Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Call me a nerd but I like my coolers. Whether it is a CPU or GPU cooler I get a little excited when buying one. In fact I have spent dozens of hours and probably hundreds over the years tweaking my media PC to be as quiet as possible. One of the hardest things to cool and keep quiet has always been graphics cards, there are just not as many quiet solutions as I would like. You end up in limbo between performance and heat issues.

Thermaltake have just released their Fanless 330 0dBA, the VGA cooler is specially made for hardcore gamers who demand quiet cooling device for their high-end video cards.

It claims to be able to work on nVidia cards up to 9600GT & 8800GT and ATI cards up to HD 3850 Series.

Ok so they are not the top end Graphics Cards but lets be honest you are never going to have a high end silent gaming system.

It is a shame that the Cooler does not work on the ATI HD 4670 as Bit Tech gave this an excellent review and it looks like it would make a great card for a media PC and it uses less power than a BFG Tech GeForce 9600 GT so excessive heat should not be that much of an issue.

Features of this cooler include:

- Completely Silent - Fanless design gives no noise operation
- 3 Heatsink Modules in One - 4 heatpipes & 106 fins make 3 single heatsink modules
and get multiple cooling performance
- Completely Silent – passive fanless design makes no noise but also good cooling effect
- Dual Layer Structure with 3 Heatsink Modules : conducts heat effectively from GPU and
gets more surfaces to dissipate

AMD today introduced the ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, raising the performance bar for graphics cards priced at less than $150 (USD).

Like all ATI Radeon HD 4800 series products, the new offering delivers game performance and HD multimedia capabilities, as well support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games.

The ATI Radeon HD 4830 cards will also support ATI CrossFireX technology allowing gamers to combine as many as four cards in one PC.

NVIDIA have finally enabled PhysX support via a free GeForce Power Pack download that contains a free full copy of Warmonger, three PhysX-enabled Unreal Tournament 3 maps, demos of Metal Knight Zero and the Nurien UT3-based social networking service, and a couple tech demos.

As you may know Nvidia bought Ageia and the PhysX engine in February 2008 effectively rendering the PhysX add-in card redundant. PhysX is currently the only available solution for physics hardware acceleration.

Download the GeForce Power Pack

Ok so the details are a bit thin on the ground and the pictures are a little uninspiring as the unit is not branded. However some basic details on the new 9800 GX2 have been leaked.

This new NVIDIA graphics card is essentially a 8800 GPU using the 65nm Fab Process and in SLI on a single card. This will make it similar to the old 7950 GX2 and may support Quad SLI.

The Geforce 9800 GX2 will include:

1GB Frame Buffer

Two PCBs

Two 65nm GPUs

256 Stream Processors.

This information was from [H}enthusiast and they believe it to be trustworthy.

We previously announced that nVidia was about to launch the new 8800 GTS 512Mb after nVidia accidentally added it to there product page. As of today nVidia has officially launched the card. As with the new 8800 GT this card is this card is based on the G92 architecture which uses a 65nm fabrication process.

nVidia has been making a bit of a mess with its naming conventions as the performance of each set of cards can vary wildly. The 8800 GTS is possibly the main suspect, there are currently 3 varieties out already. 2 using 96 stream processors with 320 and 640 MB respectively and 1 with 112 stream processors with 640 MB. The 96 Stream processor 8800 GTS had 1600MHz (effective) memory clock with 64GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The new 8800 GTS which uses 256-bit memory interface, hence 512MB, uses a 1940MHz (effective) memory clock with a memory bandwidth of 62.08GB/sec.

The old 8800 GTS had 6 shader clusters each featuring 16 stream processors, 4 texture address units and 8 texture filtering units adding up to 96 stream processors, 24 texture units for addressing and 48 for filtering.

The new 8800 GTS has 8 shaders, 16 stream processors, and 8 units for both texture addressing and texture filtering. This results in more shader and texturing power than the 8800 Ultra. Putting it simply the card is quite a bit cheaper than a 8800 Ultra but should manage to compete in terms of performance (with memory bandwidth limiting performance slightly).

Bit Tech have had chance to do a review of some of the new units with some excellent results. If you are really interested in the performance of these cards I would recommend you read their review.

Some of the main findings from the review included that the card had less power usage than the 8800 GTS 320MB while idle and slight higher under load. This is mainly due to the new 65nm process.

Overall the performance was very similar to the GeForce 8800 GTX while managing to be quite a bit cheaper than the GTX. The GTS should retail for about £220 inc VAT with the GTX being around the £280 mark.

If you are using a large monitor 1920x1200+ and your budget handles it, it is still recommended to use the 8800 Gtx or Ultra due to their increased memory bandwidth.