With Version 0.5.8 comes two new features along the regular fixes provided.

The first one is a render test that applies sufficient load ( but not stress) on the GPU to pull it out of PCI-Express link-state power-management, ensuring the Bus information is accurate. If information is displayed incorrectly (i.e. PCI-Express bus link speed or PCIe version displayed incorrectly) just click on the “?” button next to the field to launch the load test.

The second feature is ASIC quality, designed for NVIDIA Fermi (GF10x and GF11x GPUs) and AMD Southern Islands (HD 7800 series and above), aimed at advanced users, hardware manufacturers, and the likes. TechPowerUp found the ways in which AMD and NVIDIA segregate their freshly-made GPU ASICs based on the electrical leakages the chips produce (to increase yield by allotting them in different SKUs and performance bins), and they’ve found ways in which ASIC quality can be quantified and displayed. You’ll find this feature in the context menu of GPU-Z. They’re also currently working on implementing this feature on older AMD Radeon GPUs.

Here’s a full log of the changes made:

• Added explanation about PCI-Express power savings and 3D render test to accurately measure bus config under load
• Added function to display ASIC quality for Fermi and Southern Islands. (Located in the GPU-Z system menu)
• Fixed crash on older ATI cards
• Added voltage monitoring for HD 7970
• Improved real-time clock monitoring for HD 7970
• Fixed OpenCL detection for AMD Antilles, Whistler, Seymour, Blackcomb
• Improved default clock reading for AMD HD 7970 and Fusion
• Added support for AMD FirePro V7900, HD 6930, HD 7690M, HD 6410D
• Fixed Intel Sandy Bridge IGP to be DirectX 10.1, 32 nm
• Added support for NVIDIA Tesla C2075, GeForce GT 630M

Available now, you may download the regular GPU-Z 0.5.8 here, or choose to get the ROG theme GPU-Z 0.5.8 here.

Source: TPU

Starting from the top we have the R6570-MD2GD3, which is equipped with 2GB Vram giving a larger frame buffer, especially for high resolution monitors. It’s also equipped with the Military Class III Concept Components, including SFC and solid capacitor, offering higher reliability and longer lifespan even when under heavy load.

Gamers are also given the option to record in-game scenes in real time and share them with friends within MSI’s exclusive overclocking utility.

Using the MSI Afterburner overclocking utility, gamers will be able to adjust the clock speeds to their needs and to gain better performance.

The R6570-MD2GD3 is very similar (to the extent of having the same name) yet it features only 1GB of DDR3 memory on a 64-bit memory bus. This version will also cost less than the other.

Display outputs offered on both version include DVI, VGA and HDMI.

No price or release date have been given, and even though featuring rather low specs when you come to think about what’s on offer today, these entry-level solutions present a good alternative for those who either don’t have between 300-500 bucks to spend on high quality graphics card or for those who just want to enjoy Full HD content and casual gaming without going overkill or breaking the bank.

Source: tech2

Originally expected for a February launch, it later moved back to January, the second entry in the 28 nm GPU section from AMD, as well as the second product from the 7900 series, the Tahiti based Radeon HD 7950 today sees more specifications revealed from no other than DonanimHaber.

The HD 7950 will be clocked at 800 MHz while the memory will be clocked at 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz GDDR5 effective). For comparison, the HD 7970 boasts 925 MHz for the core and 1375 MHz for the memory (5.50 GHz effective).

This promises the HD 7950 to be a good overclocker when you think about the speeds it features, you’ll most probably see some factory-OC products from a few partners.

Price wise, DonanimHaber reveals that the HD 7950 will cost around $100-150 less than the more expensive HD 7970 listed around $400-$450.

Source: DonanimHaber

After mentioning more than once that it was time for Nvidia to step up, CES buzzed with talks these past days and the company’s next generation GPU architecture, both for the desktops and notebooks, is coming out in early Q2 this year.

No precise date is marked, but it has been heard several times that April was the month, coincidentally, it’s the same month Intel is planning to release Ivy Bridge. Nvidia sure took its time, AMD took the first place with the HD 7970, the first 28nm to be out ‘in the wild’. Yet Nvidia isn’t far back, with a good boost, the GTX 580 can still keep up with its rival for now.

Several sources and website around the web mention that Nvidia’s Kepler is superior to AMD’s Southern Islands, but as of today AMD is the undisputed king with the only next-gen GPU in stores. However, if Kepler does turn out to be better than Tahiti, or any other 28nm GPU from AMD, you can count on a beefy price tag.

Looking back on the previous so called “leaked roadmap”, we doubt that Nvidia will keep a scheme of “entry level first, high-end last” and will most probably counter AMD with some sort of equivalent graphics card.

April is certainly going to be a month of surprise and suspense, as was reported previously, the dual-GPU 28nm from AMD is set to launch around April as well (Radeon HD 7990 equipped with 2xHD 7970 GPUs). We certainly look forward to this new ‘clash of the titans’, mark your calendars, the showdown is coming.

Source: Fudzilla

GV-R797D5-3GD-B

Two products were presented, one being a reference card, the GV-R797D5-3GD-B, using the same reference cooler with different stickers, while the second one is the GV-R797OC-3GD and presents some more interesting features.

GV-R797OC-3GD

Starting with the most evident change is the cooler, featuring WINDFORCE 3X Cooling Technology and ”Triangle Cool” Technology, both work in conjunction to provide around 15% of cooling improvement over the reference cooler.

WINDFORCE 3X Cooling Technology is Gigabyte’s new innovative new generation triple-fan solution featuring patented anti-turbulence inclined fans and three 8mm pure copper heat pipes. Both of these help to reduce excessive heat and minimizes the flow of turbulence between fans.

The ”Triangle Cool” Technology (patent pending) uses fin with clip modules in a special triangle shape which, in conjunction with the anti-turbulence fans, enhances the efficiency of heat dissipation.

In addition to the cooler, the GV-R797OC-3GD is equipped with Eyefinity 2.0 and HD3D technology in order to provide gamers the best multi-display and 3D experience. The HD 7970′s DirectX 11 support and large high-speed memory allows for maximum image quality for the best gaming experience.

None can be enjoyed without the right connectivity, both of these new products feature one DVI port, one HDMI 1.4a with support for Blu-ray 3D as well as two mini DisplayPorts.

Pricing for the GV-R797OC-3GD hasn’t been mentioned, the GV-R797D5-3GD-B hasn’t been given a ‘fully official’ price either, however a simple look around revealed the price to be going between $560 and $600 so far.

Source: Press Release

This week saw the kick off of the next generation of GPUs, AMD entering first with the Radeon HD 7970. This is only the beginning, as more are coming including the Radeon HD 7950, but also planned are 28 nm mobile chips.

While the HD 7950 will see the light of day some time during this quarter, the mobile 28 nm GPUs for notebooks will have to wait longer and won’t come out until Q2.

The mobile chips from AMD will be based on the GCN architecture and will bring DirectX 11.1 support along with power, image quality and display output enhancements.

Although still unconfirmed, there is a very high chance for the 28 nm mobile GPUs to be introduced in the Radeon HD 7000M series, which already includes 40 nm-based cards previously released (including 7600M, 7500M, 7400M, 7300M). As for the 28 nm mobile GPUs, these chips will be branded starting from Radeon HD 7700M.

Source: ComputerBase

EK Water Block, one of the many water cooling specialist, has recently revealed their latest water block, aimed at the new flagship from the HD 7900 series of graphics card from AMD.

As always the announcement was short and direct, but this time EK didn’t reveal much information, neither availability nor price were given, only a picture was released.

From what most will have deduced, this new waterblock will be pretty standard, cover all the main heat-creating zones, will be made out of copper and is covered by what looks like a plastic cover with a smaller metal plaque on it.

However, with the first products in the HD 7900 series launching next week, it shouldn’t be long before EK releases its new product.

Source

GPU-Z, the GPU monitoring and information utility known and used worldwide by overclockers and reviewers alike has recently been updated to version 0.5.7.

Main feature in this update is the support for the AMD Radeon HD 7970 and 7350. Aside from this are minor bug fixes.

The latest release includes fixed APIC counter broken message on AMD Fusion Graphics, fixed PCIe 3.0 showing as 2.0, fixed filter rate on Fermi and ROP count on GT 420, GT 520, HD 5450 and HD 6450 graphics cards, improved detection for HD 5570, HD 6450A and HD 6470M as well as a couple of additional fixes.

Same as always, thanks to W1zzard for this utility, the full release notes and download link for the current version as well as previous can be found here.

The computer manufacturer HP has recently had a slight ‘incident’ by letting the upcoming Radeon HD 7000M series from AMD an available options for some of its notebooks.

Apparently this doesn’t concern only HP as some sources say that Asus has had the same ‘issue’.

While unexpected and most probably unofficial, this is the first public disclosure of a 28nm GPU. These GPUs were the Radeon HD 7670M and the Radeon HD 7690M. Both are based on the “Thames-XT” GPU which is built on the 28 nm process.

Some of the features include current-generation VLIW4 stream pocessors, a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface as well as DirectX 11 support (rather expected don’t you think?).

Here are more specs for some of the upcoming Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs for your viewing pleasure.

Source 1; Source 2

The coming years look promising for Nvidia, during which we will see some big products launched and centered around the new DirectX 11.1 with the big transition to the 28nm.

ExpertsPC.com and 4Gamer.net have compiled informations into a table of what Nvidia’s next-generation graphics family could look like, included when it could potentially be released.

To avoid any technical issues with TSMC’s new 28nm manufacturing process, Nvidia is planning to follow a bottom-up product release model, which will also allow for the newly launched GPUs to keep on packing a higher number of transistors until the very top.

First up into next year’s GPU line is the GeForce Kepler 107 (GK107), on which will be based entry through lower-mainstream SKUs. Not a lot of data is revealed, although for what we can see, in addition to the 28nm transition, the GK107 will have a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, it will stay on the current PCI-Express 2.0 and will support DirectX 11.1.

Right after that is the GK106, which could be the base for the “sweet-spot” SKUs. The GK106 is going to be Nvidia’s first PCI-Express 3.0 GPU of the year and it will have a 156-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

Moving up the latter we reach the GK104, Nvidia’s high-performance GPU. The GK104 will have a 384-bit wide interface as well as supporting PCI-Express 3.0…getting more and more interesting.

Arriving at the end of 2012, we should see the GK110, which is basically some type of GTX590, as it will feature two of the GK104 to provide a SLI-on-a-stick product.

Beginning of 2013 should see the ‘grand finale’, after the 28nm process has achieved a certain degree of maturity, Nvidia will release a monolithic high-end GPU, the GK112 which is going to feature a massive 512-bit wide memory interface.

All in all, a pretty impressive roadmap for which we can’t wait to see the final products.

Source

While eTeknix is one of the many supporters of Distributive Computing through Folding @ Home (more here and here), Nvidia themselves have today announced the addition of four new applications with support for multiple GPU acceleration, thus enabling to cut simulations time from days to hours.

Those four leading applications for material-science and biomolecular modeling are GAMESS, GROMACS, LAMMPS and QMCPACK, and thanks to their addition to the multiple GPU acceleration support, they should help scientist in studying larger molecular model for longer time periods with greater accuracy, leading to increased knowledge of the potential impact of drugs and the effectiveness of new materials. Drug developers could also benefit from shorter discovery times and lower development costs.

Joining a growing list of application, these same application allow university, government and industry researchers to advance researchers by leveraging the power of GPUs.

The fours applications mentioned above are used to advance modeling in various key areas:

• GAMESS is a quantum chemistry application important in the design of new drugs and materials. It uses computational methods to solve the electronic structure and properties of molecules.
• GROMACS enables the simulation of biomolecular interactions between proteins and drug candidates. It can be used to study protein folding and mis-folding, which is relevant in understanding such diseases as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s disease and some forms of cancer.
• LAMMPS is utilized to model, at the atomic scale, soft (biomolecules, polymers) or solid-state (metals, semiconductors) materials.
• QMCPACK simulates the properties of materials, achieving high accuracy and excellent scalability using a continuum quantum Monte Carlo method.

For the biomolecular and material-science researchers interested in a free trial of these new GPU-accelerated applications, they can now register for the Nvidia Tesla MD SimCluster program. This off-the-shelf integrated cluster solution is fully optimized to simulate large-size models and achieve higher accuracy, while significantly reducing simulation time.

Quotes

“We like to push the envelope as far as we can toward highly scalable efficient code. GPU technology is the most promising way to achieve this goal. Given our association with a DOE laboratory, energy efficiency is equally important, which is another benefit of accelerating quantum chemistry using GPUs.”
– Mark Gordon, distinguished professor at Iowa State University’s Chemistry Department, director of the Applied Mathematical Sciences Program at AMES Laboratory, project lead for GAMESS

“GROMACS 4.6 supported by GPUs is expected to accelerate simulation performance 2-3 times faster than previously possible. The greater simulation speed enables research scientists to have deeper insights into the biological behavior of drug candidate and protein receptors involved in diseases.”
– Erik Lindahl, professor of Theoretical & Computational Biophysics, KTH Royal Institute, and technology professor of Computational Structural Biology, at Stockholm University’s AlbaNova University Center

“For major workloads using QMCPACK, we’re seeing a 3x node-to-node speedup for single-GPU nodes over dual-socket CPU nodes. We’re also seeing excellent scaling of this performance for hundreds of GPUs. This allows us to investigate material properties at an unprecedented scale and level of accuracy.”
– Jeongnim Kim, R&D scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“Molecular dynamics practitioners are handicapped by well-known timescale limitations: they can’t simulate long enough to model many phenomena of interest,” said one of the original LAMMPS developers. ”Simulation timescales can be extended dramatically by use of large-scale clusters of GPUs.”
– Steve Plimpton, distinguished member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories

“The Availability of many computationally efficient GPU nodes locally has allowed us to approach drug design in a new way, giving fresh insights into disease mechanisms. With GPUs, we’ve been able to run many more simulations with fewer assumptions, creating more realistic models.”
– Dr. Michael Kuiper, computational scientist at Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing

For more information about Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs visit here. For more information about Nvidia’s CUDA architecture visit here.

Source: Press Release

Palit have today revealed their latest product with a limited edition of a GTX 560 Ti based non-reference design graphics card: the Palit GTX 560 Ti Twin Light Turbo.

This time around, Palit is using a black PCB design as a base unlike their usual red as well as a unique GPU cooler. Similar to that of the Gainward Phantom, the fan is located between the aluminium fins of the heat sink and the graphics card itself. The heatsink is formed of four aluminium pipes connected to the stacked fins on one side, and on the GPU heatsink on the other. The fans draw air through the heatsink to cool the GPU, all of this for a claimed noise output of less than 10 dBA.

No clock speeds have been announced, but we know that being a GTX 560, it’s equipped with a 40nm GeForce Fermi 114 GPU, has a total of 384 CUDA cores as well as 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit interface, all of this being DirectX 11 compliant.

Connectivity is available through two DVI, one D-Sub and one HDMI (full size), the GTX 560 is also 2-way SLI capable and draw power from a 6-pin PCI-E connector.

As for the clock speeds, the price and release date haven’t been announced yet.

Source

When we talk of VGA and GPU coolers we mostly assume a new heat sink/ fan combination or a watercooling block. But Titan have gone for a simpler, cheaper and more convenient solution to giving your GPU that extra cooling capability. A PCI bracket with two attached 95mm fans blow air onto your GPU allowing the already installed cooler to work more efficiently and be supplemented with more additional airflow. The TTC-SC07TZ(RB) unit also includes a rear facing fan controller so you can adjust the two 95mm fans as you need more or less airflow. The fans operate between 1000 and 1800 RPM with a maximum noise output of 27dBA. Pricing is not yet known but such units have been sold before and it would be reasonable to assume a price tag of around £11/€12/$18 for it.

Source

“Although we will have early silicon this year, Kepler-based products are actually scheduled to go into production in 2012. We wanted to clarify this so people wouldn’t expect product to be available this year.” said Ken Brown, spokesman for nVidia

AMD, on their part, as still working on their HD 7000 series of GPU, named Southern Islands, and are planning on launching before the end of this year, right in time for the highly awaited Battlefield 3.

So that’s that for AMD fans, the nVidia fans, on the other hand, will have to wait a little more.

Source

Thomas Seifert, interim Chief Executive officer, note that in the long run, some parts of the business will be ‘cannibalized’ and the low-end discrete GPUs will be replaced with Fusion-type (and similar) products. Of course, as far as they are concerned AMD are winning whichever way it turns.

Recently, AMD had insisted that low-end graphics cards- such as the company’s Radeon HD 5400 and 6400 series- will continue to exist despite huge improvements in performance of integrated graphics solution. AMD then upped the performance of its Caicos ship (to give us the HD 6400 series) so that it was still competitive with the A-series Llano chips.

In the long run, parts of [graphics cards] business will be cannibalized and the low-end discrete GPUs will be replaced with Fusion-type products. This is all goodness for us because it replaces low-cost margin revenue with high-gross margin revenue,” said Thomas Seifert, interim chief executive officer of AMD, during the most recent conference call with financial analysts.

Of course none of these changes are going to happen over night, and AMD will still continue to offer dedicated GPUs, but in the future they are less likely to produce the lower-end cards. Currently however, it still has the entire Intel based motherboard market that can still benefit even from a low-end discrete GPU but it will be interesting to see how much their sales drop as Fusion comes to the forefront of the market.