To quote from The Register review on the AMD Phenom 9500, “It seems that 2008 is not going to be a good year for AMD”. Doesn’t sound to positive for the already in trouble AMD does it?
The Register have done a fantastic and lengthy review on the Phenom 9500, and though they liked it they said “AMD’s Phenom squares up for a fight with the Intel Core 2 Quad, but comes out with the bruises…” It means that if you are an AMD fanboy, you might want to wait till AMD can refine this processor class a little. They did give it a decent 75% rating, but I got a feeling it is more out of pity, then the processor itself. At least the new ATI’s are good.
For more info, click over to The Register.
One of the things that is always using more and more power as time goes on is your video card. There are even dedicated power supplies made especially for the purpose of powering your behemoth configurations. Didn’t the graphics card industry get the memo? We are suppose to be aiming to use less power!
That is exactly what ATI aim to do with a new Hybrid Crossfire system. The concept is very simple, when you don’t need high end gaming graphics, the top end card will be disabled, therefore saving power. When you need that power again it is there for the taking.
This concept has been done previously on Sony Vaio notebooks, with the ability to disable the addon Nvidia video card, and use the onboard Intel card. Difference this time, is it seems it is made for desktops and more focused at the people who want to lower the power bill for those PC’s (like mine) that are left on all the time.
ATI has shown off its capability to PC Perspective, with a test system containing a 2.2GHz Phenom processor, a RS780 (never heard of it) integrated graphics chipset and a RV620-based card labeled HD Radeon 3450. The configuration was quite impressive with frame rates of 30-35fps for Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3, which then jumped to around 55fps when hybrid mode was enabled.
AMD are aiming for a 2008 release, with the initial batch of hybrid CrossFire-capable cards to be priced around $50. It is not yet known whether it will be available in notebooks, but my magic 8 ball says the chances are good.
For more info, click over to the Engadget Blog.
I don’t care who win this whole ATI/AMD Vs Intel battle (Intel is killing them at the moment), as long as it is ATI/AMD. Their newest weapon, which is more focused at Nvidia, is the Mobile Radeon 2700. It features 120 stream processors and a 128-bit memory bus, making it a competitor for the M8600 from Nvidia (I thought the HD2600 was the competitor for the M8600?). No one other then Fujitsu seems to have picked it up, but there really hasn’t been an official announcement so only time will tell. It will be interesting to see what the performance gains over the 2600 are, and if anyone actually makes a notebook featuring it. Good luck ATI.
For more info, click over to the Inquirer Website.
I have to say I feel sorry for anyone who just forked out for a new video card, because you can guarantee that in the next couple of weeks there are going to be big changes. It was only a few days ago that AMDATI did the big HD 3800 series release and there is already news of a HD 2600 series replacement.
The new series, which you could have guessed already, will be titled the HD 3600 series, and will come in 2 flavors. The first having 512 MB of DDR2 (they still make that stuff?) and the second will be a 256 MB DDR3 version. It isn’t known yet if they will keep the old branding of XT and Pro, but considering the introduction of the 3850 and 3870, I would guess them to be the 3650 and 3670. The new series will based on the ‘RV635′ GPU and will support DirectX 10.1.
Apart from that, there is also talk of a 2400 series replacement (I guess the 3400).
For more info, click over to The Register Website.
It wasn’t long ago, in the scheme of things, that ATI released their HD 2000 series of video cards that brought in a budget DirectX 10 era, and now that have pushed a new product to the budget buyer, the HD 3800 series.
The series will come in 2 flavors, the HD 3850 and 3870, which main difference’s are DDR3 on the 3850 and DDR4 on the 3870. Otherwise, both cards support full 10.1, are built on the - world’s first - 55nm manufacture process, 666 million transistors, run on PCI Express 2.0 and the list just goes on. There is a million things to read about it, and there is no better place to read it then at the Reg Hardware Website.
Now to what the rest of us are after, the benchmarks. It is hard to say currently (different on every site), even though it is no limit to the amount of reviews already found around the net, but currently it sits around the HD 2900 series mark. Not bad when you consider the cards are going to sell for around the $US150-200 range.
It seems that AMDATI have gone all out on this offering, and it looks like it could do well. We will have to wait and see what NVidia have lying in wait before we give it the crown, but I personally have to say that this would be the next video card I put in my system.
For more info, click over to the Engadget Blog, or for a list of reviews, go to the DailyTech Website.
For the loyal AMD fanboys out there it may be time for that long awaited PC upgrade. Your favourite Athlons (and Semprons) are getting a price drop of up to 27.5%. The bigger drops were on the single core processors, which ranged from 22.4 per cent to 27.5 per cent, while the dual cores were between 6.2 per cent and 12.4 per cent. As well as the drops a whole range of new processors were added to the ever growing list of Athlons. I won’t list them, but if you go to The Register page they have a hell of a lot more info.
For the whole story, go to The Register.
So you just read the news on the 2900PRO? That is a little old now, with the news of the ATI 2950 Pro being released on 19 November. What has changed since the old 2900 series? Well it will now support Direct X 10.1, Shader Model 4.0 and PCI Express 2.0 (twice as much bandwidth then PCIeX 1.1). They are also talking about updates to the 2400 and 2600 series, so that they support DX10.1 as well, with supposed release days of early 2008. Sounds like I’m holding off on the new PC again.
For a lot more info, dance over to the Reg Hardware Website.