If you were wondering when the latest, monthly, ATI Catalyst drivers would be released well you had a bit of a wait this month as AMD chose to push them out on Microsoft’s Windows 7 launch date. In the latest 9.10 driver set you can expect quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes as well as support for the newest ATI Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 graphics cards. Unfortunately Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 support didn’t make it in but those cards should see support shortly in the form of a hotfixed driver.

If you’re running a Radeon graphics card earlier than the Radeon HD 2400 series you’ll have to grab the company’s legacy drivers as earlier generations of their graphics chips have been moved to legacy support status.

Here are some quick links to AMD’s download pages:

ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows 7
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows 7 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows Vista
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows Vista 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP 64-bit

In cooling silence is a completely relative term. What may seem whisper quiet to someone is annoyingly loud to someone else. There is of course a way to get complete silence but it used to mean setting your performance sights low.

Testseek has a review of the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 SilentCell 1GB graphics card and its completely silent and fan-less cooler that’s perfect for your next HTPC build:

Another outstanding feature of this card is its PCB, which is built upon the “Ultra Durable VGA” principles. The UDV technology uses almost double the normal amount of copper, which helps better lead the electricity and also improves on the cooling and general stability of the card. On the PCB we also find the 6 pin PCI-E  power connector and the connector for CrossFire mode.

A nice looking card but you’re going to want some decent airflow over it in order to keep it cooled off.

Gaming laptops have typically come in one form: large and obnoxious looking. As well as they perform sometimes you just don’t want to proclaim your tendency to game to the general public, not that you could as they’re more like desktop replacements than actual portable machines.

Dell has taken things down a notch with their Studio XPS 16 notebook, offering up a more palatable set of color schemes making for a sensible looking machine. HotHardware has a review:

In fact, the machine looks so good that it’s easy to forget that it’s not exactly the thinnest or lightest machine on the block. Now, it’s certainly nimble enough for most, and we’re actually impressed with the overall look and feel considering its screen size. Also, the added room enabled Dell to install a full-size keyboard, more powerful speakers, a 1080p panel and a potent 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon 4670 GPU, which is admittedly the star of the system.

A nice machine but, for the price, they could toss in a battery that actually lasted a decent amount of time.

High end graphics cards usually come with a stock cooler design that is capable of handling the sort of heat the monsters put out, unfortunately they only do enough to maintain GPUs at a safe operating temperature.

Hardware Canucks has a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X video card. It sports an insanely beefy cooling system that should keep things a bit quiet and running cooler:

Sapphire’s HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X has a unique design with a partial-length heatsink covering the area directly above the core and making its way towards the backplate. Meanwhile, the rear portion of the card has a separate heatsink which is used to cool off the hot running VRMs. Its blue PCB makes the whole affair look faintly Gigabyte-esque while the length sticks to the reference 9.5”.

Beefy and svelte, interesting combination they have going on there.

AMD’s monthly driver cycle is upon us once again which brings about a new ATI Catalyst drivers set bringing them up to version 9.9. The usual bug fixes are in as well as CrossFireX support for Resident Evil 5.

The drivers support DirectX 10 capable GPUs so those with Radeon graphics cards sporting a chipset that was released earlier than the Radeon HD 2000 series will have to wait for the next round of legacy driver support or make due with the 9.8 legacy drivers.

Here are the links directly to AMD’s driver downloads:

ATI Catalyst 9.9 Video Drivers for Windows 7
ATI Catalyst 9.9 Video Drivers for Windows 7 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.9 Video Drivers for Windows Vista
ATI Catalyst 9.9 Video Drivers for Windows Vista 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.9 Video Drivers for Windows XP
ATI Catalyst 9.9 Video Drivers for Windows XP 64-bit

Multi-monitor solutions over the years have ranged from astounding driver nightmares to expensive third party solutions and, in the end, never really came into form when supporting gaming across multiple displays.

AMD seeks to change all of that with their upcoming ATI Radeon Eyefinity technology which should be showing up on their next generation DirectX 11 supporting cards. HardOCP has seen the 7680×3200 promised land:

What you are seeing below is a single air cooled AMD next-gen video card in a consumer ATX case powering six LCD displays. No tricks, no switches. Six 30" LCD panels with DisplayPort, and one "Evergreen" video card. This card is a future product that will likely be for sale around the holidays, but on launch day every card will support no less than 3 displays.

It is an exciting product, hopefully we’ll see a return to super sampling anti-aliasing in older titles with all of that extra horsepower under the hood.

ATI/AMD moved a large number of their older graphics cards (anything earlier than the Radeon HD moniker) to legacy support status which means that they’ll still see driver updates just not as often as their newer card lineups.

The company has released their Catalyst 9.8 driver set for Windows XP, Windows 7, and Vista which support the following video cards:

Radeon 9500 Series, Radeon 9550 Series, Radeon 9600 Series, Radeon 9700 Series, Radeon 9800 Series, Radeon X300 Series, Radeon X550 Series, Radeon X600 Series, Radeon X700 Series, Radeon X800 Series, Radeon X850 Series, Radeon X1050 Series, Radeon X1300 Series, Radeon X1550 Series, Radeon X1600 Series, Radeon X1650 Series, Radeon X1800 Series, Radeon X1900 Series, Radeon Xpress Series, Radeon X1200 Series, Radeon X1250 Series, Radeon X2100 Series,

Here are links directly to ATI/AMD’s driver download page, note only the complete Catalyst Software Suite link contains the 9.8 version of the drivers:

ATI Catalyst 9.8 Legacy Video Drivers for Windows XP
ATI Catalyst 9.8 Legacy Video Drivers for Windows Vista
ATI Catalyst 9.8 Legacy Video Drivers for Windows Vista 64bit
ATI Catalyst 9.8 Legacy Video Drivers for Windows 7
ATI Catalyst 9.8 Legacy Video Drivers for Windows 7 64bit

The benefit, for consumers, of having a few technology companies battling it out means we reap the rewards in the form of faster components and the constant price undercutting between the manufacturers.

It’s good times indeed.

Tweak News has a look at the XFX Radeon HD 4770 graphics card and its ability to keep pace with some of the much higher end products out there despite its low price tag:

With a stock baseline set at 750Mhz Core and 800Mhz memory, through constant testing and benchmarking, I was able to push the core up to 820Mhz for an additional 70Mhz and the memory could be increased all the way up to 830Mhz for a 30Mhz increase.

Impressive numbers on the tweaking front and given its low price tag some CrossFire action is definitely in order.

The high end of the market is jam packed with insanely powerful hardware destined to make your gaming experience a richer, and quicker, one at a rather large expense. Thankfully today’s mid-range offers more bang for the buck than ever before.

Techgage has a look at the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4770 512MB graphics card. It’s based on the 4800 series graphics core so you know it has a fair share of performance potential:

At its ~$100 price point, the main competition from NVIDIA’s latest-gen cards is the GTS 250, which costs about $20 more on average. From ATI’s own line-up, the competing card to the HD 4770 is the HD 4850, which currently actually sells for just about the same. Where the HD 4770 shines though, is that it has a much lower power consumption, and when overclocked, it can pretty-well match the performance of the HD 4850, while retaining the lower power draw (resulting also in lower temperatures).

You can’t beat it at its price range, heck it matches up favorably against cards that demand a slightly higher price tag as well.

In the forward march of progress there’s very little that can withstand the pressure of genuine innovation and improvement.That said there are still those that cling to their old hardware because, well, it still works pretty damn well so it suits their needs.

Hi Tech Legion takes a gander at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 AGP video card and what it can bring to the slightly older systems out there. Here’s a sampling:

The Sapphire ATI HD4650 AGP features the same 4600 series power but with an AGP interface. The Sapphire ATI HD4650 AGP serves to upgrade aging systems to meet some of the current graphics demands of current games and video. The release of this inexpensive graphics card in an AGP format is certain to stir some interest among those with older systems that just don’t have the money for more current technology but would like to try their hand at some of the more current games, even if at lower settings and resolutions.

A gaming solution this isn’t but you do get a low-power graphics chip that can do wonders for your high def video playback, if you’re into that sort of thing.