Smooth Creations, Havoc gets overclocked

Here is a perfect buy to enter this weekend. Recently announced ATI Radeon HD 58xx first DirectX 11 video card series makes its way to extreme Smooth Creations' gaming desktops. But the overclocked Radeon HD 5870 1GB XOC Havoc they have announced today is just going to eleven. At their official website Radeon HD 5870 1GB XOC Havoc is already available as one of the components for their custom desktops, so we couldn't resist and configured a very best of what Smooth Creations offers. See what we have accomplished.


A LANShark Extreme pictured above shouldn't be shown to kids under 7 to not creep them out with its bare rugged awesome. But then they are not likely to come anywhere near it because its price bites even more than the insane styling does. Anyway, we'll keep impressions to ourselves here so that we could tell all about overclocked Radeon HD 5870 1GB XOC Havoc. Versus a standard HD 5870 it scores 950 MHz core clock speed and 1.4 GHz memory speed, which of course is a DDR5 unit. All the rest of basic specs, I'm sure you know them, has been added an automatic GPU adjustment for undemanding applications and custom developed firmaware.

You don't want a Radeon HD 5870 1GB XOC Havoc in a lazy-spec PC, right? Neither do we, so this is what we've picked at Smooth Cretions':

* ASUS Rampage Gene x58 motherboard

* Intel Core i7 975 3.33Ghz

* ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB

* 12GB DDR3 1333MHz

* 160GB Intel X25 SSD
* CPU / GPU Danger Den Water Cooling Kit

* Vista Ultimate 64 w/Windows 7 upgrade coupon

* Colorshifting Purpleen Purple-Blue-Green paint

* Smooth Creations 3 Year Extended Warranty



All from above plus painted Logitech keyboard and 1000W power plant sums up to 5,698.00 USD, and you have to bring your own mouse.

AMD launches ATI Radeon HD 4770

The AMD officially announced it newest video card ATI Radeon HD 4770. It is the first video card that is made using 40 nanometers technical process. ATI Radeon HD 4770 is the third-generation video card and it supports DirectX 10.1. Also it is powered by GDDR5 video memory. As it is known, GDDR5 is twice faster than GDDR3.

ATI Radeon HD 4770 is discreet video card and it supports ATI CrossFire technology which allows establishing one more same video card on a system. Also it supports an anisotropic filtration, smoothing and also AMD Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2.0).

The UVD 2.0 provides decoding HD video without creating addition loading on the main system processor. It can decode video which was written by VC-1, H.264, MPEG-2 codecs. Also it decodes video from Blu-ray dual stream (HD+SD). AMD Radeon HD 4770 deduces the image in 2560x1600 pixel resolution on the monitor with dual-link interface.

And this is not all the advantages. AMD Radeon HD 4770 supports HDMI, DisplayPort, OpenGL 3.0, Picture-In-Picture (PiP), 7.1 channel sound (including AC-3, AAC and DTS). Also the video card supports Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT). The AVT technology provides converting video in standard or HD quality to different formats for its further using. Also Radeon HD 4770 supports xvYCC technology which make the image on the screen by more realistic

NVIDIA Quadro NVS 420 fuels four displays simultaneously

As is turns up, graphic cards have to do a lot more than just support latest DirectX 10 games and playback HD quality content. For instance, it would be great for a modern GPU to meet needs of a businessman who has to do presentations at work on big screens or plausibly uses more than one screen at the same time every day. All these via a laptop, or why not, a small form factor PC. Such a way GPU developers have a little bit different target group to satisfy, and here is what NVIDIA got for them. This is an upcoming NVIDIA Quadro NVS 420 graphic card. It will come out in February for 499 USD as manufacturer suggests.

NVIDIA Quadro NVS 420 GPU may be aimed for multi-display functions and to fit some small dimensions, but of course it has enough guts to for almost any PC game out there. In fact, it has 512 MB in it and 11.2 GBps bandwidth speed, so, should be enough for a couple of years. However the main thing still is how it handles a number of widescreen displays. Thanks to NVIDIA nView display software, Quadro NVS 420 can support up to four 30 inch displays at 2560 x 1600 resolution. More specs are: 4 x DisplayPort, 4 x Dual Link DVI and CUDA Parallel Computing Processor with 16 cores. This is how NVS 420 comes up to 499 USD, but I can easily find a whole new small form factor computer for that kind of money. I think Quadro NVS 420 is utterly expensive even though it can be a good value for money with all that gear stuffed into SFF GPU. And here is one more issue. How it is going to be cooled down by a small-sized fan and yet be quiet enough not to be annoying?

AMD introduces ATI Radeon HD 4600 graphics plaque series

AMD redefines with Radeon 4670 and Radeon 4650 what means mainstream graphic plaques.

AMD fulfill their promises and launches officially a new series of graphic plaques - ATI Radeon HD 4600 that intend to offer an exceptional performance for games and HD multimedia, at power consumption lower than one of a bulb. And all these at a very attractive price for graphic plaques from mainstream category.


4600 graphic plaque series are practically limited versions of 4800 series, with what AMD succeeded to overcome those from Nvidia. They are based on TeraScale graphic processor, realized in 55 nm and with 320 stream processors that is a modified RV770.

ATI Radeon HD 4670 works at a 750 MHz nuclear frequency, 2 GHz memory frequency, has a memory interface on 256 bits, and can include 512 MB or 1 GB of GDDR3 memory.

Less powerful version, ATI Radeon HD 4650, has a 600MHz nuclear frequency, 1GHz memory frequency, memory interface on 128 bits and includes 512 MB of GDDR2 memory.

Both of these plaques have 320 stream processors, 32 texture units and support DirectX 10.1, include Unified Video Decoder (UVD) 2.0 for HD video processing and HDMI 7.1 surround sound audio.

Plaques have a reduce power consumption, 60 W for 4670 and 50 W for 4650. Prices are extremely attractive, being smaller than initial estimations. So, HD 4670 with 512 MB of memory costs 80 dollars (version with 1 GB will appear later), and HD 4650 has a price of 60 dollars.

From initial reviews performance of these gadgets seems to be excellent, considering low power consumption and price. So HD 4670 is situated somewhere among Radeon HD 3650 or GeForce 9500 GT and Radeon HD 3850 or GeForce 9600 GT/GSO in some tests even overcoming them.