Phenom II X4 965 reviews

Anandtech has reviewed the Phenom II X4 965, the 3.4GHz top chip from AMD. Price is in line with the previous Black Editon model, the X4 965.

There's not much to see, idle power consumption is good, comparable to the lower clocked Core i7 920 and performance is good in games. Load power consumption is of 140W. Ouch.

Good news is the subsequent price drops in all of AMD's lineup, with the Phenom II X3 720 now at $119, the pointless X4 810 gone and the X4 955 priced at $195. Most of the other chips have also gone down in cost and with AMD AM2+ motherboards cheaper than Core i7 equivalents, the Phenom II is still the best budget minded platform around.

Now, where's that mostly pointless, but oh so cool, "Istanbul" based Phenom II X6? Speed bumps can only last this long, 3.6GHz can be possible but 3.8GHz will be pushing the envelope.

AMD RV870 could feature 384bit memory bus

The new Radeon HD 5800 may mimic the G80 chips.

Hardware-Infos is reporting that an Asian source has provided them with details that point to the possibility of the new AMD RV870 chips to use a 384bit memory bus, in an effort to improve bandwidth from the previous generation of cards. Coupled with DDR5 chips, the new cards could deliver 240GB/s, providing an increase in line with the expected improvements in processing power.

While 384bit bus will not deliver such cheap card as those of the HD 4800 series but AMD might deliver 256bit ones for lower price points. It is also easier to fit 12 memory chips on a graphics card PCB than 16, like it happens on Nvidia's GTX 28x cards.
No new memory technology is expected to come to the rescue of PCB costs, so AMD might not really have another option to sustain the increased processing power that is expected from the new chips. Samsung has touted 7GHz GDDR5 chips but, at reasonable price points, manufactures are not yet expected to deliver more than 5GHz.

Source: Hardware-Infos

Core i9 "Gulftown" early benchmarks

25-48% faster in multi-threaded apps, in line with the expected results of the added 50% processing power.

HKEPC has published benchmarks of the upcoming revised architecture known as "Westmere", which is a 32nm processor with some architectural improvements.


Game performance doesn't increase much but since games are traditionally cache size bound, the increase in L3 cache size from 8 to 12MB does have some effect on performance. CPU scores are very high, as expected.

This result I actually found surprising, given that the CPUs benchmarked both seem to run at 2.4GHz and Cinebench usually scales well to multiple cores. There's some lack of bandwidth for the hexa core, it seems.
Scientific benchmarks don't yield massive improvements due to the same bandwidth limitations.

The other reference at clockspeed can be found here, where the 2.4GHz Core i9 is compared with the Core i7 965. It actually draws less power, but it's also clocked 800MHz lower - this figure should improve slightly in retail processors, especially for follow up revisions.

Now it's up to Intel to deliver the final specs and pricing on the chip but it should be available only in one model, costing $999 and sold as an Xtreme Edition model.

MSI P55 "Big Bang" packs Lucid Hydra chip

Multi-GPU with different cards, no game profiles required.

Lucid's Hydra is a new technology that has been making the rounds of the internet for a while now. The chip is touted as allowing for different graphics cards to be used in multi GPU settings, while scaling even better than today's solutions. Different, in this sense, means one from AMD, one from Nvidia, one 4670 and one 4890, etc.
Lucid has not yet fully detailed how they can achieve this kind of performance scaling and card mixing but Intel is one of the funding entities of this Israelit company - the fact that a retail, consumer product is implementing the chip should mean the technology is getting ready for mass adoption. Supposedly, the chip can split work at the rendering primitives level, but not much else is known.

This P55 motherboard, nicknamed "Big Bang", will feature support of up to three graphics cards via three x16 PCIe slots but the lane configuration wasn't disclosed.

Source: TechPowerUp

OCZ announces Solid 2 SSD drives

After the release of the cheaper Indilinx Barefoot based Agility SSD, OCZ have announced a new product, the Solid 2 Series 2.5" SSD.

The peak performance of the OCZ Solid 2 SSDs is lower than both the Agility and the original JMicron based OCZ Solid SSD:

• Read speeds(sequential) up to 125MB/s for both models
• Write speeds(sequential) up to 80MB/s for the 60GB and 100MB/s for the 120GB model

The old OCZ Solid provided up to 155MB/s in reads and 90MB/s in writes and the Agility provides up to 230MB/s in reads and 135MB/s in sequential writes. Peak numbers mean nothing, of course.
The reason behind this slower performance, especially in sequential reads, is the use of cheaper NAND Flash chips. This is not a big problem, as the drive still retains the 64MB of cache of the other models and provides very good random read and write speeds. The background garbage collection functionality is also expected to be part of this drive's firmware.

The big problem of cheaper NAND Flash chips is reliability, which will in part be due to the number of low erase cycles that the flash chips can endure. This information is not provided by any manufacturer, but one can assume OCZ should be using lower quality chips on these cheaper drives. Problems may arise from this, although if well handled will "only" mean you'll starting to loose drive space and not data. Either way, SSDs have evolved much since the first Eee problems.
Last time I checked, the Solid had 5000 cycles MLC flash and some reliability problems, although the chips did have some extra spare internal blocks and OCZ was sparing some extra capacity for redundancy. Mine still works fine but I haven't given it much use - yet.

The Solid 2 will be a lot faster than the Solid due to the high random read and write speeds provided by the 64MB cache and Indilinx controller. The lower sequential read and write speeds should not scare you as the drive will still feel hugely fast, not any different from the Vertex unless you'll go and measure it.

AMD planning 795GX, aka RS880D

While AMD has been pushing for integrated graphics in all Phenom II motherboards for a while, it has not come to pass. The 790FX is still highly sought for and the 770 is a very good chipset all around.

AMD will be releasing the 795GX with the updated RS880D, which is a higher clocked 785G chipset that's capable of x8/x8 Crossfire by splitting the PCI-e lanes. The GPU clock is 700MHz, the same that was used in the previous 790GX chipset.

It would be great if every motherboard chipset would carry an graphics core, as this would allow for AMD to use the PowerXpress feature on the desktop side as well. PowerXpress is a notebook only feature for now, which allows the discrete graphics card to be shut down to save power when idle. This is especially useful for CrossFire setups but AMD and nVidia haven't been able to tackle it just right on the desktop. Current AMD implementations allow to seamlessly move between discrete and integrated graphics without rebooting the machine, changing as the power source goes from battery to AC.
Without PowerXpress, the 795GX becomes a rather pointless chipset, which is why the 790FX is still highly used in enthusiast class components.

Acer cuts on 14 and 15'' ultra-thin notebook orders

Not unsurprisingly, the Timeline series sees little orders.

Or so Digitimes reports:

Wistron, OEM for the two models, is producing around 200,000 units per month, down from an expected 600,000 units. The drop might hurt Wistron's notebook shipments in August, added the paper.

Not that they're bad laptops, I'm particularly impressed with the 13.3" Timeline, it has good battery life, very good cooling, a very low profile and both VGA and HDMI outputs, making it perfect to dock or use on the move. The problem is it's just too expensive for the average buyer. That is also Intel's fault, since the single core Core 2 processors used are priced much higher than your usual CPU, without delivering proper performance. Looking at it, it just seems like a thiner regular laptop but underpowered - although it's really well built.

The 14" and 15" models become somewhat pointless as they will still be quite big to carry around comfortably and are more expensive, although they do carry an optical drive, something ever more useless with the advent of big, useful USB drives. From the report, the 13.3" seems unaffected, which is what I've seen available for sale around here.

Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2H released

A small form factor targeted motherboard.

Since I'm into small PCs nowadays, this board grabbed my attention. It features the lower end Intel G41 chipset but still features a good array of I/O ports, among which the useful DVI-D and HDMI ports. The lack of hardware video decoding by the chipset doesn't make this motherboard a first HTPC choice but the smaller form factor does help and a 65W dual core will provide enough performance to decode every stream you throw at it, while giving little hassle with software.

All around it's a motherboard with the quality that Gigabyte has gotten us used to, targeted at a lower price point and with the unusual small motherboard footprint. There's still a three phase CPU power supply, which may prove too little for Core 2 Quads but more than enough for Core 2 Duos and Pentium processors.

As promised earlier, even this motherboard supports Gigabyte's DualBIOS, FSB is supported from 800MHz to 1333MHz and there's a PCI-e x16 slot. Be warned though, as to provide dual digital video outputs, the board can only provide 4 PCI-e lanes on the x16 slot. This will still be enough for mainstream graphics cards but don't expect it to deal with a GTX 285 in a spectacular way.

OCZ's Vertex SSD receives background garbage collection

OCZ keeps pushing SSD technology forward with a new beta firmware for it's Indilinx Barefoot based drive.

One of the problems that have gone unsolved, until now, by the best products in the SSD market - Intel and Indilinx based parts - is the inability to de-fragment the SSD once you've given it some use. Most manufacturers will not encourage you to run a filesystem defragmentator as this will shorten the lifespan of the SSD. There is good reason to do so and it will not solve your SSD fragmentation problems, since filesystem and flash fragmentation are different problems - the filesystem can't help the SSD since it doesn't know it's internal flash structure.

Typically, a used SSD will be slower and will have it's top sequential write speed drop to less than half of what it was originally and sequential reads will also take a considerable hit. It will still kick an HDD's ass but will be slower then when you bought it.
OCZ has delivered a new beta firmware for it's Vertex SSD drives that performs background defragmentation of the SSD - meaning it will only do so when the drive is not doing any work - and can restore the drive to it's "as new" state in about half an hour, which is an excellent result.

For anyone who is on the market for an SSD drive, the Vertex will be the drive of choice for some time to come. Intel has released updated X25-M drives but they still don't feature this kind of features and do loose out to the Vertex in some tests, less the random writes test, which is still an Intel advantage.
Hop over to PC Perspective for the test.

Vizo ARIUS II ARS-250 reviewed

If computer cases don't get 2.5" bays and SSDs don't got 3.5"... get and adapter.

This new product from Vizo is aimed at building personal computer's with up to two 2.5" drives fitting in a 3.5" bay. OCZ has already unveiled an adapter for its SSD drives, which is cheap at $12 but carries only one drive. This one from Vizo is more expensive, at $59.99, but can also be found by around $40 on eBay. It doesn't waste as much space but the price is steeper.

Source: Tweaktown

AMD Sempron 140 unlocks to dual core

You can now have some fun trying to get a $35 dual-core.

The new Sempron 140 is an AM3 part, compatible with both DDR3 and DDR2 when used in AM2/AM2+ platforms. It comes with a nice enough clock of 2.7GHz, 1MB of L2 cache and a disabled core.
The enthusiasts at VModtech have been able to unlock one they had, with an ASRock M3A790GXH/128 motherboard, to achieve a perfect dual core with an overclocked core speed of 3.7GHz:


Such a cheap processor, when unlocked and overclocked, will provide decent performance in most of recent games and you won't require a motherboard with a very complex CPU PWM module due to the lower wattage of the said CPU vs the Phenom II X2/X3/X4. While it will still heat up, the CPU will require around half of the said amperage, which is the biggest problem that PWM modules have to deal with nowadays.

Core i7 870 retail pricing tips up

We had already had a look at the new "Lynnfield" based Core i7 and Core i5 performance earlier and some hints on pricing, which hinted at $562 for the top Core i7 870 model. That has been confirmed by a website that is listing it at $678.99 - the old Core i7 920 never looked so sweet. Also look out for the Core i5 750 soon, as it should be priced at around $200 and showed interesting performance for it's price.

AMD 785G shows interesting results

An incremental updated with interesting performance when overclocked.

We already knew that the 785G's performance wasn't going to be extraordinary and the lack of DX10.1 titles that would benefit from a speedup of the new features present in the chipset would make it even harder on AMD, which has been lacking in improving performance.

Anandtech has reviewed the new chipset and performance is on par with the old 780G:


The only interesting result is the one where the IGP is overclocked to 800MHz, or 100MHz more than the 790GX. This provides a good performance increase over the baseline, delivering greater gains in less bandwidth bound games. For gaming, sideport is mostly useless nowadays because the dual channel DDR2/DDR3 setup can provide a decent amount of bandwidth - courtesy of a 128-bit bus width - versus the measly onboard DDR3 chip that can only provide 32bits of bus width. Albeit higher clocked, it loses ground to the quick updates on CPU memory speeds.

The AMD 785G provides a reasonable gaming platform on a budget, mostly for older titles, and you'll definitely want a motherboard that allows IGP clock manipulation - more information on that should pop up soon. Stay away from it's integrated core if you're a Linux user as ATI drivers still need much work - trust me, bad Radeon HD 4830 experience. HTPC owners will want to pay attention to the lack of 8 channel LPCM over HDMI due to a chipset bug. For that you will have to turn to Nvidia's solutions.