The water cooled graphics card isn't something that's exactly new, we've seen a lot of companies offer it over the past few years. BFG tends to go the more hard core route which involves people needing an existing water cooled setup within their case. Other companies go for the all-in-one solution. MSI did it not too long ago with the GeForce 9 series and we've also seen ECS release a dual pack which comes with two GeForce 9800 GTX+ cards. We have even seen some companies do it to AMD cards, but not for a while now, it seems. Today we're looking at one that comes from Zotac. It's an all-in-one system that's strapped to one of NVIDIA's highend cards, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ board. - TweakTown
We have has just released a new 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. Doing so users gain some extra performance, enable certain hidden features, tweak memory latencies, provide extensive information, adapt bootup settings, change fan speed options and/or get extra stability on the NVIDIA based graphics accelerators.
We have has just released a new 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. Doing so users gain some extra performance, enable certain hidden features, tweak memory latencies, provide extensive information, adapt bootup settings, change fan speed options and/or get extra stability on the NVIDIA based graphics accelerators.
We've never had the chance to look at a graphics card from Point of View before, but now is as good a time as any to start. When word came through that the first card the company would ever be sending to me would be the GeForce 9500 GT, we felt kind of sorry for them. Clearly they didn't read our original review of the GeForce 9500 GT from Leadtek. We made our thoughts pretty clear on the card, offering half the performance of the GeForce 9600 GSO but not half the price. This absolutely killed any form of value for money the product offered. Apart from being cheap, there wasn't really much else the card could offer, even if you were extremely tight when it came to the money side of things. - TweakTown
The Radeon HD 4870 has been quite the performer from the word go, but it's in our blood that we have the need for even more power. This is where overclocking comes into play. Today Palit has placed the Radeon HD 4870 under their Sonic naming scheme, which means we get a nice little out of the box overclock. Palit hasn't just bumped the clock speeds up though, they've also decided to change it by removing the boring reference cooler that we've been seeing for so long and adding their own design. Before we check out the cooler and the clocks the new Radeon HD 4870 Sonic from Palit offers, we'll quickly take the time to have a look at the package to see if there's anything to get excited about. - TweakTown
Sapphire's Toxic branding means factory overclocks, custom cooling and win. And Toxic is exactly what Radeon HD 4850 needed. Despite outstanding, downright cheap gaming performance, there were still some subtle drawbacks to the Radeon HD 4850's out there. Semi drawback, they were all the same. People who build their own computers want them to be unique. The aftermarket thrives on tweakers' desire to have the most unique machine, something that reflects the effort that's gone into putting together a PC from scratch. Because the Radeon HD 4850 is a great card that pretty much everyone agrees on, it's also mundane. Which is part of why Toxic is so popular and not just hardware. - TechLounge
When we looked at the GeForce 9800 GTX+ for the first time the other week, the ASUS TOP version did impress us to a degree. As mentioned in our article, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is pretty much an overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX, while an overclocked GTX+ is just an extremely overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX card. The thing is though, ultimately at the price point we had and the performance we got, it does offer some very good performance in its price bracket. There's no denying that people aren't getting too excited about it. It feels last gen now, it's similar to AMD dropping the price of the Radeon HD 3870 through the floor, it represents some great value but no one really cares about it at the moment. - TweakTown
The NVIDIA GeForce 9 generation features a couple of low-cost cards, among which you will find the GeForce 9600 GSO. This card is positioned above the GeForce 9500 GT but it sells at a price similar, or a bit lower than the GeForce 9600 GT. We've seen many new cards this month, but many of those were just rebranded old stuff. Sadly, the GeForce 9600 GSO is not an exception to that rule as this card is nothing but the old GeForce 8800 GS with a fancy new name. Many of you probably never heard of the GeForce 8800 GS, as only a couple of partners such as ASUS and XFX incorporated it into their offer. Though now the rebranded GeForce 9600 GSO is more widely available. - FudZilla
Gainward has been an NVIDIA partner for a long time, but as it tends to happen in the IT industry. things do change from time to time. As of recently Gainward decided to join the red team, as well, and as we could notice, it has done it very well. It is as such the first time that Gainward went for the red team but not as such for the full red design which we are quite used to from them. But yes, Gainward is now playing on both horses which is a nice change. They will still keep to their NVIDIA range but expand their products further via the latest ATI line-up. Today, we take a quick look at Gainward's first non reference ATI card, the Radeon HD 4850 Golden Sample version. - FudZilla
It was only going to be a matter of time till ASUS strapped some mean clocks onto the GeForce GTX 280 and put it under its TOP naming scheme. Well, that day has come and it's time to see what happens when the GeForce GTX 280 gets, for the most part, an unnecessary but much loved speed bump. The tumbling GeForce GTX 280 prices over the past few weeks make the card more and more affordable for people wanting to get a top gaming experience. While we all know that for the most part the new AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the faster single card on the market, NVIDIA still hold the crown of the fastest single cored card, which is surely a great plus on the market. - TweakTown
Earlier this week with the release of the Catalyst 8.8 driver we were first to deliver Linux CrossFire benchmarks for the Radeon HD 4800 series along with the first Overdrive for Linux article. With our initial CrossFire for Linux article we had delivered benchmarks from the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870, now though we are delivering the first Radeon HD 4870 X2 benchmarks under Ubuntu Linux. In this article we have our hands on the VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB graphics card, and we will once again run our usual programs to see how it performs. This means to get the Catalyst drivers running on Linux and get some games to deliver their gaming performance. - Phonorix
Now that the Radeon HD 4850 has been hanging around for a bit, we're beginning to see more and more companies jump on the aftermarket bandwagon. The latest company to do this is Palit, bringing the highly popular Radeon HD 4850 to the also highly popular Sonic line. The Radeon HD 4850 has had so much going for it from the word go, its aggressive pricing and excellent performance gave users everything they wanted. It wasn't all rosy, though, while the use of a single slot cooler was handy, it caused the card to run extremely hot. This isn't the first time we've mentioned this, it doesn't mean we don't want it to run cooler. Along with overclocking the card, Palit have strapped a new cooler on. - TweakTown
An important victory, we must say, and no, we're not talking about the Beijing olympic games, but rather the heavyweight graphics category. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is currently the fastest graphics card on the planet. We are showing the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 card, packing two powerful RV770 graphics processors running in CrossFire mode on one PCB. That's why X2 found its place in the name of the card, and note that this is a multi-GPU card. The product we have in front of us is called the R700, it runs great, and the results speak for themselves. The GeForce GTX 280 is finally dethroned, and NVIDIA definitely has to do something about it, as we're sure they will. - FudZilla
Just when we thought we would no longer receive any more GeForce 9600 GT's because we figured we'd have checked just about every single one on the market, ASUS has decided to run around and release a new one. The particular card we're looking at today is part of the Republic of Gamers collection, which is something we tend to see more in the motherboard department. It makes a lot of sense, though, that ASUS are going to expand this popular naming scheme out to more than just motherboards. This new card comes to us as the Extreme N9600 GT Matrix. Matrix is also something we haven't heard of from ASUS before, so it will be interesting to see if they're starting new lines. - TweakTown
What's so great about the TOP line-up from ASUS is that they don't get a card and just add an extra 10MHz to the core and 20MHz to the memory, the TOP line-up of cards are really well overclocked cards that stand out from the competition. That latest card to carry the TOP name comes from the AMD team, the Radeon HD 4870 has quickly become a hot product for so many people thanks to the aggressive performance and even more aggressive price tag. Today we'll be checking out how the ASUS overclocked version goes against a stock clocked offering and see if it's worth paying the premium that the TOP cards carry to get the larger out of the box clocks. - TweakTown
We've repeatedly stated that AMD would offer high-end CrossFire multi-GPU solutions. In fact, AMD has a single GPU competitor only to oppose NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, the cheapest card in the series. We're talking about Radeon HD 4870, the fastest single GPU solution of the Radeon HD 4800 series. The company itself mentioned on many occasions that it was going to manufacture single GPU graphics cards for mid-end and lower high-end segments, and offer dual-GPU solutions for the top segment. First of all, it was planned to oppose GeForce GTX 280 with CrossFire configurations based on two separate Radeon HD 4850 or Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. - Digit-Life
Not being able to think of a better sentence, we think NVIDIA shit in their pants when AMD released the Radeon HD 4850 at the price they did. The performance of AMD's little card certainly raised the standard for a medium-end card and NVIDIA swiftly reacted by announcing the GeForce 9800 GTX+ GPU which is, simply put a die shrunked and overclocked version of the GeForce 9800 GTX. This 55nm GPU runs at stock speeds of 738MHz for the core and 1836MHz for shaders. With us today, we have Zotac’s AMP! edition of the card which is a term that Zotac uses for their overclocked cards. Zotac has upped the core clock to 756MHz, shaders to 1890MHz while memory runs at 2300MHz. - t-break
The other day we looked at the smooth creations asylum and inside was the new Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black edition. This isn't your normal overclocked Radeon HD 4870, though. If you have a look at the specifications on the thing, you will quickly discover that the card is packing some mega serious clock speeds. So what we've done is pull the card out of the smooth creations rig and install it into our testbed to see how the card performs against some of our other favorites. Since this wasn't a retail sample, we won't be looking at the package today. What we will do is have a quick look around the card and then check out the clock speeds and of course the gaming performance. - TweakTown
AMD's Radeon HD 4800 series brought high-end performance to the mainstream price points and sparked a heated round of price-cuts from NVIDIA, thereby repositioning its products more competitively. Then, just yesterday, AMD went for the jugular with the launch of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB card that trounced a GeForce GTX 280 when evaluated with respect to ultra high resolution gaming. Our performance comparison showed that NVIDIA's partners would need to release a heavily overclocked GeForce GTX 280 to come close to competing for the crown of fastest single board graphics card. So we trotted out BFG's OCX version, to see if it could make a dent into the twin-GPU from AMD. - Hexus
We've seen more GeForce 9600 GT cards than we would like to honestly admit. The bottom line is, though, that the card does offer some excellent value for money and if you don't have the budget to buy new high-end cards like the Radeon HD 4870 or GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260, the GeForce 9600 GT still remains a very good option. Today we're going to take the time to check out the latest GeForce 9600 GT incarnation from ECS and see what it has to offer over the competition. In a time where bundles and overclocks separate brands, we see if the latest version from ECS can stand out. Now let's get straight into the package from ECS and see what it offers. - TweakTown
NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 series of graphics cards, that launched about 60 days prior to the publishing of this article, have undergone a significant price reduction since they first debuted. At the time, NVIDIA flexed its GPU muscle with a high-end, single GPU graphics design that their primary competition could only compete with by throwing two GPU's at the problem. As such, NVIDIA initially priced their flagship GeForce GTX 280 at a significant premium, meaning $649 upon its introduction on launch day. Would you believe us, if we told you back then, that these cards would be selling for $200 dollars less in only about two months time? You can believe it today. - HotHardware
Although AMD took the hardware community by surprise with the performance of the RV770, and NVIDIA immediately turned around and slashed the prices on its own models, determined to win this round of the ongoing graphics card war. AMD is not out just to make waves with the gamers looking for value. It also wants to reclaim a crown it lost a long time ago to NVIDIA's last two generations of large, monolithic programmable graphics architectures. As a means to that end, the company is putting a pair of its most impressive GPU's on a single PCB and calling it the Radeon HD 4870 X2. Does the new board have the muscle to take on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280, the single fastest card? - Tom's Hardware
It is hard to turn around and say that the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is one of the most anticipated cards of recent times, due to the plain fact that there have been so many cards released over the last three months. While some had thought that the new Radeon HD 4870 would become the fastest single card solution on the market, the price AMD launched the card at gave indication that the chances were going to be pretty slim. Fast forward a few months and we've got a new card that sits at around the same price of the GeForce GTX 280. And it's packing two Radeon HD 4870 cores on a single PCB, the same core and memory speed as its single card and a whole bunch of extra performance. - TweakTown
The dominance of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 didn't last very long as AMD quickly released the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 and more recently the Radeon HD 4870 X2 which we checked yesterday. However, as normal with most NVIDIA partners overclocked cards have started to come out and a few of them show some promise. It is quite typical from NVIDIA to soon after the initial release of their new series to grant their partners to bring out pre-overclocked versions. This is just what makes the market so interesting and variable. Today we'll be looking at the ASUS GeForce GTX 260 TOP edition which is one of this cards that comes overclocked out of the box. - AMDZone
The Radeon HD 4850 is the card that has put AMD back on the graphics card map over the past month. While the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 were both good cards, a constant line-up of NVIDIA cards along with price drops meant that the aging technology was having trouble keeping up with cards not only in a similar price bracket, but cheaper again. The Radeon HD 4850 though, has brought performance computing to the masses at a good price, which is what the market wants. The Radeon HD 4870, while more expensive is still at an extremely competitive price point. The latest Radeon HD 4850 to come into the labs is from Gigabyte and we are looking into its performance. - TweakTown
The Hydro Copper 16 is an overclocked and water cooled GeForce GTX 280 card partly named by the large copper block that replaced reference cooling. Water cooling is the most efficient way to cool the GPU chip, and we all know that appropriate cooling will lengthen your card's life. However, due to complexity of production water cooling isn't at all cheap, so water cooled cards were always something special. The EVGA Hydro Copper 16 isn't an exception to that rule, as it costs $629. Since a water block for the GeForce GTX 280 will set you back $125, and the Hydro Copper 16's price is not too high compared to their EVGA e-GeForce GTX 280 FTW version card with reference cooling. - FudZilla
NiBiTor v4.5a
We have has just released a new 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. Doing so users gain some extra performance, enable certain hidden features, tweak memory latencies, provide extensive information, adapt bootup settings, change fan speed options and/or get extra stability on the NVIDIA based graphics accelerators.
