Author: Ben Sun · 12-19-2008
The holiday season is upon us and I hope everyone has a safe and sane holiday season as we will celebrate Christmas next week and the New Year's the week after that. This is the time of year for Christmas gifts and one of the best gifts that a person can give to a computer user is a new video card as it can improve the game playing experience on the computer immensely.
ATI announced the HD 4870 series of cards in June of 2008. The 4870 was a great card at launch as it offered great performance for a good price as compared to the competition, the GeForce GTX 260 which had launched at a much higher price and similar performance. This caused NVIDIA to lower their prices to compete. The vast majority of computer video card sales are not in the $300 price range that the HD 4870 was targeted at.
Most video card purchases are made in the under $200 price range and ATI decided to target this price range with the HD 4850 which was a lower clocked, DDR3 memory 4870 card. Even more sales are made on under $100 video cards and the ATI HD 4670 is poised right at that price point with a MSRP of just $79. Today, I'm reviewing the MSI R4670 2d512/D3 card. While a lot of headlines are generated justifiably so by the HD 4870, the X2 and the GTX 280, let's see what MSI can do with their 4670 card.
MSI's HD 4670 is based upon ATI's RV730 graphics chip which is in turn based upon TSMC's 55 nanometer process with 514 million transistors and a die size of 146 square millimeters. The 4670 HAS 320 Stream Processors which is 40% of the total that is on the HD 4870 cards. Comparing the HD 4670 to the HD 3650 which it replaces, it has doubled the transistor count on a 20% larger die size on the same process.
The HD 4670 has 8 SIMD cores each of which has 40 Stream Processors to make up the 320 SPs on the card. This compares with the HD 4870 which has 10 SIMD cores with 80 Stream Processors. The HD 4670 has 32 texture filtering units compared to the HD 3870 which had 16. The previous generation HD 3650 had 8 texture filtering units meaning that the HD 4670 has four times the filtering rate of its immediate predecessor.
Product:
EVGA X58 SLI
Manufacturer:
EVGA
Part number:
32-BL-E758-A1
Information:
EVGA
Street price:
$299
If there's one technology that impressed me the most this year, it has to be Intel's Core i7 release. To this date I am still stunned by it's performance. It's so good that starting from Q1 2009, all test systems in the Guru3D lab will be Core i7 based until something better comes along. I'm that excited about the technology!
What's a little less exciting is that Intel only has one chipset available for for the Core i7 series processors, making the upgrade pretty expensive. However, this is an enthusiast user product. Targeted at the same enthusiast user that would purchase say a nForce 790 Ultra SLI and QX9770 processor. When you look at it from that point of view the Core i7 upgrade path doesn't look so hideously expensive anymore as in fact, if you purchase a 299 Core i7 920 processor and a decent 299 USD X58 motherboard .. you'll be going much faster than the QX9770 system I just mentioned, and you have the ability to go both ATI and NVIDIA multi GPU wise, which is a great flexibility to have.
Of course you need to plant DDR3 memory on this motherboard as well, 3 DIMMS recommended, but two give gruesomely fast performance as well. It's suffice to say that the Core i7 combo is fast .. extremely fast. And therefore we have been covering all related Core i7 products a lot. Up-to this point we tested two Core i7 processors, a Core i7 Multi-GPU performance article and no less than four X58 motherboard reviews.
Today we'll test the fifth X58 motherboard in a row, this time from the folks at eVGA. They recently released their eVGA X58 SLI motherboard loaded with features. Tagged with a 299 USD sales price this motherboard seem to be very impressive. But since it's eVGA, they decided that this motherboard should be all about overclocking, and nothing else.
So hypothetically, if you were planning to purchase this product, pop in a Core i7 processor and leave things as they are .. well, you'd be wasting money really. In this article we'll show you why that is. We'll cover the motherboard from A to Z, and to spice it up a little I'll slap on some water-cooling and overclock our processor towards 4.2 GHz, stable.
That should be fun right? Have a peek at the motherboard and browse onwards to the next page please.
source : www.motherboards.org
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