GeForce GTX Call of Duty Rivalries competition ...and more

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | November 15, 2012 - 04:05 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: nvidia, call of duty, black ops 2

NVIDIA will be celebrating the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops II by launching the first-ever “GeForce GTX Call of Duty Rivalries” competition which pits top colleges against each other in Call of Duty: Black Ops II four-person, last team standing multiplayer matches. Participants in the first round of competition include the storied rivalries of Cal vs. Stanford, USC vs. UCLA and UNC vs. NC State. Two additional wildcard colleges from any accredited college in the United States will also be chosen by the Facebook community to field teams. See details on GeForce.com or visit NVIDIA’s Facebook page on how you can walk away with a Maingear gaming rig.

In addition to the contest NVIDIA also released the GeForce 310.54 beta driver with specific benefits for players of Black Ops 2, specifically the inclusion of TXAA.

• Delivers up to 26 percent faster performance in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and up to 18% faster performance in Assassin’s Creed III.
• Provides smooth, shimmer-free graphics with NVIDIA TXAA antialiasing in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Assassin’s Creed III.
• Improves performance by up to 16% in other top games likes Battlefield 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and StarCraft II.

As always, our new driver includes new profiles for today’s top titles, increasing multi-GPU performance.

• Hawken – Added SLI profile
• Hitman: Absolution – Added SLI profile
• Natural Selection 2 – Added SLI profile
• Primal Carnage – Added SLI profile

You can grab the driver and read about all the improvements right here.

Podcast #227 - Golden Z77 Motherboard from ECS, High Powered WiFi from Amped Wireless, Supercomputing GPUs and more!

Subject: General Tech | November 15, 2012 - 02:10 PM | Ken Addison
Tagged: titan, thor, tesla, s1000, podcast, nvidia, k20x, Intel, golden board, firepro, ECS, dust, Amped Wireless, amd

PC Perspective Podcast #227 - 11/15/2012

Join us this week as we talk about a Golden Z77 Motherboard from ECS, High Powered WiFi from Amped Wireless, Supercomputing GPUs and more!

You can subscribe to us through iTunes and you can still access it directly through the RSS page HERE.

The URL for the podcast is: http://pcper.com/podcast - Share with your friends!

• iTunes - Subscribe to the podcast directly through the iTunes Store
• RSS - Subscribe through your regular RSS reader
• MP3 - Direct download link to the MP3 file

Hosts: Ryan Shrout, Jeremy Hellstrom, Josh Walrath, and Allyn Malventano

This Podcast is brought to you by MSI!

Program length: 1:07:04

Podcast topics of discussion:

1. Join us for the Hitman: Absolution Game Stream
2. Week in Reviews:
   1. 0:02:00 ECS Z77H2-AX Golden Board Motherboard
   2. 0:07:00 Amped Wireless R20000G Router and Adapter
   3. 0:12:20 Intel says USB 3.0 and 2.4 GHz don't get along
3. 0:18:00 This Podcast is brought to you by MSI!
4. News items of interest:
   1. 0:19:00 A renaissance of game types that have been sadly missing
   2. 0:24:00 You missed our live Medal of Honor Game Stream - loser!
   3. 0:26:12 NVIDIA launches Tesla K20X Card, Powers Titan Supercomputer
   4. 0:30:15 AMD Launches Dual Tahiti FirePro S10000
   5. 0:38:00 Some guy leaves Microsoft - is the Start Menu on its way back??
   6. 0:41:40 AMD is apparently not for sale
   7. 0:46:05 ECS joins the Thunderbolt family with a new Z77 motherboard
5. Closing:
   1. 0:54:00 Hardware / Software Pick of the Week
      1. Ryan: Corsair Hydro Series H60 for $75
      2. Jeremy: Form over function or vice versa?
      3. Josh: A foundation worth donating to
      4. Allyn: ArmorSuit Military Shields

1. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
2. http://pcper.com/podcast
3. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
4. Closing/outro

Be sure to subscribe to the PC Perspective YouTube channel!!

The driving force behind revisting Radeon and GeForce cards

Subject: Graphics Cards | November 15, 2012 - 01:43 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: amd, nvidia, catalyst, forceware

We have seen quite a few driver updates since the release of cards like the HD 7970 GHz Edition and the GTX 680 which inspired [H]ard|OCP to revisit the performance of these cards in several games.  Some results were not surprising, the two top cards have historically run neck and neck in performance and price and that remains true now.  There was a definite loser however, the performance of the GTX 660 Ti matches that of the HD7870 but the price is similar to the much faster HD7950.  Check out the full results here.

"With the recent release of new beta drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA, and the upping of clocks by AMD, significant performance gains have been claimed by both parties for current generation video cards. We will investigate with a 6-way roundup comparison to see if we can crown a champion."

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Graphics Cards

• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 4GB @ Legion Hardware
• Sparkle Calibre X680 Captain @ Kitguru
• ASUS HD 7970 3GB Matrix Platinum Edition Review @ Hardware Canucks
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB @ eTeknix
• MSI GEFORCE GTX 660 HAWK 2GB @ Tweaktown
• Call Of Duty Black Ops II VGA Graphics performance with 21 cards @ Guru of 3D
• A Look at NVIDIA's Kepler-based Tesla K-Series GPU Accelerators @ Techgage
• ASUS GeForce GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II TOP @ Guru of 3D
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Review @ Neoseeker
• Benchmarking NVIDIA's R310 Linux Driver Improvements @ Phoronix
• Clock-For-Clock, Nouveau Can Compete With NVIDIA's Driver @ Phoronix
• HIS Radeon HD 7750 IceQ X Turbo 1 GB @ techPowerUp
• AMD FirePro W5000 Professional Graphics Card Review @ Legit Reviews
• HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition & 7950 IceQ X² Boost Clock @ Legion Hardware
• Sapphire HD 7770 FleX @ TechwareLabs
• Asus Matrix HD 7970 Platinum 3GB @ eTeknix

NVIDIA Launches Tesla K20X Accelerator Card, Powers Titan Supercomputer

Subject: General Tech | November 12, 2012 - 06:29 AM | Tim Verry
Tagged: tesla, supercomputer, nvidia, k20x, HPC, CUDA, computing

Graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA launched a new Tesla K20X accelerator card today that supplants the existing K20 as the top of the line model. The new card cranks up the double and single precision floating point performance, beefs up the memory capacity and bandwidth, and brings some efficiency improvements to the supercomputer space.

While it is not yet clear how many CUDA cores the K20X has, NVIDIA has stated that it is using the GK110 GPU, and is running with 6GB of memory with 250 GB/s of bandwidth – a nice improvement over the K20’s 5GB at 208 GB/s. Both the new K20X and K20 accelerator cards are based on the company’s Kepler architecture, but NVIDIA has managed to wring out more performance from the K20X. The K20 is rated at 1.17 TFlops peak double precision and 3.52 TFlops peak single precision while the K20X is rated at 1.31 TFlops and 3.95 TFlops.

The K20X manages to score 1.22 TFlops in DGEmm, which puts it at almost three times faster than the previous generation Tesla M2090 accelerator based on the Fermi architecture.

Aside from pure performance, NVIDIA is also touting efficiency gains with the new K20X accelerator card. When two K20X cards are paired with a 2P Sandy Bridge server, NVIDIA claims to achieve 76% efficiency versus 61% efficiency with a 2P Sandy Bridge server equipped with two previous generation M2090 accelerator cards. Additionally, NVIDIA claims to have enabled the Titan supercomputer to reach the #1 spot on the top 500 green supercomputers thanks to its new cards with a rating of 2,120.16 MFLOPS/W (million floating point operations per second per watt).

NVIDIA claims to have already shipped 30 PFLOPS worth of GPU accelerated computing power. Interestingly, most of that computing power is housed in the recently unveiled Titan supercomputer. This supercomputer contains 18,688 Tesla K20X (Kepler GK110) GPUs and 299,008 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processors. It will consume 9 megawatts of power and is rated at a peak of 27 Petaflops and 17.59 Petaflops during a sustained Linpack benchmark. Further, when compared to Sandy Bridge processors, the K20 series offers up between 8.2 and 18.1 times more performance at several scientific applications.

While the Tesla cards undoubtedly use more power than CPUs, you need far fewer numbers of accelerator cards than processors to hit the same performance numbers. That is where NVIDIA is getting its power efficiency numbers from.

NVIDIA is aiming the accelerator cards at researchers and businesses doing 3D graphics, visual effects, high performance computing, climate modeling, molecular dynamics, earth science, simulations, fluid dynamics, and other such computationally intensive tasks. Using CUDA and the parrallel nature of the GPU, the Tesla cards can acheive performance much higher than a CPU-only system can. NVIDIA has also engineered software to better parrellelize workloads and keep the GPU accelerators fed with data that the company calls Hyper-Q and Dynamic Parallelism respectively.

It is interesting to see NVIDIA bring out a new flagship, especially another GK110 card. Systems using the K20 and the new K20X are available now with cards shipping this week and general availability later this month.

You can find the full press release below and a look at the GK110 GPU in our preview.

Anandtech also managed to get a look inside the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labratory, where you can see the Tesla K20X cards in action.

Podcast #226 - Dual GTX 690 System from Origin, Intel's new SATA6 controller, Piledriver-based Opeterons and more!

Subject: General Tech | November 8, 2012 - 01:33 PM | Ken Addison
Tagged: ssd, sata6, podcast, piledriver, pcper, origin, opeteron, nvidia, Intel, genesis, corsair, amd, 690

PC Perspective Podcast #226 - 11/08/2012

Join us this week as we talk about a Dual GTX 690 System from Origin, Intel's new SATA6 controller, Piledriver-based Opeterons and more!

You can subscribe to us through iTunes and you can still access it directly through the RSS page HERE.

The URL for the podcast is: http://pcper.com/podcast - Share with your friends!

• iTunes - Subscribe to the podcast directly through the iTunes Store
• RSS - Subscribe through your regular RSS reader
• MP3 - Direct download link to the MP3 file

Hosts: Ryan Shrout, Jeremy Hellstrom, Josh Walrath, and  Allyn Malventano

This Podcast is brought to you by MSI!

Program length: 1:21:17

Podcast topics of discussion:

1. Join us for the MoH Game Stream!
2. Week in Reviews:
   1. 0:04:30 Corsair Vengeance C70 Case
   2. 0:07:30 ASUS P8Z77 WS Motherboard
   3. 0:12:20 ORIGIN Genesis Dual GTX 690 System
   4. 0:16:40 Silverstone 450 watt SFX Power Supply
3. 0:19:30 This podcast is brought to you by MSI
4. News items of interest:
   1. 0:20:25 Intel Crystal Forest Communications Platform
   2. 0:23:30 Google Nexus 10 tablet
   3. 0:27:00 Corsair Hydro H100i and H80i coolers
   4. 0:34:00 New Corsair AXi series power supplies
   5. 0:36:30 Intel DC S3700 Enterprise SSD
   6. 0:46:30 AMD Launches Piledriver based Opteron 6300 chips
   7. 0:51:10 Get Assassin's Creed III for Samsung SSD
   8. 0:52:45 Limited Linux Steam Beta starts
   9. 0:56:15 Zotac AD06 with new AMD APU
   10. 0:58:30 Mouse.. DRM!?
5. Closing:
   1. Hardware / Software Pick of the Week
      1. Ryan: Corsair Vengence MM200 and MM400 Mouse Mats
      2. Jeremy: Movember and Is this thing on or did it crash? or NewEgg
      3. Josh: Everyone needs a mouse
      4. Allyn: Shure SE315-CL and CBL-M+-K

1. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
2. http://pcper.com/podcast
3. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
4. Closing/outro

Be sure to subscribe to the PC Perspective YouTube channel!!

Asus Zenbook Refresh Introduces Several New Ultrabooks

Subject: General Tech, Mobile | October 28, 2012 - 03:18 AM | Tim Verry
Tagged: zenbook, windows 8, ultrabook, nvidia, laptop, Ivy Bridge, GT650M, GT620M, asus

Asus has announced a refresh of its Zenbook lineup of Intel-powered ultrabooks to accompany its new VivoBooks and VivoTabs running Windows 8. Available next month, the PC OEM is introducing six new laptop SKUs with Ivy Bridge processors and dedicated graphics cards from NVIDIA. Specifically, the Asus Zenbook UX21A, UX31A, UX32VD, UX42VS, US52VS, and U500VZ ultrabooks are coming soon with the refresh.

The UX31A Ultrabook with touch display

The new Zenbooks will have Ivy Bridge processors, up to 10GB of memory, and up to NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics. They maintain the aluminum chassis of Asus’ previous generation ultrabooks but up the hardware ante. The company has expanded the lineup to include models with 11.6,” 13.3,” 14,” and 15.6” IPS displays, backlit keyboards, and multitouch trackpads. The U500VZ and UX31A can even be outfitted with capacitive touchscreen displays.

The ASUS UX42VS Zenbook

The VX42VS further includes an optical drive, but otherwise the Zenbooks source of storage lies in solid state or hybrid hard drives. Interestingly, the UX32VD and U500VZ can even be configured with two 256GB solid state drives in RAID 0 (Ryan’s favorite kind of RAID).

The ASUS UX52VS Zenbook

The following chart outlines all the known specifications. Note that several of the ultrabooks are not listed on Asus’ website yet so exact dimensions are unknown for the UX52VS and U500VZ in particular.

*onboard + 1 x SODIMM

All of the new Zenbook laptops will be available in November and will come with Windows 8. Pricing will range from $699 to $1999 for the premium model (The U500VZ). Specific pricing details should become available closer to launch.

Podcast #224 - ASUS N66U Router, AMD FX 8350 and 6300 CPU, our Windows RT hands on, and more!

Subject: General Tech | October 25, 2012 - 02:26 PM | Ken Addison
Tagged: windows rt, windows 8, vivotab rt, vishera, tegra, podcast, nvidia, n668, linus, fx 8350, fx 6300, asus, amd

PC Perspective Podcast #224 - 10/25/2012

Join us this week as we talk about the ASUS N66U Router, AMD FX 8350 and 6300 CPU, our Windows RT hands on, and more!

You can subscribe to us through iTunes and you can still access it directly through the RSS page HERE.

The URL for the podcast is: http://pcper.com/podcast - Share with your friends!

• iTunes - Subscribe to the podcast directly through the iTunes Store
• RSS - Subscribe through your regular RSS reader
• MP3 - Direct download link to the MP3 file

Hosts: Ryan Shrout, Jeremy Hellstrom, Josh Walrath, Allyn Malventano, and Linus Sebastian

This Podcast is brought to you by MSI!

Program length: 1:30:18

Podcast topics of discussion:

1. 0:00:50 Welcome our Guest: Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips!
2. Week in Reviews:
   1. 0:07:50 ASUS RT-N66U Router and Adapters Roundup
   2. 0:13:15 AMD Never Settle 12.11 Driver Update
      1. The Never Settle Bundle is awesome too
   3. 0:25:50 AMD FX-8350 and FX-6300 Vishera CPU Review
3. 0:36:20 This podcast is brought to you by MSI
4. News items of interest:
   1. 0:37:15 A quick look at the data on Apple's Fusion Drive
   2. 0:46:30 AMD work force cut coming?
   3. 0:52:10 ASUS VivoTab RT Released
      1. Hands on time!
   4. 1:07:45 ASUS TAICHI as well - can this really become popular
   5. 1:08:45 Corsair Carbide 200R Launches
      1. LinusTech Video on it
5. Closing:
   1. 1:06:15 Hardware / Software Pick of the Week
      1. Ryan: Lantronix xPrintServer
      2. Jeremy: Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project
      3. Josh: Nice motherboard, now with new CPUS!
      4. Allyn: Media Player Classic - Home Cinema
      5. Linus: Fractal Design Define R4

1. 1-888-38-PCPER or podcast@pcper.com
2. http://pcper.com/podcast
3. http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper
4. Closing/outro

Be sure to subscribe to the PC Perspective YouTube channel!!

Join us tomorrow for a LIVE Unboxing and First Impressions of the ASUS Vivo Tab RT!

Subject: Editorial, General Tech, Mobile | October 22, 2012 - 06:22 PM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: asus, vivo tab rt, tegra 3, nvidia, video, live

If you happen to be free tomorrow afternoon and would like to be one of the first to see the upcoming ASUS Vivo Tab RT based on the Windows RT operating system and the NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoC, you should set your calendar for 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT and join me on the PC Perspective Live! page.

While we won't have any insight on our long term experiences with the device at that time tomorrow, you can see our initial impressions and anything/everything that occurrs with our intial setup and usage!

If you have questions or thoughts on the device that you want addressed during the live stream, you can leave them here in our comments or hang around in our chat room during the event as well.  We want this to be interactive so your input is requested!

Again, that is 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT at the PC Perspective Live! page.