Cooler Master launches N300 and N500 ATX cases

Mid-tower N-series

Cooler Master has announced the N-series, a brand new series of compact mid-tower mainstream cases that feature support for 240mm radiators, improved air cooling performance as well as a subtle and simplistic design

According to Cooler Master, the new N-series were designed with cooling performance in mind, especially liquid cooling. The entire series will feature full mesh front panels with large amount of vents for maximum air streaming as well as enough room to instal extra long graphics cards and several ODDs, HDDs or SSDs, despite its compact design

The N500 has support for up to 9 fans while N300 will have stick with support for up to 8 fans. The N500 can take two 120/140mm on top, two 120mm front fans, two 120mm rear, two 120mm side, one 120mm bottom fan as well as the one optional HDD cage 120mm fan. As noted earlier, both cases support top 240mm radiator. There is enough room for 400mm long VGA cards (320mm long on the N300) that are placed next to a 2.5-inch rack that can hold three 2.5-inch HDDs/SSDs

Both the N300 and the N500 will be available in four different versions, with and without a window side panel and with either two USB 3.0 or one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports on the I/O panel

Both cases will be available in Europe as of this month, but the precise MSRP has not been announced

Sapphire announces new HD 7990 Malta graphics card

Reference design for now

 

Just as expected, Sapphire has announced that it will start shipping the AMD Radeon HD 7990 graphics card with two 28nm Tahiti GPUs based on AMD's GCN architecture

Like all AMD partners Sapphire will also have to stick with AMD's reference design. In case you missed it, the AMD Radeon HD 7990 features two 28nm fully enabled Tahiti GPUs for a total of 4096 stream processors and 6GB of GDDR5 memory (3GB per GPU). The GPUs are working at 950MHz base and 1000MHz Boost clocks and while 6GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with 2x384-bit memory interface ended up clocked at 6000MHz

The new AMD Radeon HD 7990 Malta features an impressive dual-slot, triple-fan cooler that can easily cope with those two GPUs and even do it at reasonably low noise levels. It features four DisplayPort and single DVI output supporting up to 5 displays in AMD Eyefinity mode

As announced earlier, the Sapphire Radeon HD 7990 will also be a part of AMD's Never Settle Reloaded campaign and will be bundled with no less than eight games, including BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, FarCry 3, and Tomb Raider and others

Nvidia rolls out Geforce 320.00 beta driver

 

Up to 20 percent performance improvement on some cards

  

Nvidia has released its new Geforce 320.00 beta driver bringing new SLI profiles for some game titles, as well as performance improvements that go up to 20 percent on some graphics cards

According to the release highlights, the new Geforce 320.00 beta driver is called as the Geforce "game ready" driver for Dead Island: Riptide, Neverwinter and Star Trek game titles and brings performance improvement by up to 20% for Geforce 400, 500 and 600 series graphics cards when compared to the Geforce 314.22 WHQL driver

Nvidia also posted examples of measured gains on Geforce GTX 660 and GTX 660 in SLI graphics card that reached up to 20 percent in Dirt: Showdown, up to 18 percent in Tomb Raider, up to 8 percent in StarCraft II and up to 6 percent in Sniper Elite V2, Metro 2033, Far Cry 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution as well as up to 5 percent in F1 2012. The performance for GTX 660 SLI are quite similar but also includes couple of other games as the new beta driver brings SLI profiles for some new games

You can find the new driver as well as full release highlights here

AMD Radeon HD 7990 Malta roundup

Roundup: Flagship performance at US $999

  

As expected. AMD has lifted the NDA curtain and officially unveiled its newest flagship Radeon HD 7990 Malta dual-GPU card based on two fully enabled 28nm Tahiti GPUs

Detailed earlier, the Radeon HD 7990 Malta packs two 28nm Tahiti GPUs based on AMD's GCN architecture for a total of 4096 stream processors (2048 per GPU), 256 TMUs, 64 ROPs and 384-bit memory interface for each GPU connected to a total of 6GB of GDDR5 memory. AMD did a great job in keeping the power requirements as the card actually "only" needs two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors and ended up with impressive 950MHz base and 1000MHz Boost GPU clocks while memory ended up clocked at 6000MHz adding up to 288GB/s of memory bandwidth per GPU

Since we are talking about a dual-GPU graphics card, AMD opted for a PLX PEX8747 48-lane PCI-Express 3.0 bridge chip in order to connect those two GPUs in Crossfire. The reference design is quite good and does not leave much room for custom solutions. It is pretty much what we had a chance to see from Nvidia's flagship offerings as it does a great job in keeping both GPUs well cooled at impressively low noise levels. In order to give as much value to the new graphics card, same as it did with its entire HD 7800/7900 series, AMD decided to bundle no less than eight free games, including Crysis 3, Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Sleeping Dogs, Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Hitman Absolution

As far as the performance goes, the AMD Radeon HD 7990 is unquestionably the fastest graphics card that money can buy, especially if you plan to do some gaming on higher resolutions. It wastes more power than the GTX 690, the main competitor from the green camp, but since we are talking about US $999 graphics cards here, talking about power consumption is pretty pointless. As it was the case with all previous graphics cards, the performance is a mix bag as it is good in some games and not so good in others

AMD does have an upper hand over GTX 690 as it offers more memory per GPU, 3GB over 2GB, which will eventually become important and currently is in case you want to talk about extremely higher 4k resolutions and extreme multi-monitor setups. It pretty much has the same problem as the GTX 690 as you need to have proper Crossfire driver in order to see those impressive performance in any game

On the other hand it undeniably offers more value than the GTX 690 due to the Never Settle bundle, a quite big thorn in Nvidia's eye. The bottom line is that AMD Radeon HD 7990 Malta is currently the fastest graphics card that money can buy and since it is a dual-GPU solution as it offers more value and better future investment than the GTX 690, especially for those with deeper pockets that are looking to game at 2560x1440 single/dual setups or even 4096x2160 ones

It is pretty much a battle for bragging, i.e.  the graphics card throne, and according to various reviews around the net, AMD has won this round

Anandtech.com
Techpowerup.com
HotHardware.com
Tweaktown.com
Tomshadware.com
Benchmark.rs
Legitreviews.com
Hardwareheaven.com

Western Digital shipping 5mm 2.5-inch drives

WD ultra slim Blue and Black HDDs/SSHDs

 

Western Digital has announced that it has started to ship the world's first ultra-slim 2.5-inch 5mm thick HDD and solid state hybrid drives (SSHD) desinged for slimmest devices and space-constrained computing environments

To be available in capacities of up to 500GB as well as high performance SSHD technology the new slim line will overcome usual tradeoffs between capacity, pshysical size and performance. Western Digital actually announced both WD Blue and WD Black 5mm drives that will enable new levels of devices portability

According to Western Digital, the new 5mm ultra-slim form factor reduces weight by up to 36 percent compared to a standard 9.5mm HDD and is also quiet at mere 17 dB during seek operations making it over 10 percent less noisy when compared to competing 7mm drives. The new 5mm HDDs and SSHDs implement the new Edge Card and Edge Card connector features that maximize the mechanical sway space, ensure shock performance and are actually the first drives that use SFF-8784 edge connector recieving power and intefacing with the host I/O bus via SATA connector

Unfortunately, Western Digital did not shed much details regarding the specs of the WD Black 5mm SSHD model other than it is currently shipping to OEMs and integrators. The WD Blue 5mm on the other hand will be available as a single 500GB HDD (model: WD5000MPCK) with MSRP of US $89 and should be shipping to OEMs and distributors

HD 7990 goes official, $999

AMD’s foray into 4K

The HD 7990 is official, sort of, and it will hit retail in two weeks time. Here are a few figures - $999, over 8 TFLOPS, 8.6 billion transistors, 6 gigs of GDDR5 and a bunch of bundled games

AMD is touting the HD 7990 as the ultimate 4K graphics card, as it is supposed to handle any current game at 4K with max settings. The dual-GPU monster boasts an equally impressive game bundle, including titles such as Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. In total, AMD is giving away eight AAA titles

The generous bundle should offset the $999 asking price, which is high but in line with expectations. AMD claims the new card is faster and quieter than Nvidia’s GTX 690. It is pricey, but it sounds like a better deal than NV’s flagship, especially when you take into account the eight game bundle

Cooler Master announces V-Series PSUs

Single-rail and up to 1kW

  

Cooler Master has announced a new addition to its line of power supply units. The new modular V-series PSUs will be available in 700, 850 and 1000W versions

The new V-series will feature a single-rail design and feature outstanding voltage stability, ripple suppression and efficiency. Paired up with 135mm high-quality FDB fan will make the V-series as quiet as possible, even under full loud. The V-series will also use a modular design that will feature new, all black, extra slim flat-ribbon cables

The insides of the entire V-series will be based on Japanese electrolyte, solid capacitors and high quality 42mm transformers. It also feature a custom design PCB that lines up all rails ensuring minimum voltage plane cross-overs, thus keeping the crosstalk, EMI and droop at a minimum. The entire series is rated with 80 Plus Gold certification with up to 93 percent efficiency at 50 percent load and features five years of warranty

All three models in the V-series should be available across Europe by the end of April and should be priced at €159.58 for the V1000, €134.37 for the V850 and €109.16 for the V700.