First look: Nvidia’s integrated graphics

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Intel beware: Nvidia has its scope trained squarely on your dominance in the notebook graphics market. With an estimated 140 million laptops in the wild in 2008, more than two-thirds of which feature nothing more powerful than basic integrated graphics chips, it’s a huge segment that Nvidia has until now had no access to.

The 9400M is the key that Nvidia hopes will allow it to eat away at Intel’s share. Combining the north bridge, south bridge and GPU into one chip less than half the size of Intel’s GMA X4500HD, it could be the great leap forward we’ve been waiting so long for. The integrated graphics solution that can actually run the latest games – we’d almost given up hope.

(more…)

Is Nvidia losing its grip?

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Today sees a very telling announcement in the graphics world. Gainward, for years an exclusive producer of mainstream and overclocked GeForce cards, has launched its first Radeons to market – the HD 4850 and HD 4870.

You could look at it one of two ways. The simplest reason could be that Gainward (owned by non-exclusive card maker, Palit) simply wants to boost its profits by reaching a larger audience than it previously sold to. The other is that AMD’s current resurgence has Gainward looking upon Nvidia as less of a sure thing than before.

After all, each of Nvidia’s last few launches has seen the GeForces getting faster, but also bigger and hotter than ever before, while AMD is managing to keep up in the speed race while keeping its Radeons much more manageable, and vastly less expensive.

It’ll be interesting to see if any other manufacturers follow suit.

Just in: a monster PC from Mesh

Monday, June 16th, 2008

It’s fair to say that we were quite impressed by the Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut. A powerful 9800 GX2 graphics card, Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor and 24in Samsung screen certainly made an impression in the Labs – and it made everyone who saw it quite jealous. We all wanted one.

Except that I now have a feeling that the Juggernaut’s crown as top monster PC may be under threat. We’ve just taken delivery of the Mesh Ultimate XT9450 GTO and, well – to paraphrase the slogan of a particularly nasty meat snack – it’s a bit of an animal. As you can see, it’s housed inside a monolithic Cooler Master Cosmos, which is certainly a good start.

(more…)

Three: Definitely a Crowd.

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

You may have seen a while ago that we examined a new chunk of hardware that – and this may be something of a blessing – will never make it to retail: the Asus EAH3850 X3 Trinity.

We were surprised and, dare we say it, a little impressed: Asus packed three 3850 chipsets onto one PCB and, remarkably, made it work. With water cooling and enough electricity to power Bill Gates’ cash machine – almost 300W for the card on its own, in fact. It didn’t really increase frame-rates much when compared to a single 512MB HD 3850 – adding 3fps to our high benchmark in Crysis – but it was certainly an interesting experiment.

(more…)