Lab Report – Sapphire Radeon HD5770 FleX Edition
ATI’s Eyefinity technology has always had the Achilles heal of needing either a DisplayPort supporting screen or an expensive third party dongle to get the third monitor part of the setup working, or should that be used to have, as now Sapphire have come up with an answer to get around this problem with their latest card the HD5770 FleX, the first card to support Eyefinity straight out of the box via DVI monitors, without needing either a DisplayPort monitor or that expensive dongle. [more +]
quick looks – Scythe Slip Stream 140 SM1425SL12M (1,200rpm)
There once was a time when replacing or installing a case fan meant getting the hole cutter or Dremel out and butchering your case until a hole was big enough for the fan to fit. Thankfully that’s mostly a thing of the past as most cases come with enough cooling fans to satisfy most needs, but what if you think those 120mm fans are no longer cutting the mustard or have started to become noisy. As everybody knows the larger the fan, the quieter the noise as the fan doesn’t have to spin so fast to shift the airflow through it.
Scythe’s Slip Stream range of 140mm fans may just be the answer as not only do they run quieter than most standard case fans, they come in a range of varying speeds and most cleverly of all have 120mm mounting holes so you don’t even have to drill new holes to fit them.
The design of the Slip Stream is interesting as they have smaller fan hubs and large swept blades which give increased air flow at lower fan speeds and therefore less noise. The four models in the family are:-
SM1425SL12SL 500rpm spin speed 27.2CFM air flow 9.6dBA quoted noise level
SM1425SL12L 800rpm spin speed 43.5CFM air flow 14.3dBA quoted noise level
SM1425SL12M 1200rpm spin speed 65.2CFM air flow 23.2dBA quoted noise level
SM1425SL12H 1700rpm spin speed 92.4CFM air flow 36.4dBA quoted noise level
Manufacturer: Scythe
Price: SM1425SL12M £9.99 (inc VAT)
Where to buy: Quiet PC
Lab Report – Sapphire Radeon HD5670 Ultimate
While the super fast high-end graphics cards steal all the limelight, in the real world their price usually puts them out of reach of most people. The real bread and butter cards for the graphics card vendors are those that are priced in the £70 -£100 price bracket which is where AMD aimed the HD 5670 at, offering a DX11 supporting card for the masses.
More often not when it comes to passively cooled graphics cards there are compromises made to allow the GPU core and memory chips to run without any form of active cooling, namely the clock speeds of both the core and memory chips are reduced, sometimes pretty dramatically to allow the passive cooler to get rid of the heat effectively. With the HD5670 Ultimate, Sapphire has kicked this idea well into touch as the card comes with the same clock speeds as the reference actively cooled design. [more +]
Lab Report – HIS Radeon HD5830 Turbo iCooler V
The Radeon HD5830 iCooler V Turbo 1GB is the flagship model in HIS’s HD5830 family line-up and as with all their cards carrying the Turbo logo, it’s factory overclocked out of the box. As with all the cards in the range it also uses one of HIS’s iCooler V coolers to keep everything nice and cool [more +]
graphic card news – New king of the hill from Sapphire
Sapphire have just launched another version of the dual cored Radeon HD5970, the HD5970 4G Toxic, which as you might have guessed from the name comes with a massive 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
Not only does the new card come with a massive memory buffer, but being from the Toxic family it also has factory overclocked core and memory clocks. The core’s are clocked at 900MHz, 175MHz faster than the standard card, while the memory has been heavily tweaked to run at 1,200MHz (4.8GHz effective), 200MHz (800MHz effective) over the the reference design, making it the fastest card on the planet at time of release.
Keeping this massive beastie ( it measures 12in in length), cool are three 92mm Arctic Cooling dual ball bearing fans.
Look out for benchmark results and lab report coming soon.
graphic card news – Sapphire unleash 2GB Toxic and Vapor-X HD5870
Sapphire have just announced 2GB frame buffer versions of thier Toxic and Vapor-X Radeon HD5870′s. The Toxic features an overclocked core engine, up from the default 850MHz to 950MHz while the GDDR5 memory gets a boost from the standard 1,200MHz (4.8GHz effective) up to 1,225MHz (4.9GHz effective) all sitting under a Vapor-X cooler
The Vapor-X version has the same 2GB frame buffer and Vapor-X cooling but keeps the clock speeds at the default settings
Look out for benchmark results and lab report’s coming soon.
graphic card news – AMD hit a 6
The latest devolpment of AMD’s mighty 5 series graphics architecture is the ATI Radeon HD5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition graphics card, the first consumer graphics card able to power six, yes six displays, up to a theoretical maximum resolution of 8,192 x 8,192! To put that into some kind of perspective, six 30in (2,560 by 1,600) monitors arranged in a 3 by 2 landscape set up will only give you a resolution of 7,680 by 3,200.
The Eyefinity 6 Edition uses a single HD5870 (Cypress) core clocked at the reference 850MHz but has a 2GB frame buffer, double that of the reference HD5870, which in turn has meant a slight rise in the power requirements of the card (228W peak, 34W idle) and now one of the two 6-pin PCI-E power adaptors of the standard card has been replaced by an eight pin one, with the cooler remaining the same as the reference HD580. The memory speed is also still the same with the GDDR 5 having an effective speed of 4,800MHz.
The major external change is on the backplate where the usual array of ports have been replaced by six Mini DisplayPort connectors but only two of these can be converted to DVI, HDMI (only one) or VGA using the adaptors provided in the box; two mini-DisplayPort-to-DisplayPort adapters, a passive mini DisplayPort-to-HDMI dongle and two passive mini DisplayPort-to-DVI (single-link) dongles.
So far just two companies have released versions of the HD5870 6 Eyefinity Edition, Sapphire (Sapphire HD5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition) and ASUS (EYEFINITY 6/6S/2GD)
