Testing the ATI Radeon HD 5870

Posted by Jon Peddie and Robert Dow on September 30th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: gpu amd ati graphics 3d radeon gpgpu 2d teraflops

By now you’ve probably read our review of the RV870 and a half dozen others so you should already know it’s suppose to be a 2.7 TFLOPS chip with 1,600 processors and ultra fast 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

The Insight drive—simple and sweet

Posted by Kathleen Maher on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: apple disk storage hd verbatim backup nero time machine

Kathleen Maher

Verbatim has been building its storage business with products that are easy to use and give customers a little something extra. Their latest product, the InSight drive, adds a small, 32x128, always on LCD display that includes the drive’s name and the amount of storage left on the drive. It’s a little thing, but in situations where there are a number of drives being handed around with video files, audio files, pictures, and backup data, it’s helpful to be able to see the name.

How low can you go?

Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: mobile vista disk storage ibm verbatim drive kodak flashdrive

Jon Peddie

Verbatim, one of the pioneer companies of the industry, having started in 1969 with a license from IBM to build floppy discs, has gone through the usual ups and downs, management changes, and refinancing gyrations any 50-year-old company in the computer business would have to endure. In 1985, it was bought by Eastman Kodak, and in 1990 it was sold to Mitsubishi Kasei Corporation, a giant Japanese chemical conglomerate that also manufactured optical disks and other information products. And through all that, it has managed to maintain its corporate headquarters at its Charlotte, North Carolina, facility.

Darkest of Days: What if you could travel in time?

Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Software Review
Tags: gpu nvidia cpu games wwii realistic physics physx

Jon Peddie

You can, and enjoy physics and cinematic visions whilst doing it: the first serious implementation of GPU-based physics. During wars and natural catastrophes people go missing, MIA in the case of wars, simply missing persons in disasters. They could be alive, they could be dead, the ambiguity of their status is the basis for the time travel in the multi-era, Darkest of Days FSP from 8Monkey Labs. In order to avoid conflicts with the time-continuum and prevent you from killing your own grandmother, you have to be in never-never land, or so the game’s story premise goes. I buy it, it…

CyberLink MediaShow—they love GPUs

Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Software Review
Tags: apple facebook microsoft media flickr faces cyberlink photo recognition

Jon Peddie

CyberLink has been at the forefront of GPU exploitation for photos, and their latest effort is MediaShow. YAPP—yet another photo program, but this time it’s got more. If you’re like me, you have several photo programs, some you wanted, some that were forced on you. I currently have: Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Photo Gallery, Picasa 3, Roxio 2010 PhotoSuite 12, and now CyberLink MediaShow; there may be others lurking on my system I’m not aware of. They all have their own indexing system and files, and then there’s the ever loving Vista indexer making life easier for us all.

Go fast, go long—Intel releases the Lynnfield platform

Posted by Robert Dow and Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: nvidia intel cpu ram processor nehalem core

Lynnfield is Intel’s first mainstream Nehalem, and is being marketed as Core i5. It’s built in 45nm, has 4 cores, and Hyper Threading, 8MB of shared L3 memory, and Turbo Boost Technology for dynamic frequency scaling.

The Core i5, again like the i7, has an integrated 1333 MHz DDR3 memory controller, but the Lynnfield’s is dual channel instead of triple channel. Unlike Core i7, Lynnfield communicates directly with PCI-e 2.0 graphics, though at a maximum of x16 lanes, which requires splitting them x8/x8 in multiple AIB setups.

Wolfenstein - Great game little use of GPU

Posted by Jon Peddie on September 4th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Software Review
Tags: gpu 3d games fps activision

Jon Peddie

Activision has recently released a remake of the classic FPS Wolfenstein, and all I can say is thank you Activision. However, the GPU folks may not be quite as thankful. When I heard it was coming out I expected it to be in stereovision and have killer physics, after all this is 2009. The physics are good, damn good, but not accelerated by the GPU, and alas there’s no stereo. No doubt Nvidia will do a driver tweak and correct that but a natively developed game in stereo is just so much better.