December 1, 2008
Remember the NVIDIA GeForce 9300/9400 launch a few weeks ago, yeah we forgot about it also, until NVIDIA called last week to remind us this product was no longer on life support. All joking aside, this product introduction turned out to be a paper launch for the most part with ASUS being the only partner that delivered boards into the retail channel, and barely at that. Over the course of the last week, supply is finally catching up to demand with a variety of boards being available through most channels now.
In the meantime, we had this small thing called the i7 launch and it has consumed us for the past few weeks, too much so to be honest. Instead of completing our IGP Chronicles Part 4 with a final look at the GF9300 and AMD 790GX product lines, we ended up waiting and waiting and waiting on the GF9300 product to show up for review. In hindsight, this was the wrong direction to take after it became obvious that the product was being delayed without "officially" being delayed. Apologies are in order for the wait, but fortunately we received our retail review samples from MSI, EVGA, and Gigabyte today. We should have the Zotac GF9300 here by Friday. Our i7/X58 motherboard coverage starts in a couple of days and with those boards tested and out of the way, we can get back to covering product that most of us afford.
We really liked the GF9300 in our launch coverage and considered it to be the ideal chipset for the HTPC and SOHO markets. We had a few problems (growing pains) with the chipset, BIOS, and drivers, but for the most part our concerns have been addressed with the latest driver and BIOS releases. We are still experiencing problems getting CAS4 stable but based on initial testing with the new boards today, it appears the product has matured quickly. This development, along with decent supply, has us strongly recommending the GF9300 product now.
Of course the question now is which motherboard to recommend. We still have significant testing to complete but the Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H has caught our eye in early testing.
The GA-E7AUM-DS2H features the speedier GF9400 chipset, four DDR2 DIMM slots with 16GB support, Realtek RTL-8211CL Gigabit LAN, Realtek ALC 889a HD audio codec, 5 3Gb/s SATA ports and 1 3Gb/s eSATA port (RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD), IEEE 1394a via a T.I. TSB43AB23 chipset, an x16 PCIe 2.0 slot, one x1 PCIe slot, and two PCI slots. Gigabyte covers most of the video standards with VGA, HDMI, and DVI-D outputs. All in all, a full featured uATX board that appears to also be a decent overclocker. Our E8400 has reached a stable 450FSB in early testing and the performance of this board is already at the top compared to other boards in this category.
That is it for now, we will be back as soon as possible to wrap up our IGP series. In case this makes any difference in your purchasing decision before Black Friday, we will be recommending the GA-E7AUM-DS2H in our upcoming buyer's guide.
Cooler Master gave us some more insides on their upcoming Black Edition of the Cosmos chassis. As it seems the changes to the case are rather minor, besides the black paint. There will not be any change to the hard drive bays as we have hoped for. It's a matter of fact that the case seems not changed at all. Even the large flat front door will come as it was. If you are interested in the further outcome and more information about this bundle be sure to hit Cooler Master's special website for the Black Edition.
Cooler Master announced the pending arrival of a luxury edition of... yes, of what exactly? Cooler Master couldn't tell us exactly what the full package will entail, but the manufacturer at least revealed a picture of a modified Cosmos chassis and some specs and information for a "luxurious limited edition bundle". Within the package users will get a modified Cosmos chassis decked out in black on the outside and inside. The bundle is to provide "the best products Cooler Master has to offer", so we expect it will also include a power supply, and possibly a water-cooling system or air-coolers for the CPU and GPU. There might be a few other items as well.
Cooler Master also indicates the chassis will have some upgrades in the form of two 140mm fans and a new hard drive bay that includes a 120mm fan. The only picture available right now is the above image, but we do know the chassis is "a special version of the popular Cosmos", so it should be similar to the Cosmos 1000 that has been in the market for a while. Let's look at the Cosmos 1000 a bit more to get an idea of what to expect.
Looking at the inside we see two top-mounted 120mm fans, which are now being changed to two 140mm fans. Since the existing Cosmos 1000 cases already have 140mm mounting holes, this change won't present any problems.
The drive bays will needs some changes to accommodate the new "HDD cooling module with 120mm fan". The number and arrangement of 3.5" bays in the module is not yet known; it could remain six like in the existing Cosmos with a fan in front, or the fan could take up two of the existing HDD spots.
We have seen some black painted interiors in the past, for example from Antec, and these were popular among a certain segment of users. Of course, it costs extra to paint the chassis interior and exterior, especially if you use high-quality paint, and you need to account for additional defect rates. Not long ago, Cooler Master offered CSX brand custom paintjobs, so the idea of a case with high-gloss black paint inside and out might have started there. It's unlikely that the CSX artists have anything to do with the painting of the limited Black Edition, however. Here are some additional pictures of the Cosmos 1000 for reference.
Besides the products, Cooler Master also offers all customers buying the Black Edition bundle exclusive membership in Cooler Master's VIP Club. Details of what this entails are scarce, but this membership provides benefits such as "exclusive articles, downloads, forum access, VIP invites, and much more". Cooler Master is keeping the remaining details secret until December 11, at which time we should also hear about pricing (though we'd hazard "not cheap" is a safe bet).
Until then, we're left with more questions than answers, but Cooler Master expects these bundled cases to fly off the shelves, so if this sounds like something interesting you might want to reserve the date. There will only be 500 of these custom cases/bundles available worldwide, each individually numbered, with no plans for further production. Hopefully the additional components will be as special as the case, or users might need to think twice about whether or not the bundle is worth the price of admission.
As of today, the Intel Core i7 processor series and X58 chipset based motherboards are "officially" on sale. With that bit of news out of the way, EVGA is officially launching their X58 SLI motherboard today. We received a retail board on Saturday and have been running it through the benchmark gauntlet for the past 37 (and counting) hours. It's amazing what one can try to accomplish with a case of Rockstar and a few AC/DC albums. However, even unlimited amounts of caffeine and Angus Young failed to get us to the point of having a full preview ready tonight. That will come later today but in the meantime we would like to provide a recap of our experiences this weekend.
First off, the EVGA X58 SLI motherboard is a solid piece of workmanship, feature laden, and offers excellent performance when compared to its competition from ASUS, Gigabyte, Intel, and MSI. Aside from some early BIOS problems and a couple of questionable layout decisions, we have throughly enjoyed our time so far with the board. A few hours ago, we were singing a different tune but have since worked through a few problems with EVGA.
EVGA is prepping a new BIOS at this moment to address some items of interest. Like most initial BIOS releases, there are usually a few items that need to be corrected. Most of our items are minor or just recommendations, but we had a couple of issues that had us shaking our heads. Fortunately, EVGA normally provides excellent customer support and that is the case with this board.
The current BIOS release does not support overclocking profiles, so those enthusiasts who like to overclock will find themselves resetting numerous BIOS options if an overclock setting goes awry. Not a major item, but one we think should have been addressed before retail release for an enthusiast level board. Especially one that will save users significant keyboard time as they go through the process of figuring out what overclocked settings work or not.
We also discovered during testing that setting the ICH10R to AHCI/RAID operation causes a bit of a problem for us storage hounds. After switching from IDE mode to AHCI/RAID on the ICH10R, if the user tries to install a drive on ports four or five, then hard drives on ports zero through three will not be recognized. This also holds true if you attach a hard drive to the JMicron SATA/eSATA ports on the board or install a RAID card on of the available PCIe slots. This problem will be addressed very shortly. (Update - EVGA delivered a new BIOS this morning to address this problem.)
The only other item of note is that the user will need to disable EIST (speedstep) and CxE for the system to overclock properly. We found out the hard way that disabling all the power management functions but leaving CxE set to Auto will create some very interesting and frustrating overclock sessions. EVGA recommends the Load Optimal settings routine after the first POST and then again if the board does not recover properly from an errant BIOS setting as it could remain in safe mode. Several power management items will be turned off as a result of this action, but CxE is left at Auto with the BIOS setting enabled instead of disabled in this situation. This holds true with the available auto overclocking feature and the results will more than likely end in an BSOD or several of them. CxE will be disabled in these situations in an upcoming BIOS release. (Update - EVGA delivered a new BIOS this morning to address this problem.)
Once we had the board setup properly, we were rewarded with some excellent results from our i920 setup. Our "safe" overclock on air cooling ended up being a 21x196 configuration with Turbo enabled. This resulted in a final core speed of 4115MHz on 1.40V. Actual voltage was 1.411V as the board will slightly overvolt at this point.
Our Corsair 6GB DDR3 Tri-Channel kit afforded us a 8-8-8-19 1T setting at DDR3-1568 on 1.65V. EVGA is still tuning memory performance, so we expect this board to match our settings on the ASUS P6T-Deluxe board that ran at 7-8-7-20 1T. Currently CL5 and TRAS 15 is not available for users who want to push timings at 1066/1333. (Update - BIOS update this morning opens up CL5 and TRAS 15 settings) Even so, this board offers excellent performance at stock settings or when overclocked.
We will be back shortly with a quick look at the board, BIOS features, overclocking, and general performance results against the like priced ASUS P6T-Deluxe OC Palm Edition. Our full X58 roundup will be published later this week with boards from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Intel, EVGA, and maybe even DFI. In the meantime, we would like to give a shout out to TankGuys for getting us setup with some retail i7 processors this weekend.
We recently received several mini-ITX form factor boards for an upcoming HTPC guide. These boards represent a wide variety of chipsets ranging from the Intel G45 to the NVIDIA GF8200. However, none of them prepared us for the motherboard that we received from J&W Technology.
Based on the AMD 780G chipset, the MINIX 780G-SP128MB is one of the most impressive motherboard designs we have seen in the labs recently. Impressive not only from an aesthetic and layout viewpoint, but the quality of components and available ports put this board ahead of our other candidates. However, since it is based on the 780G chipset, the board carries a penalty for HTPC users as multi-channel LPCM via HDMI output is not available. If you can live without that feature then we highly recommend this board.
J&W managed to shoehorn four SATA 3Gbps ports, IDE connectivity, a physical x16 PCIe 2.0 slot, two SO-DIMM slots, a USB 2.0 header providing four additional ports, COM header, IR connector, and an iPartner Control Center header. The PCIe x16 slot actually operates at x4 electronically due to the limitation of available trace counts on the mini-ITX board design. This could be seen as a limitation, but the primary purpose of the board was never to be a high-end gaming system.
That said, we have not noticed any real performance differences when utilizing our HD 4350, HD 4550, or HD 4670 video cards on this board compared to a uATX 780G board from Gigabyte. In fact, an HD 4350 card on this board will offer improved casual gaming performance while also providing multi-channel LPCM audio for another $30 if a user wanted to go that direction. The board supports Hybrid graphics although your money is better spent on a HD 4550 card instead of the previous generation HD 3450. J&W also included 128MB of 800MHz DDR2 memory for side-port functionality.
This board supports current 45W/65W/95W TDP AM2/AM2+ processors including the Phenom 8750 and 9350e series. J&W explicitly states that 125W or higher processors are not supported due to the three phase power delivery design. An additional warning is also provided that 95W TDP processors should only be utilized if proper heat dissipation is available for both the CPU and motherboard.
A single heatsink covers the 780G Northbridge and SB700 Southbridge. Unless your case is well ventilated, the chipset heatsink will require additional airflow to keep thermals under control. Fortunately, J&W is shipping a fairly quiet AVC Digital Home Series 4010 DC fan with the kit. Three fan connectors are included along with decent BIOS support for monitoring and control.
The board features a loaded I/O panel that consists of a PS2 keyboard port, six USB 2.0 ports, Optical and RCA S/PDIF ports, VGA/HDMI/DVI output, an eSATA port run off the SB700, an RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet port, and a audio panel featuring six 3.5mm jacks for the Realtek ALC 885 7.1 channel HD codec.
Installing SATA cables requires some forethought as the area between the heatsink, SATA/IDE ports, and the 24-pin ATX power connector is cramped. We installed the SATA cables on the board before case installation to alleviate any potential problems.
The MINIX 780G-SP128MB features 4GB memory support that is provided by two DDR2 200-pin SO-DIMM slots. This board supports DDR2-533, DDR2-667, DDR2-800, and DDR2-1066 memory speeds. DDR2-1066 support requires a Phenom based processor but without . We purchased 4GB of GSkill DDR2-800 with timings of 5-5-5-15 at 1.8V for $49, so there is not a significant cost penalty for using SO-DIMMs unless you are trying to locate the DDR2-1066 variety.
In the end, J&W has designed and produced a well engineered motherboard that has us excited about the mini-ITX market again.
We have been busily preparing an X58 motherboard roundup and overclocking guide that will be published shortly. During the course of testing over the past few weeks we have encountered more than our fair share of problems. Problems ranged from poor GPU driver support to BIOS releases that had difficulty booting 12GB memory configuration much less offering a decent performance or overclocking experience.
We are still not pleased with multi-GPU performance on the X58 platform and even less pleased that we do not expect to see several problems fixed until December. That is a story for another time, but had we known ahead of time the number of problems we would encounter, our graphics card of choice for motherboard testing would not have been from AMD.
As for the motherboards, well we are finally at the point with the latest BIOS releases that we would not hesitate to purchase an X58 platform now. Our latest BIOS releases from ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and Intel are finally up to speed, not that they are perfect, but certainly worthy of stable 24/7 operation. Memory compatibility and performance is greatly improved, on-board peripherals are working properly, and overclocking capabilities are up to speed now. We are utilizing the following BIOS spins for our two roundups, ASUS P6T-Deluxe (0901), ASUS Rampage II Extreme (0602), Intel DX58SO (2724), MSI Eclipse (1.121), and the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 (F3D). One note of interest is that we had several problems with our Rampage II Extreme board in regards to memory compatibility and overclocking. The 0602 BIOS certainly improved the situation but ASUS has updated the board and retail units will incorporate the latest component updates.
In the meantime, we have burned through our credit lines at Newegg purchasing various DDR3 memory kits that are specified for use with the X58 platform. Our latest purchase was 12GB of Patriot Memory PVT36G1600ELK featuring 9-9-9-24 timings at DDR3-1600 on 1.6V or so. Patriot also offers the PVT36G1600LLK kit that features timings of 8-8-8-24 at DDR3-1600 speeds on the same voltages along with additional overclocking headroom.
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One of our new benchmark tests is Microsoft's Flight Simulator X with the Acceleration expansion pack. FSX is multi-core aware and the i7 is a perfect match for this normally CPU intensive game. Utilizing the ASUS P6T-Deluxe, i7 920, CoolIT System's Freezone Elite, Sapphire HD 4870, and 12GB of Patriot's latest memory we were able to push the system to a 24/7 benchmarking friendly 4009MHz (21x191) with memory speed at DDR3-1528 on 7-8-7-20 1N settings. Our settings consisted of 1.3975V VCore, 1.64V VDimm, and the secret sauce setting of QPI voltage at 1.3750V. Our FSX settings were run at Ultra High with AA/AF/DX10 enabled in order to stress the CPU and GPU during the benchmark sessions.
Keeping VCore, VDimm, and VQPI in proper sync is the key to a stable overclock at voltages that will not shorten your processor's lifespan, well not by that much from what we can tell at this point. Intel's guidance continues to be not setting VCore past 1.55V, VDimm past 1.65V and VQPI (uncore to us) past 1.315V when overclocking. Kris will go over this in detail shortly, but in my experiences so far, getting these three voltages too far out of sync will quickly cause problems as one of our i965 processors can attest to now. Keeping them in sync and tweaking a few other settings will result in a finely tuned system that is capable of running settings higher than Intel's guidance although it is a warranty buster. At this point we like to keep VCore and VQPI within 0.0250~0.0375V of each other as you clock up, generally speaking, once you exceed about 1.3V on VCore it is time to start syncing these settings and others in the BIOS.
For us, VQPI is one of the most sensitive settings in the BIOS and one that will reward the user with higher bclk and mclk capabilities quicker than most other settings (except VCore/VDimm, although clock skews and amplitude are critical tuning settings also). When tweaking the BIOS, raising VQPI will generally allow memory speeds to either increase or memory timings to decrease without raising VDimm at certain gates. Depending on the memory utilized, you can even trade off higher VQPI for lower VDimm and improved timings, it's all a balancing act. In fact, our Corsair DDR3-1600 6GB kit is capable of running at DDR3-1066 on 5-5-5-15 timings with 1.58V VDimm and VQPI raised slightly to 1.2125V.
The same holds true for running VCore slightly lower when you are looking for the highest possible overclock without exceeding the capabilities of your cooling solution. While the cascade and LN2 users will see different results and can push settings a lot further, for those of us on air or water, these settings are critical to getting the most out of this platform in a 24/7 environment.
We will be back shortly with additional results. In the meantime, we had excellent results with our first X58 specific memory kits from Patriot Memory.
Q2 as you may recall was a bust for NVIDIA, with their first loss in quite some time due to a combination of problems regarding product prices and the costs of replacing defective mobile products. Not a great deal has changed in a single quarter, and Wall Street’s Q3 projections were rather pessimistic as a result.
With that said, for Q3 NVIDIA managed to get back into the black, posting a profit of $61.7 million, on revenue of $897.7 million. This is a marked decline from last year, where in the same quarter they pulled in $1.12 billion in revenue, alongside $235 million in profit. The silver lining to this however is that those pessimistic projections called for around half as much profit as NVIDIA actually posted, which ultimately made this a good quarter for NVIDIA. The company has been on solid enough ground that there hasn’t been a question of whether they’d continue turning a profit after Q2, but how much alongside what kind of revenue has been the question, and now we have the answers.
One interesting item from NVIDIA’s statement was that their gross margin is up, nearly 3%, from 39.1% to 41.9%. As NVIDIA has continued to take a soaking on the GTX 200 series, a more rational outcome would have been for those GPUs to drag the gross margin down; instead and in spite of that it’s up. Clearly NVIDIA is still finding a way to make money on what’s an expensive chip to make, and barring further price cuts things should further improve as they finish transitioning their GPUs to 55nm. Their “performance segment “ (which we take to mean the sub-$200 GF9 parts) is now entirely at 55nm, for example.
As we mentioned earlier, much of Q3 was driven by the same things as Q2; poor pricing and lost sales are the primary reasons that NVIDIA’s revenue and profit have dipped so much. But one significant thing has changed this quarter, and it has been NVIDIA’s ace that allowed them to beat the estimates: Apple. Getting the GeForce 9400M and 9600M into Apple’s laptops is a big deal for NVIDIA, as while those products aren’t particularly profitable, Apple’s fortune in the laptop market means that NVIDIA will be shipping a lot of them. Care should be taken not to read too much into this, but it’s a positive note on what’s otherwise a rough time.
And that rough time will be continuing into Q4. You know there’s a recession going on when Q3 revenue is expected to exceed Q4, which is exactly what is happening. NVIDIA is not counting on the usual Christmas spending that gives tech companies strong 4th quarters, which puts them in line with the rest of the tech industry where everyone is finally starting to feel the full brunt of the sputtering economy. NVIDIA’s own predictions would put Q4 revenue at around $850 million, making Q4 much like Q3: Shrinking revenue, with a decent but not fancy profit.
Finally, Rambus would like to remind everyone that they’re still trying to shake down NVIDIA for money (and the timing is not coincidental). Near the end of Q2 they filed suit against NVIDIA, and now they’re filing a complaint against NVIDIA with the US International Trade Commission. The complaints and the requested remedy are the same: Rambus wants an injunction barring NVIDIA and its partners from importing or selling infringing products (i.e. just about everything NVIDIA makes). Injunctions are often used to drive a company back to the bargaining table, so it’s very unlikely we’ll see one, but it bears mentioning. Given how slow the ITC is (it’ll take 30 days just to decide if they want to investigate) it’s not a matter that’s going to be resolved any time soon.
We’ll close with a quick mention of AMD and where things stand. The economic problems we mentioned earlier are just as applicable to AMD’s graphics division as they are NVIDIA, so there’s little expectation that either company will pull away from the other. If you ever wanted an example of equality in the graphics market, this is pretty much it; in the consumer space both are roughly tied in performance, and in the financial space both are slightly profitable. NVIDIA does blow away AMD in graphics revenue but this is largely due to better stratification by NVIDIA – they have a much better position in the high performance computing market than AMD’s graphics division does. It wouldn’t be too surprising to see someone blink and lower their prices again, with similar products and similar profits, neither one is well positioned to do much else in a single quarter beyond playing with prices.
- queue length is about 0.22 (More than 2 indicates that the harddisk can not keep up)
- typical average I/O latency is 0.23 ms (90%), with about 10% spikes of 7 to 12 ms (we measure the average over the past 2 seconds)
- Queue length is lower: 0.153 (but 0.2 was already very low)
- typical access latency: an average 0.1 with very few spikes of 0.5 ms.
- 1900 instead of 1400 tr/s
Sometimes setbacks happen. I had been planning an article on top to bottom graphics hardware performance in Far Cry 2 for this week. This was already pushing it with a platform change, and it just got to be too much to get it all finished in time. In time for what? Well, in this case it was the fact that AMD just released a new hotfix driver for Far Cry 2 that fixes a couple rendering issues the original hotfix had. It wouldn't do to publish an article with numbers from an old driver, so here we are retesting things.
But that's no reason to disappoint our readers. Far Cry 2 is a decent looking game that many have been interested in for a while. I haven't really played the game much (just doing testing) so I can't comment on the goodness of the game. But I can comment on the complete awesomeness of the benchmark tool it comes with.
The Far Cry 2 benchmark tool owns all other built in benchmark tools around. So far there are only two issues we have with it. We want it to be able to take screenshots at a specific frame or at specific intervals, and we want it to be just a little more stable. The former issue is of less importance than the latter, as there are other ways to take screenshots. But stability is the only thing that really stands in the way of some incredible analysis. If running more than 5 to 10 different test cases, we've found the tool to be likely not to complete. If individual runs fail, we'd still like to see the benchmark continue, but unfortunately it just stops.
This is a big issue when performing 60 runs. That's right, 2 DX versions, 2 AA settings (off and 4x), 3 quality settings, and 5 resolutions. It's a data collectors dream come true. Not only do they keep CSV files with frame data for all frames from each of the 3 loops we are running per test, but they build a nice html file with all the data for easy access and even display a graph of instantaneous framerate per frame. Even though I haven't had the chance to re-run our AMD numbers, here's a sample of what we're looking at:
Comparing this to the DX9 and to the Radeon HD 4870 in both DX9 and DX10 will be quite informative. As we can see, even at the maximum possible settings, we still get playable framerates. This is really a testament to the engine, as Ubisoft were able to do some great things with the visuals while still providing excellent playability across the board.
Under DX10, High and Very High quality settings don't differ in performance nearly as much as Ultra. In fact, you can get Very High quality with 4xAA for about the price of Ultra quality in most cases with this test under the GTX 280. Performance with 4xAA tends to drop off faster as resolution increases than without regardless of quality mode. This makes sense because as resolution increases the added memory needs for 4xAA increase as well. I'll get in to more analysis of the data when we get the numbers for the article done.
The benchmark tool offers lots of other cool features beyond just running billions of tests in an automated way. For instance, we can run fixed time length demos in which the camera travels a path and frames are rendered as fast as possible -- like the game is played. These are similar to FRAPS tests, but the data that's collected is much more repeatable because the camera path is fixed. We can also run a fixed number of frames timedemo. A timedemo is useful because it renders the exact same set of frames each time as fast as possible. This way, we have a more consistent work load and know what's going on better. Of course, this stresses different things. Each type of test has it's use, and buidling in this kind of flexibility is incredible.
We commend Ubisoft for creating such an AMAZING benchmarking tool. I hate SecureROM because dealing with activations is tough when we build and/or reinstall new systems all the time and our hardware is always changing. But the benchmark tool almost makes up for it. Almost. Every other game developer needs to copy this tool immediately and put it in every game.
Anyway, I'm off to bed for now. I'll be testing this more tomorrow with the latest drivers and will get this wrapped up some time early next week most likely. I'm hoping to have some neat surprises in here that are made possible by the flexibility of the benchmark tool. But no promises ;-)
Kingston is launching their new HyperX Triple Channel kits for the upcoming i7/X58 platform today. The 3GB kits will ship first with 6GB kits following shortly. Speed ranges for the HyperX family will range from 1375MHz up to 2000MHz. The triple channel ValueRAM kits will be available immediately in 1066/1333MHz speed bins in both 3GB and 6GB capacities. Kingston is providing an overview of the 3GB 1600MHz kit running at 2GHz (something we are not allowed to do yet) on the ASUS P6T Deluxe on YouTube. The link is: Kingston 2GHz Results.
The official press release is below -
Kingston Technology Launches HyperX DDR3 2GHz Triple-Channel Memory in Support of Intel Core i7, X58 Platforms
First to Market with Fastest Memory at 1.65 volts
Fountain Valley, CA -- October 29, 2008 -- Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced it is first to ship 2GHz memory in triple-channel configuration designed specifically for the new Intel-based X58 motherboards. Kingston's HyperX® DDR3 2GHz memory, available now, come in kits of three 1GB modules that are Intel® XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) ready meeting the Core i7 1.65 volt platform recommendation.
"Kingston is excited to bring the fastest DDR3 triple channel memory products to market as we are the first to deliver 2000MHz gaming kits of three with Intel's reduced voltage,” said Mark Tekunoff, senior technology manager, Kingston®. "All of our triple-channel kits can be overclocked manually or by using XMP-ready profiles. The 2GHz modules have been tested to support up to that speed on ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboards while the Intel DX58SO motherboards have been tested up to 1600MHz.”
In addition to the top-of-the-line 2000MHz, Kingston's family of triple-channel kits include 1866- and 1800MHz, and low-latency 1600- and 1375MHz speeds. Kingston ValueRAM® kits of three are also available in 1333MHz and 1066MHz, in 1- and 2GB capacities.
Kingston HyperX & ValueRAM DDR3 Specifications:
Part Number
KHX16000D3K3/3GX
3GB 2000MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 1.65v) kit of 3 optimized for XMP $ 334.00
KHX14900D3K3/3GX
3GB 1866MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 1.65v) kit of 3 optimized for XMP $ 317.00
KHX14400D3K3/3GX
3GB 1800MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 1.65v) kit of 3 optimized for XMP $ 312.00
KHX12800D3LLK3/3GX
3GB 1600MHz (CL8-8-8-24 @ 1.65v) kit of 3 optimized for XMP $ 285.00
KHX11000D3LLK3/3GX
3GB 1375MHz (CL7-7-7-20 @ 1.65v) kit of 3 optimized for XMP $ 192.00
KVR1333D3N9K3/6G
6GB 1333MHz (CL9-9-9 @ 1.5v) ValueRAM kit of 3 $ 240.00
KVR1333D3N9K3/3G
3GB 1333MHz (CL9-9-9 @ 1.5v) ValueRAM kit of 3 $ 132.00
KVR1066D3N7K3/6G
6GB 1066MHz (CL7-7-7 @ 1.5v) ValueRAM kit of 3 $ 240.00
KVR1066D3N7K3/3G
3GB 1066MHz (CL7-7-7 @ 1.5v) ValueRAM kit of 3 $ 132.00
Kingston HyperX is backed by a lifetime warranty and free 24/7 technical support. For more detailed information please visit the Kingston Web site at www.kingston.com.
You guys have (rightfully) been asking over the last few months where the article has been, and the answer to that has kept slipping. Just about everything that could go wrong in the 6 month span did go wrong, most of them unrelated to Ubuntu itself. For what I'll leave as simply "external" reasons, Mr. Murphy has continually thwarted my attempts to write a comprehensive Ubuntu article, until now.
The article is just about finished, and the goal right now (however unlikely it may be) is to get it out no later than the 30th, the release date for the next version of Ubuntu, 8.10. This creates a clear problem with timing, so allow me to explain the hows and whys.
The decision has been made to finish the 8.04 article, as that's what I have been using for nearly the last 6 months. Switching to 8.10 would effectively invalidate much of the experiment, and push it back once more. As 8.04 is a long term support release, we feel that it's best to start there, even if the article ends up outdated by the release of Ubuntu 8.10. The short life cycle (and short support cycle) of non-LTS releases means that we're uncomfortable basing too much on a revision of Ubuntu that was never meant to last.