6970 | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:34:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png 6970 | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 HIS Launches new 6970 EyeFinity RTS (Ready-to-See) Graphics Cards https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/raymond-daily/his-launches-new-6970-eyefinity-rts-ready-to-see-graphics-cards/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/raymond-daily/his-launches-new-6970-eyefinity-rts-ready-to-see-graphics-cards/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:32:13 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=61812 HIS today launched new 6970 EyeFinity Ready-to-See graphics cards, the perfect solution to enable AMD's EyeFinity game play on up to three screens! The HIS 6970 RTS uses innovative technology to enable AMD’s EyeFinity via HDMI. Gamers no longer have to connect the DisplayPort output or use the active DisplayPort adapter in order to perform …

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HIS today launched new 6970 EyeFinity Ready-to-See graphics cards, the perfect solution to enable AMD's EyeFinity game play on up to three screens! The HIS 6970 RTS uses innovative technology to enable AMD’s EyeFinity via HDMI. Gamers no longer have to connect the DisplayPort output or use the active DisplayPort adapter in order to perform EyeFinity and can easily set up EyeFinity with three outputs via HDMI.

Product Features & Benefits:

Ready-to-See EyeFinity – Inexpensively enables AMD's EyeFinity through HDMI without the need for display port monitor and active adapters to support up to 3 displays.

IceQ Technology – Cool air is drawn from both sides of the fan to enhance the cooling efficiency and directly exhausts hot air out of the PC’s case.

-23°C Cooler – HIS 6970 IceQ Series is over 23°C cooler than the Reference Cooler.

Quieter – HIS 6970 IceQ Series is quieter than the Reference Cooler, significantly reducing noise levels.

4 Heatpipes – Optimise cooling performance by removing heat from the core area, providing the ultimate solution for professional gamers and HTCP users.

Black Hole Impeller – Cool air is drawn from both sides of the fan to enhance the cooling efficiency

HIS 6970 EyeFinity RTS (Ready-to-See): http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-670.shtml

Source: Press Release

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Radeon HD5970 pricing due to drop: expect £30 less https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/carl/hd5970-pricing-due-to-drop-expect-20-30-less/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/carl/hd5970-pricing-due-to-drop-expect-20-30-less/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 09:03:35 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=23155 Our reports show that AMD are due to drop the user price of their HD5970 graphics card in reaction to the launch of the nVidia GTX580. nVidia's new card is a monster, so AMD feel the need to bring their own monster in direct conflict. While this has yet to take affect in the UK …

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Our reports show that AMD are due to drop the user price of their HD5970 graphics card in reaction to the launch of the nVidia GTX580. nVidia's new card is a monster, so AMD feel the need to bring their own monster in direct conflict.

While this has yet to take affect in the UK we have noticed a few locations in Europe already seem to have listed prices as low as €389.

As a straight translation into British Pounds, with 17.5% VAT, we get £389.

How seriously will nVidia take this move is uncertain.

The thing to look for would be a price move from nVidia on the GTX580. If we see it start to be offered under it's launch price of £399, then we will know the 5970 is being considered a serious threat and that nVidia have moved to counter it.

Still the fastest thing on the planet: The HD5970 will drop in price, but we can't say for certain what will happen with special editions.

We hope this hits the UK soon as prices are still in the wallet sapping £460-£500 region, meaning it is around £30+ more than nVidia's high end benchmark.

KitGuru says: It is still a lot of ponies to cough up, but if  you were looking for the fastest card in the world, then that is still the 5970. In the aftermath of the global downturn, who would have thought that we'd have price wars for graphic cards around the £399 mark?

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nVidia kills off GTX490, pumps out GTX590 for CeBIT https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/faith/nvidia-kills-off-gtx490-pumps-out-gtx590-for-cebit/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/faith/nvidia-kills-off-gtx490-pumps-out-gtx590-for-cebit/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:50:47 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=20970 Shoppers are lucky. They go into a store, see what they want and buy it. They are safe from having ‘too much knowledge' about what goes on behind the scenes. Sausage eaters are the same. Stick it in your mouth and don't ask. Unfortunately, KitGuru seems to be a hub for rumour dropping and negative …

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Shoppers are lucky. They go into a store, see what they want and buy it. They are safe from having ‘too much knowledge' about what goes on behind the scenes. Sausage eaters are the same. Stick it in your mouth and don't ask. Unfortunately, KitGuru seems to be a hub for rumour dropping and negative briefings as much as cool kit and cold hard fact. Rest assured dear reader, every spoon these PR wizards try to feed us gets mulled over and cross-referenced several times before we hit the send button.

Several months ago, we ran a story comparing the GTX480 against the Radeon HD 6870. AMD's complete re-write of the entire Radeon naming strategy left everyone confused and we had to do a serious re-write for it to make any sense at all.

At this point in time, we're fairly sure that the card we're talking about will be the Radeon HD 6970.

KitGuru would appear to have been right on the money, way back in June 2010

.

Stories appearing today on sites like Bit-Tech, are referencing a Chinese site called ZOL.com which has predicted that the new Radeon HD 6970 will rise to 23,499 in 3DMark Vantage.

Does 23,499 look familiar?

Looks an awful lot like the bar we charted months ago.

In the face of this onslaught, nVidia has rethought its plans.

We now understand that the dual GPU GTX490 (that we had all expected to arrive before Northern Islands) has been carried out of the back door at nVidia's Santa Clara HQ. Its career as the world's fastest graphics card was not as much short as it was non-existant.

Here's a picture of what we believed to be an ASUS GTX490 PCB that we published back in July.

We believed that Asus would be first to market with the GTX490 at the end of Summer 2010. Based on a pair of GTX470 chips, this could have been the fastest card in the world, but now appears to have been canned.

KitGuru has now spoken with 2 of nVidia's biggest partners and what we're hearing is that the standard chips will all be refreshed ahead of any multi-GPU experimentation.The PCB designs may well be the same, but a second generation Fermi will not toast the components anywhere near as much.

We are predicting that, if you have a decent SLR and a ticket to CeBIT for the first week in March 2011, then you can expect to see dual GPU GTX590 cards on several nVidia partner stands.That's exactly 12 months after Fermi was first shown properly in public.

Will nVidia's CEO, Jen Hsun Huang, be in position to double-pump his GTX590 with pride for an huge and approving audience of hardcore German enthusiasts at CeBIT?

KitGuru says: We will plant some more ‘Flags of our Predictions' next week. Given the apparently stunning accuracy of our estimates for the performance capability of the Radeon HD 6970, we're looking to repeat that exercise with equal precision!

Tell us we're right/wrong below.

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AMD Radeon HD 6970 benchmark performance predicted https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/faith/amd-radeon-hd-6890-benchmark-performance-predicted/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/faith/amd-radeon-hd-6890-benchmark-performance-predicted/#comments Fri, 22 Oct 2010 06:29:35 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=20711 Each generation of graphic card is faster than the previous one, but the real question is ‘How much faster?'. KitGuru has been up late at night, drinking with experts and ‘outsiders who claim to be in the know'. We're ready to stick our flag in the ground on Radeon HD 6970 performance. KitGuru friends, prepare …

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Each generation of graphic card is faster than the previous one, but the real question is ‘How much faster?'. KitGuru has been up late at night, drinking with experts and ‘outsiders who claim to be in the know'. We're ready to stick our flag in the ground on Radeon HD 6970 performance. KitGuru friends, prepare to smile knowingly. KitGuru doubters, sharpen your knives and prepare to stab our backs.

Graphics processing speed can be improved by a huge number of factors. It's a bit like Formula One cars. Often one team spends ages developing a series of small improvements – each of which gives them a small boost – only to find that the competition made one single change and blasted to the front of the grid (we're thinking ‘rear diffuser'). The next generation of Radeons is several months away, but it's looking good for the graphics division of CPU giant AMD. Let's break the future down into manageable blocks and see what might be possible by Christmas.

What's all this Tick-Tock stuff?
With processors (CPU and GPU), the most common ‘diffuser advantage' is simply moving to a new process sooner. The new process will be smaller (die shrink), reduce hot-spots and the effect of aggressor wires etc. Most importantly, in the case of graphics, it will give you more GPUs per wafer.

Back in the disastrous days of the R600/Radeon 2000 series, nVidia was scoring clear wins at almost every price point. The entry level Radeon 2400, however, had one thing going for it. ATI managed to make it smaller and cheaper than the nearest nVidia product. The difference was less than $5, but in creating that small price advantage, ATI won a huge amount of business with the world's biggest system builders like Lenovo. All of our Far East system builder friends are famous for ‘tick box marketing' and their inability to ‘say no to a saving'.

Will AMD be able to move to 28nm for the launch of the remaining Radeon 6000 series in Q4? It is unlikely. In the past, both nVidia and ATI have been burned by trying to move a complex technology to a new process. At the same time, the world leader in this kind of manufacturing has a simple strategy called Tick-Tock.

In its own words, Intel creates a new process (i.e. a shrink) which gives a better version of an existing processor. They call this the ‘Tick'. Then Intel unveils a new processor architecture, which is normally much more powerful. They call that the ‘Tock'. The result is a series of solid, predictable steps. It's a very simple strategy but, most importantly, it works.

Will AMD try to beat the Tick-Tock?
Looking at the complexity of each new generation of graphic cards, we can't see AMD wanting to take any huge risk in bringing them to market.
So how can you know for sure whether AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series will launch on 28nm?……….Simple.

If there's one thing that KitGuru's learned over the years, it's that semi-conductor companies LOVE laying claim to any ‘world first' available. You can almost imagine the CTOs getting armoured up and laying claim to the new lands. There's been no announcement so far, so we think the die shrink is a safe ‘no' bet.

Sir Eric Demers seen claiming DX11 in the face of extreme competition and technical complexity

Timeline

“Why has the 5000-series taken so long to re-spin?” we hear KitGuru readers ask. Response? “Lack of DX11 competition”. Without stiff competition for so long, we'd guess that AMD has gone straight past a simple re-spin and will be making significant changes to the architecture.

Think about it this way, even before a new product launches the manufacturer already knows what the weak points are. They will know which parts work and which are busted. Remember, GPU projects don't run in series, there are strong elements of parallel development. Overlaps. The Radeon HD 6000 series design kicked off a long time before the Radeon 5000 ever launched. Known issues with the Radeon 5000's basic design will have been addressed, alongside a number of issues that AMD will have found with the 5000 product AFTER then went into production.

From the launch of the Radeon HD 5870 last September, AMD was probably in position to do some kind of re-spin around the CeBIT timeframe (March 2010 – 6 months after launch). However, with little/no DX11 pressure from nVidia, development would have carried on. At the same time, the ATI engineering teams would have been able to analyse the complete Fermi architecture in detail. That analysis lets the Developer Relations team understand what kind of games would work best on Fermi hardware.

If AMD had launched around Computex (June 2010 – 9 months after the initial Radeon HD 5870 launch), then a lot of changes could have been made. Given the actual launch date of Northern Islands (Er… today!), loads of improvements to the fundamental design will have been possible. As a result, you can see that AMD's latest £135 cards can be overclocked to match performance levels only available around £350 a year ago.

We can expect much more from the Radeon HD 6970.

The 6970 may not even need exotic cooling to hit stunning new benchmark levels

Radeon HD 6970 Benchmark Prediction
From KitGuru's first experience with the GTX480 at CeBIT 2010, it seemed clear that nVidia's biggest win would be in ultra-complex tessellation situations. KitGuru Labs' full, in-depth testing with the GTX480 has proven that correct. Turning the tessellation sections of the Unigine benchmark to ‘crazy difficult mode' allows the GTX480 to pull away from it's Radeon competitors by some margin. Unfortunately for nVidia, none of its TWIMTBP games have been released yet and gamers don't play benchmarks. Our labs tests show that articifially high levels of tessellation don't seem to represent any real world examples of gaming. Maybe that will change next year, but not right now. Some games with increased tessellation will be hitting the streets around the Christmas holidays, but mostly at sensible levels.

All of that preamble brings us to the main event. Can KitGuru accurately predict how fast the AMD radeon HD 6970 graphics card will be when it launches just in time for Christmas 2010?

We've tried out best.

AMD Radeon HD 6970 Benchmark Performance against GeForce GTX480 in 3DMark Vantage?

KitGuru says: Are we correct? Are we way out? With the AMD Radeon HD 6970 sail past 23,000? Would you bet against our prediction? Come on KitGuru followers – you must have an opinion. Also, there is the real question to consider, “Is there any end to this development?”. Each generation of card seems to deliver more performance that we could ever have wished for. Then, within 6 months, we're looking at the next big thing and all of the previous records lie smashed on the floor. OK, we can't help it, we're already drooling and can't wait to get our undeserving Ultra White Lab Mittens on the Radeon HD 6970 so we can torture test it and render our verdict. Roll on Q4!

Smart/regular readers will know that this is an update of a much earlier piece we did…   However, AMD fooled us with its renaming strategy – so we're re-issuing because we believe the content is still very relevant. Got an opinion? Share it below!


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