We test and review the OCZ RevoDrive. Pretty much two SSDs slapped onto a PCB, armed with a RAID controller. Pop it in, install the new storage unit and you'll have tremendous performance right of the shelves without the need to configure anything. What OCZ did was done right. They smacked 120GB or alternatively 240 GB of the fastest NAND Flash memory on the PCB, armed that Flash memory with two separate 8-channel SandForce SSD ICs, then bind them to a SIS RAID controller, pop on a PCie x4 bridge and then offer a "PCIe SSD" (if you can call it that) reaching 300,k 400 even 500 MB/sec read and write speeds.

Gigabyte finally announced their passively cooled Radeon HD 5770. Here's the press release:

The GV-R577SL-1GD is based on the Radeon HD 5770 Series GPU, which utilizes the latest 826 million transistors on 40nm fabrication process and GDDR5 memory. GIGABYTE GV-R577SL-1GD is equipped with Microsoft DirectX 11, ATI Eyefinity Technology, ATI Stream technology, ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support, UVD 2 and PowerPlay, setting a new standard for HD gaming performance.

The GIGABYTE GV-R577SL-1GD features GIGABYTE

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The colleagues over at VR Zone found some benchmark results of what is said to be the AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card, the info is really dodgy though. The numbers were published at the Asian PCinlife Forums, it includes 3DMark Vantage Extreme & Performance, Crysis Very High and Unigine Heaven scores.

The card delivers a score of X12092 in the 3DMark Vantage Extreme benchmark, and P24499 in the Performance benchmark. It's about 20 percent faster than the GeForce GTX 480, and closing in on the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970. Here are the Crysis and Unigine scores:

But, can it play Crysis? At Very High, 1920x1200, 4x AA, the HD 6870 comfortably plays along at 43.55 fps. The minimum fps is 29.57. Crysis has been well and truly conquered at HD resolutions with high IQ settings. At these kind of settings, previous single GPU cards barely broke 30 fps average, which means the HD 6870's minimum framerate is the same as the average of HD 5870 / GTX 480. Remarkable!

Unigine's Heaven tessellation has been and one of the biggest weaknesses of the HD 5000 series, possibly signifying weak tessellation performance for future games. On the other hand, it was GTX 400's strongest benchmark, with the GTX 480 proving to be an incredible 75% faster than the HD 5870 for the (unrealistic) Extreme preset. Typical scores for 1920x1200 4xAA Extreme are 900+ for the GTX 480 and 500+ for the HD 5870. Amazingly, the HD 6870 scores a whopping 922, which is a massive increase over the HD 5870 and puts it on par with the GTX 480. Do note, however, that the previous results were on Heaven 2.0, whereas the HD 6870 benchmarks use Heaven 2.1. The relevance of the Extreme tessellation benchmark has been heavily questioned as well. Still, it is clear that AMD have taken tessellation very seriously with the HD 6000 series.

Check the thumbnails.

   

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LucidLogix Technologies intor's Unity, pretty much the Hydra chip that will enable graphics card vendors to create cards with multi-vendor-multi-GPU support. Plugging one of these video cards into your system will add HydraLogix multi-GPU graphics capabilities to existing motherboards allowing you to mix and match multiple GPUs / brands / vendors.

Here's the PR with all the details.

Today LucidLogix Technologies (Lucid) announced its arming video card manufacturers with the new Unity

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The Civilization V website reveals that the playable demo for Sid Meier's: Civilization V is now expected on September 21, the same day the game is expected in stores.

At the time of that announcement, we expected to be able to get the demo out before the 21st, but unfortunately we weren

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Just one day before September, Intel unveils some price adjustments to their processors and also introduces some new CPU models. As you can see, the most recognizable name in the table is the Core i7 950 which now costs $294 instead of its previous price at $562.

Nonetheless, it

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Gigabyte X58A-UD9 review

We test and review the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 motherboard, the flagship of the Gigabyte X58 family of motherboards. Gigabyte recently released one hot dish of a X58 motherboard. It is the performance oriented GA-X58A-UD9 motherboard, based on the X58 chipset and boasting features like a 24 phase (!) unlocked power design, 4-way graphics support including NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFireX, as well as a host of distinctive other features.

 It is chucked full with the latest gadgets and features; comes with liquid cooling blocks on the chipset and it is equipped to make sure you get the very best overclock out of your system. Check her out, she's a thing of beauty.

Check out the full Guru3D review right here.

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Though far far away from the release a GTS 450 board has popped up on the web. It is the ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCu and it has been listed on a Bulgarian online store.

The picture reveals a shows the graphics card in all it's glory and makes clear that it features ASUS' popular DirectCu (direct copper) GPU heatsink assemblyLooks like this card comes with a DVI, D-Sub, and HDMI connectos, you will also spot one SLI connector.

Thes little goofup shows the GPU specifications we reported earlier last week as well on a 40nm core. Reported clock frequencies seem to be nicely high at 783 MHz on the core, 1577 MHz on the shader processors and 1804 (3600 effective) MHz on the memory, the 1GB DDR5 will run a 128-bit memory bus with a bandwidth of 57.8 MB/s. ASUS claims to be 20% cooler and 35% quieter than the NVIDIA reference design.

It looks like this model will cost just under 150 EUR. Click on the thumbnail ...

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A new WHQL driver propagates through Windows update and it is, 259.47. Now when you unraffle the drivers and look at the .inf entries .. you'll spot a selection of new graphics cards, that clearly are pending. Now we all knew about the GeForce GTX 450 already but, check it out. The new driver will work with GeForce GTS 450/455 video boards but also GT 440/430/420 models and a series of GT 400M series.

• NVIDIA_DEV.0E23.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GTS 455)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DC4.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DC5.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DC0.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 440)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DE1.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 430)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DE2.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 420)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0E30.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470M
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DD1.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DD2.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 445M)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DD3.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 435M)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DF2.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 435M)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DF0.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DF3.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DF1.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M)
• NVIDIA_DEV.0DEE.01 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 415M)

Definitely interesting, as that's the bottom to mid-range line-up right there in your face.

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It was rumored a couple of days ago already, but it seems to be somwhat confirmed. AMD wants to merge the CPU and GPU products under one brand, so you can expect the Radeon and FirePro series logo's to be removed in the nearby future.

Volkmann, AMD's vice president of global corporate marketing told THINQ the following:

 "It's literally the standard battery of questions: Are you aware of this brand? Would you consider it? And then we ask a very specific form of a preference question."
"The Radeon brand and the ATI brand are equally strong with respect to conveying our graphics processor offering," he goes on to saying.

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Microsoft launched the beta of Windows Live Sync along with Windows Live Essentials 2011, allowing users to sync files and data between PC and PC, and between your PC and the cloud. After the most recent beta refresh, Microsoft will be rebranding Sync to Windows Live Mesh.

We continue to see that the primary way customers are syncing files is between their different PCs (or Macs). And we will continue to make it easy to sync virtually unlimited amounts of data between your PCs. When syncing files to the cloud, beta participants get 2 GB of synced cloud storage. Only 2% of these participants are using more than 1.5 GB. However, Live Mesh offers 5 GB, and while only a small number of Live Mesh customers use all their space, we want to ease migration and increase the online storage limit from 2 GB to 5 GB.

A number of customers have asked why we don't allow you to sync up to 25 GB, given that 25 GB is the SkyDrive limit. While we merged Sync and Live Mesh in this release, we did not merge the online storage system used for Live Mesh with the one used for Office or Photos on SkyDrive. This means that each system has different storage limits and is optimized for different scenarios.

SkyDrive offers enough storage for you to share documents and photos with friends, family, and co-workers. Hotmail offers enough storage for you to store your email, calendar, and contacts. Windows Live Mesh lets you sync all your files and folders across your PCs and devices, and provides enough cloud storage for your most important files. Over time, we'll be considering ways to do even more to share information across these systems.

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THQ has released a new video for Company of Heroes Online, a free-to-play micro-transaction online version of Company of Heroes developed by Relic Entertainment. The beta testing of the game will open to the public next week. [via ggmania]


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We test and review the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 motherboard, the flagship of the Gigabyte X58 family of motherboards. It is chucked full with the latest gadgets and features; comes with liquid cooling blocks on the chipset and it is equipped to make sure you get the very best overclock out of your system. Check her out, she's a thing of beauty.

New drivers originating from Microsoft Update released, supporting all desktop and notebook GeForce 6 to 400 series (and Quadro equivalents).

New support for mainstream GeForce 400 products.

Please see the source URL for more info and download links.
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