Geek Gold

Even though we just saw the Radeon HD 6000-series launched in late 2010, it is rumoured by Bit-Tech that we may be seeing the 7000-series sooner than later! Bit-Tech has stated that the Radeon HD 7000-series may see production start in May of this year with the cards landing on shelves in June or July.

While the 6000-series used a 40nm fabrication process, it is expected that the Southern Islands-based 7000-series will take advantage of a 28nm process allowing for much more power to be packed into a single GPU. This increased transistor density may allow AMD to pack in a whopping “3,000 stream processors” – nearly double the number those found on the current flagship Radeon HD 6970.

Wouldn’t the Radeon HD 7000-series be the ideal launch buddy for AMD’s upcoming Bulldozer CPUs? Here is to hoping!

While perusing the ASUS website today, I came across a very interesting product – the EAH6950 DirectCU II. The most interesting aspect with this flavour of 6950 is that it occupies three PCI slots! There are two reasons for this card to occupy three slots: 1) this card has 6 display outputs (4x DisplayPort and 2X DVI) and 2)this card has the ASUS’ new DirectCU II cooler, which allows heat to dissipate out the rear of the card.

Featuring 2GB of GDDR5 memory and with an engine clock of 810 MHz, this 6950 is a performer! With 6 display outputs, the EAH6950 DCII is capable of driving up to 6 monitors – something rarely seen on non-flagship card such as the 6950. As a bonus, two of these cards can be combined in CrossFire, thus allowing outputs to up twelve displays! Keep in mind, though, that each card eats up 3 slots, so future expansion will be difficult at best with two of these cards in your system.

The ASUS EAH6950 DirectCU II is available now with a retail price of $324.99 USD/CAD. Read more about this graphics card over at the ASUS website.

Linus Sebastian, of Linus Tech Tips fame, has posted a video regarding overclocking the just-released NVIDIA GTX 590 dual-GPU graphics card. By maxing-out the core voltage in MSI’s Afterburner, Linus was able to significantly increase the clock speeds of the GTX 590 to even greater values than a stock GTX 580 – quite impressive! The numbers achieved are shown below:

Core/graphics clock: 809 MHz (33.3% increase over stock clock of 607 MHz)
Shader/processor clock: 1618 MHz (33.2% increase over stock clock of 1215 MHz)
Memory clock: 2120 MHz (24.2% increase over stock clock of 1707 MHz)

In 3DMark11, the overclocked GTX 590 scored X3277, while the stock version came in at X3061 – not a huge gain, but a gain nonetheless. In a practical real-world test, Linus saw about a 15% increase in performance in Metro 2033, which is quite impressive. As more of these cards make their way around the enthusiast community, we will surely see more overclocking results.

Keep in mind that overclocking produces more heat, which results in more required cooling, which results in louder performance – not to mention greatly increased power draw. Linus notes, multiple times in the video, that you should be very cautious if you are overclocking your GTX 590 – this is a $700 graphics card we are talking about and over-volting most likely voids your warranty. Do so at your own risk!

UPDATE: NVIDIA has just posted an official “Note on GeForce GTX 590 Overcurrent Protection and Overclocking”