NVIDIA Blacklists Hardware Secrets after it Defends Unbiased Review

What is happening to the computer industry when a product can not even stand up on its own merit? Well one would hope that the countless review sites around the web would reflect that. It seems some manufacturer's just will not accept that their new product is the best thing since sliced bread and rather than trying to work on a solution to any problems, they prefer to snub the very sites that give them any publicity in the first place. This time it is NVIDIA who are the bad guys who have dropped all support for and blacklisted Hardware Secrets. I can not put in to words how much this disgusts me, and it goes on further to prove that some tech sites out there, are most definitely in bed with NVIDIA. I would rather publish no review at all than a bias one, the full response from Hardware Secrets follows.

ATI Catalyst 10.5 Driver Released

AMD have released this months ATI Catalyst Driver 10.5. From my own testing and reading around the internet, these already pose a potential major issue, in that when software is set to overclock 3D mode, graphics cards will fail to downclock to idle speeds. For instance, a HD 5870's idle speeds are 157 Mhz core, 300 MHz memory. But with a software overclock enabled be it through the Catalyst Control Center or any other utility, the card will clock to 400 MHz core, 1200 Mhz memory in idle, causing an increase of over 10 degrees Celsius on idle with the stock cooler, and therefore an increase in power consumption would be without doubt.

ASUS Crosshair IV Formula QVL

It seems ASUS are yet to release the digital version of the QVL on their support website for the Crosshair IV Formula. As I have been lucky enough to get a retail version early and thus a copy of the manual, many people are asking me about the QVL for the memory, so they know what to buy and what is officially supported. I have scanned the QVL pages from the manual and saved them as a pdf document, you will therefore need a pdf reader to view them. Just remember that the memory controller is in the CPU for AMD processors now, so anything above 1333 MHz, will be considered overclocking.

Crosshair IV Formula Preview, Unboxing & Assembly

I have decided to wait until I have the Phenom, to start running benchmarks on this board, as doing so with the sempron is going to be quite meaningless. However so you don't have to wait, here are the pictures taken during unboxing and assembly. I'll let them do the talking, expect a more in depth review including performance analysis when the Phenom X6 processors are released.

My Crosshair IV Formula Has Arrived

Yes you read that right, I have today take delivery for the retail version of the Asus Crosshair IV Formula. Said to be under NDA until 27th, with this being bought from retail with my own money, Ill be bringing you as much info on it as I can with the limited resources I have available. Here are some teaser pics to get you started. Ill hopefully being powering it up for the first time in about an hours time :D

UPDATE:

I decided to build the board into my current rig and use the sempron to tide me over until the release of the new Phenoms. As a result I wasn't able to get anything other than lots of pics. Stay tuned, they will be up tomorrow along with an initial impression review :)

ASUS Crosshair IV Formula, In stock at UK Retailer Scan

More than a week before the 890FX boards were expected to surface, and with mentions of NDAs on these boards of the 27th April, the UK Retailer Scan (www.scan.co.uk), on Saturday listed the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula as in stock for the price of £141.89 (exc VAT), thats about $215 US. Thats only £15 (or $22) more than the board it replaces the Crosshair III Formula, based on Scan's pricing.

I thought about posting this over the weekend, but though better of it, expecting this to either be pulled or moved on to a pre-order. However, I placed an order for this board on Sunday, and have now received confirmation it has been authorised, packed and and despatched, for delivery tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I do not own any AMD processors to be able to test this board should it arrive tomorrow, so we will have to wait for the Phenom II X6's to become available before I can power it up and show you some performance figures. Until then, keep a look out for an in depth first look at the board and packaging, hopefully in the next few days.

UPDATE:

I have now purchased an AMD Sempron to do some inital testing of the board. Hopefully trying out the unlock feature giving me a free upgrade to an Athlon X2. More to come, I will keep you updated on the progress.

UPDATE 2:

The motherboard has now been pulled from Scan's site, one would assume they have spotted the error. However my board appears to have been dispatched and I have tracking information, stay tuned, I will post if/when it arrives tomorrow.

What Graphics Benchmarks Would You Like To See?

Before I look again at the HD 5870, and to set out some tests for everyone to do when they review a graphics card, I would like to hear from you in this articles discussion thread, what you would like to see benchmarked and test in reviews and articles.

The first request is that you split your answer into:

Freely available
- These would be benchmarks/tech demos etc which are free to download and run.

If available
- Games, etc which are not free but you would like to see, if the reviewer has access to them.

And the second request is that the above must have some way of using a fixed time or benchmark mode. I don't believe in using average runs through a game as it gives inaccurate results. Please specify available tools, etc for applications which do not themselves have a benchmarking tool. For example, the Crysis Benchmarking Tool from crymod.com for benchmarking Crysis.

I look forward to hearing from you, and from the discusion hopefully we can come up with a list and make recorded timedemos (where applicable) available to download for everyone to have comparable consistent reviews.

Thanks.

AMD Phenom II X6 1050T Retail, Priced and Pictured

Expreview has found AMD's yet to be released Phenom II X6 1050T, retail boxed, on sale in China. AMD appear to have gone for a new colour scheme as can be seen below, although the same Phenom II logo has been used. The box confirms that the 1050T is in fact clocked at 2.8 GHz and features 9 MB total cache, what is not noted is the TDP, as the 1050T was expected to be released in 95W and 125W variants. With a listing price of RMB1999 (US$293), it does seem a littler higher than expected, however this could well be down to early availability pricing. The 1050T is one of three new AMD Phenom II X6 processors, with the 1035T clocked slightly slower at 2.6 GHz and the 1090T BE clocked at the higher speed of 3.2 GHz, they are expected to be released officially on the 26th of this month.

Source: Expreview

ATI Radeon HD 5870 Initial Review & CPU Bottleneck Comparison

Today I'll be taking my first look at AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870. The particular board and cooler is a reference model and built by ATI, although branded by PowerColor. I will be looking at how a slightly older, more mainstream, processor, motherboard and ram combo fairs with one of these new cards, as opposed to many reviews which feature an i7 test bed. You can see the full system setup later in the review. Anyway, lets jump straight into what you have probably seen 100 times, the card's technical specifications!

Gears of War 3 Announced for April 2011

Seemingly out of nowhere, Gears of War 3 has been announced by none other than the Xbox 360 itself. Owners of the console may have already noticed that in the Spotlight channel, lays the item as pictured below. No further information is given by the link, all we know is that there is in fact a Gears of War 3, its due out April 2011 and it could be the last in the series as the caption reads, "The epic story concludes April 2011."

Source: Joystiq

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