With the upcoming release of the Phenom II we take a look at what we can expect by overclocking every aspect of our Phenom X4 9950 CPU. HT Link, Memory, Northbridge and RAW CPU speed scaling is compared in-depth to help you get the most out of your Phenom setup.

Read the full analysis at Madshrimps

Since earlier this year we have been waiting for AMD to release documentation and/or code on the ATI R600 series concerning 3D acceleration so that the open-source Linux drivers can begin to support the newer ATI graphics processors. It has taken longer than expected for AMD to complete and release this information, but it's now available. AMD has released the fundamental Linux code needed to begin fostering the development of an open-source R600 3D driver. Furthermore, this code also concerns the latest R700 series of graphics processors! The microcode for the newest GPUs has also been released.

AMD Releases Open-Source R600/700 3D Code @ Phoronix

Discuss this article in the Linux Drivers Forum

Microsoft Corp. last week applied for a patent that spells out a "pay as you go" concept under which users would be charged for both the software they run and the computing horsepower they use. According to the patent application filed last week with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the "Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience" scheme would meter software use and access to specific computer hardware. Fees would be charged against a prepaid or billed account.

"The current business model for computer hardware and software relies on a user purchasing a computer with hardware and software that is suited to the most demanding applications that the user expects to encounter," said Microsoft in the application. "Therefore, a user may buy a multi-core processor with a significant amount of memory and advanced video support for gaming applications that are only used on the weekend, while the user's day-in, day-out activities may involve little more than word processing or web-browsing."
Microsoft's plan would instead monitor the machine to track things such as disk storage space, processor cores and memory used, then bill the user for what was consumed during a set period.

"A different business model may allow a more granular approach to hardware and software sales," Microsoft argued. "A computer may have individually metered hardware and software components that a user can select and activate based on current need. When the need is browsing, a low level of performance may be used, and when network-based interactive gaming is the need of the moment, the highest available performance may be made available to the user."

Source: computerworld.com

These motherboards are a pretty good deal, though from what I can find, the price of the two is almost identical, averaging only $6-10 between the two models. With such a miniscule difference, the only reason to take the 790 over the 780 would be if you are building a very cheap system that still has a video card. Also having 100% solid state capacitors on the 790 will provide another advantage. There is an order of magnitude increase in reliability from liquid caps to solid. Anyone who has seen a blown cap knows how much of a headache that can be.

ASRock AOD790GX & A780GXE Motherboards Review @ Virtual-Hideout

Today I will be looking at MSI's version of the Radeon HD 4830, the R4830-T2D512 OC. The HD 4830 is ATI's last new product of 2008, and I suppose the last new card in the Radeon 4000 series. Read on to see what MSI has done with the HD 4830, with a factory overclock and heavy duty power supply with solid state chokes, this card is far from the reference version. I should mention that besides this being TC's first MSI sponsored review, this will also be my first MSI product. I really don't know why, MSI has been a consideration with every video card purchase I have made, for whatever reason I ended up with a different brand.

Read the full review at ThinkComputers.org

Benchmark Reviews is no stranger to the Radeon HD 4870 and today we add one more to the ranks: the ASUS EAH4870 Dark Knight Top. This 'DK TOP' model comes equipped with ASUS' famed Dark Knight cooler and claims of a 9% performance lead over stock 4870's thanks to an impressive factory overclock. In today's review, we'll put this claim to the test and find out what kind of performance the EAH4870 DK Top brings to the table.

Check out the full review at Benchmark Reviews

With the competition between AMD's Radeon HD 4870 1GB and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 really hotting up over recent months, there's plenty of incentive to AIB partners to create a product based around these parts that will stand out from the crowd. Enter HIS' Radeon HD 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo 1GB, which sports a UV-sensitive custom cooling solution and factory overclocks to try and tempt you to part with your hard-earned cash.

Compared to those reference clock speeds, HIS have chosen to up both core and memory clocks on the IceQ 4+ Turbo. The board's RV770 core gets a very modest rise of just 20MHz to leave us with a core clock speed of 770MHz, while the board's GDDR5 memory gets more attention lavished upon it, increasing the clock speed from 900MHz to 1GHz, giving us an effective speed of 4GHz considering the properties of GDDR5 memory.

This being HIS, this board also does away with the reference cooler, in favour of a dual-slot, heatpipe based offering which is also UV sensitive, meaning that it'll glow a shade of blue if you put any UV lights close enough to it in your chassis.

Read the full review at Elite Bastards.

Sure not everyone needs a watercooled videocard, but this videocard is not targeted towards the everyday gamer. This product has the crosshairs on the consumer that has the money, wants the best, wants it easily installed, and wants to game as fast as possible without the noise and bother. To me, if you can afford it, you cannot afford to turn this option down. Period.....

Read the full review at Tweaknews.net

The timings aren't too shabby on these OCZ sticks especially considering the 2GHz clock speed at only 1.65volts.

Now that Core i7 processors are out and giddy enthusiasts have had a chance to learn how to overclock them, OCZ has chosen to ramp up clock speeds among its triple-channel DDR3 memory offerings. The company's latest effort, the PC3-16000 Blade Series triple-channel kit, is rated for operation at a whopping 2,000MHz.

The new kit is launching only in a 6GB flavor made up of three 2GB modules, all of which can reportedly hit 2GHz with 7-8-7 timings and a 1.65V voltage setting. Intel says users risk damaging their Core i7 processors if they push the RAM voltage any higher than 1.65V, so it's a good thing OCZ didn't go over.

Aside from their mouth-watering specs, the Blade Series DDR3-2000 modules have black aluminum heatsinks and lifetime warranty coverage. OCZ doesn't quote pricing, but seeing as the firm's 6GB DDR3-1866 kit sells for over $300 at Newegg, a launch price closer to $400 wouldn't surprise us. OCZ does claim this kit can deliver 35GB/s of memory bandwidth, though, and we have seen that faster memory does make a difference on the Core i7.

Source: The Tech Report

Click HERE to discuss this topic in our General Hardware forums!

The Athlon name has a much better marketing name than the Phenom does, so this should help boost sales in the low-end to slightly lower mid range market for AMD. Most likely OEM's will be the biggest customer on these chips.

The brand that has been known for a little less than ten years – AMD Athlon – is expected to get yet another life with the revamped K10 micro-architecture by Advanced Micro Devices, once the new chips get launched in April 2009.

Sources with knowledge of AMD’s plans have indicated that the world’s second largest maker of chips plans to continue using the well-known AMD Athlon trademark to market processors known under code-names Propus, Rana and Regor and made using 45nm process technology. This will prolong the life of the brand and will also attract attention of those, who once knew Athlon and Athlon 64 chips as performance champions.

AMD Athlon X4 600-series (Propus) is a quad-core processor with dual-channel DDR2/DDR3 memory controller (depending on packaging) and 2MB L2 cache (512KB per core) , Athlon X3 400-series (Rana) is a triple-core central processing unit with DDR2/DDR3 memory controller (depending on packaging) and with 1.5MB L2 cache, whereas AMD Athlon X2 200-series (Regor) is a dual-core processor with 1MB L2 cache per core and DDR2/DDR3 support, depending on the packaging.

Quad-core and triple-core AMD Athlon X4 and Athlon X3 chips are projected to be released in April, 2009, whereas the Athlon X2 is expected to be released in June, 2009. All the chips are projected to run in the 2.70GHz – 2.80GHz range.

Source: X-bit Labs

Click HERE to discuss this topic in our General Hardware forums!

The features, specifications, real world performance, and physical appearance of the Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD4870 X2 2048MB graphics card are all incredible. It is one of the highest performance cards on the market, while also probably being one of the coolest and quietest. This low noise and low heat is even more impressive when you consider that it isn't just the GPU being cooled, but the CPU and the case, too.

Read the full article @ Bigbruin.com

On Thursday December 18th 2008 Nvidia announced the up and coming release of a new Hybrid GPU, the GTX-295. The GTX-295 is poised to replace the ATI 4870x2 as the fastest GPU on the planet when it releases shortly after the first of the year. The photos supplied to us of the GTX-295 are of an Nvidia reference GPU. It's almost 2 GTX-260's on one GPU, by almost we mean it's a hybrid GPU that has most of the features of a dual GTX-260, but has some improvements that resemble the GTX-280. We'll let that go until it's time for the infamous Bjorn3D table.

Check it out @ Bjorn3D.com

DriverHeaven checks out the Sapphire 4870X2 Atomic L/C & Gainward Rampage 700 cards:

It comes as no surprise to us that there are also versions of the 4870X2 hitting the market with extreme cooling solutions in addition to enhanced speeds. Today we will run two of the most interesting through a selection of real world tests, including gaming at 2560x1600 and Blu-Ray playback to find out how good the 4870 X2 can get.

Source: DriverHeaven

Featuring a closed-loop liquid cooled system, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic ST-6026 brings workstation class cooling to the PC, enabling faster clock speeds and quieter operation - and delivering the fastest graphics performance ever seen in a single card-slot solution. Both GPU's in the Sapphire Atomic ST-6026 are clocked at 800MHz and each has 1GB of DDR5 memory clocked at 1000MHz, making a total of 2GB of video frame buffer. The streamlined single-slot liquid-cooler assembly on the graphics card evenly cools both RV770 GPU's and their associated memories - enabling this dual graphics system to run with a high level of stability even when delivering the highest levels of performance.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic ST-6026 is a limited edition product, and comes packaged in a stylish aluminium case with a host of accessories aimed at the gaming enthusiast, The list of included tools include an HDMI adapter, HDMI cable, CCL UV lamp, two Sapphire USB flash drives, as well as driver and utilities software and benchmarking tools. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests Sapphire's fastest Radeon HD 4870 X2 video card against the best graphics products available.

Read the full article @ Benchmark Reviews

After taking a look at one of XFX's GeForce GTX 260 offerings earlier this week, Elite Bastards examine the difference in performance between the two different iterations of GeForce GTX 260, namely the Core 192 model versus the later Core 216 part.

While the original GeForce GTX 260 configuration had two Thread Processing Clusters and one ROP partition disabled to give that SKU 192 Stream Processors and 28 ROPs, this has since been overhauled into what is widely known as the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, which has only a single cluster of Stream Processors disabled to give it 216 in total (which also gives this core 72 texture filtering units, while holding the same number of ROPs.

Both GeForce GTX 260 configurations feature the same reference clock speeds, made up of a 576MHz core with shaders clocked at 1242MHz, while the 896MB of GDDR3 memory on-board (using a reduced 448-bit memory bus) is set to 999MHz.

Read the findings in full at Elite Bastards.

It was awhile ago we tested a processor so today it's time again. AMD sent us their second fastest processor that is on the market right now, X4 9860BE. We are going to put this vs our Intel QX6700 that is a bit outdated compared to the faster i7 processors but you will also see some results on how the i7 perform so lets get this show on the road.

Check out the full review at rbmods.com

Last year when publishing our AMD Year in Review article there were numerous new features to account for, including but not limited to the new OpenGL driver, support for Compiz, and the AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition. This year has been another interesting year for AMD's Linux efforts on both the open and closed fronts. We are focusing on their Catalyst driver efforts in this article, which has picked up support for CrossFire, is now capable of being overclocked with OverDrive, and AMD is now delivering same-day Linux product support. In this article we will recap some of the highlights from the Catalyst driver releases this year as well as set out on a benchmarking extravaganza.

Enjoy the full article at Phoronix.com

If this rumor is true then things may get a little bit more interesting.

One of Nvidia's few exclusive partners may giving AMD some love before too long. According to Hexus, XFX will soon add Radeons to its graphics card lineup, and a "formal announcement" might come as early as tomorrow.

XFX will reportedly offer GeForces and Radeons side-by-side, so it won't jump ship altogether. Its presence in the AMD graphics card market could put pressure on other card vendors, though. XFX is one of the few companies to offer lifetime warranty coverage ("double lifetime," technically), which is a rare perk when it comes to Radeons. Perhaps the competition will be inclined to follow suit if XFX applies that policy to future AMD offerings.

Source: The Tech Report

Click HERE to discuss this topic in our General ATI Radeon Discussion forum!

After being caught cold by the launch of AMD's Radeon HD 4800 series parts, recent months have seen NVIDIA trying to work their way back into a competitive position at the high-end via price cuts, driver updates, and a refresh to their GeForce GTX 260 SKU to enable more Stream Processors, in the process creating the so-called "Core 216" part. It's just such a graphics board Elite Bastards are taking a look at today, given a further spin by XFX in their usual fashion thanks to some impressive factory clock speed increases to match the board's "Black Edition" moniker.

As we just mentioned, while the GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition may look like a standard reference board in terms of its cooling solution, things begin to look very different once you take a look at clock speeds, with this part offering some big boosts to clocks across the board. Starting out with the Black Edition's core clock, the reference clock speed of 576MHz is ditched in favour of a 666MHz clock (yes, that's right, they did go there) to make a 90MHz increase in speed. Together with this, shader clock speed also gets a big increase of 162MHz, up to 1404MHz from 1242MHz. Lastly, the board's GDDR3 memory gets an impressive increase from 999MHz up to 1150MHz to make for a 151MHz gain.

Read the full review at Elite Bastards.

We have to admit to being a little surprised a few weeks ago when AMD emailed us to say our review sample of the new high-end Athlon CPU was on its way. 2006 was the last time we had such an email and since then the Phenom line of processors has been AMDs focus, with a limited number of Sempron models released into the budget marketplace. The model we are testing today is the 7750 Black Edition, quite a jump from the current highest model, the 6400+

Check out the full article at DriverHeaven.net

This is pretty astounding, really. At these clock speeds, using RivaTuner we were able to get more performance out of our R4830 than a stock HD 4850! To put things into further perspective, the R4830 stock speed is 585 / 900, so the stable 734 / 1121 overclock we obtained is a 28% / 25% increase. Generally, video cards average about a 5% - 8% overclocking average, and 10% - 15% can be considered a nice overclock for a video card. The only other card in the last one and half years of my tenure here at Neoseeker that overclocked nearly as good was the HD 2900 Pro.

If you are into overclocking at all, this is the card to get. HD 4850+ performance for a damn cheap price. Most impressive.

Full review @ Neoseeker.com

In this review we will be looking at the new MicroATX motherboard from DFI called the LanParty Jr 790GX-M2RS. This motherboard is a perfect blend between the enthusiast power we have come to expect from DFI and the practicality found in the smaller MicroATX hardware offerings.

Read the full review at Ninjalane.com

This news is a bit of a bummer. Their 5 year warranty was a huge selling point for some.

Well, that was good while it lasted. After four and a half years of offering five-year warranties as standard for its "bare" consumer hard drives, Seagate has backpedaled and decided to cut coverage back to three years.

According to the company's new product warranty matrix, the change will take place on January 3, 2009, and it will affect Barracuda 7200 desktop drives and Momentus mobile drives. Barracuda and Momentus drives sold in boxed retail kits will continue to have five-year coverage, although those packages typically cost more than bare, so-called "OEM" drives.

Naturally, the change won't impact Seagate's enterprise drives, which will also continue to carry five-year warranties. Seagate says it's making these modifications so its warranty terms are "in line with industry standard warranty offerings" and better aligned to "the requirements of . . . partners and customers." The company stresses that it still wants to offer "the most reliable storage solutions available anywhere," but it claims 95% of returns take place within the first three years after a drive purchase, anyway. (Thanks to TechPowerUp! for the tip.)

Source: The Tech Report

Click HERE to discuss this topic in our General Hardware forum!

Left 4 Dead, a revival of the FPS Horror Genre, was released on November 18th 2008, published by Valve and much to our surprise, was a DX9 game. The single player game consists of four levels where you're trying to reach a destination and get rescued. Each of the four levels has its own rescue point. While making your way to the rescue points you'll encounter hordes of Zombies, the occasional Boomer, solitary Hunters, occasional Zombie Witches, choking Smokers, and the dreaded Tank. Each has its own strategy, and their AI allows them to attack in different ways. While Zombie AI is what you'd expect from the recently dead returned to life, Boomers and Hunters have a more refined AI that allows for some strategy.

Read the full review @ Bjorn3D.com

AMD has released ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 for Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux platforms on http://www.amd.com

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 Windows release include:

• ATI Stream™ support:
• ATI Stream™ application: ATI Avivo Video Converter
• ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 Folding@Home performance enhancements
• ATI Catalyst™ Control Center – Noise reduction for progressive video content
• Performance improvements

Highlights of the Linux ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 release include:

• ATI Stream™ support
• Support for new Linux operating systems
• SurroundView™ support

For more information on ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 (for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 release notes.

Release Notes (pdf): Here

Download: Here

Discussion Thread: Rage3D Catalyst Drivers Forum