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Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic 1 GB GDDR5

W1zzard — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:31:43 GMT

Introduction

Currently NVIDIA is releasing new versions of their lower end graphics card series. All new cards are based on NVIDIA's first 40 nm graphics processors. The GeForce GT 220 uses the GT216 GPU, while the G 210 uses the GT218 processor. This week marks the release of the GeForce GT 240 - NVIDIA's first GDDR5 memory card. It uses the GT215 GPU which is made in a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. While the G 210 and GT 220 were positioned in the low-end segment, the GT 240 will offer performance similar to the GeForce 9600 GT, yet considerably below the aging GeForce 9800 GT.

NVIDIA lets partners build a wide range of different configurations, 512 MB or 1 GB of memory, GDDR3 or GDDR5, choice of DVI, VGA, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs. Palit has designed their own PCB and uses a custom cooling solution on their Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic. In addition to that the card uses 1 GB of GDDR5 memory and features clocks that are higher than the reference design clock speeds.

	Radeon HD 4550	GeForce 9500 GT	GeForce GT 220	Radeon HD 4670	GeForce GT 240	Palit GT 240	GeForce 9600 GT	GeForce 9800 GT
Shader units	80	32	48	320	96	96	64	112
ROPs	4	8	8	8	8	8	16	16
GPU	RV710	G96	GT216	RV730	GT215	GT215	G94	G92
Transistors	242M	314M	486M	512M	727M	727M	505M	754M
Memory Size	512 MB	256 MB / 512 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB	512 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB	1024 MB	512 MB	512 MB
Memory Bus Width	64 bit	128 bit	128 bit	128 bit	128 bit	128 bit	256 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	600 MHz	550 MHz	625 MHz	750 MHz	550 MHz	585 MHz	650 MHz	600 MHz
Memory Clock	400 MHz	900 MHz	790 MHz / 1012 MHz	1000 MHz	1700 MHz / 1000 MHz	1890 MHz	900 MHz	900 MHz
Price	$45	$45	$69 - $79	$67	$99	$110	$80	$90

Packaging

Palit's mascot, the Green Frog makes the package easily identifiable as a Palit product. Even though the front shows "Sonic Edition" (in fairly small letters), the actual clock speeds are nowhere to be found.

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + Quick Install Guide

The Card

Palit has chosen to design their own PCB and uses a custom cooling solution. A transparent peel-off-foil on the cooler (not pictured here) protects it from scratches.

Palit has designed the card to occupy two slots in the system, with the cooler being about 1.5 slots tall. This means that even in a full case there will be plenty of space for the cooler to suck in air.

The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and and one HDMI port. For a low-end graphics card, this is a very reasonable output configuration since many low-end PC users still use CRTs. For media PC users the HDMI output enables an easy way to hook up their graphics card to the big screen without any adapter cables or converters.
As mentioned before, NVIDIA has slightly changed how their HDMI Audio works. Instead of connecting an SPDIF output from your sound card to the graphics card, the card features its own audio device now. According to NVIDIA "fully uncompressed 7.1 LPCM" is supported, as far as I know the CPU will take care of decoding the audio from other formats into LPCM. Please note that this means that you can not send encoded formats like DTS over the wire to be processed in the TV/receiver. 7.1 LPCM is basically 8 uncompressed WAV streams being sent at the same time.

While there are no SLI connectors, it is possible to put two of these cards in SLI mode for better performance and data will be transferred via the PCI-Express bus.

Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

The cooler is a simple heatsink with a fan strapped to it. Thanks to the efficient 40 nm GPU design there is no need for copper or fancy heatpipes.

Thanks to NVIDIA's power efficient design the GeForce GT 240 no longer requires an extra power connector - while its predecessor 9600 GT required one.

This is the first time that NVIDIA uses GDDR5 memory chips on their graphics cards. Compared to GDDR3, GDDR5 offers twice the available bandwidth at the same frequency. The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC05. They are specified to run at 2000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).

The uP6210 is a compact, cost-effective voltage regulator that is commonly used on lower end cards. It does not have an I2C interface, so software voltage control is not possible.

This is NVIDIA's new GT215 GPU, it comes with 727 million transistors and is produced on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.

Test System

Test System
CPU:	Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 & ICH10R
Memory:	3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 @ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	BFG ES-800 800W
Software:	Windows Vista 32-bit SP2
Drivers:	NVIDIA: 186.18 GT 240: 195.55 ATI: Catalyst 9.6 HD 58xx: 8.66 RC6
Display:	LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

BattleForge

BattleForge, a card based RTS, is developed by the German EA Phenomic Studio. A few months after launch the game was transformed into a Play 4 Free branded game. That move and the fact that it was included as game bundle with a large number of ATI cards made it one of the more well known RTS games of 2009. You as a player assemble your deck before game to select the units that will be available. Your choice can be from forces of Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow to complement each other.
The BattleForge engine has full support for DX 9, DX 10 and DX 10.1, we used the internal benchmark tool to acquire our results.

Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4 is a first-person shooter that is built on the award winning Call of Duty Series. It is the first version to play in modern times. In a near-future conflict between the United States, Europe and Russia you get to play as a United States Marine and a British SAS operative. The engine is Infinity Ward's own creation and has true dynamic lighting, depth of field, dynamic shadows and HDR. Even though the game plot is scripted you will find yourself in intense battles, often working together with computer controlled team mates.

Call of Juarez 2

Call of Juarez 2: Bound in Blood is a prequel to the first Call of Juarez game which was one of the first DX10 titles available on the market. This time the plot evolves around two brothers, before each mission you may pick one to play. Your choices affect the game play since both characters have different ways of handling situations and doing combat.
Call of Juarez 2 uses Techland's Chrome Engine 4 which adds Edge Anti Aliasing as one of the first engines on the market. Edge Anti Aliasing looks similar to normal AA but comes with a considerably reduced performance drop. However, due to the deferred shading design of Edge AA, normal AA can't be used on top of it.

Company Of Heroes

The real-time strategy game Company of Heroes is set during World War II where you take two American companies through several fights all over France to liberate the country from German occupation. Company of Heroes is the first game to use Relic's next-generation engine "Essence Engine" which includes support for HDR lighting, Shader Model 3.0, normal mapping, dynamic lighting and shadows. You are able to zoom in from the tactical view of the battle field to see the individual units fighting. Often you catch yourself admiring the detailed animations of the soldiers while the fight around you is raging.

Crysis

After the tremendous success of Far Cry, the German game studio Crytek released their latest shooter Crysis in 2007. The game was by far the most hyped and anticipated game in 2007, the forums were full of "Can my system run Crysis?" threads because of the high hardware requirements of this game. Just like in Far Cry the plot evolves on a small island with a thick and richly detailed jungle world. A lot of attention has been given to small details like correct physics. For example when you fire on a tree trunk, it will shatter and the tree will fall over leaving a stump behind. Enemies in a car can be stopped by shooting the tire of the car. The game graphics are by far the best ever seen in a PC game so far, yet the game still runs well on most computers.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II by Relic Entertainment is an RTS game based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Unlike other Dawn of War titles there is no base-building element in the game, you simply command units on the battlefield. Due to the non-linear mission design, the choices which mission and objective you pick to pursue have considerable impact on game play and mission difficulty. A "hero" unit concept adds RPG elements to the game, allowing you to advance the unit in terms of levels and abilities. Dawn of War 2 uses the Essence Engine 2.0, version 1.0 was used in the Company of Heroes Series.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The first-person shooter Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set in the science-fiction universe of Quake and requires several classes to work together to achieve certain goals on a map. In the campaign mode you gain experience which you can use to buy upgrades for your class. The player gets to pick from five classes of either the Global Defense Force or the Strogg faction. As underlying game engine, the successful id Software Doom 3 engine has been licensed, but several features like MegaTextures have been added, giving the outdoor world a much more detailed appearance.

Far Cry

Far Cry was released in early 2004 by the new development studio Crytek. It quickly became a massive success because it was one of the first titles to take you in a beautiful 3D outdoor world. Far Cry was one of the most demanding games at its time. Even with today's video cards you can still see big differences in frame rates, especially at the higher resolutions.

Far Cry 2

Four years after the success of Far Cry, Ubisoft has published the sequel called Far Cry 2. While the first part was set on an island, Far Cry 2 takes you deep into Africa with game play that resembles Grand Theft Auto much more than the original Far Cry, which was a classical 3D shooter. Ubisoft engineered a completely new 3D engine called "Dunia" which offers a large amount of popular features like DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 support, destructible environments, physics and non-scripted AI while not being as much of a resource hog as Crytek's CryEngine.

FEAR

The first person shooter F.E.A.R, developed by Monolith Game Studios, was released in Fall 2005 and has a great 3D engine that uses a large number of shading and shadow effects to accurately model the game world. In addition to that it features a realistic physics engine that lets you interact with many objects in the game world. The game was voted game of the year by several publications.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. is one of the very few recent flight simulator games on the market. Being a console conversion it emphasizes "flight" more than "simulator". It is set in a near future in which private military companies have begun fighting conflicts for nations with their own military gear. You are playing an elite pilot who was recruited by such a private company. During the game you get to fly over 50 different aircrafts, ranging from the MIG 21 to the mighty F22 Raptor. One notable feature of its engine is the use of GeoEye satellite imagery for terrain generation which offers one of the most realistic incarnations of battlefield terrain available today.

Prey

Prey is based on a highly modified 3D engine made by id Software. This first person shooter brought a completely new way of gaming to the genre. In many levels you find yourself walking upside down or on the walls. This adds a completely new aspect to the gaming experience in this genre.

Quake 4

The Quake titles are among the most successful first person games. Developed by id Software, the famous game studio that brought you DOOM, you find yourself in a sci-fi world that is full of aliens and shocking effects. The main focus of the game is the single player story line. Quake 4 puts you on the home planet of the Strogg. In a number of missions you and your fellow marines will encounter all sorts of enemies, including some really huge aliens.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is a first person shooter game set in a far future. You are Riddick, a notorious space criminal played by Vin Diesel in the movies. Dark Athena continues where Escape from Butcher Bay ended. A major aspect of the game is its tactical use of shadows and stealth so that enemies can't detect you. Vin Diesel's voice acting also adds greatly to the game experience.
The 0.0 FPS scores for NVIDIA cards at 2560x1600 are caused by driver crashes which seem to be related to card with 512 MB memory and below. Since it works fine on ATI this is not a game problem but an NVIDIA driver issue.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Before its release in 2007, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was one of the most hyped games of the last years. This RPG/FPS hybrid game is set a few years in the future, after a nuclear disaster occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The release of radiation causes strange things like mutations in the nearby area. You take the role of a Stalker who seeks fame and riches in the contaminated area around Chernobyl. The game engine features all the latest buzzwords like HDR, bullet physics, skeletal animation, soft shadows and weather effects. Stalker's vast outside world is richly modeled, you can interact with a large number of objects in the game thanks to the physics engine.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

STALKER Clear Sky is GSC Gameworld's prequel to the 2007 hit "STALKER". Just like in the first part the game is set around the Russian area of Chernobyl and Pripyat, most well known for the nuclear accident that occurred there. You play the role of a mercenary who spends his days in The Zone trying to make a living. The Zone is an area which is affected by so-called anomalies which cause mutants to appear and laws of physics to change. While you investigate these anomalies the plot leads up to the events that happened right before the first game starts. A new in-game faction system encourages you to befriend various groups in The Zone in exchange for information or items. While the graphics of Clear Sky are based on the first Stalker game engine, there are numerous improvements, including support for DirectX10 and depth-of-field/volumetric effects.

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 by the famous people from Valve software builds on an improved Half-Life 2 engine to deliver an action packed, team oriented, comic graphics first person shooter game. Even though the game features nice graphics, it tends to be very CPU limited, especially on lower resolutions. Players get to team up being either RED or BLU with a selection of nine classes. Each class offers a different play style, just like in the original Team Fortress games.

Unreal Tournament 3

The fourth game in Epic's highly successful Unreal Tournament Series is simply called Unreal Tournament 3. It is based on the all-new Unreal 3 engine which is a major step forward from the previous engine. The game principle is centered about an arena style gameplay where several contestants try to reach a certain kill count or capture a flag for example. As you would expect from a new 2007 title, the graphics are top notch, with large and detailed textures. One major drawback of the way the engine is designed is that there is no support for Anti-Aliasing.

World In Conflict

The realtime strategy game World In Conflict by Massive Entertainment is set in 1989 taking the player through a fictional conflict during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike other RTS games, World in Conflict is not centered around building a base, you command units on the battlefield with a number of reinforcement points available to replace lost troops.
Massive's Masstech Game Engine makes heavy use of level-of-detail techniques which allow you to zoom in closely on the action displaying fights in high-fidelity with a large number of effects.

3DMark03

Futuremark Corporation is the number one player in the world of synthetic benchmarking. The 3DMark series is the most popular test suite for video card testing and is used by gamers, overclockers and manufacturers alike to determine how fast their hardware is. Even though it is a few years old, 3DMark03 can easily stress today's video cards.

3DMark05

Another benchmark from Futuremark is 3DMark05 which comes with four completely new game tests that make massive use of shaders and lighting effects. 3DMark05 is a great test for modern video card architectures - in some tests you are often close to the 30 fps mark, below which your games will feel sluggish.

3DMark06

Even though it's based on Futuremark's 3DMark05, the new 3DMark06 adds new tests for Shader Model 3.0 and HDR rendering. It is also the first 3DMark to incorporate a CPU score into the final 3DMark score. All tests have received an overhaul, for example in the Canyon Flight test you can now see beautiful sun glare effects with the help of High Dynamic Range rendering.

Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.

For this test we measure power consumption of only the graphics card, via PCI-Express power connector(s) and PCI-Express bus slot. A Keithley Integra 2700 with 6.5 digits is used for all measurements. Again, the values here reflect card only power consumption measured at DC VGA card inputs, not the whole system.

We chose 3DMark03 Nature as a standard test representing typical 3D usage because it offers: - very high power draw - high repeatability - is a standard benchmark that is supported by all cards - drivers are actively tested and optimized for it - supports all multi-GPU configurations - easy to obtain - fairly compact in size - test runs a constant duration and renders a variable scene with variable complexity just like any normal game.

The four result values are as following:

Idle: Windows Vista Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle until power draw is stable.
Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (12 per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. Highest single reading during the test.
Maximum: Furmark Stability Test at 1280x1024, 0xAA. This results in a very high non-game power consumption that can typically be reached only with stress testing applications. Card left running stress test until power draw converged to a stable value.

Previous NVIDIA cards using their new 40 nm graphics processors have already delivered excellent power consumption results. The GeForce GT 240 set the bar even higher. Idle power consumption is at an all-time low for a card in this performance class. Under load the power draw increases, but is still considerably lower than previous-generation products of similar performance. I'd also like to point out that compared to the MSI GT 240, the power consumption under load is higher, probably due to the out-of-the-box overclock and higher voltages which give you better overclocking potential.

Fan Noise

In the past years users would accept everything just to get more performance. Nowadays this has changed with people being more aware of the fan noise and power consumption of their graphic cards.
In order to properly test the fan noise a card emits we are using a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.

The tested graphics card is installed in a system that is completely passively cooled. That is passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard and Solid-State HDD.
This setup allows us to eliminate secondary noise sources and test only the video card. To be more compliant with standards like DIN 45635 (we are not claiming to be fully DIN 45635 certified) the measurement is conducted at 100 cm distance and 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room is well below 20 dbA for all measurements. Please note that the dbA scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. 40 dbA is not twice as loud as 20 dbA. A 3 dbA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dbA increase doubles the perceived sound level.

Palit has implemented a decent fan control mechanism. When the card is idling its fan slows down to be reasonably quiet, yet not as quiet as it (c/sh)ould be in my opinion. Under load the fan noise is very low making this card an enjoyable experience. Other board partners save about 1 USD on their design and completely leave out fan control which results in much noisier cards than the Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic.

Performance Summary

To create this graph we took all performance results of the five resolutions we tested, threw them together and calculated the relative performance of each card, compared to our review sample. In a sixth graph we also combined all tests in all resolutions to calculate the total relative performance of the review sample.

Performance per Watt

This graph was created by taking the relative performance numbers and putting them in contrast to the average power consumption results.

Performance per Dollar

If you are looking for the best bang for the buck, then you will love this graph. We looked up the current USD price of each card on the popular online shop Newegg and used it and the relative performance numbers to calculate the Performance per Dollar Index.

Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.

The overclocks of our card are 670 MHz core (15% overclock) and 2190 MHz Memory (16% overclock). When compared to the NVIDIA reference design clocks, the overclocks are 22% and 29%. Quite some impressive numbers I have to admit, and the overclocking process was really easy. All I did was click "Find Max" three times in GPUTool and everything turned out right. Compared to the MSI GT 240, which required some special tricks, this baby was as easy to OC as it gets. It should be noted however that Palit's card has a higher power draw under load as the card from MSI for example, which is probably caused by higher 3D voltages that help with the overclock.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.

The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 18.3%.

Temperatures

Temperatures look good, personally I would have liked to see all temperatures shifted by +10�C and got less fan noise in return. Nevertheless, the cooling solution does a nice job, even with 20% overclocking, the temperatures go up by only 2�C.

Value and Conclusion

	According to Palit the expected price of their GeForce GT 240 will be around USD 110.
	Solid overclocking potential Overclocked out of the box Low idle power consumption 40 nm GPU Temperature-controlled fan speeds Native HDMI output HDMI audio no longer requires SPDIF cable No external power connector required Support for DirectX 10.1 Support for CUDA / PhysX
	High price Increased power draw in 3D Can't compete against 9800 GT which is even cheaper No support for DirectX 11
8.6	NVIDIA's recent introduction of 40 nm graphics processors is a wise move from the company's standpoint, as it allows the company to take baby-steps on the new silicon fabrication technology. The company started off with two entry-level GPUs in the GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220, and has gradually upscaled them. This release marks the company's first graphics card to make use of the GDDR5 memory standard, which is twice as fast as GDDR3, clock-for-clock. To begin with, the GeForce GT 240 does come across as noteworthy, perhaps not because of its initial price, which history has shown to have little bearing on a product's performance on the shelves, but that it is able to deliver decent performance levels for the amount of power it consumes, perhaps a fruition of the 40 nm process. Palit's overclocked GeForce GT 240 Sonic delivers performance very close to the GeForce 9600 GT, the 50% higher shader core count comes to its rescue in recent games. The GeForce 9600 GT seems to benefit from its higher number of raster operation units. In simple terms, while older games seem to perform well on the 9600 GT, newer, shader-intensive games benefit from the more powerful shader domain of the GeForce GT 240. Thanks to the new 40 nm process, the card does not require an additional power connector. It also scores with an extremely low power draw of only 12 Watts in idle. During gaming it needs roughly 60W, which is about 20W more than other GT 240 cards that we reviewed before. It seems to me that Palit gave the GPU voltage a little bump in 3D which considerably helps improving the overclocking potential of this Sonic Edition card. Overclocking was very easy and yielded a healthy overclock, we gained over 15%. Remember, the Sonic Edition is already overclocked, so compared to NVIDIA's reference speeds the total gain was 22% on the core and 29% on the memory. Even with the overclock the fan was reasonably quiet. Palit has done a good job implementing a temperature based fan control mechanism which results in a pleasant work and gaming experience - other board partners save a few bucks and build noisy cards with fixed fan speeds. The Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic makes for a decent buy for a cool, low-power, low-noise graphics card that can handle games at medium-thru-low resolutions, if only it had a better price. With GeForce 9800 GT accelerators easily available around the $100 mark, the $110 price-tag simply doesn't cut it. Hopefully, the prices will come down in the near future.

HIS Radeon HD 5970 CrossFire

W1zzard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:26:56 GMT

Introduction

Earlier launched today, AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5970 is the company's new flagship graphics accelerator that intends to clinch the performance leadership crown off its competitor. Packing two of the industry's fastest GPUs codenamed AMD Cypress, 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, DirectX 11 support, and 3200 stream processors in its kitty, the HD 5970 is touted to be quite a monstrosity in itself. Make sure you find out more about the accelerator in solo, in our ASUS EAH5970 review first.

In this review, we paired two Radeon HD 5970 accelerators by HIS in a 4-way ATI CrossFireX setup. 4-way, since there are four physical GPUs working in tandem. It should give you an idea of what the setup that stands to be the best money can buy really offers. The findings of this review will also tell you how four AMD Cypress GPUs are able to upscale, and whether the amount of graphics processing power is relevant for today's applications.

Since the ASUS EAH5970 review already covered every aspect about the card, we will jump straight on to the performance figures. Installation of HD 5970 CrossFireX is as easy as installing any other multi-GPU setup. Ensure that your motherboard features two PCI-Express slots for the cards to be installed in, and supports the ATI CrossFire technology. Also, ensure that your power-supply unit is reasonably powerful. Based on our findings, and given our test machine, we recommend at least a 750W power-supply. Install the two accelerators, upon installing the drivers, you will be prompted to enable CrossFireX, and will be able to verify if the two cards are working in tandem.

Package & Contents

You will receive:

Graphics Card
HIS iClear Card
HIS Universal Screwdriver Tool
CrossFire Bridge
Driver CD + Documentation
DVI to HDMI adapter, DVI to Analog Adapter, Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort Adapter
2x PCI-E power cable
Dirt 2 Coupon (Steam required)

Test System

Test System
CPU:	Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 & ICH10R
Memory:	3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 @ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	BFG ES-800 800W
Software:	Windows Vista 32-bit SP2
Drivers:	NVIDIA: 186.18 ATI: Catalyst 9.6 HD 58xx: 8.663.1 Beta 5 (AMD recommended reviewer driver)
Display:	LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

We simulated the performance of the HD 5850 by taking our HD 5870, reducing the clock speeds and disabling two SIMDs, which results in exactly the same performance as HD 5850.

BattleForge

Call of Duty 4

Call of Juarez 2

Company Of Heroes

Crysis

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Far Cry

Far Cry 2

FEAR

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Prey

Quake 4

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

Team Fortress 2

Unreal Tournament 3

World In Conflict

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

Performance Summary

Performance per Dollar

Multi-GPU Scaling

Just like any other Multi GPU solution, the performance gains increase with resolution. One reason is that at lower resolutions it is more difficult to split the work load between GPUs and it is also possible the the rendering is CPU limited. At lower resolutions some benchmarks can't just render any faster, no matter the graphics power, because they have to wait for some data to be calculated on the CPU every single frame.
Please also note that the 4-GPU setup failed to complete several benchmarks at 2560x1600 which results in a lower score.

Value and Conclusion

	At US $599 a piece, two Radeon HD 5970 accelerators should typically set you back by $1200. You will also need a motherboard with two PCI-Express slots, which supports ATI CrossFire technology.
	Fastest setup possible Support for DirectX 11, DirectX 10.1 Some things just look better in pairs™ Low idle power consumptions of each card makes overall idle power draw comfortable Excusably quiet in idle GDDR5 memory Support for software based voltage control Support for AMD EyeFinity Technology Native HDMI & DisplayPort Improvements to integrated HDMI audio device
	High price, really! Fails several game tests at 2560x1600 Not useful for resolutions lower than 2560x1600 Requires a CrossFire supportive motherboard with two PCI-Express slots Massive heat output DirectX 11 won't be relevant for quite a while No support for CUDA / PhysX
9.3	It sure isn't the most sensible thing to spend $1200 on two graphics cards, that dump about 600W of heat in your room when fully loaded, that barely fit inside your computer, and that make a quite some fan noise. But oh boy, the frames fly like you've never seen before! The "All Resolutions" performance summary graph simply doesn't do justice as HD 5970 CrossFire gets irrelevant, and CPU-limited in lower resolutions. 2560x1600 seems to be the only resolution where having a pair of these will allow you to splurge on eye-candy like never before. If you want to build the fastest rig money can buy then a HD 5970 CrossFire setup is what you need. Die-hard overclockers all over the planet will open their wallets and camp the online stores to get a pair of these, unfortunately supply will be limited. Should you not belong to the most extreme crowd of gamers or tweakers then it might make more sense to get a single HD 5970 or "only" a HD 5870 because these cards offer much better price/performance ratios. It should also be noted that the drivers do not seem to be in a fully finalized state yet. Three of our benchmarks failed to run at 2560x1600, which, for this kind of product, is the only resolution that really counts in the results. I am confident however that AMD will quickly address these issues in a future driver version.

ASUS EAH5970 - Radeon HD 5970

W1zzard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:27:48 GMT

Introduction

Today marks a 'red'-letter day of sorts for AMD, which looks to reclaim performance leadership in the graphics cards industry with its new flagship ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics accelerator. Of all the products AMD has been working on over the past year, we bet this product won the most anticipation, since the "next big thing" from a company in the hardware industry often defines its market position, and competitiveness as a solution provider. The Radeon HD 5970 makes use of two AMD Cypress GPUs in an internal multi-GPU configuration. The accelerator is compliant with Microsoft DirectX 11, which forms one of the important features of the company's Windows 7 operating system, and is a next-generation multimedia API. AMD Cypress on the other hand, with the recently launched Radeon HD 5800 series products, has established itself as the industry's single most powerful graphics processor.

For computer enthusiasts, replenished competition from either sides is always a win. Professional overclockers looking forward to the next big contest will naturally eye an accelerator that makes use of two of the most powerful GPUs on the planet. For the long-sighted buyer who is willing to splurge, this is potentially a one-time investment that secures future-proofing for long.

The Radeon HD 5970 packs two AMD Cypress GPUs with 1600 stream processors each (total 3200), and holds 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface per GPU (total 2 GB of memory on board, across a 2x 256-bit wide memory interface).

In this review, we will evaluate the performance, thermal, electrical, and acoustic characteristics of the ASUS EAH5970 Radeon HD 5970 graphics accelerator.

	GeForce GTX 280	Radeon HD 4870 X2	GeForce GTX 285	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 5870	GeForce GTX 295	Radeon HD 5970
Shader units	240	2x 800	240	1440	1600	2x 240	2x 1600
ROPs	32	2x 16	32	32	32	2x 28	2x 32
GPU	GT200	2x RV770	GT200b	Cypress	Cypress	2x GT200b	2x Cypress
Transistors	1400M	2x 956M	1400M	2154M	2154M	2x 1400M	2x 2154M
Memory Size	1024 MB	2x 1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	2x 896 MB	2x 1024 MB
Memory Bus Width	512 bit	2x 256 bit	512 bit	256 bit	256 bit	2x 448 bit	2x 256 bit
Core Clock	602 MHz	750 MHz	648 MHz	725 MHz	850 MHz	576 MHz	725 MHz
Memory Clock	1107 MHz	900 MHz	1242 MHz	1000 MHz	1200 MHz	999 MHz	1000 MHz
Price	$329	$429	$340	$299	$399	$500	$599

Packaging

ASUS ships their EAH5970 in a big and colorful package that communicates all important product highlights on the front, the back has more detail in multiple languages.

You will receive:

Graphics Card
CrossFire Bridge
Dirt 2 Coupon (Steam required)
PCI-Express power adapter
Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter
Documentation + Driver CDs
DVI to HDMI Adapter
Leather CD case

Architecture

AMD's dual-GPU graphics cards in recent times have carried a simple design methodology: There are two graphics processors, each with its own memory and voltage regulation circuitry. One of the two gets to be connected to the displays. Both GPUs then have PCI-Express x16 connections to a PCI-Express bridge chip, which broadcasts data from the host system, to which it is directly connected over the card's PCI-Express x16 interface. The two GPUs have a CrossFire connection (through the bridge), and can connect to up to two more GPUs of its kind over external CrossFire (in which there are multiple graphics cards connected using CrossFire cables). The card's internal CrossFire between its GPUs is enabled by default, not requiring the user to do anything beyond installing the accelerator like any other. The internal CrossFire is neutral to the system it is installed on, and hence it doesn't matter which make the system's chipset is. Have PCI-Express x16, will work.

With the Radeon HD 5970, it's no different. Each GPU is based on AMD's TeraScale 2 Architecture that offers over 2 TFLOPs of processing power. Each GPU has 1600 stream processors, arranged into 20 SIMD engines, each with 16 thread processors that have 5 processing cores each. There are 80 texture units per GPU, and 32 raster operation units. Built on the 40 nm silicon process by TSMC, the GPUs employ new energy-saving performance profiles that are found to offer some of the lowest power draws in idle, and some of the highest performance per Watt, when on the job. Each GPU uses a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, which provides 128 GB/s of memory bandwidth (256 GB/s for the entire card). The slightly improved PCI-Express bridge chip now supports the new PCI-Express 2.1 standard. According to AMD the new PCI-E 2.0 bridge chip has so much bandwidth that the mythical sideport from HD 4870 X2 can no longer be useful - not even in theory.

The Card

AMD continues their design theme of the Radeon HD 5000 Series. The cooler looks extremely powerful, yet not styled to the extreme. It conveys a feeling of powerful understatement. The surface feels "high quality", yet I like the surface of the HD 5870 cooler a little bit more. ASUS has put a carbon-fibre look sticker on their cooler which definitely adds to the overall appearance. In my opinion this approach looks a lot better than a sticker with dancing anime girls.

From left to right: GeForce GTX 295 Single PCB, Radeon HD 4870 X2, Radeon HD 5870, Radeon HD 5970. Sizewise this card reminds me of some old ISA graphics cards that were huge and took up most of the case. The exact length of the card is 31 cm (from slot cover to end of fan). Please make sure your case has enough space to accommodate this card.

Dual slot card, no surprises here. The red trim on the side, with the "ATI Radeon" text, is aligned so that it can be read when the card is installed in a normal case with window.

On the back plate you have a stamped ATI Radeon Premium Graphics logo which will also be visible if you have a case window.

The card has two DVI-D ports, and one mini-DisplayPort. This is just one of many output configurations that are possible on the new cards, thanks to the overhauled display output logic. Basically the card can drive six TMDS signals that can be combined in any way (a dual-link DVI consumes two TMDS lines).
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 8.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.

On the back of the card you see two nicely styled air vents that look great, yet have no cooling function. Most air is sucked in via the fan opening.

Using the lone CrossFire bridge connector, the Radeon HD 5970 can pair with one more of its kind. Later down the line, one can expect being able to pair this with other graphics cards that use the AMD Cypress GPU, though nothing specific in this regard has been disclosed.

Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

Taking the card apart takes a bit of patience because there are a lot more screws involved than on previous products. As a first step we removed the backplate of the card.

The backplate is made from metal and cools a bunch of memory chips on this side of the PCB. It also serves as protection against physical damage when handling the card.

Then we removed the main cooler which is a complex piece of hardware, it cools the GPU, memory and several smaller components. It is also quite heavy and looks like it adds quite some cost to the card's design.

Disassembling the cooler module we can see that it consists of several parts. First there is a copper baseplate that uses vapor chamber technology. Think of it as a big heatpipe surface that covers the whole baseplate. This results in greatly optimized heat transfer to the aluminum cooling fins that sit in airflow generated by the fan.

According to AMD the card fits within a 300W power budget. That's why we see a 6-pin and an 8-pin connector here (75W slot + 75W 6-pin + 150W 8-pin = 300W). It should also be noted that the PCB has been designed with the option for a second 8-pin power connector. According to AMD they do not expect partners to release customized versions of the card utilizing this or any other change before Q2 2010.

The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).

It seems AMD went all out when they designed the power circuitry of the Radeon HD 5970. The card features three Volterra voltage regulators that support software voltage control.

The PCI-Express bridge chip which connects the two GPUs and interfaces with the system via PCI-Express 2.0 is made by PLX. Apparently PLX lets ATI rebrand their product. According to AMD the bridge chip supports PCI-Express 2.1 x16 which supplies enough bandwidth to both GPUs for any situation.

Even though the product's codename is "Hemlock", AMD uses two Cypress GPUs (like on the HD 5850 and HD 5870) for the HD 5970. However, it should be noted that these chips were binned for lower leakage which helps to reduce the power consumption. Cypress comes with 2154 million transistors each and is made in a 40 nm production process at TSMC Taiwan.

Test System

Test System
CPU:	Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 & ICH10R
Memory:	3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 @ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	BFG ES-800 800W
Software:	Windows Vista 32-bit SP2
Drivers:	NVIDIA: 186.18 ATI: Catalyst 9.6 HD 58xx: 8.663.1 Beta 5 (AMD recommended reviewer driver)
Display:	LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

We simulated the performance of the HD 5850 by taking our HD 5870, reducing the clock speeds and disabling two SIMDs, which results in exactly the same performance as HD 5850.

BattleForge

Call of Duty 4

Call of Juarez 2

Company Of Heroes

Crysis

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Far Cry

Far Cry 2

FEAR

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Prey

Quake 4

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

Team Fortress 2

Unreal Tournament 3

World In Conflict

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

Power Consumption

Idle: Windows Vista Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle until power draw is stable.
Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (12 per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. Highest single reading during the test.
Maximum: Furmark Stability Test at 1280x1024, 0xAA. This results in a very high non-game power consumption that can typically be reached only with stress testing applications. Card left running stress test until power draw converged to a stable value.

AMD has done an incredible job reducing the power consumption of their new generation of cards. This is due to several improvements, one being the 40 nm production process. Another big improvement happened in the dynamic power management of the cards which is a lot more aggressive now. Most of you know about the flicker on the GDDR5 HD 4800 cards that appears when memory clock is changed. This was the reason that the HD 4800 GDDR5 cards never reduced memory clock, even when completely idle. AMD has successfully fixed this problem and both engine and memory clock can be changed very quickly now- without any flickering or any other way to notice. In addition to that the second GPU on the Radeon HD 5970 uses something called ULPS (Ultra Low Power State). When the second card is not needed it is switched into an extreme low power mode that is similar to the lowest power ACPI state (standby). Unfortunately this causes issues with software that tries to access the registers of this GPU. Since the GPU is in a low power state it can not properly process the requests the software sends. While AMD has added proper support for this in their own software, tools like GPU-Z are not yet designed to handle this.

When compared to AMD's last generation dual-GPU card, the HD 4870 X2, the power consumption is considerably lower, yet the card offers substantially more performance - great job, AMD.

Fan Noise

In the past years users would accept everything just to get more performance. Nowadays this has changed with people being more aware of the fan noise and power consumption of their graphic cards.
In order to properly test the fan noise a card emits we are using a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.

The tested graphics card is installed in a system that is completely passively cooled. That is passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard and Solid-State HDD.
This setup allows us to eliminate secondary noise sources and test only the video card. To be more compliant with standards like DIN 45635 (we are not claiming to be fully DIN 45635 certified) the measurement is conducted at 100 cm distance and 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room is well below 20 dbA for all measurements. Please note that the dbA scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. 40 dbA is not twice as loud as 20 dbA. A 3 dbA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dbA increase doubles the perceived sound level.

I have to admit I am positively surprised by the idle fan noise of the ASUS EAH5970. It seems AMD has given this some serious thought and implemented an extremely quiet card in idle that ramps up fan speed as needed. As you will see further on in the review, the low fan noise in idle results in higher idle temperatures - still great in my opinion. Under load the fan ramps up gradually to resemble something like a leaf blower when the card has been fully loaded for a while. It seems that despite all the power saving mechanisms the card still has a serious heat output and this heat needs to go away. Looking at the temps again, they are in the 80� range under load which is a safe choice by AMD. Depending on the maximum temperatures reached you could adjust the fan parameters to trade fan noise for temperature.

Performance Summary

Performance per Watt

This graph was created by taking the relative performance numbers and putting them in contrast to the average power consumption results.

Performance per Dollar

Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.

The overclocks of our card are 780 MHz core (8% overclock) and 1310 MHz Memory (31% overclock). These clocks reflect about what I expected. Memory overclocks very well because the chips are specified to run at 1250 MHz at least. The core however seems to be held back by heat and voltage.

ASUS includes their own SmartDoctor Utility which lets you raise the voltages on the graphics card with just a few mouse clicks.

I didn't have time to play with SmartDoctor before this review was published, but now I went back, installed it and started pushing voltages. The GUI is really simple and lets you adjust the voltage up to 1.45V which seems very high for permanent use on air cooling. For the screenshot, I maxxed out the sliders so you can see where the limits are.

Wow! 1.337V on the GPUs resulted in 980 MHz Core, 1300 MHz Memory.
All that with the stock cooler, fan speed let at default (yes it gets noisy).

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.

The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 8.7%, and 20.5% when using voltage control.

Temperatures

Temperatures look ok. Even though the idle temperature looks a bit high, I find it an acceptable tradeoff for the reduced idle fan noise. Under load the card stays within safe temperatures, unlike other dual GPU cards which can easily go far beyond 100�C.
The overclocked temperatures are only marginally higher because as temperature increases, so increases the fan speed which helps with keeping the temps in check.

Please note that "OC" here refers to the first overclock (780/1310). When I tested the voltage increase + overclock I had already disassembled the card and replaced the thermal paste when reassembling. Temps of voltage increase + oc were around 95�C in that case.

Value and Conclusion

	AMD has set a price of $599 for their Radeon HD 5970. This is quite a lot of money, but even at this price, supply will be limited.
	World's fastest graphics card Huge performance improvement Support for DirectX 11, DirectX 10.1 Sexy looks Quiet in idle Very low power consumption GDDR5 memory Low temperatures Support for software based voltage control via ASUS SmartDoctor Support for AMD EyeFinity Technology Native DisplayPort Improvements to integrated HDMI audio device
	High price, low price/performance Noisy under load Extremely long card, might not fit all cases DirectX 11 won't be relevant for quite a while Based on CrossFire Technology - requires game support No support for CUDA / PhysX
9.5	There you are, the Radeon HD 5970. This dual-GPU graphics accelerator has proven itself to be a real monstrosity in terms of its performance, and is the fastest money can buy...if available in your friendly neighbourhood hardware store. Being the fifth dual-GPU flagship accelerator since DirectX 10, the Radeon HD 5970 asserts that dual-GPU cards are here to stay, and however much a company would prefer making monolithic single-GPU designs, at some point, it will find the need to release a dual-GPU flagship accelerator to maintain competitiveness in the high-end segment. Like its immediate ancestors, the Radeon HD 5970 comes with pros and cons in an almost stereotypical fashion. Temperatures, fan-noise, and power draw are traded off for unassailable performance. There is no game that the HD 5970 can't run, at any resolution, at any level of detail, while keeping things playable. With strong shader compute resources and an improved anti-aliasing feature-set at its disposal, level of detail is never compromised on the HD 5970. The only places where it didn't feel the rush was with some of the older games, which ended up being CPU-limited. The HD 5970 is made for high-resolutions, far beyond 1080p. To keep so much silicon operationally cool, AMD returned to its workhorse dual-slot cooler design. It now makes use of a unified base-plate and a single, large heatsink. When loaded, the cooler is loud, but then again, that was expected of the cooler. The temperatures and power draws are a slightly different issue. The transition to the 40 nm process seems to have helped AMD's case a great deal. While the card idles below 65�C, it doesn't touch 90� C at load. The GPUs are warm, but don't heat up to 100� levels some other dual-GPU accelerators are infamous for. The new power-saving features that AMD integrated into their Cypress GPUs have become life-savers for this accelerator's overall outlook. If you recall, AMD kept its promise of keeping the idle-power draw for the single-GPU HD 5800 series accelerators under 30W. For the HD 5970, with an idle power draw of 39W, it more than fulfilled what many of you would be looking for in an accelerator this powerful to not guzzle down energy when rendering Firefox. With a peak power draw of 211W, it actually turns out a notch or two better than dual-GPU accelerators from the previous generation, which reflects on its performance-per-watt charts. Part of what makes the Radeon HD 5970 an enthusiast-grade product is its overclocking headroom. With this release, AMD tried to brandish a "Massive Headroom" with overclocking. Given that the clock speeds of the GPUs and memory on this card are actually lower than those on the single-GPU HD 5870, AMD had to prove this by not only covering the natural headroom of Cypress' 850/1200 MHz, but also surpass it significantly. Our findings show that it's just about able to reach those speeds on the stock AMD cooler, though on the software-side, ATI Overdrive technically allows us to go further. It is beyond this point that third-party cooling needs to substitute air-cooling. Leading water-cooling brands have already come up with designs of full-coverage water-blocks, while liquid-nitrogen evaporators aren't hard to innovate. Giving it the best conditions, 1000 MHz on the core, and 1500 MHz on the memory don't seem impossible, taking into account extreme cooling, voltmods and cherry picking. If you're expecting all that headroom on the air-cooler, you better hail from a very cold country. Finally, the dreaded price-tag. With prices starting at USD 599, the HD 5970 is uncomfortably pricey. Even given the generosity AMD showed with its choice of components, $549 would have been reasonable, $499 pleasant. Perhaps an important factor driving this is the availability. Since its launch, graphics cards based on the AMD Cypress GPUs aren't very regularly spotted in stores and on e-tailers. Hopefully things improve, and fast, since some markets are already heading into the winter shopping season. Not being able to cash in on precious months' lead in time-to-market for the Radeon HD 5800 and HD 5900 series products compared to competitive DirectX 11 compliant products is not a good thing for AMD. In all, reviewing the Radeon HD 5970 has been like a sumptuous meal for us. Dual-GPU accelerators are all about performance, and being able to have it all in a single addon card. The HD 5970 changes the game in being a loud yet gentle beast. Go for one if you have the money, and your retailer has one to sell. Also check out our Crossfire Review of two of these cards.

MSI GeForce GT 240 512 MB GDDR5

W1zzard — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:47:40 GMT

Introduction

Currently NVIDIA is releasing new versions of their lower end graphics card series. All new cards are based on NVIDIA's first 40 nm graphics processors. The GeForce GT 220 uses the GT216 GPU, while the G 210 uses the GT218 processor. Today marks the release of the GeForce GT 240 - NVIDIA's first GDDR5 memory card. It uses the GT215 GPU which is made in a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. While the G 210 and GT 220 were position in the low-end segment, the GT 240 will offer performance similar to the GeForce 9600 GT, yet considerably below the again GeForce 9800 GT.

NVIDIA lets partners build a wide range of different configurations, 512 MB or 1 GB of memory, GDDR3 or GDDR5, choice of DVI, VGA, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs. MSI has sent us their N240GT which comes with 512 MB of GDDR5 memory and a slightly higher memory clock of 1800 MHz.

	Radeon HD 4550	GeForce 9500 GT	GeForce GT 220	Radeon HD 4670	GeForce GT 240	MSI GT 240	GeForce 9600 GT	GeForce 9800 GT
Shader units	80	32	48	320	96	96	64	112
ROPs	4	8	8	8	8	8	16	16
GPU	RV710	G96	GT216	RV730	GT215	GT215	G94	G92
Transistors	242M	314M	486M	512M	727M	727M	505M	754M
Memory Size	512 MB	256 MB / 512 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB	512 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB	512 MB	512 MB	512 MB
Memory Bus Width	64 bit	128 bit	128 bit	128 bit	128 bit	128 bit	256 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	600 MHz	550 MHz	625 MHz	750 MHz	550 MHz	550 MHz	650 MHz	600 MHz
Memory Clock	400 MHz	900 MHz	790 MHz / 1012 MHz	1000 MHz	1700 MHz / 1000 MHz	1800 MHz	900 MHz	900 MHz
Price	$45	$45	$69 - $79	$67	$99	$105	$80	$90

Packaging

The compact package follows MSI's latest military theme. It displays a fighter jet on the front and several sticker like elements that point out the highlights of the product. The back goes into further detail what kind of features MSI has added to their card.

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + Manual + Quick Start Guide

The Card

MSI has chosen to design their own PCB design and uses a custom cooling solution.

MSI has designed the card to occupy two slots in the system, with the cooler being about 1.5 slots tall. This means that even in a full case there will be plenty of space for the cooler to suck in air.

The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and and one HDMI port. For a low-end graphics card, this is a very reasonable output configuration since many low-end PC users still use CRTs. For media PC users the HDMI output enables an easy way to hook up their graphics card to the big screen without any adapter cables or converters.
As mentioned before, NVIDIA has slightly changed how their HDMI Audio works. Instead of connecting an SPDIF output from your sound card to the graphics card, the driver will route the audio signal from the sound device over the PCI-Express bus into the graphics card. According to NVIDIA "fully uncompressed 7.1 LPCM" is supported, as far as I know the sound card will take care of decoding the audio from other formats into LPCM. Please note that you will still need an onboard sound device or sound card. Unlike ATI graphics cards there is no complete sound device embedded inside the GPU.

While there are no SLI connectors, it is possible to put two of these cards in SLI mode for better performance and data will be transferred via the PCI-Express bus.

Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

The cooler is a simple heatsink with a fan strapped to it. Thanks to the efficient 40 nm GPU design there is no need for copper or fancy heatpipes.

Thanks to NVIDIA's power efficient design the GeForce GT 240 no longer requires an extra power connector - while its predecessor 9600 GT required one.

This is the first time that NVIDIA uses GDDR5 memory chips on their graphics cards. Compared to GDDR3, GDDR5 offers twice the available bandwidth at the same frequency. The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC05. They are specified to run at 2000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).

This is NVIDIA's new GT215 GPU, it comes with 727 million transistors and is produced on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.

Test System

Test System
CPU:	Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 & ICH10R
Memory:	3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 @ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	BFG ES-800 800W
Software:	Windows Vista 32-bit SP2
Drivers:	NVIDIA: 186.18 GT 240: 195.55 ATI: Catalyst 9.6 HD 58xx: 8.66 RC6
Display:	LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

BattleForge

Call of Duty 4

Call of Juarez 2

Company Of Heroes

Crysis

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Far Cry

Far Cry 2

FEAR

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Prey

Quake 4

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

Team Fortress 2

Unreal Tournament 3

World In Conflict

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

Power Consumption

Idle: Windows Vista Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle until power draw is stable.
Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (12 per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. Highest single reading during the test.
Maximum: Furmark Stability Test at 1280x1024, 0xAA. This results in a very high non-game power consumption that can typically be reached only with stress testing applications. Card left running stress test until power draw converged to a stable value.

Previous NVIDIA cards using their new 40 nm graphics processors have already delivered excellent power consumption results. The GeForce GT 240 set the bar even higher. Power consumption is extremely low in all scenarios, no matter if you idle or game.

Fan Noise

In the past years users would accept everything just to get more performance. Nowadays this has changed with people being more aware of the fan noise and power consumption of their graphic cards.
In order to properly test the fan noise a card emits we are using a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.

The tested graphics card is installed in a system that is completely passively cooled. That is passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard and Solid-State HDD.
This setup allows us to eliminate secondary noise sources and test only the video card. To be more compliant with standards like DIN 45635 (we are not claiming to be fully DIN 45635 certified) the measurement is conducted at 100 cm distance and 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room is well below 20 dbA for all measurements. Please note that the dbA scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. 40 dbA is not twice as loud as 20 dbA. A 3 dbA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dbA increase doubles the perceived sound level.

It seems that MSI has not implemented any sort of fan control on their GeForce GT 240. This results in a very noisy card in idle - far more noisy than is needed to keep the heat levels down. Under load the fan noise appears relatively lower because the other cards in our test group ramp up their fan speed. It is sad that graphics card manufacturers try to save a few dollars (if even that much) and the end result is a noisy card that is no fun to use.

Performance Summary

Performance per Watt

This graph was created by taking the relative performance numbers and putting them in contrast to the average power consumption results.

Performance per Dollar

Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.

The overclocks of our card are 620 MHz core (13% overclock) and 1960 MHz Memory (9% overclock). Getting this much overclock out of the card was quite difficult. When applying a normal method of changing 3D clocks only and then testing if the card is stable I could barely overclock core/shaders by 20 MHz. Then the card would jump into some kind of safety mode which forces 2D Low Power clocks all the time. To get out of this mode you need to reboot, which can be a quite frustrating waste of time when searching for a maximum overclock. In order to reduce the amount of time spent to find the max OC I forced the clocks I wanted to test on both the 2D Low Power and 3D profile. Surprisingly the card stopped crashing/mode changing and simply went on to run fine.

The overclock listed here is the stable clock achieved when both 2D Low Power and 3D are set to the same clock. When overclocking only 3D, expect a substantially lower overclock (at least on our sample). Please also consider the implication this has for power management.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.

The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 12.9%.

Temperatures

Temperatures look excellent. Even with overclocking the temperature is comfortably cool. Unfortunately the price that you have to pay for the low temperatures is the extremely noisy fan which always spins at the same speed, no matter how cool the card is.

Value and Conclusion

	According to MSI the expected price of their GeForce GT 240 will be around USD 105.
	Low power consumption 40 nm GPU Native HDMI output HDMI audio no longer requires SPDIF cable Low temperatures No external power connector required Support for DirectX 10.1 Support for CUDA / PhysX
	Noisy High price Difficult overclocking process Can't compete against 9800 GT which is even cheaper No support for DirectX 11
8.3	NVIDIA's recent introduction of 40 nm graphics processors is a wise move from the company's standpoint, as it allows the company to take baby-steps on the new silicon fabrication technology. The company started off with two entry-level GPUs in the GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220, and has gradually upscaled them. This release marks the company's first graphics card to make use of the GDDR5 memory standard, which is twice as fast as GDDR3, clock-for-clock. To begin with, the GeForce GT 240 does come across as noteworthy, perhaps not because of its initial price, which history has shown to have little bearing on a product's performance on the shelves, but that it is able to deliver decent performance levels for the amount of power it consumes, perhaps a fruition of the 40 nm process. The GeForce GT 240 found its arch-rival in the Radeon HD 4670. While it manages to outperform the Radeon in lower resolutions, the performance increment goes down with increase in resolution. At 1680 x 1050, the performance dips below that of its competitor, and interestingly then, increases with the resolution, although the card's performance levels then lose relevance with today's games. The GeForce GT 240 also edges past the GeForce 9600 GT, the 50% higher shader core count comes to its rescue. The GeForce 9600 GT seems to benefit from its higher number of raster operation units. In simple terms, while older games seem to perform well on the 9600 GT, newer, shader-intensive games benefit from the more powerful shader domain of the GeForce GT 240. Thanks to the new 40 nm process, the card does not require an additional power connector. The lower power draw also translates to cooler operation. This is where MSI seems to have fumbled, with a noisy GPU cooler, which is unpleasantly loud when idling. Since the card lacks a concrete fan-speed control, the card maintains this noise-level throughout. With a reworked HDMI audio logic, the card is able to relay audio from the system's audio device without the need for any additional cable. While it makes life easier, I would still like it to be similar to AMD's GPUs, which have audio controllers integrated into the GPUs. The MSI GeForce GT 240 would make for a decent buy for a cool, low-power graphics card that can handle games at medium-thru-low resolutions, if only it had a better price. With GeForce 9800 GT accelerators easily available around the $100 mark, the $105 price-tag simply doesn't cut it. Hopefully, the prices will come down in the near future.

SteelSeries 9HD Mouse Mat

Frederik S — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:06:00 GMT

Introduction

SteelSeries has recently launched what looks to be the successor to the much praised SteelSeries S&S mouse mat. Dubbed 9HD it maintains the design of the S&S, but adds an all new and improved surface. Besides the new more flashy design, the 9HD features a new type of base which should eliminate unwanted desk movement.

Specifications

Material: Hard plastic
Surface treatment: Heat
Dimensions: 270 x 320 x 2 mm / 10,7 x 12,7 x 0,08 in
Size: Medium
Glide: Semi-rough
Compatibility: Optical, laser, ball

The Package

Like the other modern SteelSeries mats this one comes in a transparent plastic box that is reuseable, which is handy if you plan on hitting a lot of LAN parties. The 9HD is a hard mat, but can flex a lot before getting damaged. Also the surface seems more scratch resistant than the old S&S.

I was quite surprised when I opened up the box. Apparently SteelSeries has altered the bundle to only include a microfiber cloth for cleaning, instead of the usual Teflon mouse feet. This decision seems very odd to me especially since it is a plastic mat that can handle being wiped down with alcohol. I think the majority of users would have liked to see a set of mice feet bundle with the mat instead of a piece of cloth perhaps especially at the high price tag.

Closer Examination

Taking after its elderly brethren the S&S and 4H, the all new 9HD has the original SteelSeries design with the arched bottom and rounded square design. I really like the general design of the S&S so I feel right at home using the 9HD. The surface has been given a new treatment and feels like a smoother SP mat.

On the back side of the mat we find a completely re-engineered natural rubber base. Gone is the art stucco sprayed on rubber and behold a new firmer molded base. The new base has a great amount of gripping power and stays in place on my wooden desk nicely. Another great thing about the new base is that it seems much more solid and less prone to wearing out like the spray on which wears off in time. Since the base is now molded, the geometry has been altered and is now made of many small dots, that I suspect might improve grip on rough surfaces compared to just a slab of natural rubber.

The surface looks quite nice. From some angles the surface's reflective quality makes it look rougher than it is.

Besides all the small (annoyingly Louis Vuitton-ish!) SteelSeries logos there is a big one at the bottom left corner of the mat. I wished that SteelSeries would have kept their logo there instead of spreading small logos across the mat. One of the reasons why I loved the old S&S design was because it is so simple, a pure black mat with only one logo. SteelSeries has improved the logo and it is now embedded in a graphics layer rather than being post applied on top of the mat which used to upset the glide in the area surrounding the graphics.

Performance

The mat was tested with mice incorporating the following sensor technologies: optical (Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0), infrared (Razer DeathAdder), laser (Razer Orochi, OCZ Equalizer). Needless to say the mat performed brilliantly with all, and proved to be the medium sensitivity gamer's delight. Paired up with a good medium sensitivity mouse this mat delivers excellent precision and a good balanced glide that enables you to be effective. The surface provides you with a better more controllable gliding experience than the old S&S or the SP for that matter, which is on the rough side. The surface texture and glide reminds me a bit of QPAD because it is so finely grained, however, the glide and control with the 9HD is far superior compared to any remotely comparable hybrid mat like QPAD, NOIDpad, Razer hybrids.

Due to the fact that the mat combines great glide and control it is a thrill to use under almost all circumstances - if you are the kind of gamer that tolerates a little vibrational feedback from the surface. Some really low sensitivity gamers might feel a bit cramped space wise, but with a width of 32 cm you have to use a really low sensitivity or employ an odd movement strategy in order to need more space.

One thing I noticed by coincidence after using it for a long time was that it is marginally thicker than the S&S, with about 1 mm. Another small thing about the 9HD is that the edges are slightly less rounded than what is found on the S&S. Price/performance wise this mat does well, but because of its steep price you really have to want a close to perfect glide experience in order for it to be worth it.

Durability

It seems that SteelSeries has learned from past failures and finally beefed up the base to such an extent that I dare say this is one of the best performing and most durable solutions out there. The surface seems to be a bit more scratch resistant than that of older types of plastic mats like for instance Func F10s, and the SteelSeries S&S which is neat.

Value and Conclusion

	The SteelSeries 9HD can be had for � 34.99
	Surface Works with all modern sensor technologies Good looks (if you do not mind a lot of tiny SteelSeries logos) Near perfect base Durable Perfectly balanced glide Only minor feedback from mat
	Price (� 34.99 ouch!) Small logos spread across the mat Perhaps too small for some low sensitivity gamers
9.6	This mat deserves a lot of praise, but none for the price. At � 34.99 the 9HD will put a serious hole in your pocket, but also a mighty smile on your face. In general this mat excels at almost any task, and the only real "problem" with it is that it could be a bit bigger to accommodate low sensitivity gamers. Besides the size issue some gamers might be put off by the fact that it is a hard mat and will make your mouse rumble lightly when you move it across the mat and provide little dampening when you drop the mouse on the mat while resetting its position on the mat. Comfort wise this mat is just as brilliant as the old slim S&S mat because it is so thin it does not upset your wrist. There is no doubt about it the 9HD will set the benchmark for future hard mats performance wise, perhaps no so much design wise. The design is definitely the not the 9HD's force, the small logos do not really do anything for the looks of it in my opinion.

AMD Athlon II X3 425 2.70 GHz

Omega — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:39:00 GMT

Introduction

After conquering the $100 price segment, AMD is introducing a cut down version of their Athlon II X4 processors to fill up the performance and price gap between entry level dual core models and recently introduced Athlon II X4 Quad Core processors. AMD's new Athlon II X3 Series, like its name suggests, is equipped with three logic cores, and is based on AMD's K10.5 architecture, like any other Athlon II or Phenom model.

The Athlon II X3 425 model we're reviewing today shares a lot of similarities with Athlon II X4 models, because it is based on a Propus Quad Core with one disabled core. Thus, the Rana core is born, at least on paper and yes, it is possible for the fourth core to be unlocked. Athlon II X3 425 is the cheapest, and slowest version (not including the energy efficient "e" models) working at 2.70 GHz, and with its affordable price tag of just $79, it threatens Intel's new Pentium models.

I would like to thank Links for providing the processor sample for this review.

Packaging and Contents

The Athlon II X3 425 comes in a retail package that includes a short installation manual, AMD Athlon II X3 case-badge, AMD-certified aluminum heatsink, and of course the processor itself. AMD offers a 3-year warranty for all retail processors, including this one.

Athlon II X3 425

If you read our Athlon II X4 620 review published recently, everything you've read there applies here as well. Athlon II X3 series, with one disabled core, is the Athlon II X4 processor. It's based on same Propus core like Athlon II X4, but because one core is disabled, AMD renamed it to Rana. No other modifications or changes have been done, so like Athlon II X4 it supports AM2+ and AM3 sockets, as well as DDR2 up to 1066 MHz and DDR3 memory up to 1333 MHz.

The Athlon II X3 425 is clocked at 2.70 GHz which puts it ahead of the Athlon II X4 620 by 100 MHz, and makes it 200 MHz slower than the fastest Dual Core Athlon II X2 250. Considering it has three cores and a price tag of $79, this sounds like a real sweet spot for a budget CPU. AMD has set a very high operational voltage of 1.425 for this processor, just like with the Athlon II X4 series, which results in higher power consumption and more heat output. But for some overclockers this could also mean higher overclocking potential with stock voltage. The TDP rating for Athlon II X3 models is set to 95W, same as on the Quad Core Athlon II models. Of course, I will be checking undervolting capabilities of Athlon II X3 425, as well as unlocking options.

Since the Athlon II X3 series is based on a Propus-derived Rana core, it is missing the L3 cache and has just 512 KB of L2 cache memory per core. This will have a serious impact on performance in some benchmarks, with gaming taking the biggest hit. By removing the L3 cache memory, AMD significantly reduced the core die size which measures 168 mm�. A smaller die means lower manufacturing costs, which results in lower prices for end customers. But by removing the L3 cache, AMD also removed one of the most important features of the K10.5 architecture: its large and fast memory buffer for CPU instructions which can be shared between all cores. Without L3 cache, the CPU cores have to wait for instructions from much slower system memory, resulting in performance drops in some applications. Performance scaling is also weakened, because no matter how fast the CPU is clocked, it still has to wait for instructions from system memory to process any fast clocked workload.

Athlon II X3 425 is connected to the rest of your PC components through Northbridge via HyperTransport interconnect which provides up to 16 GB/s bandwidth. More than enough bandwidth even for quad CrossFireX setups.

As far as other technology implementations go, there are no changes compared to AMD's Athlon II X4 series, which means Athlon II X3 is supporting everything that the top model Phenoms support, including MMX, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4A instructions, Enhanced 3DNow!, NX bit, AMD64, Cool'n'Quiet, and AMD-V virtualization technology.

If you are thinking about overclocking, it is recommended to have decent memory and motherboard as the multiplier is locked to 13.5, and overclocking must be done via increasing the HT Link value.

Specifications

In the table below you can review detailed specifications of Athlon II X3 425 and other models that will show up later in the performance graphs. Intel's closest price competitor is the new Pentium E6x00 series, to be exact, the Pentium E6300 Dual Core model clocked at 2.8 GHz.

Processor	AMD Sempron 140	AMD Athlon II X2 240	AMD Athlon II X3 425	AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE	AMD Athlon II X4 620	AMD Phenom II X3 710	Intel Celeron E1600	Intel Pentium E5200	Intel Pentium E6300	Intel Core 2 Duo E7600	Intel Core 2 Duo E8200	Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200
Number of cores	Single	Dual	Triple	Dual	Quad	Triple	Dual	Dual	Dual	Dual	Dual	Quad
Core codename	Sargas	Regor	Rana	Callisto	Propus	Heka	Allendale	Wolfdale 3M	Wolfdale 3M	Wolfdale 3M	Wolfdale	Yorkfield 6M
Socket	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	LGA775	LGA775	LGA775	LGA775	LGA775	LGA775
Core speed	2700 MHz	2800 MHz	2700 MHz	3100 MHz	2600 MHz	2600 MHz	2400 MHz	2500 MHz	2800 MHz	3060 MHz	2660 MHz	2330 MHz
L2 Cache	1 MB	1 MB/core	512 KB/core	512 KB/core	512 KB/core	512 KB/core	512 KB	2 MB	2 MB	3 MB	6 MB	4 MB
L3 Cache	-	-	-	6 MB	-	6 MB	-	-	-	-	-	-
Process Node	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	65 nm	45nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm
Core die size	117 mm�	117 mm�	168 mm�	258 mm�	168 mm�	258 mm�	77 mm�	82 mm�	82 mm�	82mm�	107 mm�	164 mm�
TDP	45 W	65 W	95 W	80 W	95 W	95 W	65 W	65 W	65 W	65 W	65 W	95 W
Price	$ 40	$ 60	$ 79	$ 102	$ 99	$ 109	$ 62	$ 67	$ 81	$ 145	EOL	$ 140

Test Systems

Test System
Motherboard:	AMD: Asus M4A79T Deluxe Intel: Asus P5QC ASRock P45X3 Deluxe for Core 2 Duo E8200
Cooler:	Stock HSF
Memory:	2 x 2048 MB G.Skill Perfect Storm PC-16000 DDR3 @ 1333 MHz 7-7-7 @ 1066 MHz 7-7-7 for E6x00 / E7x00 @ 800 MHz 5-5-5 for Celeron/Pentium E5x00
Graphic card	Sapphire HD4890 BattleStation Edition
Harddisk:	Samsung HD161HJ 160 GB
Power Supply:	Enermax Liberty 620 W
Software:	Windows Vista 32-bit SP2
Drivers:	Catalyst 9.9

Below you can see the entire list of programs used to test our processors. Most of the tests make good use of multithreading, but just like real-life situations, there are some tests that prefer higher clock frequencies over number of cores or size of L2/L3 cache buffer.

Benchmark Suite

Everest Ultimate 5.02 - Read/Write/Copy/Latency
PC Mark Vantage
3D Mark Vantage v1.0.1 Performance preset
wPrime 32M v2.0

Handbrake 0.9.3 - DVD rip to .mkv
Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate v5.1.20 - Quicktime 1080p encode to MPEG-4
DivX Converter 7.0 - AVI encode with Home Theater preset

BonkEncoder v1.0.13 FLAC encode with LAME MP3 320 kbs
I'm Too Audio Encoder v2.1.77 - WMA encode with LAME MP3 320 kbs

Photoshop CS4
Cinebench R10
Blender 2.49
POV Ray 3.7b

7zip v4.65 32 MB mutithreding
WinRAR 3.9 Benchmark
WinRAR 3.9 compression - 688 MB file

Tom Clancy's HAWX v1.1 - high details
Resident Evil 5 benchmark - medium details
Section 8 v1.0 - high details
GTR Evolution v1.0 - high details, Level 1 AA
Far Cry 2 v1.3 - DirectX 10, High Details

Prime95 for maximum heat and consumption
CPU-Z 1.52
AMD Overdrive 3.02

Everest Ultimate

Everest is great for quick diagnostic of computer components and for checking some of the CPU's basic synthetic performance, as well as memory bandwidth and latency. Everest Ultimate version 5.02 is used to check the Memory Read/Write/Copy/Latency performance.

The lack of L3 cache in Sempron and Athlon II models actually increases the system memory performance, but since these are just theoretical numbers, they do not represent real life performance of processors.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Possibly the best known and widely used synthetic benchmark, 3D Mark Vantage tests the gaming performance of the PC. PC Mark Vantage on the other hand tests other performance aspects of the PC like video encoding, home entertainment multimedia features, working in an office environment, and basic gaming.

Futuremak's synthetic benchmarks ranks Athlon II X3 425 quite high with performance being equal or even better than Phenom II X3 710. Apparently, L3 cache memory plays little part in these tests.

3D Mark Vantage

PC Mark Vantage

wPrime 32M

Prime is a benchmarking application designed to use a highly multithreaded approach to calculate the square-roots of large amounts of numbers, primarily used by overclockers to check the stability and performance of overclocked CPUs.

BonkEncoder

BonkEncoder is a small end free audio encoder with a wide range of supported audio formats. For this test we encode high quality .flac files into MP3 format via LAME codec.
Despite achieving 100% load on all cores while encoding, the benchmark prefers higher clocked CPUs and uses just a single core to process the workload. Intel CPUs dominate both audio encoding benchmark tests.

I'm Too Audio Encoder

I�m Too Audio Encoder is representing commercial versions of audio encoders. It�s easy to use, with broad audio format support, and for this test it is used to encode an audio CD to high quality MP3. As source we use the CD's disc image which is mounted as a virtual drive.

Handbrake 0.9.3

Handbrake video encoding utility is small, free, easy to use and works great when encoding DVDs to MKV files. For this test the first three chapters of the "U2 Go Home" DVD are encoded to MKV format using the Film preset. It uses the x264 codec with AC3 audio. The time in seconds represents how long it takes the CPU to encode the video. Measurements include both passes. As you can see from the graphs it scales almost perfectly with multithreaded CPUs.

Since Handbrake distributes the workload evenly between all CPU cores, Athlon II X3 425 is ranked quite high, thanks to its three cores and 2.70 GHz clock.

Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate 5.1

Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate is great when you need to do a lot of day to day small video encoding from one format to another. It has an extremely wide range of encoding presets and supports almost every known video format. For this test the MPEG-4 preset is used to encode a 1080p high definition trailer.

Surprisingly commercial versions of video encoders seem to be stuck with using just two cores fully, while load on the third and fourth core varies from 15-25%. Higher clock frequencies do make a difference in this test.

DivX Converter 7.0

A long time ago DivX was the format almost everyone used every day and now, finally it�s getting the x264 codec with its 7.0 version. Too little, too late and with bad multithreading support, but still used by wide range of users.

From bad to worst, as far as multithreading performance goes, DivX shows mixed results with slower clocked models lined at the back of the grid.

Photoshop CS4

A must-have tool for all photographers and graphics designers, Adobe Photoshop allows you to create wonders out of poorly taken photos. A small custom action is used to test the basic CPU performance in Adobe�s Photoshop CS4.

Cinebench R10

3D rendering tools are also used to test CPU performance. Cinebench R10, Blender and POV Ray simulate real world performance with integrated benchmark scripts.
3D rendering has been Intel's home ground for a long time, but AMD is making progress with its new models and is not that far behind Intel's processors.

Blender 2.49

POV Ray 3.7b

File Compression

7Zip is free archiving tool and strong alternative to popular WinRAR. Integrated benchmark scripts are used in both 7Zip and WinRAR to test the performance of CPUs with multithreading enabled. One real life test with WinRAR is simulated while measuring the time needed to compress a ~700MB image file. We can see that multithreading support does not work so good like it does in benchmark scripts.

Just like video encoding, AMD's processors seem to love working with archives and show really decent performance levels. For the first time Athlon II X3 425 shows significantly slower performance than Phenom II X3 710 due to the lack of L3 cache.

7Zip 32MB

WinRAR 3.9 Benchmark

WinRAR 3.9 compressing

Gaming Tests

And finally some gaming benchmarks, the favorite review page for all gamers. Five popular and new titles are chosen to represent every game genre. Far Cry 2 and Section 8 for FPS gamers, Resident Evil 5 for adventure gamers, HAWX and GTR Evolution for simulation gamers. GTR Evolution is a bit older but it shows how it is done when it comes to using multiple cores on a CPU.

In game quality details for all resolutions are set to following:

Tom Clancy's HAWX v1.1 - high details
Resident Evil 5 benchmark - medium details
Section 8 v1.0 - high details
GTR Evolution v1.0 - high details, Level 1 AA
Far Cry 2 v1.3 - DirectX 10, High Detail

As seen in previous benchmark graphs, Athlon II X3 425 has no problem producing on par performance with the $109 Phenom II X3 710 - thanks to the 100 MHz faster clock speed. Most of the general computing applications don't take that much of a performance drop with L3 cache removed, but gaming wise, it's a whole different story.

In most gaming tests Athlon II X3 425 produces more or less identical performance as Athlon II X4 620. That may sound good, but you should take in consideration that Athlon II X4 620 is struggling to beat the dual core Phenom II X2 550, and AMD's triple core Phenom II X3 710 is most of the time way out of reach. Simply put, Athlon II X3 and X4 series are not designed for gamers, that doesn't mean they can't run games, but are rather aimed at average budget users.

Far Cry 2

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Resident Evil 5

GTR Evolution

Section 8 System Power Consumption

The four result values are as following:

AMD Cool'n'Quiet / Intel SpeedStep: Windows Vista with Aero off, sitting at the desktop (1920x1080 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Processors have their power saving technology enabled, left in idle until power draw is stable.
Idle: Windows Vista with Aero off, sitting at the desktop (1920x1080 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Processors have their power saving technology disabled, left in idle until power draw is stable.
Load: Prime95 is used to increase load on all available cores and measurements are taken when power draw is stable.

AMD's Athlon II X3 425 ranks high on the power consumption board. AMD's Cool & Quiet manages to improve the idle power draw a bit, but without it Athlon II X3 425 draws considerably more power than its competitors, especially when under load. Numbers are still okay for this kind of processor, but AMD needs to improve this in future versions.

Undervolting capabilities were tested as well. As it turns out, our sample can maintain stable operation at 2.70 GHz with just 1.150 V core voltage, while stock core voltage is set by AMD to 1.425 V. Under idle this lower voltage brings ~10 W lower power draw, while under load low voltage Athlon II X3 425 can save up to ~35 W of power compared to the stock model.

Temperatures

During tests AMD Athlon II X3 425 was cooled with the stock heatsink provided in the packaging. Although operating temperatures are very good, the noise that the stock cooler produces is sometimes unbearable.

Overclocking and Unlocking

Yes, the Athlon X3 425 has one core locked. Yes, it can be unlocked with the proper motherboard, and yes, I did manage do unlock my tested sample to a full Quad Core Athlon II X4.

Trying out the maximum overclock for Athlon II X3 425 pushed the CPU up to 3.51 GHz using 1.500 V core voltage. Bumping the voltages higher did not produce any additional overclock headroom. After finding the max overclock for CPU, HTT and Memory, multipliers were adjusted and the final result was 3.51 GHz core clock, 2080 MHz for HTT and Northbridge and 1390 MHz for system memory.

When trying to unlock the fourth core, additional voltage was needed even on stock settings. To make four cores stable at 2.70 GHz, 1.4525 V core voltage was needed, suggesting the lower quality of the locked core. Surprisingly the processor did manage to achieve the same overclocked frequencies with the unlocked core - but 1.525 V core voltage was needed. Any further voltage bumps did not result in any increase of maximum overclock. Because overclocking had to be done via HT Link, this same clock speed achieved by stock and unlocked cores could suggest a HT Link wall was hit at ~260 MHz.

Overclocked results in a few benchmarks are shown below, as well as power consumption and temperature measurements. Athlon II X3 425 overclocked, with three cores, is shown in green, and overclocked, with four cores, results are shown in blue. Notice the small performance increase in gaming tests, regardless of speed increase or unlocked core.

Resident Evil 5

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Cinebench and Handbrake

System Power Consumption

Value and Conclusion

	AMD is pricing their Athlon II X3 425 at $79.
	Great performance Fair price Low heat output Undervolting and unlocking capabilities
	Gaming performance High stock voltage and power consumption Bad performance scaling when overclocked
9.0	In the end, Athlon II X3 425 left me with mixed feelings. Compared to its main competitor, Intel Pentium E6300, it wins in almost every benchmark, including games, and is still cheaper. Intel lowered the price of its entry-level Quad Core model Q8200, but considering performance compared to Athlon II X4 620 or Athlon II X3 it's still heavily overpriced. Intel's fastest Core 2 Duo E7600 with its 3.06 GHz clock manages to compete with AMD's X3 425 in some not so multi-threaded benchmarks, but as soon as there are more than two cores used during calculations, the E7600 drops behind the Athlon's performance� and it costs almost twice as much as the X3 425. If Intel doesn't do some serious price adjustments, they have nothing that can compete against AMD's entire Athlon II lineup in the same price segment. But that doesn't seem to bother Intel for now, as they concentrate their efforts on the upcoming dual core processors for LGA1156 platform. AMD's biggest concern for now is the fact that they are making competition for themselves. On paper, the Athlon II X2, X3 and X4 price and performance categorization looks great, but in real life, it's a real mess, especially for non-experienced buyers. As shown in this review, Athlon II X3 425 manages to perform on par with the more expensive Athlon II X4 620 in most tests, thanks to its 100 MHz higher clock. This is because most of the applications still can't efficiently use all four CPU cores, and the only tests in which the Athlon II X4 manages to justify its higher price tag are the ones that are really optimized for multithreading, such as Handbrake, 3D rendering and graphics, archiving applications, and some games. Another problem is the presence of the lower-end Phenom II dual and triple core models, they aren't that much more expensive, but come with 6 MB L3 cache which helps in gaming and other benchmarks. So in a $30 price range you will find AMD's Athlon II Dual Core, Triple Core and Quad Core models, as well as Phenom II Dual Core and Triple Core processors. Since each one of these has its specific benefits and shortcomings, it creates a different choice for the user. Power consumption and gaming performance are the weakest points of the Athlon II X3 425. With stock voltage it draws considerably more than Intel's CPUs, although this can be modified with some voltage tweaks. Unlike power draw, there is no quick fix for gaming performance. It's still faster in games compared to Intel dual cores, and it will satisfy the needs of casual gamers, but you would do better with an entry-level Phenom II X3 700 model. Overclocking potential is nothing special, but still a welcome bonus. The only problem with overclocking is that performance increases do not scale with clocks. As mentioned earlier, at one point it doesn't matter if your Athlon II runs a few hundred MHz faster, because it can't receive instructions and data fast enough to process them. This situation can be clearly seen in gaming benchmarks with overclocked settings. So if you are building a budget HTPC or general use PC, dual core Athlon II models will do fine. If more budget CPU power is needed, Athlon II X3 or X4 models are a great choice, and for budget gamers Phenom II X3 models are still the best. As for our Athlon II X3 425 model, considering the price/performance/power consumption/overclocking, it really is in the middle of everything, and makes it harder to draw the line when you really need more than two, and fewer than four CPU cores.

Intel Pentium E6300 2.80 GHz

Omega — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:36:10 GMT

Introduction

After AMD launched its reincarnated Athlon II series of processors, Intel needed to find a quick fix to maintain lower end segment performance leadership, until new generation of LGA 1156 Pentiums and Core i3 processors are ready for the market. While the old Pentium E5x00 models are still good enough to compete with dual core Athlon II X2 models, there was a large price and performance gap between those and higher end Core 2 Duos, a gap that came under heavy attack when AMD launched triple core Athlon II X3 and quad core Athlon II X4 processors.

Intel's Pentium E6x00 family is higher a clocked Pentium with more FSB bandwidth. Based on the Wolfdale 2M core, these dual core processors have a difficult task ahead - fight off AMD's cheap and effective Athlon II processors.

I would like to thank Links for providing the processor sample for this review.

Packaging and Contents

The Pentium E6300 comes in a retail package that includes a short installation manual, Intel Pentium case-badge, Intel-certified aluminum heatsink, and of course the processor itself. Intel offers a 3-year warranty for all retail processors, including this one.

Pentium E6300

The new Pentium E6300 is based on a 45 nm Wolfdale 2M core, which is derivate of the Wolfdale core with 6 MB of L2 cache. Cache reduction to 2 MB of total L2 cache resulted in a processor that has a die size of only 82 mm�. While carrying the same family name, Pentium E6300 models have little in common with the older Core 2 Duo E6x00 series which were based on Conroe 65 nm cores.

Pentiums E6x00 are here to replace the soon to be EOL-ed E5x00 family, and except for higher clocks E6x00 models don't bring anything new to the market. Both cores on E6300 run at 2.80 GHz while the FSB speed has been increased from 800 MHz to 1066 MHz. This translates to DDR2 or DDR3 1066 MHz support, higher bandwidth and small performance increases per clock over E5x00 the Pentium family. With Pentium E6x00, Intel's Virtualization Technology is finally available on lower end models, and other than that there are no more differences between Pentium E6x00 and E5x00 processors.
Pentium's E6300 operational voltage ranges from 0.85 V to 1.3625 V, and on our tested sample it was set to 1.275 V. Maximum power consumption or TDP is rated at 65 W.

Pentium E6300 is based on Intel's "older" architecture and is LGA775 compatible, its memory controller is located in the motherboard Northbridge chipset which is connected to the processor via FSB bus communication, so you can expect lower memory performance and bigger latencies with these models. FSB bus support also determines maximum supported memory speed, and with 1066 MHz FSB bus on Pentium E6300 it supports DDR2 or DDR3 memory up to 1066 MHz. Memory type is dependant on the motherboard chipset and choice of memory type. Comparing it to newer generations of AMD or Intel processors, E6300 is really simple in its inner workings making it very overclocking friendly .

Although Pentium E6300 is simpler in design compared to its main competitor, Athlon II, it is still faster clock per clock, so a stock frequency of 2.80 GHz makes it noticeably faster than dual core Athlon II X2 and almost on par with Phenom II X2 processors. But the problem is when you compare the prices of Pentium E6300 with AMD's lineup. Intel is confident that E6300's two faster cores are more than enough to combat AMD's triple core Athlon II X3 425, hence the similar price tag. Pentium E6300 is also much more expensive than Athlon II X2 240, so it will have to offer some impressive numbers to justify its heavier price tag.

Specifications

In the table below you can review detailed specifications of Pentium E6300 and other models that will show up later in the performance graphs. AMD's competition in this market segment comes in form of the Athlon II X3 425 which has one extra core compared to Pentium E6300.

Processor	AMD Sempron 140	AMD Athlon II X2 240	AMD Athlon II X3 425	AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE	AMD Athlon II X4 620	AMD Phenom II X3 710	Intel Celeron E1600	Intel Pentium E5200	Intel Pentium E6300	Intel Core 2 Duo E7600	Intel Core 2 Duo E8200	Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200
Number of cores	Single	Dual	Triple	Dual	Quad	Triple	Dual	Dual	Dual	Dual	Dual	Quad
Core codename	Sargas	Regor	Rana	Callisto	Propus	Heka	Allendale	Wolfdale 2M	Wolfdale 2M	Wolfdale 3M	Wolfdale	Yorkfield 6M
Socket	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	AM2+/AM3	LGA775	LGA775	LGA775	LGA775	LGA775	LGA775
Core speed	2700 MHz	2800 MHz	2700 MHz	3100 MHz	2600 MHz	2600 MHz	2400 MHz	2500 MHz	2800 MHz	3060 MHz	2660 MHz	2330 MHz
L2 Cache	1 MB	1 MB/core	512 KB/core	512 KB/core	512 KB/core	512 KB/core	512 KB	2 MB	2 MB	3 MB	6 MB	4 MB
L3 Cache	-	-	-	6 MB	-	6 MB	-	-	-	-	-	-
Process Node	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	65 nm	45nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm	45 nm
Core die size	117 mm�	117 mm�	168 mm�	258 mm�	168 mm�	258 mm�	77 mm�	82 mm�	82 mm�	82mm�	107 mm�	164 mm�
TDP	45 W	65 W	95 W	80 W	95 W	95 W	65 W	65 W	65 W	65 W	65 W	95 W
Price	$ 37	$ 60	$ 79	$ 102	$ 99	$ 109	$ 62	$ 65	$ 81	$ 145	EOL	$ 150

Test Systems

Test System
Motherboard:	AMD: Asus M4A79T Deluxe Intel: Asus P5QC ASRock P45X3 Deluxe for Core 2 Duo E8200
Cooler:	Stock HSF
Memory:	2 x 2048 MB G.Skill Perfect Storm PC-16000 DDR3 @ 1333 MHz 7-7-7 @ 1066 MHz 7-7-7 for E6x00 / E7x00 @ 800 MHz 5-5-5 for Celeron/Pentium E5x00
Graphic card	Sapphire HD4890 BattleStation Edition
Harddisk:	Samsung HD161HJ 160 GB
Power Supply:	Enermax Liberty 620 W
Software:	Windows Vista 32-bit SP2
Drivers:	Catalyst 9.9

Benchmark Suite

Everest Ultimate 5.02 - Read/Write/Copy/Latency
PC Mark Vantage
3D Mark Vantage v1.0.1 Performance preset
wPrime 32M v2.0

Handbrake 0.9.3 - DVD rip to .mkv
Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate v5.1.20 - Quicktime 1080p encode to MPEG-4
DivX Converter 7.0 - AVI encode with Home Theater preset

BonkEncoder v1.0.13 FLAC encode with LAME MP3 320 kbs
I'm Too Audio Encoder v2.1.77 - WMA encode with LAME MP3 320 kbs

Photoshop CS4
Cinebench R10
Blender 2.49
POV Ray 3.7b

7zip v4.65 32 MB mutithreding
WinRAR 3.9 Benchmark
WinRAR 3.9 compression - 688 MB file

Tom Clancy's HAWX v1.1 - high details
Resident Evil 5 benchmark - medium details
Section 8 v1.0 - high details
GTR Evolution v1.0 - high details, Level 1 AA
Far Cry 2 v1.3 - DirectX 10, High Details

Prime95 for maximum heat and consumption
CPU-Z 1.52
AMD Overdrive 3.02

Everest Ultimate

Everest is great for quick diagnostic of computer components and for checking some of the CPU's basic synthetic performance, as well as memory bandwidth and latency. Everest Ultimate version 5.02 is used to check the Memory Read/Write/Copy/Latency performance.

All LGA775 processors show lower memory performance than its "green" competitors, due to the memory controller being located in the northbridge chipset. Pentium E6300 shows some impressive memory bandwidth improvements over E5x00 family.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Possibly the best known and widely used synthetic benchmark, 3D Mark Vantage tests the gaming performance of the PC. PC Mark Vantage on the other hand tests other performance aspects of the PC like video encoding, home entertainment multimedia features, working in an office environment, and basic gaming.

Futuremark's synthetic benchmarks give us a first glimpse at Pentium E6300 performance, and while it scores some decent numbers in total 3D Mark Vantage score, its main competitor Athlon II X3 425 is far out of reach in every other synthetic benchmark.

3D Mark Vantage

PC Mark Vantage

wPrime 32M

BonkEncoder

BonkEncoder is a small end free audio encoder with a wide range of supported audio formats. For this test we encode high quality .flac files into MP3 format via LAME codec.
Despite achieving 100% load on all cores while encoding, the benchmark prefers higher clocked CPUs. Single threaded and clock dependant audio encoding tests favor the new Pentium E6300 and rank it high on our performance graphs.

I'm Too Audio Encoder

Handbrake 0.9.3

Handbrake video encoding utility is small, free, easy to use and works great when encoding DVDs to MKV files. For this test the first three chapters of the "U2 Go Home" DVD are encoded to MKV format using the Film preset. It uses x264 codec with AC3 audio. Needed time in seconds is measured, how long it takes the CPU to encode the video. Measurements include both passes. As you can see from the graphs it scales almost perfectly with multithreaded CPUs.

The more multithreading optimized an application is, the more E6300 drops in performance. In handbrake, Pentium E6300 stands no chance against Athlon II X3 425, and can't even offer a significant performance gap ahed of the much cheaper Athlon II X2 240.

Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate 5.1

DivX Converter 7.0

Photoshop CS4

Cinebench R10

Blender 2.49

POV Ray 3.7b

File Compression

7Zip is free archiving tool and strong alternative to popular WinRAR. Integrated benchmark scripts are used in both 7Zip and WinRAR to test the performance of CPUs with multithreading enabled. One real life test with WinRAR is simulated while measuring the time needed to compress a ~700MB image file. We can see that multithreading support does not work so good like it does in benchmark scripts.

Just like video encoding, AMD's processors seem to love working with archives and show really decent performance levels. Pentium E6300 fails here in every test, ending up slower than Athlon II X2 240.

7Zip 32MB

WinRAR 3.9 Benchmark

WinRAR 3.9 compressing

Gaming Tests

Tom Clancy's HAWX v1.1 - high details
Resident Evil 5 benchmark - medium details
Section 8 v1.0 - high details
GTR Evolution v1.0 - high details, Level 1 AA
Far Cry 2 v1.3 - DirectX 10, High Detail

While Core 2 Duo based processors have always been praised as the best gamer's choice, the situation has changed alot, thanks to AMD. Today's games use at least two cores, but more and more of them go all the way to four cores, and performance of dual core processors falls behind with each new title.

As for Pentium E6300, it can offer some decent gaming performance thanks to its higher clock, but it's nowhere near Athlon II X3 425 in titles that are multithreading optimized. In those games that utilize only one or two cores, Pentium E6300 can offer on par or even better performance than Athlon II X3 425, but so can Athlon II X2 240.

Far Cry 2

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Resident Evil 5

GTR Evolution

Section 8 System Power Consumption

The four result values are as following:

AMD Cool'n'Quiet / Intel SpeedStep: Windows Vista with Aero off, sitting at the desktop (1920x1080 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Processors have their power saving technology enabled, left in idle until power draw is stable.
Idle: Windows Vista with Aero off, sitting at the desktop (1920x1080 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Processors have their power saving technology disabled, left in idle until power draw is stable.
Load: Prime95 is used to increase load on all available cores and measurements are taken when power draw is stable.

Power consumption is one of the best things with Core 2 processors. Intel's Pentium E6300 power draw is almost comparable to AMD's single core Sempron, which is really great to see from a budget dual core CPU.

We checked the undervolting capabilities too. As it turns out, our sample can maintain stable operation at 2.80 GHz with just 1.055 V core voltage, while stock core voltage is set by Intel to 1.275 V. Under idle lower voltage this brings no improvements to power consumption but shaves off another 13 W in load state.

Overclocking and Temperatures

Pentium E6300 is based on the R0 revision of Wolfdale 2M core, which should have removed FSB wall and improved maximum overclock using lower voltages. Overclocking is done by simply raising the FSB bus frequency and keeping in check the memory multipliers. Final result is an impressive 3.90 GHz with 1.40 V core voltage in BIOS. Due to small VDrop, effective voltage varied between 1.375-1.40 V. Overclocking was done using the stock cooler making the result even more impressive, and with some decent cooling the result could have been even better.

Bellow you can review Pentium E6300 performance gains when overclocked. Stock settings are highlighted with blue and overclocked with green bar.

Resident Evil 5

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Cinebench and Handbrake

System Power Consumption

Value and Conclusion

	Intel is pricing their Pentium E6300 at $81.
	Low power consumption and heat output Balanced performance Overclocking potential Undervolting capabilities
	Price Very expensive performance
7.5	All in all, the new and improved Pentium E6300 can make a great choice. It has everything a budget processor should have. It has good performance in almost every benchmark, not great but still good for a budget CPU. It has extremely low power draw, both in load and idle states, it's easy to keep at cool temperatures and even the stock cooling can run very silent. Intel even added the virtualization technology so small companies can enjoy XP mode on Windows 7 if needed. For budget overclockers or those who seek passive HTPC components this little fellow is a great choice. Performance gains with overclocked settings are really great, and in most cases it can offer the performance of budget quad core models while keeping the power consumption within reasonable limits. But in the end, it all comes down to its pricing, and with Pentium E6300 Intel completely missed the spot. Pentium E6300 is being directly priced against Athlon II X3 425, which has much better performance in almost every benchmark, and it�s a few bucks cheaper too. Pentium E6300 is also about $20 more expensive than Athlon II X2 240 and in most cases it cannot justify the price difference with just performance. Considering the total platform costs, especially with recent DDR2/DDR3 memory price gap despairing, you would be better off with AMD's AM3 platform, accompanied by an Athlon II processor if you're looking for a budget system that can serve as HTPC, gaming and every day usage computer. Pentium E6300 is just a time killer until the real deal 32 nm Westmere cores arrives next month.

Sapphire HD 5750 1 GB GDDR5

W1zzard — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:46:17 GMT

Introduction

During this fall, AMD has been releasing their new Radeon HD 5000 Series cards. Currently, the smallest model is the Radeon HD 5750, which uses the same Juniper GPU as the HD 5770, but with lesser shaders, and reduced clock speeds.

Unlike with the big Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 models, for the Radeon HD 5700 series, add-in-board partners are allowed to make changes to the design right from the start to ensure optimal pricing, availability or other unique selling points they may have.

Sapphire's HD 5750 uses an AMD reference PCB, but with a typical Sapphire blue PCB. As cooler, Sapphire uses an in-house design that has been used on other HD 4xxx Series cards before.

	GeForce 9600 GT	Radeon HD 4830	Radeon HD 4770	GeForce GTS 250	Radeon HD 4850	Radeon HD 5750	Radeon HD 4870	Radeon HD 5770
Shader units	64	640	640	128	800	720	800	800
ROPs	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16
GPU	G94	RV770	RV740	G92	RV770	Juniper	RV770	Juniper
Transistors	505M	956M	826M	754M	956M	1040M	956M	1040M
Memory Size	512 MB	512 MB	512 MB	1024 MB	512 MB	1024 MB	512 MB	1024 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	256 bit	128 bit	256 bit	256 bit	128 bit	256 bit	128 bit
Core Clock	650 MHz	575 MHz	750 MHz	738 MHz	625 MHz	700 MHz	750 MHz	850 MHz
Memory Clock	900 MHz	900 MHz	800 MHz	1100 MHz	993 MHz	1150 MHz	900 MHz	1200 MHz
Price	$80	$95	$110	$140	$100	$139	$130	$159

Packaging

Sapphire's box looks well styled, even though I find the green as dominant color not too appropriate. You will easily find all important product specs on the package.

You will receive:

Graphics card
DVI to analog adapter
Dirt 2 coupon (for Steam version)
Driver CD + Manual
PCI-E power cable
CrossFire bridge
ArcSoft SimHD

The Card

Compared to the stylish AMD coolers, the Sapphire cooler doesn't look too impressive. Let me tell you at this point already, it does an excellent job and runs very quiet on top of that.

Like all other HD 5000 cards, the design requires two slots in your system.

The card has two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. This is just one of many output configurations that are possible on the new cards, thanks to the overhauled display output logic. Basically the card can drive six TMDS signals that can be combined in any way (a dual-link DVI consumes two TMDS lines).

For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.

Crossfire configurations are supported to improve performance even further.

Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

Sapphire has chosen to use a fairly simple cooler design that doesn't require any heatpipes. A central copper core soaks up heat quickly and gives it off to the surrounding fins which sit in airflow created by a fan. Please note that the copper you see is a copper cylinder going all the way to the top of the heatsink - not just a base plate.

Operation of the card requires one six-pin PCI-E power connector. Power consumption is low, but in the worst case slightly higher than 75W which would be allowed without power connector.

The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).

The GPU voltage is managed by a uP6201BQ voltage controller (same as on many HD 4770 designs).

This is AMD's new Juniper GPU, it comes with 1040 million transistors, and is produced on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.

Test System

Test System
CPU:	Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 & ICH10R
Memory:	3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 @ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	BFG ES-800 800W
Software:	Windows Vista 32-bit SP2
Drivers:	NVIDIA: 186.18 ATI: Catalyst 9.6 HD 57xx/58xx: 8.66 RC6 (AMD recommended reviewer driver)
Display:	LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600

Performance of the Radeon HD 5750 was simulated by disabling a SIMD unit and reducing clocks to 700 / 1150, which delivers exactly the same performance as a real HD 5750.

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

BattleForge

Call of Duty 4

Call of Juarez 2

Company Of Heroes

Crysis

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Far Cry

Far Cry 2

FEAR

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Prey

Quake 4

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

Team Fortress 2

Unreal Tournament 3

World In Conflict

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

Power Consumption

Idle: Windows Vista Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle until power draw is stable.
Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (12 per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. Highest single reading during the test.
Maximum: Furmark Stability Test at 1280x1024, 0xAA. This results in a very high non-game power consumption that can typically be reached only with stress testing applications. Card left running stress test until power draw converged to a stable value.

Sapphire's HD 5750 excels with extremely low power consumption in all scenarios. Especially its low idle power consumption makes it an interesting choice for people who work on the desktop most of the day, resulting in considerable power savings.

Fan Noise

In the past years users would accept everything just to get more performance. Nowadays this has changed with people being more aware of the fan noise and power consumption of their graphic cards.
In order to properly test the fan noise a card emits we are using a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.

The tested graphics card is installed in a system that is completely passively cooled. That is passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard and Solid-State HDD.
This setup allows us to eliminate secondary noise sources and test only the video card. To be more compliant with standards like DIN 45635 (we are not claiming to be fully DIN 45635 certified) the measurement is conducted at 100 cm distance and 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room is well below 20 dbA for all measurements. Please note that the dbA scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. 40 dbA is not twice as loud as 20 dbA. A 3 dbA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dbA increase doubles the perceived sound level.

When I first saw the cooler on Sapphire's HD 5750, I was thoroughly disappointed, even before seeing it in action! During the review however, the cooler could impress and change my opinion. The card is one of the quietest I ever had the pleasure of working with, it leads the "fan noise load" test group by quite a margin. It is not only quiet but the temperatures look great too, below 70� under load.

Performance Summary

Performance per Watt

This graph was created by taking the relative performance numbers and putting them in contrast to the average power consumption results.

Performance per Dollar

Overclocking

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies, we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.

The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 20.3%.

Temperatures

Temperatures are really low. Even with massive overclocking, the temperatures are in a perfectly safe range. On top of that the fan is whisper quiet - full score for Sapphire!

Value and Conclusion

	Sapphire's initial price for the HD 5750 is $140, I expect we will see that drop down to ~$120 very soon.
	Very quiet Very low power consumption Massive overclocking potential Reasonably priced Support for DirectX 11, DirectX 10.1 Low temperatures GDDR5 memory Dirt 2 voucher included Support for AMD EyeFinity Technology Native HDMI & DisplayPort Improvements to integrated HDMI audio device
	Not the best price/performance ratio DirectX 11 won't be relevant for quite a while Not as visually appealing as HD 5770 reference design No support for CUDA / PhysX
9.4	Sapphire's Radeon HD 5750 is a worthy addition to the new HD 5000 Series lineup. Even though it might not win any beauty contest against AMD's reference design HD 5770, which comes with a very stylish modern looking cooler, it can score high on all other criteria. Performance is decent, sitting right between the HD 4850 and HD 4870. Due to its more power efficient design it can take leading spots in idle power consumption and performance per Watt. If you spend most of your day at the desktop idle, working office apps or surfing the Web, the ~20W saved might be able to make quite a difference over time. It should also be noted that even though the cooler looks neither sexy nor powerful it offers excellent cooling performance, which allows Sapphire to run at very quiet fan speeds, offering a very enjoyable work and gaming experience with their new HD 5750. Our sample showed some impressive overclocking capabilities. Both core and and memory could be overclocked by well over 20%. If you are willing to go this route, you could easily save some money and get performance similar to the HD 5770 or HD 4870. When looking at pure performance per buck you will be disappointed however. AMD's HD 4850 can be had at substantially lower price levels (-30%) than the HD 5750 and offers similar performance (-8%). I have to admit that the new features like DirectX 11, EyeFinity, native HDMI & DisplayPort warrant a price increase, but these features are not important for everyone. So the bottom line is: if you want the best bang for the buck right now, go with the HD 4850. If you want a longer term investment in future technologies, check out the HD 5750.

Beta Brainwavz In-ears

Frederik S — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:09:37 GMT

Introduction

MP4Nation is a company that produces some rather interesting cheap in-ears. Today we will be having a look at their newest model dubbed Beta Brainwavz. The MP4Nation Beta Brainwavz look pretty common, but do not let the looks fool you. These in-ears feature an 11 mm diameter driver which is huge by in-ear standards, where most in-ears use 9 mm diameter drivers. Besides the odd driver size the Betas come with a wealth of accessories compared to other cheap models. Beta Brainwavz are sold by MP4Nation and are actually supplied with several of their portable media players. They are also available separately with or without a FiiO E5 for $44.50.

Specifications

Driver: 11mm CCAW (copper-clad aluminum wire) dynamic driver
Impedance: 24 Ohm (+/- 20%) @ 1kHz
Sensitivity: 110dB @ 1mW
Frequency response: 8Hz – 28kHz
Cable: 125cm, Y-style, 45� angled 3.5mm gold-plated plug
Accessories: Silicon tips, foam tips, shirt clip, fishbone winder, screw-on filters

Specification wise there is nothing wrong with the Beta Brainwavz, however, they do appear to be slightly optimistic about the frequency response of the drivers, 8 Hz to 28 kHz is beyond reach for any dynamic driver at least if linearity is considered a goal.

The Package

MP4Nation's Betas ship in a neat looking black cardboard box. The box is absolutely stuffed with both essential accessories and goodies that you might find use for along the way. Besides the earphones you get a nicely padded little bag, a cable clip, two clips, a set of filters. The bundle takes after the SoundMagic earphones in the sense that they both ship with a huge bundle.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were a lot of tips included, however, non of them seemed to fit my particular ears that well. MP4Nation are currently updating the tips and the new bundle will provide tips with a bigger range in size and design, in order to make sure that everyone can get a good fit.

The cable quality is really good, not the least microphonic. It is better than what is on recent models from SoundMagic.

Closer Examination

One of the things that surprised me the most about the Betas was how good they look and feel. Compared to the SoundMagic PL30 earphones we recently reviewed, these are a class above in terms of build quality and finish.

Another interesting feature of the MP4Nation Betas is that you can alter the frequency response somewhat by installing a small filter on the nozzle. The filter is as you can see just a small metal mesh installed on a finger friendly nut.

Sound nozzle wise the Betas stand out a bit, because of both the dimensions and the thread for installing the filter. Even though the nozzle diameter is a bit smaller than that of my Head-Direct and Ultimate Ears in-ears I was still able to fit the tips to it, however, they were not held in place that securely. So if you are going to spring for aftermarket tips, be sure to try them on first or have a close look at the measurements.

The cable entry to the earphones is slightly beefier than the rest of the cable which should help to prevent cable breakage near the entry. The reinforcement is just as soft as the cable so it does not upset insertion or prohibits you from using the earphones with the cable wrapped over your ears.

On the back side of the Beta there is a small L/R-indicator which is easy to spot even in bad lighting conditions. Also worth noticing is the symmetrical housing which enables you to use the earphones both with the cable over and under your ear.

Performance

Before I began testing these in-ears I had them burning in for well over 150 hours in order to make sure they were sounding their best. To test the full capabilities of the earphones I tested them both with my PMP which is a Cowon D2 and with my HifiMAN EF2 being fed lossless files from my PC via ASIO4ALL and Foobar2000. The first thing you notice with these in-ears is their warm and full sound, especially so with the filters on. Without the filters, the upper midrange and treble is a bit more forward, which in this case is not all that good because it has a coarse sound to it, but that is manageable by using the filters. It is not a cure, it just dampens it sufficiently in order to make the earphones more entertaining to listen to.

The force of these particular in-ears is the midrange, which is well rounded and warm, but detail wise it lacks quite a bit to beat a set of Head-Direct RE2s or iMetal iM-590s for example. By comparison the Beta sound more veiled and slow.

The bass has weight to it once you get a good fit, more so than the SoundMagic in-ears we recently covered. Bass extension on the other hand is not that good, but still better than most sub $50 in-ears. These in-ears work very well for most types of music because of their natural warmness which makes them very forgiving. Even though the bass is not overwhelming in any sense, not even when coupled with the Beta's decent midbass hump. What it is lacking is punch for drums etc.

The high end is quite rolled off and a bit shill, it sounds a bit on the artificial side, the hi-hats just sound slightly off for some reason. For classical music these will not cut it. The complexity of the music will make all its faults easily recognizable.

Soundstage wise the Beta have very little to show and basically give the same left / right presentation like all of the other entry level in-ears I have heard. Their warmness also puts a mighty damper on the spaciousness of the sound.

There is no air and instruments are very vaguely defined. For me their presentation is about what I would expect, I am a bit detail-centric and hence I would be easier to sway if the midrange was more precise in its reproduction, but you cannot have it all. All things considered I really digg the earphones for what they are, cheap, fun sounding in-ears.

When it comes to sensitivity these are about average, I am sure that the average PMP can power these to their full capabilities, which makes them a good purchase for a reasonably priced portable rig.

Durability

These in-ears are well built and come with a padded bag. Although not a hard-shell it will provide ample protection for normal every day use. The construction of the earpieces is very simple and with few joints so I would expect them to last a long time. The cable is likewise simple in its construction and the entry points on the earpieces are reinforced adequately.

Value and Conclusion

	The Beta Brainwavz can be had for $34.50
	Well executed design Above average build quality Somewhat customizable sound Good sound quality for the price Attractive looks Bundle Price! ($44.50 incl. a FiiO E5 or $39.50 incl a FiiO E3)
	Included tips are not that great Sound quality
8.5	The MP4Nation Beta Brainwavz definitely hold their own against the other entry level in-ears I have heard over the past year, however, it is clear that there is still a long way from the entry level in-ears to the ones that can best be described as low mid-end. If you take into account the low price of these in-ears it becomes very clear that you get good value for money if you are looking for a fun sounding set of in-ears. The bundle includes all the stuff you really need and then some which makes the Betas a good, well rounded package for about $40. If you are looking to create a cheap portable rig the Betas would definitely be on my short list.

A.C. Ryan PlayON! DVR TV

Darksaber — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:22:21 GMT

Introduction

I would like to thank CaseKing.de for supplying the review sample.

CaseKing is one of the few companies out there, which will not just sell anything. They only offer hardware that performs well and is of high quality. The shop carries quite a few exclusive parts and devices from all around the world and it is also the official distributor for a long list of well known manufacturers. Their assortment has grown substantially in recent years, while great service and support is still a very important part of the shop philosophy. The website may be in German, but due to great demand an English version is also available.

We will be taking a closer look at the A.C. Ryan PlayOn! DVR TV. This is a multimedia hard drive enclosure, which comes equipped with multiple networking interfaces, traditional USB 2.0 connectivity and a HDMI out, so that you can display 720P video on your LCD or Plasma TV easily. You can also use the it as a DVR to record both analog and digital (DVB-T) signals unto the hard drive. A.C.Ryan offers the PlayOn! DVR in three versions. One without a TV tuner, but with the capability to play back media with up to 720P, then the one we are showing you today with a tuner build-in and a high-end version with HDMI 1.3 and FullHD playback - called the PlayOn! HD.

Features.

TV Recording (analog & digital)
Internet Radio
Record, Store & Playback
Digital audio, video & images
HDMI High Definition Multimedia Interface
NAS Network HDD / Media Player
Wired & Wireless Network
Supports internal 3.5" SATA/SATA2 Harddisk
Supports external USB Harddisk / external USB storage
USB2.0 Host for expansion with more USB drives
Remote Control

Packaging

The multimedia hard drive enclosure ships in a blue carboard box, which is not as thick as you may expect, but is still sturdy enough when filled correctly. The front of the package has an image of the device, while the rear goes into great detail about the functions of the PlayOn! DVR. The shot of all the rear connectivity can be found on one side, while the other has some marketing text. It is weird to see this text turned by 90 degrees, when compared to all the other information on the box.

The enclosure itself is very well protected. This should make up for the fairly thin cardboard box. Foam spacers and a foam bag protect the unit from damage during transportation.

You get quite a few extras along with the PlayOn! DVR. Starting with the manual, which goes into great detail about setup. A.C. Ryan also includes a USB 2.0 cable, a component cable and a pair of RCA cables to connect the DVR to both the PC or the TV. You will also find a small splitter for your TV signal and a DVB-T antenna within the package. While this is great, we would have loved to see one for the HDMI connectivity as well.

But wait, there is more! A full remote control and a USB dongle for the advertised wireless functionality round up the extras. It would have been nice to have the Wifi functionality built into the enclosure itself, as this will now fill one of the two USB 2.0 ports in the rear of the enclosure.

The power supply is actually quite compact. It is comparable to other the ones used for traditional external hard drive enclosures these days. Sure there are smaller ones, but the the PlayOn! DVR requires 3 A at 12V instead of the 1.5 - 2 A that simpler units usually require.

A Closer Look

The PlayOn! DVR TV is actually quite tall, because of the way the hard drive is mounted within the chassis. Unlike most enclosures, including the PlayOn! DVR without the tuner, which hold the drive vertical instead of horizontal. The casing is constructed out of aluminum, while the inner frame is made of steel.

A.C.Ryan has chosen to design the front out of plastic with a so called "piano" finish. This glossy look will not only attract dust but fingerprints and scratches as well. You will find the LEDs on the top left edge, while the buttons are all located on the bottom half of the front. All connections have been placed in the rear of the PlayOn! DVR below a small and probably noisy fan. Starting from the top we have:

2x USB 2.0 host
USB 2.0 connectivity
Component output
RCA output
RCA input
Coaxial & optical SPDIF output
HDMI output
10/100 MBit/s Ethernet
AC input

Both sides of the PlayOn! DVR TV are clean and there are no air vents or fans. This should help in keeping the drive noise within the enclosure. It will be interesting to see how hot the unit becomes as this would be a sign of direct heat transfer to the exterior aluminum shell of the case.

PlayOn! DVR TV Up & Running

We have connected the PlayON! DVR TV via HDMI to a 32 inch LG LCD TV. Starting the device up takes a bit of time. Roughly around 30 seconds. After which you see the main menu. It consists of six large icons, each of which are pretty easy to understand. First off, during our testing the menu felt sluggish most of the time, responding slowly to the presses on the remote control. At times I found myself pressing the same button multiple times, thinking that the IR sensor did not pick the signal up. Most of the time, I ended up somewhere completely different as a result, as these key presses were processed all at once after 2-3 seconds. That said, the IR sensor of the device is not the greatest either.
Overall, the interface is clean but somewhat boring and crude at times. It reminds me a bit of the OEM MP4 players from Asia. But, before we get started on the functionality, let us take a quick look at the settings part of the device.

Settings

The overall interface of the PlayOn! is quite easy to understand. The settings area consists of vertical tabs and horizontal choices within each tab. The right area of these choices displays the information of each selected sub-menu item. "ATV" stands for analogue TV, which we will not really get into, as this is just a simple TV tuner also available in every TV set out there, while DVB-T is short for "Digital Video Broadcast - Terrestrial". This means that you can only view "over-the-air" digital broadcasts. The next two tabs are "Audio" and "Video", in which you may set the format of each type to best fit your needs. You may select which way to output the audio and what format the TV output should be like. In our case, audio was sent over HDMI and the video output was set to 16:9.

The next tab is called "Recording", in which you may set in what quality to record in, how to time the chapters so you may jump between them, how to act with timeshift and where to store the recorded material. In the "Network" tab you may set your connectivity - be it wired or wireless. It also gives you the ability to turn on "NAS mode" which makes the device accessible as a network attached storage. Sadly, by doing so, you will loose all other functionality until you close the message box. While this is an annoyance, it is a step up from some of the other media players out there, which require a restart to enter NAS mode.

The "System" tab gives you control over the display language, the time and date, parental control, hard drive format and the possiblity to restore the defaults of the device. Lastly, the "MISC" tab gives you some information about the device firmware, hard drive information and gives you the ability to control the slide show speed and the background music when presenting such a show. Our unit came with the EcoGreen F2 Samsung 502HI hard drive, with 5400 RPM, 16 MB cache and 8.9 ms access time.

DVB-T

Austria has a four real channels and four information channels available for your viewing pleasure. Searching for these takes quite some time, but since this is a one time process, I am inclined to oversee such a small shortcoming. Each channel is then shown along with some information. As you can see, the on-screen menu of the channel shows me that the movie - in this case "The Green Mile" - is being broadcast in German at 480P, yes we Europeans are no where close to what the US has for digital broadcast. Channel switching time is adequate, being a tad bit slower than on a normal TV set. I should mention, that DVB-T is not really useful yet as there are simply not enough channels being broadcast over the air like that, at least not in Europe.

Media Player

The second area of interest ist the media player. This gives you access to videos, audio files and pictures stored on various locations. The PlayON! can access the internal hard drive, an attached USB device, the network or use a play list to play one item after another from various locations. Video playback is flawless and the audio is always in sync as well. Once you select a video file, the movie will start playing in a little window on the right within the interface. Hitting "enter" on the remote then goes into fullscreen and starts the movie from the beginning. Sadly there is no feature to allow you to continue where you left off from. The audio menu is easily accessible as well. The test album played perfectly fine over the TV speakers and all the information accessible through the MP3 file meta data was correctly displayed on the screen as well. No album cover was shown, which would have been a nice feature as well.

Internet Radio

Internet radio seems to get the station listing from Shoutcast as it seems. You first get a list of all the stations, which you may sort in various ways. After choosing the station you want to listen to, select one of the servers and the music starts playing along with some information about the station and current song.

ATV, A/V Input & Playback

These three areas do exactly that and there is really no need for pictures. The ATV allows you to view analog TV, which should come in handy if you are using an LCD monitor without a built-in tuner. The channel switching times are similar to that of DVB-T, which is a bit slower than most modern TVs. A/V Input allows you to connect external audio or video devices to the PlayON!. This should be interesting for those who have a camcorder and want to transfer it to the device as you can record whatever you are currently watching. These inputs act the exact same way as the ones on the TV. Simply select the wanted input and it is displayed on the screen. Finally, the Playback functionality does just that. It plays back your recorded media as you can see in the picture above. This is different from the audio and video files you have stored on the device itself.

Performance

USB 2.0

Connecting the device to the PC via USB 2.0 is nothing out of the ordinary. You do need to wait quite a bit longer for it to show up in Windows, as the PlayON! seems to boot up to a certain point, to give you access to the internal drive. Once connected, it delivers some good performance numbers in both read speed and CPU utilization

The write speeds are fine too, considering there is a 5400 RPM drive inside the box. Sure a 7200RPM would have been a bit faster in this area, but it would be pointless for the purpose and would result in a price increase for the customer.

Ethernet

Not much to say about Ethernet connectivity. The PlayON! DVR TV has a 100 MBit/s interface, thus streaming anything is easily done by simply plugging the unit into the router and then selecting the NET option in the media menu. This simply accesses a shared folder on the TV and streams the contents over the network to your TV and home theater.

WiFi

This connection is easily created by simply plugging in the WiFi dongle and then going to the Settings -> Network screen. There you can search for the SSID and enter all the credentials needed. Sadly, the unit only supports WEP and WPA, but no WPA2. So I had to change my entire network before being able to test the speed of the 54 MB/s based connection. That said, speed are adequate and reception quality is perfectly fine as well. The unit was placed in the living room and both audio and video was streamed from the PC to the device, which presented the content on the TV flawlessly.

I should mention at this point, that the A.C.Ryan offers support for streaming of formats usually not usable on the PlayON! DVR. But to get the transcoding software, you are required to register your device with them first. I am not a big fan of having to pass on personal information just to get some functionality. Either one offers it right out of the box, as a free and unbinding upgrade or not at all.

Power Consumption

One last area of interest would be the power consumption. We won't compare the device to a HTPC directly, but let us keep in mind that an ION based nettop pulls around 35 W under load. As you can see, it draws 2 W when in standby, but this can be eliminated when hitting the power switch in the rear. At full load, which would be playing a movie, the unit requires 17.6 W. Other tasks like playing audio or watching TV pull just a touch less, but no matter how you look at it, the PlayON! DVR TV is much more efficient than any HTPC - ION or otherwise.

Value & Conclusion

	The A.C.Ryan PlayON! DVR TV will set you back 199 � without a drive, 249 � with 500 GB and 299 � with an 1TB drive at Caseking.
	Cheaper than a HTPC Possibility to stream audio/video over the network Plays back many different formats Simple menu layout Network connectivity works well, allows for easy streaming from your main PC or Home Server DVB-T works well, great reception with adequate channel switching times Audio playback works well, with all the infos displayed Internet radio works as advertised Analog tuner perfect for those using an LCD monitor Every cable you could possibly use included Silent operation Remote control included
	Menu is sluggish, reacts slowly to button presses of remote Menu design quite boring Additional functionality requires you to register with A.C.Ryan IR sensor not that great, need to point the remote at device Remote feels cheap NAS mode blocks the device Wireless functionality only with external dongle - no WPA2 support HTPCs may not give you the storage space, but more functionality
8.2	The A.C.Ryan is a device which fills the gap between normal TV and a HTPC. It gives you a lot of storage capability with media playback features, but lacks extras like web browsing and gaming like an HTPC would allow. But, the A.C.Ryan can be had for just 249 � which is less than a HTPC will ever cost you. It is also great for those who are watching the power consumption, do not want to have to go through the hassle of setting up something. The PlayON! DVR TV works right out of the box. Just transfer or stream the audio, video or pictures and they will display on your TV or through your home theater. A.C.Ryan has done a great job at adding more or less interesting features like DVB-T, NAS functionality or the possibility to listen to Internet radio stations. So we can all agree, that the feature set of this device is excellent, but it does have some shortcomings. One of the most annoying aspects is the external WiFi dongle. Instead of placing something like that into the device and thus freeing up a USB 2.0 plug, you will have to keep the cheap plastic dongle connected to the PlayON! DVR TV. Add the fact that it cannot handle WPA2, which should frustrate quite a few people, as that would force them to change their entire network security just for this device. While the NAS support is great, it would have been perfect if the unit could be both a media player and NAS at the same time. And last but not least, the extremely sluggish menu really kills the joy of this device, to such an extend that some may ditch it and go with an HTPC for another 50-100 � more. But, considering the great feature set the A.C.Ryan is a device capable of much more than simply playing back media - for those with a little patience or the lack thereof to set up a full PC in their living room.

Corsair Obsidian 800D

Darksaber — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:33:14 GMT

Introduction

I would like to thank Corsair for supplying the review sample.

Corsair is a well known brand of performance memory in the enthusiast market. To diversify their portfolio the company has started with some high quality power supplies quite some time ago. They are now offering their first enclosure, called the Obsidian 800D. This chassis has been designed by Corsair from the ground up with a lot of unique features. While it is currently only available with a windowed side, Corsair will be offering a solid panel for purchase.

From the manufacturer:

Four easily accessed hot-swap drive bays
Removable CPU backplate panel for easy heatsink installation
Isolated cooling zones prevent heat buildup
Unique cable routing holes guarantee a clean and clutter-free installation
Three fans included, with the ability to add four more 120mm fans
Tool-free optical drive installation makes building a system faster than ever
Two year warranty with Corsair�s world-class customer service and technical support

Available Colors	Black
Drive Bays	5 - External 5.25" 7 - Internal 3.5" (4x SATA hot-swappable)
Form Factor	ATX, mATX, EATX
Expansion Slots	7 standard slots (+1 vent)
Case Fans	(x3) 140mm Fans Up to 4x 120mm Fans (not included)
Dimensions	24" (H) x 24" (L) x 9" (W) - (609mm X 609mm X 229 mm)
Weight
Switches	Power, Reset
Front Access	4 x USB 2.0, 1 x IEEE1394, 1 x Headphone, 1 x MIC

Packaging

The package of the Obsidian 800D is huge, as the chassis itself is one of the largest we have had the pleasure to review. On the front is an image of the case along with some features, while the rear goes into detail and gives you some insight on the layout of the enclosure.

Looking at the sides, one holds the specifications along with a few more angled shots, while the other is filled with the exact same text as the front of the box.

Our sample was shipped across half the planet and the Styrofoam spacers have sustained some damage, but the case remained unharmed. So one can say that the protection for the Obsidian 800D is adequate and you will not have to worry about it arriving with dents or scratches.

Corsair is going for the all black look, so even the box of contents - which does hold a few surprises - are all black. You will get all the necessary screws, along with rails for the bottom two hard drive bays. An anti-vibration frame for a single 120 mm fan is included, which seems a bit out of place, as the case can take more than one such cooling unit. The zip ties are a nice addition, but the kicker is the included four connector SATA power strand in combination with the four black SATA cables. We have seen the latter included in cases with hot swappable drive bays before, but the SATA power cable is an excellent little addition. A simple, but effective manual should help you, if you happen to get stuck during assembly.

A Closer Look - Outside

The chassis itself is made of steel with an aluminum front, but is still quite light considering the large dimensions. Corsair further protects the front and window of the enclosure with plastic foil. The surface of the case feels much like fine sandpaper, which is excellent as it is very resilient, but actually acts like a fine sand paper and will rub off the dead skin cells off your hand. This does not harm your hand, nor is it bad for you, but it will leave that "skin dust" on the surface of the chassis.

Looking straight at the front of the chassis, the first thing that becomes obvious are the clean and straight lines. Corsair has refrained from using any additional design elements in this area. The edges of the front panel are quite sharp, so you want to avoid bumping into these as they will hurt (but not further harm you). In addition, any foreign object may damage that sharp corner as aluminum is a fairly soft material. so a bump with something edgy leaving a mark is more likely with the Obsidian 800D in comparison to those cases with rounded corners. The rear hints at the huge amount of space you will have within the case. Look at the PSU bay on the bottom with all that space around it! If you look closely, you can see the row of holes running along the left side of the rear. This gives a hint to the area between the side panel and mainboard tray. A fan pushes air across the four hot-swappable bays and under the tray out the back. Sure, this won't make much of a difference in real world scenarios, but is a nice layout for air flow.

Both sides of the chassis are also made of steel as well, but Corsair has chosen to place a window on the main panel. While this is a nice feature, those wanting to use the 800D as a workstation case may want to shell out another 20 US Dollars and buy themselves the solid panel instead.

Let us take a close look at the front of the chassis. On the bottom you will find the three sails of the company logo and the brand name. We will skip the middle area for a second and move right up to the top. The five 5.25 inch drive bays should be more than most of you will need. Especially as you already get four externally accessible hard drive bays. Corsair has not added a 3.5 to 5.25 inch frame to the Obsidian 800D, so we were forced to use the Lian Li one for this review. I do believe that there is still plenty of use for such a bay and that one should have been included with the 800D.

All covers are made of plastic with a thin aluminum plate glued to them. So Corsair is cheating slightly here to achieve the all aluminum look. These covers are extremely loose and are very easy to push them into the case about 2 mm. They still stay in place, since the internal case frame won't allow them to move any further. This is frustrating to say the least. Corsair should either use stronger plastic clips on them or allow you to screw them down. The very top holds the four USB 2.0 connectors, one Firewire plug and the usual pair of audio connectivity. A reset button is present as well, under the panel cover. The diamond cut power button and power LED have been placed to the left of this panel.

So, let's get back to that mysterious door in the middle of the front panel. It covers the four hot-swappable hard drive trays. It opens from right to left by default, but you may place the hinge on the other side if you wish. The trays are made of plastic, while the locks are constructed of aluminum as well. The locking mechanism works extremely well and the silver metal springs make sure that the tray does not have any play.

Turning the case around, starting at the bottom, we have the afore mentioned PSU bay. You may place a single unit here with the fan facing downward. Above that are seven mainboard expansion slots, with some additional space below the last one. Corsair advertises it as "7+1", but I would have liked to see an actual 8th slot instead, as the space is available. On top you will find a vent and two holes for water cooling tubes to be routed outside. There are two buttons which release the side panels. These take the same idea Lian Li has implemented with a locking bar, but take it a step further, not requiring any screws - well done!

The ceiling of the Obsidian is covered with three slots for fans to be installed. You may also place a triple radiator here, which is an excellent feature. However, if you do not use such a device, the opening allows for every bit of noise from the interior of the chassis to escape to the outside, let alone allowing objects to fall into the running PC. It would have been great to see some sort of silcone cover for this area if it remains unused. Let's be honest, many of us will want this case because of the cable management and space, while only a few will install a water cooling loop.

A Closer Look - Inside

Speaking of insides, the entire case is black - including the interior. You do not need to do much to gain access to the interior. Simply push the button in the rear and the side panel releases. While this is great, such a convenient way to open the Obsidian 800D up may prove fatal at a LAN party. A thief will not require more than a few seconds to pull the panel off and steal your precious hardware or do deliberate damage after you have beaten him in that Counter-Strike tournament.

Turning the case around we can clearly see a lot of openings in the mainboard tray. The entire piece may also be removed for even easier installation, but considering the small benefit would come at the price of taking out the entire tray, coupled with the fact that assembly is already a breeze, I do not really see any need for it. The large opening under the CPU area is very large and also covered by a simple plastic door. As we will see at the end, this gives you more than enough room to access CPU cooler backplates.

Corsair has chosen to create a thermal compartment in the bottom. The PSU has been isolated from the rest of the system. This way uses can keep all unneeded cables in this area and route the required ones nicely through the underside of the mainboard tray. A fan in the dividing wall creates additional air flow. Corsair has designed the Obsidian with the mainboard upright in the upper section of the case. The expansion slots are removable and held in place by black thumb screws. Above that is a 120 mm exaust fan right next to the backplate cutout.

Moving our focus to the front area of the chassis, you will find two internal hard drive bays all the way on the bottom compartment. These do not require screws but make use of plastic rails to hold the drives in place. It is nice to see such bays, as some hard drives do not line up correctly with the SATA backplates. Above are these hot-swappable bays. I have taken off the plastic covers to show you the fan and the four PCBs. A 120 mm unit blows across these four hard drives to keep them cool. Corsair has opted for plastic locks for the five external drive bays. While I am not happy to see such an option, these do hold well enough. You will still need to use screws to tighten things up though, as we will see during the assembly process.

All cabling has been kept in black as well and all connectors are labeled, so that any confusion will be kept to a minimum. Those who have memorized the standard colors of each type of connection, will have to revert to reading these labels.

Assembly

As mentioned before, you may take out the entire tray, but I really do not see any reason to do so. Installing the board is more than easy with so much space at your disposal. The full size ATX board is dwarfed in the Obsidian 800D and the cable management holes line up perfectly along the edge of the board.

Installing a hard drive into the bottom two slots requires the removal of the front panel. This is done by a firm pull away from the case frame. Simply place the rails on the drive - in this case the SATA backplate incompatible version of the VelociRaptor - and slide the drive into the bay until it snaps into place.

All other drives were placed into the trays and secured with the included screws - so yes, you still require a screw driver, but there is nothing wrong with that for this purpose. Once installed in such a tray, slide it into place and push down the locking lever. While an excellent and highly favorable feature, the tray and locking system used is no big innovation. Nonetheless, it has been implemented flawlessly in the Obsidian 800D

In theory, you will not require any screws to install an optical drive, but I highly recommend using at least a single screw on each drive, as the plastic locks do not hold them all that good. I do applaud Corsair for the effort, but I still do believe that any trusted and true method should be valued more than a semi-functional innovation.

Once everything is installed, I have hooked up everything. All the data cables, power lines and case i/o. The only thing I was not able to route through were the PCIe power cables, as those were too short. Corsair does include an extension cable for the P4 power cables however. Overall, this is the cleanest system I have ever built (and I have built many), right out of the box without having to mod anything. There is simply no need to and Corsair has included openings wherever necessary. As you can see, all the cables are hidden behind the mainboard tray and the opening under the CPU area is so large, that you can clearly see all six memory slots of the X58 board.

Finished Looks

Even though there are a lot of cables below the mainboard tray, the side panel closes easily. You can clearly see the mainboard and the PSU through the side window, while the unexciting optical drives are hidden.

Turning the case on, it does appear to be a bit louder than some others out there. This is not so much due to the fans used, which are very quiet, but due to the fact that all the noise can easily exit the case through the open vents in the ceiling of the case. Corsair has not included any lighting, but the LEDs on the mainboard do help out with that aspect. I am happy to report, that there are absolutely no vibrations being passed on to the case frame, even after using it for a few weeks now.

Value and Conclusion

	The Corsair Obsidian 800D sells for around 230 � or 299.99 US Dollars. This puts it right in line with other full tower enclosures of this calibre.
	Excellent cable routing possibilities Functional interior layout Loads of space to work with Four hot-swappable hard drive bays Special power cables for these bays included Total choice of cooling, water or air - no matter how big - will fit Space for a triple radiator Thermal divider for PSU Cool looking white power LED Five 5.25 inch bays Two extra 3.5 inch bays Well packaged
	Front panel covers don't hold well at all Triple radiator allows for noise to exit the case, a cover would have been nice No 3.5 to 5.25 inch drive bay adapter Fairly sharp edged front panel ODD screw-less system does not work well Not a secure LAN party case, as case cannot be locked up
9.2	Corsair has really done a great job with their first chassis. They have invested a lot of work and thought into the design and look of the chassis. Instead of going with elaborate looks, the Obsidian 800D goes for the understated look with clean lines and functionality on the outside. In the interior, they have managed to take advantage of the large size and divided it into thermal chambers. This does not only make it easier to plan your cable routing, but it also looks much better. The Obsidian 800D gives you compete freedom in regard of cooling, with the possibility to install a triple radiator or virtually any air cooler on the market. Even if you fill the chassis to the rim, you can easily keep things perfectly clean, as there are many ways to hide and route the cables. That said, there is a bit of room for improvement. There are a few features which are so good, that they do have a small downside as well. First off, getting into the chassis is so easy that you want to keep an eye on it at a LAN party and the fact that you may install a tri-rad means that there is a large opening in the ceiling if you do not use this feature. But, the biggest gripe I have are those lose plastic front drive bay covers. Those expecting am uncompromising full-aluminum front without that slight cheat may find this to be a deal breaker. Even with these little kinks, the Obsidian 800D is a worthy player in the high-end, full tower segment and I am looking forward to future cases from Corsair.