Just ahead of Computex, E3 and Intel’s launch of its 4th generation of processors, NVIDIA has announced its GTX 700M family of graphics processors (GPUs) for laptops. This is a performance-oriented refresh that hits on nearly all important elements: core […]
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Razer promised it was aiming to iterate its Blade gaming laptop on a yearly basis, and despite the company’s recent focus on tablets, it appears to be keeping its word. Today, a mere eight months after releasing the second-gen Blade, Razer unveiled two new members of the Blade family: the 17-inch Blade Pro and its 14-inch sibling. As you might expect, the Pro tops its elders with new silicon and storage options. It’s exchanging third-gen Intel Ivy Bridge silicon for a fourth-gen Haswell chip and upgrading from an NVIDIA GTX 660M to a GTX 765M GPU. Oh, and Razer’s nixed the HDD options from the big Blade’s menu — the Pro packs a 128GB SSD standard, with optional upgrades to 256 or 512GB. That new hardware is evidently smaller than what it’s replacing: though the Pro shares the same size chassis as its predecessor, it packs a 74Wh battery (the older Blade has a 60Wh cell). Other than that, the Blade Pro comes with Razer’s Switchblade interface, a trio of USB 3.0 ports, 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and a 1920 x 1080 display, just like the prior Blade.
Meanwhile, the new 14-inch Blade will come with mostly the same hardware as the Pro, meaning it’s got a Haswell chip and GTX 765M graphics along with a buffet of SSD choices. Those components are stuffed inside a chassis that measures 13.6 x 9.3 x 0.66 inches, and weighs 4.13 pounds. Naturally, given its smaller size, it lacks the Switchblade LCD and buttons, has a 1.3 megapixel webcam (as opposed to the Pro’s 2 megapixel unit) and a 14-inch 1600 x 900 display. And, despite its relatively svelte dimensions (for a portable gaming rig), the baby Blade still has a 70Wh battery inside. The Pro starts at $2,299, or $200 less than prior Blades and the 14-inch model will set you back a minimum of $1,799. Each will be available in North America in Q2, with a worldwide rollout of the Pro coming sometime later this year.
Update: Good news, Indie game developers! Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan just announced that those devs with a successfully funded Kickstarter can get a new Blade Pro for just $999.
We’ve already seen a couple of new desktop GTX cards from NVIDIA this month, and if the mysterious spec sheet for MSI’s GT70 Dragon Edition 2 laptop wasn’t enough of a hint, the company’s got some notebook variants to let loose, too. The GeForce GTX 700M series, officially announced today, is a quartet of chips built on the Kepler architecture. At the top of the stack is the GTX 780M, which NVIDIA claims is the “world’s fastest notebook GPU,” taking the title from AMD’s Radeon HD 8970M. For fans of the hard numbers, the 780M has 1,536 CUDA cores, an 823MHz base clock speed and memory configs of up to 4GB of 256-bit GDDR5 — in other words, not a world apart from a desktop card. Whereas the 780M’s clear focus is performance, trade-offs for portability and affordability are made as you go down through the 770M, 765M and 760M. Nevertheless, the 760M is said to be 30 percent faster than its predecessor, and the 770M 55 percent faster.
All of the chips feature NVIDIA’s GPU Boost 2.0 and Optimus technologies, and work with the GeForce Experience game auto-settings utility. The 700M series should start showing up in a host of laptops soon, and a bunch of OEMs have already pledged their allegiance. Check out a video with NVIDIA’s Mark Avermann after the break, where he shows off a range of laptops packing 700M GPUs, and helps us answer the most important question of all: can it run Crysis? (Or, in this case, Crysis 3.)
Gallery: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 700M slide deck
Filed under: Gaming, Laptops, Peripherals, NVIDIA
Now that we have the low-down on NVIDIA’s two mainstream heavyweights, the GTX 770 and the GTX 780, we figure it’s time to move beyond specs and official slide decks and bring together some reviews from the specialist sites. Both cards contain the same Kepler architecture as NVIDIA’s 2012 line-up, with no huge leaps in evidence, but they either add more of this silicon (in the case of the GTX 780) or drive it harder (in the case of the GTX 770) in order create new options for enthusiasts and for those upgrading from a card that is two or more generations old. At the same time, these products represent a major shift in NVIDIA’s pricing strategy. At $649, the GTX 780 is priced much higher than its direct ancestor, and it aims to approach Titan-level performance without hitting the same thousand-dollar high. Meanwhile, the GTX 770 costs just $399 and yet is said to replace last year’s flagship cards like the GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, which are still being sold for $450 and upwards at some retailers. Read on and we’ll summarize how these claims have stacked up against reality.
The gaming device known as SHIELD is headed through the FCC this week with NVIDIA’s original code-name attached: Project Thor. As the machine was originally called Project SHIELD when it was introduced earlier this year at CES 2013, the name Thor follows well: Marvel Comics fans the folks at NVIDIA must be. This device is headed for the hands of pre-order users sooner than later, too.
The device known as SHIELD had its product drawings created by NVIDIA Senior Product Designer Jason Su as well as designer Richard Lai. Other than a confirmation of what we already knew to be true about this device, nothing much has turned up odd.
This machine is a clambshell Android gaming device, working with a 5-inch display up top and a set of physical controls below. The display works with 720p resolution and is fully multi-touch-sensitive. The display, the controls, and the two dedicated integrated speakers were all developed specifically for this device, and the whole device is manufactured for NVIDIA.
This is odd because of the lack of NVIDIA-made NIVIDA-designed devices up until this year. This is the first fully NVIDIA-made Android device, and though they’ve been working with manufacturers from all corners of the Android-toting universe to bring their Tegra mobile processors to the public, this is also the first time they’ve put one in one of their own.
Inside SHIELD is the NVIDIA Tegra 4 quad-core processor with 72 GPU cores – here coming to the public in a device for the first time. This processor was also introduced earlier this year at CES 2013.
Stay tuned as SlashGear has a look a SHIELD and its gaming abilities in the very near future. We’ll be looking at it from an Android perspective, from a GeForce PC gaming streaming perspective, and from the perspective of an everyday user, too.
NVIDIA SHIELD hits FCC with Avengers hat tip in code: Project THOR is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Today NVIDIA let it be known that they’ve not just added the GeForce GTX 780 to their ranks, they’ve replaced the GTX 670 with the GTX 770 as well. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770′s design is based on the GK104 GPU, this being the same unit used in the 680, the card replaced by the 780 earlier this month. This unit works with a base clock speed of 1,046 MHz and can be boosted up to 1,085 MHz, bringing with it a fastest-ever GDDR5 memory speed at 7.0 Gbps.
Inside the GTX 770, users will find 8 SMX units bringing on a massive 1536 CUDA Cores, ready to keep the finest games on the market up to speed. While the typical Boost Clock speed will be 1085MHz, NVIDIA notes that many partners will be offering their 770 boards at higher clock speeds.
The GTX 770 works with the same vapor cooling chamber cooler that works with the GTX 780 and the GTX TITAN introduced earlier this year. Though on the GTX 770 reference boards this technology will be in play, retail GeForce GTX 770 cards work with their own unique board design, cooling, and OC clock speeds – the 4dB sound drop seen in the in-house test results here are from reference board designs only: the final product could be ever-so-slightly different.
This is the second card to be released with the NVIDIA GeForce Experience packaged and pushed to manufacturers – that’s the company’s game optimization suite, now in version 1.5 and available to the public. This user experience has replaced “NVIDIA Update” as the group’s graphic driver standard.
NVIDIA has made clear once again that the GeForce Experience is their jumping off point, a place where gamers can optimize the newest in high-powered games for the GeForce GTX graphics cards they’ve so gratefully purchased and installed. As it was made clear earlier this year at CES 2013, the cross-section of people who own high-powered graphics cards and those that take the time to set their games up to make the most of them is pitifully small: the GeForce Experience aims to put an end to that.
The GeForce GTX 770′s hardware certainly makes for a convincing case for necessary optimization. What good is a single precision of 3.2 Teraflops and either 2GB or 4GB GDDR5 memory capacities at 7.0 Gbps when you’re not making full use of it? There’s a lovely memory subsystem you might want to make use of as well, that consisting of four 64-bit memory controllers (256-bit).
This unit’s TDP (Thermal Design Power or Thermal Design Point) is 230W. TDP represents the maximum amount of power the cooling system will require to dissipate – and it’s important to note that this is the maximum “average” power the chip will draw, not the most power it’s capable of drawing in strange circumstances (there, now you learned something today.)
Meanwhile the recommended power supply for the GTX 770 has been suggested by NVIDIA to be 600 Watts. You’ll need to hook up one 6-pin power connector and one 8-pin power connector, each with PCI Express 3.0 design in play.
Output includes 2x Dual-Link DVI connectors, one full-sized HDMI connector, and one DisplayPort 1.2 connector. Kepler features of note include support for up to four displays, GPU Boost 2.0, and TXAA. NVIDIA’s standard GeForce GTX 770 2GB card is coming in at a suggested etail price point of $399.00 USD, with individual manufacturer prices incoming sooner than later.
GeForce GTX 770 joins 780 for two-tier gaming graphics sweep is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
It probably won’t come as a huge surprise, given the GTX 780‘s appearance last week, but today’s launch of the GTX 770 nevertheless brings us a very interesting product. The card is claimed to be about five percent faster than last year’s much more expensive flagship, the GTX 680, thanks to faster memory (7Gb/s instead of 6Gb/s), a slightly higher base clock speed (1,046 vs. 1,006MHz) and an equivalent number of CUDA cores (1,536). Seeing as how the the GTX 680 still holds its own with current games, this performance parity strikes us as something of a deal — assuming independent benchmarks back it up. We’re awaiting a confirmed US price, but we’ll eat our SATA cables if it’s anything other than $399 for a 2GB model (the press release just says “under $400”). UK and European prices match those of the GTX 670 (£329 inc. VAT, 329 euros exc. VAT), and availability begins today. Check out NVIDIA’s slide deck for more details, including power consumption and noise, SLI scaling (which looks healthy) and some in-house frame rate comparisons against other products.
Update: $399 is confirmed. The cables are safe.
Gallery: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 slide deck
Eager to get your mitts on NVIDIA’s first Tegra 4 device? Cast your jealous eyes upon the federal government — they’ve already got one. NVIDIA’s Shield gaming handheld dropped by the FCC to get its label approved, betraying its original code name, Project Thor, in the processes. Hardly a surprise to see the device passing federal muster, of course, as it’s slated for release at the end of next month. Unfortunately, the filings don’t reveal any hidden goodies (that is, no cellular radio), just a standard WiFi antenna. Still, if label location drawings and test reports are your thing, check out the FCC link below.
Source: FCC
Today the team behind NVIDIA’s SHIELD device have spoken on the activities and preparations made for showing the device on “P-Relase” day. P-Release signifies the device is ready for production, and what the team has shared today is what went on behind the scenes right up until NVIDIA’s most recent quarterly internal company meeting where CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off the very first SHIELD production unit. This device was first introduced back at CES 2013 earlier this year, and it’ll be shipped to the first wave of pre-order users in June.
The first run of SHIELD devices spoken about in this telling of the process was a small set of 220 devices – though its not clear whether this was the first full run of devices or not, the intense construction process behind the device is.
Two weeks before pre-orders for this device were set to go up and a “quick turn” manufacturing team is lead by a man named Brant. Brant spoke briefly to the team about how they’ll go about hands-on testing of this first set of 220 devices, then flew to the contract manufacturer taking the bulk of the assembling for SHIELD.
This quick-turn team has a set of deliverables that includes, amongst other things, a 100 page packet of assembly instructions. Details as small as how long each unit is charged before being shipped are covered in full. The fact that this machine works with elements like directional pads, physical buttons, and a clamshell display mean it’s also significantly more complex to put together than the average smartphone or tablet.
At around 24 hours before SHIELD would be announced fully “P-Release” ready, NVIDIA’s marketing team sat in a room speaking about what they’d be demoing the next day. They added a set of 30 games to the device itself (most of which won’t be on the final device, but will be available through the NVIDIA TegraZone). They plugged an SD card full of media into the device with movies like Thor and Iron Man.
The team made an effort to “wittle down” the app lineup that’d be launched on the device in this session as well. Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp were suggested, and the final set was selected. Though there is a unique set of apps on this device, SHIELD remains “pure android”, as they say, working with an un-skinned version of Android Jelly Bean.
P-Release was revealed to be just three days before publications like SlashGear arrived to test SHIELD out – just days before Google I/O 2013, as well.
The device is now being produced in its first full run, while the initial pre-order set is coming in less than a month. SHIELD is made to work with Android apps on the device itself with its NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor as well as (in Beta mode, for now) streaming from GeForce GTX-powered gaming PCs.
SOURCE: NVIDIA
NVIDIA SHIELD final hours recounted before Production Release is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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