Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

It looks like NVIDIA may have a special treat (of sorts) for gamers in China, as DigiTimes is reporting that the company is now selling a 128-bit version of its GeForce 8400GS in the country, something that apparently wasn’t on its original roadmap. According to DigiTimes, “sources at graphics card makers” say that the new chip is “very similar” to NVIDIA’s GeForce 8500GT, with the only apparent difference being that it operates at a lower core frequency. Those same sources are also apparently speculating that the “new” 8400GS could in fact simply be GeForce 8500GT chips that did not pass testing and were then downgraded in order to clear them out. For its part, however, NVIDIA doesn’t seem to be saying anything about the matter.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This

Filed under: Gaming

Clearly due to the current heat on Microsoft concerning the Xbox 360 RROD, disk scratching, and overheating scandals, Sony’s Dave Karraker is mooning on the company’s official blog over a recent PS3 Vault “stress test” called “How to kill a PS3 console” which showed the company’s game system to be surprisingly resilient in the face of extreme conditions. “A lot of noise has been made recently about the reliability issues of one of our competitor’s systems,” Karraker said, then went on to kick some sand in Redmond’s eye by adding “Did it fail? Nope. Like the Energizer Bunny, it kept going and going and going.” Admittedly, the tests — which included running games and Blu-ray movies for 108 hours in a typical “living room” environment, placing the console in a freezer van then lowering the temperature from 50 degrees to zero, and powering the PS3 in a sauna where heat increased from 100 degrees to 120 degrees over a nearly three-day session — were quite extreme. In the end, however, the testers say besides being “extremely hot” after coming out of the sauna, the system is running fine and back in regular use. Microsoft, the ball’s in your court.

[Via DailyTech]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This

Filed under: Gaming

Well it appears that despite all of our wishing, hoping, and positive-thinking exercises, Microsoft has failed to deliver on a small dream of ours, namely, 65nm chips for the new HDMI-rocking Xbox 360 Premiums. Despite signs pointing otherwise, new photos show that this batch of systems continue to carry the Zephyr motherboard layout, which uses the older, hotter 90nm chips, though the boys in Redmond have addressed the heat issue a little bit with the addition of a second “daughter” heatsink attached to the CPU by heatpipe. The new 65nm “Falcon” boards — which chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) confirmed are in production — are still on their way according to the rumor mill, slated for release sometime this Fall. Interestingly, Microsoft and TSMC have just laid plans to produce the Xbox’s graphics-memory subsystem using the chip manufacturer’s 90nm embedded DRAM spec. We won’t speculate on when we’ll start seeing that addition appear, however.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Share This