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NVIDIA’s march into the mainstream graphics segment with graphics processors derived from the Fermi architecture is headed by the GF106 GPU. One of the first SKUs based on it us the GeForce GTS 450. PCB drawings of its reference board surfaced last week.

According to fresh details sourced by Donanim Haber, NVIDIA pushed back the launch of GTS 450 from 31st August to 13th September. The site also sourced clock speeds of the SKU, which are 789 MHz (core), and 3760 MHz or 940 MHz actual (memory). The GPU on this SKU has a 128-bit wide memory interface, carrying 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. NVIDIA is targeting the $160 price point with the GTS 450.

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If you have been following the news and reviews lately you will have assuredly seen mention of nVidia’s stellar new ‘mass market’ Fermi card the GTX460 – KitGuru reviewed the overclocked eVGA version and it walked away with very high praise indeed. While it is capable of delivering a fantastic gaming experience it only costs around £175 and the upside of this is that ATI have been forced to reduce some of their own prices to help keep the market competitive.

This means that if you are in the market for a new graphics card and can’t stretch to the GTX460 asking price then the card on review today might very well tickle your tastebuds. With the reference HD5770 on offer now for £130, there has never been a more affordable time to get into DX11 gaming. Read more…

Sparkle Computer announced a pair of new graphics cards based on the GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 465 graphics processors, and sporting Sparkle’s own design as far as the cooler goes. The SXX4701280D5-NM (GTX 470) and SXX4651024D5-NM (GTX 465) feature a GPU cooler that makes use of a dense aluminum fin array to which heat is conveyed by five copper heat pipes, and cooled by an 80 mm fan. With this cooler, Sparkle claims to have brought down temperatures by 4 °C on the GTX 470, and 5 °C on the GTX 465.

Both cards retain NVIDIA’s reference design PCB, except for that it is blue in color. Both models stick to reference NVIDIA clock speeds and other specifications. Sparkle did not give out a price, though one can expect these to be priced just a little over the reference design cards.

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It should come as no surprise, and has been rumoured for a while now. The first GF104 cards, the GTX 460s, had 1 full cluster, or 48 shaders disabled. Based on yields, a faster GF104 was speculated, possibly as a replacement for GTX 470. Fudzilla reports that NVIDIA is indeed planning a full 384 SP / 256-bit GF104 based card.

Despite feature more shaders (448 SP), wider memory interface (320-bit), more ROPs (40) GTX 470 is bogged down by relatively low clock speeds, as expected from a salvage chip. The full GF104 is expected make up for the deficit in core units by higher clock speeds, with the core clock likely to exceed 700 MHz. The fully enabled GF104 may end up faster than the GTX 470, and thus, the nomenclature of GTX 475 is being rumoured. Read more…

Since the introduction of the Fermi architecture nearly a year ago, we have known that NVIDIA really designed the GPU from the ground up for their Quadro and Tesla lines of products. The Tesla products are mostly server-based and aimed at the HPC (high performance computing) areas while the Quadro line is targeted at those people responsible for creating all the content we see in the world. Whether that is the latest PC gaming titles, the movie you saw last weekend or even the late night news, there is a good chance there is a Quadro at work somewhere in the pipeline.

The updated Quadro graphics cards that NVIDIA is introducing today are the first to use the Fermi GPU – the latest generation of graphics processor from NVIDIA that was released to the consumer as the GeForce GTX 400-series of cards back in March. Read more…

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460 was released a couple of weeks’ ago to general acclaim. Putting forward decent performance credentials augmented by attractive street pricing, the 768MB (£150+) and 1,024MB (£170+) have the sub-£200 market sewn-up, as far as we’re concerned.

Excellent scaling via two-card SLI is a hallmark of the GeForce GTX 400 range, evinced by the numbers we saw when putting two 1GB cards together. But what would happen if you ran two pre-overclocked GeForce GTX 460 768MB cards in tandem? That’s what we’re going to find out with a look at two EVGA GeForce GTX 460 SuperClocked cards tied together. Read more…

Ever since the first Fermi-based graphics card appeared at the end of March, it was clear that something just doesn’t smell alright about it. The first cards from the GeForce GTX 400 series were obviously engineered under great pressure. The result was chips that were fast, but the price, consumption, heating and yield percentage of which was far from commendable, as much as Nvidia tried to convince us otherwise.

Yet everyone has the right to a second chance, so Nvidia figured that the correct perspective isn’t in weakening the way too expensive GF100 chip and its installation onto weaker card revisions (as confirmed by GeForce GTX 465, the review of which we’ve recently published), instead going for developing a weaker, but more economical version of the chip, something that the upper intermediate class cards could be based on.
This has given birth to GF104. This is a chip manufactured in the same 40-nm production process, but containing a bit under two billion transistors, unlike the three billion contained by the monstrous GF100. Read more…

Our first look at the GeForce GTX 460 showed it to be an impressive product with excellent all-around performance for the price. Next our SLI follow-up showed that a GTX 460 SLI rig was competitive with NVIDIA’s own flagship DX11 products. But how does GTX 460 SLI compare with AMD’s HD 5850, 5870, and 5970 cards?

When we first looked at the impressive GeForce GTX 460, we liked what we saw and did so most of you, our readers. But you quickly made it apparent that you wanted to see some SLI performance comparisons, which were not included in the first evaluation due to time constraints. We quickly put some information together to show you that a pair of GeForce GTX 460s in SLI outperforms not only a GeForce GTX 470, but even a GTX 480. Now we’re going to show you how a GTX 460 SLI setup will perform when compared to AMD’s higher priced products. Specifically, we will be comparing GTX 460 SLI performance with AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5850, Radeon HD 5870, and the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970. Read more…

Two days after reports surfaced about NVIDIA readying the GeForce GTS 450 mainstream graphics SKU for a late August launch, PCInLife got a hold of the PCB’s x-ray drawings, which reveals quite a bit about the GF106 GPU the GTS 450 is based on. The PCB reveals a square GPU that is bordered on three sides with six memory chips, is powered by a 3+1 phase VRM, draws power from a 6-pin PCI-E power input, supports 2-way SLI, and has display outputs including two DVI and a mini-HDMI.

The presence of six memory chips particularly intrigues, as it could indicate a 192-bit wide memory interface. Perhaps two of those slots are empty, if GTS 450 does end up with a 128-bit memory interface, and enabled on a higher SKU, or that GTS 450 itself has a 192-bit memory interface (supporting 768 MB or 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory). Expect more details to come out in the run up for end-August.

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The launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460 series graphics cards certainly has been a very successful one. The eagle has landed twice with two new SKUs (768MB/1024MB), and it surely is a product that a lot of you guys have been waiting on. In its baseline configuration these products are just good. However, for the first time in a rather long time NVIDIA allowed its partners to customize the PCB, cooler and clock frequencies at launch time. The board partners have been complaining about that stringent grip of NVIDIA on the board designs for a long time now, and the minute we see a launch with customized board partner SKUs, the minute the launch is a success.

KFA2, jumps onto the successful GTX 460 series as they smack down four boards on the table. Two of them have 1 GB of GDDR5 graphics memory and a memory bus-width of 256-bits, whereas the other two obviously have ‘only’ 768 MB of memory and an interface of 192-bits. All of them are factory overclocked, but the Super OC Editions are the real beasts of the series. Read more…

After an industry-wide launch of the GeForce GTX 460 768M and GTX 460 1G, NVIDIA’s next product launch is increasingly looking like a mainstream SKU, which will be based on a newer GPU. The GF106 graphics processor will push NVIDIA deeper into the mainstream market segment, where it will be competing for graphics cards in the sub-$150 range. One of the first SKUs is the GeForce GTS 450.

The GeForce GTS 450 GPU will have 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface, according to sources close to DonanimHaber. There won’t be a reference NVIDIA board as such, and board partners will be given full lease to design their own PCBs and coolers. The GeForce GTS 450 is expected to be released to the market by the end of August, 2010.
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When the GTX 400 series cards launched in March 2010, consumers were greeted with a new architecture that met our expectations, and Nvidia lovers finally had an alternative to the ATi HD 5000 series. Nvidia stole back the single GPU performance crown, also made their footprint on tessellation with very impressive results. CUDA cores were increased, overall performance was increased, now Nvidia lovers finally had a DirectX 11 card to purchase. Aside from power draw and heat output, the only real negative trait the GTX 400 series had was pricing.

With the GTX 470 going for $349 MSRP and the GTX 480 going for $499 MSRP, Nvidia was lacking a Fermi powered card in the mainstream $250 price range. ATi has a $239 MSRP HD 5830, and Nvidia had nothing to answer with. However, things were looking great for Nvidia because hardcore enthusiasts finally got the card they had waited over 6 months for and the performance crown was back in Nvidia’s camp. Unfortunately for budget gamers, they were left without any Fermi offering to purchase. Now, a full two months after Fermi’s appearance, Nvidia released the GTX 465, which has an unexpected launch MSRP of $279.
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Point of View known for its range of NVIDIA based 3D Graphics cards, Netbooks and other PC products, announces today a brand new line up of Factory overclocked Graphics cards. The POINT OF VIEW TGT Series are hand selected high end models of individually overclocked Graphics Cards.

For a couple of weeks a specialized European POV/TGT Tuning team, lead by Wolfram Tismer, have been working day and night to get the maximum performance out of these High-end POINT OF VIEW Fermi Graphics Cards solely based on NVIDIA’s superior technology. All cards are carefully hand selected and qualified with a comprehensive burn-in test in our European testing center of TGT to ensure highest quality and stability even beyond the OC clock settings for maximized speed and performance. Read more…

Taiwanese tech firm MSI has answered the prayers of Home Theatre PC-owners looking to turn their slimline set-ups into veritable games machines, releasing a low-profile Radeon HD 5670 graphics card.

Most low-profile graphics cards work on the principle that video playback is more important than gaming power, and accordingly feature cut-down GPUs and a narrow 64-bit memory interface.

However, MSI’s R5670-PD512 features a DirectX 11 GPU with 400 stream processors, as well as a 128-bit memory interface. The latter is hooked up to 512MB of 4,040MHz (effective) GDDR5 memory, while the GPU itself is clocked at 775MHz.
It might not be a patch on the specs of AMD and Nvidia’s top-end DirectX 11 chips, but it’s still a healthy dose of gaming power. You shouldn’t have any trouble playing Fallout 3 or Call of Duty: World at War at 1,680 x 1,050, for example, although current games won’t be happy about you pushing the resolution any further. Read more…

In our GeForce GTX 460 launch article we had a shootout of many cards. Tucked away in there was the 768MB version of MSI’s Cyclone GTX 460 as well. However, there’s another SKU available, the 1024MB OC model and MSI really wanted us to test that card as well. Though it arrived a little late we certainly wanted to take a good look at it as the GTX 460 cards offer true value for money.

The launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460 series graphics has certainly been a very successful one with two new interesting SKUs (768MB/1024MB), and it surely is a product that a lot of you guys have been waiting on. In their baseline configuration these products are just good. However, for the first time in a rather long time NVIDIA allowed it’s partners to customize the PCBs, cooler and clock frequencies at launch time. The board partners have been complaining about that stringent grip of NVIDIA on the board designs for a long time time now, and the minute we see a launch with customized board partner SKUs, the minute the launch is a success. Read more…

Nvidia had just released the GTX 465 which was a scaled down GF 100 card using a total of three graphics processing clusters with 11 streaming multiprocessors and 352 cuda cores to do battle with the likes of the HD 5830 and HD 5850 (albeit with mixed results). It still pulled a lot of juice and ran warm just like its big brother the GTX 480. Pricing left a lot to be desired based purely on performance.

Fast forward a little more than a month and we have the release of the GTX 460 with its modified Fermi architecture using a GF 104 40nm core that comes equipped with two GPC clusters housing 7 streaming multiprocessors, 336 CUDA cores, 56 texture units and either 32 or 24 ROP units depending on the amount of memory onboard. You have two separate versions of the GTX 460, one with 768Mb of memory on a 192 bit bus (24ROP) and 1024Mb on a 256bit bus (32 ROP). The Palit GTX 460 Sonic Platinum overclocking Edition is based on this GF 104 design and is one of three models that Palit offers. This model comes with what may be the highest clock speeds out of the box at 800Mhz on the fixed function units 1600Mhz on the Shader domain and 2000Mhz for the GDDR5 memory. With specifications like that this card may well be what the GTX 465 was not, the right card at the right price. Read more…

After treating the enthusiast community to the Republic of Gamers (ROG) ARES Dual HD 5870 graphics accelerator, ASUS isn’t wasting any time is designing its successor, referred to (for now) as “MARS II”. This graphics accelerator uses two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 (GF100) GPUs on one board, that’s right, the first dual-GPU accelerator based on GF100, which is dreaded for its thermal and electrical characteristics so much, that NVIDIA is content with having the second-fastest graphics card in the market (GTX 480), with no immediate plans of working on a dual-GPU accelerator.

ASUS’ ambitious attempt is in the design stage deep inside its R&D, where the design is in an evaluation state. The R&D gave us some exclusive pictures of the MARS II PCB to treat you with. To begin with, the card’s basic design is consistent with almost every other dual-GPU NVIDIA card in recent past. Read more…

On Monday we showed you in our NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 video card launch article that the GTX 460 is the best performing DirectX 11 graphics card for under $229. The new GF104 ‘Fermi’ core on this GPU was found to be very fast and the cards temperatures and overclocking performance numbers were amazing. When EVGA called us and asked us to review a pair of their EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB SuperClocked video cards in SLI we jumped at the chance. Can you blame us? Take a look at the SLI scaling performance that NVIDIA claims can be had.

NVIDIA is showing any where from 60-90% scaling on the GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards across a range of seven popular PC game titles. The chance to take two factory overclocked NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 cards for a test drive was something we were looking forward to doing since we got our hands on the 768MB and 1GB versions of the cards a couple weeks back. Read more…

MSI slipped in a new entry-level graphics card based on the NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 graphics processor. The card sports a low-profile, single-slot design, and makes use of a tiny active air-cooler. Based on the 40 nm GT216 GPU, the GeForce GT 220 has 48 CUDA cores, and is DirectX 10.1 compliant. MSI’s implementation uses 512 MB of DDR3 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface. The GPU is clocked at 625 MHz, shaders at 1360 MHz, and memory at 980 MHz.

Outputs include DVI, D-Sub (detachable), and HDMI. A low-profile bracket kit is bundled. Expect MSI’s new low-profile GT 220 card to cost on par with most other GT 220 graphics cards in the market.

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It’s been a while since I’ve been this excited about a mid range video card. It’s crazy these days at what a mid range card is and even more so insane at what a mid range card is capable of doing.

A mid range card is ultimately based on the price of the model and not the performance it offers. The same is done with a high end card and for that reason we find that sometimes high end cards don’t deliver when you consider the price of the product. The same is seen in the mid range market as well. Read more…