NVIDIA’s Ion LE promises to deliver the same 1080p HD playback as its regular Ion sibling, but at a cheaper price; to do that, it drops DirectX 10 support in favor of solely accommodating DX9. It turns out that the limitation is, in fact, an arbitrary one and that the Ion LE seems to have been artificially crippled by NVIDIA themselves; MyHPMini forum member runawayprisoner found that by slightly modifying HP’s own Ion drivers he could get them to install for the Ion LE.
Been waiting for some of that sweet NVIDIA 40nm GPU action, but aren’t keen on buying a new PC with an OEM card installed? You’ll be pleased to hear that the first retail versions of NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 220 and G210 video cards have emerged, initially courtesy of Gigabyte, and both carrying prices well under the $100 mark.
News of several graphics cards and notebook GPUs from AMD have leaked, courtesy of the usual shadowy DigiTimes sources. According to the insiders, AMD plan to launch their ATI Radeon HD 5700 series desktop GPUs in October, in the shape of the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750, followed by the Radeon 5870 X2 (R800) in November.
Lenovo have quietly launched a USB to DVI monitor adapter based on DisplayLink’s virtual video card technology, that promises up to 1,920 x 1,200 WUXGA output – supporting 1080p High-Definition video – via a single USB connection. Up to six of the adapters can be used on a single computer (three if you have a ThinkPad with switchable graphics) in addition to the machines’ native video outputs.
AMD made a big song and dance of their new ATI DirectX 11 video card last week, showing it off for the first time at QuakeCon and putting on some heady demonstrations of its indecently high performance. Well, we say “showing it off”, but actually AMD kept a tight lid on the physical design of the new card; unfortunately not tight enough to avoid Chiphell getting their hands on some leaked images.
BFG Technologies have announced their latest liquid-cooling system, this time for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 and GeForce GTX 295, promising maintenance-free performance cooling. The two cards come pre-fitted with BFG’s ThermoIntelligence advanced cooling systems, with the company claiming running temperatures of up to 30-degrees centigrade cooler than standard air-cooled models.
NVIDIA have released a second graphics product in their Ion range, the Ion LE, intended for entry-level devices such as netbooks and nettops. Ion LE is apparently exactly the same as the existing Ion – which boosts netbook video performance to handle 1080p high-definition – aside from it lacks DirectX 10 support.
AMD have announced the latest in its high-end professional 3D video cards, the ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation accelerator, promising four times the processing power over rival systems. The FirePro V8750 boasts 2GB of memory with range-topping 115.2GB/sec bandwidth, together with 800 shader processing units, full 30-bit display pipeline and stream computing compatibility.
Video demo after the cut
MSI have announced a new video card, the R4890 Cyclone SOC, which brings together ATI’s 1GHz HD 4890 core with 800 stream processors and 1GB of GDDR5 256-bit memory. Since cooling all that takes some effort, there’s also a huge 10cm fan with four 8mm heatpipes. That makes for the biggest fan on an HD 4890-based video card to date, and a setup which MSI claim is far quieter than rival systems.
Yesterday’s rumored NVIDIA 40nm GPUs have been made official, in the shape of listings for two new OEM cards: the NVIDIA GeForce G210 and the GeForce GT 220. Both support DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.0 and CUDA, with the G210 having VGA, DisplayPort and DVI outputs while the GT 220 has VGA, HDMI and DVI.
Full specifications for both cards after the cut
JP
