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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Sunday, December 2, 2007
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AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870 is a great product for the money, but its price point is incredibly important to its long term success. I say this because unfortunately for AMD, there's a certain G92-based graphics card from Nvidia which delivers, in some cases, quite a bit more performance for not much more financial outlay. With that said though, if you're an AMD/ATI fan or are on a budget, the Radeon HD 3870 is by no means a dud - this and the Radeon HD 2900 XT are like night and day. It's a great time to be in the market for a new graphics card, because there are treats on both sides of the fence. If it wasn't for the GeForce 8800 GT, the Radeon HD 3870 would be one of the few graphics card worth serious consideration if you want value for money and, as a result of this, it earns a solid recommendation from us.
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Monday, November 26, 2007
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Today at HotHardware, we an evaluation of the new FireGL V7600 512MB workstation graphics card on tap. This card is based on the same basic board design as the Radeon HD 2900 lineup for gamers, but it is tweaked on both the hardware and software level for enhanced workstation performance. The card is the least costly of ATI's FireGL lineup based on the R600 GPU, and currently retails for just south of $1,000. Head on over to the site and check it out...
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Tuesday, November 20, 2007
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The AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ "Black Edition" is a nice gift from AMD to the enthusiast community. An unlocked CPU multiplier and lots of overclocking headroom make this an awesome value at only $130. For those who already own a lower end AM2 processor, this would be an excellent drop-in replacement for a nice performance boost. As an added benefit the Brisbane based 5000+ runs very cool and does not need a high end HSF to overclock it. Thanks to the unlocked multiplier, you don't need a sophisticated mainboard to overclock it either.
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With today's launch comes two new AMD Phenom processors. The AMD Phenom processor 9600 (2.3GHz) and 9500 (2.2GHz) are now available for $283 and $251 respectively in 1,000-unit pricing. AMD was originally going to launch the AMD Phenom 9700 (2.4GHz) and AMD Phenom 9900 (2.6 GHz) quad core processors today, but they have been held off till Q1 2008. The launch of these two higher performance processors models will now coincide with the introduction of CrossFireX...
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Thursday, November 15, 2007
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The ATI Radeon HD 38XX series are the first graphics cards in the world to support DirectX 10.1 capabilities and plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU upgradeability. CrossFireX is similar to CrossFire, but up to four graphics cards are paired together this time around. If you would like to run eight displays or want the ultimate gaming performance from AMD - CrossFireX is the way to go, but you have to use an AMD 790FX motherboard with four x16 PCI Express lanes to make it possible. DirectX 10.1 brings awesome new lighting features like global illumination to reality, but in order to support Microsoft DirectX 10.1 these cards will need to be used on a system with Microsoft Vista SP1, which isn't due out till sometime in 2008...
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November is a make-or-break month for AMD. The Radeon HD 3800 family is the first three products that it hopes will revive its flagging fortune. Well, though priced at only £140, the Radeon HD 3870 certainly has the beating of the Radeon HD 2900 but does that make it the new mid-market king?
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As for the fundamental blocks inside the GPU, the RV670 doesn?t differ very much from R600. The RV670 still has 320 stream processing units, 16 texture units, and 16 ROPs. The RV670 however, does away with the 1024-bit internal ring-bus memory controller in favor of a 512-bit variant. And its memory interface has also been pared down from 512-bits to 256-bit. From high-level perspective, these changes sound-like downgrades, but other tweaks to the GPU negate a massive loss of internal and external bandwidth.
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Friday, November 9, 2007
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We recently retested the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT with a slew of new DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 games and of course, new drivers! We also threw the new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT into the mix. Unfortunately for ATI, the new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT totally blew away the Radeon HD 2900 XT.
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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
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There has been a lot of fuss around AMD lately. First of all, a new graphics card, 2900 Pro, was released recently, however, AMD hardly forgot about its primary field of interest - CPUs, and presents us with a very interesting new product: the new Athlon64 X2 5000+ Black Edition.
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Monday, October 15, 2007
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We understand why AMD doesn't allow to retail cards like HD 2900 XT 1GB. Even after our first article of this series it was clear that the problem was not in memory capacity - 512 MB of memory was quite sufficient even for top graphics cards. There is nothing wrong with memory bus width either. The problem is in the core...
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Thursday, September 13, 2007
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AMD's Energy Efficient processors (65W TDP vs. the usual 89W TDP) appeared rather long ago, but... we were too busy to review them. :) Today we present an article about three EE processors: 4400+, 4600+, and 4800+. Two of these - 4400+ and 4800+ - are manufactured using the 65-nm process technology, which, theoretically, should have a positive effect on their power consumption. Besides, our inquisitive readers will finally learn about performance of the new 4400+ CPU.
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Monday, September 10, 2007
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All week we have talked about the performance of the 8.41 display driver and the performance on various ATI graphics cards from the R300 series to the latest R600 graphics card. In some of these articles, we have briefly commented on the image quality, but in this article we will be looking exclusively at the image quality while gaming with the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB under Linux.
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This week has been extremely exciting to say the least. We started by telling you about the AMD 8.41 Display Driver which is largely rewritten and offers Radeon HD 2000 product support, performance improvements, and soon will support AIGLX. Four articles looking at the R300/400, R500, and R600 performance under Linux followed that preview. Then yesterday we told you about AMD's new open-source strategy for supporting Linux and the open-source community. Well, what do we have for you today? With the 8.41 display driver we have completed some additional benchmarks using the Radeon HD 2400PRO 256MB and Radeon HD 2600PRO 256MB graphics cards. In this article, we see if these two mid-range ATI Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards are able to compete against NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series.
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Friday, August 24, 2007
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Models BE-2300 and BE-2350 are something of a "low-power" replacement for models X2 3600+ and X2 4000+. While they have higher frequency and lower power consumption, this, of course, isn't enough to beat the competition. AMD seems to be well-aware of that, so this processor's target market isn't overclockers, but office and home users, to whom CPU performance is hardly on the list of priorities.
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Thursday, August 9, 2007
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As much as the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 line was a disappointment to gaming enthusiasts on a budget, the AMD HD 2400 and 2600 lines are even more so. Although they offer a great feature set including DirectX 10 capabilities, performance is often times below their last generation of cards on current DX 9 games...
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