Hasta La Gadget!

NVIDIA has revealed its latest graphics option, the GeForce GTX 650 iI, a $149 video card targeting upgraders looking for the company’s Kepler cleverness. Packing a promised five-times the performance of the GeForce 9600 GT, the GTX 650 Ti supports DirectX 11 and Full HD 1080p, and NVIDIA is even throwing in the promise of a free game for those who go shopping soon.

Buy a GeForce GTX 650 Ti-based video card from one of NVIDIA’s participating retailers, and you’ll get a copy of Assassin’s Creed III free. The game will have 768 CUDA cores to play with, along with a 925MHz GPU clock and 64 texture units, though no access to NVIDIA’s GPU Boost system.

There’s also 1GB of GDDR5 memory, a 128-bit memory bus and 105W TDP. It’s actually based on the same Kepler GK106 that powers NVIDIA’s GTX 660, though pared back somewhat on the specs so as to bring the price down to sit between that card and the GTX 550 Ti.

Connectivity includes a single 6-pin power connector, along with two dual-link DVI ports and a mini HDMI on NVIDIA’s reference design. However, the GPU itself supports up to four displays, though it’s up to manufacturers themselves to equip their versions with the right connectivity.

ASUS, EVGA, Gainward, KFA2 (Galaxy), Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, Point of View, and Zotac will all be pushing out video cards based on the GeForce GTX 650 Ti GPU, with availability from today.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti arrives to fill $149 GPU gap is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

AMD’s Trinity APUs have only been in the wild for a few days, but some have already taken on the challenge of pushing the new desktop silicon to its limits. By giving the A10-5800K model 1.956 volts, disabling two of its cores and cooling it with liquid nitrogen, overclockers were able to push the chip to 7.3GHz. Air-cooling and 1.616 volts squeezed out 5.1GHz without sacrificing any cores. If you’re a mere mortal who’s fresh out of liquid nitrogen (or never had any to begin with), you should be able to comfortably bump CPU performance by roughly 10 percent and GPU speeds by 15 to 17 percent. For the full specs on this particular overclock, hit the source links below.

Filed under: Desktops

AMD Trinity APU overclocked at 7.3 GHz, kept cool with liquid nitrogen originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Oct 2012 09:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TG Daily, PC Games Hardware (Tranlsated)  |  CPU-Z (7.3 GHz), (5.1GHz)  | Email this | Comments

AMD just announced the processor that could power your next desktop: the second generation A-Series processor. It has more cores for more power, integrated graphics with the AMD Radeon HD 7000 for graphics and puts a high priority on power efficiency. More »

These days, we have a better idea of what the Wii U is packing under the hood. While there are some aspects of the Wii U that are clearly better than the Xbox 360 or PS3, the CPU isn’t one of them. We don’t know everything about the Wii U’s CPU just yet (clock speed, for instance, is still a mystery), but we do know that it comes from IBM and features three Power PC cores.

That underwhelming CPU is giving one Wii U launch developer some trouble. During the Tokyo Game Show, Eurogamer sat down with Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper producer Akihiro Suzuki, who says that the Wii U’s CPU tends to have some issues when there are multiple characters on screen, which is pretty much always the case when playing a Dynasty Warriors game. “One of the weaknesses of the Wii U compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 is the CPU power is a little bit less,” Suzuki said. “So for games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU.”

Suzuki followed up by saying that dealing with those performance issues can be “a challenge,” but did also point out that as far as sheer graphics power is concerned, the Wii U has the 360 and PS3 beat. Not only does the Wii U feature what is believed to be a custom AMD 7 series GPU, but it’s been confirmed to house 1GB of RAM that is dedicated to games, which is twice the amount the 360 and PS3 can boast. This means games which are more GPU-intensive will shine on Wii U, while those that require some significant CPU power risk falling flat.

It’s important to keep in mind that as time goes on, developers will figure out how to squeeze the most power out of the Wii U’s CPU. All you need to do is look at this generation to see that much is true – compare titles like The Last of Us or Uncharted 3 to games that launched at the beginning of the generation, and you’ll surely notice a sizable boost in overall quality. It seems safe to assume that we can expect a similar progression with games on Wii U, so this is just probably one of those launch hurdles that most developers have to deal with. Check our story timeline below for more on the Wii U!

Wii U’s slow CPU “a challenge” for one launch developer is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

NVIDIA has taken the wraps off of its latest Kepler graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 650 and GTX 660, bringing the CUDA-based GPUs to the lowest price so far. Prices are promised at around $109 for the GeForce GTX 650, which offers a 1GHz clock speed and 1GB of DDR5 memory, and around $229 for the GeForce GTX 660, which doubles the RAM and is the cheapest way to get NVIDIA’s GPU Boost for automatic overclocking.

That’s not to say that the GTX 650 can’t be overclocked, or indeed that it needs to be. Out of the box it can simultaneously drive four monitors for a total resolution of 5760 x 1080 with its 384 CUDA cores, but there’s a 6-pin power connector for those wanting to coax up to around 1.2GHz from the GPU.

Gamers, though, might want to step straight to the GTX 660 for the native GPU Boost. That works with the card’s 960 CUDA cores, and 192-bit memory channel (versus the 128-bit of the GTX 650) to drive Full HD monitors at some impressive frame rates compared to its predecessors; check out the benchmarks in the table below (click for a larger version):

Connectivity includes a Dual Link DVI-I, Dual Link DVI-D, HDMI, and a DisplayPort on the double-width GTX 660, and a Dual Link DVI-I, a Dual Link DVI-D, and a Mini HDMI on the double-width GTX 650. Expect cards from the usual suspects from today.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 and GTX 660 push Kepler to sub-$110 is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.