ATI’s Radeon HD5970 Hemlock - DirectX 11, lots-o-cores, multiple displays, over-clockable
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 24th 2009 | Permalink
Categories:
Hardware Review
Tags:
gpu
amd
ati
graphics
opencl
directx
pmark
benchmark
overclock
Number five in its series of new AIBs, ATI as promised delivered the dual chip HD5970 Radeon board. It’s killer fast, easy on the power supply and pocketbook, and has bonuses like multi-display output and over clocking tools. The board comes with 2GB of DDR5, one each for each GPU. The GPUs get to the PCIe lanes via a gen2 PLX PCIe bridge chip. We ran a series of tests on the board in Windows 7 and the results were very impressive—without over-clocking. ATI has a lot of headroom in the RV870 Evergreen GPU, and the two of them on the…
The new Zune review – HD at work
Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 19th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Microsoft's latest assault on the portable media market is the Zune HD. It is a lovely little piece of hardware that gives Microsoft a play against some strong. In fact, it reminds me of my beloved Samsung Yepp YP-P2. Samsung has upgraded that line with a new P3 and of course, Apple is the power house with the iPod Touch. Microsoft developed this generation of Zune, the HD, with Nvidia’s Tegra and the added power is evident in the beautiful bright screen. It also has a nifty interface, a long battery life, and a software infrastructure that needs work. Table 1:…
Kill a watt
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 19th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Every month the electric bill comes in and every month it’s higher than you think it should be and every month you say we have to find out what is using all that power, it can't be just the PC I sit in front of all day, someone is leaving lights on or something. And then you go back to reading your email and tapping out tweets. At quitting time, you get up and some folks turn off their PC, others have a sleep mode set and want to have instant on when they come back so they leave the machine…
Your very own switchboard
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 19th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Here at Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs we run several computers with AMD or Intel processors of various sizes. We have a variety of monitors, keyboards, and mice, and the one we want is never attached to the machine we’re going to run tests on. Not only that, when we do unravel the rat’s nests of wires, one of them in inevitably is either too short or too knotted up to reach and so a few frustrating minutes are lost sorting that out. We’ve tried to get a KVM switch that would help us manage it and couldn’t find one that handled…
Reviewing the Lenovo D20, Quadro FX 4800 and AMD FirePro 7850
Posted by Alex Herrera on November 9th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Lenovo loaned us a new workstation to take a look at, the company’s recent top-end Nehalem-class, dual-socket ThinkStation D20. The D20 came equipped with both sockets filled, as well as 12 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 memory. Two of the machine’s five 3.5-inch drive bays were filled, each with one 500 GB SATA drive, connected via a Marvell VD 0 SCSI adapter that presented them as one 1 TB RAID 0 drive (RAID 0 offers no redundancy). For graphics, Lenovo supplied us with one Quadro FX 4800 card, with 1.5 GB GDDR3 memory. And, we also tried it with an AMD…
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