Hardware

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”

The embargoes have lifted and NVIDIA’s flagship graphics card, the dual-GPU GTX 590, has officially been launched! In similar fashion to the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 from AMD, the GTX 590 features two high-end GPUs on a single graphics card. While the 6990 from AMD is essentially two slightly-underclocked 6970 cards packed into one, the GTX 590 contains two GF110 GPUs, or essentially two quite-underclocked GTX 580 GPUs.

According to the NVIDIA’s GTX 590 mini site, the GTX 590 sports 3GB of GDDR5 memory (1.5GB per GPU), 1024 CUDA cores in total, a 607 MHz graphics clock, a 1215 MHz processor clock, 3x DVI inputs and 1x Mini Display Port input all in an 11″ card. To put the size in perspective, the 6990 from AMD is a whopping 12.25″ long! On the power end of things, the GTX 590 uses 2x 8-pin PCI-Express power connections to deliver up to 365W of power. If you plan on adding a GTX 590 to your system, NVIDIA recommends that you have a 700W power supply as a minimum.

Now to the plethora of reviews that have hit the Web. To put it simply, I would say that the overall reaction to the NVIDIA GTX 590 has been disappointment. Yes the GTX 590 is quieter, cooler, and smaller than the 6990, but the lower clock speeds really hinder the GTX 590s performance. Of course, higher performance means means more heat, which means more cooling required, which leads to increased noise. It is clear that NVIDIA really went for acoustics over performance on this card. There have been a couple of glowing reviews on the GTX 590, but taking into consideration the competition, pricing, availability (this may be a huge issue as NVIDIA is reportedly producing all board themselves), the GTX 590 did not meet the 6990-crushing expectations that were placed upon it.

In the HardOCP review of the GTX 590, the disappointment is summed up quite well.

“We truly thought the GTX 590 was going to make the Radeon 6990 look bad, but the fact of the matter is that NVIDIA made the 6990 look that much better. The GTX 590 is not the “World’s Fastest Single Card Solution” as stated on our page 1 slides; the Radeon HD 6990 is very much retaining that title. Hail to the King, baby!”

For buyers, the card has come in lower than originally expected with an MSRP of $699 USD ($799 CAD+ at NCIX), putting it at, or above, the same price as the Radeon HD 6990. Expect to see the GTX 590 in stores this week.

Review Links

Hardware Canucks
Hexus
HardOCP
TechSpot
TechPowerUp
Bit-Tech
Guru3D
XtremeSystems
TechRadar

Graphics card powerhouse, NVIDIA, just posted a teaser video featuring a “top secret” box that contains their “next generation highest performance graphics card.” Could it be the know-to-exist dual-GPU GTX 590 or will NVIDIA shock us all with a completely new technology?  NVIDIA will be releasing details on whatever is in the box on Thursday, March 24 at 6am PDT. Check out the video below and make your prediction in the comments!

Major component manufacturer, OCZ Technology, recently launched their latest line of power supplies, the ZX Series. The OCZ ZX Series features three models (850W, 1000W, 1250W) all of which are fully modular, sport 80+ Gold certifications and deliver all of their power on a single +12V rail. Both the 1000W and 1250W models come packaged with 6x PCI-Express 6+2 pin cables making them three-way SLI and three-way CrossFire ready out of the box.

Over the years, OCZ has had quality control issues with some of their lower-middle end power supplies – a simple search at any retailer will show a mixed bag of reviews (I should note that my six-year-old PC is still running strong on an original OCZ 520W ModStream PSU). However, the high-end ZX Series, delivering 92% efficiency under a typical load and sporting a 5-year warranty, should put your mind at ease.

The OCZ ZX Series of PSUs are available at retailers now with an MSRP of $179.99 to $239.99 USD, but often include $20-$50 mail-in rebates.

Check out full reviews of the OCZ ZX Series PSUs:
Hardware Heaven
Hardware Secrets
OverClock Intelligence Agency
Aph Networks
GND-Tech

A couple of weeks ago Intel released their latest in a strong pedigree of solid-state drives (SSDs), the Intel 510. Sporting the use of 34nm NAND memory, a SATA3 6Gbps interface and available in 120GB and 250GB flavours, the Intel 510 is currently one of the fastest SSDs on the market. On a SATA3 6Gbps connection, the 120GB 510-series SSD is capable of sustained sequential read speeds of 400MB/s (although reported to be 450MB/s in an Intel product PDF) and sustained sequential write speeds of  210MB/s. The 250GB is capable of even higher speeds with sustained sequential read speeds of 500MB/s and sustained sequential write speeds of  315MB/s. To put this in perspective the read/write speeds of Intel’s last generation SSD, the 310-series, were 200MB/s and 70MB/s, respectively. All numbers were pulled from the Intel product pages.

As the numbers above are all sustained speeds, real-word benchmarks can show some differences. Thankfully, the folks over at Guru3D have posted a very thorough review of the 250GB Intel 510 SSD. Their findings largely confirm Intel’s reported speeds, but they find that the Intel 510 falls short to the soon-to-be-released OCZ Vertex 3 SSD.

Unfortunately, the performance upgrade over last generation SSDs comes at a premium. Current generation, 120GB SATA2 3Gbps SSDs can be found under $200, whereas the 120GB flavour of the Intel 510 is approximately $300 at retail. Additionally, OCZ’s Vertex 3 SATA3 6Gbps SSDs will be hitting the market any day now and with read speeds of up to 550MB/s and write speeds topping out at a whopping 500MB/s, they will outperform the Intel 510. Check out the Guru3D review above to see some of the differences for yourself.

Both the Vertex 3 and Intel 510 will have similar prices, but this does not mean that the Vertex 3 will be the best choice as OCZ has recently burned a few bridges with enthusiasts and Intel is largely known for supporting quality products. For most, it will come down to price and, hopefully, Intel will undercut the Vertex 3. I know that when it comes time for me to build a system, it will be a tough decision.

After compiling a plethora of information, the folks over at X-bit Labs have published a detailed table outlining the AMD Q3/Q4 “Llano” APU (accelerated processing unit) roadmap. The X-bit Labs roadmap is slightly different than the slide leaked by Donanim Haber, which showed evidence of tri-core APUs and overall lower TDPs. While there are no details on overall clock speed of each APU, there are a reported 11 forthcoming APUs that feature either 2 or 4 “Husky” cores, integrated Radeon HD 6000-series GPUs, and operate at a TDP (thermal design power) of 65W or 100W. Check out the detail roadmap below:

It is interesting to see that AMD will be refreshing their Q3 offerings just a few months later in Q4 – the changes are unclear the moment, but it should safe to assume that we will see both increased CPU and GPU clock speeds in the updated models (ie. A8-3550P we see in Q3 gets upgraded to A8-3560P in Q4). What is really important in the middle-to-high end APUs is the number of stream core counts, which directly relates to multimedia and rendering performance.  With the Radeon HD 6500M series having stream core counts of 320 and 400, I would expect these “Llano” APUs to outperform their Core i3 2000-series counterparts in multimedia performance quite handily.

Please note that the “Llano” line of APUs are targeted towards notebooks in the low-to-mid price range. While they may outperform a few mid-high end notebooks, their direct competition will be Intel systems using integrated Intel HD graphics and not using high-end discrete graphics. To compete with high-end mobile graphics, AMD has their Radeon HD 6900M series of discrete GPUs. Expect these “Llano” APUs to be a game changer when they land later this year.

Head over to X-bit Labs for more details!