Graphics Card | PC Pro blog

Why is PC gaming intent on killing itself?

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Today’s launch (and review) of Nvidia’s latest enthusiast cards staggered me. The GeForce GTX 280 is fast, blisteringly so; but it’s also mind-bendingly, incomprehensibly, ball-achingly expensive. It’s certainly not the first – every new launch seems to have such prices attached – and it won’t be the last. But £430 for a graphics card?

Let me set my stall out right from the outset: I once spent in excess of £300 on a Radeon 9800 Pro with a fancy blue cooler just to play Far Cry in all its glory. Being a student, I had no money and even less sense, but it just seemed like something I had to do – how else would I experience something so beautiful?

A launch like the GTX 280 should be like technological Viagra to me, then, shouldn’t it? (more…)

Tags: beer, crysis, Graphics card, Nvidia, PlayStation 3, sony, TV

Posted in: Rant

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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.

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Tags: AMD, Asus, ati, geforce, Graphics card, HD3850, Nvidia, radeon, trinity

Posted in: View from the Labs

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Nvidia Squares Up to Intel

Monday, April 28th, 2008

So, after finding out that Intel were planning to release its own graphics card – the mysterious and, at the moment, practically mythical Larrabee – the Nvidia boardroom must have been a fun place to be. The GPU market is, after all, where the Californian company has ruled the roost for the past few years thanks to the strength of the 8000-series and, now, the emergence of some decent 9000 series cards like the 9600 GT and 9800 GTX.

$Nvidia\'s latest 9800 GTX graphics card$

Evidently, it’s decided to come out on the offensive: Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang recently lambasted Intel’s integrated graphics, which have long been a staple of PCs that don’t need to play games and edit demanding videos, as ‘a joke’. He also boasted of his plans to ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ onto Intel, which must be quaking in its boots – after all, its CPUs haven’t done that well, and they certainly not market leaders with no real competitors. Ahem.

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Tags: 8800 gt, 9800 gtx, gpu, graphics, Graphics card, gx2, intel, larrabee, Nvidia, sli