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Nvidia has put online documents relative to its new entry level cards, the GeForce 9300 GE, 9300 GS and 9400 GT.
 According to recent GeForce driver Release Notes, the first two are equipped with a G98. This 65nm GPU is more competitive than its predecessor, the G86 produced in 80nm, compared to the RV620 which is engraved in 55nm. Otherwise, it supports PCI-Express 2.0.  GeForce 9300 GEOn the other hand, the GeForce 9400 GT is still based on the G86. Moreover, it is like a carbon copy of the GeForce 8500 GT (or almost) because like all GeForce 9s it is supposed to support PCI-E 2.0. While it’s true that certain entry level G8xs can indeed support the second version of this standard, to our knowledge they do not do it as well as the G9x. Also according to the latest information, the GeForce 9400 will be an IGP/mGPU, the MCP79/7A, which will hardly simplify things... |
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Gigabyte seems to rather like the latest AMD chipsets, the 780G and 790GX, especially the latter which is a high end variation of the 780G based on the same silicon but with a design featuring 2 PCI Express graphic ports. There is therefore a integrated graphic core accompanied by local memory of 64 or 128 MB.
The GA-MA790GP-DS4H is the most interesting motherboard found on Gigabyte’s stand according to the product manager in charge of it.Of course, we were surprised to not find a motherboard not based on Nvidia’s 780a chipset for this manufacturer. Moreover, they told us not to be too interested in this chipset for several reasons: it’s a small market and therefore they have to concentrate on the essentials; Nvidia integrated graphic cores have lower performances in 3D; Nvidia asks for excessive prices for its components; and the various delays and small problems didn’t help their case. It was the same with Nvidia chipsets for the Intel platform, esteemed to be of little interest by Gigabyte which in turn didn’t give them priority. So it seems that Nvidia’s chipset division has “missed the boat” these last few months with a strategy that was probably a little too based on marketing and not on the technical or reliability aspect. This ended up exasperating quite a few people. |
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Yesterday, Nvidia officially launched its new line of GPUs for notebooks:
 All of these products are destined for the mid-entry level and there is nothing revolutionary as the GeForce 9650M GS strangely reminds us of the 8700M GT and therefore has lower performances than an aging 8600 GTS. Moreover, we noticed several other curious items. As we write these lines Nvidia’s site mentions 8 calculation units for the GeForce 9300M GS and 16 for the 9300M G. In terms of frequencies, the company with the green chameleon logo isn’t taking too many risks, because they say nothing (or almost) for a number of models. For the others, we have listed the official specifications, but unfortunately laptop manufacturers often offer solutions under these names although with lower GPU and memory frequencies due to cost and/or heat dissipation reasons. One important point is that the 9100M G and 8200M G are actually IGPs or "mGPUs" which is not without repercussions on the available memory bandwidth. The press release reminds us that the main innovations are support of Hybrid SLI and GeForce Boost which may indeed be of great interest in notebooks. A new version of the PureVideo HD engine should also be included but the way (or at least partly so) that GeForce 9xx0Ms use the G8x remains rather vague. Finally, they can fit into MXM 3.0 type modules. |
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CoolerMaster has introduced a new casing at the Computex, the HAF. It has no real innovation on the technical level with its simple metal design, basic organization, and theoretically efficient cooling given the enormous fans (implying that noise levels were maybe not a priority). So why release such a casing and why are we talking about it? Because the particularity is that it is somewhat of a "return to the past" in terms of its design which is rather industrial, robust and simple. This is something to satisfy gamers and overclockers that do not wanted an “aerodynamic” casing which is generally the current trend and prefer a more "technical" no frills look. According to Coolermaster, it’s a group that has been largely ignored.
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Bit-tech was able to take some photos of a Nehalem Bloomfield processor as well as an MSI motherboard equipped with a Socket 1366 and X58 chipset combined with an ICH10.
 According to the manufacturer’s own words, the new high end Northbridge heats up significantly more than its predecessors despite the 65nm engraving and the fact that the memory controller was transferred to the CPU. The cause is most likely QPI bus support which replaces the FSB. In terms of PCI-Express 2.0, there will be 36 lanes.  Otherwise, VR-Zone has published the CPU scores in 3DMark Vantage of a Bloomfield set at 2.66 GHz combined with an X58 which were as high as 16,334. This is approximately 45% faster than a quad core Penryn set at the same frequency. Of course, it’s only a vague indication and not a complete test although it is still interesting.  We should keep in mind that the next Intel CPU will support up to 8 simultaneous threads thanks to its 4 cores and SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading, quite similar to HyperThreading) and DDR3 on 3 channels. The Santa Clara giant has mentioned performances that are 20% to 100% higher in applications which are multi threaded and 10% to 25% in those that are not. |
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 Seagate has launched the Savvio 10K.3, a hard drive in 2" 1/2 format destined for servers. While the 15K and 10K.2 do not surpass 73 GB and 146 GB, respectively, the latest from the world leader in hard drives attains 300 GB with two platters.
Few details were given up until now; besides its rotation speed of 10,000 rpm, we know that it uses the version 2.0 of the SAS interface (Serial Attached SCSI), has a data encryption system and an MTBF of 1.6 million hours. The press release specifies that big OEMs have already received drives in order to evaluate their potential and large scale availability is planned for the second half of the year. Let’s hope that until then that Seagate will reveal a minimum on its performances and power consumption... |
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