AVADirect, the custom computer manufacturer, has announced their "most powerful notebook for gamers." The powerhouse notebook is an update of the older Clevo M980NU, replacing the Intel Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA GTX 280M SLI with a Core i7 and a GTX 285M SLI to provide a sizable bump in performance. The new model, NBK-CLV-X8100, uses the Clevo X8100 chassis with the same 18.4" 1920x1080 LED-backlit screen as its predecessor.

At the heart of the machine is a choice of Intel Core i7 processors from the 1.6GHz 720QM, to either a 1.73GHz 820QM or a top of the range 2.0GHz 920XM. All of these i7 CPU's are quad-core with Turbo Boost technology for greater single core performance and Hyper-Threading for when quad-core isn't enough for your multitasking needs. The 820QM and 920XM also come with 8MB L3 cache compared to 6MB on the 720QM. You can read specifics about the Clarksfield CPUs in our launch article.

A variety of DDR3 RAM options are available from 2GB to 8GB. There are also many HDD/SSD options spread over three drive bays with RAID 0 or 1 available. A Blu-Ray reader/writer is also available as an option to make the most of the full HD screen, and the X8100 comes with HDMI, DVI and VGA video outputs.

Powering the huge screen is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285M SLI setup. Each GPU has 1GB RAM for 2GB total, though effectively it's the same as a 1GB single GPU. However, for such a graphically orientated notebook, it is a mystery why a previous generation GPU is used. While it's no slouch for graphical productivity applications, for gamers looking to upgrade, Direct X11 is the must have feature for the near future. NVIDIA's DX11 parts, the GeForce GTX 470 and 480, will be unleashed on March 26^th, barely more than two weeks away, but no mobile variant has yet been announced.

Ignoring that fact though, we already have very competent DX11 cards from ATI. For example, the rather nifty looking ASUS G73J comes with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 and looks to perform exceptionally well. That means users are now going to have to decide between NVIDIA DX10/10.1 mobile GPUs or ATI DX11 GPUs, and with ATI's new mobile driver program we're inclined to go with ATI until NVIDIA starts shipping mobile DX11 solutions.

The latest Clevo offering also features built-in 5.1 speakers, a 7-in-1 flash reader, 2MP webcam, Bluetooth, ExpressCard 34/54, eight programmable buttons for gaming, and eight touch sensitive buttons for the usual notebook functions such as changing the volume. An integrated mini-PCI TV tuner with remote control is also an option. In a rather strange move, 802.11n is an "upgrade" starting at $30.25—apparently AVADirect wants users to be able to choose exactly what sort of hardware they get, even allowing them to forego the standard WiFi adapter. More perplexing is that in spite of the huge chassis that will attract many multimedia and gaming peripherals, there are only three USB 2.0 ports and a single Firewire 1394a port. Fortunately eSATA , which doubles as a fourth USB port, and gigabit Ethernet is present for storage and networking needs.

Chassis-wise it is largely identical to its predecessor, complete with a chiclet-style isolated keyboard with a full numerical pad. The lid and wrist rest feature a "Mirror-Black" finish, which will undoubtedly be a fingerprint magnet. A review of the chassis in M980NU guise is available here. To round things off, a variety of Windows 7 (and strangely Windows Vista) versions are available, and although battery life isn't specifically mentioned, it is likely to be non-existent should you ever wish to haul the 12.50 lbs. notebook anywhere. Unfortunately for a notebook of this specification, it only comes with a standard 1-year warranty; extended 2-year and 3-year warranties are available for $157 and $286, respectively.

To be honest it is hard to recommend such a machine. The aforementioned ASUS G73J couples the same Core i7 CPU with a DX11 capable GPU with the same, and in some cases better, specifications in all other areas, but in a much lighter chassis with a 2-year warranty from a very respectable $1599.99—and that's after the $100 extra surcharge due to demand (MSRP for the G73J is $1500). Did I mention the ASUS chassis is designed to look like an F-117 stealth fighter jet? Full details are available on the ASUS website.

Should you prefer the Clevo X8100 gaming notebook—it will certainly be faster than other gaming notebooks, thanks to the 285M SLI configuration, even if it doesn't support DX11—it is available at www.avadirect.com starting at $2472.55, though once you add the usual upgrades you'll likely pay a lot more. We specced out a system with the i7-820QM, 2x4GB DDR3, a 160GB Intel X25-M G2 SSD, and a pair of 500GB 7200RPM drives for mass storage; total cost of such a system comes to $3740.

As many of you are aware, NVIDIA has hit some snags with their latest round of WHQL drivers. The drivers have been interfering with the fan operation on certain NVIDIA video cards, resulting in the GPU overheating. NVIDIA has taken down the drivers in question, and has asked that we pass along the following message:

We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers do not download this driver. Instead, please stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our website and we also are asking our partners and others to remove temporarily this 196.75 WHQL driver as well.

Here’s a link for instructions on how to roll back your driver. http://www.nvidia.com/object/driver_rollback.html

MSI, best known for their PC components, have launched their latest Intel Arrandale equipped notebook offerings. We discussed some of the initial products in our CES coverage, and these are now shipping and available at retailers like Newegg and Amazon.

The four latest models are part of their “Classic Series”, and they’re larger form factors: three 15.6” and one 16” model. All feature LED-backlit 1366x768 displays, integrated 1.3 megapixel webcams and Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit, suggesting a media- and value-orientated lineup. They also include the obligatory 4-in-1 card reader, VGA and HDMI out, three USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, and 802.11b/g/draft n. Something that we don’t see quite as often on entry level laptops is the inclusion of ExpressCard/34 slots, which can be useful for those interested in mobile broadband solutions.

Two of the 15.6” models use a Core i3-330M CPU and a 320GB HDD, with either a DVD writer or a Blu-Ray drive. It would be nice to get a 1080p LCD for the Blu-ray version, but HDMI out does enable a portable home theater experience. The CR620-030US comes with a DVD for $630 while the CR620-033US adds the BD combo drive for $700. The third model, the $730 CR620-031US, will offer a Core i5-430M CPU with a DVD writer and a 500GB HDD. There’s no Blu-Ray option, unfortunately, though the move to an i5 processor brings Turbo mode support along with a slightly higher clock speed (even if the Turbo mode is a relatively small 266MHz boost).

All of the 15.6” models utilize the onboard Arrandale HD Graphics and come with 4GB of DDR3-1066 RAM. However, the 32-bit version of Windows 7 will limit accessible RAM to 3GB in practice. Frankly, we’re baffled as to why they would ship 4GB laptops with a 32-bit OS, considering the vast majority of new PCs and laptops are now running 64-bit Windows. MSI really need to make the shift to 64-bit OSes on their laptops, as we have seen nothing that would stop us from recommending such setups to end users. On the exterior, all the laptops feature the increasingly common “chiclet” keyboards and a “Cross-Hatch” texture finish on the lid with “Color Film Print”— marketing speak for a checkered texture on a vibrant enamel finish.

The 16” CR600-234US machine makes up the entry-level offering and changes things up quite a bit. Rather than using an Arrandale CPU, it shifts to a “lowly” Pentium Dual-Core T4500 and 3GB of DDR2 RAM. An NVIDIA GeForce 8200M G provides graphics with reasonable performance in the absence of an Arrandale IGP. This model will retail for around $529.99 and comes with the same DVD writer and 320GB HDD as the base model Core i3. This model does without the checkered textured lid but retains the enamel black finish.

Rather surprisingly all models weigh in at the same 5.46 lbs; however, the weight is kept down by a relatively small 6-cell battery. This unfortunately appears to be the downfall of these machines. Despite MSI’s “ECO Engine Power Management” technology, which is fitted to all models, the stated battery life is just 3 hours. Considering these are far from performance machines, this is very disappointing.

On the surface, these MSI laptops have average specifications, relatively poor battery life, and reasonable pricing. They don’t seem to be worth the bother, except for one other item. All of these models come with a standard 3-year warranty from MSI, including one year of international coverage. We’ve seen plenty of user complaints on laptops that are only 18 months old, so a 3-year warranty is definitely appreciated. For just $730, the CR620-033US provides Core i3, Blu-ray playback, and 3 years of worry free ownership. The design and aesthetics are nothing special, but the overall packages are still a respectable paddle in the Arrandale waters for MSI.

These laptops (and others) are currently available in the US through Newegg, Amazon, and MSImobile.com; there’s no word yet on European availability.

Since we published our reviews of the Radeon HD 5450 and the Radeon HD 5570, we have been going back and forth with AMD over the results of our video quality tests using the Cheese Slices test. Our initial results showed that neither the 5570 nor the 5450 had enough compute power to handle the full suite of post-processing abilities on 1080i video, the most important of which was Vector Adaptive deinterlacing. Since then, AMD has let us in on a few things that have changed that significantly, so let’s dive right in.

Enforce Smooth Video Playback (ESVP): The first thing that changed is that we finally got a complete answer on what Enforce Smooth Video Playback does. The short answer is that it’s an “idiot button” for users, to keep them from using so many post-processing settings on low-end video cards that It causes frames to drop.

Specifically, AMD has their own internal test suite that they use to test their low-end cards to see what they’re capable of when it comes to post-processing. If those cards are incapable of a certain feature(s) at certain settings, then using ESVP will have the driver quietly disable those features, so that only the features the card can keep up with are used. In essence, ESVP is a list of monitor-resolution/feature/video-resolution combinations where features need to be disabled when ESVP is active. This is all done driver side, and is not a 5000-series only feature as some people have speculated.

Anyhow, ESVP is not essential to the operation of the video card. It’s not doing anything beside disabling features on cards & situations where there are known issues, which means it’s not doing anything on faster cards; turning it on or off on a 5570 or better has no impact on anything whatsoever. However with that in mind, we tested it and found that it shouldn’t be disabled. On faster cards it’s not hurting anything (since it doesn’t have anything on its list to disable) and on slower cards we’ve found that AMD’s settings are in fact right on the nose. For example if we forced Vector Adaptive deinterlacing on the 5450 at 2560x1600, the card would drop 3 frames over the span of the Cheese Slices test. ESVP was doing the right thing by disabling it. Thus as far as we can tell, any feature disabled with ESVP turned on is disabled for a good reason.

With that in mind, we’re going to stick to our original suggestion of leaving ESVP enabled on all AMD cards. Enthusiasts can turn it off and tweak things if they want to, but AMD looks to have done a solid job profiling their cards – if you try to outsmart ESVP, you’re probably going to be dropping frames in doing so.

Radeon HD 5570: As we noted earlier, the 5570 original failed our Cheese Slices test. After AMD’s engineers looked in to it, it turns out that the drivers sampled with the card (ATI_8.69_RC3_Win7_Vista_Jan14) had a 5570-specific bug when ESVP was enabled. If you recall our review of the card, enabling ESVP would forcibly disable all post-processing and advanced deinterlacing features on the 5570, both internally and in the Catalyst Control Center itself. That was the bug – ESVP wasn’t supposed to be disabling anything.

The old AVIVO control panel on the Radeon HD 5570

AMD has since provided us with a newer build of their drivers (ATI_Win7_Vista_8.692RC2_Feb10, available from AMD here) which correct this issue. ESVP no longer blocks the operation of any post-processing features.

We went ahead and tested this driver in-depth, and the driver does indeed correct the issue. The 5570 is able to use all post-processing and advanced deinterlacing features with ESVP enabled and disabled. The quality was just as good as the 5670 (we would expect no less) and we found no evidence of the card dropping any frames.

Old Drivers: Radeon 5570 Deinterlacing

New Drivers: Radeon 5570 Deinterlacing

Thus as far as we can tell, the 5570 is in fact the perfect Radeon HTPC card that we have been looking for. It’s the cheapest, smallest, and coolest running 5000-series card that can offer the full suite of post-processing abilities, and of course it has the 5000-series’s audio bitstreaming capabilities. Since the whole point of this exercise was to identify the lowest 5000-series card that was still perfect for HTPC use, we have found it. And the best part is it even fits in a low-profile case.

Radeon HD 5450: While the driver bug in the earlier driver set only affected the 5570, in the process we learned something that had an impact on the 5450. As we discussed previous with ESVP, it takes in to consideration the resolution of the monitor along with the resolution of the video (i.e. is it HD) and the features requested. It turns out that we were inadvertently causing the 5450 to do worse than what it’s capable of.

For our testing, we use a Samsung SyncMaster 305T 30” LCD. The 305T is a bit unusual in that it doesn’t have a built-in scaler, so we ran our desktop at the full 2560x1600 resolution for the Cheese Slices test since we can’t do 1:1 pixel mapping of a lower resolution. This allowed us to run Cheese Slices in a window unscaled.

It turns out that the difference between rendering a 1920x1200 desktop and a 2560x1600 desktop is enough to make the 5450 start dropping frames when Vector Adaptive deinterlacing is in use. If we forced the issue by disabling ESVP, we would see a few frames get dropped in the Cheese Slices test when running at 2560x1600, but not at 1920x1200. This is actually something AMD was aware of, and as we just found out AMD has ESVP disable Vector Adaptive deinterlacing on a 2560x1600 desktop, but leaves it enabled at 1920x1200. Or in other words, the 5450 has enough compute power to do Vector Adaptive deinterlacing at HD desktop resolutions, just not at resolutions above that.

1920x1200: Radeon 5450 Deinterlacing

The important thing here is that HDTVs still top out at 1920x1080 – you (okay, most of you) wouldn’t be running a bigger display as an HDTV. Hence if we hooked this up to an HDTV via HDMI, we would be using a resolution below 2560x1600, and the 5450 would have used Vector Adaptive deinterlacing on all media. Our poor results in Cheese Slices had more to do with our desktop resolution than it did the abilities of the card.

With that said, there is one catch: the 5450 doesn’t have enough compute power to do any further post-processing on 1080i video besides Vector Adaptive deinterlacing. Just doing the decoding and that deinterlacing requires everything the 5450 can squeeze out, which means there’s nothing left for edge enhancement, de-noise, dynamic contrast, etc. So while the 5450 is a very capable HTPC card (more so than we first thought), it is not the perfect HTPC card like the 5570. If you need every last bell & whistle, the 5450 isn’t quite up to the task. But with Vector Adaptive deinterlacing working, it’s a reasonable expectation that the 5450 offers enough for most people – compared to Vector Adaptive deinterlacing, it’s in our own experience that the other post-processing features go unused most of the time.

So the 5450 is still the almost-perfect HTPC card, but it’s actually quite close. Unless you need more than Vector Adaptive deinterlacing, the 5450 would be as good of a fit as the 5570. To that end it’s the cheapest of the 5000-series, and it’s passively cooled, which certainly has its advantages.

Other Issues: We have had several HTPC enthusiasts email us over the last week asking about various features or complaining about various issues they have encountered. We’ve seen one particularly good thread over at AVSForum that lists out these issues, and while we don’t consider any of these to be nearly as significant as the earlier ESVP & deinterlacing oversights, we have passed the list on to AMD. At the very least, it’s something to take in to consideration if you’re going the HTPC route.

Update: NVIDIA has confirmed that the Twitter account is indeed theirs, so this information is official.

With a skeptical eye towards Twitter, a post was made on the NVIDIAGeForce account 4 hours ago announcing the names of the first two GF100 cards. As we’re largely sure this is a legitimate NVIDIA account we’re going to go ahead and post this information, but please keep in mind that we have not yet been able to confirm that this is indeed an official NVIDIA posting (it’s 10PM on the West Coast).

With that out of the way, the post reads as follows:

Fun Fact of the Week: GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 will be the names of the first two GPUs shipped based on our new GF100 chip!

It’s a very small piece of information so we don’t have a lot of commentary here, but the names are a little bit surprising. The names are consistent with NVIDIA’s G/GT/GTX naming scheme, but we’re not quite sure what happened with the numbers. Technically speaking NVIDIA launched their 300 series late last year with the GeForce 310, an OEM-only rebadge of the GeForce 210. But we had expected that NVIDIA would fill the rest of the 300 series with GF100 and GF100-derrived parts, similar to how the 200 series is organized with a mix of DX10 and DX10.1 capable parts. Such an expectation is also consistent with the earlier rumors on the GTX 380 and GTX 360.

Instead they've gone ahead and started the 400 series of cards with GF100, not that we’re complaining. This is great news for developers and buyers since it prevents a repeat of the GeForce 4 Ti/MX situation, but it does make us wonder what the point was in burning off a whole series number with a single bottom-tier card. And although this is an article about the 400 series, we're left wondering what the purpose is of a rebadged 300 series is since that clearly has an impact on the naming of the 400 series.

At any rate, no further information was announced. We still don't know what the performance will be like or the clock speeds. It's a good bet however that the GTX 470 will have some CUDA Cores disabled, if NVIDIA's GTX 280/270/260 naming scheme is anything to go by.

AMD’s often perilous financial situation usually bears watching, but this past quarter is of particular interest. On the business side we have seen AMD and Intel settle their long-standing feud over accusations of anti-competitive behavior by Intel, which had several big outcomes for AMD this past quarter. As part of the settlement terms Intel paid AMD a cool 1.25 billion USD, officially to make up for past transgressions – and unofficially as life support for a company that lost money for the last 13 quarters.

On the technology side we’ve seen AMD’s graphics division spend an entire quarter driving their own destiny. With Fermi/GF100 delayed well in to Q1 of this year, Q4 was all about the Radeon 5000 series – and it would have been an even better quarter if only it weren’t for that pesky TSMC 40nm supply problem. AMD’s CPU division didn’t have quite as rosy of a time, but Intel’s price gaps below $200 have left AMD with a viable value market.

So with that in mind, how did AMD fare for the quarter and for the year? It’s a mixed bag, particularly if you throw out the Intel settlement. Perhaps a table will best get at this.

AMD booked the final Intel settlement at $1,242 million, giving us the difference between AMD’s actual results for the quarter and year, and what it would have been without the Intel settlement. Officially AMD booked a profit even without the Intel settlement if you go by their non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) numbers, but we’re sticking with the GAAP numbers here and just yanking out the Intel settlement.

To put things in perspective, last year AMD lost $1.4 billion just on Q4’08, and $3.1B for all of 2008, so this is a massive turnaround for the company. At this point both of their core divisions are turning a small profit, and the company’s reduced exposure to the foundry business has greatly improved their bottom line. AMD took a loss of $99M in Q4 from their share of Global Foundries – so if they were able to drop the foundry business entirely, they would have likely turned a true GAAP profit. Although AMD has several problems, at the moment it’s the foundry business that continues to be doing the most harm to them.

On a broader market outlook, AMD was expected to lose some 18 cents a share this quarter (not factoring in the Intel settlement), whereas they actually only lost 8 cents a share, so the company beat the street in losing less than half as much as was expected. Certainly that’s good news for AMD, whose long streak of losing quarters has made it an unpopular item.

One thing of interest from AMD’s results was the average selling prices and gross margins. AMD doesn’t give us the exact ASP of their products, but they do compare it to previous quarters and years.

In spite of AMD’s overall better financial position, the ASPs in both the processor and graphics division has fallen both on a quarterly and yearly basis. This isn’t particularly surprising for the processor division with Nehalem regulating AMD to the sub-$200 market, but it is more surprising on the graphics side where AMD had not been able to sell a single-GPU video card for over $300 for years until now. It just goes to show you that the bulk of products really are sold at the low-end, where prices on older 4000-series products continue to slowly drop. Graphics revenue is a similar story: Up slightly on the year, but up significantly for the quarter compared both to last year and to Q3 of this year.

What is surprising is that considering AMD’s financial situation, their processor gross margin is pretty good. At 45% they’re no Intel (64.7%) but it’s the kind of margin the company needs to pay for things like R&D, particularly since they don’t move massive volumes of chips like Intel does.

Wrapping things up, the big thing for the company in 2010 is going to be that they’re finally going to escape the black hole that has been Global Foundries. ATIC – whose long-term plan has always been to completely buy-out GF from AMD – is expected to go through with that transaction soon now that Intel is no longer going to block the sale through the use of the x86 license. Since GF has been a losing proposition for AMD, in the short-term they stand to finally stop losing money on it, meaning they stand a good chance of turning at least a small profit overall since both processors and graphics are profit-generating. Of course it remains to be seen whether this is a great long-term strategy, but you can’t argue with the short-term effects on the balance sheet.

On the tech side, this quarter will see the launch of the rest of the Radeon 5000 series (Evergreen) chi p stack. 55nm products will continue to sell for quite some time, but it should be good for the ASP of the graphics division. Fuzion (CPU+GPU) products are still on-schedule for a launch late this year, so the CPU side of things should see a decent shakeup even though Bulldozer won’t make it this year. AMD mentioned that the first Fuzion products will be SOI-based, so it sounds like they’ll be making them at GF, with later products fabbed at additional foundries.

From our Radeon HD 5770 Review:

Interestingly enough, we’ve been told that the Phoenix shroud isn’t going to be sticking around for long. The first wave of cards launching today and for the near future will be using the shroud, but once AMD’s vendors begin using their own designs, AMD doesn’t expect most of the vendors to stick with the shroud. XFX has specifically been named as a party that will keep using the shroud on products, but anyone else is subject to change. With a TDP of only 108W, the Phoenix shroud is probably overbuilt and certainly more expensive than vendors would like, where mainstream products come with thinner margins. We would expect the vendors that do switch to move to more traditional dual-slot coolers, likely ones that aren’t shrouded at all and would not blow hot air outside of the case.

What AMD explained to us quickly came to pass, and once the first wave of 5770s sold out, the replacement waves started coming with coolers besides the Phoenix shroud. Since then we’ve had a number of people ask us how the later coolers compare to the Phoenix, and this is something that we can finally answer today.

XFX's 5770 Rev 2

XFX – who AMD named as one of the companies who would be selling the Phoenix along with other cooler designs – was kind enough to send over one of their alternative 5770 models for this cooler evaluation. Our particular interest in this card is that it uses the same egg-shrouded cooler that is appearing on the majority of 5770s seen in retail, making it the de-facto standard 5770 cooler. For the sake of simplicity, we are calling this the 5770 Revision 2 cooler. In XFX’s case, this is sold alongside cards using the Phoenix and another card using an open cooler similar to the Rev 2.

When first looking at the Rev 2, looks can be deceiving. While it does use an egg-shaped shroud very similar to that found on the 5750, the actual HSF unit is entirely different, making the similarities merely superficial. Ultimately the 5750’s HSF was a simple aluminum heatsink sitting on top of the GPU, with a fan sitting on top of the heatsink. For the 5770, a much more elaborate HSF is used, consisting of a copper block with a pair of heatpipes embedded. These heatpipes then run the entire circumference of a circular aluminum heatsink that sits on top of the copper block. Finally, sitting in the middle of the heatsink (and not above it) is the fan.

A side view of the Rev 2 cooler

The original Phoenix cooler

In short, in spite of the visual similarities to the 5750’s cooler, the Rev 2 cooler entails a much larger heatsink using heatpipes and better fan placement. If you’ve ever seen Zalman’s VF900 GPU cooler, then the design is very similar to that.

Overall the Rev 2 is very similar to the Zalman VF900 (image courtesy Zalman)

With the change in coolers comes some space savings for the card. As the Phoenix shroud added another half-inch to the total length of the 5770, it pushed an 8.25” design out to 8.75”. With the Rev 2 cooler there is no overhang, bringing the card in at just the PCB length of 8.25”. This also means that the 6-pin PCIe power plug is no longer partially hidden by the shroud, making it easily accessible on the Rev 2.

We should note that while the cooler has changed, the PCB has not. The PCB on this card is exactly identical to the PCB on our 5770 reference card. In fact the only difference besides the cooler is the use of Samsung GDDR5 rather than Hynix GDDR5. In benchmarks there is absolutely no difference in performance between our Rev 2 card and our original reference card. So the only practical difference is the cooler.

That brings us to what kind of difference the change in coolers brings. When we first discussed the 5770, we noted that the Phoenix was probably overbuilt for the relatively low 108W TDP of a 5770. Indeed that appears to be the case, as you can see with the results of our Rev 2 cooler.

We’ll start with a look at temperatures. Our expectations for the Rev 2 cooler were for higher overall temperatures since its design means that it has to recycle some hot air rather than blowing it entirely out of computer like the Phoenix cooler does, and it’s here where we found our first surprise. Rather than being warmer than the Phoenix, the Rev 2 is cooler (if ever so slightly) in both idle and load situations. At a 2C and 1C different at idle and load respectively it’s not a huge difference, but it’s an extremely notable difference since the otherwise simpler Rev 2 cooler is clearly keeping up with and otherwise outperforming the Phoenix.

Our other surprise came in our noise tests .Surely the Phoenix would be quieter thanks to its shrouding, right? Wrong we were once again. In fact the difference is even more pronounced than the temperature differences. The Rev 2 cooler not only manages to stay quieter than the rest of the computer (something the Phoenix can’t claim) but at load the difference becomes 6dB. While the Phoenix cooler is by no means a loud cooler, the Rev 2 in comparison is whisper-silent. Even compared to itself, the Rev 2 is only 3dB louder under load than it is while idling.

Final Thoughts

Frankly, based on this data we have a hard time justifying the Phoenix over the Rev 2 cooler. The Rev 2 makes for a smaller board, a slightly cooler GPU, and a significantly quieter video card. Thusly the only advantage the Phoenix cooler has is that it completely exhausts all hot air, which in the case of our well ventilated Thermaltake case isn’t doing it any favors. Unless this card is placed in a case with extremely poor airflow, we can’t think of a situation where the Phoenix cooler is superior (and in which case, we’re left wondering whether there would be enough fresh air to satisfy the Phoenix regardless).

The Phoenix cooler may be the better looking (and 5800-series matching) cooler, but ultimately it’s not the best cooler. AMD and their partners were wise to ditch the Phoenix for the Rev 2 in most of their design, as it offers better thermal and acoustic performance, not to mention a lower resulting price (we’d peg the difference at about $10 retail). In fact at this point we’re left wondering why they launched the Phoenix at all –ultimately it would have been all the more impressive for the 5770 and cheaper for consumers if they had just launched with the Rev 2 cooler in the first place.

On a quick note this morning, along with yesterday’s release of the Catalyst 9.12 drivers, AMD has also published a 9.12 hotfix driver that has added a couple of interesting things.

Along with refreshing their line of OpenCL-capable drivers (OpenCL is still not in the mainline driver), AMD has added support for Crossfire Eyefinity. We first saw Crossfire Eyefinity in our Radeon 5970 review, where the feature was enabled solely for the 5970 so that the complete card could be used for Eyefinity. At the time AMD had promised that they would be enabling Crossfire Eyefinity for true Crossfire-paired cards soon, and this is the first step of fulfilling that promise. The need for AMD to whitelist games for Crossfire Eyefinity has not changed, so while it works on Crossfire-paired cards, it still does not work for all games.

The second interesting addition is support for DisplayPort audio. Although we tend to think of DisplayPort as a replacement for DVI rather than HDMI, technically it can serve as a replacement for both. Several of you have been asking us if the 5000 series supported DisplayPort Audio, and we did not have a good answer until now. If you do have a DisplayPort setup that supports audio, then this driver will allow you to finally get audio out of that DisplayPort on your 5000 series card.

On the performance front we have heard that these drivers may offer some respectable performance boosts for the 5000 series, but this isn’t something we’ve had a chance to test. The timing would be good however, since the supply of RV700 cards (4870/4850) have completely dried up, so buying a cheap 4870 in place of a 5700 series card has ceased to be an option.

• "The total number of x86 instructions is well above one thousand" (!!)
  
• "CPU dispatching ... makes the code bigger, and it is so costly in terms of development time and maintenance costs that it is almost never done in a way that adequately optimizes for all brands of CPUs."
• "the decoding of instructions can be a serious bottleneck, and it becomes worse the more complicated the instruction codes are"
• The costs of supporting obsolete instructions is not negligible. You need large execution units to support a large number of instructions. This means more silicon space, longer data paths, more power consumption, and slower execution.

We just got off the phone with Nick Knupffer of Intel, who confirmed something that has long been speculated upon: the fate of Larrabee. As of today, the first Larrabee chip’s retail release has been canceled. This means that Intel will not be releasing a Larrabee video card or a Larrabee HPC/GPGPU compute part.

The Larrabee project itself has not been canceled however, and Intel is still hard at work developing their first entirely in-house discrete GPU. The first Larrabee chip (which for lack of an official name, we’re going to be calling Larrabee Prime) will be used for the R&D of future Larrabee chips in the form of development kits for internal and external use.

The big question of course is “why?” Officially, the reason why Larrabee Prime was scrubbed was that both the hardware and the software were behind schedule. Intel has left the finer details up to speculation in true Intel fashion, but it has been widely rumored in the last few months that Larrabee Prime has not been performing as well as Intel had been expecting it to, which is consistent with the chip being behind schedule.

Bear in mind that Larrabee Prime’s launch was originally scheduled to be in the 2009-2010 timeframe, so Intel has already missed the first year of their launch window. Even with TSMC’s 40nm problems, Intel would have been launching after NVIDIA’s Fermi and AMD’s Cypress, if not after Cypress’ 2010 successor too. If the chip was underperforming, then the time element would only make things worse for Intel, as they would be setting up Larrabee Prime against successively more powerful products from NVIDIA and AMD.

The software side leaves us a bit more curious, as Intel normally has a strong track record here. Their x86 compiler technology is second to none, and as Larrabee Prime is x86 based, this would have left them in a good starting position for software development. What we’re left wondering is whether the software setback was for overall HPC/GPGPU use, or if it was for graphics. Certainly the harder part of Larrabee Prime’s software development would be the need to write graphics drivers from scratch that were capable of harnessing the chip as a video card, taking in to consideration the need to support older APIs such as DX9 that make implicit assumptions about the layout of the hardware. Could it be that Intel couldn’t get Larrabee Prime working as a video card? That’s going to be a big question that’s going to hang over Intel’s heads right up to the day that they finally launch a Larrabee video card.

Ultimately when we took our first look at Larrabee Prime’s architecture, there were 3 things that we believed could go wrong: manufacturing/yield problems, performance problems, and driver problems. Based on what Intel has said, we can’t write off any of those scenarios. Larrabee Prime is certainly suffering from something that can be classified as driver problems, and it may very well be suffering from both manufacturing and performance problems too.

To Intel’s credit, even if Larrabee Prime will never see the light of day as a retail product, it has been turning in some impressive numbers at trade shows. At SC09 last month, Intel demonstrated Larrabee Prime running the SGEMM HPC benchmark at 1 TeraFLOP, a notable accomplishment as the actual performance of any GPU is usually a fraction of its theoretical performance. 1TF is close to the theoretical performance of NVIDIA’s GT200 and AMD’s RV770 chips, so Larrabee was no slouch. But then again its competition would not be GT220 and RV770, it’s Fermi and Cypress.

Next, this brings us to the future of Larrabee. Larrabee Prime may be canceled, but the Larrabee project is not. As Intel puts it, Larrabee is a “complex multi-year project” and development will be continuing. Intel still wants a piece of the HPC/GPGPU pie (least NVIDIA and AMD get it all to themselves) and they still want in to the video card space given the collision between those markets. For Intel, their plans have just been delayed.

The Larrabee architecture lives on

For the immediate future, as we mentioned earlier Larrabee Prime is still going to be used by Intel for R&D purposes, as a software development platform. This is a very good use of the hardware (however troubled it may be) as it allows Intel to bootstrap the software side of Larrabee so that developers can get started programming for real hardware while Intel works on the next iteration of Larrabee. Much like how NVIDIA and AMD sample their video cards months ahead of time to game developers, we expect that Larrabee Prime SDKs would be limited to Intel’s closest software partners, so don’t expect to see much if anything leak about Larrabee Prime once chips start leaving Intel’s hands, or to see extensive software development initially. Widespread Larrabee software development will still not start until Intel ships the next iteration of Larrabee, if this is the case.

We should know more about the Larrabee situation next year, as Intel is already planning on an announcement at some point in 2010. Our best guess is that Intel will announce the next Larrabee chip at that time, with a product release in 2011 or 2012. Much of this will depend on what the hardware problem was and what process node Intel wants to use. If Intel just needs the ability to pack more cores on to a Larrabee chip then 2011 is a reasonable target, otherwise if there’s a more fundamental issue then 2012 is more likely. This lines up with the process nodes for those years: if they go for 2011 they hit the 2^nd year of their 32nm process, otherwise if they launched in 2012 they would be able to launch it as one of the first products on the 22nm process.

For that matter, Since the Larrabee project was not killed, it’s a safe assumption that any future Larrabee chips are going to be based on the same architectural design. The vibe from Intel is that the problem is Larrabee Prime and not the Larrabee architecture itself. The idea of an x86 many-cores GPU is still alive and well.

On-Chip GMA-based GPUs: Still On Schedule For 2010

Finally, there’s the matter of Intel’s competition. For AMD and NVIDIA, this is just about the best possible announcement they could hope for. On the video card front it means they won’t be facing any new competitors through 2010 and most of 2011. That doesn’t mean that Intel isn’t going to be a challenge for them – Intel is still launching Carkdale and Arrandale with on-chip GPUs next year – but they won’t be facing competition at the high-end too. For NVIDIA in particular, this means that Fermi has a clear shot at the HPC/GPGPU space without competition from Intel, which is exactly the kind of break NVIDIA needed since Fermi is running late.

Raja and I have been working on a Holiday Guide the past couple of weeks and hopefully we will complete it this week. Our emphasis has been on finding components that offer a great bang for the buck even though they might not be the absolute best in their class. While we will offer our opinions on what is best in class, our focus has been on balanced performance, support, and features versus cost. A really good example is the ASRock X58 and P55 Extreme boards that offer a great set of features and performance for excellent pricing in each category. While they will not satisfy the needs of extreme overclockers, for the other 98% of us, they offer a really great value. Just like the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P, MSI 790FX-GD70, and ASUS M4A77TD Pro have in their respective categories.

That said, there are a lot of great choices currently in the lower end market, especially in the AMD 785G camp. The 785G boards are just terrific values for building a SOHO centric platform that will be primarily used for office applications, Internet, communications, and casual gaming. This is especially true when paired up with an Athlon II based processor. Really, current Intel S775 processors in the sub $100 market teamed with a G41 based board just do not have what it takes to compete with the AMD products in this price sector. Intel has a competitive answer coming early next year, but until then AMD is the wise choice.

J&W is one of our favorite second tier suppliers and they have a winner in the 785G market with their new JW-A785GMT-Extreme board. This product compares very favorably with the Gigabyte and ASUS 785G offerings and actually makes for a great SFF gaming platform for those who just use a single graphics card. Our testing to date with a Phenom II X4 965BE and AMD HD 5850 leads us to believe this a great combination for the gamer centric user on a budget or as an all around gaming/media center with a HD 5770 and Athlon II X2 550BE.

The JW-A785GMT-Extreme features a great five-phase PWM design that fully supports 140W processors, Realtek ALC 888 8-channel HD audio, Realtek RTL8111D Gigabit LAN, IEEE-1394a via the JMicron JMB381 chipset, 12 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI/DVI/VGA output, 16GB DDR3 support, six SATA 3G ports via the SB710, and on-board graphics capability thanks to the update HD 4200 IG engine with full DX10.1 and UVD 2.0 support. J&W also throws in 128MB of DDR3 side port memory. There are three fan headers, with the CPU fan header having speed and temperature settings.

The layout of the board is very good and includes an LED Debug display along with power on and reset buttons.

Initial performance ranks right with the Gigabyte and ASUS 785G boards when it comes to overclocking. Our results with the 965BE were superb as the board allowed stock voltage overclocks to 3.87GHz with our GSkill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 4GB C8 kit reaching DDR3-1720 at 9-9-9-24 2T timings.

Bumping up the CPU VID to 1.43V resulted in 24/7 stable 4.07GHz clocks under Windows 7 64-bit with NB speeds at 2.86GHz, something we have not been able to do under a 64-bit operating system until now. The BIOS is geared for the overclocker with significant settings available for memory and voltage tuning. That said, memory timings are not as aggressive past 1600 as the Gigabyte or ASUS boards but this board typically clocked our CPU about 70MHz higher at like voltage settings. We will take a further look at this board in the near future but for now, anyone looking for a very high quality 785G motherboard should place the JW-A785GMT-Extreme at the top of their list.