiving Australian outback, the Sniper would spend months by himself. Prolonged isolation taught him a valuable lesson: You don't have to rely on other people if you never miss !

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I can't help thinking that NVIDIA is getting a little worried about ATI's Radeon 4000 release next week. I just started testing the new RV770 GPUs myself and can tell you already, these are very price/performance effective products. Very interesting indeed as the cheapest Radeon 4000 series card will definitely match or is faster than a 9800 GTX.

To counteract the new Radeon 4000 products NVIDIA decided to quickly create another SKU in the market called NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ Pretty much it is a faster clocked NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX, and next to that ... the price is dropping pretty significantly towards a suggested retail price of $229 USD. Even better news, the GeForce 9800 GTX will drop towards 199 USD !

Gotta love the competition and after next week it's definitely going to be interesting to purchase a higher specced mid-range card as they'll get you excellent performance for the money you pay.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ takes the highly efficient G92-based GeForce 9800 GTX and offers value for value conscious gamers.

Key product points:

• GeForce 9800 GTX+ is the best single card price/performance at $229; the original GeForce 9800 GTX will transition to $199
• Shader Processor clock of 1836MHz and graphics core clock of 738MHz
• GeForce PhysX support! World
  

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Here you can download the new ATI Catalyst 8.6 driver for Windows XP 32-bit 

Highlights of the Catalyst 8.6 Windows release include:

Performance improvements 

• 3DMark Vantage: Performance increases between 10% to 15% across the ATI Radeon
  

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BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC edition review

Today a review on BFG's GeForce GTX 280 1024MB OC edition. It had to go something like this; the minute BFG finished designing this product they got all giddily and figured .. ooh we gotta send Guru3D one. Sure thing, hey bring it on.

So a couple of days ago, prior to the actual GTX 200 series product launch, we received that OC model from BFG. BFG figured, hey for the same launch price we can introduce a slightly overclocked version, fire off a life-time warranty at it and slap an OC label on there.

Read the full review here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/bfg-geforce-gtx-280-oc-edition-review/

GeForce GTX 280 Dual and Triple SLI

Today ladies and gentlemen we'll not spend 650,- USD on a graphics card .. no kind Sir, we'll put down 1300 USD on the table and see what two of these cards can achieve performance wise. Expensive ? Yeah, Stupid ? yeah, ... Guru? Yeah ... kick'ass man.

And just for the sake of it, let's spend 2 grand on GPUs to see what that can bring us. We live and breathe for this stuff. So sure, we'll do a threesome with tree-way SLI as well.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-sli-triple-review-test/

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 review

Today Guru3D brings you a review and test on the GeForce GTX 280. NVIDIA launches this new flagship along with the GeForce GTX 260. In this review you can read all you need to know about them. And yes, the rumor was right; 1.4 Billion transistors slapped onto a piece of silicon. Crazy, but oh so much fun. We finally found a product that can play Crysis at a decent resolution with high-image quality settings.

Be sure to check out the review, which you can find right here:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-review-test/

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Nvidia Folding @ Home Client BETA Released

Berberg has anounced that the client has been released as BETA.

If you could, do fold for The Guru of 3D (69411). Do bear in mind, it is a beta and not yet officially supported.

Download the GPU client here: click

We're happy to roll out the beta nVidia client, it's a nice beta, and so here we go...

First and before you do anything else, LOOK OVER THE FAQ. Lots of important things in there that you'll need to know if you do anything beyond run the installer and run it.

Drivers
You MUST use the 174.55 version of the drivers for now. You do not need the other files, just the drivers.

Known bugs:
It's a beta, and yes we meant that, not like Google but like software engineers - expect glitches and updates. The main thing is that the viewer will not work, as we're in the middle of changing how the live coordinates get to the viewer. Other then that, visit our nVidia beta Forum to see what's happening.

Download: 6.12 beta 6

 

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GeForce GTX 280 Dual and Triple SLI - tested and reviewed

Today ladies and gentlemen we'll not spend 650,- USD on a graphics card .. no kind Sir, we'll put down 1300 USD on the table and see what two of these cards can achieve performance wise. Expensive ? Yeah, Stupid ? yeah, ... Guru? Yeah ... kick'ass man.

And just for the sake of it, let's spend 2 grand on GPUs to see what that can bring us. We live and breathe for this stuff. So sure, we'll do a threesome with tree-way SLI as well.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-sli-triple-review-test/

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A day later than usual as I was on a small trip, but during the GeForce GTX launch a lot of board-parners issued press releases announcing them. Here's a small excerpt of some of them in random order:

BFG Technology GeForce GTX 260 & 280 (watercooled)

Next to the regular models, the BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC 1GB graphics card with ThermoIntelligence water cooling solution offers exceptional thermal performance in a single slot design. Co-developed by BFG and Danger Den, the ThermoIntelligence custom copper water block is totally silent and allows the GTX 280 GPU to be factory overclocked to the highest stable level

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AMD's next-generation video chipset will be capable of graphics that are movie-realistic, the company claimed today. A preview of the RV770 chipset, which is used both in the FireStream 9250 and should form the heart of the Radeon HD 4870, has been labeled Cinema 2.0 for its ability to recreate near-photorealistic footage in real time. The two teraflops of performance from two RV770 chips is enough to not only accurately model many very detailed objects in one scene, drawing them at a better-than-film 25-30 frames per second, but also to add many of the effects that are produced by a real camera, such as depth-of-field or motion blur.

The video chipset maker doesn't provide exact details of the scenes, which include a robot attack in a lifelike city and a scorpion near a desert home, but cites them as thresholds that will let movie makers potentially release titles on computers or simply speed up production work. As camera angles can change in real time, a computer version of a movie could let users pick their view of a scene, while cinematographers for traditional videos can get a scene right on the first take by choosing the camera angles and actions while live, AMD argues. Games should also benefit by recreating scenes from some movies almost shot-for-shot.

No clues are given as to the release date of consumer hardware capable of supporting the level of visual effects shown in the Cinema 2.0 presentation, though AMD confirms that the chipsets will appear in ATI Radeon HD video cards. Leaks point to an initial release of the Radeon HD 4800 series using the chipset in late June.

We have a small movie, click here.

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The Khronos Group late yesterday established a new alliance between vendors that could see standards for high performance computing such as OpenCL gain a foothold across many operating systems and hardware platforms. Called the Computer Working Group, the team includes graphics rivals 3DLabs, AMD, and NVIDIA, processor makers such as ARM, Freescale, Intel, and Qualcomm, and end product manufacturers such as Motorola and Nokia, all of whom hope to create and maintain genuinely open and royalty-free standards for using newer graphics hardware to process very demanding compute tasks.

The Working Group isn't limited to a specific standard but is likely to start with the OpenCL standard expected to appear in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The format is now known to have been proposed by Apple and would let developers tap into both the unused resources for e video chipset as well as the multiple cores of a standard CPU to improve not just business tasks but also more common uses. A fast-enough system using OpenCL could accelerate physics in games or use it to boost image processing speeds, Khronos says.

The move potentially sets up OpenCL as a true standard and could give Macs and mainstream PCs access both to the inbuilt general computing performance of existing video chipsets as well as to imminent graphics and computing cards that are specifically tailored to these tasks. Both NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 series and AMD's still unofficial Radeon HD 4800 will both explicitly support non-video processing but are currently tied to proprietary languages that limit the incentive to accelerate specialized code.

OpenCL also potentially broadens the usefulness and operating system support of both AMD's FireStream and NVIDIA's Tesla add-in cards and servers, both of which transform graphics chipsets entirely into dedicated processors for workstation and supercomputer-level tasks.

While Khronos has not said if or when it expects OpenCL to be ratified as a standard by the members of the Computer Working Group, Apple itself plans to launch Snow Leopard in mid-2009 and effectively kick off public accessibility for the technology.

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Transcend today released its all-new high speed 64GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk (SSD) for consumer electronics as well as industrial systems and military applications. Transcend

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Download the Medusa NVIDIA GeForce GTX 200 series technology demo -

With each launch of a major new GPU, NVIDIA will release a technology demo which is designed to showcase the power of its new graphics chips. It creates some early excitement for their upcoming product.

Check this one out, one of the best tech demo's ever made.

Download - Click here

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Japanese researchers have put another dent in Quantum cryptograpy's reputation as the final word in secure communications.

Transmissions sent using the technique are protected from eavesdroppers by the fundamental rules of quantum physics, at least in theory.n practice, implementation weaknesses can leave a narrow door for attackers, and Japanese boffins have developed an idea for a quantum eavesdropping device that can exploit one such weakness.

Quantum cryptography is designed to allow users to exchange secret keys. The polarisation of individual light photons determines one bit of a key. The rules of quantum mechanics mean that any attempt to intercept this data irreversibly alters it.

Because of this effect, any attempt to eavesdrop a key would be detected as a unacceptably noisy communications path.

The loophole exploited by Japanese boffins is that it might be possible to make a partial copy of a quantum key without tripping an alert that a communications path has been compromised. This partial copy might be used in subsequent cryptoanalysis. The technique relies on constructing an optical cloning circuit and a measuring device, as explained in a paper by the researchers here (pdf).

Boffins led by Yuta Okubo at the University of Tskuba in Japan have not yet built a device that implements the approach. Nonetheless the research is a concern for banks and government agencies that bought quantum cryptography systems in the belief they were inherently secure.

The Japanese research follows an earlier study by boffins in Sweden examining another practical shortcoming with quantum cryptography systems. As previously reported, the weakness identified by the Swedish team involved shortcomings in how systems verify that the content of a message has not been altered in transit.

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Are governments trying to instigate fear for more control or what is going here? (imo)

Whitehall was left combing its season ticket loan records this weekend as another set of top secret papers did the rounds of the 5.45pm from Waterloo.

Just days after a Cabinet Office worker left a stack of top secret anti-terrorist papers

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 review

Today Guru3D brings you a review and test on the GeForce GTX 280. NVIDIA launches this new flagship along with the GeForce GTX 260. In this review you can read all you need to know about them. And yes, the rumor was right; 1.4 Billion transistors slapped onto a piece of silicon. Crazy, but oh so much fun. We finally found a product that can play Crysis at a decent resolution with high-image quality settings.

Be sure to check out the review, which you can find right here:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-review-test/

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A couple of days ago NVIDIA's released a new NFORCE Driver, for the whole nforce motherboard series.  The new revision build is  Version: 15.17 with a release date of June 9, 2008.

The included binaries are:

• Ethernet Driver (v67.80) WHQL
• SATAIDE Driver (v10.3.0.21) WHQL
• SATARAID Driver (v10.3.0.21) WHQL
• RAIDTOOL Application (v10.3.0.21)
• SMU Driver (v1.45) WHQL
• SMBus Driver (v4.64) WHQL
• Installer (v5.93)

Download :

  nForce Driver 15.17 - XP 32-bit
  nForce Driver 15.17 - XP 64-bit
  nForce Driver 15.17 - Vista 64-bit
  nForce Driver 15.17 - Vista 32-bit

Thanks go out to forum visitor Applejack who reported the new updates. We have a discussion thread open on these drivers right here.

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