JeGX's Infamous Lab

Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

The new Alienware’s gaming notebook is available with the following features:
- 17 inch Wide Screen WUXGA 1920×1200
- Intel Core 2 Duo
- NVIDIA 8800M/8700M/8600M GT/GTX and SLI
- up to 4Gb of RAM
- HDD: up to 500Mb or 1Tb in Raid 0 (2×500Mb)

Full features and more on that monster here:

Alienware Area-51 m17x – Learn More

A graphics card with a very nice looking GPU cooler. Unfortunately, this card will available in Korea only…

- Source

I found this thread on [H]ard|Forum where we can read this:

“That fur demo is known to get cards the hottest, it is also known for smoking cards as well (it was the last thing run for a number of people on the extremesystems forums).”

I knew FurMark was good for heating the graphics cards up but I didn’t know it’s also good to really kill them. I feel the summer will be hot for some graphics cards…

Extremetech has reviewed the new gems of Dell, the XPS M1730:

This is a beast, with a Core 2 Extreme X9000 mobile CPU running at 2.8GHz, a pair of GeForce 8800M GTX cards in SLI (the dream for all graphics geeks!), and two 200GB 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 configuration, it’s no surprise that this $4500 monster is fast.

Dell’s XPS series is really a good product (I’m the lucky owner of the previous generation, the XPS M1710 (with a GeForce 7900GTX/512M)) so if you can afford it, buy it!

Here is a sum-up of the next GPGPU: far more important than you think. Think 10x a CPU’s performance.

This article discusses about the use of GPU for non-graphical purposes or GPGPU (General Purpose (computation) on Graphics Processing Units). The author talks essentially about ATI 3870 X2 and the FireStream 9170 Stream Processor but don’t forget that NVIDIA has also the same kind of products with the Geforce 8 or Tesla. ATI’s Radeon HD 3870 X2 can hit around 1TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per second), in contrast, a high-end quad-core CPU can push out around 60GFLOPS, or one-sixteenth the amount of floating-point power.

To program the GPU for non graphical rendering, you can use the The FireStream SDK (Software Development Kit) for ATI cards that gives the developer low-level access to the workings of the GPU. With NVIDIA boards, you can use CUDA to perform equivalent tasks.

And the final sentence:

”So the next time you look at the Radeon HD 3870 or NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT in your machine, remember that it’s more than just a graphics card; it’s a floating-point monster that will increasingly be used for non-graphical tasks.”

Related Links:

Sapphire’s 3870 X2 ATOMIC version will hit US and Europe market next month. This card will have 1Gb of GDDR3 memory, Dual DVI / TVO with Water Cooler. Nice product.

You can see two kind of power connectors: 2×3 and 2×4. The first one (2×3) is the regular PCI-Express power connector and the second one (2×4) is the new PCI-Express 2.0 connector.

More pitures on the Radeon 3870X2 ATOMIC: Sapphire_Prepares_ATOMIC_3870-X2.

If you find your Xbox 360 a little bit too noisy, ExtremTech shows you how to replace the stock fan.

Ok cool but why Microsoft does not do this hack directly ???