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Gigabyte reinvents the Batmobile

Posted on 7th Jul 2010 at 10:37 by James Gorbold with 19 comments

Back when ATI launched the Radeon HD 5870, along with other journalists, we were immediately struck by the similarity of the new card's cooler to the classic 1960s Batmobile.

The other day, while doing some research on the price of graphics cards I was therefore quite amused to find that Gigabyte appears to have taken ATI's idea one step further and actually mounted a Batmobile on top of one of its cards.

Tags ati, batman, design, hd 5870, radeon

How To Fix Underscan in ATI's Catalyst Control Center

Posted on 3rd Mar 2010 at 09:53 by Clive Webster with 25 comments

I've just updated my graphics driver to Catalyst 10.2, and it doesn't seem to know what a 1080p screen is... The screen is being underscanned, so there's a huge black border around the displayed image. There's a way to fix the issue, but it's hardly easy.

Hardware Podcast 10 - All Praise the Capital of Hardwareland

Posted on 1st Mar 2010 at 12:20 by Podcast with 15 comments

The long-awaited (or so we’d like to think) tenth episode of the Hardware Podcast sees Rich, Clive, Harry and James rather confused about tenses and timelines. You’d think that four reasonably intelligent hardware reviewers would be able to understand that if you record a pod on Thursday to cast on Monday, you need to act as if Monday is in the past. Apparently not. Revealed in this pod: the capital of Hardwareland is Gulftown, and the most effective components for an energy-efficient PC.

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EK Waterblock on the Radeon HD 5870

Posted on 4th Dec 2009 at 10:41 by Richard Swinburne with 13 comments

We had planned a whole article around this, but our Asus 5870 voltage tweak isn't playing ball and we can't work out why. During the review it worked perfectly, however after applying the waterblock and reinstalling the card it wouldn't overclock for toffee.

Unfortunately, after a day and a half of solid fiddling we had to call it a day and move on with other reviews. However - I couldn't pass up the opportunity to give our friends at EK some love, and show off their lovely waterblock.

Tags amd, ati, ek, hd 5870, radeon, watercooling

The Most Annoying Crapware

Posted on 16th Sep 2009 at 11:23 by Richard Swinburne with 67 comments

What makes companies think it's OK to install extra crap you didn't ask for by default? There are numerous examples of this, from store-bought laptops that are preloaded with bloatware to toolbars that come included with your chosen browser. Even the most trusted sources and manufacturers have become involved with this crapware epidemic.

"Security" companies seem to to be most notorious offenders of all, constantly trying to weasel their way onto your PC when you don't want them to. Once they've invaded your registry and (previously) clean startup procedure so that they're nigh impossible to remove they begin their main task - pummelling you with notifications and subscription requests.

It's not limited to Microsoft (probably one of the worst facilitators of this) either; ATI, Adobe, Asus and Gigabyte are all guilty parties too and that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure many of you will fill me in with your experiences too, so go ahead - name and shame them!

Below, I've listed some of the worst and most annoying examples of bloatware and their carriers that I've found in the past few weeks.

AMD could move all ATI GPUs to SOI at 32nm - here's why

Posted on 9th Jun 2009 at 10:58 by Tim Smalley with 7 comments

One of the most interesting discussions we had last week was with silicon manufacturing firm Global Foundries, and it talked about its future following its separation from AMD.

Naturally, we talked about process technology and where the industry is heading, and bit-tech came away with a good idea of how Global Foundries hopes to succeed where AMD couldn’t, becoming a leader in silicon manufacturing technology.

Ever since AMD acquired ATI, the new combined company has talked at length about its plans to integrate the GPU onto the CPU die. This decision has been greeted with polarised reactions; Nvidia argues that the integrated GPUs will be ‘outdated’ while AMD and Intel, which later announced its intention to do the same, say it’s the natural progression of technology as CPUs becomes more parallel and GPUs become more general purpose.

Series 3, Episode 1 - Phenom II isn’t that bad and cats still need rescuing

Posted on 8th May 2009 at 18:08 by Podcast with 34 comments

The podcast returns for a third series, powered up by the addition of the bit-tech team and some new microphones from Shure. CPC Editor Alex, Reviews Editor Clive and bit-tech main man Tim take a look at the big stories in tech from the last month, including new graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia, and the Phenom II X4 955 BE which sees AMD returning to form. Tim talks about getting his new laptop, the Thinkpad, X301 and the panel then look ahead, taking in Windows 7 and DirectX 11. The games chart returns, but it looks depressingly familiar. Fortunately one of the team is still playing Mass Effect.

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Tags amd, ati, geforce, phenom 2

Overclocking the ATI Radeon HD 4770

Posted on 29th Apr 2009 at 15:40 by Tim Smalley with 12 comments

One thing we unfortunately had to cut out of our AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770 review yesterday was overclocking. Understandably, a number of our readers asked why we'd not bothered to overclock the card.

The answer is that we simply ran out of time when we made the decision to double (and triple) check all of our Far Cry 2 performance numbers when the new Radeon came out on top against the cards we'd compared it to. Although the results were theoretically possible - compared to the much-loved Radeon HD 4850, it has a higher pixel fillrate and very similar theoretical shader throughput (it's just four percent lower), we wanted to be not just doubly sure, but triply sure before publishing our conclusions.

Yesterday afternoon, I dragged myself back down into the benchmarking sweatshop that is the bit-tech and Custom PC labs to find out how well our reference card overclocked. It's worth noting that it's not the only Radeon HD 4770 we've got in house - there are a couple of partner cards already and we'll be looking at them in due course - but we've only focused on overclocking the reference card for now.

2009: The year of the rebrand

Posted on 17th Feb 2009 at 18:42 by Richard Swinburne with 1 comments

I'm going to forgo the continually depressing reiteration of "economic downturn" or whatever you want to call it. But since quite a few large companies are posting massive demand drops and insolvency is the latest craze these days, there's no doubt we're seeing an unfortunate trend of re-branding take an ever present role in "new" product lines.

Of the companies that we spend the majority of our time covering, Intel, Nvidia and AMD are getting in on the act.

Despite the billions of dollars of investment Intel is ploughing into its 32nm facilities, the chip giant still feels the need to rename its ICH7 southbridge (first released in 2005) to something different for the next release of its popular Atom product: Pineview. Inside the "new" southbridge, there's still the same set of features but, on the outside, there's a fresh coat of paint as it'll now be known as Tigerpoint.

Rawr!

bit-tech.net

Archive for the ‘ati’ tag

Gigabyte reinvents the Batmobile

How To Fix Underscan in ATI's Catalyst Control Center

Hardware Podcast 10 - All Praise the Capital of Hardwareland

EK Waterblock on the Radeon HD 5870

The Most Annoying Crapware

AMD could move all ATI GPUs to SOI at 32nm - here's why

Series 3, Episode 1 - Phenom II isn’t that bad and cats still need rescuing

Overclocking the ATI Radeon HD 4770

2009: The year of the rebrand

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