The PC Report

If you’re eagerly awaiting the new GeForce GTX 480 and 470 from Nvidia (set to be released on March 26), then you’ll be happy to know that people have got hold of PCB shots of the cards. Above is a shot of the GTX 480 with the cooler removed; this card is an A2 revision so it may not be the final model. However, if you look closely above you’ll notice the 2 SLI connectors, 2x DVI and 1x Mini-HDMI ports, 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors and the source notes that there are 12 128MB chips for a total of 1.5GB VRAM.

Below is a shot of the back of the GTX 470. As with the GTX 480, you’ll notice there is a hole in the back of the card to support for airflow for the cooler. The card also appears to be shorter than the GTX 480 above, but features the same 2 SLI connectors and 2 DVI and 1 HDMI ports. The card also appears to only need 2x 6-pin PCIe power connectors. More info on these cards will no doubt be released later.

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Today Nvidia launched officially their next-gen ION chips. The ION 2 graphics chips are 10 times more powerful than integrated graphics and allows playback of 1080p videos. They are also more power efficiant thanks to Nvidia’s Optimus technology that powers down the ION GPU when it’s now being used and powers it up for more intensive tasks such as 3D gaming and HD video decoding.

The ION 2 is a discrete graphics chip that has dedicated memory and is attached to an Intel Atom Pine Trail processor via PCIe. It will be available in notebooks/netbooks starting in April with the Acer Aspire One 532G; more than 30 laptops in total with ION 2 chips in them are set to launch by Q2 2010.

This is now the 8th card to be released into ATI’s Evergreen GPU family and this time it will bridge the gap between the HD 5770 and HD 5850. The ATI Radeon HD 5830 packs the same Eyefinity, DirectX 11 and PowerPlay support as it’s older brothers, and comes loaded with 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1000 MHz. Joining in with the 5870 and 5850, the GPU present on the board contains 2.15 billion transistors, however it has only 1120 stream processors, 56 texture units and a core clock speed of 800 MHz – the total power of the card is 1.79 TFLOPS.

Looking at the card (check the pic above) you’ll see that the card is roughly the same size as the HD 5870, and almost identical in design. It comes with two DVI ports, HDMI with audio and a DisplayPort (perfect for 3 display Eyefinity). It’s also a dual-slot card and needs two 6-pin PCIe power inputs to support the card’s 175W max power, which is higher than the HD 5850 due to a higher core clock; the idle power is lower though at 25W.

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If you’re hanging out for the eagerly anticipated Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 & GTX 470 – aka. the new long overdue Fermi-based cards – then you’re in luck. Nvidia has given all of us a release date for the new cards, March 26, 2010. This date also conveniently coincides with an Nvidia-hosted event at PAX 2010.

The GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 will be the first cards released based off Nvidia’s GF-100 (Fermi) architecture. They will be the first Nvidia cards to support DirectX 11, and also they will be the fastest cards to come out of Nvidia, sporting a whopping 3 billion transistors on-board. Keep in tune guys for more news relating to the new Nvidia GTX 400 cards.

Never fear! Another Radeon is here! And so soon too after we saw the HD 5450 just last week. Anyway the new card is the ATI Radeon HD 5570 and of course it supports DirectX 11, Eyefinity and all the other features that the HD 5000 series cards have. The HD 5570, like the HD 5450, is targeted at the HTPC users with its low profile, low power consumption, low price and quiet cooler.

The HD 5450 is made on the 40nm process and has 627 million transistors on its die. The core clock comes in at 650MHz with 400 stream processors and 20 texture units for a total power of 520 GFLOPS. The card will have 1GB of DDR3 RAM on board with a clock of 900MHz and a data rate of 1.8 Gbps. It’s also rated at using 9.7W of power during idle with a “typical” rating of 38W.

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AMD has been on fire recently releasing card after card into their DirectX 11 HD 5000 series. Now they are catering to those who want to build a HTPC with the newest card – the ATI Radeon HD 5450. The HD 5450 has much the same features as the bigger and more powerful brothers, including DirectX 11 support and ATI’s Eyefinity multi-display technology. The card is very power friendly (~20W when in use) and is half height and passively cooled making it perfect for your HTPC.

The HD 5450 performs well for what you need it to, namely all types of media playback including Blu-ray/1080p – which is perfect with low CPU utilisation. However, if you’re planning to buy this card for gaming, thing again. It consistently performed well under the it’s nearest brother, the HD 5670, in many games so don’t even bother gaming on this card. This card starts at US$49 and should be perfect for HTPC that needs to be silent, low powered and small.

Note: This card underperforms all 25 cards on our graphics card rankings list, so it has not been added.

A post made on Twitter today by NVIDIAGeForce has given away the names of the new graphics cards soon to be released by Nvidia based on the GF100 chip. Apparently the naming scheme is going to skip a whole number and go from the GTX 200 series to the GTX 400 series, with the first two cards being named the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470.

Is Nvidia trying to give a twice as powerful card a twice as grand name? We’ll have to see when the cards are properly released, which should be soon.

ATI is getting around to filling out the lower-end of their DirectX 11 compatible series with their latest release: the ATI Radeon HD 5670. The new card is made on the same 40nm process as its bigger brothers, carries either 1GB or 512MB GDDR5 RAM and is fully compatible with both DirectX 11 and ATI’s multi-monitor Eyefinity technology.

Performance wise, the HD 5670 is on-par with the performance of Nvidia’s GT 240 card, if not slightly better in real-world testing while using less power to boot. However, of course, this card isn’t really designed for gaming (being a lower-end 5000 series card) so don’t expect fantastic framerates in the latest games. But, for under US$100 you wont find a better card with the same wealth of features.

A few days ago at CES 2010, AMD unveiled their new range of DirectX 11 compatible ATI Mobility Radeons for the new generation of high performance laptops. The top of the line Mobility Radeon HD 5870 of the HD 5800 series is also followed by the HD 5700, HD 5600 and HD 5400 series – all DirectX 11 compatible and all come with support for ATI’s Eyefinity multi-monitor technology.

Asus has already packed the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 into their latest gaming laptop, the ROG G73jh, making it one of the fastest gaming laptops available with full DX11 capabilities. We should be seeing more laptops like the G73jh soon enough (with no battery life, of course) as well as some mid-range laptops for multimedia playback using the lower end HD 5000 Mobility Radeons.

Nvidia’s DirectX 11 graphics card refresh was originally scheduled for a November 2009 launch, however due to manufacturing defects this was delayed to CES 2010. Now sources are saying that the GPU refresh wont occur until March of 2010, first with a GF100 card with a 40nm GPU and GDDR5 memory and followed by a GF104 card for the higher-end markets in Q2 2010.

Meanwhile, over in the ATI zone, ATI are planning to release some mid/low range DirectX 11 (Evergreen) cards to flesh out the lower areas of the 5000 series. We should be seeing a HD 5670 and HD 5450 as well as the leaked HD 5570 and HD 5350 cards launching sometime in January or February.