ShaneBaxtor.com

I have to admit that this week was busier than I thought, the big thing for video cards this week was if we would see any HD 5800 series card that moved away from the normal cooler. While we’ve heard from many companies since the beginning of the year that they had hoped to release a OC version of the HD 5870 or HD 5850, or one with a new cooler before Chinese New Year it seems that most weren’t able to hit the deadline.

Saying that; some companies did manage to get the cards ready, this week we saw a sample from PowerColor who we haven’t seen anything from in ages, they decided to reintroduce themselves in style with the HD 5870 PCS+ which will go online tonight at TweakTown.

The other company that was able to get a modified HD 5800 series card in time was Sapphire with the HD 5850 TOXIC; which is a model I’ve been waiting on for ages with the HD 5870 having already received the TOXIC treatment a bit back.

HIS seemed to want to get a few samples out before the CNY holiday, I received from them alone this week a HD 5450, HD 5570 and HD 5770. These cards will get tested over CNY which should be a fairly quiet week with no one else really getting samples out before the factories closed for the holidays.

The RAM side of things was pretty quiet this week with only a Kingston Hyper-X 2133MHz kit coming in. This gets thrown into a pile of a few other RAM kits that really need to be tested over the coming week.

At the moment I think only the HD 5830 will arrive next week but some other brands might have got something out before the factories and offices shut down.

As for reviews this week I would recommend checking out the Sapphire HD 5570 which is quite a mean little low profile card, while not for everyone it clearly has its market. The other really stand out product would be the HD 5770 HAWK that I mentioned last week, you can see that one here. The overclock on this model was insane; so if you’re looking at a HD 5770 I would highly recommend you check this one out.

I wasn’t sure it was going to happen before Chinese New Year, and to be honest it was going to be a real push but the good news is that NDA paperwork is coming through for the HD 5830 and samples are shipping out Friday which will be just in time.

Originally we heard a date that was going to fall in the middle of CNY, and while we could still launch at that date the official date for the model will be the week of the 22nd with reviews most likely being published around the 25th / 26th of the month as I previously speculated.

The good news is that the model is going to be seen before the GTX 400 series and should really complete the whole ATI line up from top to bottom with the HD 5830 really.

As for the specifications Fudzilla has said:

The card is based on AMD’s Cypress LE core, used in HD 5850 cards, but it features fewer shaders, 1280 instead of 1440 on the HD 5850. It also has 60 texture units compared to 72 on the HD 5850. All in all it doesn’t sound like AMD crippled it too much and we can assume it will still pack quite a punch. The GPU clock is apparently set at 750MHz, which is 25MHz faster than the reference HD 5850. The higher clock comes as a surprise, but bear in mind that these are unofficial specs and we’re taking them with a grain of salt.

According to an early EU listing, the card should cost around €215, but once again this is an unofficial figure. We guess it could easily drop below the €200 psychological barrier, but even if it doesn’t it still sounds like a very tempting deal. An average HD 5850 will set you back around €250, so the €215 price tag sounds quite reasonable.

We can’t confirm nor deny how accurate these numbers are though.

On the topic of retail supply I have trouble believing you’re going to see this side of February, because of CNY this model will feel a bit like a paper launch, saying that we should see supply middle of March.

What a week it’s been, we’ve heard heaps of little rumours about the HD 5830 and NVIDIA finally let us know what the name of its new series will be. With a couple of NDAs though this weeks samples have been fairly crazy.

Thursday saw the HD 5450 launch and I was ready with the Sapphire HD 5450 and ATI HD 5450 that arrived on Monday. MSI also let us know that the HD 5770 HAWK they sent was going to be under NDA till today so that came in early in the week and went straight to the testbed. This is an absolutely awesome version of the HD 5770, if you’re interested in this series I would highly recommend that you head on over to TweakTown and check out the review here.

Over the weekend the HD 5570 from Sapphire will hit the testbed in time for the NDA early next week, it’ll be interesting to see how this model sits between the HD 5450 and HD 5670. Gigabyte also sent over the new HD 5670 OC which will get a run sometime early next week.

On the RAM front Kingston sent over there new 24GB HyperX kit that was seen at CES last month, we’re still figuring out the best way to test this kit so we can see some advantages from the huge amount of memory on offer. If you’ve got any idea on benchmarks please feel free to leave a comment below.

Last but not least another high speed kit arrived, in this case it was a 4GB kit from G.Skill that is part of the PI Series. Coming in at 2300MHz DDR it’s not the fastest kit to date we’ve tested but it’ll be interesting to see how it performs.

Next week will be interesting, we’ve got a few companies that are hoping to get products ready before Chinese New Year, it will be either really busy or really quite. After that though it should be fairly full on with the HD 5830 launch and NVIDIA GTX 400 series launch in March.

For our Australian readers don’t forget about our competition here sponsored by PC Maniacs and iBuyPower Australia, and for everyone else don’t forget to check out the Global competition made possible by Corsair.

It comes as no surprise that I wake up this morning to word that a new date for the HD 5830 was set, the 18th date, while I feel should be possible for ATI wasn’t going to fly for long due to the fact that it fell straight in the middle of Chinese New Year.

Now if there was a problem; getting a hold of a US ATI representative wasn’t going to be too much trouble but getting any information out of Asia was going to be extremely hard. So what I’m now hearing is the week of the 22nd.

This would pretty much be spot on with what I thought, a release date on the 26th or there about. The most important thing for ATI is that the model comes out before NVIDIA open the flood gates. Chinese New Year starts at the end of next week so there’s not going to be much time for the date to jump around again.

Fingers crossed that this date is locked in internally and we see it before February comes to a close. As always if anything new comes in about this model we’ll keep you updated including NDA papers with a date and time.

In some typical snooping around I’ve managed to get a date on what should be the HD 5830s launch, at the moment I’m currently hearing the 18th of February, there’s no reason why it should take any longer to come out as the issue with the HD 5830 regarding the ASIC was jumped on quickly and didn’t seem to be all that serious.

With that said it’s possible this date could get moved around slightly with it falling in the middle of Chinese New Year, unless companies have samples to ship out by the 12th it’s possible that the date could get pushed back to the 26th or even later due to Chinese New Year falling between the 14th and 21st of February.

The biggest thing for ATI is that the card launches before the new GTX 400 series, if they don’t the green light from the release of the new models is going to be too bright for the HD 5830 to combat and the model will fall in between the middle of GTX 400 series content on websites all over.

As always if anything chances we’ll let you know, if the Feb 18th is true that means that NDA paper work should be showing up soon, once we have that we’ll have a locked in date for the model like we did with the HD 5400 and HD 5500 models.

It seems that the people behind the NVIDIAGeForce twitter account decided to let us know what the two models for the new GeForce series that are due to be released hopefully in March. It seems that many people are slowly showing less and less interest over the series as delays continue to plague the model.

To keep everyone talking about it though we’ve heard that the first two models we’ll see from NVIDIA are the GTX 470 and GTX 480. We’re not sure why NVIDIA has chosen to skip the 300 series name, one person I spoke to from ATI made mention that maybe they’re worried about it sounding like the model is too far away from the HD 5000 series. How much truth this actully holds we’re not sure, we’ll probably never really find out why they skipped the 300 series name, mind you it’s possible that they’re maybe going to release mid range models under that name.

As the weeks go on we’re seeing more and more information come out about the models, of course NVIDIA is giving us the information and it’s all positive for them. We’ll no doubt be making up our own mind when the model arrives in March. We’re sure the models going to be fast but it’s exciting to find out what is on offer that NVIDIA hasn’t told us about.

One NVIDIA partner has said to me that while they haven’t got any official documentation from NVIDIA about the new models they’re pretty sure they’re correct.

As more information becomes available on the model we’ll let you know, what we really want is a solid date for the launch. We probably won’t hear that till March unless the release date is in the first week of March, in the case we’ll hear something closer to the end of February.

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.

Everything is getting back into the swing of things with a few more samples arriving this week, we should have a couple of busy weeks before Chinese New Year which starts on the 13th of February and comes to a close on the 21st which means we’ll hit a bit of a dead spot. We won’t worry about that though, instead let’s have a look what I’ve received this week.

In the world of memory Corsair sent over another blistering fast kit of RAM with a default clock speed of 2400MHz DDR. Like the previous kit I looked at it really gave me a chance to find out just how much room was on offer from my ASROCK P55 TestBed. I really thought that getting too 2400MHz wouldn’t be an easy task but I was proved wrong. To check out the full review of the kit head on over to TweakTown.

The Video Card world was a little busier, MSI shipped over a HD 5670 1GB which uses their own cooler design. The review of this one has been done and will be posted on TweakTown sometime early next week.

HIS finally sent over some IceQ+ cards in the form of the HD 5670 and HD 5750. I say finally because lately we’ve seen iCooler and reference models from the company and it’s been ages since we’ve seen a model make use of the IceQ+ cooler. I’m actually benching these cards at the moment and you should see the reviews for these two cards show up some time later next week. Now all we really need is some Turbo models from the company and I’ll be really happy.

In my first *Knock Knock* Delivery! post I made mention that the reference HD 5670 from ATI had arrived, my plan was to CrossFire that but with the model not carrying CrossFire ports and being a 512MB model instead of a 1GB that plan quickly changed. Instead that card made for an interesting 512MB vs 1GB HD 5670 article and you can see that one here. I would highly recommend it if you’re looking at buying one of these lower end cards.

If you’re a bit bummed that the CrossFire article wasn’t done the good news is that I used the MSI which did carry CrossFire ports and 1GB of memory. As mentioned above that review should show up early next week.

Last week my HD 5670 overclocking also article went online, if you’re interested in that one you can see it here . For memory fans if you’re into overclocking, looking at a single Video Card setup and you’re tossing up between a P55 setup or an X58 one another article of mine comparing the performance of the two in mainly memory related areas but also some games might be useful to you.

Next week we’ll see some new models arrive along with an NDA being lifted on one.

I’ve said that there’s so much that I want to do with my blog, I don’t want it to be another blog which regurgitates information that’s already on the net or gives the opinion of someone who doesn’t really matter. I want to bring you information that’s fresh and perspective of people who are in the industry.

For that reasons I’m glad to announce ShaneBaxtor.com first Featured Blogger. The idea behind a Featured Blogger is that they’ll be able to bring something to the table that I can’t, and the reason they’re here is because they’re unable to manage a blog which needs daily updates due to their own business or work commitments, instead with some spare time here and there they can give us a fresh perspective once or twice a month or every week.

The first Featured Blogger is a good friend of mine; Rex, Owner of iBuyPower Australia and PC Maniacs who has worked with me a number of times on TweakTown.com in some of our most exciting articles like HD 4870 CrossFire X @ 4GHz when I was living in Melbourne, Australia will be able to offer something I can’t.

Being the Owner and Operator of two of Australia’s premier e-tailors and a computer enthusiast himself, Rex is going to bring a perspective of what it’s like owning and operating these two websites. He’ll cover everything from why he’s selling one brand over another, insight of what it’s like running these businesses and his thoughts on the latest products he’s using himself.

We hope to have what will be known as the Power Report become a weekly feature but our plan for featured bloggers is that they’ll do what they can when they can.

Aside from this we’ll be starting competitions from next week, the plan is to have two one will be a global competition open to everyone which will more than like have a different sponsor every time we run one. The second is one open to Australian Residents Only and sponsored by PC Maniacs, the first prize that’s going to be given away is a Logitech G13 Advanced Gameboard. Details on how to enter will be posted soon.

For now though I want to welcome Rex to what will become a premier board of Featured Bloggers and look forward to seeing his first Power Report.

Just a quick update on the site, and *Knock Knock* Delivery, we’re now on a dedicated server and since the transfer of the site happened when I would do *Knock Knock* Delivery it hasn’t happened yet. I will work on it though over the next 24 hours so keep an eye out. I also hope that the new server feels speedy