Being the vendor behind the fastest graphics card money can buy means a lot for both NVIDIA and AMD, in equal measures, as neither is willing to just accept the second best spot while trying to spin off their mediocrity with performance and/or features to price. NVIDIA has been a company traditionally seen as being behind the fastest GPU's for longer periods of time, and with higher standards in product quality. Its GeForce GTX 580 single GPU was very fast, but its competition was inconclusive with the Radeon HD 5970 card, the red team lead extended with the launch of the Radeon HD 6990 a couple of weeks earlier, but now NVIDIA got the GeForce GTX 590 fully ready to go up against in full battle mode. - techPowerUp
With this GeForce GTX 570 DirectCu edition, ASUS shows a factory overclocked version of the GeForce GTX 570 accelerators. Additionally this video card got an overworked power design as well as an ASUS huge triple slot cooler. This should therefore be both more powerful and more silent. This card can rely on 8-phases and to further improve reliability ASUS provided these different components like coils, capacitors, etc with an alloy which should keep them cooler and therefore improve the components lifespan. Another key component with this board is the DirectCu cooler which also is a design by ASUS and has been equipped with two 100mm fans. You also got five heatpipes with 8mm in diameter. - OcaHolic
Already impressed with what the GeForce GTX 550 Ti can do after looking at the MSI Cyclone edition, it's now time to see what Gainward brings to the table with its highly popular Golden Sample series. This is a series that's been popular for years and in recent times we've seen them come out hard and fast offering strong cooling solutions, but more importantly fantastic out of the box overclocks that have resulted in excellent performance gains over other models. When Gainward has chosen to throw the overclock tag on a model, especially the Golden Sample one, we know it means that it is going to be strong versus other companies who have done the same and then offered us a small 10MHz increase. - TweakTown
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 500 series Juggernaut is sinking deep into the market key business area, the mainstream where most money is made, with the newest GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics card. While the GeForce GTX 560 Ti launched last month rattled the gamer's sweet spot price range, and it's now up to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti to capture the sub-$200 market as the best option available. That is a huge task, in a market almost saturated with options. The $5 you paid to the toll-booth on your way to the hardware store could determine what graphics card you end up buying. This GeForce 550 Ti is technically somehow just a successor to the GeForce GTS 450, which was trailing a bit behind lately. - techPowerUp
Last week we were looking at AMD release a new card that manages to take top spot as the fastest graphics card currently on the market. From one extreme to another, we are checking out the new baby mid-range card from NVIDIA today in the GeForce GTX 550 Ti variant. And just like us though NVIDIA understands that $699 cards aren't for everyone, and really where the bread and butter is for these companies is the mid-range market, as that is what really sells. So the question is, how will this GeForce GTX 550 Ti be performing? Like most mid-range models lately, the NVIDIA partners have come out hard and fast with models that move away from the reference design with the one we're looking at today. - TweakTown
Well we have just released the newest version of NVIDIA BIOS Editor (NiBiTor) software. NiBiTor is the original and definitive BIOS tweaker that supports the latest NVIDIA graphics cards, and which is updated on a regular basis. NiBiTor allows graphics card enthusiasts, or the hardcore overclockers to have full control over some advanced features and functionality found on firmware of supporting cards. And doing so users gain some extra performance, enable certain hidden features, tweaking memory latencies, provide extensive information, adapt bootup settings, changing fan speed options and/or get extra stability on their NVIDIA based graphics accelerators which will just give them that little extra value.
With the GPU battle between the two major chip manufacturers now ramping up after NVIDIA played a little catch-up when AMD was the first company to market with their DirectX 11 graphics cards, things are now a lot different. For close to a year now, the ball has been bouncing back and forth between the two which has again split the market relatively in two. While things are a little different, with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 firmly in place as arguably the fastest single GPU card on the market. At this given time, the GeForce GTX 570 has rather been AMD's main rival for the Radeon HD 6970. Zotac was kind enough to provide a sample to verify the performance swing if pointing more to either companies. - TweakNews
As you might have noticed AMD launched their new Radeon HD 6990 today, and we were at hand to analyse firstly the reference board. We know that discerning readers want to see how two of these video cards perform in an dual CrossFireX configuration. As such we will be putting two of these Radeon HD 6990's through their paces across single screen and four screen configurations and comparing them against many of the mainstream boards available on the market today. We will show you how insanely fast are two of these cards when paired up but also how hot do these get. And can you live with this noise and how much power do they need. Quite a few thing we are keen to get some insights. - KitGuru
Having the fastest graphics card available can be quite a money spinner for AMD and NVIDIA, the kudos that comes from having just that top end card filters down through enthusiasts and word of mouth to sales in lower specification parts. And because of that, in past generations we have seen the sales swing backward and forward between these two manufacturers as their various architectures took the lead at one point or another. Then in the most recent generations we actually had something an little bit different, AMD had the fastest graphics card in form of the Radeon HD 5970 edition however NVIDIA had the fastest GPU with the GeForce GTX 580. Both could stake some claim to having the best. - HeavenMedia
It feels like it has been ages since we have tested a video card. Unfortunately we were then quick to realize that it has only been a little over a week, and became concerned that ten days felt like an eternity. To get back into the swing of things, though, we fired up the Raeon HD 6950 from MSI which has just gotten the Twin Frozr treatment. These Radeon HD 6900 series runs just a little warmer than the previous generation Radeon HD 5800 series, so it's good to see MSI attacks the model with the Twin Frozr cooler. Out of the box the focus has never been about a pre-overclock on this model instead it's been all about the cooling and making sure the core is running as cool as possible but not too loud. - TweakTown
Over the last month or so we have taken a look at a number of GeForce GTX 560 Ti models from various manufacturers and in the majority of cases we have been impressed. The stock GeForce GTX 560 Ti is a good card with great performance for the price and offers an nice entry into stereoscopic 3D and PhysX rendering. That said the reference design does have some stiff competition from the Radeon HD 6870 and more recently their Radeon HD 6950 with 1GB of memory. In order to make their product more attractive to the end user and sway them towards it most manufacturers release redesigned cards which improve on various aspects including the cooling solution and clock speed settings. - HeavenMedia
NiBiTor v6.03
