techETA » video

EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 the low-end tweaker’s approach

Rafael Hernandez — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:52:22 +0000

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.

Legit Reviews is all over the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 video card which chooses to go with DDR3 over the slower DDR2 and pushes clock rates a bit higher as well:

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.

ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP, Windows 7, Vista

Rafael Hernandez — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:33:06 +0000

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

Radeon HD 5770 3-Way CrossFireX provides interesting performance possibilities

Rafael Hernandez — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:29:09 +0000

While the ATI Radeon HD 5770 presents a solid mid-range performance gaming experience there is that often overlooked benefit that a multiple GPU environment brings in. Thankfully there are those dedicated enough to test such technology.

Guru3D has tested the Radeon HD 5770 in a three card CrossFireX setup which may seem a bit excessive but the performance benefits are there:

Obviously rendering your games with three GPUs equals a lot of brute horsepower, so big that the rest of the PC might become a bottleneck for your graphics solution. That is however a luxury problem though but as an example, Fallout 3 at 8x AA at 1920×1200 performed as well as a 2-way 5770 setup as the processor (Core i7 @ 3.75 GHz) was literally holding back the GPUs from reaching the stratosphere.

When your gaming performance is held back by such a powerful processor it’s a good problem to have.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 flaunts inspired gaming prowess

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:08:35 +0000

The mid-range isn’t the mid-range you remember, it’s now what used to be last generation’s high-end, performance-wise at least. It’s all a little confusing but given the price/performance ratios offered by these new products it’s not hard to figure out why an upgrade is so tempting.

Rage3D has a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 graphics card and its DirectX 11 supporting ways. It’s no 5870 but it’s sure to handle most of your budget gaming needs:

In some circumstances the HD5770 outperforms the HD4870, thanks to a high engine clock and plenty of GDDR5, and in others the reduced memory bandwidth shows itself; but really this card is the average gamers hero, offering HD gaming performance, Eyefinity, Dx11 and more as well as great HTPC features.

Intriguing to say the least. Budget based CrossFire anyone?

JVC PICSIO GC-FM1 Announced, pocketsized HD video capturing

Rafael Hernandez — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:38:29 +0000

If you’re the sort of person that still thinks their path to fame and fortune is a series of Youtube videos, or you just want a handy pocket-sized HD video recorder, you may want to take a look at the new JVC PICSIO GC-FM1 camera.

The gadget sports an 8 megapixel sensor for decent stills and sports a 1440×1080 video recording resolution. Image stabilization and support for up to 32GB SD cards seals the deal although some on-board memory would’ve been nice to see.

The damage? It’ll set you back $199.95 and is available now.

Zotac GeForce GT 220, redefining the low-end…sort of

Rafael Hernandez — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:35:44 +0000

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.

techPowerUp has a look at the Zotac GeForce GT 220 graphics card which sports a purpose built design to keep power usage down:

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.

Belkin SOHO F1DD104L four-port KVM, sharing your gear without the fuss

Rafael Hernandez — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:11:01 +0000

While it would be nice to have a dedicated displays and input devices for every PC you have at your disposal you clearly don’t have enough desk space or a surge protector long enough.

In comes the Belkin SOHO F1DD104L four-port KVM which makes sharing your USB keyboard, mouse, DVI monitor, and speakers a breeze. Benchmark Reviews has a look:

The Belkin SOHO “learns” the DDC specs of your monitor the first time the monitor is connected to the switch and turned on, and thereafter presents these specs to all computers that are plugged in, all the time. It also emulates a generic keyboard and mouse on the USB ports, and what all this means is that each computer connected to the SOHO thinks it’s connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse all the time. This is turn means minimal delay when switching between computers: your keyboard and mouse are instantly available, and your monitor re-syncs in just a second or two; it also means that you can boot or restart a connected computer without having to switch to it first.

A nifty set of features so you don’t have to wait for your PC to accept your hardware.

XFX Radeon HD 4890 Extreme, the last hurrah

Rafael Hernandez — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:26:17 +0000

As is customary with most technology the best revisions and refinements usually come around at the end of a product’s life, this time around is no different. The XFX Radeon HD 4890 Extreme sports a mild factory stock overclock and, with a bit of prodding, may just hit those high speeds you desire.

HardOCP has a review:

Taking it a step further to see just how much farther we could get, we increased the fan speed from auto to manual and set it at 100%. With this, we ended up with a fantastic clock speed 990MHz on the GPU and 4.68GHz on the memory without any voltage modifications!

Speedy, but you may want to save up a bit more and go for the latest and greatest.

ATI Radeon HD 5870, sensible high end performance

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:23:00 +0000

The graphics battle kicks into high gear again with today’s launch of AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. Of course you can expect the usual performance improvements but the chip also sports new power saving features that should tame it when it’s just sitting around idling.

Here’s a collection of links testing the new board:

AMD’s Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs – AnandTech
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Review – bit-tech
AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review – HardOCP
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One – Hot Hardware
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Graphics Card and AMD Eyefinity Review – PC Perspective
AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 graphics processor – The Tech Report

Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 SilentCell 1GB, quiet as a mouse

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:32:00 +0000

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.