Category of small cheap notebooks became very popular and there is no wonder why most of big brands want a piece of cake for themselves. But Asus got all of them off-guard. Because of that we’ve been waiting rather long for Eee’s true rival . We’ve already mentioned MSI’s agility which allowed them again to be first with new product on market. Their trump card wears name Wind and model that InsideHW had tested is MSI Wind U100.
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The long waited AMD platform for notebooks under the name PUMA is finally introduced and InsideHW had a chance to test notebook based on this platform. To all users that have been waiting cheap integrated graphics with good performances, time has come. Intel Centrino was so far “untouchable” in field of portable computers but AMD Puma, by all appearance, got a necessary quality to fight for highest position.
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USB hard disks lately become very popular. This especially goes for 2.5’’models. The reasons for that can be found in their usefulness and practicality. Yet, we are living in times when it is necessary to transfer huge amounts of data from place to place. At first, manufacturers on market fought with larger and larger capacity of these devices. Lately, when capacity stopped being key factor, manufacturers turned to HDD case design. On that field, Prestigio went step ahead of its competitors and launched Prestigio data Safe II Fashion Edition.
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At the end of June, in Spain, we were introduced to a new series of 48xx graphics cards from ATI. We saw then only RV770PRO (4850) but at this moment 4870 (RV770XT) is also available. Even though our sources from AMD didn’t unveil why 4870 wasn’t shown on launching, we assume that some problems with quantities of available GDDR5 memory occurred. Considering that 4850 uses GDDR3 memory, it is no surprise that many retailers had them on stock. ATI 4870 will be sold, in beginning, exclusively with GDDR5 memory (this is the first graphics card that uses this memory) but AMD leaves a possibility that some innovative partner might launch later version that uses GDDR3 memory.
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It’s rare occasion to have on test, on the same month, new generation products from two big rivals (nVIDIA and ATI). This is really good news because ATI had some serious delays with R600 and that is one of reasons why it was so indifferently received on market. ATI realized that now must roll up its sleeves to catch up nVIDIA, because at that point seemed that nVIDIA unreachably moved away.
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The tendency to increase the presence of models with the G92 chip on the market is quite logical in the chain of events. Although they are still outnumbered on the market, the new GeForce 8800GT and GTS cards are very good and asked for. As we couldn't find a single 8800GTS with 512 MB of VRAM so far, we decided to plunder a little, and dug out an XFX model.
In a very nice, XFX-typical black box, all of the prerequisites are neatly packed: cables, driver discs, a DVI-to-VGA connector and so on. Since this is an “Alpha Dog” edition, the card comes bundled with the Company of Heroes game as well, which is certainly commendable. After the packaging, we moved on to the card. As you can see in the picture, XFX has decided to “go with the flow”, i.e. to employ the referent card design with no extravagant cooler solutions or anything like that.
XFX GeForce 8800GTS 512MB
GeForce 8800GTX
GPU
G92
G80
Manufacturing Technology (nm)
65
80
GPU Frequency (MHz)
650
575
Stream Processors Freq. (MHz)
1625
1350
Stream Processors
128
128
Texture Units
64
32
ROPs
16
24
Interface
PCI Express 2.0
PCI Express
Memory Size (MB)
512
768
Memory Bus (bit)
256
384
Memory Frequency (Mhz)
1940
1800
Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)
62,08
86,4
Memory Type
GDDR3
GDDR3
Shader Operations (Op/sec)
208000
172800
Texture FillRate (MTex/sec)
41600
18400
Pixel FillRate (Mpix/sec)
10400
13800
Even the sticker on the card is the default Nvidia sticker. The cooling profile is much bigger than the one on the 8800GT, which is to be expected, as this revision of G92 has no parts turned off and works at higher clocks, which inevitably turns up the heat. Aluminium was used as the main material for the cooling body and has a heat-dispersing heatpipe. A “blower” fan is in charge of keeping the passive parts cool, and although it is perhaps a bit on the noisy side, it turned out to be working very well.
It is only after an extensive period of gaming that the fan will have to increase its RPM, bringing the card out of its “stealth” mode, during which you won't be noticing its fan. The fan itself is not placed downright on the card, but is under a 15º angle, due to the longish nature of the condensers. The card has a standard set of output connectors – two DVI and one S-Video.
Compared to GeForce 8800GT, the new card has a slightly more complex GPU, since it has a fully functional G92 on itself. Unlike 8800GT with its 112 stream processors, this card has 128 of them. Also, the number of texture units is 64, which is great and really makes it a monster in “texture fillrate” tests, but also very efficient in newer games and higher relosutions. The ROP number is the same – 16. Both the GPU and the SP clocks have been increased to 650 and 1625 MHz, respectively.
This makes this GPU even more powerful than the G80 present on the 8800GTX cards (take a look at the charts), which is still the best Nvidia has to offer. The weaker, though less important side of these cards is their 256-bit bus. This might seem a limiting factor at first, but both ATI and Nvidia reverted to this value from the higher ones, so it is evident that the memory bus is no longer a crucial factor. Also, a wider bus is one of the major expense sources, and there was no need to make this card more expensive than it is. As far as memory is concerned, it is of DDR3 type, with a response time of 1 ns and clock value of 1940 MHz.
1600x1200
XFX GeForce 8800GTS 512MB
3DMark05
14558
3DMark06 (SM 2.0 / SM 3.0 / Final)
4832 / 4650 / 11146
Fear
41 / 80 / 162
Crysis (MedQ) (min/avg/max)
54,8 / 80,96 / 90,1
Crysis (HighQ) (min/avg/max)
24,8 / 37,95 / 44,8
World in Conflict (HighQ) (min/avg/max)
27 / 58 /125
After testing, we reached a conclusion that this solution is very good – Nvidia engineers definitely knew what they were doing. Performance results are great, even better than the 8800GTX in some cases. We had no doubts whatsoever, though, that the G92 will be a great choice in all of its variations. And just by the way, for gamers who are not financially strong enough to buy this sort of card, be patient, we will be having a 8800GS tested very soon!
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