Delete those photos of Stonehenge from your site

Stupid copyright enforcement of the day

 

English Heritage, which is supposed to be protecting Stonehenge for humanity, has been taking it upon itself to serve up cease and desist notices on photosharing and stock photo sites

The big idea is English Heritage, which is backed by the UK government, claims that any picture of Stonehenge breaks its copyright. Any use of the snaps “for commercial interest” have to be approved by English Heritage which we guess also means money changing hands

One recipient of a cease and desist letter, the site FotoLibra, is trying to figure out on what legal basis English Heritage is making this claim, noting that English Heritage "has been their responsibility for 27 of the monument's 4,500 year old history

We would have thought that after 4,500 years after its creator's death Stonehenge would be public domain and almost certainly prior art. We know that that English Heritage is probably having a bit of trouble struggling with a Government which wants to cut back a bit on spending, but making a swift buck out of websites who run pictures of ancient monuments is fairly daft

Internet has a population of two billion

Any room to move in here

The World Wide Wibble now has a population of nearly two billion people according to the report, from the International Telecommunication Union

The report says that we will see 2 billion Web dwellers by the end of this year a figure which means that the number of internet users worldwide has doubled in the past five years. Most of the increase is due to users in developing countries signing up

The report said 162 million of the 226 million new Internet users in 2010 will live in those countries, where Web access is still growing. More than 65 percent of Europeans are on the internet, the report said, compared to less than 10 percent of Africans. The ITU, is an agency of the United Nations that monitors communication technology

Its report said that high-speed internet connection are increasingly needed to view modern Web content efficiently and are the key to continued growth. Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure said broadband is the next tipping  point, the next truly transformational technology which can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity, and underpin long-term economic competitiveness

Only about 8 percent of the world will have broadband access this year, according to the report

HTC rolls out Gratia

European version of HTC Aria

HTC has decided to release the new HTC Gratia in Europe which is nothing more than a perfect copy of HTC Aria, which was the AT&T exclusive for quite some time

Despite the obvious name change, the HTC Gratia will get a minor update with two new colours and will come with Android 2.2 Froyo out of the box. Just to remind you, the HTC Gratia is powered by Qualcomm's 600MHz processor, has 512MB of RAM and 384MB of ROM memory, has 8.1cm HVGA (320x480) capacitive touchscreen and bunch of other specs that are quite common for a smartphone these days, including GPS/A-GPS, 5 megapixel camera, digital compas, Bluetooth 2.1 and microSD slot with support for 32GB card

The HTC Gratia measures 103.8x57.7x11.7 mm (LxWxD) and weighs 115g. As noted, it comes equipped with Android 2.2 Froyo and HTC Sense. It features a 1,200mAh battery

According to our info the HTC Gratia will start to sell in German Media Markt and Saturn as of December while the rest of the German market should get it in early 2011. The price is set at €399. We aren't sure about the rest of the European market but we guess that they will also get it in 2011.

XFX HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 have arrived

Review: Goes over 1GHz

AMD’s current plan is to launch 5 new graphics cards by the end of the year and it will start with today’s Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870. Next in line is Radeon HD 6970, the fastest single-GPU card in this generation followed by the HD 6950. Cherry on top is of course the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990.

The graphics cards we’re talking about are AMD’s second gen DirectX 11 architecture codenamed Northern Islands. The two cards on our test today are based on Barts core, a direct result of the HD 5800 series optimization. The core is still in 40nm but the fine-tuned architecture should provide more performance per Watt and mm2 compared to the previous, Evergreen generation

We must admit AMD picked a somewhat confusing naming scheme; namely, you’d think that Radeon HD 6870 is faster than Radeon HD 5870, which unfortunately isn’t the case. Performance wise, Radeon HD 6870 is somewhere between Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850, whereas Radeon HD 6850 is slower than Radeon HD 5850.

Barts cards are mid-range cards that cover the $150-250 segment. Recommended pricing for the HD 6870 stands at $239 in the US and €199 including VAT. The HD 6850’s MRSP stands at $179.99 or €150 in EU. Considering the price and the promised performance, HD 6850 and HD 6870 sound like a pretty nice deal for those on the prowl for a decent gaming card

All this means that mid range and high end graphics segments will definitely get a bit crowded – AMD will replace the HD 5800 with HD 6800 and HD 69000, so there’ll be plenty of flavors between the fastest dual-chip card and HD 5700 series

AMD decided that the HD 5700 series will, for now, coexist with the HD 6000 series, meaning Barts, Cayman and Antilles based cards. The fastest single-GPU card from Northern Islands family will be Radeon HD 6970 and it will be based on Cayman core, whereas dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 will have Antilles core

HD 6890 uses Barts XT; HD 6850 uses Barts Pro core. Barts measures 255mm2, which is 31% smaller compared to HD 5870 and HD 5850’s Cypress (334mm2). Cypress has 2.15 billion transistors while our today’s GPUs come with 1.8 billion. The GPUs in question are all built in 40nm

You can see GPU pictures of XFX HD 6870 and XFX HD 6850 cards, as well as some info AMD presented



The Barts XT, known as the HD 6870 card, has 14 SIMDs, with 80 Stream Processor per SIMD (total of 1120 Stream Processors) and 56 texture units (TMUs). As noted it has a 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface and comes with 32 Raster Operation Processors (ROPs). The fully enabled Barts, or the Barts XT, has 2TFLOPS of computational power. The reference Barts XT GPU ended up clocked at 900MHz for the GPU and 4200MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface



The Barts pro is quite similar except, of course, for the fact that it has two SIMDs less, or simply, it has 48 Texture Units (TMUs) and 960 Stream processors. This one ended up clocked at 775MHz for the GPU and 4000MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface. We've been informed that some early engineering samples with more stream processors count have been shipped, but we have confirmed that our today's test sample is the real Barts PRO deal - 960 stream processors right on the spot





Barts uses AMD's so called "Arch 5D" design with five stream processors; w, x, y, z and t units. Or simply there are four simple SPs and one, t unit, that handles special tasks. The SIMD remained pretty much the same compared to the Cypress GPU as you still have 80SPs per SIMD, same L1 cache size and same number of texture units per SIMD, although this time each SIMD "block" got its own Ultra-Threaded Dispatch Processor component, Instruction Cache and Constant Cache, while Cypress only had one for both blocks

In general, Barts' SIMD consists of 16KB L1 texture, 8KB L1 compute cache and 4 texture units per SIMD. Staying on the trail of Cypress design, Barts retained the number of ROPs as well. The Barts GPU has 32 ROPs with four 128KB blocks of L2 cache memory and four 64-bit memory controllers for a total of 512KB of L2 cache and 256-bit memory interface

AMD apparently worked hard to optimize Cypress for better performance in parallel computing as well as tessellation. Barts does have some differences compared to the Cypress, as the UVD, Display Controller and Tessellation Unit were completely redesigned. AMD's Barts GPU is also 25 percent smaller than Cypress, and impressively, only a
tad slower than the Cypress based cards

Eyefinity technology still remains one of AMD’s aces in their fight with Nvidia, and now it’s gotten even better. Namely, you now have even more outs on the card – six display controllers offer six TDMS links. Reference out configuration lists single-link DVI, dual-link DVI, HDMI and two mini-DisplayPort connectors

Both mini-DisplayPorts 1.2 support Multi-Stream technology, which allows for using up to 3 displays on only one port, provided you use MST HUB. Of course, two DisplayPorts mean up to 6 screens. Unified Video Decoder (UVD 3.0) has also gotten an overhaul and it offers Blu-ray and DivX high definition GPU acceleration, while the card’s HDMI 1.4a connector offers support for stereoscopic 3D standards such as Blu-ray 3D

XFX HD 6890 is a reference design card measuring 10.5 inches in lenght, just like the HD 5850. The cooling is also the reference solution – copper base and three heatpipes. The cooler looks like the one on HD 5850 cards, but the edges are sharper. Although both cards feature the same length PCB, HD 6870’s cooler is longer than HD 5850’s



The I/O panel features two DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, HDMI 1.4a and two DVI connectors (one of them is single-link with maximum resolution of 1920x1200). By using a DisplayPort hub, it’s possible to chain up to three monitors to a single mini-DisplayPort. As far as sound goes, HDMI 1.4a provides Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192KHz/24bit output


Unlike the HD 5850, HD 6870 comes with only one CrossFire connector. This means that you can only use two cards in 2-way CrossFire

Radeon HD 6870 consumes 151W at max so it will require two power connectors – 150W is the limit for one power connector

XFX’s HD 6850 is a custom design that boasts 100% Japan capacitors and comes with XFX’s in-house cooling - circular heatsink with an upsized 80mm fan. The cooling isn’t particularly quiet in idle mode but it does a good job of cooling. After all, there is RPM regulation that you can rely on to make your card quiet



XFX Radeon HD 6850 features two DVIs, one HDMI and one DisplayPort.  Like its HD 6870 brother, the HD 6850 also sports a XFX-branded exhaust vent


The entire card has a black plastic hood and large vents for hot air to escape. There is a single CrossFire connector for adding another card to your graphics setup. XFX’s HD 6850 consumes up to 127W, which makes one 6-pin PCI Express connector enough to power this card

Testbed

Motherboard: EVGA 4xSLI
CPU: Core i7 965 XE      Intel EIST and Vdrop enabled
Memory: 6GB Corsair Dominator 12800 7-7-7-24.
Harddisk:   OCZ Vertex 2 100 GB
Power Supply: CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 800W
Case: CoolerMaster HAF X
Fan Controler: Kaze Master Pro 5.25
Operating System: Win7 64-bit
260.89_desktop_win7_winvista_64bit_english
10.10 CCC      Driver 8.782RC

AMD introduced three quality settings within its new Catalyst AI (performance, quality and high quality) of which AMD says the following

With the introduction of the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series and its new hardware texture capabilities, the AMD Catalyst A.I. user interface in AMD Catalyst Control Center™ has also been updated to allow direct user control over performance optimizations that may affect image quality. The new AMD Catalyst A.I. options can be found by opening the 3D settings page, selecting the “All” tab and scrolling down

The Texture Filtering Quality slider has three settings – High Quality, Quality (default), and Performance. The High Quality setting disables all texture optimizations. The Quality setting enables a trilinear optimization as well as an anisotropic sample optimization, which are designed to have no visible impact on image quality while offering improved performance. The Performance setting enables more aggressive versions of these optimizations that offer further performance improvement, but may have a small impact on image quality

The AMD Radeon HD 6800 series continues to support fully angle invariant anisotropic filtering, and incorporates further improvements in LOD precision relative to the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series. These image quality benefits come with no additional performance cost and remain enabled at all Texture Filtering Quality settings

When comparing performance and image quality against NVIDIA products, we recommend using the same Texture Filtering Quality setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel to ensure the most direct and fair comparison. However, note that as of this writing NVIDIA products do not offer a comparable anisotropic filtering option with full angle independence

The Surface Format Optimization checkbox allows improved performance in selected games that use 16-bit floating point surfaces for HDR rendering. It is designed to have no discernable effect on image quality, and therefore we recommend it be left enabled at all times

In our HD 6800 cards review, we used high quality settings, just like on Nvidia cards. This resulted in HD 5850 cards actually scoring higher than HD 6870. The high quality option turns off every single filtering optimization (the 5800 series is running at quality setting by default) - the point of the high quality setting is to illustrate the fact that between quality and high quality there is no difference in image quality but the performance is increased. We got the following results, but we do intend to update the review with tests at quality settings


Gaming tests clearly show that the previously explained testing mode (with high-quality texture filtering) affects HD 6800 performance. We will soon test whether it affects picture quality as well
















Tessellation tests preferred HD 6800 and it shows that AMD worked really hard to improve on this field

HD 6800 Overclocking

HD 6870’s reference clocks are 900MHz for the GPU an 1050MHz for the memory, and our today’s XFX cards use reference design. CCC Overdrive limits the clocks to 1000MHz for the GPU and 1250MHz for the memory, so we relied on MSI’s Afterburner for our overclocking. We managed to hit 1010MHz for the GPU but only after we increased the fan RPM to 55%, where the fan ran pretty loud

We managed to hit 990MHz for the GPU and 1020MHz for the memory by running the fan in AUTO mode, and it resulted in 8% better results in Aliens vs. Predator. Had the HD 6870 been just a tad bit louder during our tests (AUTO fan mode), we’d call the card loud, but it still isn’t unbearable

On the other hand, the card is quiet when idle




XFX HD 6850 is also a reference clocked card – the GPU runs at 775MHz, shaders at 775MHz and the memory at 1000MHz (4000MHz effectively). The card allowed an overclock to 930MHz GPU and 1180MHz for the memory and it resulted in 18% better results in Aliens vs. Predator





Fan noise

XFX HD 6870 is pretty quiet when idle, and it doesn’t get loud during gaming either

The XFX HD 6850, on the other hand, gets loud both when idle and when gaming and it is definitely louder than XFX HD 6870. The BIOS sets the fan to 42% RPM in idle mode making the card pretty loud. Furmark testing caused the XFX HD 6850 temperatures to go up to 65 degrees Celsius, which speaks volumes on the cooler's quality. Furthermore, it also means that you can sacrifice a couple of C and make the card quieter




Consumption

Faster cards usually have two 6-pin PCIe power connectors but the HD 6870 had to have two. A single Watt that is the culprit, as the card will draw 151W while one connector can supply “only” 150W. However, the additional power connector allows for overclocking beyond 900MHz

The slower HD 6850 comes with one 6-pin power connector. As you probably already know, Barts XT and PRO chips’ die size measures 255mm2. HD 6870 consumes 19W in idle and 151W during operation whereas the 6850 draws 19W when idle and 127W during operation

We measured our entire rig's consumption after stressing the graphics with FurMark. The tests show that HD 6870’s consumption is similar to the GTX 460 1GB

Conclusion

Today, AMD announced two new graphics cards – Radoen HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850. Both these cards are based on performance oriented Barts core, for the $150-250 price segment. The HD 6870’s MSRP stands at $239, whereas Europeans will have to pay €199 incl. VAT. The HD 6850’s MRSP stands at $179.99 in the US and about €150 in EU

We received two cards for our testing – the reference XFX HD 6870 and custom designed XFX HD 6850 which retained reference clocks. XFX made sure that you know what card is in your system by launching a custom designed HD 6850 card with in-house cooling, 100% Japanese capacitors and a unique XFX backplate

The XFX HD 6870 is selling with a €199, while the HD 6850 has a price tag set at €150.

Performance wise, both the HD 6850 and HD 6870 seem like nice deals for those on the prowl for decent graphics cards

Nvidia cut the pricing on their GTX 460 cards yesterday, so the GTX 460 768MB holds its own versus the HD 6850, while Radeon HD 6970 is priced about $30 higher than the GTX 460 1GB

Radeon HD 6850 does well versus Geforce GTX 460 768MB, whereas the HD 6870 outperformed the GTX 460 1GB. Our results unfortunately can’t give an exact answer to the performance comparison between the HD 6870 and HD 5850. Namely, we tested the HD 6800 series with Catalyst AI high quality texture filtering, which wasn’t be applied to HD 5800 cards so in our update we will introduce comparable results of Radeon cards

Both XFX cards have proven to be good overclockers and the HD 6870 allowed us to hit more than 1GHz for the GPU and 930MHz with XFX’s custom designed HD 6850. The HD 6870’s GPU reference clock is 900MHz whereas HD 6850’s ticker runs at 775MHz

All in all, AMD’s new cards have a good price-performance ratio, nice overclocking potential, improved performance per watt ration, HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2, Eyefinity support for up to 6 screens per card, improved tessellation, etc. So, such pricing, performance and potential make it virtually impossible for us not to recommend XFX’s HD 6870 or HD 6850 cards

Linux has a serious security flaw

Deep in the kernel

 

Insecurity outfit VSR Security has warned that the Linux operating system contains a serious security flaw that can be exploited to gain superuser rights on a target system

The vulnerability, in the Linux implementation of the Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) protocol, affects unpatched versions of the Linux kernel, starting from 2.6.30, where the RDS protocol was first included. VSR Security said that Linux installations are only vulnerable if the CONFIG_RDS kernel configuration option is set, and if there are no restrictions on unprivileged users loading packet family modules, as is the case on most stock distributions

Kernel functions responsible for copying data between kernel and user space. If they don't verify that a user-provided address resided in the user segment, a local attacker could issue specially crafted socket function calls to write arbritrary values into kernel memory. Once they have done that it is a doddle to escalate privileges to root

The outfit has been showing off a proof-of-concept exploit to demonstrate the severity of the vulnerability.  The exploit was tested on Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit) and opened a root shell.  There is a patch available and the problem will be fixed in the next Kernel upgrade

XFX rolls out its own 68x0 Barts

Reference clocked cards but a custom designed HD 6850

Together with the rest of the AMD AIB partners, XFX has also launched its own Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 cards. Both of the cards feature reference clocks and bring support for DirectX 11, AMD's Crossfire and Eyefinity

XFX made sure that you know what card is in your system by launching a custom designed card with in-house cooling and a unique XFX backplate. Not only that, but XFX's 6850 comes with 100% Japanese capacitors

The XFX HD 6870 works at 900MHz for the GPU and 4200MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory. It comes with a reference dual slot blower-fan cooler. The XFX HD 6850 also works at reference 775MHz for the GPU and 4000MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory. As noted, both cards feature a rather unique backplate as XFX decided to replace the stock exhaust grill with XFX logo

The HD 6870 is selling with a suggested price tag set at US $279.99, while the HD 6850 has a suggested price tag set at US $219.99.

Seagate calls Steve Jobs bluff

SSDs are not the future of laptops

When Steve Jobs was showing off the new MacBook Air he claimed that SSDs would kill off conventional hard-drives

But according to Seagate boss, Steve Luczo SSDs are not the future of notebook storage. In a conference call to analysts  Luczo said that the percentage of Macs Apple sells with SSDs is tiny, under three percent. Luczo ran an Air book with an SSD unit and said that it was frustrating how much it cost and the lack of capacity

"I can tell you that my SSD drive takes about 25, 30 seconds to boot now versus the 12 seconds when I bought it," Luczo said. While that is just an issue more related to OS than it is specifically to the technology but again with the hybrid there is things that you can do it alleviate that so your boot times are actually as compelling one and two, three and four years down the road, he said

Luczo said that Apple would be successful with the SSD based Air because it was “successful with all its products” but he added that it is not where mainstream computing was going

Powercolor shows its own HD 6800 cards

Factory overclocked HD 6850

In addition to the reference HD 6870 and custom cooled HD 6850 cards, Powercolor is one of few partners to offer a factory overclocked HD 6850 from day one. In order to make its HD 6850 Premium Edition a bit special, Powercolor decided to use Zerotherm cooler and give the card a slight factory overclock

The HD 6850 Premium Edition, as Powercolor decided to call it, features a dual slot, quad heatpipe, Zerotherm cooler and works at 800MHz for the GPU and 4200MHz for memory. It is a pleasant boost compared to the reference HD 6850 that works at 775MHz and 4000MHz. The card still features 960 Stream processors, 1GB of memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface and two DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs

The reference HD 6870 and the custom HD 6850 are pretty much the same as all the other cards on the market except for the fact that Powercolor used its own cooling solution for the regular HD 6850.

Unfortunately, the price of the Premium Edition hasn't been announced but we guess that it will show up in retail pretty soon

Sapphire rolls out its HD 6800 cards

Only two for now

Sapphire has rolled out its Barts based cards, the HD 6850 and the HD 6870. The Sapphire HD 6870 is based on the reference design while the HD 6850 is based, like every other card on the market, on non-reference, in-house design.

Both cards are based on AMD's newest 40nm Barts GPU and features support for DirectX 11, Crossfire, Eyefinity and brings more display option when compared to the previous generation. Both cards feature HDMI 1.4a, DisplayPort 1.2 and two DVI outuputs

The HD 6870 packs 1120 Stream Processors and works at 900MHz for the GPU and 4200MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface. It needs two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors and has a suggested retail price set at US $239.99.

The non-reference HD 6850 features 960 Stream Processors, has 1GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface and works at 775MHz for the GPU and 4000MHz for memory. This one has a suggested price tag set at US $179.99.

MSI officially launches its N480GTX Lightning

The meanest Fermi around

Although it was detailed at last MSI MOA (Master Overclocking Arena) finals, MSI has now officially launched its latest Lightning series card, the N480GTX Lightning. Based on Nvidia's GF100 GPU, this beast brings an improved PCB design, Twin Frozr III cooler and is aimed purely at overclocking enthusiasts, especially those that are not afraid to meddle with LN2.

The card works 750MHz for the GPU and comes with 1536MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4000MHz. It features 480 CUDA Cores clocked at 1401MHz. The Twin Frozr III cooler has two 90mm fans, two 8mm heatpipes and should be quite enough to keep this beast well cooled

The card can brag with 16-phase VRM design, Military Class components, Dual BIOS, Proadlizer capacitors and DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort gold-plated outputs. Bear in mind that in order to run this beast, you'll need two 8-pin and one 6-pin PCI-Express power connector

Back during MOA, the card was capable of scoring P39281, which is actually a 3DMark Vantage record, of course, under LN2 cooling

Windows 7 marks first birthday

240 million licenses and counting

 

It's been a year since Microsoft introduced Windows 7, which has gone on to become the fastest selling OS in history

Redmond sold 240 million licenses in the first year of sales, not counting illegal copies and easily eclipsing its predecessor by selling a mind boggling 7.5 copies per second. Mind you, Vista was anything but popular and most punters viewed the 7 as a worthy successor to XP. Vista on the other hand was viewed as an inbred with special needs

Windows 7 is currently installed on one in five PCs worldwide and it has a user satisfaction rate of 94 percent, which is 93 percent higher than Vista

Today is HD 6800 day

Roundup: Worthy Juniper successor

AMD has officially lifted the NDA veil on its HD 6800 cards and first reviews have started to appear. Bear in mind that AMD never meant to push HD 6870 and the 6850 as high end cards, and once again, renaming made quite a fuss as the market was expecting a direct successor to the Cypress, something that will happen once AMD launches the Cayman based HD 6900 series card. Until then, Barts is here and it certainly looks good

As a direct successor of the Juniper, HD 5700 based cards, both the HD 6850 and the HD 6870 are quite an improvement. Despite the early rumours, Barts is simply a Cypress derivative and is using the same arch 5D design, cache hierarchy and ROPs as the Cypress, but also brings some quality, feature and tessellation improvements

AMD's Barts takes the US $200 market quite confidently but bear in mind that Nvidia still had room for slight price adjustments that actually happened yesterday. Despite the Nvidia price adjustments, both the HD 6850 and the HD 6870 are dominating the market and are either cheaper or faster than their direct competition, the GTX 460 1GB and the GTX 470 cards

Of course, Nvidia will push its factory overclocked cards, but only until partners start to show up with their own versions of the HD 6800 series. As we wrote before, non-reference HD 6850 are just around the corner and the non-reference HD 6870 will show up eventually.The bottom line is that AMD launched two quite impressive cards as we are talking here about successors of mid-range cards that are performing close to the previous generation high-end HD 5800 series cards

At US $179/€149.99 the HD 6850 certainly is a great alternative to GTX 460 cards and it is a matter of choice whether you want CUDA/PhysX on Nvidia or impressive display output that AMD offers. On the other hand, the HD 6870 sells at US $239.99/€199.99 and is mostly on par with its GTX 470 competition and we are quite sure that Nvidia isn't happy with the GTX 470 price as the Barts is certainly cheaper to produce

Here are some reviews and our will be up pretty soon

 Anandtech.com
 TechPowerUp.com - Radeon HD 6870; Radeon HD 6850
 Neoseeker.com
 Legitreviews.com
 HotHardware.com
 PCEkspert.com

Nvidia confirms the GTX 580

Shows up at Nvidia.com

The guys from Geek3d.com managed to find the GTX 580 on Nvidia's website and it looks like the big green slipped its existence on the 3D Vision System Requirements page

According to the recent rumours, the Geforce GTX 580 should be based on 40nm GF110 GPU that should have 512 CUDA Cores, 2GB of GDDR5 memory and should appear sometimes by the end of this year. Nvidia has planed to push this card against AMD Cayman based cards

The Geforce GTX 580 appeared here, but we are pretty sure that Nvidia will take it off in a matter of minutes. In case that happens, the guys from Techconnect.com have a screenshot ready. You can find it here

PowerColor to use new cooler on Barts

Revamped PCS cooler coming

PowerColor has leaked a couple of HD 6800 pics on its Facebook page. The actual designation was blurred out, but this appears to be an HD 6850. It's also easy to spot the new cooler design slapped on top

The picture shows a revamped PCS cooler with a sizable heatpiped heatsink and Powercolor went for a 92mm fan

PowerColor's non-reference coolers have always offered good performance and low noise levels, but we don't have the clocks. If the old HD 5850 PCS+ is anything to go by, the new card should be a pretty good overclocker

3DMark 11 "High Temple" trailer shows up

Still scheduled for 2010

The guys from Futuremark have released their second trailer for the upcoming 3DMark 11 benchmark. The "High Temple" tech demo uses advanced tesselation, volumetric lightning and other various effects to show some DirectX 11 beauty

This time Futuremark replaced the last MSI comercial with Antec's and Antec will have an honour to show it at its booth during BlizzCon 2010. The new tech demo looks pretty good, and we will dare to say that it looks even better than the first one we saw back in May

Still, Futuremark was clear with its statement that the actual tech demo doesn't represent the final product and that 3DMark 11 might look a bit different. We guess we will know by the end of this year

Nvidia has Geforce „475“

The new one is based on new GF104

We have a few details about Nvidia's new plans that we want to share with you. Recent Geforce GTX 470 price drops have alerted many of Nvidia partners who now believe that the new GF104 chip with more firepower is just around the corner

The new GF104 has eight Streaming multiprocessors (SM) while the old GF104 had seven. This could very easily be the same GF104 chip with one streaming multiprocessor disabled, as Nvidia simply didn’t need that more power back in July time when it launched Geforce GTX 460 cards. Now, since they might need some more power, they simply enabled the eight SM unit

Each Streaming Multiprocessor(SM) within GF104/106/108 GPU architecture contains 48 SPs and 8 SFUs. The new card could end up with 384 Stream processors and 32 SFUs. So, the Stream processor number is up by 48.

The texture units are likely to get a boost from 56 to 64. All in all it's an eight Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) part that is likely to easily outperform Geforce GTX 470, but bear in mind that GTX 470 at €200 or below is one hot but great buy. And when we say hot, we mean the GTX 470’s 215W TDP hot

To understand Geforce 400 architecture better, you can read the Wiki part here

Point of View / TGT GTX 480 Beast reviewed

Review: GTX 480 Beast is the fastest Fermi around

Today we’ll finish up our talk on GTX 480 Beast, a card that’s anything but ordinary, which again isn’t a surprise considering that Point of View and TGT teams are behind it. GTX 480 Beast is special for its higher operating clocks, which means better performance as well as higher pricing. GTX 480 Beast card is already famous for its performance and we’re currently looking at the fastest factory-clocked GTX 480 card; GPU runs at 810MHz whereas GDDR5 memory runs at 950MHz (3800MHz effectively). Unfortunately, the price of €661 will definitely make some users reconsider a purchase. Note however that the card comes significantly overclocked, has a water block that will do a world of good for cooling and noise levels and to top it all off, it’s covered by warranty

Point of View / TGT recently started their overclocking endeavors, and already the Beast series is proudly sitting as the fastest of all GTX 480 cards. Beast moniker is found only on the fastest, crème of the crop cards, whereas the slower ones come with Ultra Charged and Charged monikers. Note that only the GTX 480 Beast comes with a water block – the rest use reference cooling

GTX 480 card was announced more than six months ago, so Point of View / TGT perhaps comes a bit late. On the other hand, since TGT team is only warming up, we’re anxious to see their future products arriving in time, which was the case with GTX 460 Beast/Ultra Charged/Charged cards

Point of View / TGT GTX 480 Beast uses Innovatek’s water cooling block – Cool-Matic GTX 480. You can purchase this block separately for €199, and it has been specially designed for cooling GTX 480 cards. Furthermore, Cool-Matic will not only take care of cooling the GPU, but the memory and power circuitry as well. We’ve already heard rumors about Cool-Matic GTX 480, but it appears like Innovatek hesitated because of low demand for GTX 480 water blocks. Fortunately, it seems like orders from Point of View / TGT have remedied that and played a significant role in launching the product


Cool-Matic GTX 480 cooler has 137 parts (including the screws) and is in direct contact with the PCB at no less than 59 points



Innovatek uses the new Injektor PRO technology making the water block internals more complex, but in turn providing improved cooling performance. On its own, Cool-Matic GTX 480 costs about €199 although when we first wrote about GTX 480 a few weeks ago, it was listed on Innovatek’s page with a €189 price tag

GTX 480 Beast is a dual slot card, and the following picture clearly shows that the water block is more than one slot wide



Just like the reference card, the GTX 480 Beast is powered via one 6-pin and one 8-pin connector

Testbed

Motherboard: EVGA 4xSLI
CPU: Core i7 965 XE   Intel EIST and Vdrop enabled
Memory: 6GB Corsair Dominator 12800 7-7-7-24.
Harddisk:   OCZ Vertex 2 100 GB
Power Supply: CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 800W
Case: CoolerMaster HAF X
Fan Controler: Kaze Master Pro 5.25".
Operating System: Win7 64-bit
260.63_desktop_win7_winvista_64bit_english
10.9 CCC

 

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage rates the GTX 480 Beast as much as 31% faster than the reference GTX 480. GTX 480 Beast is the fastest single-GPU card and while it's capable of beating the HD 5870 by up to 37%, dual-GPU HD 5970 clearly takes the cake in 3DMark Vantage

Aliens vs Predator

In this game, GTX 480 Beast outruns the reference GTX 480 by up to 12%. The difference between the GTX 480 Beast and dual-GPU HD 5970 is lower in antialiasing tests and even lower after we pushed the resolution; at 2560x1600 the difference is 12% whereas 1920x1080 results in 16% difference

 

 

 

 

 

Dirt 2

Dirt 2 at 1920x1080 sees the GTX 480 Beast outrun the dual-GPU HD 5970, but the aforementioned card retakes the lead at 2560x1600. Reference GTX 480 is slower than its beastly cousin by 12%.

 

 

Tesselation test - Unigine Heaven v2.1

The distinguishing feature of this benchmark is hardware tessellation, a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that games gain drastically detailed and more elaborated look almost free of charge in terms of performance. Tessellation feature REQUIRES both video card with DirectX 11 support and MS Windows Vista/7!

There are three tessellation modes available in this version of the benchmark:

Moderate Mode : This mode is targeted to provide reasonable performance on a wide range of DX11 hardware.

Normal Mode : Default mode available in the benchmark shows optimal quality-to-performance ratio. That's the way to achieve prominent visual difference with hardware tessellation technology.

Extreme Mode : It is designed to meet the perspectives of the next series of DX11-capable hardware pushing up the tessellation level to the extreme in the next 1-2 years.
Source, unigine.com

Tesselation test - TessMark

TessMark is an OpenGL 4 benchmark. That means you can play with GPU tessellation under Windows XP, Vista and Seven. Of course, you need a GeForce GTX 400 series or a Radeon HD 5000 Series. No GPU tessellation with previous generation of graphics cards!.

Like Unigine Heaven, TessMark allows to select the level tessellation. The small difference is that TessMark proposes four differents levels (moderate, normal, extreme and insane), source geeks3d.com / oZone3D.net

GTX 480 Beast outruns the reference GTX 480 in OpenGL tessellation test by 14%.

 

Overclocking, Consumption, Thermals

Of course, many will want to know about GPU temperatures, as this hasn’t quite been the selling point of GTX 480 cards. Our today’s card however, comes with water cooling, which promises to change that. The water cooling system included a PPS Plus 12V Pump (Innovatek / Eheim) and a radiator with three silent Ebm-Papst 4412 F/2GL fans



Power consumption and performance-per-watt ratio on GTX 480 cards have received more than enough criticism and the following table shows exactly why. It’s perfectly normal and expected for an overclocked GTX 480 Beast to draw more power than the reference GTX 480, although we must admit we’re still hoping that Nvidia’s next generation high end cards will draw less power



We used default voltages during our testing, which on the GTX 480 Beast’s GPU were at 1100mV



The following photo shows GPU temperatures during FurMark testing. Note that this is the worst case scenario solely for testing purposes, and you’re not likely to replicate this in everyday work





The GTX 480 Beast ran stable at 880MHz GPU and 4300MHz memory, and all that without meddling with voltages





Pushing the voltage to 1125mV did just enough to make the GPU run stable at 895MHz, with GPU temperatures staying at 68°C. 1138mV didn’t change the scenario and not even 1150mV helped the GPU run stable beyond 895MHz



Conclusion

A few days ago, Point of View / TGT launched the GTX 480 Beast, a card that comes factory overclocked to 810MHz GPU and 950MHz memory (3800MHz effectively). The overclock resulted in up to 14% better performance compared to the reference card, making our today’s test sample the fastest GTX 480 around. The benefits of water cooling and improved performance does not come without a cost though, and and you’ll have to splash out about €661, here. Note that such high pricing is for the most part Innovatek’s “fault”, as their Cool-Matic GTX 480 block costs €199 when purchased separately

The GTX 480 is already known for its high consumption and pretty high noise levels, and while GTX 480 Beast will solve the noise and thermals, the consumption is naturally even higher. Whether this is the perfect card for you is naturally not ours to say. What we can tell you, though, is that the GTX 480 is currently the fastest single-GPU card around, which means that it will take anything you throw at it in stride, regardless of whether it’s demanding games or PhysX and CUDA apps

AMD HD 6000 features get detailed

Up to six displays via DP 1.2

A new set of leaked slides that have showed up over at Chiphell have revealed some details regarding the feature set of the upcoming Radeon HD 6000 series cards. As it was rumoured a while back, it is now pretty much confirmed that both Barts and Cayman boards will have support for up to six displays, thanks to DisplayPort 1.2 outputs

The secret behind it is the MultiStream feature of DisplayPort 1.2, that has double the data-rate of DisplayPort 1.1. In addition to the higher data-rate, DP 1.2 also brings support for higher resolution support and support for stereoscopic 3D. The new HD 6000 will be able to support up to six DisplayPort displays by "daisy chaining" them to two Displayport outputs. The best part for AMD is that they can use Evergreen (Eyefinity 6) reference boards for this one since Barts and Cypress are pin compatible

The rest of the outputs include HDMI 1.4 output for 3D video (Blu-ray 3D) support, and two dual-link DVI-I outputs. The slides also reveal that we can expect increased performance in every segment and AMD's UVD 3.0 video processing engine for GPU acceleration

3TB drives listed in Germany

Die Deutschen like them big

 

Two 3TB drives have popped up on a German e-tail site, but they’re still not available and there’s no pricing info

Schottenland.de is currently listing Seagate’s 3TB Barracuda XT (ST33000651AS), a 7200rpm drive with 64MB of cache. Apart from the size, the Barracuda’s main selling point will probably be SATA 6gbps support

The site has also listed a somewhat more conservative Western Digital Caviar Green (WD30ERZS). This is a 5400rpm drive with 64MB of cache, but it lacks SATA 6gbps support

Sadly it’s still unclear when the drives will actually show up in stock and we don’t know the price, either

NBC kills off Google ad deal

Bad news for Google TV

 

NBC Universal has killed off a two-year-old arrangement with Google that allowed the Internet giant to flog ads on several NBC cable channels

According to the LA Times the deal meant that Google sold ad space on NBC's Syfy, Oxygen, MSNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller channels by way of its Google TV Ads online marketplace. The Times quoted NBC Universal spokeswoman Liz Fischer as saying the TVchannel was not currently contributing inventory into the Google marketplace

The reason that NBC pulled the agreement was because although Google TV Ads had helped fill ad space on small channels, it hadn't worked out so well in regard to more established networks. NBC is getting a little jittery about Googles pressing forward in its Google TV idea and is worried about the service killing off some of its business

The Times seems to think that NBC does not like the idea of Google sitting between it and its customers

Microsoft slags off Open Office

Creates customer video

 

Software giant Microsoft has been dedicating a lot of time and effort making a video to slag off OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a free, open source package which is the main rival to Microsoft’s cash cow Office. Redmond has compiled comments from 15 customers who switched to Office after evaluating OpenOffice. It has stuck them on a video posted to the company's office videos YouTube channel here

Redmond later set the video as "private," which is supposed to mean it can't be watched by the great unwashed. However we have had no problems with the above link. The three minute video only choosing quotes from customers who have switched back to its productivity suite. The video has 17 quotes in total, 14 of which complain about how OpenOffice leads to higher long-term costs, poor interoperability, lower productivity, decreased efficiency, and overall frustration

Apparently it can even affect the grades of students although it did not mention anything about causing kittens to die. The quotes appear to have come from case studies and press articles from the last four years, most of which are hosted on Microsoft.com

Next OS X to be called Lion?

We will find out October 20th

 

Apple is sending out invites for an event to be held October 20th, where the company is expected to show a sneak preview of its next version of Mac OS X. Sources are suggesting that perhaps Apple is going to call the next version Lion

Beyond the sneak peek of the new version of the OS, rumors of a new Air, Core i3 13” MacBook and new and high-end graphics support could be on the agenda. Our best guess is that the new MacBook Air is possible for an announcement, but we think the i3 13” MacBook offering is a lot more likely to be announced

Until the 20th arrives, we expect the Apple rumor mill to go into overdrive trying to figure out what Apple might show. It seems the only sure thing is a sneak peek at the next version of OS X

Mac to get new sync software

Zune & WP7 devices to be supported

 

Sources are confirming to us that Microsoft has plans to release synchronization software supporting both Windows Phone 7 devices as well as Zune devices for connectivity to the Mac platform. The news is surprising, but not really if you think about it

While the release details are not nailed down yet, nor is how the sync functionality will work with the Mac, apparently Microsoft is going to offer it. We are not sure how Mac users are going to embrace the functionality, but we do think it will be important for the long-term success potential for the WP7 platform. After all, even BlackBerry offers Mac support

We doubt that it will make much impact in the Zune product space, as we don’t see Mac users leaving iTunes and iPods to switch to a Zune. Nonetheless, it is an important step forward for Microsoft as far as cross-platform support

Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 launch Oct 22nd

Barts XT and Pro

 

AMD has finally made up its mind about the launch of Barts PRO and XT. These new cores will sport Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 brands, but it looks like that they will end up marginally slower than the original 5870 and 5850.

Don’t worry though, Cayman is still supposed to launch this year most likely with the HD 6890 if not 6970 / 6950 brands. We still don’t know these brands but this is something that would not surprise

The two cards launching on Friday are the Radeon HD 6870, with 1GB GDDR5 as well as HDMI,DVI-I, DVI-D and Dual mini DisplayPort outputs, and the Radeon HD 6850, also with 1GB GDDR5, DVI-I and DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort

The cards will start shipping to shops by the end of this week or early next week. You should be able to buy them in e-tail / retail shortly after launch

Radeon HD 6870 officially at 900MHz

1050MHz GDDR5 memory

The chip that was supposed to replace Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 and that mysteriously ended up with Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 moniker has finally got its clock. It runs at 900MHz

As we speak AMD is telling chosen press representatives about the specifics of the chips and how they plan to dominate the word. We still don’t see many ATI Radeon HD 5870 owners to be that hot for AMD Radeon HD 6870. I guess the message is that AMD's Radeon is not as good as ATI’s, and of course we are joking, but let us get burned by our beloved fanboys in the comments section

You mean to tell me that we have fanboys commenting our stories? No way. sub.ed

The GDDR5 works at 1050MHz or 4200MHz if you consider that the GDDR5 is quad band and that the card has a 256-bit memory controller. Of course it has a dual slot cooler and of it supports CrossFire. The card also has two six pin power connectors

The US retail price should land somewhere around 250 USD and we guess that 250 euro should be quite realistic price for EU countries that use this currency. We just got word that the price will be closer to €250, not € / $300 as originally reported

Launch is on the 22nd October, next Friday and this should be the availability day, at least for a few lucky ones as everything indicates that Radeon HD 6870 might be in short supply

J&W ships the mother of all ITX boards

890GX, PCIe 2.0 x16 and much more

 

We wrote about J&W’s first ITX motherboard based on AMD’s 890GX chipset a few months ago. The board was not available back then, but now it’s finally shipping in EU markets. Judging by the spec, it’s probably the best ITX board for AMD processors on the market today, but it’s also one of the priciest

Thanks to the SB850 southbridge the Minix 890GX packs two USB 3.0 ports as well as four SATA 6gbps connectors. There’s also a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, as well as a mini PCIe slot. The board features integrated Radeon HD 4250 graphics with 128MB of SidePort memory and it offers VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs. It also features hybrid CrossFireX support

In addition the board packs four plain USB 2.0 ports as well as 2 SO-DIMMs for DDR3 modules. Bluetooth and b/g/n wireless are also on board

All in all, this tiny feature packed board could put many proper ATX boards to shame. However, all this comes at a price. The board is currently listed at €169, so it’s not what we’d call affordable, but it’s impressive nonetheless

Motorola readies Tegra 2 superphone

Gingerbread anyone?

Motorola is reportedly readying its first superphone slated for early 2011.

Originally dubbed Droid T2 or Terminator, the new phone is based on Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core processor and it will run Android 3.0 Gingerbread

Sadly, there really isn’t much to go on at this point. Some reports claim that the CPU will end up clocked at 1GHz and that the phone will be designated Motorola Olympus MB 680. However, we still don’t have event the basic specs, but the fact that the phone will feature a relatively powerful chip and a new OS capable of supporting resolutions up to 1,280x760 leaves quite a bit of room for optimism

We can only hope that it will do better than recent Motorola phones, which have failed gain a foothold in the Android market

More here

Shred developer hit with layoffs

Future unknown for Tony Hawk franchise

 

Developer Robomodo, which developed Tony Hawk: Ride and the yet-to-be released Tony Hawk: Shred, has been hit with what has been described to us as a significant number of layoffs. The news comes as sources from within the studio acknowledge that this will be the last Tony Hawk project that the studio will be doing for publisher Activision

The developer has acknowledged that a number of employees have been let go, but a good number of staff as well as developers, leads and directors remain on board as they work to secure a new project. Of course, once they start ramping up for a new project, some employees may have the chance to rejoin Robomodo if they wish. The number of layoffs is believed to be between 30 and 60 employees

The Robomodo studio housed a number of developers from the former EA Chicago and Midway Chicago studios. Reports suggest that Robomodo was selected by Activision to work on Ride because of the amount of experience that team members within the studio had working with arcade games and peripherals. Ride was not really successful, and reports claim that Activision was only able to move about 114,000 copies of the title and the skateboard peripheral. Despite the lack of success the first time around, Activision stuck with the developer for the yet-to-be released Shred title

While Robomodo will not be working on future Tony Hawk projects, it could be that the entire Tony Hawk franchise might be in doubt. The franchise has lost ground to Electronic Arts rival, Skate, and Ubisoft will be launching a new Shaun White Skateboarding title later this year, as well. Sources suggest to us that Activision is likely to reboot the franchise again with a new developer in hopes of a last ditch effort to revive the franchise to take on its rivals

It is unknown if the Shred title, which is targeted at a much younger audience (said to be 6 to 12), will be successful or not; but the layoff news might not be a good sign

Rumoured HD 6800 performance leaks out

Slower than HD 5800 in 3DMark

The first rumoured performance details regarding AMD's Barts-based HD 6800 series have leaked online, and although these numbers are far from being confirmed, they do make sense as the upcoming HD 6800 series ends up marginally slower than the HD 5800 series and a bit faster than Nvidia's GTX 460 card

The first results are coming from XFastest website and show the performance of both the HD 6870 and the HD 6850 in 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark06. The HD 6870 scores P16270 and 19480 which is a bit slower than the previous HD 5800 generation. When compared to the GTX 460 (256-bit 1GB), even the HD 6850 (Barts Pro) ends up faster

This does make sense as due to the new, unconfirmed, AMD naming scheme. Basically the upcoming Barts HD 6800 series should replace the Juniper based HD 5700 series while the Cypress HD 5800 replacements, Cayman based cards, should come a month later

These preliminary scores show that the Barts based cards feature impressive performance and certainly have a bright future. Clearly, that the upcoming Cayman-based boards and the dual-GPU Antilles card will certainly look just as good. The mentioned naming scheme might bring a certain level of confusion to the market, but in the end, it will still follow the good old, "higher number is a faster card" theme

You can find the rest of the results here

LG and Samsung jump the gun with WP7

Windows Phone 7 superphones are here

 

LG and Samsung have jumped the gun and leaked two Windows Phone 7 handsets and some might even call them superphones



Samsung’s Omnia 7 features a massive 4-inch AMOLED screen with a 1GHz Qualcomm processor. It packs 8GB of storage and a 5MP camera with 720p support. However, those of us blessed with the gift of sight will probably look elsewhere, as the new Omnia is rather unspectacular and even downright ugly compared to recent Samsung phones



LG’s Optimus 7 is no beauty, either. It’s a bit more interesting under the bonnet, as it’s powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor. Hopefully it will do better than the first phone to use Tegra, Microsoft’s ill-fated and utterly pathetic Kin. It features a 3.8-inch WVGA screen, 16GB of storage and 5MP camera. It looks like a pretty nice offer on paper, but the jury is still out on Windows Phone 7. Android might still be the best bet in the long run and neither Samsung nor LG are the first brands that come to mind when you thing of premium phones