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Asus rolls out HDMI-enabled EAX1600PRO / EN7600GT graphics cards
Asus is no stranger to kicking out curious motherboards and other peripherals that we geeks just can't help but love, and following up on its undertaking of auxiliary displays and the AquaTank PCI card is a couple of swank new video cards that tout an HDCP-friendly HDMI port. The half-height ATI Radeon X1600 EAX1600PRO was apparently crafted with the common HTPC builder in mind, as its diminutive size lends itself to becoming a perfect fit for those tight spaces within AV-like media center PC cases. But before you gamers get too excited, you should probably know that in-game performance is likely to be less than stellar, but HotHardware did note that its model wasn't shy when overclocked. Interestingly, this HTPC-centric card comes bundled sans a true HDMI-to-HDMI cable, which leaves us all a bit miffed considering the niche it's trying to appease. The EN7600GT ups the ante by delivering the frame rate luxuries as only an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 can, but its full-height design will definitely cause problems in slimmer enclosures. Other extras found on this device are its SLI-capabilities, DVI / S-video outputs, and optical audio jack, but considering it packs just 256MB of GDDR3 RAM, the hardcore gamers in the crowd are still not likely to find themselves impressed. Still, with the EAX1600PRO ringing up at just around a cool hundred, and the more powerful EN7600GT asking just about twice that, these here cards look to be solid options if you're just getting around to creating your own HTPC.[Via Slashdot]
The Burning Crusade -- hardware upgrade time?
Back in October, Mike Schramm let us know what the Burning Crusade system requirements were going to be. Now that we're in the holiday season and the expansion is a matter of weeks away, do you plan on making any upgrades in order to get the most out of the Outlands? I've been playing WoW on a number of systems since beta. I started on a 12" PowerBook G4, then swapped to a 1GHz Duron desktop, then to a 15" PowerBook G4, then a 20" iMac G5, and now I play on both the iMac and a recently-purchased Core 2 Duo system with an ATI x1900. Through all of those systems, the two most important factors I've found in playing WoW are system memory and the video card. For memory it seems that 2 gigabytes seems to be the sweet spot for playing WoW on OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. With only a single gigabyte, all of my systems have seemed to chug a little, relying on caching to keep everything going. If you play with Teamspeak or Ventrilo, or have iTunes running in the background, you're definitely going to want 2 gigs of ram. With the video card situation, it's all about where you can move the sliders in your Video Options. On my iMac, I play with the default settings except that I've turned the viewing distance down to minimum, and that's with the 128mb ATI 9600 pro that comes in the system. With the PC, everything is cranked to maximum on the 256mb ATI AIW x1900. I've played around on different systems, from the AMD Athlons through the Core 2 Duo chips, and it seems like WoW's not really a system resource hog in terms of processing power. So, what system did you start playing WoW on, way back in 2004? What do you see yourself playing WoW on in 2007? Is the expansion inspiring you to upgrade or change your system at all, or will you stick with what you've had all along?
NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX reviewed
If you're looking to impress with your gaming rig and money is no object, it doesn't look like you can do much better than NVIDIA's latest bit of graphics excess, the DirectX 10-compliant GeForce 8800 GTX . That's according to the good folks at bit-tech.net, who recently got a chance to put this monster of a graphics card through its paces, finding that it delivered on performance -- but, obviously, isn't for everybody. For one thing, you'll want to have at least a 24-inch monitor to take full advantage of the card, with bit-tech actually saying that the card is too fast for use with resolutions less than 1900 x 1200. Not surprisingly, it also consumes loads of power, with NVIDIA recommending a minimum 450W power supply; that, of course, is for a single card -- we're a little scared to think of what you'll need for an SLI setup. Bit-tech did find a few problems with the device, including a few glitches with image quality in Half-Life 2: Episode One, although they suspects that'll be remedied with a driver update.
ATI to release power-hungry external video card?
As microprocessors increase in efficiency and semiconductors diminish in size, the power required for them to function would also decrease -- in an ideal world, anyway. Unfortunately, this hasn't exactly been the case. If we're to believe the rumors, ATI's next major graphics core, dubbed the R600, will be packed to the brim with pixel pipelines and shader processors to handle the tasks that lie ahead in Windows Vista (if it ever comes out, of course), and, you know, games. But the crazy part here is that the chipset will supposedly require so much power that only an external implementation could provide the level of power necessary to satisfy those demands. An outboard graphics card, however, would one-up internal boards by providing a new level of flexibility. For starters, the same board could power your notebook and desktop, and laptop gamers would have access to bleeding-edge graphics that could turn a relatively weak notebook into a suitable LAN-party machine without the expense of an entirely new rig. Of course, there's still the issue of an external interface that could handle the multi-gigabit bandwidth required to make this system feasible not yet existing, but who knows, maybe those microchip wizards from AMD can give ATI a hand in bringing this to fruition without kicking our kilowatt meters into overdrive -- for now though, our quad-SLI setups are doing just fine, thanks.[Thanks, Mack S.]
NVIDIA is happy about AMD + ATI merger
FiringSquad, a site covering all things gaming, interviewed Derek Perez, the Director of Public Relations for NVIDIA (ATI's largest competitor), about yesterday's news of the AMD and ATI merger. Mr. Perez looks at the merger as a boost to their own business, excited that NVIDIA will be the only GPU company that supports both AMD and Intel. If this is true, however, this merger could wind up being a bad thing for Mac users as Apple's machines are 100% Intel Inside (yes, I know that slogan is dead now). FiringSquad didn't get much out of Intel, their only comment was basically "we'll get back to you after we're finished reading all this legal mumbo jumbo".It's still way too early to tell, but I hope this merger doesn't mean that Apple's customers will lose one custom build option in the online store.[via IMG]
