Nvidia's whole entire software suite is dangerous. There. That is the first and last time that I will parody a Busta Ryhmes song on this site.

Now to business. If you have the 196.75 GeForce drivers installed please uninstall them and revert back to the previous release (196.21) right away. 196.75 is so dangerous that Nvidia has pulled them from their site until they can be fixed. Here is a quote from Nvidia's driver download page:

196.75 Alert!
We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our website.

There is another HD 5000 series video card coming out this month. This one is being released in the 'sweet spot' between the 5850 ($300) and 5770 ($150) and if the reviews are any indication, the HD 5830 is well worth the money. It looks like if you decrease the AA level by one notch, the HD 5830 will net you the same amount of frames per second as the more expensive HD 5850.

Some of these boards are looking pretty sweet by the way.

Yesterday Nvidia launched this handy page that detailed their plans for PAX East and I was totally jazzed to see that the GTX 480 would be available for hands on enjoyment. I will make a point to stop by Nvidia's booth to get all the details on their new line. I was under the impression that the PAX East  appearance would be a sneak peek of the GTX 480, but it turns out that Nvidia is launching their new stuff on March 26th, which is the first day of the convention.

If you are attending PAX East and you want to hang out with me, leave your contact information in a comment to this post. I will remove your contact info before I approve your comment. Or if you prefer, you can use our contact form. None of you has ever had the courage to meet me in person yet, perhaps you will be the first!

I really hope that this falls into the better late than never category. The HD 5450 and HD 5570 were launched earlier this month and like some sort of immortal demon for whom time has no meaning, I just finished adding them to the site. These graphics cards are cheap DirectX 11 cards for your HTPC or workstation which are a return to GDDR3 and DDR2 memory for ATI.

I have been able to find the names of the graphics chip(s) that the HD 5670, 5570 and 5450 are using so for now I have tweaked the RV850 chip for each of these cards so that the fill rate and operation numbers all come out to match the advertised speeds. If any of you can find the chip names for these cards, please let me know.

I receieved a free copy of Dark Void from Nvidia (thanks Nvidia!) for the PC because it supports 3D Vision and PhysX but it turns out that it is a really bad game that is not fun at all. I was completely unable to shoot any UFOs during the opening of the game (which by the way is the worst opening for a game ever) even after tinkering with the controls for a long time. They should have called the game Dark Avoid, because you should avoid it.

According to the information Nvidia released, Fermi is going to be a geometry powerhouse and it will also do much better than the HD 5870 at tessellation. I think those of you are that are smarter than me will really be impressed by the fundamental design, so give this stuff a read.

For those of you who likes them newfangled video thingys, check these legit Fermi videos out. On that page Kyle does not say they are authentic, but he does say that on the bottom of this page.

There is now a sub $100 5,000 series video card available from ATI. According to the press release, a single HD 5670 has enough power to allow gaming on three displays using Eyefinity. If true, that is amazing. I will need to find a review that tests that assertion before I accept it as fact.

This release has occured at a very inconvenient time for me so I will not have enough time to get the necessary work done until Saturday. Perhaps by then there will be more than one HD 5670 model for sale on Newegg.

This is going to be a very short post due to the fact that I lost the original post that I worked on for about an hour because Nvidia's website crashed my browser. They are having problems with their News page due to CES I guess...

The only thing mentioned in the press conference that you folks would be interested in is that GF100 (Fermi) is "in volume production, ramping very hard and you can get a sneak peak of it here at CES." They also introduced 3D Vision Surround which is three 120Hz monitors arranged in a horizontal fashion. It is obvious that 3D Vision Surround is meant to combat ATI's Eyefinity technology.  

I am hoping that some more GPU related stories will come out of this year's CES, and if they do you can be sure that I will post them here for your reading pleasure.

Tweak News photographed a functioning Fermi engineering sample at Nvidia's booth.

Overclockers Club has a nice article detailing the future of 3D Vision that I found pretty interesting. Since I already have a 120Hz PC monitor and the 3D Vision glasses kit, I am in a pretty good position when it comes to watching 3D Blu-rays next year. I think I might get rid of my elderly DVD drive for a drive that can play 3D Blu-ray discs. I have also been thinking about getting a newer 120Hz HDTV that will allow me to use 3D Vision on a larger scale. If this 3D Blu-ray technology becomes a reality for me, you will be able to read all about my impressions right here.

When I went looking for a 3D Vision graphic to post here, I noticed that there are a lot more 3D Vision Test Drive Centers than there used to be. You can now try 3D Vision for yourself at 38 locations in 20 different states, so give it a go and tell us what you think.

UPDATE: Apparently "40 million homes" will have 3D TVs by 2014.

I will be attending Control Point Con 3 (CP Con 3) from December 31st through January 3rd in Huntsville Alabama. Control Point is a very popular Team Fortress 2 podcast created by the Dead Workers Party. I am an important member of the CP community and close friends with the hosts of Control Point. I'm also a host of the Left 4 Dead podcast for DWP called the Safe House.

Anyhoo, this Con will consist of LAN gaming, board gaming, Rock Band/DJ Hero/Guitar Hero gaming, an open mic night, a Rock Band contest and a farewell dinner. I will also be giving 3D Vision demonstrations of games like Left 4 Dead 2, Resident Evil 5 and Batman Arkham Asylum. Besides myself you can also meet Joe Hills and Art Frederick, the creators of Jack of all Blades, Ash Williams of Dumb Blonde, Dead , Shannon Saar the creator of the Wighthouse comic and the four totally awesome hosts of Control Point.

If you are near Huntsville or Alabama you should consider dropping by. You can hang out and have a great time for free, but if you want a schwag bag and if you want to attend the dinner, then it will cost you $6.00. If you are interested in this shindig, then you should join the Dead Workers Party forums where we are all talking about the Con.

The hotel the attendees are staying at is the Holiday Inn in downtown Huntsville. Most of the Con happens at Lowe Mill which is a very short drive from the hotel.

I am so engrossed by Left 4 Dead 2 right now that the launch of the HD 5970 has snuck up on me and it has bitten me on my ass. There is a large chunk missing from my metaphorical ass right now.

Even though Left 4 Dead 2 is like the most fun ever, I am going to add the reviews and cards to the site tonight before I allow myself to be entertained by my zombie murder simulator.

UPDATE: I have added all the cards and reviews that I could find. Now I get to go play.

I was just adding this watercooled Powercolor HD 5870 to our system when I noticed that Newegg has implemented a new product viewing system. The horizontal slider rotates the product and you can also zoom in on the product at any angle. The zoom is almost powerful enough to allow you to read the small print on the PCB. Here are some products that feature this new stuff:

Powercolor HD 5870 LCS

Evga GT 220

XFX HD 5750

Galaxy GT 220

Sapphire HD 5750

I wanted to post about this on Monday when I found the card in our parser, but I've been way too busy at work. I am totally posting about it now though! Evga has constructed a GTX 275 that features an added GTS 250 core for PhysX processing duties. This is a very unique thing to do and while I do think it is pretty cool, it makes the job of adding this card to our database harder. When creating a new reference card in out database we can only enter one GPU model for it. So the only thing I can do is add the card to our GTX 275 list and enter (+GTS 250 core) in the card name.

If you're interested in trying this card out for yourself, you can pre-order it now from Evga for $349.99. This one of a kind card comes with a coupon for a free copy of the totally sweet Batman Arkham Asylum game for the PC as well.

PC Perspective Article

I was on vacation yesterday (I had the day off from work) so I was kinda surprised to see that I had three new cards to the site today. This morning I got all my work on the HD 5770 and HD 5750 completely done and I setup the GT216 chip, GT 200 series and I created the GT 220 page. Now I am about to start adding the GT 220 cards, reviews, and Newegg links. It's not easy to balance my work on the site with the work I do at my real job, but I do it all for you dear readers.

The shiny Sapphire HD 5750:

Here's your HD 5850 overclocking results. Congrats to the team at Guru3D (once again) for their stunning victory. They almost managed to get the HD 5850 to the reference HD 5870 speeds.

Looks like the HD 5850 reviews are hitting the presses today. I'll get as many as I can linked up on this page right now, and later I'll post another overclocking roundup. I bet this overclocking roundup will be very interesting.

[H]ard|OCP has a pretty nice video review of AMD's Eyefinity tech and seeing as how I am a very visually oriented person, it really caught my attention. I was not being sarcastic Mr. Cutter when I said "Color me excited and intrigued." Did the [H] dig it? Perhaps...

Apparently since the 186 GeForce drivers, Nvidia has disabled PhysX processing if an AMD video card is being used for the graphics processing. That is just not cool at all. I agree with Unknown-One's statement, "Ok, so don't support it, but don't go out of your way to disable it!". If this was my decision, I would make sure that PhysX works very well in this configuration so that the user can see the value in my company's technology. Perhaps then the user might be presuaded to buy a video card from Nvidia the next time around. What do you guys think?

Here is Nvidia’s customer care center entry about this situation:

Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons - some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non- NVIDIA GPUs.

It's the headless body of Spiro Agnew!

Here's your HD 5870 overclocking results. Congrats to the team at Guru3D for their stunning victory.

Ah launch day. How I have missed thee. It has been almost 5 months since the last video card launch we covered (the HD 4770). Well AMD is back bitches! And by the looks of these reviews, they have succeeded in raising the bar in several graphical areas while also using less power than the HD 4890!

I have the HD 5870 and HD 5850 pages up and I have added all the cards and reviews that I could find at the moment. I have not had time to read through many reviews yet but I have a few things I would like to share with you. Check out the comparison pics at the top of this page. The HD 5870 has drawn an almost perfect circle all the way through the rainbow tunnel of happiness! TechPowerUp created a seconday article about how the HD 5870 handles decreased PCI-E bandwidth. And finally Hexus and TweakTown were able to do some CrossFireX testing.

Sometime later today I will put together an overclocking roundup and I will also get some Newegg links connected.