EVGA has launched the first GeForce GTX 980 with an all-in-one liquid and air cooler, with the card dubbed the GTX 980 Hybrid. The custom cooling option is claimed to reduce temperatures by a full 25 degrees Celsius when compared to a reference GTX 980, allowing EVGA to substantially overclock the card out of the gate.

The GTX 980 Hybrid features a base clock of 1291MHz and a boost clock of 1393MHz, with the vendor stating that there will be plenty headroom left for further overclocking. The card comes with 4GB GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit interface and a bandwidth of 7010MHz. The liquid-cooled portion directs heat away from the GPU, while the included air cooler is used to cool the memory and VRM sections of the video card.

This isn’t the first AIO liquid-cooled video card, as that distinction goes to AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2, but this is the first time we’re seeing this system used on the GTX 980. Based on Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) new Maxwell architecture, the GTX 980 features the GM2014 GPU with 2048 CUDA cores.

The GTX 980 is listed on EVGA’s website for US $649.99/€779,00. If you’re interested in just getting the cooler, EVGA is offering it for $99.99.

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CableMod is a brand new company that specializes in producing high-end sleeved cable kits for popular PSU brands and models.  It currently produces cable kits for popular Corsair, EVGA(G2,P2), and Seasonic power supplies that incorporate a fully modular design.

The custom cables are made with ModFlex sleeving, which is a premium cable sleeving that is much higher quality than standard sleeving.  ModFlex is made with ultra-fine fibers  with a very dense weave that are much softer than typical nylon sleeving, which makes it much more supple and able to route throughout the case much easier.  For years you likely have seen modders with custom builds that have had painstakingly modded PSU cables that have been individually sleeved.  In these cases the sleeving had been secured with heatshrink tubing, which is something that you won’t find on the CableMod cables.  The cables are completely heat shrink free, giving these cables a very clean look that modders will no doubt love.  The cable kits are available in many of the most popular colors and two color combinations.  The solid colors are black, red, blue, green, orange, and white.  The combo colors are black and red, black and blue, black and green, and black and orange.  It is nice to see this segment of the hardware industry finally filled since there has been a demand for such products for a long time now and CableMod will surely do well with being the first one on the scene.

There are three different cable series that CableMod makes, each for a different brands of fully modular power supplies.  The C-Series is made for Corsair with the compatible models being in the AXi, HXi, and RM series.  The E-Series is made for EVGA with the compatible models being G2 and P2 series.  Lastly the SE-Series is made for Seasonic power supplies in its XP2 and KM3 series.

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But, in the past 48 hours I spoke with three different Nvidia AIBs… their names will remain unknown, of course – I was told that since Rel180 came out, they all have a spike in tech support. Issues range from temp and fan speeds not being reported correctly, to game crashes. After doing internal testing, all three vendors started to advise users to roll back to a previous driver version – and miracle happened. Systems became stable again.

So, what is going on? I sent out couple of e-mails out, and judging by first response I got (off-the-record), it seems that Big Bang II drivers introduced rewrite at the way how temperatures are addressed. This caused all sorts of malfunctions in thermal monitoring software, and at the moment, there is no easy way to correctly find out what is the temperature of the graphics card – unless you can touch it, that is.

I checked the only two GTX280 cards I have, PALIT GeForce GTX280 1GB and EVGA’s GeForce GTX280 Superclocked and saw small, but noticable difference in temperatures between the two driver revisions (178.24 and 180.48)… 2-3 degrees, but still noticable. 

The “crash” we experienced is the fact that the fan will not spin up on Superclocked card, and this caused some errors with Crysis Warhead. On 178.24, there are no issues.  With Big Bang II drivers, the card is producing a lot of errors in Crysis Warhead and does not want to launch CoD5 at all. 

Al in all, weird situation.

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When it comes to computers, analogy of supercars applies to high-end computers. People that criticize high-end computers mostly do so because they can’t afford one, instead of putting in an effort to acquire one. After assembling the computers for the better part of my life, I wanted to see how it is to get the final thing, assembled by well-trained professionals. Reviewing a system is quite a big difference compared to evaluating just one system component. We judge everything, from packaging, how easy it is to set it up, and look for issues each and every step of the way. Regardless are you buying system for $600 or $6000, everything has to work.

We have heard quite a lot about enthusiast PC vendors that overclock their machines, but at the end of the day, one question remains – is the system stable? With all kudos to enthusiast overclockers who will shed no tear when a graphics card or a CPU gives up the ghost after being soaked in gallons of LN2, purpose of this article is to see can a boutique vendor deliver on its promise and deliver 100% stable operation on a part that costs several thousand dollars.

Enter Biohazard’s Annihilation F.A.T.E. – this machine features Intel Core 2 Extreme processor and triple GeForce GTX 280. As you can guess, price is heaven’s high – but is it really worth that money?

The System
We have received the system based on following components:

Intel Core 2 Quad QX9650 – 3.8 GHz clock, based on 45nm Harpertown core
EVGA 790i Ultra SLI – motherboard based on nForce 3 790i Ultra SLI chipset
2GB OCZ DDR3-10666 – OCZ’s Reaper memory proved its quality, but only 2GB?
3x EVGA GeForce GTX 280 1GB – Stock clocked cards 
Western Digital RaptorX 150 GB – Oldie but Goldie… one of fastest hard drives out there
PP&C Turbo Cool 1.2 KW ESA – Monster of a power supply that feeds the whole system
LG SuperMulti Blu-ray SATA Rewriter – DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray in one place
Lian-Li PC-V1110B – Aluminum case polished to perfection
SilenX 120mm fans – Fast spinning series
Windows Vista Ultimate – we had 32-bit version on our hands.

Taking a look at components, we can see that Biohazard did not save a dime – every component in the system just calls for one thing – speed. We spoke with Josh Smith (CEO), who explained to us that the guys at Biohazard Computers tweak their systems using S.H.O.C. This is abbreviation for Stable Hyper Over-Clock, series of steps that ensures achieved clocks are sustainable in a 24×7 period throughout life of the system. As of November 2008, Annihilation F.A.T.E. features Core i7 platform, so motherboard and memory were changed.

Biohazard guarantees that the delivered system will work in temperatures that are “worst case scenario”, such as 100% load in a room with air temperature at 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. Given the demands, we were not surprised to see modifications that Biohazard did on the case in order to ensure uninterrupted airflow inside the system.

 This setup was equipped with F.A.T.E. cooling. FATE stands for Forced Air Thermal Exchange is their name for designing the system with not “as much fans as possible”, but putting fans in optimal places to ensure top cooling. For instance, Graphics cards are cooled with two fans that are discretely placed, and 3-Way SLI works with no problems. For the record, I’ve experienced a lot of instabilities with 3-Way SLI and CrossFireX setups in cases from other system vendors. Seeing a GPU at 100degC is just too much – and it looks like Biohazard nailed this one.

How we test
In order to see how this system will breathe, we tested the system using series of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. We separate our testing to “everyday” and “gaming” application suite, and comparing it to our reference platform.

Our “Everyday” section is consisted out of audio encoding, video transcoding, rendering action and two synthetic benchmarks: Everest and PCMark Vantage. Encoding audio is based on using iTunes 7 to transform CD audio into AAC format. Video section is covered by transcoding a 1080p MPEG-2 video clip into MPEG-4 and from AVI to WMV-9. For transcoding the video, we’re relying on Adobe Premiere, while AVI to WMV-9 is being handled by Windows Media Encoder 9. Rendering tests are handled by Cinebench R10, which became benchmark of choice for this purpose.

Gaming suite is consisted out of optimal mix between different genres. Age of Conan is our take on world of ever-popular MMO genre, Crysis represent shooters, Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces takes the role of strategy genre, while Race Driver: GRID is something we all love to do: speedy driving. In all cases, we maxed out in-game details and see can you play the game or not.

Our target resolution is 1920×1200, and we expect that high-end systems work flawlessly in this resolution. If you use computer for gaming or movies, there is a good chance that you will connect it to a 24/27″ display or 1080p capable projector/LCD/Plasma.

Here comes the culprit. If you’re wondering why a 1920×1200 resolution, and not 2560×1600 on oh-so-many 30″ displays out there, the reason is simple. Dell 3008WFP will set you back for $1999 and yeah, it is awesome display. But for equal amount of money, you can buy a gigantic 52″ Sharp AQIOUS LCD TV screen. This screen supports 120Hz resolution, and this is very, very important feature in 2009.

Nvidia is set to launch its 3D technology next year, and this technology requires 120Hz displays. Secondly, if you want ultimate gaming experience, don’t settle for second best and sit by the computer. Biohazard Annihilation is actually an ideal computer to showcase games to friends in the living room, and the feeling of playing Fallout 3 or racing in Race Driver GRID in 1920×1200 with 16xAA and 16xAF is priceless.

Our reference platform is based upon following components:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 – 65nm Clovertown at 3.00 GHz
EVGA nForce 680i – brilliant old-school motherboard using nForce 680i chipset
2GB Corsair PC2-9136C5D – DDR2 running at 1066 MHz
PALIT GeForce GTX 280 1GB – the non-squealing GTX280
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250 GB – yep, I know it’s only 250GB, but I kinda like it. 64/64GB config for WinXP/Vista and 114GB for stuff
Thermaltake TR2 900W PSU – excellent power supply
Sony BWU-100A BD-DL Burner – Two years down the line, still the best Blu-ray burner on the market.. I wish I had SATA model
CoolIT Freezone Elite – No questions asked, this is by far the best TEC water-cooling setup that appeared on the market. Simple, and works like a charm

This platform was recently updated with GeForce GTX 280 graphics card, but in essence represents a high-end system from 2006 and just proves just how awesome job was delivered in Santa Clara – both Intel and Nvidia created a platform that is able to take on any computer manufactured today. This is also an answer regarding Annihilation. Our configuration was launched in May 2008, and it is well capable of providing a compelling gaming experience for years to come.

Experiences
Biohazard installed latest drivers on the system, and it was good to see ESA interface in action. Nvidia System Utilities were filled with details, since even the power supply supports ESA. Your geeky soul will die a little every time you see at all the gory details at how this machine works.

Bear in mind that this system emits a lot of heat, since three GTX 280 cards and quad-core CPU at 3.8 GHz can melt the polar ice. Thus, it is highly recommended that you keep this system in a room that is able to sustain decent room temperature. Having quality AC will help you out. But even with AC, this system was cooled down by fans, and even though their name alludes to silence, system was significantly audible. Thus, ideal companion for this system are either good headphones such as one by Audio-Technica or Logitech/Klipsch 5.1 surround system.

When it comes to our tests, we started off with iTunes and decoding the Audio CD. Not so nice part is the question are we going to use an actual CD or mount an image? In real world, you will not have hundreds of CDs mounted on your system and then using the power of CPU to encode the audio, but you will take a CD or a DVD and put it in the drive. In our test, we took the CD, placed in LG SuperBlu burner and saw that 94 seconds are needed to encode the whole CD. In comparison, our reference system equipped with Sony DWU-100A Blu-ray burner took 98 seconds. Advantage: Biohazard. If we would cheat and just mount the CD image from a hard drive, it would take just 24 seconds compared to our 33 seconds, clearly showing advantage of 3.8 GHz clock over our reference 2.93 GHz.

On the other hand, transcoding video was quite fun – our version of Premiere was enhanced with Elemental Technologies GPU plug-in, meaning  that our scene was encoded in just 32 seconds. This is quite impressive, since it took 4min37 seconds using Biohazard’s CPU. Our reference machine took almost six minutes.

But the biggest evidence how Biohazard’s 45 nanometer CPU demolished our old 65nm Core 2 Extreme is Windows Media Encoder 9. It took only 36 seconds to do test file encode, while our 2.93 GHz CPU took 73 seconds. This is almost twice as fast, so if transcoding is your thing, this baby ran our testbed to the ground. Sadly, GPU-accelerated plug-in does not recognize more than one GPU, so our 3-SLI setup was not exactly loaded. Elemental Technologies recently stated that they’re working on a multi-GPU support, meaning that the three GTX280 cards will eat up any transcoding in the future.

When it comes to games, we have nothing but words of praise for this system. Age of Conan was playable at 1920×1200 with settings maxed out. That includes visibility of 3500 meters and grass all the way to 1000m. You could leave VSync on and enjoy in 60fps with no major glitches with 8xAA and 16xAF. Sadly, at 16xAA, we saw framerates dipping down to mid-40s. 45 fps is still enough for a smooth gameplay in MMOs, but our target was average of 60fps and above. And this is the first time we saw a 2GB bottleneck.

Company of Heroes was quite enjoyable. In 1920×1200, you can turn AA all the way to 16xQ, leave Anisotropic Filtering at 16x and still have framerate at 130fps. Of course, we’re talking about DirectX 10 mode. Just for kicks, we loaded the game at 2560×1600, and at 16xQ/16x settings, the game barely dipped below 100fps (97.5 fps).

On the other hand, Crysis showed to us that even 3-Way SLI is not enough to get 4xAA working flawlessly at 1920×1200 with all the details on Very High. With details on High, you can freely push the game to 4xAA/16xAF and even turn the VSync on – you will have stable 60fps. Please note that our Crysis testing is actually a timedemo of last level of the game, thus it is pushing graphics cards to their maximum. Here, we have to complain about the fact that system was delivered with only 2GB of memory. We’re certain that 4GB would help this game a whole great deal, since system has more video than system memory (3GB vs. 2GB).

Race Driver: GRID gave out high framerates all the way to 1920×1200 with 16xQCSAA/16xAF, when framerates finally dipped under 60fps. If you play the game with regular 16xAA/16xAF – you will enjoy 71.11 fps at 1920×1200. At 2560×1600, we could enjoy average of 51 fps at 16xAA/16xAF.

We also tried titles such as Call of Duty 4: Warfare, Mass Effect and Unreal Tournament III. In every case, Annihilation ran the games in 1920×1200 with highest settings at comfortable VSync 60Hz and 120Hz levels.

Do the scores justify price difference... it all depends on how you look. One thing is certain - they both don't have enough RAM.

When it comes to GPGPU performance, I decided to check Folding@Home. Recently, Stanford changed the packets for Nvidia cards, and they’re now folding much more complex packets. These 511-point packets decreased the performance by roughly two packets a day, so you’re looking at around 7000 PPD from a single card. In the case of Annihilation F.A.T.E., we measured 23.350 PPD using old 480-point packets and 21.100 PPD on the new ones. This is highest number of points I’ve seen in a shipping system – and it is a very impressive number by any account. With this system, you can simulate two miliseconds in a life of a protein (per day). Hopefully, with next generation hardware, every card should be able to do a mili-second… or just order Cryosphere system and achieve that today (with three vapor-chamber chilled GTX280 cards).

Stability
For our temperature torture, we put the system in a chamber with air heated to 44C (110 degrees Fahrenheit). Then, we started anti-virus running in the background, loaded GRID and played for the next 60 minutes. System did not crash, even though the temperature of GPU2 and GPU2 went to 94 and 98 deg Celsius (201-208 degrees F). With we concluded that the setup will survive such a torture without crashing.

During our three weeks of evaluation, we saw no crashes.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, we have to say that we were extremely satisfied with the system. It passed all the tests with flying colors, and seeing that gaming with 16xAA / 16xAF at 1920×1200 became a reality for Call of Duty and GRID. Seeing playable settings in Age of Conan only makes us feel warm at heart.

However, at a price tag of around $6500, seeing a system with 2GB of memory and 32-bit operating system leaves a lot of question marks above our heads. Biohazard recently updated the system specs with Core i7, but the 2GB memory is just slowing the 3-SLI setup. 

In closing words, Annihilation F.A.T.E. is a great system, but if you decide to go for it, make sure you pick 8GB of memory and 64-bit operating system. One thing is certain: if the money was no object to us, this baby would end up on my desk, that’s for sure.

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EVGA's AMD motherboard features all the nice things EVGA is known for: EMI-shielded chokes, solid-state caps, overclocking BIOS... what will happen when Phenom II arrives?

That product is now in stores, retailing for around $95 under the name nForce 730a (GeForce 8200+730a, the 113-M2-E113). The board comes with custom design cooler, all passive, and features solid-state caps all around. But, you can expect real fireworks coming in time for Phenom II and Dragon platform launch. EVGA will not depart from nForce chipset world, but you can expect something spectacular, as far as overclocking is concerned. After all, EVGA didn’t poach Shamino and joined him with Vince for the sake of burning hundreds of kilos of LN2 on trade shows – expect some heavy-duty overclocking expertise on improving every enthusiast motherboard that EVGA will manufacture.
I could bet my red hair that first folk to reach 7 GHz on Phenom II platform would be either Shamino or Vince, since now they have a whole motherboard R&D team tweaking not just the BIOS, but hardware components as well – and bear in mind, that whoever has the highest clocked board that works, it will work “all peachy” in regular conditions, yet alone overclocking.
I wonder what’s brewing in EVGA’s halls… after all, nForce 8 chipsets (MCP8A series) for AMD are around the corner.

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This tale speaks of a company that makes great chips, but also has a serious design flaw: PCB design. As long as story about “Built by Nvidia” components was told, there were isolated cases of “squealing”. This squealing is caused by vibration of copper coils, and is not present on products designed by people that take attention at these things. Read: if your card has Digital Voltage Regulation Module (DVRM, as Iwill originally called it – Digital PWM is more popular these days) or all solid-state caps and shielded chokes, no sound should be produced. But, if your part has coils or non-shielded capacitors/chokes, you could be “enjoying” in squealing sounds of electronics.

To make the matters clear, certain products from BOTH ATI and Nvidia can squeal under load. ATI moved to clear the issue, Nvidia didn’t. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to record squealing with any of my microphones (upcoming test lab will feature ultra-sensitive microphone equipment), but in a silent computer with three Noctua fans, any non-standard behavior is noticeable. This high-pitched noise is often eaten by the sound of fans, but if you have a silent rig, it gets really, I mean REALLY – annoying.

The squealing is only appearing when the GPU is cranked all the way up, in Folding@Home, Far Cry 2, Crysis: Warhead – the same cards that squealed like pigs in Crysis didn’t do the same in Unreal Tournament 3, Fallout 3 or Race Driver: GRID.

After experiencing squealing with my reference Nvidia GTX280 card in the past month or so, I’ve thoroughly checked following products:

• ATI Radeon X850XT
• ATI Radeon X1800XT CrossFire Edition
• ATI Radeon 2900XT 512MB
• ATI FireGL V8600 1024MB (2900XT)
• ATI Radeon 3850 256MB
• ASUS EN9800GX2 1024MB TOP
• ASUS EN9800GTX 512MB TOP
• EVGA GeForce GTX260 Core 216 896MB x2
• EVGA GeForce GTX280 SuperClocked 1024MB
• EVGA GeForce GTX280 SSC 1024MB x2
• Gainward GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
• Gainward GeForce 8800GT 512MB
• Palit Radeon 4850 512MB x2
• Palit Radeon 4870 512MB x2
• Palit GeForce 9800GX2 1024MB x2
• Palit GeForce GTX280 1024MB
• Sapphire Atomic 3870 512MB
• XFX GeForce 8600GTS 256MB XXX Edition

“Squealing” appeared on several Nvidia and a single ATI board – and on EVGA 680i motherboard. On EVGA’s 780i and 790i FTW boards, where Nvidia design was replaced with EPoX engineering brilliance, no squealing appeared. I never noticed any squealing on following motherboards:

• ASUS M3A78-T (AMD 790GX+SB750)
• ASUS Maximus Formula (X38+ICH9R)
• ASUS Maximus II Formula (P45+ICH10R)
• ASUS P5E Deluxe (X48+ICH9R)
• GigaByte MA-790GX-DQ6
• MSI K9A2 Platinum (790FX+SB600)

Since squealing is coming as a consequence of a high-amp 12V rail, I decided to test the cards with several power supplies:

• Antec TruePower Quattro 850W
• Corsair HX620W
• Hiper  Type R II 680W
• Hiper Type R II 880W
• Thermaltake Toughpower 850W
• Thermaltake Toughpower 900W Prototype – never released

I also had that luck of testing the 9800GX2, GTX280 and ATI Radeon 2900, 3850 and 4850/4870 cards on two continents. First place where I did the test was Livermore, CA, using standard US 110V/60Hz current. Second location was Zagreb, Croatia, using standard Euro 220V/50Hz current.
This is the list of products that squealed in Crysis/Crysis: Warhead/Far Cry 2/Folding@Home:

• ATI Radeon X850XT
• ATI Radeon X1800XT CrossFire Edition
• ATI Radeon 3850 256MB
• ASUS EN9800GX2 1024MB TOP
• EVGA GeForce GTX280 SuperClocked 1024MB
• Gainward GeForce 8800GT 512MB
• Nvidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB
• Palit GeForce 9800GX2 1024MB
• Palit GeForce GTX280 1024MB

As you can see, quite large number of cards produced some sort of noise, but with different variations. Most irritating were ASUS/Palit 9800GX2 and Nvidia’s GTX280, while other cards produced more subtle, but still high pitched noise. Power hogs like ATI Radeon 2900XT and new babies such as Palit Radeon 4850 and 4870 didn’t squealed. The reason is very simple: ATI pioneered the usage of digital power management (excellent design by Volterra) with 2900XT/V8600, went back to cost-effective analog capacitors/chokes on 3800, saw squealing re-appearing and again went digital with 4800 series. Result is very simple – no squealing under any circumstance.

Solution
If you own a card that squeals, you might ask yourself what to do. At present, only EVGA makes its own custom design cards with GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 and latest GTX 280 designs. All other partners are forced to use Nvidia’s reference design and well, squealing may or may not appear on your setup.

If you own a card that squeals, you should do following things:

• Change the power cable. Incredible, but it did work on some cases reported by my friends.
• Is your power clean or “dirty”? Putting a power-filter such as UPS might help.
• If these two fail – mod the board.

Note that for instance, one Palit 9800GX2 squealed, two didn’t. After the mod, not a single one did. EVGA GTX280 Superclocked board (nV reference design) squealed, SSC ones (EVGA design) were good as gold. Gainward’s 8800GT continued to squeal after the mod.

We’re not talking here about “if you get Nvidia card, it will squeal”, but rather this issue is an isolated one, or “just how lucky you are”. However, this does not absolve board designers from full blame on this issue, since the “slaughtered pig squeal” issue could have been avoided by using digital circuitry.

Personally, I decided to go with warranty-voiding “coloring” of the board using color-less nail polish. For this experiment, we took Palit’s GTX280 and dismantled it. Daniela took each and every power component and soaked it with polish, and where she could, Daniela filled the inside of the capacitor/choke. We also removed all the factory-default thermal paste from the GPU and replace it with Gelid’s GX-1 compound. That reduced load temperature by 3 degrees, as we wanted to lower the thermal load of the PCB.

After putting the card back in the system, we turned Folding@Home back on and saw that squealing was almost gone and we only had a CPU and PSU fans on (OCZ Vendetta + Thermaltake Toughpower). It is not a 100% solution, but with all the fans back in the system, the board continued to fold and rock in games.

Conclusion
This issue is only the latest in history of recent scrutiny on Nvidia parts. Personally, I do not understand a dumb move done by circuitry designers who decided to continue using old, analog power management in time when Digital PWM is becoming more and more available. It is not true that Nvidia didn’t knew about the issue, since the first reports about squealing are traced back to nForce 680i and GeForce 8600GTS cards. Nvidia’s GTX200 series debuted at $449 and $649 price points and there is no explanation why more expensive digital circuitry could not be used. ATI introduced digital PWM with 2900XT, went back to analog with 3800 series, saw squealing re-appearing and went fully digital with the 4800 series. Case closed as far as Red Team is concerned. I spoke with several sources inside Nvidia’s and ATI’s partners, and they all moved forward to clear the squealing issue in their own custom designs, such as EVGA’s FTW series of motherboards of latest GTX200 cards.

We hope that GT206 and GT212-based cards will feature digital circuitry and that Nvidia will move in 21st century, as far as PCB design is concerned. Nvidia, here’s a free hint. If you need a contact in Volterra, I know a guy that knows a guy, we can make GT212 work all nicely, and SILENT!

P.S. I wish to thank Ivan and his girlfriend Daniela for all the help and dismantling their own GTX280 board. BTW Ivan, sorry to put it in public, but the digital camera on Sony Ericsson P1e sux. I wasn’t able to kill the noise even after 20min per picture in Photoshop. Grrr…

UPDATE February 1, 2009 00:40AM CET: I decided to update this article with a detailed picture of GeForce GTX280 and markings where nail polish or hot glue should be applied. Note that I haven’t tried the hot glue method myself. What needs to be isolated are the caps (marked with red line), but in case of Palit GeForce GTX280, squealing didn’t stop until Daniela put nail polish on the remaining power distribution elements as well (blue line).

Caps should be the ones producing squealing sound, but in case of our card, nail polish was needed elsewhere as well.

Picture is provided courtesy of TechPowerUp! Thanks guys.

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X58 motherboard in its final production form...

Official packaging... hope there is one 8-pin power extender inside.

The motherboard, as far as several engineers is concerned, has only one design flaw: placement of 8-pin 12V rail. If your PSU comes with rigid cabling, you’ll have hellish time trying to get that cable connected to the motherboard without cutting the cabling insulation or bending the dual heat-pipe cooler for Digital PWM. On a second note, the reason for this placement is exact reason why this motherboard overclocks like there’s no tomorrow – since EVGA board supplies that whole rail into the CPU with no questions asked, the power transfer is as direct as possible.
Now, there is just one thing I am really hissy about. In product description on Tiger Direct, it states that EVGA motherboard allows customers to “Take advantage of the most significant architectural change in the x86 architecture in 13 years, the Intel Core i7.”
What kind of marketing BS is that? Core i7 is to Intel platform what Athlon 64 was to AMD’s one (even though first reviews of Bloomfield don’t show same performance jump), it is a majestic overclocking monster, but 13 years? C’mon, grow the heck up.
13 years ago, Intel introduced Pentium Pro architecture, and no, Core i7 cannot compare with the Pentium Pro (even though, there are some similarities between Pentium/Pentium Pro and Core 2/i7). In the halls of fame in IT industry, 8086, 80386, P6 (PPro), Athlon, Athlon 64 and Core 2 are the only CPUs that can be hailed as “great ones”. When Intel or AMD release a 128-bit CPU, we can talk about next “the greatest…” that came to the world of CPU architecture. Sorry.

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The King is dead, long live the king

Also, this is a short gallery (pictures are 1024 pixel wide) of the stuff he is using right now – have to admit, motherboard looks like a really good one. CrossFire and SLI support in one place – one has to ask what kind of politics kept this for so long.

Now, AMD has a mountain to climb with its upcoming 45nm Deneb processors. I wish them all the best, since my main gaming rig will continue to be AMD-powered, with a hope of replacing Phenom 9950BE with the 45nm one. My workstation will continue to be Intel powered, with QX6800, until I get my hands on these babies.

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Nvidia's client may not look as nice as ATI one, but it's the efficiency that counts...

Fast forward to GTX280 launch and the Vijay Pande team debuted the Folding@Home client for Nvidia chips as well. Nvidia and ATI lead a short marketing war who can fold better and things went quiet… apparently, for a reason.
The reason why things went quiet is probably the “inconvenient truth”: ATI showed up with Radeon 4800 series and demolished Nvidia’s dominance in the segment, with GTX260 and 280 going through radical price drops in order to stay competitive. However, ATI’s Radeon 4800 series has one field where the card is losing against 5-10x cheaper cards: Folding@Home.
The 10x argument lies in comparison between current ATI’s flagship, the  Radeon 4870X2 and Nvidia’s GeForce 9600GSO. This $50 card can easily out-fold ATI Radeon 4870X2, which retails for more than 500 USD/450EUR in respective markets.
In the past weeks, I’ve conducted a series of tests with various graphics cards (all that I own or could put my hands on), and the results were quite depressing if you own an ATI card. I’ve asked some of my contacts in AMD why the performance is so bad and the answers were ranging from “we wanted to make best gamer’s card, not a card for Folding” to sad silence. It seems to me that the difference lies in shader type and clock: ATI’s R6xx and RV7xx architecture lies around big fat units and lot of tiny ones (64+256 in case of Radeon 3800, 80+720 in case of Radeon 4800), and the clock is much lower than in case with GeForce cards. At the same time, Nvidia went the other route and came up with large number of “fat” units, while the company didn’t even count the “thin” (MADD) ones.
When we compare the GTX280 and 4870X2, comparisons are just astounding: in a period of a month, EVGA’s GTX280 SSC achieved an average of 6,802 points per day, while ATI Radeon 4870X2 managed puny 3,870 ppd. At the same time, I’ve witnessed higher PPD scores achieved even by two-year old GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB, which was quite a surprise. Around two weeks ago, I started following PPD numbers using FahMon on a large number of systems that mostly bear the same configuration: dua-core processor or more, 2GB system memory or more and the graphics cards. In all cases, with the help of my friends, I’ve managed to check FahMon and KakaoStats for rougly 25 cards and came to a surprising result.
With the recent update to the GPU2 client and new Fah_Core11.exe (ATI uses v1.17, Nvidia v1.15), the community witnessed further fall in number of completed packets per day. If you’re not familiar with Folding@Home packets, every package features certain number of mathematical simulations for tested protein – in case of Nvidia, packet consists out of 25 million, while ATI’s one features 10 million operations. However, due do different type of mathematical operations, Nvidia’s packet usually will result in 480 points, while ATI’s 10 million will return 548 points (or recently introduced ATI packets with 338 points).
Like I previously wrote, the table below is not the result of one packet score and Excel calculation, but rather continuous number crunching over the course of several weeks, with one week used for measurement.

Improvised Top 20 Folding@Home GPUs:

1. Nvidia GeForce GTX280 1GB (EVGA SSC)
2. Nvidia GeForce GTX260-216 898MB (EVGA SSC)
3. Nvidia GeForce GTX260 898MB (EVGA Superclocked)
4. Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX+ 512MB (ASUS TOP)
5. Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 SDI 768MB (PNY)
6. Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX 512MB (ASUS TOP)
7. Nvidia GeForce 8800GTX 768MB (Zotac AMP! Edition)
8. Nvidia GeForce 8800Ultra 768MB (XFX XXX Edition)
9. Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS 512MB (Gainward)
10. Nvidia GeForce 8800GT 512MB (Gainward)
11. Nvidia GeForce 9600GSO 768MB (EVGA)
12. Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (LeadTek)
13. ATI Radeon 4870X2 2GB (PowerColor)
14. ATI Radeon 4870 512MB (PALIT)
15. Nvidia GeForce 9600GT 256MB (Zotac)
16. ATI Radeon 4850 512MB (PALIT)
17. ATI Radeon 3870 512MB (Sapphire Atomic)
18. ATI FireGL V8600 1GB (ATI)
19. Nvidia GeForce 8600GTS 256MB (XFX XXX Edition)
20. ATI Radeon 3850 256MB (Sapphire)

This is not a complete table by no means, since I am missing several new GPUs. But in this one, as you can see for yourself – results are quite dramatic for the red team. Two year old GeForce GPUs demolished otherwise-brilliant Radeon series, and it is incredible that even GeForce 9600 will outfold Radeon 4850. This is a rude wake-up call for guys at Markham, because this is just unbelievable.
Personally, I am running a combination of AMD Spider platform (9850BE + 790GX + ATI Radeon 4870X2) and hybrid Intel’s V8-Skulltrail platform with Quadro FX 4600 SDI.
Of course, everything can be changed with a simple driver update. I don’t understand what happened with AMD/ATI, company that lead the field of GPGPU computing for so long – why should AMD work on optimizing Folding@Home client… I am aware that AMD poached Mike Houston from Stanford to work on Brooke+ and now OpenCL APIs, but surely the performance didn’t went downhill from the influence of just one person. Or just maybe…
Overall, I hope that Catalyst 8.11 or 8.12 will bring more performance for ATI cards, since I do not believe that it would be so hard to optimize drivers for GPGPU/GPU Computing usage. For now, in Folding@Home, ATI is complete washout.

For the end of this article, if you find that your GPU cycles could be used for something good, I invite you to read the following article and join F@H family, regardless of what client (CPU or GPU) or team you choose in the end. Intel, AMD, ATI, Nvidia, Windows, Linux or Mac OS – it does not matter, just join – If you want, of course.

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EVGA's first non-nV-based motherboard - all SATA connectors are angled, so your storage expansion is not limited even with 3-Way SLI. Good move.

The motherboard is being designed by ex-EPoX engineering team, bringing plentiful of overclocking capabilities, Digital PWM, and fully solid-state caps across the board. Special attention is being given to providing top juice to graphics cards, so if you decide to go for the gold and grab 3-SLI setup with three water-cooled GTX270 boards, be our guest.
But, that is not all. This is the first motherboard, which will be followed by ultimate motherboard for this Christmas, no questions asked. The enthusiast motherboard is actually being designed by a world class overclocker. Yes, the one and only Peter Tan a.k.a. Shamino, who is making “Shamino special”.

For those unaware – Brian Flood from Mushkin, Shamino, Kinc and I share a special connection. According to German police, we all had the honor of dying and resurrecting. Last year, we were all pronounced “missing presumably dead” when some east-German thieves stole helluwa stuff from our brand new VW Passat Variant, en route to the airport. Well, VW is one car I will *never* buy. Piece of alarm-unsecured junk.
Getting back to the subject, EVGA is bringing several things to high-end X58 market that nobody has. First of all, the company will offer limited lifetime warranty (just as with all of their high-end products) and yes, 90-day Step up program.
If that is not making ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and other motherboard makers sweat, we don’t know what will. Lifetime warranty on a motherboard? Free upgrade program? Bloody hell, I am buying that one.

UPDATED: Inserted picture of the motherboard. Courtesy of XtremeSystems forums.

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FTW series is proving to be quite a success...

Under a current plan, every product is slowly being upgraded to an own design, enabling higher overclocking margins and making sure that future of Superclocked, SSC, FTW and Black Pearl parts is safe.
During our visit in EVGA’s European HQ, we learned that custom design GTX series is also coming to market. All in all, things are getting interesting. Sadly for EVGA’s motherboard team, Nvidia will not make chipset for upcoming Core i7 processors using LGA-1366 socket, but who knows, we just might see X58 chipset with two nForce 200 chips on it.
Company has rather aggressive plans for 2009, and it will be interesting to see how will their alternative business lines will develop (dual LCD display, DisplayLink adapters, TV tuners, waterblocks).

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