Hasta La Gadget!

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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Don’t get too excited, we don’t have specs or release windows yet, but we do have hilariously inflated model names to share with you. NVIDIA’s all-new graphics architecture, commonly known as Fermi and recently re-coded as the GF100, has its first two commercial product names — the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 — which as you’ll have noticed skip right past the 300s and nearly double the model numbers of the company’s current gen offerings. Let’s just hope the performance lives up to such a blusterous naming scheme.

NVIDIA’s first two Fermi cards to be known as GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s no Shift, but Maingear‘s new line of F1X gaming rigs are still delightfully potent in their own right. Starting at $2,249 (F1X 200) and sailing well north of $5,149 for the top-end F1X 500, this trio of desktops runs on a 64-bit copy of Windows 7 and packs an 80GB SSD boot drive, an overclocked Intel Core i7 CPU and an optional Blu-ray burner. The big fellow touts a 3.6GHz OC’d Core i7-975, 12GB of DDR3 memory, a 1.5TB Western Digital storage drive, 6x Blu-ray writer, a closed-loop watercooling system, 1,000 watt power supply and twin ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPUs (1GB). The other guys step things down just a wee bit, but you can rest assured that today’s latest games will be handled with ease should you snag any of ’em. Speaking of which — they’re only available from Tiger Direct, Circuit City (the website) and CompUSA, so don’t waste your time looking elsewhere for a better deal.

Maingear introduces F1X gaming desktops with overclocked Core i7 CPUs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fermi hardware might still be two months away, but NVIDIA has done the sage thing and released some tantalizing numbers and architectural details to keep the fanboys chirping in the meantime. The GF100 will signal the end of tiresome rebadging and clock speed massaging, and early adopters will find 512 CUDA cores, 48 ROPs, and a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface sprawled across three billion transistors. Big changes are also afoot in how the card will do its work, with a reorganization toward a more parallel workflow leading to promises of up to eight times better geometry performance than on the GT200. HardOCP reports that anti-aliasing results have improved “notably,” while the video we’ve got stashed after the break for you shows the GF100 beating the GTX 285 handily in a Far Cry 2 benchmark. Still, the PC Perspective crew expressed some apprehension about the massive die size and how it could impact yields given the still young 40nm production process — a sentiment echoed by other publications who questioned whether NVIDIA would not have been better off trying for a less ambitious, more gaming-oriented board. We should all know that answer soon enough.

Read – AnandTech
Read – Hot Hardware
Read – PC Perspective
Read – HardOCP
Read – Tom’s Hardware

Continue reading NVIDIA Fermi / GF100 architectural details revealed

NVIDIA Fermi / GF100 architectural details revealed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There comes a time when you have to stop chasing performance and start making good for the environmental damage you’ve caused — or do you? NEC’s latest Mate desktop offers 30% boosted efficiency over previous models despite offering better performance with Core i5 or i7 processors, consuming just 23 watts thanks to a redesigned motherboard and the use of SSD. It also features greater use of recyclable components and a shell composed of environmentally friendly yet flame-retardant plastic — important when your power supplies have been known for their explosive personalities. NEC is also announcing the new VersaPro VD laptop (pictured after the break), similarly equipped with Intel’s latest, and offering a new software tool for tracking energy consumption to “increase user awareness of energy saving.” Knowing is half the battle, friends.

Continue reading NEC’s new Mate ME desktop is 30% more efficient, 75% more recyclable, 100% less flammable

NEC’s new Mate ME desktop is 30% more efficient, 75% more recyclable, 100% less flammable originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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