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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Wednesday, March 5, 2008
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The 780G platform launching today combines the core logic expertise and graphics technology brought in from ATI with AMD's latest low-power Athlon X2, yielding a very fast, very inexpensive platform that won't rack up a substantial energy tab. Additionally, the chipset supports a new feature called Hybrid Graphics-a Vista-only capability that harnesses the power of an add-in card, combines it with the integrated engine, and gives you a CrossFire-like experience at a price point so low that AMD doesn't want to call it CrossFire. Sounds like just the ticket for cost-conscious gamers eager to hang with the big boys.
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Without doubt the AMD 780G chipset is a revolution in performance for Home Theatre PCs - we finally have a platform that can playback everything we throw at it without compromises, regardless of the CPU used. It's strange to think that AMD is not only releasing a very inexpensive chipset but it also (inadvertently) encourages you to buy the cheapest, lowest power CPU possible because it'll still be more than capable thanks to the 780G's Unified Video Decoder (UVD) engine.
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Thursday, February 28, 2008
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AMD recently released two new ATI TV Wonder HD tuners, both of which have been in our lab for the past few months. In that time, we've put them through numerous tests to see what each one was made of. While the 600 PCI left a bit to be desired, the 650 Combo USB proves to do a lot of things right.
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Friday, February 15, 2008
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ATI is back in the game with their high end 3870X2 being the top performing video card on the market today. DirectX 10.1 offers new features that haven't made the jump to the NVIDIA side of things. The decreased power draw of the 3870x2 card meant that putting two chips on one board allowed the same power to be used versus the old generation 2900XT and was a major negative of ATI's last generation high-end. Today that has changed with the 3xxx series all on the 55 nanometer die process and power consumption levels back to normal. The advent of the HD3870X2 makes quad Crossfire a possibility with only two video cards.
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Thursday, February 14, 2008
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Having a mixed up CrossFire configuration performed better than expected and was able to near the performance level of other high end ATI CrossFire setups. This goes to show that ATI has made great improvements to their CATALYST drivers as taking an ATI Radeon HD 3870 and running it in CrossFire mode with an ATI Radeon HD 3850 was found to be stable and offered great improvements over a single card of either model. How many people will actually try this has yet to be seen, but this is an easy way to cut costs and improve performance...
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With the release of the Phenom, AMD has introduced the world to native quad core computing at a consumer level. We test the Phenom 9600 Black Edition for its performance and overclocking results. Will the Phenom 9600 Black Edition please consumers and provide results as well as overclocking? Read our review to see our "Mixed" results.
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Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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AMD has proven itself, successfully launching the Radeon HD 3870 X2 on schedule, and perhaps even more important than that, having actual products on retail shelves immediately. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 is essentially two Radeon HD 3870 GPUs stuck together on the same PCB is meant to be a 'transparent' single card solution, it doesn't require a supporting motherboard. The GPUs use a PCI Express 1.1 bridge to communicate in much the same way Crossfire ATI cards would. However, because the X2 is meant to be a 'transparent' single card solution, it doesn't require a supporting motherboard, and in fact it opens the possibility for quad-Crossfire using two of these graphics cards.
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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While the Radeon HD 3870 X2 has the potential to become one of, if not the fastest graphics cards released to date, it's not something that I can recommend over Nvidia's current flagship GeForce 8800 Ultra and 8800 GTX cards because it's only as strong as its weakest link. Sadly for AMD's graphics product group, that means there's a long road ahead with driver support for this beast because, even from just looking at current releases, I believe there will be scenarios in the future where CrossFire isn't as well supported as it probably should be.
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The one downside about graphics cards which carry two cores on the singular PCB is that they're normally slower than buying two separate cards based on the same tech. What we're going to look at here today is the performance of the HD 3870 X2 compared to the HD 3870 in Crossfire. We're not going to look at the packages etc. since we've covered that side of things with the cards separately in the past. We're simply just going to get stuck straight into the benchmarking, so let's leave it at that and move on.
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The core frequency on the R680 is higher than that on an RV670, which is a shocking move. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 has a core clock of 775 MHz while the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 has been increased up to 825 MHz. This might have been down as the memory clock was decreased from 2.25GHz GDDR4 to 1.8GHz GDDR3. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2's cooling fan operates at 36dBA, which is just slighting higher than the 34dBA seen on the Radeon HD 3870. The boards peak power usage is also 91W higher than the Radeon HD 3870 at 196W under full load. Having two RV670 cores on one board doubles many things like the frame buffer size and the math processing power, but the power consumption does not double.
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ATI has plans to re-take the crown of fastest graphics-card on the market. That plan involves stitching two Radeon HD 3870s together on to one PCB. Will it work?
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Monday, January 28, 2008
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It has been a boring state of affairs in the graphics card industry with Nvidia ruling the roost for a long time. Today we take a look at ATI's new HD 3870 X2 card, do they finally have an answer to Nvidia's high end dominance? We think you might be surprised ....
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AMD officially launched their new high-end flagship graphics card today and this one has a pair of graphics processors on a single PCB. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 was codenamed R680 throughout its development. Although that codename implies the card is powered by a new GPU, it is not. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 is instead powered by a pair of RV670 GPUs linked together on a single PCB by a PCI Express fan-out switch. In essence, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is "CrossFire on a card" but with a small boost in clock speed for each GPU as well.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
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Today we are looking at a new video card form ATI called the Radeon HD 3450. This card is the perfect card for a HTPC machine. The ATI Radeon HD 3450 has 181 million transistors and is built on a 55nm process. The card has the previously mentioned 40 stream processors, four texture units and four render backends. The clock speed for the card is 600MHz on the core and 1GHz on the memory. DirectX 10.1 and ATI PowerPlay are supported as well. One of the best features of the ATI Radeon HD 3450 is the price, the card will retail for $49.
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The ATI Radeon HD 3650 is the direct replacement for the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro as you can tell from the chart above. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 is active cooled with a core clock of 725MHz and a memory clock of 800MHz and will be available with two kinds of memory ICs - GDDR3 and GDDR2. The slower and older GDDR2 memory chips will be used on the $79 price point cards, while the $99 cards will feature faster GDDR3 memory ICs...
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