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The Catalyst 10.3 driver set I’m calling the Holy Crap! driver set because as far as I’m concerned when you look at what it offers they’re the only two words that come to mind.

I’m not going to say much because really the driver notes speak for themselves; on the key feature front we’ve got all those goodies that we saw in the 1-2 Punch article. If you’ve forgotten they include:

ATI Catalyst Mobility – monthly updates for the mobile crowd

ATI Eyefinity Technology Bezel Correction – compensate for your bezels so objects in your game move from one display to the other smoothly

ATI Eyefinity Technology Per Display Control – adjust for differences in each individual displays brightness, color and contrast

ATI Eyefinity Technology Multiple Display Groups – more display groups to give further control of your desktop with three displays or more connected

ATI Eyefinity Technology Display Configuration Switching – easily switch from one display mode to another

3D Stereoscopic 3D driver hooks – enables 3rd party middleware vendors to bring more 3D stereoscopic gaming options

If that wasn’t enough to excite you though the performance improvements are insane:

3DMark Vantage

Overall scores increase by up to 8% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Overall scores increase by up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products and up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products

Aliens vs. Predator

Overall performance increases 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

Battleforge

Improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Call of Duty: World at War

Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Company of Heroes

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Crysis and Crysis Warhead

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Devil May Cry 4

Improves up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

DiRT 2

Improves up to 30% on ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 20% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Far Cry 2

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2

Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Call of Pripyat Benchmark

Improves up to 10% with Anti-Aliasing enabled on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear Sky

Improves up to 2% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products

Resident Evil 5

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Improves up to 15% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 20% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Unigine Tropics

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

World in Conflict

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Wolfenstein

Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

What makes the driver so great though outside of the massive performance improvements is the fact that ATI have not only concentrated on the HD 5000 series but also given much love to the HD 4800 series.

I’m not sure if this driver was designed to fight the new GTX 400 series from NVIDIA or if it’s just a matter of right place right time, all we can say though is that the quarter is going to come to an end in a very interesting way.

It seems that someone on the EVGA forums asked to see the EVGA GTX 480 and GTX 470 box after seeing the Galaxy one on here. Well sometimes all you have to do is ask with it then being posted on the TEAMEVGA’s flickr page.

While we’re not seeing anything too different as opposed to the other box arts we’ve seen this particular one does make note of not only 3D Vision but 3D Vision Surround. While we knew it was coming with it being in NVIDIAs own GT 100 white paper it’s nice to see that a company is going to be promoting it on the front of the box.

As usual you’ve got the other information you’re use to seeing like memory size, PHYSX support, CUDA and SLI.

If we can’t see the performance of the card we may as well have a look at some boxes.

This afternoon out of nowhere I had a couple of renders show up in my inbox of the Galaxy GTX 400 boxes. Seems that someone didn’t want to be left out after seeing the Gigabyte ones posted earlier.

This time we’ve got both the GTX 470 and GTX 480 and both have come from a good source so it’s probably very safe to assume that they’re spot on. In typical fashion the Galaxy boxes aren’t all that exciting but give you the details that you need to know.

At the end of it all we want what’s in the box more so then anything but we can see that the GTX 480 carries with it 1536MB of GDDR5 memory while the lower end GTX 470 carries 1280MB of GDDR5 memory. The unusual numbers are of course due to the memory bus width.

Anyway have a look below to have closer look at what exactly we’re dealing with.

Someone on Facebook has posted up a picture of the Gigabyte GTX 480 box; we’re not sure who did it but we know that someone is going to be in a world of pain. Considering we’re still over 20 days away from the release of the model it’s a big surprise to see box art leak out so early.

As for what it tells us; we’ll not heaps. We can clearly see that the model is going to carry with it 1536MB of GDDR5 memory. Of course the model supports DirectX 11 which isn’t a surprise but it’s clear the model will also carry Mini HDMI along with support for 7.1 audio.

As far as we can tell the box is real and the overall design looks very Gigabyte. I’m sure it’s not going to be the last box leak we see but it certainly seems to be the first.

Enjoy

I’ve been hunting down a stand for my Eyefinity monitor setup for ages. The biggest issue with three monitors on your desk is the amount of space that get’s taken up. It’s not even so much the amount of width the monitors take up but more so the stand.

Getting a good quality monitor stand has been impossible though in Australia. Even going onto eBay finds ones that promise support for 24″ monitors but when you get them they don’t fit. Lucky I wasn’t the person who found that out the hard way; instead it was someone else.

Recently I saw a company show up called Proluma in Australia who specialized in Monitor stands, unfortunately though I discovered *sarcasm* they were so specialized they didn’t even have a triple monitor one.*end sarcasm*

Oh well I thought to myself, there goes my chance of getting a triple monitor stand, that was until only a month later I saw the company announce that a Triple monitor stand was coming into the market. At $369 AU it’s hardly a cheap product but considering it’s something that you shouldn’t really have to upgrade it’s not a bad investment.

I hate paying for computer parts though, there’s few items I pay for when it comes to my computer and that’s simply because it’s one of the perks of doing this job for over 7 years. I don’t review monitors and I don’t review monitor stands so that wasn’t in my favour. I do write for one of the largest tech websites in the world and I can knock over a review very fast when I want or need too.

Putting on the charm the guys over at Proluma hooked me up with a Triple monitor stand in exchange for a review which is standard practice. Since we don’t return samples anyway this company wasn’t putting any more or less in to get a review. The guys actually put themselves more out of pocket though for me and shot a unit direct from Taiwan to me so I could get it sooner.

Today after about an hour of work I have a nice new monitor setup. Now I’m not going into any more detail as I’ll be moving from this blog post onto a review of the stand for TweakTown. So keep an eye out but for now I felt I needed to show off my sexy new monitor setup while giving people in Australia a heads up about the units due later this month.

Recently we made mention about Galaxy working on a Dual GPU GTS 250 Video Card, while we made a slight jest at it due to the fact we figured Galaxy was probably only working on it because they where board it seems the model is very real.

While the card may look like a Dual PCB model now if you look carefully the second PCB is nothing more than a card which holds the three fans that the card uses. It also gives us a fair idea that the card going to take up at least three motherboard slots. When installed you can see the three fans run a blue LED setup and looks fairly nice. See images at the bottom of the page.

As for performance we can see that under 3DMark Vantage it manages to perform a little better than the older single GPU GTX 280. We can see that the card is overclocked to 675MHz on the core and the Shader Clock has been bumped to 1696MHz which helps improve performance overall. Having a look at the Xtreme Tuner HD software which is Galaxys own overclocking program we can see that the GU temp is only 45c, no doubt this is just idle though.

Since the GTS 250 is the highest end GPU that NVIDIA partners are currently working with it comes as no surprise that someone is trying to mix it up a bit in an effort to dump some cores.

We still have no information on any release date or retail pricing but as always we’ll keep you up to date if anything changes.

We’re not sure how popular a dual GPU GTS 250 would be but it’s always nice to see companies thinking outside the box.

You have to think what many of the NVIDIA only partners are doing at the moment, speaking to a few as of late it seems that the highest end product being sold is the GTS 250 with most other models like the popular GTX 275, GTX 285 and dual GPU GTX 295 all becoming discontinued.

With all that free time on hand though it seems like some companies are choosing to experiment and have a bit of fun. The latest wacky incarnation of a NVIDIA graphics card seems to be coming from Galaxy and will carry with it two GTS 250 cores.

Information we know of at the moment is, two G92-426 cores will be placed on a single PCB with the help of the BR04 bridge chip. The particular 426 version of the G92 core are low power versions meaning that this card should use less power than that of two non 426 based GTS 250 cards.

2GB of memory is present thanks to 16 .8NS DRAM chips with both running on a 256-bit memory interface. This particular model will have 6-Phase power and Bussmann high-frequency inductance which will boost the frequency up to 2MHz. What that bit means exactly we’re not sure but the general word is that due to the low power nature of the GPUs and the high quality power supply components overclocking should be impressive.

As for clocks or a release date information is extremely limited at the moment, it’s possible that boredom could’ve just set in at Galaxy while waiting for Fermi and the company is just killing some time. If we get any more information though we’ll be sure to keep you in the loop.