(10/07) ATI RADEON HD 3870 AND 2850 DETAILS AT ULTIMATE HARDWARE - "ATI Radeon HD 3870 will feature 825 Mhz core and 2400 Mhz memory, DirectX 10.1 support and uses PCI-E 2.0 technology. ATI Radeon HD 2850 will be 700 Mhz core and 1800 Mhz memory with DirectX 10.1 support and PCI-E 2.0."
(10/07) AMD HD 3800 TO SUPPORT DX10.1 AT THG - "When the R600 graphics processor and the Radeon HD 2900 series launched, I stated that AMD had hardware that was more forward-looking than Nvidia’s G80 technology. I still feel that way after looking at the latest information we obtained from AMD about RV670. On the same day Nvidia is launching GeForce 8800GT, Rick Bergman, Vice President of the Graphics Product Group at AMD disclosed some details about the Radeon HD 3800 series and beyond. However, he kept most of the juicy bits to himself pending product launch on November 15th. We do know that this launch will focus DX 10.1 hardware. Microsoft updated its software developers kit (SDK) in August and revealed some of the changes that would be taking place."
(10/07) NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT REVIEW AT TECH REPORT - "This is an absolutely spectacular time to be a PC gamer. The slew of top-notch and hotly anticipated games hitting stores shelves is practically unprecedented, including BioShock, Crysis, Quake Wars, Unreal Tournament 3, and Valve's Orange Box trio of goodness. I can't remember a time quite like it. However, this may not be the best time to own a dated graphics card. The latest generation of high-end graphics cards brought with it pretty much twice the performance of previous high-end cards, and to add insult to injury, these GPUs added DirectX 10-class features that today's games are starting to exploit. If you have last year's best, such as a GeForce 7900 or Radeon X1900, you may not be able to drink in all the eye candy of the latest games."
(10/07) NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT REVIEW AT ANANDTECH - "Rather than actually create a midrange part based on G80, NVIDIA opted to tweak the core, shrink to a 65nm process, integrate the display engine, and come out with hardware that performed somewhere between the high end 8800 GTS and GTX (G92). While this, in itself, isn't remarkable, the fact that NVIDIA is pricing this card between $200 and $250 is. Essentially, we've been given a revised high end part at midrange prices. The resulting card, the 8800 GT, essentially cannibalizes a large chunk of NVIDIA's own DX10 class hardware lineup. Needless to say, it also further puts AMD's 2900 XT to shame."
(10/07) GEFORCE 8800 GT 512MB SLI REVIEW AT GURU3D - "The 512MB 8800 GT will fill a gap, a gap that the 320MB model has set. Yet due to it's lower pricing (199 to 259 USD) will compete directly with the 8600 GTS, which is interesting as the 8800 GT will annihilate that graphics card performance wise. Do expect to see the prices in mid-range (GeForce 8600 series) collapse due to this as quite honestly, I do not see a point for you guys to buy a 8600 GT or GTS any longer if you budget allows it. Other than the number of shader processors, a move to a smaller fabrication, there really isn't a heap of new stuff feature wise opposed to the GeForce series 8 product line, you could say it's a clone of what we've already seen. That doesn't mean nothing changed though, oh certainly not my fellow frag-meister."
(10/07) CRYSIS DEMO PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS AT TWEAKTOWN - "Less tappy tap (read: words), more picky pic (read: graphs). I didn’t download the Crysis demo and choose not to play it just so I could write a whole bunch of words to explain what we're doing here. It’s simple, and I’m going to say it in a very simple way; lots of current generation graphics cards tested in Crysis with different settings and different resolutions."
(10/07) CRYSIS SINGLE PLAYER PERFORMANCE AT PC PERSPECTIVE - "Crysis. Pretty much any PC enthusiast and PC gamer should shudder when they hear that name. One of the most anticipated titles for the PC that I can remember, Crysis is the second title from the developers of Far Cry that was one of the most technological advanced and best looking games of its day. The team at Crytek is hoping to absolutely astound people once again with a new level of visual quality as well as game play dynamics that exceed anything they have seen."
(10/07) ASROCK 4CORE1333-VIIV MOTHERBOARD REVIEW AT LEGIT REVIEWS - "ASRock is certainly not new to us here at Legit Reviews. In fact, we have probably looked at more ASRock boards in the last year than any other brand out there. They just keep sending them!!!The latest board we received is the ASRock 4Core1333-Viiv board, and it sports the P965 and the ICH8DR chips. Are these chipsets aged or mature? That is what we intend to find out as we look at this board. So let's jump right into it and see if this is a board that will fit what you are looking for in your next build."
(10/07) AMD ATHLON 64 X2 5000+ BLACK EDITION REVIEW AT THG - "The "Black Edition" of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 5000+ features an unlocked multiplier. Unlike the first Black Edition model, the 90nm 6400+, the new processor is produced on a 65 nm process. As a result, it only draws about half as much power as the 6400+, and offers enormous overclocking potential. Pushed to its limit, this processor is faster than an Athlon X2 6000+ or Intel's Core 2 Duo E6550. Among today's CPUs, this $130 processor is unique in that its performance can be increased without having to raise either the FSB or the memory frequency, making it a safe choice for any AM2 board."
(10/07) MSI RX2600XT DIAMOND HD 2600 XT REVIEW AT PC STATS - "MSI Computer's Radeon RX2600XT Diamond videocard is what PCSTATS is testing out for you today, so here are the pertinent details. This PCI Express videocard has 512MB of GDDR4 memory, its Radeon 2600XT GPU is pre-overclocked to 850 MHz, and the memory to 2300 MHz; this is up from the default of 800MHz core and 2200MHz memory."
(10/07) HELLGATE LONDON DEMO DX9 PERFORMANCE AT AMD ZONE - "Hellgate London is an RPG that can be played from the first or third person perspective. It is a rare breed, and with some key ex Blizzard employees it has been highly anticipated by RPG fans. Today we benchmark the Hellgate London beta on 12 different video cards to find out how it performs under DirectX 9. With DirectX 10 largely being a bust we may or may not add those numbers later."
(10/07) ATI RADEON HD 2900 XT 1024MB REVIEW AT DIGITLIFE - "Our tests proved that the first driver bundled with the first card sample significantly raised performance at the expense of other card features. By "other" we mean antialiasing. Alas, there is evidently a bug in the GPU, since it does not allow the core to process AA as it would normally do. But the idea was brilliant! Expand the memory bus to 512 bit, so that AA is processed almost for free! Pity, but we can already state the fact that the card does not need 512 bits of bandwidth, because it's not utilized at 100%. The company got around this bug rather smartly - drivers are used to force ALUs process AA. That is, AA is actually emulated, which takes up much shader resources and affects overall speed."
(10/07) MSI K9AG NEO2-DIGITAL AMD 690G MOTHERBOARD REVIEW AT PC STATS - "In this review PCSTATS will be testing out MSI Computer's K9AG Neo2 Digital motherboard. The MSI K9AG Neo2 Digital is one of the few full size ATX motherboards build on AMD's 690G northbridge and SB600 southbridge chipsets. The board supports all Socket AM2 processors on the market, and it's four DDR2 memory slots support a maximum of 8GB of DDR2-800 unbuffered memory."
(10/07) AMD 690G MOTHERBOARD ROUNDUP AT DIGITLIFE - "When the AMD 690G chipset was released by AMD and ATI together after their merger, AMD representatives claimed that the strategic objective of integrated chipsets from AMD was not to compete with NVIDIA products for the AMD platform, but to launch an offensive on the global competitor Intel in the segment of office solutions, entry-level multimedia computers, and media centers. Strictly speaking, there have been no technical contraindications to this attack for a long time. An interesting combination of prices and characteristics in this segment was typical of the AMD platform even at that time, when there was almost no competition in the segment of expensive desktops, and especially servers. When AMD managed to enter the top segment (owing to Athlon 64 and Opteron)."
(10/07) WORLD OF CONFLICT PERFORMANCE REVIEW AT EXTREMETECH - "Today we're going to take a look at how to use World in Conflict as a benchmark for graphics cards and CPUs. It's easy—benchmarking is built right in. We'll also run the benchmark mode on a handful of popular graphics cards and demonstrate how performance scales with different processors."
(10/07) ATI RELEASE CATALYST v7.10 DRIVER AT AMD-ATI - "The Catalyst team has been hard at work to bring you great performance increases in a number of popular games. These include an increase upto 70% with BioShock, 20% to 70% with World in Conflict, 20% with Lost Planet, 34% to 42% with Call of Juarez, 31% to 80% with Company of Heroes, 5% to 23% with Battlefield 2142, 7% with Call of Duty 2, 23% with Enemy Territory : Quake Wars, 16% with Fear and 30% - 82% with Supreme Commander!"
(10/07) HALF LIFE 2 EPISODE 2 PERFORMANCE AT ANANDTECH - "A year and a half later, Valve brought out Episode One, an attempt at episodic content that was supposed to guarantee quicker game releases, more frequent updates to the story and a better overall experience for gamers. Performance changed a bit with the release of Episode One and its associated version of Valve's Source engine, and the game quickly became a regular part of our CPU and GPU test suites. Once more, around a year and a half later, Valve finally released Episode Two, the second installment in the Half Life 2 episodic series. Armed with the latest version of the Source engine, we went to town on benchmarking the new game to see where things have changed, if at all."
(10/07) UNREAL TOURNAMENT 3 PERFORMANCE AT AMDZONE - "It is hard to believe that it has been 3 and a half years since we first published our performance numbers of the first 64 bit game, Unreal Tourament 2004 under Linux. That was over 300 articles ago, and today we bring the latest installment of Unreal Tournament, UT3. Ironically 64 bit still doesn't really matter much in gaming, and today we will be testing in Windows XP again as we were doing when UT2004 came out. Some things change, some things stay the same. We tested with the following 9 video cards for our first results."
(10/07) CALL OF DUTY 4 PERFORMANCE AT AMDZONE - "It just seems like minutes ago that we published our benchmarks of Portal and Half Life 2 Episode 2. Ok, so it was. Now we bring you something not from Valve with Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, and almost exactly two years after we first benchmarked Call of Duty 2.. Call of Duty 3 meant nothing for PC gamers as it was console only. Boo!"
(10/07) HALF LIFE 2 EPISODE 2 PERFORMANCE AT AMDZONE - "Following up our benchmarks of Team Fortress 2 we finally had a crack at Half Life Episode 2, and Portal. In the end these benchmarks may not be as important since the playtime is tiny, and no multiplayer is available. If you have been living under a rock, and don't know what these titles are then check out the videos we were showing at AGDC last year that you can grab all over the net. On to the benchmarks."
(10/07) POWERCOLOR RADEON HD 2900 PRO REVIEW AT NEOSEEKER - "The HD 2900 Pro just sort of appeared one day. Priced competively against the 320 MB 8800 GTS video cards, the HD 2900 Pro has a great deal in common with ATI's top-of-the-line HD 2900 XT. In fact, what most intrigued us was the fact that the 2900 Pro had the exact same number of stream processors as the top of the line card, and from all appearances only differed from the more expensive 2900 XT by clock speeds and a more affordable."
(10/07) TEAM FORTRESS 2 BETA PERFORMANCE AT LEGIT REVIEWS - "For fun fast paced multiplayer action gamers are going to find it very hard to look past Valve’s upcoming title Team Fortress 2, which is set to hit shelves very shortly. This cartoon-like game not only looks really cool, but it’s a heap of fun and more importantly we have found that it runs quite well on a variety of hardware. Today we have rounded up the usual suspects and put them to the test in Team Fortress 2."
(10/07) CLIVE BARKERS JERICHO PERFORMANCE AT LEGIT REVIEWS - "Late last week a playable demo of Clive Barker’s Jericho became available for download weighing in at just over a gigabyte. Although very short, the demo did give us a good idea of what is to come and how impressive the visual quality of the Mercury Engine is. In fact, in terms of visual quality the Mercury Engine appears to be very similar to that of the Unreal 3 engine, which is most impressive. However is this new game engine as demanding as the Unreal 3 engine; we endeavour to find out."
(10/07) DIRECTX 10 SHOOTOUT : NVIDIA VS ATI AT THG - "It's truth time. Now that the first games using DirectX 10 have appeared, Nvidia and ATI have to face the real world and answer the question - which card offers the most performance under Vista? In DirectX 9 under XP, the comparison between the Geforce 8 series and the Radeon 2 family always tended to favor Nvidia's cards. Currently, Nvidia has the strongest performers in the shape of the Geforce 8800 Ultra and GTX - and that hasn't changed in over half a year. ATI positions its Radeon 2900 XT against the Geforce 8800 GTS. When the Canadian company introduced this chip, it insisted that its graphics processors used the better and faster DX10 design. Its cards were looking so slow because they simply weren't being challenged enough under Windows XP and were being tested in the wrong manner anyway."
(10/07) WINDOWS XP SP3 GOES VISTA-ISH AT THE INQUIRER - "The next service pack for Windows XP contains bits and pieces from Vista. According to NeoSmart Technologies, which is among those who have received the first version of Windows XP SP3 build 3205 as part of the Windows Server 2008/Windows Vista SP1 beta, SP3 has more than 1,073 hotfixes including security updates."
(10/07) INNO3D GEFORCE 8600 GTS ICHILL REVIEW AT BIT TECH - "Inno3D doesn’t believe so as this is where the iChiLL line-up comes into play. It’s not alone when it comes to product differentiation, but in a market where there are an increasing number of products that simply look the same as one another, differentiation is a blessing in our eyes. So without further ado, let’s have a look at what makes Inno3D’s GeForce 8600 GTS iChiLL Xstriker3 different from other cards on the market."
(10/07) HIS RADEON HD 2900 PRO 512MB REVIEW AT GURU3D - "You just take a Radeon HD 2900 XT, clock is a tad slower and then you have the 2900 Pro, really it's that simple. There's virtually and physically no difference between the two cards other than how well it's performing. Same amount of shader processors, memory, PCB, fan, CrossFire compatible, built-in HDMI with multi-channel 5.1 surround audio ... everything. And you know what? That's actually good. Because quite frankly the HD 2900 XT itself isn't a bad card for the money you had to pay for it. Now this card is even more interesting as it's going to sell for $249 USD makes this product a competitor to NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 GTS and 8800 GTS 320 MB."
(10/07) HIS RADEON HD 2900 PRO 512MB REVIEW AT HEXUS - "AMD has recently attempted to harvest full value from silicon that doesn’t quite make the grade – the tri-core Phenom being a prime example. The same is true for the Radeon HD 2900 Pro, which is, for all intents and purposes, a slower-clocked XT, so the same 320 stream processors and 512-bit memory bus feeding 512MiB of onboard frame buffer."
(10/07) DIRECTX 10 GAMING PERFORMANCE AT PCPER - "The first couple of titles that actually used DirectX 10 were existing games with patches applied to them. Both Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander had told us in the past that a DX10 upgrade was in the works but only Company of Heroes kept their word; Supreme Commander will be DX9 only. Company of Heroes uses DX10 rendering paths as of the 1.7.1 patch and adds support for litter objects (based on basic physic properties), more detailed terrain, much better explosions and improved smoke effects. "
(10/07) ASUS EAH 2600 PRO HDTI 256MB REVIEW AT XBIT LABS - "Created by AMD’s graphics department to conquer the mainstream sector, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 (RV630) processor proved to be an ambiguous product. Although endowed with good technical characteristics, this GPU is not really brilliant in gaming applications. Our tests showed that the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4, the senior RV630-based graphics card model, did not have an overwhelming advantage over its market opponent Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT despite being closer to the more advanced GeForce 8600 GTS in its specs. Why? Because the RV630 core has only four rasterization subunits and the drivers are not yet quite polished off."
(10/07) GIGABYTE GA X38T DQ6 REVIEW AT TRUSTED REVIEWS - "Gigabyte has come up with two models of X38 that have a great deal in common and which both sell for the same price. The GA-X38-DQ6 supports up to 8GB of DDR2-1066 in four modules, while this full-fat GA-X38T-DQ6 supports DDR3-1600. There's a gotcha here as the options for memory multipliers will limit you to a maximum speed of 1,333MHz with the current crop of processors unless you are overclocking, but there's a good reason for this apparent oddity as the GA-X38T-DQ6 supports future 45nm and 1,600MHz FSB processors."
(10/07) ASUS EN8600GT OC GEAR REVIEW AT AMDZONE - "Asus it seems always has a new trick up their sleeve coming up with the latest twist on things for the hardcore enthusiast who wants a little more than the standard tricks we've seen before on whatever product. They've tackled video cards now for quite a while but they've got something a bit new up their sleeves though it's been seen somewhat before. Today we're going to look at Asus' EN8600GT OC GEAR 256MB."
(10/07) ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT GDDR4 REVIEW AT XBIT LABS - "We have already reviewed new Radeon HD graphics architecture before, but at that time we only took a closer look at the top Radeon HD 2900 XT model, while more mainstream solutions didn’t get covered because they were scheduled to start selling a little later. Finally, mass Radeon HD saw the light of day and today we are going to check out one of them: Radeon HD 2600 XT."
(10/07) AMD ATHLON 64 X2 5000+ BLACK EDITION REVIEW AT AMD ZONE - "With the Black Edition of the X2 5000+ the only perceivable difference between it and the current 5000+ is the fact that the multipliers are unlocked. AMD is specifically targeting the enthusiast with this product in both this unusual feature at this price and also in their marketing campaign. Most of this seems to be not much more currently than a few graphics but AMD's strength has not so much been in marketing but real-world competition through value, performance, and addressing the needs and wants of their consumers. Throw all the marketing dollars you want at it, it doesn't matter much to those looking for the best performance per watt for servers or the best value for the consumer buying a desktop PC."
(10/07) DIAMOND VIPER RADEON HD 2900 XT 1GB REVIEW AT HOT HARDWARE - "Some of AMD’s partners, however, have since decided to introduce R600-based products that show there was actually some truth to the stories that circulated early on. The product we’re going to show you here today for example, the Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB, is based on the R600 GPU, but as its name implies the card features not 512MB of frame buffer memory but a full 1GB. The memory on the card is also clocked higher than AMD’s reference ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT’s at 1GHz (2GHz DDR)."
