Sapphire Radeon HD5750 Vapor-X Review November 18th, 2009 in Graphics Technology
Bottom of the DirectX 11 range in price, but not in features, the HD5750 has a lot to offer the HTPC and casual gamer. Equipped with Sapphire's Vapor-X cooler, join Rage3D as we look at how the HD 5750 fits in your media-centric lifestyle.
ATI Radeon HD5970 Video Card Review November 18th, 2009 in Graphics Technology
Another day, another ATI GPU launch - AMD is getting good at this! Today marks the launch of AMD's new GPU product codenamed Hemlock. Join us as we take a look at it to see if its worth your hard-earned cash!
Sapphire Radeon HD5850 1GB Review November 10th, 2009 in Graphics Technology
Sapphire's Radeon HD5850 represents AMD ATI's second Cypress GPU; is it a few compute units short of a MAD MUL or does it sum up to a great price-point performer?
Sapphire Radeon HD5870 Vapor-X Review November 3rd, 2009 in Graphics Technology
Rage3D reviews Sapphire's Vapor-X edition HD5870 and has some fun with Crossfire-X - 'HD5900' style.
The guys over at DriverHeaven spoke to AMD about the recent HD 5000 shortages.
For the last few weeks we have been fielding our readers concerns about a shortage of HD5000 series cards, particularly the 5850, 5870 and the new 5890 - all of which have won top awards at DriverHeaven.
We managed to have a chat with one of the top men in AMD, John Byrne - Vice President of Worldwide GPU and CPU sales. We brought up the point that many enthusiasts can still not get a hold of one of their new mid to high end 5000 series cards.
Filename: GPU-Z.0.3.7.exe
MD5 Hash: BCF5465EF1035D3067BEA9604BD08E57 ...
GPU-Z is a lightweight utility designed to give you all information about your video card and GPU.
Please note: Some versions of McAfee Antivirus report a "Generic!Artemis" infection. This is a McAfee specific false positive, GPU-Z is not infected with any virus/trojan.
Revision History
0.3.7
Added Infotips for sensors
Fixed crash when ATI ULPS CrossFire enabled
Added full support for ATI HD 5970 (Hemlock)
Added full support for NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 (GT215)
Added "ULPS active" note to CrossFire status when ULPS active
Fixed overclocks via CCC not showing correctly
Added checkboxes to show availability of CUDA, PhysX, OpenCL and DirectX Compute
Improved memory type detection for GT 216, GT 218
Added voltage monitoring support for HD 5770
Disconnected fan now shows correctly in sensors (when detectable via hardware)
Improved accuracy of ATI GPU load monitoring
Added detection for ATI RV380/RV530 cards relabeled to NVIDIA 9400/9500/9600 GT
Added support for NVIDIA 9300 SE, NVS450, GT 240, GTS 250M, G102M
Added support for Intel G41
From the AMD @ Play blog, HD 5970 Product Manager Dave Nekechuk details the features and design behind the world's fastest graphics card.
We recently announced the ATI Radeon™ HD 5970, the fastest graphics card on the planet1. It’s been an exciting few months with our launch of the first DirectX 11 capable graphics cards, still the only cards in the world to support gaming over three monitors enabled with ATI Eyefinity Technology. This time around, we’re spicing up ultrahigh-end PC gaming with a massive jump in raw performance.
It has really been a huge privilege to be the product manager for the ATI Radeon HD 5970 since we get to work with some of the best hardware and software engineers in the industry and everyone’s been enthusiastically working around the clock to get this product out to you guys. One of the unique facets of this project was that we weren’t necessarily designing towards a strict product definition, but instead had the freedom to go a little wild in overdesigning and over-engineering this board to create something that can overclock like crazy.2 Why did we do this? Let me give you a little glimpse of this monster in the making…
AMD have updated their gorgeous Ladybug and Mecha DirectX11 demonstrations of depth of field and order independent transparency to version 1.1.
We've just posted an update to both of those DX11 demos (mecha and ladybug).
We've finally gotten rid of the login requirement to download them. And this version 1.1 has some nice updates including educational and camera free flight modes. I think you'll particularly dig the OIT educational part where we've highlighted some good slow motion side-by-side comparisons to the legacy approach to OIT.
There's also support for the other 5000 series cards and now for Vista along with Win7 (of course vista requires pretty much every sp and update available to get to the DX11 capability).
Source - David Hoff, AMD Advanced Technology Initiatives Director
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it intends to commence an offering, subject to market and other conditions, of $500 million aggregate principal amount of senior notes in a private offering. AMD intends to use the proceeds, along with existing cash, to purchase its 5.75% Convertible Senior Notes due 2012 validly tendered pursuant to the company’s tender offer for such notes, which was also announced today. Net proceeds not used in the tender offer, if any, will be used for general corporate purposes.
The new senior notes have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or applicable state securities laws, and will be offered only to qualified institutional buyers in reliance on Rule 144A and in offshore transactions pursuant to Regulation S under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Unless so registered, the new senior notes may not be offered or sold in the United States except pursuant to an exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act and applicable state securities laws.
This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state.
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it will redeem all outstanding principal amount of its 7.75% Senior Notes due 2012 (the “Notes”) on December 18, 2009. The notice of redemption will be mailed to the holders of the Notes on November 18, 2009.
Questions regarding the redemption should be directed to Wells Fargo Bank, National Association, the trustee under the indenture governing the Notes, at Wells Fargo Bank, National Association, Corporate Trust Services, 707 Wilshire Boulevard, 17th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90017.
As of this week NVIDIA has brought their 3D Vision to the mobile world. They have announced, in conjunction with ASUS, the world’s first mobile 3D Vision capable laptop. This is based off of the G51 line up and will be dubbed the G51J-3D. To do this ASUS has packed a 120Hz 15.6-inch LCD screen that is capable of handling the 3D Vision. But that is not all this new laptop brings to the table, it also has a Core i7 720QM (1.6GHz) processor under the hood along with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a GTX 260 (1GB DDR3).
But just adding 3D Vision to a mobile platform is not enough. We talked with NVIDIA and found out a few things that are interesting to say the least. Traditionally, NV has offered 3D Vision with a single set of glasses; this had made it appear to be a single user product only. Now we find that not only is NV aware that this has greater potential (3D movies at home anyone?) for multiple viewers, but they are working on bundles that include more than one pair of glasses with the RF transmitter. They are also working on a new pricing structure for this (although no details were given at this time).
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it commenced a cash tender offer for up to $1,000,000,000 in aggregate principal amount of its outstanding 5.75% Convertible Senior Notes due 2012 (the “notes”). AMD intends to finance the purchase of the notes tendered in the tender offer with the net proceeds from the closing of AMD’s private offering of $500,000,000 aggregate principal amount of senior notes due 2017 (the “New Notes Offering”), which was separately announced by AMD today, and from the receipt of the $1.25 billion cash payment (the “Settlement Payment”) from Intel Corporation pursuant to the Company’s recently announced settlement agreement with Intel.
Bottom of the DirectX 11 range in price, but not in features, the HD5750 has a lot to offer the HTPC and casual gamer. Equipped with Sapphire's Vapor-X cooler, join Rage3D as we look at how the HD 5750 fits in your media-centric lifestyle.
European Commission is guilty of bad administration with the Intel trial.
LONDON — The European Ombudsman, Nikiforos Diamandouros, has gone public in saying he has found the European Commission Competition Directorate guilty of maladministration on one count in a complaint brought by Intel Corp. However, the ruling is unlikely to alter case.
Some simple soldering will remove one of the crippling effects of Microsoft's update.
Microsoft came down with fire and fury upon the unsuspecting modding community. Where past rounds of bans has typically been limited to a couple thousand users, this time it kicked off over 1 million Xbox Live users. Microsoft detected modified drive firmware and installed an update on the banned consoles, bricking them.
As Windows 2000 was being developed in the second half of the 1990s, Microsoft was firmly focused on building in as much functionality as possible, in a play to push Novell Netware aside and establish Windows NT as the operating system for the business world. When NT was released to manufacturing ten years ago, it was well-received by reviewers, businesses, and enthusiasts alike, and for much of the decade the OS has been considered by some to be the pinnacle of Windows releases. Its headline business features—Active Directory, Group Policy, Internet Information Services, Management Console, Windows Management Instrumentation—have become industry standards. But most importantly, Windows NT served as the technological basis for what can fairly be described as the most successful and well-known software product of all time: Windows XP.
A new system uses an entangled two-qubit quantum gate alongside a single-qubit gate to create a quantum computer that can perform virtually any operation.
Scientists have developed a number of quantum computing systems that use ions or electrons as bits of data; mathematical "operations" can be performed on them with beams of light or electrical pulses. Until recently, however, these systems could only perform the specific tasks they were designed to do. But a group of NIST scientists have published a description of a quantum processor that can receive virtually any set of instructions and perform them on a set of inputs—in short, they've made the first programmable quantum processor.
Another day, another ATI GPU launch - AMD is getting good at this! Today marks the launch of AMD's new GPU product codenamed Hemlock. Join us as we take a look at it to see if its worth your hard-earned cash!
MANHASSET, NY — Intel Capital has invested a total approximately $25 million in seven companies ranging from developing cloud computing infrastruture to enabling Chinese web portals.
At the 10th annual CEO Summit Intel announced invetsments in Joyent, Active Storage Crucialtec, Gudeng Precision Industrial Co., V-cube, Phoenix New Media and NeuString.
Joyent, Inc. (Sausalito, Calif.) provides cloud computing infrastructure and services.
Active Storage (Los Angeles) provides a media storage platform for Apple-based infrastructures.
Crucialtec (Cheon-Ahn City, Korea) is a manufacturer of specialized input devices that utilize optical technology for mobile devices.
Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (Taipei, Taiwan) is a semiconductor front-end equipment manufacturer.
V-Cube (Tokyo) develops and markets Web-based videoconferencing systems.
NeuString (Dubai, UAE) delivers predictive analytics software and consulting services to mobile network operators.
Phoenix New Media (Beijing) provides dedicated portals to Chinese audiences.
At the CEO Summit Intel Capital also highlighted 10 new follow-on deals witht he following companies: picoChip, Vostu, Safend, China Digital Video Limited, Verisilicon Holdings, Financial Information Network & Operations Pvt. Ltd., Wortal, Inc., Sendmail and Zend Technologies.
Intel Capital also recently announced a $50 million investment in Clearwire.
The CEO Summit, in its 10th anniversary year, is held through Wednesday and hosts more than 600 CEOs from Intel Capital's investment portfolio companies and executives from some of the largest Global 2000 companies.
AMD has released the latest version of its Catalyst driver package.
Hi,
We have just released ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux platforms on http://www.amd.com
Highlights of the ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 Windows release include:
New Features
GPU Acceleration of H.264 video content using Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta
This release of ATI Catalyst™ supports the new Hardware Acceleration features of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta for video encoded in the H.264 format. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth video playback, reduce system resource utilization, and preserve battery life. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta is expected to be available for download from Adobe Labs (labs.adobe.com) before the end of the year. This feature is supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5800, ATI Radeon HD 5700 and ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series of products.
High Quality downscaling for video transcoding MSE
This release of ATI Catalyst™ includes an enhancement for the ATI Video converter for users transcoding high quality interlaced content (1920x1080i @60i videos) down to small resolution progressive content (320x240 @30p - iPod videos as an example), by maintaining high visual quality when down-scaling by a significant amount and converting interlaced video content to progressive.
Highlights of the Linux ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 release include:
New Features
Support for new Linux operating systems
This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
RHEL 5.4 support
openSUSE 11.2 early look support
For more information on ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 (for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 release notes.
To discuss the Windows version of the Catalyst 9.11 drivers in our forums, please click here. If you would like to talk about the Linux version, feel free to create a discussion thread here.
It's one of the last major distribution updates coming out this year, but Fedora 12 (codenamed "Constantine") is now available.
Fedora 12 features performance improvements, Ogg Theora 1.1 support, graphics improvements (including ATI kernel mode-setting by default), many virtualization improvements, PulseAudio improvements, Multi-Pointer X with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7, and many other new features.
The Fedora 12 release announcement can be read on the Fedora Wiki while the various spins of Fedora 12 can be downloaded at FedoraProject.org.
LONDON — Chip manufacturing capacity is falling and as demand is increasing the chip industry is becoming close to being sold-out. Manufacturing capacity utilization has climbed above 90 percent in several leading-edge sectors, according to the Semiconductor International Capacity Statistics (SICAS) organization.
Worldwide fab-capacity utilization hit 86.5 percent in the third quarter of 2009, up from 77.0 percent in the second quarter and foundry utilization climbed to 91.5 percent utilization in 3Q09, up from 83.1 percent in 2Q09. Manufacturing on 300-mm wafers reached 96.1 percent capacity utilization, up from 91.9 percent in the second quarter, despite a marked increase in production capacity.
Between 80-nm and 60-nm utilisation was 95.7 percent of capacity and below 60-nm capacity was at 93.5 percent of capacity in Q309.
Older MOS processes in the range 0.25-micron to 130-nm were in the mid 80 percent utilization while yet older MOS processes above 0.35-micron were at around 70 percent capacity utilization, according to SICAS.
This disparity between leading-edge capacity utilization, explains some changes in manufacturing capacity. Both IC and discrete semiconductor manufacturing capacity fell between the second and third quarters. Therefore so too did overall semiconductor manufacturing capacity, down 1.1 percent on the previous quarter and down 13.2 percent on the same quarter a year before.
However 300-mm manufacturing capacity, which typically carries the leading-edge processes, was up 6.7 percent on the previous quarter. Foundry capacity was up 9.3 percent on the previous quarter and 8.9 percent on the installed capacity it had in the third quarter of 2008, the statistics show.
Usually the movement of the manufacturing capacity utilization figure above 90 percent is taken as a prompt for chip companies to invest in manufacturing capacity. However, it takes 9 months to a year to bring such capacity on board.
The guys from NordicHardware.com managed to score some pictures of yet another Asus Republic of Gamers motherboard, the Maximus III Extreme. This one is based on Intel's P55 chipset and bunch of goodies that can be found exclusively on ROG labled motherboards.
The motherboard features support for LGA 1156 processors and has a 11-phase digital PWM. The rest of the features include five PCI-Express x16 slots, provided probably by few PCI-Express bridge chips located below the heatsink, four DDR3 slots, two SATA 6.0Gbps and seven SATA 3.0Gbps ports, two USB 3.0 ports, single eSATA port, Gigabit Ethernet and integrated audio, which surprised us as Asus usually uses dedicated card on its high-end motherboards.
The one feature that caught our eye, and which should certainly be welcomed by overclockers is the LN2 Mode jumper which enhances performance when this motherboard is paired up with LN2 for cooling. It also has on board Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons as well as the support for Bluetooth overclocking via mobile phone, something that we have yet to see.
The exact price and the availability date haven't been disclosed but we guess that you can expect a high price tag, as after all, this is a Republic of Gamers motherboard. You can check out more here.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has been diagnosed as suffering from cancer again.
According to a memo sent on Monday to employees of Vulcan, his outfit, Allen, who is a survivor of Hodgkin's disease, has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Vulcan CEO Jody Allen, who is also Paul Allen's sister, said that Allen received the diagnosis early this month and has begun chemotherapy. Doctors say he has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a relatively common form of lymphoma.
Allen beat Hodgkin's a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too, she said. The memo said that Paul was feeling OK and remained upbeat. He will be continuing to work and has no plans to change his job.
Jody Allen someone optimistically asks staff not to discuss the matter outside of the office.
We have talked to many graphics vendors and one thing is clear. The graphics shortage of most performance cards like GTX 260, 275, 285 and 295 as well as Radeon 4xx0 and 5xx0 generation will last at least until the end of the year.
Retailers and etailers are ordering more than Nvidia / ATI partners can deliver and partners cannot get enough chips from Nvidia. All in all, the only chance for you to get your desired graphics card, if it's not available at press time, is to pre-order and wait.
If you look at HD5870 availability in US, some cards are expected on the 17th of November, or later today, some on 30th and some like Asus are not available at all. Saturation doesn’t get much better with Nvidia cards.
Both graphics players did underestimated the demand in Q4 2009 and ATI certainly didn’t count that Fermi will get delayed for almost a quarter. This, like one big equation that has gone terribly wrong, has resulted in huge shortages of just about any performance card.
With the Radeon HD 5970 hitting the streets later this week, strapping two "Cypress" GPUs together onto a single physical graphics board, now seems like as good a time as any to take a look at an alternative to such a set-up - Two individual Radeon HD 5870 boards in a CrossFire configuration. Elite Bastards take a look at exactly what a Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire configuration has to offer buyers with the cash to spare compared to the already stellar performance of a single Radeon HD 5870 card.
Now we move on to a far more important topic - Real-world game testing. Here, we put both our AMD Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire configuration through its paces under Windows 7 Home Premium x64 in no less than eight current game titles. For the duration, of this article, we'll be catering towards standard sized LCD owners by starting out with a target resolution of 1920x1200, albeit with AMD's own 12x edge detect anti-aliasing mode and 16x anisotropy enabled to make the most of the additional image quality capabilities on show here, before following this up with some far more GPU intensive rendering at 2560x1600 for you 30" LCD owners out there to stress the boards more fully - first without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, followed by testing with 8x AA and 16x AF enabled.
With the news that Microsoft has dealt a serious blow to Xbox 360 users with modified consoles, the fallout has been about what you might expect. According to our sources, the straw that really broke Microsoft’s back this time around were the number of users with modified consoles that were engaged in playing the recently released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 by downloading it prior to the actual release of the game.
Microsoft seems to be unapologetic over the banning of consoles and users. The company is dedicated to attacking the industry-wide problem of piracy on their platform. As part of the clamp down, estimates are that as many as over one million consoles worldwide have been banned due to modification of their consoles.
While the company has not released specifics on how the identification process works or how the company determines if a ban is warranted, sources report that it is likely that that the bans were justified due to the use of downloaded pirated copies of games that were being played on modified Xbox 360 systems.
With all of the consoles that have been banned, the sales of used Xbox 360 systems have also taken a hit; with the company warning users about the fact that the company will not reverse a ban on a console, even if the console now has a different owner. Many retailers are reporting that banned users are attempting to dump banned consoles and purchase a new one. Some retailers are already stopping the practice of accepting for trade or purchase any Xbox 360 consoles. As one retailer told us, “Until I have a good, accurate way to check and make sure that the console isn’t banned, I am not accepting any additional systems, and I will only be selling new ones for the time being.”
Some retailers that we have spoken with have expressed to us that they would like to see Microsoft post an updated list of the Xbox 360 console serial numbers that the company considers banned.
The beta of the latest dashboard update for the Xbox 360 will draw to a close this weekend as the company will start pushing the latest update out on Tuesday, November 17th. The latest update will bring access to Facebook, Twitter, and Last.FM to all Xbox 360 users.
The beta itself was fairly uneventful, according to our sources who claim that the new additions to the Xbox 360 platform are well done. While the social networking additions of Facebook and Twitter are the main highlights of the update, the Last.FM, as well as the new revisions to the video market place, will also be included. One area that some may overlook are the Dilbert cartoons, which are actually a very nice addition to the dashboard.
While it remains to be seen how much impact Facebook and Twitter will have once everyone can access it from their Xbox 360, it seems to be the start of an interesting trend, with rumors that Sony is likely to add Facebook support for the PlayStation 3 platform next year.
