The PC Report

As per every month, ATI has released a new Catalyst driver for their range of graphics cards. Version 10.8 brings with it full OpenGL ES 2.0 support for Windows XP and up as well as Linux, anti-aliasing for StarCraft II and performance improvements for Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Stormrise. The usual amount of bugs have also been fixed.

Interestingly enough, in these new drivers from AMD a number of code names for as many as 35 unreleased ATI graphics cards have been uncovered. These code names are for the upcoming Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs (codenamed “Southern Islands”), and include a number of related codes including Cayman, Antilles, Blackcomb, Barts, Whistler, Onega, Turks, Seymour, Caicos, and Caspian.

While we await more details of the HD 6000 series, head over to the AMD Game website where you can download the latest ATI Catalyst 10.8 driver. Head below if you want the release notes for the driver.

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Yeah, you read the title right – an XFX ATI Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition is up for sale on eBay… with the current bid sitting at US$999,999. The card is a yet-to-be-released special edition HD 5970 dual-GPU card, packing 4GB of GDDR5 memory (presumably 2GB per GPU) and 6 mini-DisplayPorts for a 6-monitor Eyefinity setup similar to the HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. XFX are planning to make only 1,000 of these cards with the card up for sale bearing the serial #63.

While the seller didn’t specify how he obtained this graphics card, he does state “you have no idea how hard it was for me to get this card” – maybe he stole it? He also states that he doesn’t have a box, user manual or drivers for the graphics card but he will give you the awesome gun case that the card is stored in, along with several adapters, CrossFire bridge and a Black Edition Overclocking Tool. The auction currently has 8 days to go.

Edit: It seems the million dollar bid was a fake. The current, seemingly legitimate bid is sitting at US$10,201

Today we’re taking a deep look into which out of the two flagship single-GPU graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia is the better buy for your system. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 was released into the realm of graphics cards just last week, and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 has been with us for a good six months now.

Both cards support the latest and greatest DirectX 11 technology, each with their own specifications, performance upsides, extra features and also downsides. And each card has a different price point. We look at hopefully everything there is to each of the cards to determine which card is most deserving of your hard-worked cash. Let’s start off with the specifications of each card.

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Fresh of the production line at ATI is the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. The card differs slightly from the standard HD 5870 in that it has 6 DisplayPort outputs to power 6 monitors in an Eyefinity setup. The Eyefinity 6 Edition also sports 2GB of graphics memory to support the extra monitors, up from 1GB on the standard 5870. Card power has also increased slightly to support the extra RAM.

This is the first card to support a 6-monitor setup and was supposed to be released several months ago, but due to Windows hardware restrictions that apparently allow a maximum of 4 monitors connected to the one computer ATI had to delay the card until they could figure out a workaround. An ATI Eyefinity 6-display setup is pictured below. One downside of the 3×2 monitor setup as noted by HotHardware is that when playing first-person shooter games, the centred crosshair is split between the two monitors and you have the bezel in the middle.

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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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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.

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.

It appears as though HP has leaked a huge heap of info about some upcoming products they are releasing, including info about new Intel processors and ATI graphics cards, along with the new HP software suite. All of the leaked info looks current and details the new North American Spring 2010 line-up from HP, which by the looks of it is going to be a good line-up.

In the new HP Pavillion desktop computers it appears as though we will be seeing the latest from Intel’s Clarkdale range. The new Core i5-6xx processors will be included, featuring Intel’s Turbo Boost technology that can speed up certain cores depending on the workload at hand. Core i3-5xx processors are also going to be used, however these will feature a lowered L3 cache and no Turbo Boost technology. It is also speculated that the HP TouchSmart will be getting an upgrade to the Arrandale Core i5 and i7s.

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Enjoying your top-of-the-line GeForce GTX 295? Well sorry fellas, that card is no longer the best, with ATI claiming the top spot with their new HD 5970 dual-GPU beast. The card boasts an amazing 4.64 TFLOPs of power thanks to 4.3 billion 40nm transistors on the single PCB. The card packs what appears to be mixed specs between the HD 5850 and HD 5870: a 750MHz core clock, 3200 stream processors and 2GB of GDDR5 running at 1GHz.

The card is also quite large, coming in at 30cm (12″) which is so large it should overhang the length of most ATX motherboards. The card also guzzles a fair bit of power – 294W while in full load and 50W while in idle – so you’d better have a pretty good PSU to accommodate this beast. The card comes loaded with two DVI ports and a DisplayPort with capabilities for a 3-display EyeFinity setup and DirectX 11.

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