AMD 9950 unpacking

I found it on youtube for someone who wonder is there a heat sink in 9950 black edition.

How ATI stole Christmas

Yesterday we talked about Nvidia's Christmas lineup, bargains, or rather lack of them, here. Today it's ATI's turn, and things are looking good for the Canadian outfit, although considering what it's up against, this is hardly a surprise.

Let's start cheap and work our way up the ladder. At €33+ you can get the HD4350, while HD4550 prices start at €46. Don't let the numbers fool you, both are based on the RV710 core and differ in memory size and type (256 MB DDR2 vs. 512MB DDR3). While we can recommend the HD4350 for undemanding users, or HTPC builders, the HD4550 doesn't look like a good deal. Here's the catch, for just seven euros more you can get the HD4650, an RV730 card with 512MB of DDR2. The DDR3 version of the RV730, branded HD4670, costs €69.

In the same price range you'll find ATI's top value card of yesteryear, the HD3850. The cheapest one comes from MSI, and sells for €56. It's overclocked, but has just 256MB of memory. If you need more, you can get Sapphire's HD3850 with 512MB card for €69. HD3870 cards sell for €87+, and non-reference versions still cost over €100. Nvidia's G92 based 8800/9800GT cards have slipped into this price range, not to mention the HD4830, and both offer better performance. An overclocked dual GPU HD3870 X2 from MSI costs €174. It still packs quite a punch, and the price is reasonable.

So much for the RV670, let's move on to Nvidia's nemesis, ATI's RV770 based cards. The lineup starts with the HD4830, probably the best bang for buck card on the market at the moment. The cheapest ones come from HIS and Sapphire, and sell for €99. In our tests the HD4830 managed to outperform an overclocked 9800GT, not to mention the old HD3870, so even this crippled RV770 card packs quite a punch. As for the HD4850, it currently sells for €122+, a fair price, while the cheapest HD4870 costs €189. The latter seems a bit overpriced, especially following Nvidia's revamp of the GTX260 216 and the launch of new 180 Forceware drivers.

The R700 was never meant to be a budget card, but in recent weeks it's gone up in price, not down. Thank the weak euro and the bankers who led us straight into a recession for that. The cheapest one now costs €418, whereas three months ago it was selling for €30 less. The good news is that someone in ATI finally realized that the HD4850 X2 has potential, and what's more, they also realized that it can't be sold for €350. This, along with the two month delay, was the trouble with this rare card from the start. It was supposed to be a more sensible version of the R700, but it ended up costing almost as much as the regular one. Not anymore. As of today you can get the HD4850 X2 for €271 and it's finally starting to make sense.

ATI truly managed to steal Christmas this year, from the low-end, through the mid-range, all the way to the top, it dominates the market with affordable, yet powerful products. A year ago, Nvidia couldn't even meet demand for its G92 based cards, forcing ATI to fight for scraps, but the tables have turned and we can only hope Nvidia makes a comeback soon

AMD 7000 series

The new CPUs are part of the Athlon X2 product family, but carry a new 7000-series number sequence. The 7750 and 7550 (available to OEMs only) depart from the old 65 nm (K8) Brisbane core and use the “Kuma” core, which is based on the K10 or Stars architecture (the K10 name does not officially exist, according to AMD.) Built in 65 nm, the chips are released more than half a year after their initially planned release and offer clock speeds of 2.5 and 2.7 GHz. Like the preceding Brisbane core, Kuma comes with 128 KB L1 data cache, 128 KB L1 instruction cache and 1 MB L2 cache. However, Kuma adds 2 MB L3 cache – Brisbane CPUs do not integrate L3 cache.


The Athlon X2 7750 is currently listed with a tray-price of $79, just above the $76 the company charges for its Athlon X2 6000. With a quick look over to Intel, the same $79 would not be enough to buy you a Core 2 Duo-class processor. Intel currently sells the Pentium Dual-Core E2220 (2.4 GHz, 65 nm) for $74 and the E5200 (2.5 GHz, 45 nm) for $84. The cheapest Core 2 Duo, the E7200, lists for $113.

AMD Phenom II listings begin to appear, priced at sub-£200

Today, a pair of those Phenom II processors have appeared on the pages of UK-based etailer MoreComputers.com. According to its product listings, Phenom II will arrive in two models - a 2.8GHz Phenom II 920 and a 3.0GHz Phenom II 940 Black Edition, priced at £190.65 and £231.32, respectively.

The 920 and 940 nomenclature may seem strangely familiar, but the quad-core Phenom II won't be challenging Intel's Core i7 in the performance stakes, we feel. Instead, it'll attempt to put AMD back in the desktop race with a set of affordable mid-range chips that should at the very least challenge Intel's ageing Core 2 range.

There may still be no win in sight for AMD, though. Should Phenom II pose a threat, we'd expect Intel to respond with a slight swipe at its Core 2 pricing. Either way, the competition should result in well-priced mid-range processors for the masses.

Readers should also be aware that MoreComputers' prices are anything but definitive, and that the etailer doesn't offer any pre-sales or post-sales technical support whatsoever. Although the listings appear to be about right in our estimation, official pricing and availability won't be known until AMD lets it slip.

Source : www.hexus.net

Windows 7 to offer DirectX acceleration without a GPU

What would happen if you created a software wrapper that allowed a system without a graphics card to render DirectX 10 visuals on a CPU?

The folks at Microsoft decided to find out and development WARP10 (Windows Advanced Rasterisation Platform 10), a software component to be used in Windows 7.

WARP10, a software rasteriser, allows for DirectX rendering to take place on the CPU, allowing users to take advantage of DirectX functionality when a GPU isn't present. The idea itself isn't anything new, and despite being able to achieve its goal, performance is severely limited.

GPUs have the distinct advantage of dedicated graphics architecture, and features such as texturing units aren't available on today's CPUs. Similarly, a CPU's available bandwidth is far lower than that of a high-end graphics card.

Nonetheless, Microsoft found that WARP10 was able to run DirectX applications such as Crysis - a demanding 3D game - without any GPU at all. Highlighting the strain set upon the CPU, however, are the performance results. At a low resolution of 800x600, the high-end 3GHz Intel Core i7 processor managed an average FPS of only 7.36 - higher than Intel's integrated graphics, mind you, but still far too low to worry any dedicated graphics card.

Hardware	Ave FPS	Min FPS	Max FPS
Core i7 8 Core @ 3.0GHz	7.36	3.46	15.01
Penryn 4 Core @ 3.0GHz	5.69	2.49	10.95
Penryn 2 Core @ 3.0GHz	3.48	1.35	6.61
Phenom 9550 4 Core @ 2.2GHz	3.01	0.53	5.46
NVIDIA 8800 GTS	84.80	60.78	130.83
NVIDIA 8400 GS	33.89	21.22	51.82
ATI 3400	37.18	22.97	59.77
Intel DX10 Integrated	5.17	1.74	16.22

So, if its performance is so severely limited, what exactly is its purpose? Well, there are a few suggestions floating about. The first is that WARP10 will allow Microsoft to make its Windows 7 requirements a whole lot simpler, as a GPU may no longer be required in order to attach the "Windows 7 Capable" sticker.

There could be simpler uses, too. What would a user do if a dedicated GPU in a system were to fail? With WARP10, there's a fallback, and a user could continue to use the system without the GPU. There's a problem with this theory, though. WARP10 might take over graphics responsibilities without kicking up much of a fuss, but it'd need a video output in order to do so - that would be found on the integrated graphics or the dedicated card.

Source : www.hexus.net

NVIDIA's GPGPU ambition coming to fruition?

Soft Body demo

The Great Kulu, a tech demo by Kenneth Bugeja, demonstrates the use of soft-body PhysX technology in a real game play environment and is based on the UT3 3D-Engine.

The demo focuses on the behaviour of a soft-and-squishy creature, along with its torn pieces. It's all simulated on the GPU with the aid of PhysX and uses no pre-scripted animation.

Despite the promise of a "real game play" test, readers should be aware that the Soft Body demo is tailored to demonstrate the value of NVIDIA's PhysX technology. The advantage of PhysX in real-world gaming titles may vary.

No real surprises here, and as you'd expect, the demo achieves a far greater rate of frames per second when the GPU - as opposed to the CPU - is asked to do the PhysX calculations.

What's interesting is that at high detail, the raw power and throughput of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 is able to offer a 70 per cent increase in performance when compared to PhysX running on a 3.2GHz quad-core CPU.

Source www.hexus.net

Jasper Found in the Wild: 65nm Xbox 360s are Appearing

After entirely too long, Jasper has finally been discovered in the wild. As we originally predicted back in early October, the first Jaspers were identified by being labeled 12.1A on the 12V rail. Somewhat surprisingly, the first ones discovered also came with a 150W PSU. We of course knew this would happen eventually, but many believed that early Jaspers would use left over 175W PSUs. It's still possible there are some Jaspers floating around labeled as 14.2A and including a 175W PSU that were simply never recognized for what they were. Also as predicted, the Jasper motherboard featured a new PSU power connector that prevents using a newer, less powerful power supply on an older Xbox that needs more power. This information wasn't confirmation enough for some, but no doubt remained after one was finally dissected. One other interesting tidbit is the inclusion of 256MB of on-board flash, allowing Microsoft to forgo the memory card for Arcade systems and also to preload NXE without a hard drive.

So far it appears that lot number 0842 from team FDOU or CSON and 0843 FDOU have been confirmed Jasper. Unfortunately, the somewhat confusing bit is that some of these same lot numbers have also been confirmed to be Falcon. Clearly, we are in the midst of a transition period, so there are still no guarantees based on external box markings. If you get a console labeled 12.1A on the 12V rail and comes with a 150W PSU, you can be assured that you have a Jasper-based console.

I would like to reiterate that Microsoft will likely never comment officially on Jasper or any other Xbox 360 revision, so don't waste your time trying to contact them. Along the same lines, your average retail employee is not going to have a clue what you're talking about if you ask, so don't bother.

It may take a few weeks for these to become more common - I still can't find one locally myself, and it would be a total crap shoot ordering online. So the hunt continues around here. We'll have our own dissection and analysis as soon as we can get our hands on one. And if you're hunting for one yourself, post all of your findings in the official thread in the AnandTech Forums.