Building your own PC is a test of patience and fortitude where selecting the right components and avoiding the various pitfalls attached to certain configurations is key to avoiding long hours of troubleshooting….or you could put one together out of pre-selected parts.
Nvidia is rolling out their very own GeForce PC Kit which ships with an Nvidia themed case, GeForce 9800GT graphics card, and all of the other components you’ll need in order to put together a decently quick PC all at a decent $499USD price tag. Of course it all seems like a TigerDirect package Nvidia has approved and hopped on board.
There are some trade offs hardware wise (250GB hard drive is very undersized) and as far as an OS is concerned you’re on your own but, for the most part, it’s not a bad computer for a first time builder.
Nvidia’s graphics division is having a rough time getting new products out the door but that doesn’t mean the rest of the company is stagnating. The company has announced its newest system on a chip dubbed Tegra 2.
The company expects the chip to be used in a wide variety of mobile entertainment devices as well as a new segment of “netbook-like” computers and tablets coming out this year.
With all of the attention being paid to AMD and Intel’s impressive chipset lineups there’s still Nvidia’s lineup to consider. Sure the company has had some knocks as of late but they still produce some interesting options if you’re going for the all out performance angle.
Immediately from the specifications we can that the MSI NF980-G65 is an nVidia board through and through supporting triple SLI courtesy of its nForce 980a chipset. A host of other options round out this this overclockers dream including support for overclocking the RAM all the way to 2133MHz. As a legacy free board the MSI NF980-G65 does not have any serial or parallel ports but does include support for PCI-E Gen 2 as well as RAID and 6 SATA ports. In fact the only thing we are suprised about is the lack of an e-SATA port on the rear.
A great option if you’re sticking with the Nvidia side of the fence and want SLI gaming performance with AMD’s Phenom II lineup.
Granted you don’t need to sort of power today’s high-end and mid-range graphics cards offer but you don’t exactly want bottom rung performance for your PC either. You enjoy a bit of gaming on the side which integrated graphics chips can’t exactly handle and extremely low-end add-on cards aren’t designed to even run on.
The Zotac GeForce GT 240 AMP! Edition we received for testing is somewhat of an upgrade from NVIDIA’s reference design. Zotac’s offering sports a 600MHz core, with 1460MHz shaders, and 512MB of 2000MHz GDDR5 memory (4000MHz effective). The cooler on the card is is relatively large and covers the GPU and memory on the front side of the card, with a cooling fan right in middle. It is only a single-slot solution and proved to be relatively quiet during testing. Outputs on the card consist of single HDMI, VGA, and dual-link DVI outputs, of which two can be used simultaneously.
A nice choice for that low-power home theater PC build you’re planning, just don’t expect gaming miracles out if it.
Normally when you go for the low-end of the market you know what you’re in for. You’re looking for some cost savings or power savings by going with chips that aren’t as powerful as the more expensive options but still offer plenty of power for the mundane usage scenarios. There’s still room for tweaking though.
Today, we will be looking at the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 edition graphics card. This card has a factory overclocked core and shader clock speeds, which should help boost performance over the standard clock speeds of 625MHz and 1360MHz. The EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 has a core clock speed of 671MHz and a shader clock of 1458MHz. This is just over a 7% clock frequency boost on the GPU, so that should help out performance on the card’s 48 stream processors.
Overall its performance is still underwhelming in games but you don’t need much performance in your office or home theater PCs now do you.
There was a time when you’d have to stick to one of the two graphics chips makers in case you wanted, some day, the Multi-GPU upgrade option. Heck you even had to stay within the same card generation, same specs as well, if you wanted that sweet sweet frame rate boost two graphics cards offered. That’s no longer the case.
We tested the graphics cards in this article using a unique setup provided by Lucid. The main components consist of a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard powered by Intel’s Core i7 920 quad-core processor and 2GB of OCZ DDR3 RAM. Of course, this particular motherboard does not feature Lucid technology so as a result, the graphics cards were installed on a special evaluation board featuring the Hydra 200 chip. The evaluation board was connected via PCIe card installed on an x16 slot on the GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard. We were told that this test setup simulates the performance of the Hydra 200 when integrated on a mainboard.
It’s not final and hasn’t been integrated into a motherboard yet but the performance it’s pumping out is highly impressive and should be on most gamer’s want lists, and high end motherboards, in short order.
Nvidia’s GeForce 210 GPU isn’t designed to wow you with its 3D prowess or further computing, instead it was made to get some decent multimedia playback into your basic desktop or office system. Thankfully such a pared down product comes with a smaller price tag.
The overclocks of our card are 774 MHz core (31% overclock) and 943 MHz Memory (77% overclock). Wow! Simply amazing overclocking potential, very nice. Whether overclocking makes any sense on a graphics card like this is up to you to decide depending on your requirements.
Impressive overclock percentages but you aren’t going to see much of a performance improvement, just accept that it’s a budget card.
Nvidia may be having a tough time coming up with a high end alternative to the competitions products but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas to attack them on.
What it is made for is desktop use. The power consumption in idle is an amazing 10W which will help save you some money, especially if you are running a whole office full of computers. Feature wise everything you need is there, the lack of DirectX 11 doesn’t seem to be that important considering you won’t be enjoying many games on these cards and as NVIDIA told us for years, DirectX 10.1 is useless anyway. I really like the switch away from S-Video output to native HDMI on recent cards. It will help with the widespread adoption of media PCs to play back content on HD TVs.
It’s not for the gamers out there but should fill in those office and HTPC duties quite well.
September 30th, 2009by Rafael HernandezNo comments
Gaming has come a long way graphics-wise but there’s still quite a ways to go when it comes to the details that would make them truly immersive. One of those somewhat under-represented features is physics modeling which would improve realism but has so far been splintered into camps.
AMD has joined up with Pixelux Entertainment in order to develop an open source alternative physics engine that should be able to run on any OpenCL or DirectX 11 DirectCompute capable graphics card or hardware.
Interesting approach but, then again, there are only so many graphics chip makers and Intel, with Havok, and Nvidia, with PhysX, have already staked their claim.
September 18th, 2009by Rafael HernandezNo comments
Sometimes you just can’t get enough computers for the tasks at hand so you go and shell out another chunk of change for your next purpose-built computer, at least one computer manufacturer finds that unacceptable.
DFI’s upcoming Hybrid P45-ION motherboard combines an Intel Atom and Nvidia ION chipset on to an Intel Core 2 capable motherboard making for two computers in one case. Interesting choice should you need an extra server or other low-power computer to do tasks while you use the Core 2 components to do your real computing.
Building your own PC is a test of patience and fortitude where selecting the right components and avoiding the various pitfalls attached to certain configurations is key to avoiding long hours of troubleshooting….or you could put one together out of pre-selected parts.
Gaming has come a long way graphics-wise but there’s still quite a ways to go when it comes to the details that would make them truly immersive. One of those somewhat under-represented features is physics modeling which would improve realism but has so far been splintered into camps.