TechieGroups

WITH THE MARGIN SQUEEZE in graphics cards, the vendors are hard pressed to churn out their own card designs with as many features as possible and add as much performance as they can within the limits of the GPU makers’ specifications.

Asus, as the biggest card vendor around, has multiple iterations of enhanced GPU cards that improve on the reference design. Here we look at the Asus pre-tweaked Direct CU II series, the high-end line just one notch below its highest-end ROG Matrix graphics card range, which is a subject for yet another story.

The Direct CU II series, offered with both AMD and Nvidia high-end designs, is basically a combination of three key enhancements and is now in its second generation.

First, there’s a huge, three-slots thick (yes, three slots!) dual fan cooler with five flattened direct contact copper heat pipes and a huge fin area for roughly 20 per cent cooler temperatures.

Then, improved board level ‘super alloy’ componentry uses a special alloy formula in critical power delivery components for a claimed 15 per cent performance boost, 35C cooler operation and 2.5 times longer lifespan.

Finally, a voltage tweak feature provides for further overclocking capability up to 50 per cent above the reference clock, if you’re really keen on extreme overclocking.

While the fat three-slot cooling means you’re unlikely to ever run these cards in pairs, the extra space provides plenty of cooling air vent openings as well as four display connectors. Two dual link DVI jacks, one with VGA pass-through, are accompanied by full size HDMI and Displayport connectors. Nice.

NVIDIA’s GF104 and GF114 GPUs have been a solid success for the company so far. 10 months after GF104 launched the GTX 460 series, NVIDIA has slowly been supplementing and replacing their former 0 king. In January we saw the launch of the GF114 based GTX 560 Ti, which gave us our first look at what a fully enabled GF1x4 GPU could do. However the GTX 560 Ti was positioned above the GTX 460 series in both performance and price, so it was more an addition to their lineup than a replacement for GTX 460.

With each GF11x GPU effectively being a half-step above its GF10x predecessor, NVIDIA’s replacement strategy has been to split a 400 series card’s original market between two GF11x GPUs. For the GTX 460, on the low-end this was partially split off into the GTX 550 Ti, which came fairly close to the GTX 460 768MB’s performance. The GTX 460 1GB has remained in place however, and today NVIDIA is finally starting to change that with the GeForce GTX 560. Based upon the same GF114 GPU as the GTX 560 Ti, the GTX 560 will be the GTX 460 1GB’s eventual high-end successor and NVIDIA’s new 0 card.

The last time we checked in with iBUYPOWER we reviewed the behemoth that is the iBUYPOWER Paladin XLC, a massive hunk of machine that was generally a solid value but suffered from the same kind of shaky overclocking that afflicted so many boutique builds during the era. This time iBUYPOWER is packing a K-series Sandy Bridge processor (complete with easy overclocking) and one of the most powerful graphics cards on the planet: the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590. The 590 may ultimately not have had the performance to beat AMD's Radeon HD 6990, but it's also a much quieter card. iBUYPOWER managed to fit it into a MicroATX case (along with a 92mm water-cooling rig for the processor). Does the beefy LAN Warrior II work, and does it work well, and just how much will this bad boy set you back?

Back on Tuesday NVIDIA put out a quick teaser about a new video card that would be launching today. As virtually all of you correctly guessed, it was the GeForce GTX 590, NVIDIA’s latest dual-GPU monster. Coming only two weeks after the launch of the Radeon HD 6990, NVIDIA wants their spot back as the single card king, and it’s the GTX 590 that will fight for it. But does the GTX 590 have what it takes to dethrone the 6990 so soon? Let’s find out.

Throughout the lifetime of the 400 series, NVIDIA launched 4 GPUs: GF100, GF104, GF106, and GF108. Launched in that respective order, they became the GTX 480, GTX 460, GTS 450, and GT 430. One of the interesting things from the resulting products was that with the exception of the GT 430, NVIDIA launched each product with a less than fully populated GPU, shipping with different configurations of disabled shaders, ROPs, and memory controllers. NVIDIA has never fully opened up on why this is – be it for technical or competitive reasons – but ultimately GF100/GF104/GF106 never had the chance to fully spread their wings as 400 series parts.

It’s the 500 series that has corrected this. Starting with the GTX 580 in November of 2010, NVIDIA has been launching GPUs built on a refined transistor design with all functional units enabled. Coupled with a hearty boost in clockspeed, the performance gains have been quite notable given that this is still on the same 40nm process with a die size effectively unchanged. Thus after GTX 560 and the GF114 GPU in January, it’s time for the 3rd and final of the originally scaled down Fermi GPUs to be set loose: GF106. Reincarnated as GF116, it’s the fully enabled GPU that powers NVIDIA’s latest card, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

For the launch of the first GF100-based video cards – the GTX 480 and GTX 470 – NVIDIA sent over a 3 card reviewer’s kit containing two GTX 480s and a single GTX 470. This allowed us to do SLI testing with the GTX 480 (a money-is-no-object setup) but not with NVIDIA’s significantly cheaper GTX 470. As part of a comprehensive SLI & CrossFire guide we’re working on for next month we needed a second GTX 470 for testing GTX 470 SLI operation, and MSI answered our call with their N470GTX.

 

Today we’ll be taking a look at MSI’s GTX 470. We’ll also be taking a sneak-peek of our forthcoming SLI/CF guide with a look at GTX 470 SLI performance.

In part 2 of our GTX 460 launch coverage, we take a look at a varied selection of launch cards from Zotac, EVGA, and Asus. NVIDIA's partners aren't wasting any time in getting customized cards out, so right away we're seeing everything from factory overclocked cards to fully custom cards and anything in-between. Having seen how well the reference GTX 460 performs, now we can see how the vendors have built on NVIDIA's success.

 

Only a short month after the launch of the GeForce GTX 465, NVIDIA is back again with a new card: the GeForce GTX 460. Built on their brand-new GF104 GPU, the GTX 460 shakes up the mainstream in a big way by bringing NVIDIA's DX11 Fermi family to a 9 card and in the process righting what was wrong with the GTX 465. Along the way we'll also see just what NVIDIA did to the GF104 GPU to make this happen, and why GF104 is much more than a simple GF100 derivative.

It's been a while since we've been able to write a glowing review of an NVIDIA card, but today we'll see why NVIDIA is offering the right combination of price and performance to claim the 0-0 as their own.