ShaneBaxtor.com

I try to be careful when I organise my video card samples, it’s hopeless getting in a bunch of cards that carry with it the same clocks and all that changes is the cooler. For the most part why should I waste my time benching a card that is going to give the same results, waste your time with results that are going to be similar and TweakTowns money with a review that’s not going to bring traffic.

Now there are some exceptions to this rule, if that model is part of a higher profile series like IceQ and iCooler from HIS or Vapor-X from Sapphire; due to the nature of these cards they get happily tested across all games even though they may carry with it the same or similar results in FPS related tests. People will Google these particular variations of models though and they shouldn’t have to look at a standalone review on a reference card just to know the performance.

On the other hand if Sapphire and HIS send two cards in at launch, slightly different coolers but both don’t slot into one of the aforementioned categories the excitement level isn’t high for card number two. So we do two reviews with these cards, the first is a standard single card review with card one. Who is card one? Well it’s generally the person who arrives first, in the case they both arrive at the same time it’s the person that told me they were sending it first.

For card number two though since it’s reference clocks and follows the reference PCB design to mix it up a bit I’ll make that second article a CrossFire or SLI one. This does a few things, one it makes the review different from the first, second we still get cooling numbers and noise levels off the card and finally it’s something a bit more interesting for you to read.

Recently though I had a company complain to me that the review looked like it was a CrossFire one and not on their card, to be honest I must’ve missed the part where I wrote about their package, card, cooler, included their names in all the graphs, wrote about the temperature and heat difference and wrapped it all up in a conclusion which covered both the technology and the card.

This company will now have a few options, the first is, unless they can be the first company to send a card before NDA they won’t get a standalone review, secondly they can just not send a card that has reference clocks if they’re not interested in being tested in a different fashion, instead they can just wait till OC models come out. Thirdly they can step back a second and realize I know what I’m doing after seven years when making sure that I give each company as much exposure as possible.

If the company doesn’t want to be included in a CF article many other companies will, after I have two reference cards I ultimately stop trying to organise any more until OC ones are available. Sure they can send an OC model which will get a standalone review but that company now misses out on a review on TweakTown, instead of getting two they now only have one. Since I make sure I don’t organise crap that also means the company will more then likely miss out on an award, that’s fine for me someone else can pick it up instead.

I’ve been doing TweakTown for over 7 years and this writing gig for even longer. These companies need to know that how I represent their product in a review is the best way for them. CrossFire and SLI articles are a way to mix it up a bit, it means I learn more about the performance and you do as well. It means that if someone on a forum goes, I’m thinking about having CF or SLI *insert mid range model* that forum goers can link to the article and say this is what you can expect.

After reading this I hope the company realizes that I do what I feel is the best for them. If they don’t though there’s someone else who is always happy to take the spot and get the exposure. As for other readers of my blog, this just gives you a bit of an idea of what we deal with behind the scenes, it’s one thing whinging because they don’t like the score, but to get an award, a high score and then complain that they don’t like how it’s tested; come on!

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.

Let me start by making a few things clear, the first is that I use Eyefinity technology in my day to day usage, the image you can see above is my desk and that’s three Dell U2410s hooked up to a HD 5970. Second I know that I really gave surround gaming a beating the other day, but the reasons in that post though are why NVIDIA is going to lose the battle.

Today though I’m going to tell you why ATI and the Eyefinity branding is going to lose the war when compared to NVIDIA. Multi Screen technology is the future for computing in many ways, the biggest problem at the moment though is that both companies are spending too much time focusing on the gaming aspects of the technology and not the productivity aspect.

NVIDIA concentrating on the gaming side I can understand, the bottom line is that the way they are implementing Multi Screen Technology is flawed, and the reason it’s flawed is because it was added at the last minute. When NVIDIA discovered the technology in ATIs new HD 5000 series Video Cards it became clear that this is going to be the future, for that reason NVIDIA found a way to offer the same kind of technology, because Fermi was so far along though going back to the drawing board wasn’t going to be an option which meant we were going to see limitations.

Now the information we have from NVIDIA about the Surround Gaming technology is a bit limited at the moment, it does give us most the information we need though and even if a few surprises do pop up it doesn’t look like the technology can beat out Eyefinity.

Eyefinity is fantastic, I use it daily and love every second of it, I moved to my 3x 24″ setup from a single 30″, at one point thought I was using a dual 30″ setup, on a whole that setup just felt kind of stupid, it was massive and when I wanted to game a giant bezel down the middle did nothing for me, so I ended up back at a single 30″ which I thought gave me the desktop real estate I needed.

Towards the end of December thought I got WOWed by Eyefinity, and not in person, of course ATI didn’t let me know of any events where I could see the technology in person, albeit I give them some of the most quotable lines in my reviews which have shown up in their meetings and the fact that I review probably more video cards in a given year than anyone else. We won’t worry about that though. I got WOWed by screen shots and YouTube videos of people playing HAWX, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and more.

Thinking back now I don’t know why I let these videos persuade me because I barely have time for games, the bottom line is these videos and screenshots did persuade me. Since I have more Video Cards then I can poke a stick at getting into Eyefinity was only going to involve the cost of monitors (I don’t really review monitors and asking a company for three of anything is generally hard). When I finally set it up thought, fired up Sims 3 which seems to be the only game I have installed and realized that it looked completely crap at 5760 x 1200 I thought I had made a mistake with the purchase of these monitors.

The holidays came to an end and it was time to get back into work, feeling a bit bummed that I didn’t take full advantage of Eyefinity I was a bit concerned that $2,000AUD had been dropped for no reason. The launch of the HD 5670 changed this though, and in a big way since it was time to get back to work.

I consider myself a bit of a multi tasking master, I run two VNC windows on my machine, one to my server which has my MSN and all those useless programs that you don’t want clogging up your main PC and my laptop which runs my email so when I go away I don’t have to transfer files or that, I shut my laptop down and away I go. I have all past emails on my hand and when I get home I open it up, let it log onto the network and away I go again.

Not only do I have those two windows open all the time but when I’m benchmarking I have an excel spreadsheet for all my TweakTown graphs that takes up a whole monitor, along with that I will have a review or blog post open in word, folders to my main documents open, websites to double check pricing and specifications of models and images of the product I’m reviewing.

The nature of the three monitor setup opened me up to a new world of desktop real estate that I didn’t think existed. With Eyefinity this was done with one card and with ease. Productivity is at a new level, I’m more excited about all the windows I have open on my screen then I ever was about the gaming side of things.

The sad thing is thought that I had to discover this myself, sure ATI put how Eyefinity can expand productivity in between gaming and entertainment but every image you look at is about gaming, it’s Dragon Age on three screens and HAWX on six screens, it’s how this game works at 5760 x 1200 and that one at 7680 x 1600. Talking to editors after Eyefinity events they said, WOW it looks great, but it’s so gimmicky.

It’s true, and when you combine the fact that it’s expensive to get into an EyeFinity gaming setup it’s clear that the market is going to be a niche. You’re not catering to a market that is just gamers, you’re catering for a market that is for gamers who have serious cash to blow.

The focus of Eyefinity needs to change, it needs to be pushed as a tool. It needs to be pushed as something that is going to increase productivity, make multi tasking easier. ATI / AMD need to tell people who multi task that Eyefinity is the end to Alt Tabbing. NVIDIA can’t do this at the moment, they can’t push a technology that is aimed at people who have productivity in mind with a solution that requires two cards, or is resolution limited (We can’t confirm we’re limited to 1920 x 1080, but it’s the feeling we get from the white paper).

I spoke to someone today and they told me, ATI are going to hold an event pushing the productivity with the HD 5870 2GB card. This is the worst thing they could do, you don’t want to show people that you can do Eyefinity with a $500 card and then say it can also be done with a $99 one. People are going to think that clearly there’s going to be something wrong with the $99 solution. ATI / AMD, Manufactures, Wholesalers and Retail Stores need to show people who want productivity a setup of Eyefinity with a $99 card, on a box that costs less than $1000.

Gaming got my attention because I have the luxury of putting a HD 5970 into my own machine for less than it would cost most people to buy a HD 5670. The lack of time I have for games though let me discover what Eyefinity was really about, or at least should be about. A CEO, CFO, Stock Broker, Marketing Manager, Office Manager, e-Tailors and more aren’t going to see gaming though and go that would be great for my office.

I like ATI, I probably like ATI more than NVIDIA, there seems to be a certain attitude that people who work for NVIDIA have, they seem to think that we should bow to them because they are NVIDIA. I don’t hate that though, I understand it, I’m proud that I work for TweakTown, one of the largest Tech Websites in the world, if you tell me you work for JohnsAwsomeHardware.com I would probably have the same attitude.

NVIDIA can have this attitude though because they’re smart, they’re only pushing the gaming side of things at the moment because that’s all they can really offer you, if they promote productivity ATI / AMD would win because of a single card solution, the fact that a wide variety of prices are covered thanks to a huge model line up and more.

I guarantee you when NVIDIA release then generation of Video Cards after Fermi Multi Monitor Technology will be pushed, and it will be pushed to every user, from that person who sells on eBay and has photos, emails, websites and more open at a single time to CEOs of mega corporations where multi tasking is part of their everyday life.

Eyefinity will already have this stigma that it’s for Gaming, NVIDIA won’t have this, at the moment it’s called Surround Gaming, it won’t be called that in the future. When they can offer everyone a single card solution Multi Screen Technology or MST will become a name for the technology, something that doesn’t sound like a technology that only caters to one segment.

Eyefinity is a good name, it doesn’t sound like something that gamers will only use, ATI / AMD though need to change the way the technology is perceived though. Be that via creating an arm off Eyefinity that is something like Eyefinity Production+ or just push more than gaming under the Eyefinity name.

Sure, go to E3, setup Eyefinity with the hottest games, but make yourself present at tradeshows in which companies who could use this technology are, setup in front of the New York Stock Exchange and let brokers know this is the future of buying and selling shares, because you know what? NVIDIA will make sure they don’t miss out on this market.

Eyefinity do better what Matrox has done for years, now when we talk about Eyefinity we say things like “Yeah, Matrox use to do something similar but it wasn’t as good as Eyefinity.” What ATI / AMD need to do is make sure that in twelve months time we’re not saying “Yeah ATI had a similar technology but I love how NVIDIA offer the technology for my office.”

Today I understand that Eyefinity is a fantastic tool for productivity, I only truly understood this after taking the leap on the technology for gaming, something that most people won’t do.

I don’t want people who want to increase the way there business works wait twelve months for NVIDIA to release the same technology and market it better. I’m going to become a one man marketing team for Multi Screen Technology. I have two goals:

One is to make sure that people understand that Eyefinity isn’t just for gaming, this is a technology for anyone who is on a computer hours upon hours a day for work, people who have to Alt+Tab between screens, people who bought 30″ monitors because they needed more desktop real estate.

Second I want ATI to improve the technology, and I want NVIDIA to hit the market hard with it. This setup is going to be more useful then 3D Vision will ever be for NVIDIA.

We need to see more companies offer DisplayPort monitors, more companies offer three and six arm 24″ and 30″ monitor arms, we need manufactures, wholesales and salesman understand the technology so when they get asked a question they can give an answer.

This is a big post, but I have a plan, a goal, an agenda! Over the next few weeks there’s a few things I want to do to help bring this technology to an audience outside of gamers. So keep posted because while ATI / AMD will win this first battle in Multi Screen Technology NVIDIA will win the war because they’re hungry for success.

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.

It doesn’t matter what you call it, be it GF 100, Fermi or 300 series the new line up of NVIDIA cards are coming, albeit a bit later then we had hoped. What NVIDIA has done though over the past week is added some information on their website about the upcoming series. To have a look at what exactly is going on you can see the page here.

What we’re seeing are two bits of information, you can check out the white papers that are linked towards the bottom which will give you information that you’ll probably not understand or not be interested in. After reading it you’ll end up with still no idea what kind of performance you can expect from the series.

The other piece of information is normal marketing talk to make the new series sound exciting. To be honest if you’re into computers you don’t need this as you’re probably already getting excited about what NVIDIA is going to offer.

The reason behind this post today though is to quickly talk about NVIDIAs new surround gaming feature and the issues I think it’s going to have when compared to the competing technology from ATI, EyeFinity.

I’m only going to give you a quick run down here for two reasons, one I don’t have the card, and two information on the whole thing is still limited. What I will say though is based on the information we have, of course by the time the card launches this could change.

The biggest pro behind the way NVIDIA have implemented the setup is that it seems you don’t need to have a DisplayPort monitor. With few companies really offering the connectivity, read only Dell really! this is pretty cool. It means you should be able to get into the technology for less from the monitor side of things as the chances are you already have a monitor that doesn’t have DisplayPort. Instead of having to buy three new monitors with DisplayPort so they all look the same you can buy just two more of the monitors you have.

The other pro is that the setup will support 3D Vision, only recently I wrote a big piece about 3D Vision and how I felt about it on TweakTown. To put it in just a few words; “I loved it!” For more information about the technology though I would highly recommend you check out the article I did at TweakTown here.

For the most part though this is where the pros stop, the lack of DisplayPort and the fact the NVIDIA cards will only offer two DVI ports means that you will require a SLI setup to make use of the technology. From my understanding it also seems that the technology will only support up to 1920 x 1080 @ 120Hz displays. This is the feeling I get from reading the white paper but really there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to run three 2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz displays off two cards.

I’m not sure if NVIDIA are choosing to just push the 1920 x 1080 @ 120Hz display support because these ones will support 3D Vision or because this is the limitation of the technology. I have a real hatred for 1920 x 1080 16:9 computer monitors after using 16:10 ones for a long time. For most people though this won’t be a deal breaker, the chances are from a cost perspective 1680 x 1050 @ 60Hz and 120Hz are going to be the most popular option.

One of the biggest cons for 3D Vision is the fact that when you’re using the technology the video card is essentially working twice as hard at that resolution. What this means is that a 1920 x 1080 screen with 3D Vision on will be more intensive then a 2560 x 1600 display without 3D Vision. Now if you’re running three monitors with 3D Vision at 1920 x 1080 the amount of power needed to run that setup would be more than a setup of three 2560 x 1600 monitors without 3D Vision.

We don’t know performance numbers for the next generation series from NVIDIA but you’re going to need some serious juice to push this kind of setup.

To quickly just recap the pros for NVIDIAs surround gaming experience the lack of DisplayPort monitors needed means that you can buy two more of your current monitors and have a really nice clean looking setup, the other big pro is that you’ll be able to use 3D Vision technology with the setup, from an immersion perspective this is just going to be insane.

The con list includes the fact you’re going to need an SLI setup to run surround gaming, be that with 3D Vision or not. This in turn will mean SLI compatible motherboard and bigger power supply which is going to hit the bank account. Now there’s also the fact that if you go for a 1920 x 1080 @ 120Hz Tri-Screen setup to use 3D Vision the amount of raw graphics power needed is going to be insane and exceed that of three 2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz displays, getting playable framerates isn’t going to be cheap.

One last con would be the fact that we’ve got this feeling that the maximum resolution for the technology is 1920 x 1080 @ 120Hz. What this means is that 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz, 1680 x 1060 @ 120Hz / 60Hz and lower should be supported but not 1920 x 1200 @ 60Hz and above. I write this separate to the last paragraph because I think as we get more information on the technology this won’t hold true but at the moment it doesn’t change the fact that this is how it feels reading the white paper.

For so many people this isn’t going to be an issue as multi monitor display setups are still a rarity; it’s clear the reason NVIDIA has done it though is due to the simple fact ATI offer EyeFinity, unfortunately the solution from NVIDIA feels like a bit of a bandaid one, it’s simply done because the competition offers it, and since NVIDIA didn’t expect it and it was too late to go back to the Fermi drawing board the technology is how it is because it was added last minute.

The reason I’m speaking about it so much thought is that I personally use a 3x 1920 x 1200 setup via EyeFinity. Buying new monitors wasn’t an issue for me as I was moving from a single 30″ and I didn’t want to buy two more 30″ monitors due to the huge amount of desk space I would need.

At the end of it all though for most people the most important feature Fermi will offer is performance, if they’re able to beat ATI, offer stock and offer us a reasonable price it will be a huge win. For this reason I can’t wait to attach a Fermi or three to my 2560 x 1600 testbed monitor and let it tear up some of the latest games available.