With the release of the 7970 now passed and the cards making their way out into the big wide world, now is time for AMDs partners to release the slightly toned down version of their jaw dropping card. When we took a look at the 7970 reference card, we was astounded by the power that had been laid in front of us in the form of a single GPU format. The card took all of our test methodology in its stride and barely showed strain at any point – and this was purely a reference card before any of the partners were able to get their labs on the case and tweek them to their own recipes.

The 7950 is built around the same ‘Tahiti’ core as the 7970 but mainly its clocks speeds will be lower at stock. With the 7950 now though the workshops of AMDs partners, now we can really get a feel of what this card can do. XFX have made the push and have made it first to the eTeknix test bench, but with no standard card by far. What we have here to play with is their 7950 Black Edition Overclocked 3Gb card.

The 7950 as one would guess is at the more eco and budget friendly end of the spectrum in comparison to the 7970 and the 7990 when it comes to launch, so is there a huge compromise to be made by saving money or is it still going to thrash the pants off the 6950 and even dare I say it the GTX 580 as well? Well rumour has it that with the right tweeks, the 7950 will easily overclock to and perform at 7970 levels. So would this card be a timely investment or should we still look at the 7970 for its pure processing power?

With AMD releasing the Radeon HD 7950 today, we all knew that things would go a bit differently from when the 7970 launched back in December. The 7970 saw a reference launch with partners bringing out refreshed cards later down the line. The 7950 however was destined to see specialist models being released at launch including custom coolers and overclocked editions.

Today we take a look at the XFX Radeon HD 7950 Black Edition Overclocked 3GB graphics card which offers up a double dissipation cooler which XFX are famous for, as well as being overclocked past its stock speeds and being included in the Black Edition range of products.

Black Edition allows the components to be of the very best quality including a hand-picked custom GPU that is known to surpass certain limits in terms of overclocking.

Whilst this video review offers more of an aesethicc look at the card, we have all of the benchmarks in our full written review which offers a more technical look at things, and in a bit more detail. The video review gives a further look into the styling and design behind the card with our personal opinion on the card from a first glance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Starting with the PCIe SSD we can see OCW’s entry in the market. Using a Marvell RAID controller with four custom SandForce SF-2281 controlled SSDs each using Toshiba NAND flash. The Marvell controller supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10, as for the SSDs, they should come in various sizes. The only limiting factor you may expect is the PCIe 2.0 x4, but it should still provide good performances nonetheless.

Also new will be some external drive systems in the miniSAS market which will take part in the Jupiter product family.

Jupiter will not stop there as it all extends in the rackmount arena as well.

Source: TweakTown

OCZ Technology Group and Marvell, both well known makers of high performance products, have recently unveiled a new milestone in the PCIe SSD category, the Z-Drive R5; the industry’s fastest and most versatile PCI Express storage system designed to take the PCIe-based solid state storage to the next level.

“We are continually pushing the envelope to deliver innovative PCIe SSDs to address challenges that our clients face when processing and managing ever growing amounts of complex data sets,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. “The Z-Drive R5, leverages the powerful Kilimanjaro platform to deliver superior performance, greater capacity, and an enhanced hardware and software feature-set that is unmatched in the industry. This best-of-breed next generation native solution enables clients to eliminate I/O bottlenecks for even the most data intensive server and enterprise storage applications.”

For this new product, the two companies have jointly developed a native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform dubbed “Kilimanjaro” which allows for completely scalable performance and redundancy while eliminating the need for a separate storage controller, thus reducing the cost to deploy high performance solid state storage systems in the data centre.

The Z-Drive R5 offers an an intelligent, hardware-meets-software managed solution made specifically to accelerate database, enterprise and virtualization applications to high speeds through the combination of the high-performance architecture and OCZ managed software.

With this native PCIe SSD storage, users will experience second-to-none performance flexibility, durability, and enhanced reliability features, which will also allow data centres to rely on a PCIe-based SSD as their primary Tier 0/1 storage solution and a viable end-to-end SAN replacement.

Ideal for businesses in the need of speedy storage, the Z-Drive R5 features:

• Incredible bandwidth capabilities and maximum transactional performance
• High capacities up to 12 TB
• Ideal for all enterprise data types with both compressible and non-compressible files as well as large data sets
• Complete storage subsystem management with OCZ Virtualized Controller Architecture 3.0 software functions
• Compatible with VMware ESXi and ESX, Linux, Windows Server 2008, and OS X to support a wide range of systems and servers
• Complete power fail protection option for maximum data integrity
• Full height and half height sizes, ideal for space constrained 1U servers and multi-node rackmount servers
• MLC, eMLC, and SLC NAND Flash options

“Marvell is excited to work with OCZ on this native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform, based on our 88NV9145 silicon,” said Alan Armstrong, vice president of Marketing for the Storage Business Group at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. “We believe the PCIe SSD market will rapidly shift to a native PCIe to NAND architecture, and the Kilimanjaro platform represents OCZ and Marvell’s strong collaboration in bringing this highly scalable architecture to market.”

Price and availability are far from mentioned, although those who wish can get a glimpse at Storage Visions 2012 in the OCZ booth (No. 13) where it will officially debut, it will also be showcased at CES 2012 in the Marvell booth (No. 30542 located in the South Hall 3 on the upper level).

Source

Source

The drive comes bundled with Dataplex caching software which dynamically manages the 100GB SSD with the 1TB HDD for superior storage performance, this combination prioritises data into “hot” frequently used data which will utilise the SSD’s faster operating speeds and “cold” data which remains on the higher storage capacity HDD.

The device uses advanced caching algorithms to learn and optimise storage policies increasing overall performance for each user, it also eliminates the SATA bottleneck “unleashing ground-breaking bandwidth up to 910MB/s”, offering up to 120,000 IOPS (4K random write) for high transactional workloads brining SSD level performance, the drive also incorporates the added features of OCZ’s proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0.

The RevoDrive Hybrid leverages the best attributes of both solid state drives and traditional hard drive technology to deliver dynamic data-tiering on a single easy to deploy PCIe storage drive,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. “Leveraging Dataplex software to efficiently manage frequently accessed data delivers superior performance and capacity, making the RevoDrive Hybrid the ideal solution for high performance computing and media content creation.

The OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB comes with a three-year warranty and will be available worldwide for an MSRP of $499.99.

• Two PCI-E 1X
• One PCI-E 16X
• One PCI-E 8X (16X Physical)
• Two PCI
• 12 Phase VRM (8+2+2)
• Z68 Chipset

Back Panel Connectivity

• 8 Channel Audio
• Two USB 3.0
• Seven USB 2.0
• One e-SATA/USB 2.0 combo
• PS/2 combo
• Overclock Button
• HDMI port

Internal Connectivity

• Three USB 2.0 Headers
• One USB 3.0 Header
• Front Panel Audio header
• Front panel Overclock Button header
• Five SATA 3GB/s
• Four SATA 6GB/s

The board has high quality japanese capacitors, the Bigfoot Killer E2100 Gaming Network Interface Controller and Creative 20K2 integrated audio. The boards will be released when the new IvyBridge processors are released later this year, they will be using the same LGA 1155 socket so it does leave the possibility for current boards to accept the new processors with just a BIOS upgrade but manufacturers have yet to clarify fully on this. However, for the enthusiasts out there a new board to take advantage of PCI-E 3.0 and native 22nm support will be welcomed.

See more here.

The new bus doubles the bandwidth over PCI-E 2.0 with 1GB/s of bandwidth per lane. PCI-E 3.0 16X will have 32GB/s of bandwidth compared to 16GB/s in PCI-E 2.0 16X mode. The Codename of the next generation 28nm GPU’s will be “Southern Islands”, the first platforms to be PCI-E 3.0 compliant are likely to be Intel’s Sandybridge-E processors. It is also unknown whether the motive for AMD moving to PCI-E 3.0 is to avoid a PCI-E 2.0 bottleneck or whether it is to meet compliance of the new PCI-E standard.

All model names will feature the “Gen 3″ in them as part of the identification process of the PCI-E 3.0, the five boards are:

• Z68 Extreme7 Gen3
• Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3
• Z68 Extreme4 Gen3
• Z68 Extreme3 Gen3
• P67 Extreme4 Gen3

The PCI-E Gen 3 boasts twice as much memory bandwidth at a huge 32GB/s and 8GT/s up from 5GT/s on the PCI-E Gen 2 slots. ASRock hasn’t yet released pricing details but expect prices to be competitive as the ASRock brand always is.

However, this is not as good as it may seem. Firstly the problem with this is that with Intel processors the PCI-E controller is located within the CPU and since the socket 1155 sandy bridge processors have a PCI-E 2.1 controller they cannot fully take advantage of the new PCI-E 3.0 bus.

The technicians at MSI have claimed that although the PCI-E 3.0 bus makes no difference to graphics cards it does increase SSD transfer speeds by as much as 20% over the existing PCI-E 2.0 connection. However again there is a downside to this in that the board has 1 PCI-E 3.0 16X slot so if you choose to utilise a SSD PCI-E card such as a Revo card in that slot your graphics capabilities will be more limited.