ASUS chose last month's CES event to announce its flagship gaming notebook, the W90. Usual high-end specifications aside, the most distinct component used in it is the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870 X2, AMD's flagship mobile graphics platform, which is on the brink of snatching the performance crown away from NVIDIA for the platform. A North American sales representative for ASUS tells GPU Café that the W90 will be available from February 23, which perhaps makes it the launch-date for the Mobility HD 4870 X2. It is also noted that the Mobility HD 4670 will be out around the same time, while Mobility HD 4850 will arrive a week or two later.

XtremeSystems forum member Kinc posted some early performance numbers relating to the Mobility HD 4870 X2, featured on the ASUS W90 with an Intel Core 2 Quad T9400, which effortlessly overclocked to 4 GHz on the notebook's stock cooling system. The Mobility HD 4870 X2 carried clock speeds of 600/900 MHz (core/memory). The notebook used Intel's X38 core-logic. At the said parameters, it was put through 3DMark 06. The notebook secured a score of 20,284 3DMarks at default setting. When released, the Mobility Radeon HD 4870 X2 will replace NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX SLI as the fastest mGPU solution, replicating a similar feat by its desktop cousin.

Intel is planning on a newer flagship desktop CPU to lead the Core i7 Extreme Edition pack: the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition (XE). The model surfaced at an XtremeSystems forum thread where overclockers FUGGER and Mikeguava took a shot at the 3DMark05 world record of 45,474 3DMarks, set by AMD at its presentation of the Phenom II X4 processor running at speeds of around 6.30 GHz. The overclockers used a bench consisting of the new Core i7 975 XE, Gigabyte GA-EX58 Extreme motherboard, two Radeon HD 4870 X2 accelerators in a CrossFireX setup, powered by a PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W PSU. The CPU was cooled by a custom-made copper cooling pot. At a clock speed of 5,239 MHz and the graphics cards running at reference speeds, the bench cracked the world record to reach 47,026.

During the course of this feat however, we get to know more about the Core i7 975 XE. The new premium offering by Intel comes with a clock speed of 3.33 GHz. It achieves this frequency using a bus multiplier of 25X. Intel built this chip on the new D0 revision of the Bloomfield core, on which the company also plans to release fresh batches of the Core i7 920. Apart from the unlocked bus multiplier and the broader QuickPath Interconnect bandwidth of 6.4 GT/s, other features remain standard: 4 processing cores supporting 8 threads with HyperThreading enabled, 256 KB of L2 cache per core, 8 MB of shared L3 cache, and a triple-channel DDR3 memory interface.

Futuremark Corporation today announced that its online database of 3DMark and PCMark benchmark results has now topped 30 million records making it the world's largest source of PC system comparison data. Futuremark benchmarks are used by millions of gamers and hardware enthusiasts from all around the world. The ORB, Futuremark's online database of benchmark results, has been collecting scores since March 2001, and currently sees a new result added every 4 seconds on average.
For ten years, 3DMark has been an important part of PC performance testing for consumers, press, OEMs and semiconductor companies allowing architects, designers, gamers and overclockers to explore the limits of hardware and software.

AMD finally seems to have put a realistic assessment of its processors, with its claims of the Phenom II X4 having "massive headroom" with its overclocking potential being validated once again, this time by Team Finland, at a CES overclocking event. Team Finland was able to overclock a Phenom II X4 940 processor at its highest stable clock speed of 6.30 GHz using extreme cooling. Earlier attempts to overclock the chip beyond the 6 GHz mark only yielded in test-beds that were able to POST, boot and display the clock speed using CPU-Z. This attempt however, was a benchmark-stable overclocking feat.

The bench consisted of a Phenom II X4 engineering sample, DFI LANParty Dark 790FXB-M2RS, OCZ DDR2-1066 memory, two Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards in CrossfireX and Windows XP. The CPU cooling employed was liquid helium, which dropped the temperature to -242 degrees Celsius. To achieve a clock speed of 6.30 GHz, the processor's vCore was set at 1.84V, its bus speed at 280 MHz and a multiplier of 22.5 was set. The HyperTransport frequency multiplier was set at 8. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 accelerators were set at 800 MHz (core) and 950 MHz (memory). The machine was put through 3DMark05, where it ended with a world-record score of 45,474.

Futuremark Corporation is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its 3DMark benchmark suite with a video contest for gamers and overclockers everywhere. Fans of the popular benchmarking program are invited to show the "Life of a Benchmarker" in an original video with great prizes awarded to the best entries.
"We're launching this contest as a thank you to all our fans who have helped 3DMark become the number one PC gaming benchmark," said Dr. Jukka Mдkinen, VP and General Manager at Futuremark.

Eran Badit of NGOHQ.com successfully modified NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) to operate on an ATI GPU and has been able to run the NVIDIA PhysX layer on an RV670, the Radeon HD 3850.

He tells that enabling PhysX support on Radeon cards is not particularly difficult, leading us to believe that physics on graphics cards may not so much be a technology problem but an issue of corporate dynamics.

On his first run, Eran got a 22,606 CPU score in 3D Mark Vantage, enhancing the overall score to P4262. A comparable system without PhysX-support will cross the finish line at about P3800.

Reserved to be available on April 22nd, Futuremark's next-gen 3DMark Vantage failed to make it on time and is now rumored for an April 28-29 release, a week later than expected. 3DMark Vantage is a DirectX 10 benchmark that works with Windows Vista only, since it's the only OS to support DX10. Benchmarkers will be offered a new physics test and God knows what. The final system requierements remain unchanged (read the full story).

The long awaited Futuremark 3DMark Vantage will be released on April 22nd it has been learned from a picture posted on PCPOP.com. Most notably 3DMark Vantage will differ from previous 3DMark video benchmarks with its DirectX 10 API. DirectX 10 support also means the program will work on Windows Vista only. When started 3DMark Vantage will run through three tests to determine your PC's performance - Jane Nash, Calico and Aeroplanes. If your PC is equipped with an AGEIA PhysX card, there will be a fourth test for physics only. The full list of all NVIDIA/ATI video cards capable of running 3DMark Vantage can be found here. An online test to see if your PC is up to the task for 3DMark vantage is also running online.

Futuremark has released a 2.5MB hotfix for their popular benchmark applications. Set to work with 3DMark03 Build 3.6.0, 3DMark05 Build 1.3.0, 3DMark06 Build 1.1.0 and PCMark05 Build 1.2.0, this hotfix updates the GPU core/memory clock detection library for enhanced compatibility and support for new hardware. It also adds three new files: Direcpll.dll (4.10.1.94), Entech.sys (5.0.1.1), Entech64.sys (5.0.1.1).

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Futuremark published online today the first three screenshots of the "coming soon" 3DMark Vantage benchmark. Visitors of the new 3DMark Vantage web site are also offered to check if their PC have what it takes to run the new benchmark.

According to Nick Evanson - Editor-in-Chief, a new version of the popular 3DMark video benchmark is coming "soon...". Signs indicating that the new 2008 version is indeed almost ready are illustrated on the exclusive Futuremark screens below.

There's a new unified hotfix available for all the latest benchmarks: 3DMark03, 3DMark05, 3DMark06 and PCMark05. The hotfix updates the GPU core/memory clock detection library for enhanced compatibility and support for new hardware. This hotfix does not affect any of the benchmark results. A new full install for 3DMark06 Build 1.1.0 (with the hotfix included) will soon be available. Meanwhile, all 3DMark users should download this hotfix and install it now.

The Inquirer is claiming that they have some benchmark scores to disclose with AMD's K10. They say that it was running on the RD790 chipset, with two HD 2900 XT cards, and some Corsair's Dominator PC2-9136C5D. They clocked it at 3.0 GHz with the video cards clocked at 830 MHz for the GPU and 900MHz for the memory. They ended up with a score of 30,031 in 3DMark06 a new world record if true. They didn't point out what kind of cooling was used, but if it was just your standard heatsink. Expect even higher scores to be reached after their release.

It is already known that Futuremark is currently working hard on the next version in the popular 3DMark series. Codenamed 3DMark Next, the upcoming version will bring DirectX 10 support, will require Windows Vista and will be released by the end of the year. But the 3DMark story won't be put on pause as Futuremark has one more 3DMark up its sleeve. As stated by Nick Renqvist in a recent blog post, the development of both next generation PC benchmarks is going great and although there is no release date suggested, we might very well see one new 3DMark released this fall and one around mid-2008.

Another achievement by Marcus 'Kinc' Hultin who has now set a new 3DMark 05 world record with pair of ASUS Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics cards. With the cards overclocked to 880/990MHz core/mem (air-cooled) and an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 at 5341MHz, 2x1GB Corsair 6400C3 and an ASUS P5W64 WS Pro, Kinc managed to reach 34,126 points in 3DMark 05.

We're still far from the peak of the cards' performance though. I would certainly bet a penny or two that we will see 35,000 soon.

The 100 000 point barrier in 3DMark 03 goes down thanks to Kingpin! A Core 2 Extreme CPU clocked at 5.2GHz and two GeForce 8800 Ultra cards (with frequencies for core and memory 985/1243 respectively) were used to achieve this feat.Congratulations!