Microsoft have been having a lot of problems recently with its live service however it has not stopped them selling a whole load of 360s during the Christmas break.
Apparantly the company has shipped 17.7 Million Xbox 360 Consoles since its launch 2 years ago. On September 30 the figure was apparently at 13.4 million meaning they have sold over 4.3 millions units from October onwards. Pretty impressive really.
Ok so the details are a bit thin on the ground and the pictures are a little uninspiring as the unit is not branded. However some basic details on the new 9800 GX2 have been leaked.
This new NVIDIA graphics card is essentially a 8800 GPU using the 65nm Fab Process and in SLI on a single card. This will make it similar to the old 7950 GX2 and may support Quad SLI.
The Geforce 9800 GX2 will include:
1GB Frame Buffer
Two PCBs
Two 65nm GPUs
256 Stream Processors.
This information was from [H}enthusiast and they believe it to be trustworthy.
We previously announced that nVidia was about to launch the new 8800 GTS 512Mb after nVidia accidentally added it to there product page. As of today nVidia has officially launched the card. As with the new 8800 GT this card is this card is based on the G92 architecture which uses a 65nm fabrication process.
nVidia has been making a bit of a mess with its naming conventions as the performance of each set of cards can vary wildly. The 8800 GTS is possibly the main suspect, there are currently 3 varieties out already. 2 using 96 stream processors with 320 and 640 MB respectively and 1 with 112 stream processors with 640 MB. The 96 Stream processor 8800 GTS had 1600MHz (effective) memory clock with 64GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The new 8800 GTS which uses 256-bit memory interface, hence 512MB, uses a 1940MHz (effective) memory clock with a memory bandwidth of 62.08GB/sec.
The old 8800 GTS had 6 shader clusters each featuring 16 stream processors, 4 texture address units and 8 texture filtering units adding up to 96 stream processors, 24 texture units for addressing and 48 for filtering.
The new 8800 GTS has 8 shaders, 16 stream processors, and 8 units for both texture addressing and texture filtering. This results in more shader and texturing power than the 8800 Ultra. Putting it simply the card is quite a bit cheaper than a 8800 Ultra but should manage to compete in terms of performance (with memory bandwidth limiting performance slightly).
Bit Tech have had chance to do a review of some of the new units with some excellent results. If you are really interested in the performance of these cards I would recommend you read their review.
Some of the main findings from the review included that the card had less power usage than the 8800 GTS 320MB while idle and slight higher under load. This is mainly due to the new 65nm process.
Overall the performance was very similar to the GeForce 8800 GTX while managing to be quite a bit cheaper than the GTX. The GTS should retail for about £220 inc VAT with the GTX being around the £280 mark.
If you are using a large monitor 1920×1200+ and your budget handles it, it is still recommended to use the 8800 Gtx or Ultra due to their increased memory bandwidth.
Ok so this is not really a professional review of the Zotac Card, I do not currently have all the software to perform a proper benchmark and I my main computer is a 4400 X2 (939) with 2Gig DDR memory. I assume if I did perform any benchmarking tests the CPU and Ram would be the week link lowing the scores. So this is more a post of subjective personal opinion rather than a impartial objective review.
Anyway, they other week I decided my twin 7800GTs were getting a little old and not providing the performance I would like in my computer. I was seriously considering just building an entire new system, but its close to Christmas so spare cash is short.
After the release of the new 8800GTs based on the new and fancy 65nm process (read more on Fabrication Process here) and the superb results it was achieving I decided to fork out for one. The idea was the small (ish) investment would prolong the life of my system until mid next year or so allowing me to save up and get a very high end system.
I have to be honest I have never really heard much about Zotac before, but from what I gather they are quite new to the market and they are a subsidiary of PC Partner who are also the people behind Sapphire. My choice in buying the Zotac was purely from a financial perspective, the company I own, Dolphin Promotions, is VAT registered, normally all my computer purchases are claimed back from the nice VAT man but I decided buy through Pixmania Pro, whom on proof of VAT registration will not charge the VAT. Yeay for me. To be honest I think the final price only saved a little over a normal 8800GT but the Zotac is clocked higher than the reference cards so I was hoping to squeeze a little more out of it.
The card arrived very fast, thanks Pixmania. Unfortunately my new Benq 24″ Monitor had not arrived, no thanks there Pixmania it was in stock when I ordered but took 2 weeks to arrive. Anyway I was restricted to a 19″ Acer monitor initially. Installation was simple though I used the latest drivers from NVidia rather than the Zotac supplied ones. One of the first things I did was install the demo of Crysis. I had previously installed it but my 7800s just could not cope, even at low settings, I expect with some messing about they would of just about coped.
Crysis immediately set the optimal settings to medium, while I can not provide FPS details the game ran very smoothly and I was very happy, Crysis really is a beautiful game.
Since then I have installed Windows Vista, Hell Gate London, Call of Duty 4, Half Life 2: The Orange Box and the full version of Crysis. What’s the point of having a 8800GT if you don’t have any decent games eh?
Vista set my system performance to 5.0 with the Ram being the weak link, the Graphics had 5.9. The system ran all the games perfectly on High settings so I am very pleased so far. I have since also received my 24£ Benq, while I have not had much time for gaming on it I tried out Crysis. I have only set it to 1680×1050 at medium settings so far, from what I have heard most systems struggle with Crysis at 1920×1200. The game ran perfectly smoothly at these settings and I am hoping I will be able to push it a little further.
Overall I am very happy with the Zotac, for the price it has more than met my expectations. If you would like a bit of a technical review Bit Tech has a review of the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OC, this is slightly slower than the Zotac but should provide similar performance levels. PC Labs has a Crysis benchmark with a combination of cards including the Zotac 8800GT Amp Edition (Mine was the standard edition). The PC Labs Benchmark is a Turkish to English translation and only uses 1024×768 resolution, but it is still a good review.
Well this morning I started work to find an email off Pixmania saying my Zotac GeForce 8800 GT had been dispatched. Rather annoyingly they said my new 24" BenQ G2400W was waiting to be delivered. It was in stock when I ordered it so I am a bit annoyed!
Anyway UPS have just delivered the 8800GT so I will be happy for a little while. I can’t say I have really heard much of Zotac before, however DriverHeaven.Net gave it a good review and it is an overclocked 8800GT running at 660MHz Core,1800 MHz Memory Clock and 1600 MHz Shader.
In comparison the Nvidia reference cards run at 600, 1800MHz and 1500MHz. So there should be a bit of a performance tweak over the reference cards.
In fact Bit Tech just reviews the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB which uses 625MHz core and 1,566MHz Shader. So a tad slower than the Zotec. There opinion was
We still continue to be impressed by Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GT and in the grand scheme of things, and BFGTech’s overclocked card continues that trend.
On the whole, BFGTech’s GeForce 8800 GT OC card delivers and it earns a recommendation from us.
Hopefully I won’t be disappointed!!!
I think it was only the other week when ASDA screwed up and had bottles of beer available for 1p. This time is the turn of Tesco, they have been accidentally offering Xbox 360 consoles online for just £33.24.
The pricing slip-up would have meant a giant saving for customers, as the Xbox package was meant to cost ten times as much.
Sharp-eyed shoppers were quick to spot the bargain on the supermarket giant’s website. At least one customer ordered 39 of the knock-down consoles online and had the payment accepted - but they have not been delivered.
The deal offered the Xbox 360, the Forza Motorsport 2 and Viva Pinata games plus a wireless control pad.
According to Trading standard it is illegal to raise the price of a product if the customer has already had their offer accepted. However the Tesco website says if they make a mistake with the price, they are not obliged to stick to it. It is not clear if Tesco will honour the order however the Asda mistake mentioned above was apparently not honoured.
BenQ are setting their targets straight at the gamers with this monitor. Being a 24″ LCD monitor is can handle 1920×1600 resolutions for your PC, which also means it can handle full 1080p resolution if you want to plug your PS3/Blue Ray in. The unit comes with D-sub / DVI-D / HDMI inputs so you can have your PC through the DVI-D, PS3 through HDMI and 360 or Wii through the D-sub.
Apparently this has been slapped with a $605 RRP, however I have actually just ordered one myself from Pixmania for a shockingly low price of £283 inc Vat. It has not arrived yet so I will report back on how good it is when it arrives.
Personally I am not expecting it to be amazing but at that price I just cant say no. I have been looking around at monitors for a few weeks and I know that 22″ are the sweet spot for pricing at the moment with some available for around £150, but I cant help think that 1680×1050 wont feel much bigger than 1280×1024(my current res). I think at 1920×1600 it will feel like I will have a massive amount of extra real estate.
I have also had to treat myself to a nice new 8800 GT to ensure my computer can handle that res. Though I do realise that the GTs start struggle a little compared to the GTX at this res however I cant really justify the £300+ needed for a GTX.
*Edit* nVidia have now officially launched the 8800 GTS 512 MB at a retail price of about £220
Any day now we will see the arrival of the new and updated GeForce 8800 GTS which will sport an additional cluster of 16 shader processor, bringing up the total to 112. The same amount as the new GeForce 8800 GT. The core and shader clocks along with the memory frequency and bandwidth will be the same as the old version. This updated version thus uses the same G80 core, just less crippled. However there have also been some talk about another GeForce 8800 GTS, but that this next one will be based on the G92 core.
This new version would then sport the more traditional 512/1024 MB memory configurations and a whole 128 shader processors, and all of the advantages of the new core which the G80 lacks. For example the updated features of PureVideo HD, PCIe 2.0 and overall lower power consumption.
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