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With Nvidia, ATI and Intel all competing for the mini notebook processor market. The Dell laptop named the DELL E comes in two surprising sizes the 8.9″ and 12.1″. The laptop is 0.8 inches thick! The laptop is set to be released in august/ september time.

The Laptop can run both Linux and Windows operating systems which is a positive note against the current Asus EEE PC range. For more interesting specifications check the table below!

Standard Version:

• Display: 8.9W (1024 x 600) res
• CPU: 1.6GHz Intel Diamondville? (Atom may be?)
• 4/8 ans 16 gig flash memory, no solid state harddisk here
• 3 usb ports
• Wifi 11g
• 5hr battery life

The laptop looks promising but by the time this is released I expect other manufacturers will have competitive versions supplying better specifications for the money.

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A driver hacker had recently achieved something I would consider quite difficult in the driver world. ‘the guy’ claims to have hacked Nvidia Physx driver to run on ATI based hardware.

Screen shots of CPU-Z showing the Ageia driver settings and £d Mark Vantage with a score of 22606 CPU Points. The CPU score is only attainable using Physx Nvidia hardware/ software.

This may cause controversy between the vendors as they are in constant competition over bragging rights of software/ hardware. ATI is not likely to use the Physx driver in anyway because we know that ATI have struck a deal with Havok, who were purchased by Intel in 2007. Hmmm I guess Intel preffered ATI over Nvidia!

A good point I must mention is, will ATI benefit from using the driver since most games use the Physix engine over Havok. Could ATI loose support?

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After searching on the internet I came across and interesting find. A german website Eeepc news has found an interesting slide which suggest AMD has a rival for the Intel Atom processor, to little to late?

AMD are planning/ creating a tiny 64bit processor running at 1GHz and boasts thermal design power of 8Watts. According to the slide below the processor will include the Hypertransport powered chipset and the Northbridge memory controller. The southbridge and graphics processor will be soldered on to the main board.

The specifications

• AMD64 Instruction Set
• Integrated Memory Controller - DDR2 400mhz DIMM/ DODIMM
• 16 lane 800Mhz HyperTransport Technology link
• On-chip L1 & L2 Cache 64KB, 256 KB respectfully
• 1GHz core frequency
• 8W TDP (CPU + Northbridge Memory Controller)
• 812 pins, 27×27mm dimension

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Welcome to Friday’s Blog post! Its nearly that time of the day where the weekend is on the horizon. I was informed by a mate of mine about this monitor from alien ware. I was intrigued and had to do my research.

The display above uses DLP display technology. The double wided curved monitor with LED illumination comes at a resolution of 2880 x 900 pixels. The bizarre screen resolution and curvature actually mimics peripheral vision.

The monitor was trialed with the Crysis gaming engine and was apparently flawless. With a millisecond responce time of .02 of a millisecond I can understand why, WOW!

Only the other hand the monitor did have teething issues. I’m not sure if this was due to the technology bottleneck or because of teething problems with the prototype design. The monitor whilst in game had three faint vertical dividing lines which indicated four sub-monitors connected together.

Lastly, Sorry to burst your bubble viewers but this is only available as a prototype.  i do apologise! Keep up the good work Alienware!

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Nvidia has launched a beta version of the 177.39 drivers have introduced the PhysX support to a number of Nvidia graphics cards. I assume the support will be for the 9800 series and 200 series cards. At present the driver is only supported for the GTX, GTX 280 and GTX 260 graphics cards. The beta driver includes the PhysX software version 8.06.12.

The beta 177.30 driver includes

• Driver for windows vista!
• PhysX technology for PhysX GPU hardware acceleration
• Includes the Unreal Tournament 3 Physx mod pack
• Support SLI technology for DirectX 9 and 10 cards
• Supports CUDA Technology
• GPU overclocking and temperature monitor support

The download page for the viewers who may be interested in the download Nvidia 177.39 Beta PhysX driver.

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AMD will be launching the HD4870 x2 will be released sooner rather than later. Funnily enough the card will be the same colour as the Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ which is black. I cant see ATI adopting a green colored card that’s for sure.

The sales for ATI 4800 series cards are apparently hitting new heights, the current 4850 card is selling out throughout Europe. Lets see what ATI’s 4870 card can deliver and lets hope the ATI 4870 series x2 card can hit the top section of the enthusiasts benchmarking.

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Now that Nvidia and ATi have released their latest graphics cards Nvidia needed to re think their strategy to counter act the competitive sales from ATI.  ATI released their Radeon HD 4850 last week with their forthcoming HD4870 which is yet to be released.

Nvidia Decided to create the 9800 GTX+ which uses a 55nm process. If I remember correctly Nvida was to rethink their naming convention with the GTX 250, if this card doesnt confuse matters and dont know what will!

Nvidia will release the card in July but for the views among us will have to wait for the super modded  Xtreme yes X not ex (We mean business!!!) will need to wait that little longer.

The 9800GTX+ offers the reference clock speed of 738MHz core and 1836MHz shader clock. The GDDR3 memory of 512 Mb is clocked at 2,200MHz 200MHz higher than Nvidias default specifications. As we are aware Nvidia have joined PhysX SO Nvidia will be adding PhysX support for physics portion of graphical computation.

There is not confirmed release date and the pricing is set to be around $229. With ATI dominating the low end/ main stream markets will Nvidia snap up the mid to high end markets with this marketing strategy. N will continue to dominate the high end markets and the 9800 GTX+ could affect ATI 4000 series cards.

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As we are all aware AMD’s Radeon 4850 has been out since last week. The 4870 is yet to be released, if you was interested! AMD has issued a hotfix. The hotfix ‘#737-35298′ in AMD’s knowledge base includes display driver, catalyst control centre and is said to improve overall performance and stability.

Its available from the official AMD support website for both 32, 64 bit of windows XP and Windows Vista. AMD haven’t spoken up about the fix but users have apparently been getting gain in performance. If you have a Radeon HD 4850 and your lucky, then pick up the hot fix -> AMD Radeon 4850 HotFix.

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There has been speculation on the actual release date of the ATI graphics card. ATI have decided to release the card today! This has caused problems for reviewing/ press releasing websites. On the other hand its a great time for the consumer!

The image above shows the latest offering by ATI. It actually looks very similar to the 8800 series cards. Now for the specifications. The card has 800 unified stream processors (die size must be huge!) The Graphics processor is clocked at 625Mhz and uses 512Mb of GDDR3 memory running at 1GHz. No GDDR4? I guess not.

Now for the software sided specification. The card uses shader model 4.1 and has support for direct x 10.1. This is where ATi has the upper hand compared to Nvidia, Nvidia does not support this version.

I have looked into the benchmarking of the graphics board and it seems slower than 8800 GTX offerings! How can this be? I would like to think this is a driver issue. Considering ATI havn’t released anything since the last HD cards Nvidia are now another model in-front of ATI.

But lets keep it real here. current benchmarks are stating that the card is slower than Nvidia’s last offerings. Crysis doesn’t look good either, running 1920 x 1200 with AA off equates to 31 FPS. I was at least hoping for some sort of massive advance but i’m afraid not.

Processor technology seems to be moving on with x86 Architecture but where does Graphics processing stand. Are the main Vendors concentrating on other products such as miniature laptops and so-forth?

I dont think I will consider a upgrade till Crysis can run at a steady 60 FPS vsync on!

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The latest Geforce GTx200 cards by EVGA currently lack HDMI connectivity. The guys at EVGA have realised this is a good selling point for latest graphics hardware. Computer enthusiast with the graphics card can register their product online, in return they will be given a free adapter.

There is one slight problem! The consumer must wait till the 26th of June for an official, certified fully HDMI compliant version. On the other hand, if you cant wait, try third party versions which are available.

Consumers who will qualify for the adapter must have bought the card after June 16th and you will need your serial number!

Oh, Sorry for not posting on the latest graphics from Nvidia, I will be posting a article on the latest hardware. My tip, wait for ATI’s offering then we can truly see the difference in performance.

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