Hasta La Gadget!

With all the antitrust noise, threats to AMD, and conflicts with NVIDIA, it’s hard to feel too charmed with Intel at the moment. But, if you’re looking for the best combination of performance and power consumption possible, you’ll have to swallow any animosity and put an Intel inside, with an efficiency piece at bit-tech.net finding that chips from that manufacturer were, on average, considerably more efficient than their AMD counterparts. That’s just part of the story, the site testing everything from memory to power supplies and finding the best compromise of performance and efficiency. It’s perhaps no surprise that high-efficiency PSUs trump older, hotter ones, but you might not expect to learn that desktop SSDs offer barely any improvement over their 5,400RPM platter-based brethren. Follow the article’s advice and you can shed 104 watts without losing a single 3DMark point — though you may shed quite a few dollars in the process.

Desktop PC components get rated for power efficiency, Intel rules the roost originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anyone familiar with the constantly shifting release dates and delays that characterize GPU refresh cycles will have been impressed by ATI’s execution of the Evergreen series release. Starting out at the top with its uber-performance parts, the company kept to an aggressive schedule over the winter and can now boast a fully fleshed out family of DirectX 11 graphics processors built under a 40nm process. The fact that NVIDIA has yet to give us even one DX11 product is testament to the enormity of this feat. But as dedicated geeks we want more than just the achievements, we want to know the ins and outs of ATI’s resurgence and the decisions that led to its present position of being the market leader in features and mindshare, if not sales. To sate that curiosity, we have our good friend Anand Shimpi with a frankly unmissable retrospective on the development of the RV870 GPU that was to become the Evergreen chips we know today. He delves into the internal planning changes that took place after the delay of the R5xx series, the balancing of marketing and engineering ambitions, and even a bit of info on features that didn’t quite make it into the HD 5xxx range. Hit the source link for all that precious knowledge.

AnandTech goes behind the scenes of ATI’s RV870 / Evergreen GPU development originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s rare to see a rumor — hell, even a roadmap — pinpoint the timing of new releases quite so accurately, but our earlier report of ATI refreshing the middle and lower parts of its lineup turned out to be bang on. Following in the footsteps of the HD 5670, we have the Radeon HD 5450, which drags the entry price for DirectX 11 and Eyefinity multi-monitor support all the way down to $50. Course, the processing power inside isn’t going to be on par with its elder siblings, but that also means the 5450 will run cool enough to be offered with half-height, passive cooling solutions as seen above. ATI’s focus here is on media PCs, with a DisplayPort, um… port, alongside HDMI 1.3a, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreaming support. For the money, you really can’t argue with all this extra multimedia juice, but if you must have benchmarks to sate your soul, check out the early reviews below — they’re full of bar charts and performance comparisons, don’t you know.

Continue reading ATI Radeon HD 5450 focuses on multimedia features, neglects gaming

ATI Radeon HD 5450 focuses on multimedia features, neglects gaming originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You have to love DigiTimes and those loquacious sources it seems to keep finding. The latest word from the Taiwanese grapevine suggests that both Intel and AMD will be bringing out six-core CPUs to the consumer market by the middle of this year. We’re using the term “consumer” rather loosely here as Intel’s first Gulftown chip is expected to be priced north of $1,000. The Core i7-980X is slated for a March release, which just fits inside the Q1 window that earlier rumors had suggested. If you butter your bread on the AMD side, you’ll have to wait a while longer as those 45nm Thuban chips — hereafter to be known as the Phenom II X6 1000T series — won’t be landing until at least May. The usual caution when dealing with anonymous sources is advisable, but this sounds like a roadmap with a high likelihood of being accurate.

AMD and Intel’s six-core CPU plans revealed by mobo makers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hot on the heels of its first quarterly profit in three years (thanks to Intel, strangely enough), AMD is launching a new pair of desktop processors today that hit for under a buck twenty (amongst a few others). The $99 Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition is the company’s quickest dual-core desktop CPU to date at 3.2GHz, while the Athlon II X4 635 is expected to be one of the least expensive quad-core chips around. Both slabs of silicon hit the test bench over the weekend, and as you may expect, no one was particularly blown away. Of course, AMD never set out to shock and awe with this duo, but the performance-per-dollar ratio was downright beautiful. We’ll spare you the nitty-gritty details (all the bar charts you can handle are just below), but suffice it to say, these two are certainly worth a look if you’re fixing to build a low-end, low-cost tower for… um, your mother. Yeah, her.

Read – Hot Hardware
Read – AnandTech
Read – Computer Shopper
Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – Overclocker’s Club
Read – ExtremeTech

AMD launches new Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs right onto the test bench originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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