www.my10sen.com

ATI’s new 256MB Radeon HD 3850 graphics card is the best-performing 3D card in its price class. For $179, it will let you play most current 3D games at reasonable resolutions and detail settings. The Radeon 3850 now includes hardware support for DirectX 10.1. This means that these cards will be able to play any games that take advantage of the next iteration of Microsoft’s DirectX programming interface. This is fastest 3D card under $200, solid home-theater capabilities and supports multiple card configurations with up to four cards in the same PC. The Radeon HD 3850’s other new feature is its support for PCI Express 2.0. You can still use the card on current PCI Express motherboards, but when the PCI-E 2.0 motherboards hit, you’d gain added graphics data bandwidth.


Radeon HD 3850 also retains all of the highlights of the Radeon 2900’s core technology, which makes sense, as the core design of the 3850 is a derivation of that of the higher-end chips’. Mostly that refers to its suitability as a home-theater card. Like the Radeon 2000 cards, the Radeon 3850 is HDCP compliant, which means it can display protected HD DVD and Blu-ray content at resolutions up to 2,560×1,600 from your PC, if you have such an optical drive and a supporting monitor or TV.

It also comes with an integrated audio chip, which means via ATI’s specialized DVI-to-HDMI adapter, you can pump both video and audio over an HDMI cable to an HDTV. That greatly simplifies home theater PC installations. Like most modern graphics cards, the Radeon HD 3850 requires a direct connection to your PC’s power supply to run. All you need is a free six-pin power line and you’ll be set. This model comes in 256MB of 900MHz DDR3 RAM with a 667MHz core GPU clock. The faster Radeon 3870 comes with 512MB of DDR3 running at 1.2GHz, and with a 775MHz core clock.

As they’re modern graphics cards, each uses the unified processing pipeline, which means that shaders, geometry, and all other calculations flow through the same path, which can adjust dynamically depending on the workload for each process.

Intel is shipping an updated version of its dual-core Itanium 2 server processor, called Montvale. The successor to the Montecito chip that launched in the summer of 2006, Montvale sports a number of improvements over its predecessor. Produced on Intel’s venerable 90nm process, the seven-member Montvale line (six dual-core parts and one single-core) debuts at speeds of 1.42GHz to 1.66GHz.


Made using the same 90-nanometer (nm) process technology used to produce the existing Itanium 2 9000 series of processors, Montvale offers incremental improvements, including a faster front-side bus on some models and features that lower power consumption in certain situations and improve reliability. Itanium 2 processors are designed for high-end servers mainly used in specialized applications, such as finance and banking. The faster front-side bus and higher clock speeds in the 9100 series still offer respectable performance gains of around 19 percent over the 9000 series.

In addition to core-level lockstep and the 667MHz FSB, Montvale’s third new feature is demand-based switching (DBS). DBS is the Itanium version of Intel’s SpeedStep technology, which throttles down the processor’s clockspeed and voltage during idle periods in order to reduce power consumption.

Beyond Montvale, Intel is working on three future versions of Itanium. Tukwila, which will be manufactured using a 65-nm process and pack four processor cores on a single silicon die, will be released next year, Toh said. Tukwila will be followed by Poulson, a 32-nm chip that uses a new processor micro-architecture, and then a chip called Kittson.