Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

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Slides from AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) event at the PC Cluster Consortium event in Osaka, Japan offer up details regarding the chip vendor’s roadmap for its GPUs and CPUs, with the takeaways including the launch of a 300W APU targeted at the HPC segment along with the launch of new CPU cores.

At the event, Junji Hayashi, Consumer and Commercial Business Lead at AMD Japan, shared details on the vendor’s K12 ARM as well as the x86 Zen CPU cores. AMD is looking to introduce both ARM as well as traditional x86 cores in a pin compatible platform that is codenamed SkyBridge. Aimed at the server, embedded, semi-custom and client markets, both the ARMv8 and the x86-powered cores will offer 64-bit computing and will be manufactured using a 14-nm FinFET process. SkyBridge will be launching before the end of the year, although an exact launch window was not provided.

The K12 core will feature Simultaneous Multi-Threading, which is a departure from the Clustered Multi-Thread technology that is currently utilized in AMD’s offerings. SMT will offer larger CPU cores the ability to achieve a higher throughput by allocating underutilized resources to an additional, slower, execution thread.

As for GPUs, Hayashi mentioned that AMD would be moving to a two-year release cadence cycle for updating the GPU architecture of APUs. There was also a mention of a High Performance Computing APU, which is said to be radically different from existing designs in that is features the Stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) memory standard. The HPC APUs will slot in between the standard server cores and the FirePro line of cards.

The current generation HBM is nine times faster than GDDR5 memory and 128 times faster than DDR3. AMD is said to be utilizing the same standard in its Radeon 300 series, with the technology itself developed in collaboration with SK Hynix.

The post AMD Reveals Five-Year Roadmap For GPUs and CPUs appeared first on VR World.

After serving up a few details regarding the card at the Game Developers Conference earlier this month, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has officially launched its latest offering in the Titan series, the Titan X. The card will be priced at $999 and will be available in the month of May.

The specs on offer with the Titan X match what the last round of leaks predicted, with the card featuring a 28nm GM200 GPU that offers 3072 CUDA cores, 192 TMUs, 96 ROPs, 3MB of L2 cache along with 12GB of GDDR5 memory with a 384-bit memory interface. Base clock for the card is at 1002MHz, with a boost clock of 1078MHz.

Nvidia has stated that there is more than sufficient headroom available for overclocking the Titan X, and the card will reach frequencies of 1200MH without any hassles. The GM200 silicon is basically an enhanced version of the GM204 GPU that was introduced with the GTX 980. We see a 50% increase in bandwidth, CUDA cores and ROP count, with the end result being a card that features a maximum TDP of 250W.

The cooler itself is similar to what we’ve seen in earlier-generation Titan cards, although this time around the metal shroud has a black coat of paint. Nvidia is once again touting that the Titan X is the fastest single-GPU solution available in the world today, with the card billed more as a luxury gaming video card than an entry-level compute card, like the Kepler-based GTX Titan and GTX Titan Black. For that reason, its pricing at $999 may turn out to be the only sore point given that cards like the GTX 980 in SLI can outperform the Titan X.

The post Nvidia Officially Launches The GeForce GTX Titan X appeared first on VR World.

Although Nvidia announced the Titan X during Epic Games’ demo at the Game Developers Conference earlier this month, the chip vendor is yet to share the full specs of the video card. The card is set to be officially announced at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference later this week, but the full specifications of the GM200 silicon — which is what the card is based on — have been leaked.

Videocardz posted the block diagram of the GPU, with the fully-unlocked silicon featuring 6 Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), each holding 4 Maxwell Streaming Multiprocessor (SMMs), for a total of 24 SMMs, or 3072 CUDA cores. A total of 6 memory controllers, each with 64-bit memory means that the Titan X has a memory bus width of 384-bit. Other specs include 192 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) and 96 Raster Operation Units (ROPs).

In terms of bandwidth, the Titan X clocks in at 1002MHz base and 1089MHz boost, and will offer an astounding 12GB of GDDR5 memory at 1753MHz. While not confirmed, the video card is set to have a TDP of 250W, with one eight-pin and six-pin PCI-Express power connectors. Display connectors include three DisplayPort, one HDMI and one DVI port. Synthetic benchmarks of the card have leaked last week, indicating significant gains in performance over the GTX 980.

Pricing of the Titan X is said to be the case as earlier-generation models, which would come out to $999. The card is slated to make its debut tomorrow, which is when we’ll have further details, as well as real-world benchmarks.

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Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) upcoming DirectX 12 has a ton of exciting features and optimizations that we already know about. However the most interesting new feature comes via a report from Tom’s Hardware: the ability to pool resources from multiple GPUs from different manufacturers.

The ability to work with two different GPU architectures in the same system comes from DirectX 12’s support of something called Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities and Split Frame Rendering (SFR). Effectively this pools all GPU resources into a bucket and allows them to be utilized as one.

SFR allows developers to manually divide data between the two GPUs to allow them to work together on each frame with the work for each frame divided between the two cards. The older method, called Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR). AFR is considered to be less efficient because it required both GPUs to have all of the data already in their frame buffers. Each GPU would render an alternate frame. The downside of this, however, is that the cards would work in parallel and not independently. If you had two cards with 4GB of memory each, you’d only have 4GB of useable space in the frame buffer in total.

The kicker is that Tom’s source said that SFR will be supported across multiple GPU architectures in the same system. It will treat both GPUs as one. Reportedly this would allow a system with an AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) APU and an Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPU to have the two GPUs work together. The same would go for a discrete AMD and Nvidia GPU in the same system.

In the end this will be up to developers to make use of and optimize their code accordingly. AMD’s Mantle already supports a form of SFR, so in a way the precedent is already there.

More details on DirectX 12 — and a confirmation of this report — will likely be available during March’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.

The post Your Next Gaming PC Might Have a Radeon and Nvidia GPU appeared first on VR World.

ArrayFire found in its benchmarks that AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) integrated GPU in the Kaveri A10-7850K APU fares better at computational tasks than Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) Haswell HD 4600 series on the Core i7-4790K. The software company builds  software libraries for GPU programming, with its products working on both Nvidia CUDA-based cards as well as AMD’s OpenCL GPUs.

In its benchmarks, ArrayFire tested several GPU functions such as a bilateral filter, which is a non-linear filter that is used to smoothen out edges from images. The bilateral filter test showed AMD’s integrated GPU achieving 156 fps at 720p and 69 fps at full-HD, more than twice the score managed by the HD 4600 at 62 and 28 fps.

A similar set of results were observed in an erosion and dilution benchmark, with the Kaveri APU scoring four times as high as the HD 4600. ArrayFire also ran 2D convolution tests, which determine image processing, and found that Kaveri significantly outmatched Intel’s offering by achieving 191 fps to HD 4600’s 52 fps at full-HD resolution.

ArrayFire also ran a gamut of other computational tests, includingNxN matrix tests, sort functions as well as image resize and rotate tests, with AMD’s solution coming out on top in all benchmarks.

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It looks like Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is set to continue the Titan series, as evidenced by the leaked PCB shots of what is alleged to be the upcoming GTX Titan-X. The pictures reveal that the card will be based on a new GM200 GPU, and will feature a staggering 12 GB of GDDR5 video memory along with the Maxwell architecture.

The reported specs include 3072 CUDA cores, a 384-bit wide  memory interface and 96 ROPs. The manufacturing process is said to be 28nm, which means that we are still some ways off from the 20nm video cards. The card is detailed to feature one 6-pin and 8-pin power connector.

With the Titan-X, it looks like the goal is to enable gaming at 5K (and beyond) resolutions with a single card. While there are no benchmarks yet, earlier leaks suggested that we may see a performance increase to the tune of 50% from the GTX Titan Black. Nvidia has already shown the vast strides it has made with Maxwell through the GTX 900 series, so it isn’t too outlandish to assume that we’ll see similar gains with the Titan-X.

There’s no confirmation as to when we’ll see the Titan-X, but the leak does mention that Nvidia is looking to launch the card sometime in the first quarter of 2015. If previous generation pricing of the Titan series is anything to go by, the Titan-X will be priced above $1,000.

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AMD (NYSE: AMD) is set to roll out a comprehensive update to its Catalyst software suite with an upcoming version called Catalyst Omega (version 14.50). The update is said to bring significant improvements for both the vendor’s desktop and mobile GPUs as well as APUs.

Virtual Super Resolution

One of the highlighted features is Virtual Super Resolution, which renders visuals at a higher resolution and then scales the content down to match the resolution of your monitor. The goal with this technology is to bring 4K-like visuals to users on full-HD displays. If this sounds familiar, it is because Nvidia rolled out a similar feature dubbed Dynamic Super Resolution with the GeForce 900 series.

VSR uses supersampling anti-aliasing, which while improving the final image quality, takes a toll on the GPU as it has to render content at far higher resolutions than the native resolution of your display. For instance, if you were using VSR to render content at four times the native resolution on a full-HD monitor, the performance draw on the video card would be the same as rendering the game in 4K. As such, the feature is limited to high-end models, including the R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290 and R9 285.

The supported VSR modes include:

Multimedia features

Another new feature AMD is touting with Catalyst Omega is Fluid Motion Video, which utilizes the GPU in smoothing out the playback when reading content off Blu-Ray discs. The feature is targeted at low-power APUs, and will be available on all 7×00 A-series APUs with a TDP of 35W and higher. Standalone video cards that have this feature enabled include the R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, R9 285, R7 260X and R7 260. There is a software component to the feature as well, with users required to use Cyberlink’s PowerDVD 14.

Also included in the Catalyst Omega update is Contour Removal, a feature that aims to remove  compression artifacts from compressed videos without affecting the overall quality of the video. The feature will be available on all Athlon APUs and 7×00 A-series APUs with a TDP of 25W and higher, and the following video cards: R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, R9 285, R7 260X and R7 260.

AMD is bringing 1080P Detail Enhancement — which improves clarity of compressed and low resolution content when played back on a full-HD display — to all of its 7×00 A-Series APUs. There’s also FullHD to UltraHD Video, which enhances full-HD content when displayed on a 4K monitor. The feature is making its way to all AMD 7×00 A-Series APUs and Radeon R7 260 and higher.

The new software driver includes support for Dell’s 5K monitor, the Dell UP2715K, which has a resolution of 5120×2880 at 60Hz. Any AMD GPU with two DisplayPort 1.2 ports will now work with the 5K monitor.

AMD is also touring performance improvements on APUs by as much as 29% and discrete GPUs by 19%. Other highlights with the update dev-focused features like enabling game capture and Twitch streaming for Mantle-enabled titles, OpenCL 2.0 support, addition of power profiling to AMD CodeXL 1.6, improvements to the AMD GPU Perfstudio, HSA Runtime and more.

The update will be rolling out later this week.

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AMD’s (NYSE: AMD) Senior vice President of Manufacturing Operations John Docherty’s recently joining GlobalFoundries’ Global Operations as a senior vice president was not a highlighted issue in the industry with an official press release but was echoed and affirmed by the press.

GlobalFoundries said that Docherty is responsible for the global alignment of operations in such areas as quality, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing technology, industrial engineering and program management.

Docherty has 35 years of semiconductor manufacturing experiences and had hands-on experiences with APU, CPU and GPU manufacturing while he was working for AMD. With his experiences of senior positions at Motorola Semiconductor, LSI Agere Systems and ATI, Docherty’s switching gears from AMD to GlobalFoundries could turn out to be a smart move for both companies, as he knows what GlobalFoundries’ most prominent customers need.

For GlobalFoundries, Docherty can be assisting with 14nm FinFET production to ensure it arrives at market as soon as possible, while AMD will be relying on 14nm silicon from GlobalFoundries to counter Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) upcoming GPU architecture, codenamed “Pascal,” which is based on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s 16nm process that was believed to be launched in 2016.

Docherty’s move and future cooperation relationship between AMD and GlobalFoundries were regarded as an attempt at vertical integration for both companies, now that AMD established GlobalFundries as a subsidiary company in 2009. GlobalFundries, meanwhile, established a partnership with Korean rival Samsung (KRX: 000830) in April, to collaborate over the 14nm process.

The post John Docherty’s Switching Gears from AMD to GlobalFoundries Benefits Both appeared first on VR World.

Modern high end CPUs are pretty fast these days: an Intel Xeon E5v3 (Haswell-EP) can pack up to 18 cores and two thirds of double precision teraflop in floating point power, while the 2015 Shenwei Alpha from China, with upwards of 32 vector-assisted cores per die, will crunch even more numbers per second. On the other hand, the GPUs have accelerated their own compute roadmap, with both Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) devices in the 2015 schedule breaking through the 3 teraflop DP ceiling. Of course, both CPUs and GPUs of this generation come with well tuned, high bandwidth memory systems too.

The same of course applies to Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) Xeon Phi compute accelerator, with the next years’ Knights Landing 3 TFlop DP version matching nicely to the next generation Broadwell based Xeon E5v4. Knights Landing Xeon Phi, with its 16 GB 3D stacked memory on the package, will bring new levels of low latency ultra high bandwidth in-memory processing capabilities.

But the problems come when trying to connect these CPUs and GPUs together – the PCI Express link, used now in 99% of the cases, drastically impairs the connection, with its maximum 20 GB/s achievable net bandwidth and up to 1 microsecond roundtrip latency, over an order of magnitude slower latency what Intel QPI, AMD HyperTransport or IBM POWER8 peripheral buses and Nvidia NVlink do – and for many short transfers common in HPC, that latency can mean a lot. These other connections enable coherent shared memory between all those CPUs and GPUs, rather than messaging and copying between separate memory spaces.

So, even though the 2015 Knights Landing will still have to rely on PCIe V3 for connection to its Xeon cousins, the 2016 variety could – hopefully – use the far more efficient QPI. They better do, as, by then, the Nvidia “Pascal” GPU generation, the one after Maxwell, will team up with IBM Power8+ and Power9 to use common NVlink for tight, low latency, shared memory connection between IBM CPUs and Nvidia GPUs in computational environs.

Mind you, that need not apply just in some large supercomputers, but even in your own high end Linux workstations. If the speculated OpenPower expansion to China bears fruits soon, and we see an inexpensive Power8+ lookalike from there, with NVlink on board, making high speed heterogeneous yet shared memory ultrafast 20 – 50 TFLOPs workstations will become a reality within a year or so.

However, there’s a company that could have done it all, much earlier – you guessed it right, AMD. Remember HyperTransport, the most faithful follow-on of the Alpha EV7 bus, ahead of QPI and such? Well, why didn’t they put HyperTransport on its Hawaii and later high end GPUs, and let the GPUs coherently share each other’s memory and that of the matching Opteron CPUs? Even CrossFire stuff would operate far, far faster and neater.

It’s not too late for the company, though. If AMD does decide to again (hopefully) produce top end CPUs, and connects them via HyperTransport to its own arrays of GPUs, they could be back in business.

The post Connecting the CPUs and GPUs: Battles of Choices Are Coming appeared first on VR World.

NZXT’s Kraken G10 GPU bracket is somewhat of a unique product. The only similar product appears to be Corsair’s HG10, but that has yet to hit the market despite a soft-launch back in June 2014. The Kraken G10 GPU bracket is designed to replace a GPU’s stock cooler, and allow it to be fitted with a closed-loop liquid cooling system.

The compatibility of NZXT’s solution is impressive, supporting a variety of graphics cards and liquid coolers. The current compatibility options are listed below in the specifications:

• Model Number: RL-KRG10-W1 (White), RL-KRG10-B1 (Black), RL-KRG10-R1 (Red), RL-KRG10-U1 (Blue)
• Dimensions: 177 (W) x 32.5 (H) x 110.6 (D) mm
• Fan Bearing: Sleeve
• Fan Connector: 3-Pin
• Compatibility: Nvidia : GTX 780 Ti, 780, 770, 760, Titan, 680, 670, 660Ti, 660, 580, 570, 560Ti, 560, 560SE — AMD : R9 290X*, 290*, 280X**, 280**, 270X, 270 HD7970**, 7950**, 7870, 7850, 6970, 6950, 6870, 6850, 6790, 6770, 5870, 5850, 5830 — The compatibility list is based on AMD Radeon and NVIDIA’s reference board layout, screw spacing and die height only. Please check the height restriction before purchase. — *Some variation in die thickness and height may cause issues with screws being too short to install on some AMD 290-based cards. — *Do NOT force the G10 to fit if your card is too thick, contact support for a revised screw set. — ** Some variations in AMD die height may require the use of a shim.

• Compatibility: NZXT : Kraken X61, Kraken X41, Kraken X31, Kraken X60, Kraken X40 — Corsair : H105, H110, H90, H75, H55 , H50 (CW-9060006-WW only) — Antec : KUHLER H2O 920V4, KUHLER H2O 620V4, KUHLER H2O 920, KUHLER H2O 620 — Thermaltake : Water 3.0 Extreme, Water 3.0 Pro, Water 3.0 Performer, Water 2.0 Extreme, Water 2.0 Pro, Water 2.0 Performer — Zalman : LQ-320, LQ-315, LQ-310

• Fan Dimensions: 92 (W) x 92 (H) x 25 (D) mm
• Fan Input Power: 16W
• Fan Current: 18A
• Fan Speed: 1500 ± 10% R.P.M.
• Fan Voltage: 12V DC
• Warranty: 2 Years

In the box of the Kraken G10, along with the cooling bracket came a fan, a set of screws, and an instruction manual.

The Kraken G10 being reviewed today is the white version of the bracket. In addition, NZXT provided a Kraken X40 liquid cooler to pair with the G10. A big thanks to Nvidia as well for providing a GTX Titan for the purpose of this review.

Here are the specifications of the PC used for testing the G10:

• CPU – Intel i7-3820, with Corsair H100 Liquid Cooler
• GPU – Nvidia GTX Titan, with NZXT G10 Bracket with NZXT Kraken X40 Liquid Cooler
• RAM – Kingston HyperX 10th Anniversary Edition 16GB (4x4GB) 2400MHz DDR3
• Motherboard – Gigabyte X79-UD7
• PSU – Corsair AX1200i 1200W 80 Plus Platinum
• SSD – 2x 120GB Kingston HyperX SATA3 in RAID 0
• HDD – 4x 4TB Western Digital RE Enterprise in RAID 10
• Chassis – Corsair 800D
• Disk Drive – LG Black Blu-ray Burner

The installation of the bracket was a bit time consuming, but part of that was due to unfamiliarity with the product and procedure.

The process began with removing the stock cooler from the GTX Titan, which was a fairly simple operation. All that was required was unscrewing a few screws and unplugging the stock cooler’s fan.

Cleaning the thermal paste off of the GPU was fairly straightforward, the process is the same as it would be for a CPU: some rubbing alcohol or thermal paste remover and some cotton swabs do the trick. Just be sure whatever you use to remove the thermal paste is a non-abrasive material, as even tiny invisible scratches to the surface can cause damage and performance issues.

Next, the G10’s fan was screwed onto the bracket, while making sure the fan’s orientation would have it blow cool air onto the GPU.

Once that was done, the backplate was assembled and the long screws were attached to the bottom of the GPU. The tricky and time consuming part was the next step: Attaching the liquid cooler to the G10 bracket, and trying to lower the bracket onto the card while lining up the screws. This step was just a matter of getting the long screws to go through the correct adapter holes on the bracket while making sure the liquid cooler didn’t drop out of place. Having a second person for this part would have made things easier, but it can definitely be done by just one person.

Once the cooler was attached to the GPU, it was ready to be mounted in the chassis. This is the part that prospective buyers definitely need to consider, as the chassis will need space for the liquid cooler, and the liquid cooler’s hoses will have to reach whatever the desired mounting point is.

The test rig was already running a dual rad liquid cooler on the CPU – the Corsair H110. The Kraken X40 dual rad liquid cooler used for the GPU needed a place of its own. Since the PC was built into the extremely large Corsair 800D chassis, there was a lot of space, but the downside was that the Kraken X40’s hoses were only so long.

The Corsair H110 was mounted to the top of the case, so the optimal solution was determined to be to attach the Kraken X40 to the back of the chassis.

Determining where and how to mount the second liquid cooler was the second most difficult process as there was some concern as to how the hoses and cables would reach, and if anything would be blocking or be blocked by the cooler.

Thankfully, once the liquid cooler and graphics card were situated, it was smooth sailing. It was time to power up the system and see how the liquid cooled GTX Titan would perform against its previously stock-cooled self.

To benchmark the GPU, it was tested at both idle as well as full load.

To run the GPU at full load, Furmark was run at 1920×1080 with 8x MSAA.

The results are incredibly impressive. Even at idle, there’s an 18 degree Celsius difference between the water cooled and air cooled GTX Titan. At load, the difference becomes even more marked– the temperature difference is 33 degrees C, and the fan speed drops from the air-cooled GPU’s 56% to 33%. The fan speed of the liquid cooled GTX Titan at load is almost the same as the card on idle for both air and liquid cooling– 33% vs 30%.

Clearly having the graphics card on liquid cooling makes a massive difference in temperature. This allows for more overclocking and prevents throttling caused by high temperatures.

At a price of $29.99, the NZXT Kraken G10 is extremely affordable. A compatible single rad liquid cooler can be found for as low as $65 (if not lower in some cases), making this a GPU liquid cooling solution for under $100. Considering the alternative is an expensive liquid cooling solution requiring a variety of different components, the Kraken G10 provides a very attractive option.

Liquid cooling a graphics card is no longer the expensive and difficult task it used to be, and that’s thanks to the NZXT Kraken G10, which provides excellent performance at a great price.

The post NZXT Kraken G10 GPU Bracket Provides A Great Cooling Solution appeared first on VR World.

AMD’s earnings broken down by revenue per division also spoke to how the company was able to beat the street’s expectations.

Computing Solutions: In their Computing Solutions business, which primarily focuses on CPUs and chipsets, AMD saw a decline of 8% quarter over quarter and 12% year over year, indicating that the PC market did shrink overall year over year, but an 8% decrease sequentially is almost to be expected going from the company’s busiest quarter (as was the case with Intel). They managed to post an operating loss of $3 million rather than an operating loss of $7 million in the previous quarter, primarily driven by lower operating expenses. This is compared to an operating loss of $39 million in the same period a year ago, clearly indicating AMD’s ability to adjust, slowly. Additionally, their CPU ASP remained flat sequentially but down ‘slightly’ year over year (no percentage provided).

Graphics and Visual Solutions: In AMD’s Graphics and Visual solutions division, which includes console APUs, AMD saw their revenue in the first quarter of 2014 decrease 15% sequentially and increase 118% year over year. This is clearly being driven by their ‘semi-custom’ SoC business and their GPU business which saw revenue increase both sequentially and year over year, indicating AMD’s thirst to improve their graphics strength. They reported that GPU sales were improved due to strong demand for their AMD Radeon R7 and R9 series of graphics cards. However, AMD still has a lot of room for improvement here with most of the GPU marketshare still being in Nvidia’s hands. Additionally, it appears as though the Xbox One’s slow-down in sales may have been the biggest factor in this change from quarter to quarter as Sony’s PlayStation 4 sales are strong as ever.

AMD also reported stronger operating income with an operating income of $91 million, compared to $121 million in Q4 2013, however, when compared to the same quarter a year ago at $16 million, AMD looks to be doing much better. The sequential decline was blamed by AMD on decreased revenue from ‘semi-custom’ SoCs while the year over year increase was also driven by higher sales of ‘semi-custom’ SoCs, basically consoles drove sales very strongly.

AMD’s outlook for 2014 was also a bit rosier than expected as they did report that they expected to see revenue for 2014 to increase year over year and that they expected their gross margin to remain around 35% which is exactly where they reported it for this quarter. Based on these slightly better than expected earnings, improved outlook and GPU sales strength, AMD’s stock is currently up 6% in after hours trading, clearly indicating investors’ happiness with this quarter’s earnings.

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Sapphire's Atomic was the highest clocked 3870.. and it was occupying just a single slot.

Fast forward to January 2008 – I’ve received Sapphire Atomic 3870 graphics card (www.sapphireatomic.com) and what made this card special is single-slot vapor chamber cooling, meaning this is the only air-cooled single-slot Radeon 3870 board out here.
After six months of working without a hitch, card suddenly started to overheat… you had 10 minutes of gameplay and the driver would crash. But before I thought about RMA, I’ve decided to void my warranty and disassemble the cooler to see if single-slot may be the cause of problems.

Dismantling the board...

You can see just how fat the layer of dust was... I opened the right corner, whole board was completely blocked

As you can see on the pictures, complete cooler was blocked, with roughly 5mm of dust, meaning thin aluminum fins could not dissipate heat… at all. Now, what made this case particularly interesting is the fact that this card was housed in a case protected with dust filters, and the cleaning of inside would happen every month or so. Every cleaning included a visit to the card’s fan and cleaning it – yet, there was no way in seeing that the cooler will become clogged.
Sapphire is currently developing its solutions for 4800 generation of products, but I can’t help but feeling that future single-slot cards should have see-through cover, so that every user could see if the board became clogged with dust or not.
See-through acryl may not look attractive as a black plastic, but at the end of the day, these babies are race cars, not bikini-wearing models. Just a thought.

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