Atom vs. Nano: room for improvement GeForce Release 177.79 beta Nvidia launches the GF 9800 GT and GTX+

Juillet 2008 L M M J V S D 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 You can read previous news using our archives. [ Print all news of this day ]

<< Previous day's news July 29, 2008

Next day of news >> July 31, 2008

Atom vs. Nano: room for improvement   Posted on 30/07/2008 at 16:49 by Nicolas

	PC Watch has published a comparison of the VIA Nano L2100 (1.8 GHz-TDP of 25W) and Intel Atom 230’s (1.6 GHz-TDP of 4W) performances in addition to those of the reference chipsets from their respective manufacturers as other components were identical on the two test platforms. Overall, the Nano clearly has higher performances than its rival and this even in applications optimized for HyperThreading which enables taking advantage of the full potential of Intel’s CPU. However, things are more complex if we consider each solution and their power consumption separately. On the one hand, there is the Nano L2100+CN896 combo that needs 58W in full load while the Atom 230 combined with a 945GC is "content" with 43W. For the former, another model probably could have done better and this without sacrificing performances too much (we were also surprised by the fact that the VX800U and its 3.5W was not used). In the latter, a better adapted chipset (i.e. conceived specifically for the Atom and not the Pentium 4) would have enabled to go much lower. In short, the potential indeed seems to be there on both sides but a little more effort is needed to offer more coherent platforms... The VIA Nano platform, there is a PCI-E x16 port.

GeForce Release 177.79 beta   Posted on 30/07/2008 at 15:16 by Nicolas

	The arrival of three new cards was taken advantage by Nvidia developers to put online the GeForce Release 177.79 beta. While all GeForce 8, 9 and GTX 200 are supported (including the 9500 GS which has not yet been launched) in 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista, we noticed that aging GeForce FX, 6 and 7s are excluded. In terms of innovations, the company with the chameleon logo mentions an improvement of performances (without being more precise) s well as bug fixes in Call of Duty 4 and Counter Strike with the GeForce GTX in Windows XP and Vista. Still with this last OS, there should now no longer be control panel crashes after changing the display profile when a GeForce 9800 GX2 or 8800 GTX is relayed to several screens. Moreover, there should no longer be a corruption of textures used in the sky in Crysis after a change of resolution with GeForce 8600 GTS or 9600 GTs in SLI.

Nvidia launches the GF 9800 GT and GTX+   Posted on 30/07/2008 at 14:42 by Nicolas

	In addition to the official arrival of the GeForce 9500 GT (already found for several days now in Europe), yesterday was the date also chosen by Nvidia for the launch of the GeForce 9800 GT and GTX+. The first is based on a G92(b) with 112 activated scalar processors and frequencies of 600/1500/900 MHz for the GPU, shader core and memory, respectively. Therefore, these are strictly identical to those of the GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB. Otherwise, the new card mainly sets itself apart with HybridPower support. While the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is also equipped with a G92b and has HybridPower, there are 128 scalar processors with GPU frequencies of 738/1836 MHz or a 9% increase compared to the 9800 GTX "v1". Note that memory remains unchanged at 1100 MHz. You may recall that in June Nvidia already authorized the publication of a preview of this card following the arrival of the Radeon HD 4850 on the market.