Retirement of the Pentium E2140 & Core 2 E4500 GeForce 9500 GT: photo and benches ASUSTeK: Radeon 3850 X2

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Retirement of the Pentium E2140 & Core 2 E4500   Posted on 07/04/2008 at 23:01 by Nicolas

	Via Product Change Notification 108225 – 00, Intel has just announced the retirement of the Pentium E2140 (1.6 GHz) and the Core 2 Duo E4500 (2.2 GHz). It will no longer be possible to cancel orders after June 6th and confirmed orders will be taken until August 1st, 2008. The last deliveries will take place on April 6th, 2009 for OEMs and October 31st of this year for boxed versions. The planned retirement of these CPUs is logical because the Celeron dual core E1200 (1.6 GHz), Pentium E2220 (2.4 GHz) and Core 2 Duo E4700 (2.6 GHz) appeared on Intel’s price list at the beginning of the month. The last, which is still based on the aging Conroe, will be quickly replaced by the E7200 (2.53 GHz) normally before June. While its frequency is slightly lower, it has the Wolfdale core and therefore the optimizations added to the Penryn as well as 3 MB of L2 cache.

GeForce 9500 GT: photo and benches   Posted on 07/04/2008 at 17:53 by Nicolas

	The Chinese site zol.com.cn has gotten its hands on a GeForce 9500 GT and published the card’s final specifications as well as the first benchmarks. You may recall that it has a G96 engraved in 65nm. This GPU like the G84 which equips GeForce 8600s has 32 scalar processors and a 128 bit wide memory controller. GPU/shader core/memory frequencies are 650/1600/800 MHz (for the GDDR3 version versus 900 MHz for the GDDR2 equipped model). While the card can stand the comparison with a GeForce 8600 GT, it’s unfortunate our colleagues didn’t include a 8600 GTS set at 675/1450/1000 MHz as it should logically have almost equal performances with the 9500 GT. Given that the 8600 GTS is currently the strict minimum to play in DirectX 10 mode (in exchange for several compromises), it’s highly likely that the same goes for the 9500 GT. The newer card however should be less expensive given the slower memory and thinner 65nm engraving. Moreover, it will have the Purevideo 3 engine enabling better VC-1 decoding and finally it will have PCI-Express 2.0 support.

ASUSTeK: Radeon 3850 X2   Posted on 07/04/2008 at 13:14 by Nicolas

	ASUSTeK has officially announced the EAH3850X2/HTDI/1G, a Radeon 3850 X2 equipped with 2x 512 MB. The two RV670s and accompanying memory are set to the standard frequencies of 668 MHz and 829 MHz, respectively; however, this didn’t stop the Taiwanese giant from boasting that its card has 5% higher performances than 2 Radeon 3850s in CrossFire while specifying that tests were carried out on a P5B Deluxe. Knowing that this motherboard is limited to PCI-Express 1.0 support (just like the switch present on the EAH3850X2/HTDI/1G) and that one of the two PCI-Express ports is cabled in 4x, this isn’t too surprising. If tests were conducted on a motherboard equipped with an X38 chipset, resultants would have been noticeably different. Otherwise, if the Radeon 3870 X2’s raison d'être was that it enabled ATI to offer the card with the highest performances for several weeks, we aren’t too sure about the interest of its smaller sibling – unless it’s offered at a particularly attractive price.