With the recent rise in the number of triple-slot cards, we have a few different cards in-house that we’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks. But to kick things off, we decided to start small, looking at an interesting product from PowerColor that takes an interesting direction with the triple-slot concept.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex Edition is a factory overclocked Radeon HD 5770 with a unique feature: an adjustable height fan. By default the fan sits flush against the heatsink of this double-slot card, but with a twist of the fan it can be raised roughly 9mm. PowerColor says that doing can improve the cooling beyond what a pure double-slot card can achieve by reducing backflow, and today we set to find out if that's the case.

Just shy of 9 months after the FTC’s lawsuit began, Intel’s conflicts are starting to come to an end. Intel and the FTC have reached a settlement ahead of what would have been next month’s court hearing. With this settlement the FTC is agreeing to drop the case in return for a series of prohibitions and requirements placed upon Intel to maintain and enhance the competitive environment in the CPU and GPU markets. Today we'll be taking a look at just what the terms of the settlement are, what the FTC did and didn't get, and how - if at all - this settlement affects the average computer buyer.

For the launch of the first GF100-based video cards – the GTX 480 and GTX 470 – NVIDIA sent over a 3 card reviewer’s kit containing two GTX 480s and a single GTX 470. This allowed us to do SLI testing with the GTX 480 (a money-is-no-object setup) but not with NVIDIA’s significantly cheaper GTX 470. As part of a comprehensive SLI & CrossFire guide we’re working on for next month we needed a second GTX 470 for testing GTX 470 SLI operation, and MSI answered our call with their N470GTX.

 

Today we’ll be taking a look at MSI’s GTX 470. We’ll also be taking a sneak-peek of our forthcoming SLI/CF guide with a look at GTX 470 SLI performance.

In part 2 of our GTX 460 launch coverage, we take a look at a varied selection of launch cards from Zotac, EVGA, and Asus. NVIDIA's partners aren't wasting any time in getting customized cards out, so right away we're seeing everything from factory overclocked cards to fully custom cards and anything in-between. Having seen how well the reference GTX 460 performs, now we can see how the vendors have built on NVIDIA's success.

 

Only a short month after the launch of the GeForce GTX 465, NVIDIA is back again with a new card: the GeForce GTX 460. Built on their brand-new GF104 GPU, the GTX 460 shakes up the mainstream in a big way by bringing NVIDIA's DX11 Fermi family to a $199 card and in the process righting what was wrong with the GTX 465. Along the way we'll also see just what NVIDIA did to the GF104 GPU to make this happen, and why GF104 is much more than the simple GF100 derivative we were expecting.

It's been a while since we've been able to write a glowing review of an NVIDIA card, but today we'll see why NVIDIA is offering the right combination of price and performance to claim the $200-$250 market as their own.

 

Only a short month after the launch of the GeForce GTX 465, NVIDIA is back again with a new card: the GeForce GTX 460. Built on their brand-new GF104 GPU, the GTX 460 shakes up the mainstream in a big way by bringing NVIDIA's DX11 Fermi family to a $199 card and in the process righting what was wrong with the GTX 465. Along the way we'll also see just what NVIDIA did to the GF104 GPU to make this happen, and why GF104 is much more than the simple GF100 derivative we were expecting.

It's been a while since we've been able to write a glowing review of an NVIDIA card, but today we'll see why NVIDIA is offering the right combination of price and performance to claim the $200-$250 market as their own.

 

After a bit of ballyhoo and a bit more of a delay, NVIDIA is finally ready to launch their competitor to AMD’s triple-monitor Eyefinity technology: 3D Vision Surround.

As a quick refresher, we first learned about 3D Vision Surround at CES 2010, where NVIDIA was officially announced the technology and was offering both public and private demonstrations of the technology. At the time they had it running on both GTX 200 series cards and what would become the GTX 400 series. 3D Vision Surround was to be NVIDIA’s competition to AMD’s Eyefinity technology and then-some: not only would NVIDIA match AMD’s Eyefinity triple-monitor capabilities in the 2D space, but they would extend the concept by merging it with their 3D Vision technology for 3D Vision Surround.

NVIDIA has previously told us that they’ve been sitting on the concept for some time with no apparent market for it, with the success of Eyefinity and Matrox’s TripleHead2Go finally motivating NVIDIA to move forward with the technology. The result of this delayed plan is an interesting technology that in many ways is NVIDIA’s version of Eyefinity, and in other ways is entirely different. In a nutshell: it’s not just 3D Eyefinity.

When we reviewed Zotac's ZBOX HD-ID11 we noted that the upgrade to the Next-Generation ION didn't feel like much of an upgrade. Performance improved in some cases, but power consumption got worse and in 3D games and Flash playback performance actually dropped. The latter was a particular problem because many want to buy these NG-ION nettops for use as streaming content devices.

NVIDIA recently gave us a driver to improve the Flash playback situation on NG-ION platforms and we put it through the paces. While it doesn't fix everything, there's at least light at the end of this tunnel. Read on for the story.

Last month Ryan Smith published his findings on OS X Portal performance. While we're all glad that Valve ported the Steam engine to OS X, we weren't very happy with the performance of the initial release. Since then Valve has updated its Steam client and games as well as released Half Life 2 Episode 2 for the Mac. We take a look at its performance in both OS X and Windows on two different Macs, unfortunately the story isn't much better than last time.

Read on to get the full story.

Hot off the heels of launch of the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470, NVIDIA is launching the next card in the Fermi family. Based on the same GF100 GPU that powers the GTX 480 and GTX 470, the GTX 465 is a further reduced product designed to put a Fermi card in the all-important under-$300 price range. With a MSRP of $280, NVIDIA has put the card right under the Radeon HD 5850 with the performance to match. But is cheaper necessarily better? Not always, and today we'll see why.

As NVIDIA is not providing reference samples of the GeForce GTX 465, today we will be looking at a retail card: Zotac's GeForce GTX 465. With a hard launch ruling the day, the Zotac GTX 465 and the rest of the GTX 465 lineup are available today.

Today NVIDIA announced their latest mobile GPU, the GTX 480M. Based on the GF100 (Fermi) architecture, this will be a fully featured mobile counterpart rather than the "outdated" architectures we've seen with previous mobile GPUs (i.e. GTX 280M vs. GTX 280). Perhaps most shocking of all is that the GeForce GTX 480M should start appearing in notebooks next month, and we'll see SLI configurations at some point as well. NVIDIA has partnered with Clevo for this launch, and they're looking to give notebook gaming the biggest performance increase we've seen in a long time.

Bill Kircos, Intel’s Director of Product & Technology PR, just posted a blog on Intel’s site entitled “An Update on our Graphics-Related Programs”. In the blog Bill addresses future plans for what he calls Intel’s three visual computing efforts:

The first is the aforementioned processor graphics. Second, for our smaller Intel Atom processor and System on Chip efforts, and third, a many-core, programmable Intel architecture and first product both of which we referred to as Larrabee for graphics and other workloads.

There’s a ton of information in the vague but deliberately worded blog post, including a clear stance on Larrabee as a discrete GPU: We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market, at least in the short-term. Kircos goes on to say that Intel will increase funding for integrated graphics, as well as pursue Larrabee based HPC opportunities. Effectively validating both AMD and NVIDIA’s strategies. As different as Larrabee appeared when it first arrived, Intel appears to be going with the flow after today’s announcement.

My analysis of the post as well as some digging I’ve done follows.

Futuremark has announced the latest version of their popular benchmark software for gaming PCs, 3DMark11. New to 3DMark11 will be the ability to benchmark DirectX 11 capable hardware like the NVIDIA GTX 400 series and ATI Radeon 5000 series graphics cards. The 3DMark11 website features a tech demo entitled "Deep Sea" showcasing their new DirectX 11 rendering engine. Currently scheduled for release in Q3 2010, 3DMark11 will make its first public preview at Computex in Taipei at the start of June.

Last month we mentioned NVIDIA's plans for their upcoming drivers: the 256 series of drivers (don't ask us why they jumped from 197 to 256). Today, NVIDIA has released the first beta of the 256 drivers. We'll keep this short as our previous article already covered what this release entails, but you can read the full press release or just grab the drivers from NVIDIA and start testing. If you need a few buzz words to keep you interested, the new release boosts GTX 400 performance while adding support for Blu-ray 3D, CUDA 3.1, and OpenGL 4.0.

Fans of custom video cards have undoubtedly found themselves a bit disappointed with the Radeon HD 5800 series. Due to a perfect storm of low GPU yields from TSMC and NVIDIA’s late arrival with the GTX 400 series, the first 6 months for the 5800 series was nothing other than bonkers. AMD was selling GPUs to their partners as fast as they could come out of TSMC, and their partners were selling finished boards to OEMs and-end users alike as fast as they could be assembled. Even at prices over MSRP, the 5800 series flew off the shelves, leaving AMD’s partners with little-to-no supply of GPUs to tinker with. Custom 5800 series cards effectively took a 6 month vacation.

That wait finally came to an end in the Spring of 2010, as an increase in GPU supplies allowed AMD’s partners to catch their breathes and focus on their custom cards. With 6 months under their belts AMD’s partners were able to come up with a variety of designs for their custom cards, and today we’re going to be looking at a trio of custom Radeon HD 5870s: Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870 Toxic 2GB, MSI’s Radeon HD 5870 Lightning, and Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 5870 Super Overclock.

Update 5/15/2010: Valve released a new patch for Portal on the 13th which resolved the blurriness issue. Please see our update for more details.

It’s been a while since anyone treated Mac OS X as a first-tier gaming platform, so when Valve announced that they would be bringing their Steam service and the Source engine to the Mac, it was big news. After a roughly 2 month beta period for the Mac versions of Steam and the Source engine, yesterday Valve finally released the first wave of their Mac gaming efforts.

As it stands Valve is taking a gradual approach to rolling out their back catalog to the platform. Even though Steam is out and the Source engine has been ported, this week has seen the release of only 1 Source game for the Mac: 2007’s critically acclaimed Portal.

While it’s not the most graphically intensive Source game these days (that title belonging to Left 4 Dead), at this point it’s as good as anything else for looking at the performance of the Source engine under Mac OS X, particularly considering how long it’s been since a game’s original developer did the Mac port. So with that in mind, we went ahead and took a quick look at Portal’s performance under Mac OS X.

The Fermi cards have now been out (and only just available) for the just over a month.  Like the AMD 5xxx series, the first cards used reference PCBs and reference coolers - the only way you could distinguish between the different companies was by the branded sticker on the large chunky cooler.  Given time, and knowledge of the system, custom coolers were just around the corner.  This is what we see in the new Inno3D GTX 470 Hawk.

What we have is essentially an Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme cooler on top of a GTX 470 chip - three PWM controlled fans that run from 900 to 2,000 RPM on top of aluminium fins in a five-heatpipe design.  Inno3D claim the Hawk gives a maximum noise level of 30dB, and is 22ºC cooler than the reference design.  Two DVI-D connectors and a HDMI with integrated audio port are provided as standard.

This is, in our opinion, a bit of an ugly card (at least compared to the Galaxy 470 reported on earlier), that won't be taking home many beauty awards.  By taking up three PCI slots with a massive cooler, the Hawk may annoy those wishing to run other peripherals that require slots, or even running 2 or 3 in SLI, as the layout of most motherboards gives two slot spaces between PCI-E 2.0 x16 connectors.  The last caveat is that this card comes out the box at stock speeds, however, with any luck, Inno3D will also market a pre-overclocked version.

No word of exact release date or pricing at this time, but expect to pay the cost of a normal GTX 470 + $30~50 on top.