Asus’s Rampage Extreme line has long been considered by many as some of the top overclocking boards that have been on the market, and the Rampage V Extreme is in the same boat.

When the board first came out there was a lot of talk about the inclusion of a non-standard OC-Socket, an aftermarket LGA 2011-v3 socket that has additional contact pins.  These pins help feed additional voltage to the CPU and result in what we have found to be very impressive and stable overclocking from the board.

But is this just a gimmick or is it really something that will make a difference?  The answer we find is that this is no joke and that the board by far surpasses every other X99 motherboard that is currently available when it comes to cache/uncore overclocking.  This leads to massive performance gains that other boards will not be able to achieve and quite frankly they are left in the Rampage V Extreme’s dust.  Once again Asus continues the legend of the Rampage Extreme line with this shining example of engineering and hardware dominance.

Asus Rampage V Extreme Specifications:

• CPU Socket Type: LGA 2011-v3
• Supported CPU Technologies: Turbo Boost Technology 2.0
• Chipset: Intel X99Onboard Video: None
• Onboard Video: None
• Audio Chipset: ROG SupremeFX 2014
• Audio Channels: 8 Channels
• LAN Chipset: Intel I218-V
• Max LAN Speed: 10/100/1000MbpsWireless LAN: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac 3T3R supports frequency band 2.4/5 GHz
• Wireless LAN: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac 3T3R supports frequency band 2.4/5 GHz
• Bluetooth: Bluetooth v4.0

Memory:

• Number of Memory Slots: 8×288pin
• Memory Standard: DDR4 3300(O.C.) / 3000(O.C.) / 2800(O.C.) / 2666(O.C.) / 2400(O.C.) / 2133
• Maximum Memory Supported: 64GB
• Channel Supported: Quad Channel

Expansion Slots:

• PCI Express 3.0 x16: 4 (40-lane CPU @ x16, x16/x16, x16/x8/x8 or x16/x8/x8/x8; 28-lane CPU @ x16, x16/x8, x8/x8/x8)
• PCI Express 2.0 x16: 1 (Max. at x4 mode)
• PCI Express x1: 1
• Quad-GPU NVIDIA 4-Way SLI and AMD 4-way/Quad-GPU CrossFireX Technology (support up to 3-Way with 28-lane CPU)

 Storage Devices:

• SATA 6Gb/s: 8 x SATA 6Gb/s
• SATA Express: Intel X99 – 1 x SATA Express port, red, compatible with 2 x SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports , ASMedia SATA Express controller – 1 x SATA Express port, red, compatible with 2 x SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports
• M.2: 1 x M.2 Socket 3 with M Key, support type 2260/2280/22110 storage devices
• SATA RAID: 0/1/5/10

Rear Panel Ports:

• PS/2: 1
• RJ45: 1 x RJ45
• USB 3.0: 10 x USB 3.0
• USB 1.1/2.0: 2 x USB 2.0
• S/PDIF Out: 1 x Optical
• Audio Ports: 5 Ports

Internal I/O Connectors:

• Onboard USB
• 4 x USB 3.0
• 4 x USB 2.0

The post Asus Rampage V Extreme: An Overclocking Monster appeared first on VR World.

Fractal, a Swedish computer hardware company just released a new set of Kelvin liquid CPU coolers.

The new Kelvin design has many great features including an expandable loop design, a dedicated fill port, standard G 1/4″ fittings, and a high pressure pump.  The Kelvin liquid CPU coolers are available in 120mm, 240mm, and 360mm radiator versions.

If users want to even upgrade the fittings they can do that because of the usage of industry standard design.  This means that you can add into the loop a GPU block or another radiator, or even a combination.

Fractal has made sure that the pump is more than capable of handling the loop with the inclusion of a ceramic high pressure pump.  The block and pump combination has a fillport on the side for easily filling of the loop after it has been upgraded.  The mounting supports all modern CPU sockets making it easy to swap this loop to another system in the future.

The Kelvin has a full copper CPU waterblock with strategic jet improvements, and the radiator is also a full copper design.  The usage of both full copper block and radiator will help to lower the galvanic corrosion potential over time, as it can increase with using different metals in the same loop.  The Kelvin liquid CPU coolers will indeed be a good option when shopping around for closed loop systems, that are currently a majority of Asetek re-branded units.

The post Fractal Releases A Trio Of Kelvin Liquid CPU Coolers appeared first on VR World.

Asus (TPE:2357) today announced the company’s new flagship graphics card with a single GPU: the GTX 980 Republic of Gamers (ROG) Matrix Platinum.  The custom designed card comes with a massive boost clock of 1342 MHz, and is cooled by a custom air cooler fed by 10mm heat pipes.

This is its third custom designed GTX 980, as the Poseidon and Strix OC versions have been out for a while now.  The card comes factory overclocked with a massive boost clock of 1342 MHz, although the base clock was not disclosed the memory has been left at the standard clock speed of 7 GHz.  The custom PCB has a 14 phase VRM to provide the card with stable power, and it requires two 8-pin PCI-E to power the card.  A unique feature meant for the most extreme users are the resistive traces in the PCB to keep the card warm enough to prevent frost when the card is used under LN2 (liquid nitrogen) cooling.

The cooling is taken care of by a custom air cooler with a high density fin-stack heatsink fed by 10mm thick heat pipes.  The two Asus designed fans that cool the heatsink are CoolTech hybrid fans that are designed to force air not only down but to the sides, essentially pushing air in an 180 degree arc.  The heatsink has been nicely finished in black, making the overall aesthetic much nicer.  Users will also appreciate that the card comes with a back-plate and a brace for the card which should help to prevent sagging.  Back-plates have been a noticeable addition to cards that consumers are getting more concerned about.  It not only can make the graphics cards much nicer when inside a windowed case but at times they can help with a bit of cooling if there are components on the back of the card.

The post Asus Introduces The GTX 980 ROG Matrix Platinum appeared first on VR World.

Galax has brought out its own addition to add to the growing lineup of small form factor GTX 970s.  The new GTX 970 Black Edition is only 19cm long and packs as much power as a standard sized GTX 970.

Today Galax (aka Galaxy) announced a brand new videocard in its GTX 970 lineup, the GTX 970 Black Edition.  The card is meant to be a small form factor that will be compact enough to fit in many small form factor(SSF) cases.  The card is only 19cm long and has a very nice custom cooler employing twin 80mm fans sitting atop a aluminum fins fed by three heat-pipes.  The card come factory overclocked with a base clock of 1126MHz and a boost clock of 1266MHz.  Galax decided to leave the memory alone as it is running the standard 7GHz memory clock.  The card will be available very shortly for about €320 from a variety of retailers and etailers.

The Nvidia GTX 970 is currently the “it” card of the moment as it is quite frankly the model that provides the best price to performance ratio.  The GTX 970s have been in a constant state of in-stock and out of stock from various sellers due to the popularity.  This has created a lot of frustration for consumers who are wanting to upgrade only to find that it is constantly out of stock, and it becomes a game of check the store for availability.  The fact is that these cards are so powerful and so energy efficient that to be able to build a small form factor build with one of these new cards would be just as powerful as a full sized system.  The small form factor builds are becoming increasingly popular amount enthusiast and with the Intel X99 motherboards coming out in mATX sizes users can now create powerful rigs that take only a fraction of the space as they used to while being more powerful.

The post Galax Brings Out The New GTX 970 Black Edition appeared first on VR World.

There have been some fantastic graphics cards released this year, many with varying price points and performance levels. We are going to take a look at the best of all the GPUs available in 2014 and give you our explanation why. Do keep in mind, that some of these cards may have been released in late 2013, but remained relevant for most of 2014 and still are to this day. And without further ado, we give you the five best graphics cards of 2014. They are going to be listed in descending order from most expensive to least expensive and hopefully they will help you pick the right card for your budget. You can click on the image of the card below to find the card at the posted price on Amazon.

AMD Radeon R9 295X2 – $799

The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 was specifically designed for 4K gaming and to this day remains the best card for 4K gaming for a lot of reasons. In our review of the R9 295X2 graphics card, we found it to be one of the best cards for 4K with a single graphics card. One of the other things that made the R9 295X2 so fantastic and worthy of this list is that the liquid system that cooled this card is probably the most effective cooling solution that has ever cooled a graphics card, ever. The AMD R9 295X2 is also a great card because instead of bringing down the level of the 290X in order to be thermally manageable they actually clocked it even higher and gave you a card that was faster than two R9 290Xs. Currently, you can find the R9 295X2 selling at retailers for around $799 which is a great deal when you consider it launched earlier this year for $1,500 and the price has dropped all the way down to $799. There are some places selling a VisionTek R9 295X2 for $779, but that’s just one card at one store and $799 is a much more realistic price because the Visiontek card is likely to sell out. But why, you may ask, is AMD’s card that launched back in April at $1,500 now selling at $799 in November, only 7 months later? That would be because of the competition from the next card on our list.

The post Top Five Graphics Cards of 2014 appeared first on VR World.

There have been some fantastic graphics cards released this year, many with varying price points and performance levels. We are going to take a look at the best of all the GPUs available in 2014 and give you our explanation why. Do keep in mind, that some of these cards may have been released in late 2013, but remained relevant for most of 2014 and still are to this day. And without further ado, we give you the five best graphics cards of 2014. They are going to be listed in descending order from most expensive to least expensive and hopefully they will help you pick the right card for your budget. You can click on the image of the card below to find the card at the posted price on Amazon.

AMD Radeon R9 295X2 – $799

The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 was specifically designed for 4K gaming and to this day remains the best card for 4K gaming for a lot of reasons. In our review of the R9 295X2 graphics card, we found it to be one of the best cards for 4K with a single graphics card. One of the other things that made the R9 295X2 so fantastic and worthy of this list is that the liquid system that cooled this card is probably the most effective cooling solution that has ever cooled a graphics card, ever. The AMD R9 295X2 is also a great card because instead of bringing down the level of the 290X in order to be thermally manageable they actually clocked it even higher and gave you a card that was faster than two R9 290Xs. Currently, you can find the R9 295X2 selling at retailers for around $799 which is a great deal when you consider it launched earlier this year for $1,500 and the price has dropped all the way down to $799. There are some places selling a VisionTek R9 295X2 for $779, but that’s just one card at one store and $799 is a much more realistic price because the Visiontek card is likely to sell out. But why, you may ask, is AMD’s card that launched back in April at $1,500 now selling at $799 in November, only 7 months later? That would be because of the competition from the next card on our list.

The post Top Five Graphics Cards of 2014 appeared first on VR World.

With the holidays approaching fast and the sales that come with it many people will be getting new notebooks this holiday season.  Researching what the best notebooks out there are takes time and we though we could help out by giving you our choices in five different categories of notebooks.  They are gaming, ultraportable, Chromebook, business, and Apple MacBook.  With the latest computer parts in these notebooks it will be certain that they will be able to earn there keep for quite some time.  There are many things to consider when looking for a notebook and budget is a big one.  Most of these choices are going to be in the higher end range since they perform better.

Gaming Notebook: MSI Computer GT72  Dominator Pro with GTX 980M – $2,299

This gaming notebook is the top of the line from MSI, and it does not disappoint.  Equipped with Intel i7-4710HQ, 16GB of DDR3-1600, a 128GB SSD, and a Nvidia GTX 980M 8GB, this will tear through any recent and upcoming game.  The best thing about the GT72 Dominator Pro is that MSI has taken steps to ensure that you can update the graphics down the line when new and better GPUs come out.  This means that the investment made in this computer will last a lot longer than comparable notebooks that are stuck with their graphics for the life of the product. If you are wanting some more speed from the notebook then throw in four identical M.2 SSDs inside and put them in RAID 0 for read/write speeds of up to 1600MB/s.  From experience with MSI’s SuperRAID as it is called I can attest to how massive of an improvement that speeds like this can be, it makes using the notebook just so much more enjoyable.  You can even attach three monitors to the notebook with two mini-displayport and one HDMI outputs.  The keyboard feels like no other notebook keyboard and is made by the gaming company SteelSeries. Bottom line is that if this is in your budget and you are a gamer or even a power user, I have little doubt that you will love this notebook.

Apple Notebook: 15″ 2.5GHz MacBook Pro with Retina display – $2,374.99

There is no denying it, Apple makes good notebooks and they are arguably the best notebooks for running Windows on as well.  The Retina display will allow for better multi-tasking with various windows as the resolution gives lots of screen real estate.  The Retina display will be great for those who edit photos or video as the display will reproduce colors very well. The construction of the MacBook Pro is amazing and the fit and finish are things that other companies could learn a thing or two from.  The choice with the 2.5GHz Intel i7 was made for what would be the most capable and powerful option with a reasonable price.  At Apple you can customize the MacBook Pro with up to a 1TB SSD and a 2.8GHz Intel i7.

Ultraportable Notebook: Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro – $1,382.99

The 2-in-1 Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro is the latest model in the Yoga line and features an amazing watchband style hinge.  The hinge is made up of hundreds of individual pieces that allows the notebook to flex like no other and fold to use it in different positions.  The screen is a high resolution (3200×1800) IPS touchscreen that will reproduce colors very well and look much better than lower quality panels.  If needing something very light, portable, and a long battery life then this notebook should be on your list of ones to check out.  The stylish Yoga 3 Pro is one of the most stunning designs out now and is powered by the brand new Intel Core M processor.

 Chromebook – Toshiba Chromebook 2 1080p $329.99

Chromebooks are a new breed of notebook, and people are really loving them.  Chromebooks generally are affordable, light, and have long battery life making it an easy choice for those who need something portable.  The best thing about this model is likely the 1080p IPS panel that will look much better than panels that are in other models.  Powering the notebook is an Intel Celeron processor, and while not very powerful it will get the job done and sip power giving longer battery life.  The battery should be good for up to 8 hours and 45 minutes.  The audio has been fine-tuned by Skullcandy meaning that it should deliver much nicer sound than the standard Chromebook.  This will be useful if you enjoy listening to streaming music while you surf the web or do work.  The 802.11ac Wi-Fi is blazing fast and will allow you to get better coverage over other Chromebooks.

Business Notebook: Lenovo X1 Carbon – $1,619

When looking for a business notebook it is wise to choose something that is portable and light so you can easily get work done no matter where you are working.  The X1 Carbon also offers great battery life allowing up to 9 hours from a single charge.  Lenovo is the the most used PC maker for businesses and they sure do know what they are doing with its lineup that is geared for productivity.  The keyboard is surprisingly good and has back-lighting making it easier to get work done while on that red-eye to an important meeting or at home in the evening.  The integrated fingerprint reader should help simplify secure login by allowing you to simply swipe a finger over it.  When it comes to a business notebook, choosing Lenovo is a wise choice that millions have made before.

The post Top Five Notebooks of 2014 appeared first on VR World.

MSI just announced that they are making a special limited edition version of the Nvidia GTX 970 Gaming 4G, with with an all copper heatsink and heatpipes.  MSI calls it the Golden Edition and it is available in the US exclusively through Newegg.com.

MSI (TPE:2377) has released the Nvidia GTX 970 Gaming 4G Golden Edition and is available in limited quantities in the US and APAC regions. The sole retailer in the US is Newegg.com where the card is currently in stock and available for $399.99.  This means it is commanding a $50 premium over the standard 970 Gaming 4G that goes out of stock as soon as they replenish the inventory. Nvidia GTX 970 is sure the hot item in the industry this last month or so and that is rightfully so since the card is a great buy in the mid $300 range and it performs like a champion.  Not to mention that with these cards users have huge overclocking potential, making their money go farther in terms of performance.  Speaking of performance this new Golden Edition also comes with a base clock of 1165MHz and a boost clock of 1317MHz and opposed the the standard Gaming 4G’s 1140/1279.  But really with a full copper Twin Frozr V cooler this card should be able to run much higher while staying safe and cool.  The cooler is less than two slots wide and should be ideal for use in multi-card SLI setups.  To top things off the heatsink has been treated to prevent any tarnish on the beautiful finish.

This new Golden Edition follows in the footsteps of the N465GTX Twin Frozr II Golden Edition.  In 2010 MSI released a special limited release of GTX 465 GPUs with all copper heatsinks and heatpipes.  In 2010 they were a big hit and owners soon found out that they could flash them to a GTX 470.  Here in the US, MSI cards are the preferred brand for those who like to modify the cooling by replacing the thermal interface material or using a watercooling block.  The US office is pretty nice about letting people do this as long as users do not physically damage the card in any way.

The post MSI Announces The GTX 970 Gaming 4G Golden Edition appeared first on VR World.

During today’s Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) earnings call for Q3 with very good numbers, Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang indicated that the company was already actively discussing licensing its GPU technologies in the mobile space to certain partners.

While Huang did not say how many partners they were working with or at what stage they were in the discussions, he did say the following, “Our licensing discussions are very active. And we have many in important stages.”

That statement was a response to an analyst question about the success of Maxwell and if it was bringing any potential progress on the licensing front. Currently, Nvidia is the sole user of its mobile GPUs and mobile GPU IP, however, with the success of Maxwell in desktop, there is a very good chance that some companies would become interested in utilizing it for their SoCs. Afterall, if you look at some of our Maxwell reviews, you can see that Nvidia is getting much more performance out of their GPUs while using the same process (28nm) as the previous generation and simultaneously reducing power. These advancements eventually trickle down to Nvidia’s mobile products as the company’s product roadmaps have indicated in the past.

Currently, the Tegra K1 utilizes Nvidia’s Kepler architecture, which was originally launched in desktop and laptop GPUs back in 2012 and then perfected in 2013 with the GTX Titan. Following the Kepler release in 2012, Nvidia announced the Tegra K1 (formerly known as Tegra 5) with Kepler in the beginning of this year and has been shipping Tegra K1 SoCs since the summer. So, a realistic timeframe to see Maxwell GPU IP in mobile is very likely going to be towards the tail end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016, so that isn’t necessarily going to be as quick as the mobile refresh cycle usually is. However, with each generation of SoC Nvidia has vastly improved the speed of GPU architecture implementation so there’s no knowing exactly how soon we could see an Nvidia GPU in something like a MediaTek.

It will be interesting to see how Nvidia will balance their GPU IP licensing with customers if they are also simultaneously competing with them. After all, ARM and IMG license both CPUs and GPUs, but neither of them actually produce their own products that compete with their licensees. There is also a chance that Nvidia may be trying to muscle weaker companies into licensing their technology because of the strength of their patents, which may be why Nvidia recently sued Samsung and Qualcomm.

The post Nvidia In Discussions with 'Many' GPU Licensees appeared first on VR World.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) reported their earnings for their fiscal fourth quarter of 2014, calendar Q3 2014 as well as the whole fiscal year of 2014 which ends in the calendar third quarter of every year. Qualcomm reported profits of $1.89 billion on $6.69 billion in revenue which boils down to an EPS of $1.11. Qualcomm’s revenues were up 3% year over year and down 2% from the last quarter, which worries some investors. Additionally, Qualcomm’s profit was up 26% year over year, but down 15% from the previous quarter.

However, Qualcomm’s quarterly figures missed on both revenue and non-GAAP EPS based on analysts’ expectations. Analysts had a consensus prediction of $1.31 EPS, which Qualcomm missed by $0.05 and they had a revenue target of $7.03 billion, and Qualcomm missed on that as well by $330 million.

Qualcomm also reported their results for the whole fiscal 2014 year, which showed the company as reporting $26.49 billion in revenue and a non-GAAP EPS of $5.27 while shippin 861 million MSM chips globally, an absolutely crazy number of SoCs. And if you take into account that

The primary problems that Qualcomm has right now is that they have a very strong position in the mobile market and are the leading SoC and baseband vendor for almost all of the leading smartphone vendors. In many regions, this has made Qualcomm very profitable and helped them grow to the $26 billion a year company that they are. They also managed to generate $8 billion in profit over the course of the last year, which is up from $6.8 billion in the previous fiscal year, a pretty significant improvement by any measure.

However, Qualcomm’s situation in China appears to be worsening rather than improving. They have plenty of products and IP that Chinese OEMs wish to utilize in their products, but are having a hard time getting them to properly license those technologies and pay for/accurately report how many Qualcomm licensed devices they are shipping and for how much. Additionally, Qualcomm is being probed by the Chinese government for the very reason that they are not Chinese and they are very present in the Chinese market. This very likely has to do with the fact that many large western companies have been probed in China recently and is a mere political move by the Chinese government to get more foreign technological investment.

Qualcomm’s outlook for the fiscal year of 2015 is what really drove Qualcomm’s stock downward today on yesterday’s news, with the company expecting revenues of $26.8 billion to $28.8 billion and an EPS of $5.05 to $5.35 which is below the consensus estimates of $28.9B and $5.58. The stock fell a whopping 8.5% today in regular trading after losing 6% in after hours trading yesterday and continues to lose ground into after hours trading, slipping an additional 2%. At the time of publication, Qualcomm’s stock is at $69.19 which is significantly lower than the $77 it was trading at before earnings were announced yesterday. As we learned in the case of Samsung, and now Qualcomm, nobody is invincible.

The post Qualcomm Misses Analyst Expectations, Weakens Outlook appeared first on VR World.

ARM today announced its latest graphics IP which includes three new GPUs as well as new video and display processors. With the introduction of ARM’s new Mali 8 series graphics IP, the company put a bigger focus on power efficiency and is looking to target products across a broad spectrum of capabilities and power envelopes. ARM’s announcement today introduces the Mali-T860, Mali-T830 and Mali-T820 GPUs as well as the Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550.

The new Mali graphics IP, as shown above, is part of ARM’s effort to make their graphics solutions even more efficient than their predecessors. This includes the ARM Mali-T800 series which is a successor to the currently available Mali-T700 series. The first of this graphics IP, the Mali-T800 series is designed to be more for the mid-range of devices as opposed to the high-end, however, ARM did state that the ARM Mali-T860 is still a high performance part.

The Mali-T860 is, according to ARM, a much more efficient GPU than the previous generations stating that it is 45% more efficient at certain tasks than the T628, which was the company’s high performance part before the T700 series cam out. It also has 16 scalable shader cores, meaning that you don’t have to fully implement all cores in the design, but I suspect most that choose to license it will go for the 16 core design.

ARM also claims support for 4K, which very likely means the ability to display 4K pixels and maybe 4K UIs without much more than that. Because realistically, no mobile platform is really capable of 4K gaming right now unless they upscale 1080P content. Additionally, the GPU will support OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenCL 1.2, but no Open CL 2.0. There is also going to be DirectX 11.1 support, but no DirectX 11.3 or 12.0 support. And last but not least, they also will support renderscript compute for all of the Android implementations. The lack of OpenCL 2.0 may be due to the fact that these are designed to be more mainstream or because OpenCL 2.0 is so new, but the lack of DirectX 12 is a bit interesting since this GPU will be in products sometime next year, which is around the time of Windows 10 (and DX12) launch.

That brings us to the Mali-T830 and T820 which are ARM Mali’s even more power efficient GPUs designed for the mainstream performance. These GPUs essentially carry many of the same capabilities of the T860 but with only four shader cores and no 4K support. They also lack an advanced tiling unit, which the T860 has. With these ARM Mali graphic chips, the company claims 50% better areal efficiency and 55% faster performance over the T622 generation of ARM Mali graphics, which preceded the current T720 generation of Mali GPUs.

Last but not least, are ARM’s Mali Video and Display processors which are designed to bring ARM’s goal of efficiency all the way from the GPU to the display processor. The way that they achieve this is with their new Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550 processors each designed for high efficiency operation in conjunction with the ARM Mali 800 series GPUs.  As you can see from the slides below, the Mali-V550 also brings HEVC (h.265) encode and decode capability to ARM’s video processors and brings the ability to support multiple standards. The V550 also scales from doing 1080 at 60 FPS with a single video care to 4K at 120 FPS with 8 video cores and it supports multiple simultaneous encode and decode streams.

The Mali-DP550 further enables a lot of what the T860 and V550 can do with improved power and memory efficiency as well as the ability to scale to 4K resolution. ARM is clearly ready to hop aboard the 4K bandwagon, with Qualcomm leading the charge. They also support 3rd party display differentiation which allows for 3rd party/SoC vendor IP into the Mali display pipeline.

The post ARM Announces New ARM Mali Graphics IP appeared first on VR World.

When Khronos had originally announced OpenVX and the associated APIs, there was a lot of excitement about how it could help simplify and unify computer vision within the industry. That announcement was merely the establishment of the working group and the companies that would contribute to the standard’s development and finalization. With today’s announcement, however, OpenVX officially becomes an industry standard that can be commercially deployed within products and developed for immediately. This finalized and ratified OpenVX 1.0 version brings a laundry list of features that help abstract the underlying computer vision interaction with hardware in order to make cross-platform implementations more possible.

Keep in mind that OpenVX is an API abstraction that makes implementing computer vision easier and more vendor agnostic while also giving more tools to improve performance and optimize power consumption. The target goals are to help bring mobile SoC vendors as well as embedded vendors to bring more refined computer vision implementations to their customers and make developing for computer vision more universal as well. OpenVX helps take prototyped OpenCV implementations and turn them into finalized products that can ship into whatever market they are targeted towards, OpenVX is designed to bring production quality computer vision to these vendors and their customers.

OpenVX Companies

Since the announcement of OpenVX and the finalization of OpenVX 1.0 as a standard, the number of companies that have joined the working group have also expanded and may actually help give you an idea of who is interested in utilizing computer vision in their products as well as who will have a more developer-friendly environment. Also, the spec itself has not changed since the original announcement, but rather now there are conformance tests available in order to ensure that certain implementations of OpenVX are interoperable between vendor implementations and adhere to the standard. Also, since the original announcement, there are now two implementations of OpenVX that prove the design, one being a Khronos sample implementation that will be available opne source by the end of the year, and another from Nvidia that is already working in the alpha phase as part of the VisionWorks vision SDK.

Unfortunately, one company missing from the OpenVX working group is Apple, who is a member of other working groups like OpenCL and actively utilize standards like OpenGL in most of their products. It is a little concerning that they aren’t part of the list of companies involved with OpenVX as computer vision becomes ever more increasingly important to mobile and embedded computing. Not to mention, most of Apple’s competitors are already involved with OpenVX and there’s a very good chance that this could give those companies the leg up on Apple in terms of computer vision implementations. There is still a chance that Apple could simply use OpenVX without officially being an ‘adopter’ or a member of the working group through their GPU relationship with Imagination, and hopefully that will be the case, but at the same time there’s a very strong chance that they could be developing their own computer vision technologies and may once again diverge from the rest of the industry.

The post Khronos OpenVX Computer Vision Standard Finalized appeared first on VR World.

As a part of Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) GPU Technology Conference (GTC) the company holds a parallel track of presentations and events called the emerging companies summit (ECS). The ECS for next year’s GTC 2015 is coming with an even bigger bonus with the fact that the company with the best GPU technology startup will get $100,000 on the spot at GTC 2015’s ECS.

Nvidia has always been one to promote emerging companies and to support startups in the best ways that they can. In fact, some of Nvidia’s most famous attendees of their GPU Technology conference include GAIKAI which was sold to Sony (TYO: 6758) for $380 million. Don’t forget there’s also Oculus who makes the Oculus Rift VR headset which was sold to Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) for $2 billion as well as Natural Motion who was acquired by Zynga for $527 million.

Obviously Nvidia’s GTC attracts a decent amount of successful companies that want to get involved with Nvidia and GPU technologies and there’s clearly no end in sight. This is especially true now that Nvidia’s GPU technologies have finally found their way into mobile. In fact, we spoke with Nvidia and were informed that companies utilizing either discrete or SoC GPU graphics are eligible to apply for this prize, so there’s no reason to think too narrowly of what’s possible.

Nvidia states that it is looking for seed-funded companies, which have raised no more than $1 million and use GPU technologies in areas such as computing, visualization, analytics, entertainment, automotive, cloud or mobile. But I wouldn’t necessarily limit myself to those categories if you’ve genuinely got a novel idea and think that Nvidia might find it interesting how you utilize its GPUs. If you’d like to have your company enter, just follow this application and get your application in before January 19th, 2015.

The post Nvidia Launches $100,000 GPU Startup Prize appeared first on VR World.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has released a video that explains how the company used  voxel global illumination (VXGI) to debunk conspiracy theories of how the Lunar Landing never happened. Nvidia does this by addressing each individual conspiracy theory as they are presented using a real time rendering of the photos taken on the moon by the two astronauts and their craft. This was done using the only hardware capable of using VXGI, the GTX 980 using Maxwell GPU technology, which was just announced and reviewed by us yesterday.

The VXGI technology is not yet available as it must be implemented in a game engine and at this current moment has only been ported to Unreal Engine 4 for demonstration purposes. Nvidia states that this VXGI demonstration and technology will be available for testing once Epic Games and other engine developers are able to include VXGI into their game engines. As of right now, Nvidia says that it will be in Unreal Engine 4 around Q4 this year which should mean that we could see VXGI in games as soon as next year.

The whole Lunar landing debunking scene was a perfect way for Nvidia to try to commemorate the anniversary of the event as well as show off the graphical chops of the GTX 980, the company’s newest and most powerful GPU as seen in our review. Maxwell is the company’s latest GPU architecture and the GTX 980 is their fastest offering within the Maxwell family. VXGI will only work on Maxwell GPUs as of right now but there’s a chance it could see daylight in other GPUs in the future, very likely subsequent architectures.

The post Nvidia Disproves Lunar Conspiracy Theories with Maxwell 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.

This post originally appeared on VR World, Bright Side of News*’ sister site covering the Asia Pacific

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

喬恩·佩迪研究中心（JPR）發布了最近GPU銷售報告的續篇，而主題是特別針對圖形顯示卡的市場。GPU的銷售報告包括AMD公司（紐約證券交易所代碼：AMD）的APU和許多新型英特爾（納斯達克：INTC）的CPU，也就是具有GPU核心處理器，即便如此，圖形顯示卡的銷售報告更能作為整體圖形顯示卡之市場體質的指標.

根據JPR的報告指出，AIB（圖形顯示卡）的銷售已經比前一季同時下滑了17.5％，比去年同時下降了17.6％。相較之下，去年同期的季成長率則為5.5%。何以致此？整體PC市場的季成長率提高了1.3%是關鍵因素。

上一季的配售率是44％下滑至36%。2008年第一季的配售率記錄維持在63％。

將廠商的銷售數字來做分析，Nvidia（納斯達克代碼：NVDA）就跌幅而言表現最差，重挫21％。而AMD下滑了10.7％。

儘管Nvidia比AMD重挫更大，但Nvidia的依然是市場的領導者，整體而言，持有62％的市場占有率。

不僅僅是一個整合的問題 我們很容易的會將GPU重大衰退的結果怪罪於CPU-GPU整合的成功和競爭力。在過去幾.

年裡，AMD和英特爾兩家所提供的產品已經不斷地在實質上精進許多，以至於他們能砸重金於獨立顯示卡的市場裡。

但對於發燒遊戲玩家來說，他們永遠都需要有一個獨立顯示卡。這是個有預算並願意砸錢於GPU效能的市場群。但是有一個問題：這組他們去年甚至前年買的獨立顯示卡，到今天，面對絕大部分的遊戲都還綽綽有余。

4K的遊戲正快速增加，並有潛力可以驅使更多GPU的銷售，但目前仍處於起步階段。直到廣大的消費群消費得起的4K顯示器出現於市場之前，這個市場的劃分是不夠成熟推廣至主流應用。還有另一個因素是，遊戲開發者一般都盡可能地為Xbox One和Playstation遊戲機為首要來發展設計，然後再轉到PC上。這也就顯示著這一代的顯示卡都很難達到各自所賦予的效能。直到4K遊戲成為主流，或是開發商開始創新架構遊戲，因而推動這些最新的顯示卡，要不然，經由GPU廠商去說服這些遊戲玩家再增添一個新的顯示卡是有困難的。

The post 報告：圖形顯示卡市場的凋零 appeared first on VR World.

In a live event streamed from AMD’s office in Austin hosted by Richard Huddy, AMD announced the Radeon R9 285 and giving the company’s most recent Hawaii architecture a modified and more affordable version. This card is clearly AMD’s attempt to attack Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 760.

The card is intended to replace the R9 280 (Tahiti Pro) card in AMD’s lineup. According to specs released by AMD, the card will have 1,792 Stream Processors, a 918 MHz clock, 2GB of memory clocked at 5.5 GHz on a 256-bit wide memory interface, 32 ROPs and 112 texture units. The card is said to offer 3.29 TFLOPS of peak performance.

This is compared to its predecessor, the Radeon HD 7950, which was only capable of 2.87 TFLOPS of peak performance, even though it had 3GB of RAM and a 384-bit bus and exactly the same amount of shader cores (and roughly the same clocks).

According to AMD production manager Devon Nekechuk, the card, along with all of AMD’s GCN GPUs, will support Direct X 12, including this newly announced Radeon R9 285.

AMD has also released some early performance numbers of the card running 3D Mark FireStrike. On a system with a Core i7-4960X CPU and 16GB of DDR3 memory the R9 285 scored P7066 on performance mode, and X3513 on extreme mode. These benchmarks have not been verified independently.

Both versions (2GB and 4GB) of the card will be released on September 2, starting at $249.

The post AMD Announces Radeon R9 285 During Live Stream appeared first on VR World.

Later this week AMD will hold a birthday celebration, in honor of 30 years of innovation in graphics and gaming at both AMD and its GPU predecessor ATI. The event, hosted by the company’s Chief Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy, looks back at what the company — and its predecessor in the GPU world ATI — have done with gaming, graphics and GPUs evolving from the VGA Wonder and Mach8 to the Radeon 290X and APU.

But the days of the perpetual graphics card arms race, the drive to push performance from these boards, may soon be coming to a close.

A recent report by JPR shows that in the last quarter, both AMD and Nvidia’s shipments of discrete GPUs have decreased dramatically. AMD’s discrete GPU shipments decreased by 10.7% while Nvidia saw a slump of 21% in the same market.

In a different generation, this would have been disastrous for both companies. But the AMD and Nvidia of today are different firms than they once were: both have diversified into new markets or are bundling GPUs into non-traditional environments. Both have their respective growing professional graphics lines. AMD has its profitable semi-custom silicon division, as well as the CPU-GPU hybrid desktop SoC called the APU. Nvidia has its Tegra division, which finally is making the company some money after its focus was shifted.

Is there a demand for a better graphics card?

Both AMD and Nvidia perpetually try and out-do eachother in the GPU board market, but as JPR’s most recent report shows demand is slackening. Gamers no longer require the top cards from either company, AMD knows this as the bulk of the cards released at its #gpu14 event in Hawaii were rebrands of previous offerings.

Most of the blame for this should lie at the feet of developers, who produce games for the hardware of consoles then port to PC from there. Both the Xbox One and Playstation 4 are based on yesteryear’s hardware; the latest PC GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia are orders of magnitude more powerful than the semi-custom Jaguar hardware that powers both consoles. If developers aim for this then scale up, they are missing the best features of these new GPUs.

Because of slack demand for actual high-end gaming cards, AMD and Nvidia are left producing vanity cards such as the Radeon R9 295X2, and the Nvidia Titan Z. Neither card serves a practical use, but neither company really cares as both want to compete for the honor of having the fastest card on the market.

While these tactics may serve to please investors in the short-term, AMD will have to accelerate its transition to be less reliant on add-in boards and more reliant on divisions with proven profitability. This year’s Computex trade show in Taipei demonstrated that AMD is past its crossroads, and has reconfigured itself to meet future market needs. Radeon, as the last few years of development have shown, will certainly live on though in different applications. The GPU is more important than ever in computing; Radeon GPU cores are what give AMD’s APU its competitive advantage.

There’s no longer an active and vibrant market in pushing out perpetually faster consumer graphics cards, what’s currently on the market is “good enough” for the time being. The perpetual increases in clock speed and graphics capability that we saw in the GPU world, particularly in the early-to-mid 2000s, that was driven by ever more demanding games has come to a close for the time being. If VR and 4K gaming become mainstream — both of which have a long way to go to crack the 5% market share barrier — this might create a new renaissance in add-in board GPU capability growth. But until this hypothetical becomes a reality, it’s an era of slow growth ahead.

Radeon will live on for another 30 years, but in a different focus than the product we knew for its first 30 years.

The post After 30 Years of Graphics and Gaming, Radeon is at a Crossroads appeared first on VR World.

Nvidia’s next-generation video card launch details may have been indadvertedly leaked by a Gigabyte executive. In an interview with Expreview, the executive claimed that Nvidia will unveil the GeForce GTX 880 in the month of September, with Gigabyte coming out with a custom card based on the reference design, dubbed the GTX 880 G1.Gamer. 

Details of the card are scant at this moment, but it is estimated that Gigabyte’s GTX 880 will feature a thermal cooler that can handle loads as high as 650W, and will feature a silent cooling solution that makes little to no noise when running in idle load. Also rumored is a 256-bit interface, along with 4GB GDDR5 video memory.  The first about the card leaked online in June. The GPU that will power the card is allegedly called GM204, and will be manufactured using a 28 nm process. Difficulties in shifting to large scale manufacturing are said to be a limiting factor in launching cards on the 20 nm process.

Additional information based on Zauba database listings suggests that Nvidia is currently in the testing phase with the GTX 880. Nvidia has a facility in Hyderabad that works on integrating the software drivers for its video cards, so it is likely that reference designs of the GTX 880 have been sent to the facility for testing. 

More details regarding the launch of the GTX 880 will likely be divulged at Gamescon, which is being held later this week. 

The post Nvidia May Launch the GeForce GTX 880 in September appeared first on VR World.

Nvidia has been doing a lot of their own consumer products lately, with the original Shield handheld gaming console and the Tegra Note 7 tablet. Each of these devices was actually surprisingly good and they were very good values for the money, especially if you got them at their cheapest ($199 each). Nvidia has learned a lot of lessons from each device and they’ve done a fantastic job of updating both the Shield and the Tegra Note 7. Their updates are so frequent and regular that I almost feel like they’ve got the leg up on almost every other Android manufacturer out there. They are also some of the first if not the first to release a new version of the Android OS for their devices as it becomes available.

Nvidia Shield family

So, it comes as little surprise that Nvidia has today announced the Shield tablet, a converging device that combines the best of the Tegra Note 7 and the Shield portable gaming console into a portable gaming tablet. The Shield Tablet’s core innovation is that it sports a Tegra K1 SoC with a Kepler GPU inside rather than the previous generation Tegra 4 SoC, which was a few generations of GPU architecture behind. Tegra K1 promises to be vastly faster than anything Nvidia has ever made before and it will come in two CPU flavors with the first one being an ARM A15 implementation and the second being Nvidia’s own custom 64-bit CPU design.

The Nvidia Shield Tablet will have an 8″ Full HD IPS display capable of supporting DirectStylus 2 (an improvement over DirectStylus) and will feature a dual front-facing speaker setup much like the Tegra Note 7, but with a higher resolution because the Tegra Note 7 was only 720P and the Shield Tablet is 1080P. However, it will now have bass ports to allow for more bass to come from the speakers, a feature that many gamers will appreciate. It also has two 5MP cameras, one front and one back along with SmugMug’s Camera Awesome app built-into the phone. The tablet will support up to 128GB of SDXC memory card storage and wil come in a 16GB and 32GB versions with built-in memory. The 16GB variant of the Shield Tablet will be Wi-Fi only while the 32GB will support LTE on AT&T and T-Mobile through Nvidia’s Icera i500 modem. It will also have a 20 watt hour battery, which should suffice for about 8-10 hours of medium to light use and probably 5 hours or less of actual gaming.

Nvidia claims that the Shield Tablet will support 4K as it is “4K ready” however they are outputting the video for 4K over miniHDMI which is basically a dead standard in the mobile industry and hasn’t been used by anyone in a phone for a while. The fact that Nvidia chose to go with miniHDMI instead of MHL 3.0 is a perplexing one because with MHL 3.0 they can not only support 4K video streaming but they are also able to charge the device as it plays video back to the TV through the USB port.

The tablet will also feature Bluetooth 4.0 LE and 802.11n Wi-Fi, which is a bit of a disappointment like the Shield portable console was because in order to really get a solid gaming experience you really want to have something like 802.11ac. And yes, it will increase the overall cost of materials, but maybe Nvidia needs to develop their own because the lack of it in this tablet is almost unforgivable at this point.

Nvidia Shield Tablet Pricing

Nvidia will price the Shield Tablet at $299 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only model and $399 for the 32GB LTE model. They will also be selling a flip cover that will also double as a stand for the Shield Tablet as well as the Shield Controller which operates via Wi-Fi direct for $59. What makes this launch even more interesting is that the tablet will be available globally, the first time for any Nvidia Tegra consumer product. First the launch will begin on July 29th in the US (pre-order open today) and then Europe on August 14th and then the rest of the world this fall.

Overall, this tablet looks fairly promising as a standalone product, the real question will be how it will perform as a gaming tablet and whether or not people really want a separate tablet and game controller setup. I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to want to see if Nvidia releases a Shield portable gaming console with the Tegra K1 updated SoC inside. A gaming tablet is cool and all, but I just don’t see very many scenarios where carrying around a controller and a tablet is something a consumer would enjoy.

The post Nvidia Announces Tegra K1 Shield Tablet for Gaming appeared first on VR World.