Now that the HD 2900 is available we're all waiting for the mid- and low end parts. It seems Guru3D has found some pricing on dollarshops.eu. It seems prices are quite low.

Radeon HD 2600 series:

• Jetway Radeon HD 2600XT 512 MB DDR4 PCI-e DVI TVout €179,00
• Jetway Radeon HD 2600XT 512 MB DDR3 PCI-e DVI TV out €149,00
• Jetway Radeon HD 2600XT 256 MB DDR3 PCI-e DVI TVout €99,00
• Jetway Radeon HD 2600PRO 512 MB DDR2 PCI-e DVI TVout €89,00
• Jetway Radeon HD 2600PRO 256 MB DDR2 PCI-e DVI TVout €69,00

Radeon HD 2400 series:

• Jetway Radeon HD 2400XT 256MB DDR3 PCI-e DVI TVout €59,95
• Jetway Radeon HD 2400PRO 512MB DDR2 PCI-e DVI TVout €54,95
• Jetway Radeon HD 2400PRO 256MB DDR2 PCI-e DVI TVout €44,95

They should be available July 1st.

MSI Radeon HD X2600 XT benchmarks

Seems like first RV630 samples are out in the wild. What's interesting besides the framerates is the 65nm architecture which seems to work out fine. Forum member NV6800 on the Coolaler.com forum who tested the card claims his system only drew 197W at full load. That's just 51W more compared to when the system was idle.

The system used for the benches consisted of a Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 Dual-Core with an FSB of 1066 @ 2,933 MHz, two Gigabyte PC2-6400 memory modules and a MSI Radeon HD X2600 XT with 256MB GDDR4 RAM. The GPU was clocked at 800 MHz, while the memory's clock was 1100 MHz.

OCWorkbench has some interesting, but blurry pictures of a RD790 board. It is the successor to the RD580 or 580X chipset. I features four full length PCIe x16 slots and can actually use 4 graphic cards in Crossfire. Turns out there is no real performance gain with such a setup.

The Xbox 360 Simpsons edition is a special version of Microsoft's standard $399 console meant only to commemorate the upcoming animated movie. In contrast to previous promos with the console, the limited run will color the entire system: the whole shell, as well as the wireless gamepad, will ship in the cartoon's characteristic yellow; the main unit will also have strategically placed art to recall the movie, Microsoft says.

The console is otherwise identical to the stock $399 system, which includes a 20GB hard drive as well as a component AV cable and an Xbox Live headset. Much like the majority of the Zune's special editions, however, the Simpsons Xbox will only be available as one of 100 units available through a contest to be revealed soon on the official Xbox website.

Nvidia got a license from Intel to produce 1600MHz FSB products. This is quite logical, since Intel themselves never really made the gaming community happy. With Nvidia making the chipsets Intel makes sure this market stays satisfied. Secondly, just like Intel used ATI chipsets on their boards some time ago Intel will now use Nvidia chipsets in their products.
More surprisingly Nvidia also got a license to use CSI and produce Xeon chipsets. This is quite a major thing since the Xeon chipset market never has been really big. The current platform has some downsides like the memory subsystem and no official SLI/Crossfire support. If the memory issues get fixed by NV (ie dropping FB-DIMMs) is just wishful thinking at the time being, SLI support sounds very obvious though.

The new Intel P35 chipset will make its debut soon. Hardspell has tested the performance of the chipset against Intel's own P965 and NVIDIA's 680i. Their findings show that the P35 chipset exhibits a similar level of performance to the P965 chipset. However, when it is paired up with DDR2-1066 modules, the performance is boosted and exceeds the NV-680i in games.

Uwe Boll, known for producing and directing video game movies like Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead, will start filming on the movie Far Cry next month. Contrary to what you would have guessed and what was planned earlier, to start shooting on Hawaii, Boll instead chose Vancouver, Canada as it's primary setting. It's unknown so far if Far Cry the movie will take place in a tropical environment like the game or if Boll chose a completely different plot.

The blokes from TechOne | HDTV got hold of a picture of an HD 2900XT card from Sapphire. The interesting part of this board is the cooling unit, which is obviously different from the reference design we have seen earlier. It features three heatpipes and the blades of the radial blower are bigger than on the reference design which usually should lead to a lower overall noise.
Meanwhile some German shops began listing ASUS and Sapphire HD 2900XT cards but the shops took the offers down for some unknown reasons. Though I missed to make a screenshot when I first came across the online shop grafikkartenpower.de which still has a 2900XT category, I remember the price which was 365.90 Euro. Furthermore the European pricegrabbing machine Geizhals.at still has the speeds of GPU and memory online, 757MHz respectively 828MHz (1656MHz effectively). At the moment this information is still to be taken with a grain of salt though until the world wide NDA is lifted on May 14th.

At this point, it seems like the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray high-definition media war looks a lot like a game of chess. And right now, that game of chess is locked in a stalemate. In an effort to break the stalemate in favor of HD DVD, Wal-Mart has made a cunning move. They are attempting to make HD DVD the first affordable HD medium. They have placed an order for 2 million $299 USD HD DVD players. While a noble effort on Wal-Mart's part, we won't be seeing any of these players until at least late 2008. By then, Blu-ray may have come down in price enough to win the HD media war.

The Chinese PCINLIFE got hold of some pictures and information regarding AMD's mid range card HD2600XT. The pictured card is said to have 256MB of memory, a maximum power consumption of around 80W and full HD capabilities.

Microsoft spent millions of dollars advertising its next generation OS 'Windows Vista' in China, in fact the IT juggernaut threw up the biggest Vista Ad on the 421 meter high Jin Mao tower in Shanghai China. However after 2 weeks (Jan 19 to Feb 2) from launch Microsoft managed to sell a mere 244 copies of Windows Vista. Software piracy is rampant in the middle kingdom and a pirated version of Vista sells for a mere $1 on the streets.

All over the interweb, there are intermittent forum posts with a strange topic: how similar S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looks to Half Life 2 and Doom 3. These claims certainly do not go unfounded. Someone, with way too much free time, went through and manually compared the texture directories of Doom 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You'll see the results in the first two pictures below. A particular texture, lights_impflash.dds, has the exact same name of the Doom 3 version, excluding the extension. Half Life 2 has also been allegedly stolen from. Not only are the file names nearly identical (except for the extension), the images are extremely similar as well. Whether or not anything comes out of this depends on what ID Software and Valve decide to do. Do you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R textures are stolen?

Our last findings on how fast R600 cards perform in 3DMark06 caused a lot of buzz. Let's see how the following tidbit shapes up:
The VR-Zone has some numbers they couldn't keep for themselves regarding a Radeon X (sorry...), HD 2900 XT coupled with a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (quad core) processor. They say with the latest 8.361-RC4 drivers they got around 12K with that R600XT card which is faster 2000 points higher than the scores from FX57.net. They price of this card will be 399USD which would be quite a bargain.

The Turkish website FX57.net spilled the beans today. They allegedly tested the R600XT and XTX model on a Conroe 2.93Ghz with 2GB DDR2-800 RAM together with an Intel i975x motherboard. They came up with the following results in 3DMark 06:

Radeon HD 2900 XTX: 12k | GeForce 8800GTX: 10.5k
Radeon HD 2900 XT: 10k | GeForce 8800GTS: 9k

The operating system used was Windows Vista. They used the Catalyst 7.1 (8.33) which seems rather strange, other reviewers report about issues with drivers, so newer ones should be more likely to be used for testing/benchmarking. That could mean the results are not that meaningful at all. Either the scores are made up or there's a little bit of headroom for newer drivers. Decide for yourself...

Fudzilla was the most hasty again in disclosing the name of the new high end Radeon branded cards. There won't be a X2000... card, but instead, the name will be HD 2900.... So the first one off the line, that will make it to the market, will be the Radeon HD 2900XT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory.

Graphics Card Tidbits Part V - Update

Today in a week we will be enlightened on what NVIDIA was working on during the last few months. Will there be a GeForce 8800 Ultra or a 8850 GTX or a dual GPU card very likely named 8850 GX2? The names put aside, NVIDIA will give AMD/ATI again a run for their money, though things could change very likely another week later. It's all over town already that Tunisia will be the birthplace for AMD's first product troika (K10 CPUs, RD790 Chipset and R6x0 GPU family) on April 23rd. The invited crowd, most of them being journalists, will among other things, get shown Techdemo which Fuad got a screenshot from. He's got a second file as well, probably out of an official Powerpoint presentation, that finally solves the naming scheme riddle of the R600 high end cards. AMD's upcoming high end boards will be called X2900-Series.

Boot Daily been able to confirm pricing on ATI's upcoming R600-series GPUs. The R600, R630XT, R630Pro and R610 will cost $499, $199, $179 and $99 respectively.

Four cores running at 2.93GHz on a 1066FSB will be the base for Intel's upcoming Core 2 Extreme QX6800. Advanced cooling will be required in order to get rid of the 150W this beast will most likely dissipate. This CPU was thought to be released later this month but TheInq doesn't say so. Instead this new Intel flagship will be shown world wide on this Easter Monday - at least the NDA will go up by then. Furthermore don't expect them at your local dealers so soon, even big First Tier OEMs won't get it in substantial quantities the sources say. This all sounds like a paper launch without a real threat for Intel to continue their push-strategy. Or is the upcoming K10 architecture so much better performance wise?

There's a lot to be told about the latest graphics card news. At first Sanjin Radoš from Fudzilla wrote a small preview about the Sapphire X1950 Pro Dual. This card, as the name already implies, is powered by two Radeon X1950 Pro chips attached to each other using a special bridge chip. Every GPU (clocked at 580 MHz) has 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1400 Mhz at its disposal, using the right motherboard (ATI or Intel chipset) you will be able to get a 2GB CrossFire setup that probably outperforms even NVIDIA's 8800GTX card. In the article are some 3DMark06 scores that might get your wallet fear you again - the cards price will be around 500 Euros. The previewed sample was made by Sapphire and this will be earlier on the market than ASUS' design.The next card in the row is another X1950 Pro card, this time a single chip one. It's from Jetway and it comes with GDDR4 memory clocked at 2200 MHz. Though price is still unknown but the more expensive GDDR4 memory will definitely improve the overall performance of the card.

G100, an upcoming graphics core from NVIDIA, supposedly supports CUDA 2. CUDA, an acronym for "compute unified device architecture", allows programmers to offload complex mathematical functions onto the GPU for processing. It takes advantage of Unified Shaders for these mathematical calculations. This is a new way to do demanding science computer calculations, as a graphics chip is much faster than a CPU.

The differences between CUDA and CUDA 2 are to be seen. The G100 core is scheduled Q1 2008 and it might be even smaller than 65 nanometre.

In the first part of Graphics card tidbits we covered TSMC's new 55nm process, NVIDIA's 32 hidden stream processors in its 8800 cards and the memory speed of the GDDR4 equipped R600 boards (2000MHz).
Now let's get it on: We learned that a tested R600 prototype is clocked at 800MHz (GPU) and scores 11400 3DMarks in 3DMark06 (probably the GDDR4 version). The PC this card was plugged into was equipped with a quad core Intel QX6700 and 2GB of memory. For the sake of comparison Fuad and his guys took a GeForce 8800 GTX in a similar system and got around 10600 3DMark out of it.
Another interesting news post at Fudzilla is about the GPU and memory speeds of the NVIDIA 8600 GT. While it's faster brother the 8600 GTS clocks at 675 MHz core / 2000 MHz memory the GT ends up at 540 MHz core and 1400 MHz memory. Both cards are based on the G84, come with a 128 bit memory controller, GDDR3 memory and will be introduced to the market at April 17th.
Last but not least one note about the G100, NVIDIA's future generation graphics chip. This one will support Cuda 2 which uses unified shaders for its scientific calculations.

TSMC's 55nm Process and other Graphics card tidbits

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) announced yesterday that they readied there 55nm process technology. While a shrink from 65nm to 55nm doesn't sound much it still brings significant cost savings to companies like ATI who order thousands of GPUs. Using a new process technology in general means you can get more chips out of the same silicon wafer - that alone makes the chips cheaper. The switch to 55nm is a so called 'direct shrink' which will not require a whole redesign of the chip architecture. TSMC says chips would run with 10 to 20% less power at the same speed which in turn could be read as a higher working frequency at the same power level.

Fudzilla spoke with dozen of contacts and can now confirm that the R600 is a 80 nanometre chip. It is not 60 nanometre and it won't be 65 nanometre as going from 80 nanometre to 65 requires a complete redesign of the chip.

R600 was and is 80 nanometre and when it launches it will be 80 nanometre. Remember G80, GeForce 8800 series is 90 nanometre and it still runs great.

It looks like the R600 will be re-branded and probably cheaper than everyone expects but its very unlikely that we are waiting for G80 killer.

VR-Zone says that at the current moment, the R600 card scores no more than 200 points above the GeForce 8800 GTX in 3D Mark 06.

The latest and greatest number - 200 W - is supposed to be the total heat output for the R600 core. Fudzilla states this number as coming from "reliable" sources - and this time, I am inclined to say that I think they are right.

As we know, there are two versions of the R600 card - the "big gun", measuring in at 12.5 inches, and the "pocket sized" 9.5 inch version. The big card will probably be branded as Radeon X2900XTX and will end up with OEMs only. The bigger cooler should prolong its lifespan, and keep it cooler overall. The shorter card has a massive dual-slot cooler with heatpipes.

Everyone who could attend the HIS press dinner yesterday in the evening was surely disappointed afterwards. HIS had to inform the invited journalists that they won't see the R600 at HIS' booth - not even behind closed doors! - I guess GeCube won't show the chip neither, though they promised to do so! - ATI/AMD then let the press people know they will set up a special Tech-Day until the 31st of March and disclosed some new information. The R600 will be produced in 65nm by TSMC and not using the 80nm process because of difficulties (low yield and high leakage current). Daniel Wenzel from the German K-Hardware adds rumours have it AMD/ATI still got issues with the 512 bit memory subsystem. I nearly forgot to add the newly planned release date: Six weeks from now which reads begin of May.