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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Nvidia has just pumped out a new iteration of drivers for their GeForce and ION graphics cards. Version 196.75 adds support for the next generation ION chipsets as well as the new GT 300-series OEM graphics cards (not to be confused with the upcoming GTX 400s), as well as SLI and multi-GPU support for many recently released and upcoming games. Oh, and there’s the usual game performance improvements and bug fixes.

Grab the new drivers straight from the Nvidia website. Full release notes below

Update: It has been reported that these latest Nvidia drivers (196.75) in some cases do not control the graphics card fans automatically and can cause your graphics card to fry. We advise you to roll-back your drivers to the previous version until this bug is fixed.

Update 2: Nvidia has pulled these drivers amid the complaints that it fries graphics cards.

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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.

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.

It’s been a while since I last decided to test the early builds of Chrome OS and it looks like a lot has happened since then. A guy by the name of Hexxeh is releasing new builds of Chromium OS here and there before the OS is actually finished by Google, and his latest edition packs some nice features. Known by the build name “Flow”, the new build features Nvidia GPU support (including ION), auto-updates, user customisable menus, webcam support and much more.

If you’re up for testing the latest build, you can download it from Hexxeh’s page right now. If you’re confused about the difference between Google Chrome OS and Chromium OS (they’re almost the same), check out this blog post from Google.

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.

The latest graphics card drivers from Nvidia are out now for the taking. 196.21 packs SLI support for a large number of the latest games (including unreleased games such as Mass Effect 2) as well as the usual bug fixes. The drivers clock in at 98.4MB and are up for grabs via the Nvidia driver download page. Full release notes are below.

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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.

The latest graphics card drivers for your Nvidia graphics cards, 195.62, is now available from the Nvidia website. The new drivers, like the most recent ATI drivers, include support for the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta’s GPU-acceleration for smoother HD videos on the web. They also include the latest version of OpenCL (1.0) and support for SLI/multi-GPU cards in the latest games.

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Now this is an interesting combination of graphics chips: a Nvidia GTX 275 and GTS 250 in the same Halloween special graphics card. The EVGA GTX 275 Co-op PhysX isn’t your standard dual-GPU graphics card – the GTS 250 included is specifically designed for PhysX processing. How effective this card is is yet to be seen, but we do know there are a lot of games to test it on, including Batman: Arkham Asylum which is pictured on the card.

Unfortunately the card doesn’t support DirectX 11 due to the GeForce 200 series cards not supporting it, however you do get a combined 1280MB of DRR3 memory for your games. While we don’t have an exact price or release date as of yet, we estimate that the card will cost over US$300 – considering a standard EVGA GTX 275 is US$255 and a GTS 250 is ~US$100. Even so, I think I’ll wait for some performance benchmarks before purchasing.