Francisc Kurko, Romania – PALIT GeForce GTX280 graphics card, signed by Jen-Hsun Huang

Winners of 3DMarkVantage retail licenses are:

Radu Neagu, Romania

Boris Romac, Croatia

Jonathan Worrel (Furious Fandango), United States of America

Ivan Faj, Croatia

Nikola Peruncic (McPingvin), Croatia

Chad Hudson (Dragoon1101), United States of America

Nenad Miodrag (nmiodrag), Croatia

Goran Gjura (spikeygoran), Croatia

Eyvind Niklasson, Sweden

Joza Habijan, Croatia

In the end, I wish to congratulate each and every one for competing in PALIT Folding Challenge 2008. I am pleasantly surprised at the effort placed by all members of this small team. Also, bear in mind that the new giveaway is already planned, and this time I will focus on giving as much prizes as possible, with several tweaks in the contest rules. Rest assured, everything that I do will be global, so no exclusions. Everybody is welcome in the group, and as the new site starts to grow, you can be sure there are plenty more surprises. For starters, we’ll make sure that we have a dedicated place for all folders on the site, in the form of site section and forum section.

All winners need to contact me at FoldingChallenge@gmail.com with their shipping address, so that I could organize shipping of prizes.

The post ANNOUNCEMENT: Winners of PALIT Folding Challenge 2008 appeared first on VR World.

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.

The post Biohazard Annihilation F.A.T.E.: Life with a Ferrari appeared first on VR World.

A while ago, I wrote a piece stating that Nvidia decided to launch 55nm GT206 as Quadros first. The reason for that is the number of problems that Nvidia had in die-shrink process, so the company had to roll-out GT206 in the same way as its old NV30 (Quadro FX 2000 shipped before GeForce FX5800) or as AMD likes to launch its CPUs – commercial parts (Opteron) are launched first, followed by consumer ones (Phenom, Athlon, Turnmeon).

Thus, GT206 (G200 B Series – A series marked 65nm parts, B series denominates 55nm parts, G200 C series should mark the 40nm GPUs) debuted as Quadro CX, FX 4800 and FX 5800. Quadro CX and FX 4800 are essentially identical parts: 55nm GPU with 192 shaders (48 shaders and 6 dual-precision units are disabled for yield purposes) with 1.5 GB of GDDR3 memory, while FX 5800 features a combo of 55nm GPU and 4GB of GDDR3 memory.

55nm vs. 65nm parts, with power consumption and all...

Getting back on track with this story, the honor of being the first review of GT206 GPU belong to no other than 3D Professor. 3D Professor got his hands on Quadro FX 4800, part that was silently rolled out yesterday. In his review, the declared maximum power consumption was only 146 Watts. What makes the matters more important is the fact that this is a first high-end graphics card in three years to feature just one 6-pin power connector. It seems like the GPU manufacturers finally started to truly work on reducing the power consumption, while offering more and more performance.

We managed to get a screenshot from GPU-Z, but as you can see for yourself, GPU-Z does not correctly recognize Quadro FX 4800 and its 55nm GPU. The only numbers that correlate to Nvidia’s official product page are ones that talk about GPU clocks. What makes the situation interesting is that  Nvidia declares memory bandwidth at 76.8 GB/s, or 700 MHz DDR. In fact, 1.5 gigs of GDDR3 memory comes clocked at 800 MHz DDR (1.6 GT/s) and has 87.5 GB/s to play with. 

Well, more at 3D Professor’s page – enjoy in this world’s first review of Quadro FX 4800 and the first review of 55nm GPU from Nvidia. Bear in mind this is a professional review of professional card for professionals – which means no 3DMark score :-(. But PCMark score is here.

The post Nvidia 55nm GT206 reviewed, dramatic reduction in power consumption appeared first on VR World.

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.

The post UPDATED: Nvidia’s “deadly” flaw and how to fix it – no more squealing! appeared first on VR World.

PALIT Multimedia Folding@Home Challenge 2008

(Yes, I know it’s a long name, sorry ;))

I’ve set up a page on this blog that has all the details about the challenge, and I invite you to join in.
The awards are (hopefully) tempting – Palit GeForce GTX280 board signed by no other than Jen-Hsun Huang, triple-C of nVIDIA Corporation (Co-founder, Chairman, CEO) and 10 licenses of 3DMarkVantage Advanced Edition. There are no territorial limits, so you can join in from anywhere

I want to express my gratitude to David Makin from PALIT Multimedia North America, Oliver Baltuch, President of Futuremark Corporation and Andrew Humber from nVIDIA Corporation. More details about the contest are available on the link above – or just click here.

UPDATE: No, I am not competing for the board. I was asked this in couple of e-mails, and to make matters clear I’ve updated the rules as well.

The post UPDATED: Folding@Home Challenge 2008 appeared first on VR World.

The reason for GeForce dominance lies in the purple bar - scratch cache

Then again, problem in gaming with X1K and later R600 and RV670 was the relative lack of texture units (TMUs), and problem with GPGPU continued to be – local share. You now might be wondering what will happen if you don’t put that “scratch cache” in the GPU. What happens is that your CPU will be constantly polled, and this drags the performance down to the gutter.
We heard a lot of technical details about that particular issue, and the difference in scaling between dual-core CPU and a quad-core one. All in all, quite interesting stuff. But there is one large point to be made: the reason why Nvidia is so successful with CUDA is the fact that Nvidia offered what companies needed (scratch cache, CUDA, math libraries), while ATI suffers from selecting Brook+ to be their bread and butter until OpenCL comes along.
RV770 saves the day…or not?
The RV770 GPU, more known as Radeon 4800 series is a vast improvement over previous generations. GPGPU-wise, most important thing is introduction of local share, since every 10 shaders got their “slice of the pie”. But GPGPU is more complex field that just “here is the feature, we can all use it now”.
Our sources repeatedly criticized Brook+, claiming it is not in sync with AMD’s own CTI and Stream SDK’s. Brook+ allegedly breaks “with new drivers, with old drivers”, “whatever can go wrong, it can” and so on.
ATI’s hardware now has local share, but that support has to be hard-coded into Brooke+. AMD recently released 1.21 Beta Stream SDK featuring local share, but that same support has to come inside Brooke+ as well.
The Solution: Q1’09
So, we have shown you the problem, and now the time is for the solution. ATI can’t fix the performance issue on previous-gen hardware, but it will solve multitude of issues on Radeon 4800 boards. The team at Stanford is taking some necessary steps to re-do the workflow and introduce local memory share. This could take months, so realistic goal is to have a new client coming in Q1’09.
Once that Radeon 4870 gets fully utilized, those 800 shaders and 70% of theoretical value (700-800 GFLOPS instead of 1-1.2 TFLOPS) should be good enough for reaching the level of GTX280.

Next story update will bring some views and opinions from AMD folk.

The post AMD’s Folding performance explained, future development revealed appeared first on VR World.

I won’t go into fashion decisions, as I am not a big fan of acrylic cases, but I wish my friend all the best when it comes to cleaning up.

When it comes to the CPU itself, Intel Core i7 965 (codename: Bloomfield) works at 1.6 GHz in SpeedStep mode, and works at 3.4 GHz by default. E.g. it works in ASUS motherboard at 3.4 GHz by default, since the board came with Turbo mode on.

Intel Core i7 965 works at 1.2 Volts, the board was feeding the CPU with 1.208V, bus speed was supposed to be 133 MHz, the board was giving out 135.9 MHz (which means QPI is clocked at 3.23 GHz instead of 3.2 GHz), but if you want, you can turn the Turbo mode off. Since Core i7 Extreme is made for overclocking anyways, expect that this system will undergo a nice air cooling upgrade and then target 4 GHz on air.

One thing is certain: somebody is really, really lucky

You are free to use images from the gallery, just please link to this post. If there are interested, resolution is 2048×1536, since all pics were taken with a Sony Ericsson phone. And yes, my Nokia N93i would make way better ones

P.S. If you wonder why Intel chose the name 965 for its Core i7 series, reason is very simple: company wanted to revisit its failed NetBust marchitecture and relive the glory days. Pentium EE 965 was a 150W consuming (that was advertised, reality was a bit different… for the worse) monster that failed to beat AMD processors that worked at much less clocks… now, Intel is challenging AMD with the new 965.

The post Intel Core i7 965 Gallery – from Silicon to Benchmarks! appeared first on VR World.

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.

The post World, meet Nehalem e.g. Core i7 965 pixellated appeared first on VR World.

The motherboard for the ultimate workstation

The board supports both SLI and CrossFire in their respective maximum configurations (3 or 4 GPUs), but what makes this board really interesting is the fact that you could connect 12 LCD displays on it, or create a GPGPU/rendering/scientific/folding farm in a single case. Putting six ATI Radeon 4850 graphics cards would enable roughly 6TFLOPS of computing power. In case of Nvidia, you would have to pick up GeForce 9800GT (Palit has single-slot 1GB card) and have less theoretical computing power, but in terms of folding, you would be looking at 30-35.000 PPD system (at a cost of two GTX260 cards).
This is really impressive engineering feat from ASUS, with the only disappointment being usage of RealTek GbE controller. For a workstation motherboard, I would much happier if Marvell was on-board.
Storage-wise, you can install no less than eight SATA devices and not a single IDE device, since ASUS stayed in “Revolution” theme and killed of the PATA connector. Also, I found that a shared PS/2 port was also pretty neat solution, even though real revolution would be killing both PS/2 slots. This way, you still have one legacy part: PS/2.

There is one shared PS/2 port, for either keyboard or a mouse

Funny part of this story is that if anybody would have a time machine and go back to IBM engineers in 1986-7 frame and told them that only remain of their failed standard is going to be a keyboard/mouse connector, and that PS/2 connector will outlive PATA, I guess they would call you… crazy? Lunatic? Infidel?

P.S. If you’re wondering… yes, the answer is true. There are no technical issues that would prevent you from installing 3-Way SLI and 4-Way CrossFireX setup, consisting out of three GTX280 and two 4870X2 cards. Only problem is that you would have to have a watercooling setup, since you are limited to single-slot cooling solutions. I guess Asetek, CoolIT or somebody similar could come up with a solution for this “problem”.

The post ASUS kills PATA and PCI standards! appeared first on VR World.

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.

The post Nvidia’s $50 card destroys ATI’s $500 one or “Why ATI sucks in Folding?” appeared first on VR World.

Features

You can go the easy way of clicking... or just go to advanced options

This is a consumer friendly product, so hardcore users might object to “too fancy” interface. Personally, I have nothing against. Supported input video formats are .m2v, .mpg, .vob, .avi*, .trp, .ts, .m2t, .m2ts, .mpeg, .mts (MPEG-2, H.264, RAW, HDV, AVCHD, AC-3, MP2, PCM) in any resolution lower than full HD one. Output is being done in MP4 (H.264) profile with 2-channel AAC-LC audio, in any resolution below 720p one.

Setting up the custom resolution is "easy peasy"... for some reason, default after installation was resolution of my BBerry Bold

Since primary purpose of this application is to transcode video to your iPod, iPhone, PSP, MCE and other handheld devices. I’ve just got a Blackberry 9000 Bold, and it fits the reccomended PSP resolution perfectly (480×272). Of course, you have a choice of custom resolutions, audio settings, bit rate and so on. Bit rate is especially helpfull in order to get the movie fit on your mobile device – after some hacking, 8GB card on my Blackberry Bold had all three LOTRs for upcoming flight Zagreb-Munich-San Francisco. It may be 13 hours, but it will be more fun with Blackberry on

Audio Settings depend on the audio source featured on your DVD or video file...

Of course, writing this opinion while listening to Sex and The City on right monitor wasn’t helpful, but still my friends and myself were impressed with the speed of selecting the transcode options. Finally a no-brainer user interface which you can work with at 2AM.

Performance is a charm, but comes at a price…
So, what kind of performance can you expect from Badaboom? I’ve tried the software using AMD Athlon 64 5000BE @3GHz, Phenom 9950BE@2.6 GHz, Zotac’s GeForce 8800GTX AMP! Edition (so, higher clocked than 8800Ultra) and Nvidia’s reference GeForce GTX 280. Given the time constraints, I didn’t find the time to put slower cards such as 8600GTS and similar castrated brothers. For a video card minimum, Elemental reccomends GeForce 8800GT or 9600GSO (a brilliant card, don’t be surprised if Nvidia kills it).

Dual-core CPU is tricky area for Badaboom - you should think about quad-core that wil be able to feed the GPU

My experience was the following – Phenom system with 8800GTX beat the living crap out of Athlon system with GTX280. 8800GTX was transcoding my test Lord of The Rings – FoTR at 184-195 fps, and was done in 14 minutes. Dual-core Athlon with GTX280 achieved only 145 fps on average, with the CPU load at 88-94%. Badaboom was eating 60-70% of Athlon system, while quad-core was loaded at 60%. So for Badaboom, you need a triple or a quaddie CPU.

But the performance is awesome. When I compare a 14 minute transcode to whole-nighter on CPU alone, it is just… let’s just say that this product rocks. In order to bypass stupid MPAAfia protection on my DVDs (I have more than 200 DVDs and 300 games for which I paid for, and MPAA and game developers/publishers still treat me like a criminal. Great moves, guys – I’ll crack my original games before you say “torrent”!), I’ve used AnyDVD. This piece of software is something that every owner of DVDs should buy. Removing the protection on the fly is something… well, user friendly.

Getting back to Badaboom, from this first look I can say that it is a must buy if you want to transcode movies, and own a GeForce card, this piece of software is something that you should buy. Nvidia is expanding its GPGPU (or GPU computing, as Jensen likes to call it) offering dramatically. First schorching Folding@home performance, then Photoshop and Premiere Pro, and now Badaboom.

I got a review copy for free. But yes, I am going to spend $30 to support the guys.

UPDATE 15:41 CET 24/10/2008: I’ve just filed new story regarding the CPU utilization. You can read it here.

The post UPDATED: Elemental’s video transcoder rocks the world appeared first on VR World.

Can this device put Blu-ray on a map as viable backup solution?

OWC Mercury Pro is external Blu-ray burner, but it features e-SATA port. Yep, you’ve read it correctly – it does come with FireWire 400 and 800, USB 2.0, but it also comes with e-SATA port, meaning you can burn 50GB of data at a speed of 1GB/min, instead of almost two hours of dwelling through USB connector. I own Sony’s BWU-100A in internal IDE and external USB version, and it is a drag burning 50GB for more than an hour. E-SATA enables burning at the maximum speed of SATA 1.0 spec, which is 150MB/s, so no more 40 MB/s through USB 2.0 (USB 2.0 can do 60MB/s? Yeah, right.), or FireWires which aren’t exactly… fiery.

E-SATA is the way to go, and these guys are offering this piece of hardware for 500 bucks. Given that my Sony cost over a grand a while ago, this is a fair value. And yes, this finally brings decent Blu-ray drive to Mac systems, which are traditionally lagging behind PC in terms of hardware connectivity. Since St. Jobs finally added e-SATA connector on latest series of MacBooks, you can get this device and have decent storage capabilities.

The device supports reading HD-DVD media as well… so time to back up my 100+ HD DVD movies is here. And with a help of Badaboom Pro beta, I might even put the GTX280 to a good use, instead of waiting for weeks on a CPU.There are two models available (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/optical-drives/), one without Roxio Toast 9 Titanium (MacOS X), and one with. The difference is 80 bucks, so have phun.

If OWC dares to send the device for a review, they can be sure I’ll check their claims of 1GB/min write speed.

The post YES – Somebody finally made a decent Blu-ray burner! appeared first on VR World.