Library Update – Graphics

Zotac GeForce GTX480

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 +]

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 +]

Anyone who’s ever owned a small laptop that has had a powerful processor shoe horned into it, or owns an early example of the smaller notebook will know just how hot they can get especially if they are placed on soft surfaces when in use e.g duvets, carpets  or more importantly your lap.  Zalman’s newest addition to their range of notebook coolers, the ZM-NC1500, is designed for notebook’s with screens no larger than 12″ and is light enough to be carried around in your bag.

The ZM-NC1500 measures just 243 x 300 36mm (l x w x h) and weighs in at a 487g and has a single centrifugal fan spinning at 1,600rpm built into the base.  It’s powered by you notebook’s USB port (cable supplied) and you needn’t worry about losing a port as the unit has one built into the back.

It also helps with more comfortable typing as the legs on the rear of the cooler lift it up 8 degrees reducing the strain on your wrists when using the notebook’s keyboard.

Manufacturer: Zalman
Price: £23.99 (inc VAT)
Where to buy: Quiet PC

Lab Report – Sapphire Radeon HD5550 512MB GDDR5 DP

The HD5550 sits at the lower end of ATI’s HD5xxx family of graphics cards and because of the cut down nature of its core architecture its a card more suited to the Home Theatre (HTPC) than to gaming especially with its low power requirements and hardware video acceleration.
Because of market segment it’s in there are a multitude of cards based on the HD5550 on offer, for example Sapphire alone have seven versions of it, but the DP on the end of the name of this particular card is the all important bit as it stands for Display Port which together with the usual 5 series ports, DVI and HDMI make this the only HD5550 in Sapphire’s range capable of supporting ATI’s EyeFinity multi screen technology. Not only that but it’s also has an overclocked core and GDDR5 memory. [more +]

With its lightening fast 5Gb/s transfer rate, 10 x the speed of USB2.0, USB3.0 is set to be the interface of choice for fast data transfers between external drives and PCs and notebooks. As the present time external devices with the interface are pretty thin on the ground so its always good to see another added to the list.

StarTech’s SAT2510BU3 is a slimline external hard drive enclosure for 2.5″ SATA drives. Made from aluminium and plastic it is a doddle to use, just take off the top and bottom of the unit, slide in your drive of choice, secure it with the screws provided and off you go. As USB3.0 is fully backwards compatible with USB2.0 the supplied Y cable has connectors for both.

Quick well done to StarTech, not only do they supply the screws needed but put an extra one of each just in case the carpet monster devours one and very thoughtfully they even supply a tiny screwdriver in the bag.

Manufacturer: StarTech
Price: £41.11 (inc VAT)
Where to buy: StarTech

Lab Report – Asus Crosshair IV Formula

The Crosshair series of motherboards are the AMD based range in Asus’ ROG (Republic Of Gamers) product line, the latest addition to which is the fourth generation Crosshair IV Formula. Each generation is more feature rich than the last and the Crosshair IV Formula certainly upholds the tradition, being crammed to the gills with features; support for the latest AMD X6 six-core processors, support for up to 16GB of DDR3 memory through four DIMM slots, four PCI-E graphics slots supporting CrossFire X technology plus both SATA 6GB/s and USB 3.0 support and all the overclocking aids that you come to expect from a ROG motherboard.[more +]

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 +]

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.