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CoolerMaster CM Spawn Saturday, 22 January 2011 18:13   Earlier this year we took a look at CoolerMaster's Inferno MMORPG mouse and now we're looking at CoolerMaster's new product, Spawn, geared towards first-person shooters.
Cooler Master CM Inferno Review Saturday, 01 January 2011 17:36   The mouse is the bread and butter and ultimate tool for anyone who plays games on the PC. Over the past dozen years there's been an explosion in shapes and sizes of it and for all different utilities. It's evolved quite nicely from a few buttons and a mouse ball to lasers, lights, and more buttons than most people would ever know what to do with. That, however, is not the case for gamers. Cooler Master has a new mouse out specifically built for MMORPGs that are so popular, the Cooler Master Inferno.
Eyefinity Update: New Active DisplayPort to SL-DVI Adapter Thoroughly Tested Wednesday, 13 October 2010 13:22   The mini active DisplayPort to DVI single link adapter is pictured above.   Way back in September of 2009 AMD flew me out to Oakland, and set me up on the USS Hornet for the unveiling of their Eyefinity multi-screen capable Radeon HD 5870.  The demos were impressive, and I had a lot of fun playing Left 4 Dead on a set up that night.  It was not until May of this year that my review of the technology was out.  It was clear that it showed promise. Monitors were the main problem at this point.  There were good games, and the drivers were maturing so little problems I had before were going away.  It all boiled down to the monitors.  
AMD Eyefinity CrossFire 6 Screen Review Wednesday, 05 May 2010 15:42       Last September I was lucky enough to have AMD fly me out to California way to check out the unveiling of Eyefinity on the USS Hornet.  Its a ship, not a boat.  It was quite the tech demo with a variety of games on display and plenty of partners showing off wares.  There was a bit of a look at the Frostbyte 2 engine that powers Battlefield Bad Company 2 now, a teaser of Aliens versus Predator, and some Crytek guys were on hand showing off their new engine.  The main attraction was the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition that packed 6 mini display port connectors and would single handedly push 6 monitors.  Dirt 2 was the demo of choice although we also saw some Left 4 Dead action.  Flash forward half a year and now many more games support Eyefinity, and at long last the Eyefinity Edition has arrived.

BSN discusses AMD's short term future, or in other words later this year, and 2013.

Regarding the server segment, analysts were concerned about ASP erosion. They apparently failed to understand that due to its performance characteristics, Bulldozer had to be priced competitively and couldn't help increase ASPs. Bulldozer-based CPUs now make up over 50% of AMDs server shipments. According to the CEO the company has worked out a strategy that allows them to grow their share without going all out on a low price strategy to capture more share. He especially highlighted the strategic acquisition of SeaMicro that will help them to that end. Of course for now there is no product based on the SeaMicro fabric from AMD, so this can be considered another way of saying "Shhhh move along, there is nothing to see here". But AMDs executives see this more as a long term strategy, so we will see how it plays out in the future.

News - AMD

Here's a list of Trinity reviews that are coming in.  Enjoy!

Hot Hardware
Hardware Canucks

News - Review Roundup

If you think that shiny new Ivy Bridge laptop is the bees knees for playing Diablo III you would be wrong.  Legit Reviews shows that an AMD Trinity based laptop 

If you want to play Diablo III on a laptop and want the best graphics performance possible without a discrete graphics card, the AMD Trinity APU is your best bet. AMD has been leading when it comes integrated graphics performance for many years and nothing has changed with the latest launch of processors. Now stop reading and get back to playing Diablo III!

News - Gaming

The Austin American Statesman details AMD's upcoming Trinity APU.  

Su said AMD is going through a cultural change.

"We don't want to be dictated to by what Intel is doing. We shouldn't want to be second-best. That is not that much fun," she said. "We are one of the leading companies in the industry. We have excellent technology. We have the capability to be a leader in where the market is going versus just trying to gain a couple of (market share) points on somebody else.

News - Video Cards

Anand talks to AMD's Manju Hegde who I talked to years ago at E3 when Ageia was just getting PhysX off of the ground.

That brings us to today. In advance of this year’s AFDS, Manju has agreed to directly answer your questions about heterogeneous compute, where the industry is headed and anything else AMD will be covering at AFDS. Manju has a BS in Electrical Engineering (IIT, Bombay) and a PhD in Computer Information and Control Engineering (UMich, Ann Arbor) so make the questions as tough as you can. He'll be answering them on May 21st so keep the submissions coming.

Get those questions in guys!

News - Video Cards

Semi Accurate has a story with video of AMD's demo of Leo and GDC.

The GPU compute portion of Leo is fairly simple to explain, as you can see in the video below. Lights are one of the most complex parts of a 3D scene to render properly, and various techniques have evolved to allow complex lighting to, well, basically work. Some work better than others, but most are computationally painful, or have other rather serious drawbacks like deferred rendering.

News - Video Cards

I missed this one, but SemiAccurate has word that AMD's Chuck Moore has passed away from pancreatic cancer.  Our condolences to his family. 

News - AMD

CPU World points out some graphics numbers for the upcoming AMD Trinity core R-Series.  At 35 watts they seem to outpace Intel's intergrated video but substantial amounts.

The graph shows that AMD R-464L has 106%, and R-272F has 45% better performance than Intel i7-2710QE embedded chip in 3DMark 06 and Vantage v1.1.0 applications. Core i7-2710QE incorporates HD 3000 graphics, which is noticeably slower than HD 4000 GPU on Ivy Bridge line of processors. Nevertheless, if the benchmark results in the PDF file are correct, then AMD R-464L may still be faster in graphics applications than Core i7-3612QE, which is an Ivy Bridge successor of the i7-2710QE.

News - Video Cards

eTeknix-HIS Radeon HD 7870 IceQ X Turbo X 2GB Graphics Card
The Radeon 7870 released quite recently, and it was only a matter of time before we started to see custom solutions being brought to us from AMD partners, such as Sapphire and HIS to name a couple as that is primarily what they are famous for in this industry.

Futurelooks-Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition OC Video Card Review
The question I always find myself asking is when it comes to my next graphics card purchase, what is more important? Is it processing core count or clock speed? The answer is often not clear with so many options on the market. Especially in the highly contested $150 – 200 price range. AMD has taken a side on the question for now as they are phasing out older cards with a new architecture that may have fewer stream processors, but much higher clock speeds. Today we are putting a card that follows this new trend and they call it the Sapphire HD 7770 GHz Edition OC. Let’s put it through its paces and see if this new approach to performance is the right one.

Overclockers Club-Gigabyte A75M-D2H and A75-UD4H Motherboard Review
The retail packaging for the UD4H and the D2H are nearly identical except for the model number. They have a look that is reminiscent of the late 90s motherboard packaging and don’t exactly jump out at you from the stacks on a retail shelf. That being said, the packaging does do a good job of explaining what the "Super 4" branding is about. The top of the box has an animated sports car with flames blowing back from the front tire. Below that, it tells us that we are dealing with a "Super 4" motherboard, followed by a prominently displayed badge touting a three-year warranty for those of us in the USA and Canada. Next up are some rows containing some of the features and attributes of the board, including an explanation of what this a "Super 4" motherboard: super-speed, super-safe, super-savings, and super-sound. In the lower right corner is an image of the corner of the box being peeled back to reveal the now well known "2 x PCB copper" that Gigabyte touts being used in its motherboards for better conductivity and heat dissipation. The bottom of the package goes into more detail about what the "Super 4" features are and tells us that this is a motherboard capable of AMD Vision's Dual Graphics feature. To the side we have three images illustrating the RDS MOSFET design, the 108 dB audio, and a very high level board layout. In a less prominent fashion, we learn that this board employs an 8+2 power phase design, is equipped with on/off charge, and has Dolby home theater sound.

News - Review Roundup

This is not my usual news, but since we use RingCentral for our phones at Game Republik, the best gaming center and game console repair shop anywhere near Austin, I figured it should post this.  They went down about 10 minutes before noon Central time.  Their twitter took a while to figure this out.  Support finally indicates an issue.  Their phone lines are jammed.  The blog apparently is not used for these types of issues.

Update: Well we now have 1 out of 3 phones working as of 12:50CST, and seconds ago RingCentral tweeted this:

 

 

We expect all digital lines to be up in 30 minutes: 11:30 PST/2:30 EST.

 

 

Update 1:20CST:  2 of our 3 lines are now back up.  The login for the website is down however.  RingCentral now tweets:

UPDATE: Most digital lines back up. We have a remaining batch that will be up within another 30 minutes.

News - Site News

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