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What is COFES?

COFES is an annual event owned by Cyon Research Corporation, a think-tank consulting group focusing on strategic issues of the software industry for design and engineering. Cyon Research has been bringing the unique vision of COFES to a select group of international venues where they believe there is a significant opportunity for the event to trigger a leap forward for the industry. This COFES Israel Forum follows in the footsteps of the 2006 COFES India Summit and the September 2010 COFES Russia Forum.

Who Should Attend?

COFES Israel will break ground on the issues that everyone needs to discuss, argue, and solve. Attendees will include chief officers of manufacturing, engineering, architectural, and software development companies in Israel, who understand the needs that their businesses will face in the future. They will join with the technology elite from around the world who develop, market and guide the engineering software and technology that are in use today – and in the future.

Participants invited include industry leaders from major software companies including Autodesk, Bentley, Dassault Systemes, Intergraph, PTC, Siemens, SolidWorks, Cyon Research, Cambashi and more.

Key participants will include:

• Senior executives and experts from leading providers in the field of BIM/CAD/CAE/DP/PLM
• Senior executives from Israeli manufacturing, construction, and industrial organizations
• Analysts, media, and representatives from academia and government

Read more at Jon Peddie tech Watch

Or should we call them mighty midgets?

In late April AMD introduced the DirectX 11 Radeon HD 5550 entry-level Value Segment graphics AIB. It was well received and praised for its value, and performance. Introduced at $70 with 1GB of DDR3 and fanless, it represented a lot AIB for not too much money. Nvidia had their DirectX 10 GT220 to go up against it, and despite the hoopla of DirectX11 and a GB of memory on the AMD AIB, the older Nvidia AIB still managed to sell well.

Well better late than never, and now Nvidia has released their fanless DirectX 11 GB AIB, the GT430, at the MSRP of $70 and it’s serious but not overwhelming competition for AMD.

These AIBs are really terrific, and offer an amazing amount of features and capability.

Nvidia’s GTS has three outputs: VGA, HDMI and DVI, and they all work together. Nick Stam of Nvidia proved this by hooking up an Alienware 2310, which is a 19×10 120Hz monitor with HDMI, along with the Dell 30” DVI.

At first it didn’t come up in the Nvidia control panel because you have to activate the HDMI port on the monitor with its on-screen controls. Then it came up fine as a second monitor with both DVI and HDMI active. Stam tested both “extend the desktop” and “clone mode” and both worked.

He also made the HDMI the “primary monitor” and that worked just fine. Then he tried HDMI with VGA, and it worked fine, also switching which one was primary, etc.

While you can physically connect all three monitors to the board, and see all three show up in the Nvidia control panel, only two are active, and if you try to activate a third monitor, you get a warning that says “This GPU supports up to 2 displays.

The boards are similar in size, with the Nvidia GTS 430 a bit shorter. In both cases the VGA connector could be removed and the back plate replaced for a half-height configuration.

We tested the AIBs on a 3.2 GHz Phenom II, with 4 GB RAM and Windows 7, 64-bit. Performance-wise the two boards were close on the three tests we ran, as illustrated in the following charts.

Unigine Heaven

Unigine can be run in DirectX 10 or DirectX 11. For our testing we ran it in DirectX 11. The Unigine engine demo turns out to be a really wonderful benchmarking tool. It runs the most advanced rendering features supported by the graphics hardware. All modern features are supported by the Unigine renderer:

• Per-pixel dynamic lighting
• Normal & parallax occlusion mapping.
• 64-bit HDR rendering.
• Volumetric fog and light.
• Powerful particle systems: fire, smoke, explosions.
• Extensible set of shaders (GLSL / HLSL).
• Post-processing: depth of field, refraction, glow, blurring, color correction and much more.

Besides that, it uses and exercises:

• Shader Model 5.0 support.
• Hardware tessellation.
• SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion).
• Unique materials system with parameter hierarchy support.
• Vegetation system.
• Live water with a surf zone and caustics.

It also offers native support of stereo 3D devices (although we didn’t do any benchmarking in stereo). If Futuremark doesn’t get their act together and deliver 3Dmark DX 11 soon, they are going to be forgotten since Unigine is offering such a great test.

“Resident Evil 5”

“Resident Evil 5” only uses DirectX 10. We chose that game because it has pretty good graphics, a built-in benchmark, and most games right now are still DirectX 10. As a survival horror game, you can see the cheesy arcade game play designed for a console in it. As such it’s an OK benchmark for a PC, but it’s not a very nice or fun game, and its racial sexist overtones are pretty disgusting.

“Lost Planet”

“Lost Planet” is a three-year old DirectX 11 game that really stresses the graphics AIB. The game has a built in benchmark with a choice of A or B, A is DirectX 10, and B is DirectX 11.The primary purpose of Test B is to push the PC to its limits and to benchmark the maximum performance of the PC. It utilizes many functions of Direct X11 resulting in a very performance-orientated, very demanding benchmark mode. As the chart shows the game is not even playable with an entry level AIB in DirectX 11.

We summed all the scores to come up with an overall performance rating.

We then calculated the Pmark using $70 as the ASP for the AIBs.

Who buys this stuff?

As you know, the desktop PC market is segmented into two major categories: Consumer, and Commercial or Enterprise. Each one of those categories is segmented into two more categories: Integrated graphics, and discrete AIB graphics. And, as you’ve no doubt have heard, integrated graphics accounts for 70% of the desktop sales. But, more of the integrated graphics based PCs go to the commercial segment than the consumer segment. So that means it’s the consumer who is buying these low cost AIBs.

And, as mentioned, these $70 entry-level boards are half height and designed to lose the VGA connector if anyone wants to use them in a media center box. That’s a further indication that OEM and ODM AIB builders have targeted these low cost but powerful AIBs right at the consumer. Remember, the Fermi and Evergreen chips have pretty good video engines built into them. So if an OEM builds a media box with one of these in it, the experience is going to be fine. Also, these board’s GPUs have world-class scalers in them so they can accommodate almost any screen size., and they’ve got enough frame buffer memory and PCIe bandwidth that the video will be smooth, bright, full color, and never stutter.

There’s also the issue of geographic customers. For example, it turns out in the U.S. consumers who buy low cost PCs don’t think about adding graphics board or anything else for that matter so a low cost AIB is strictly an OEM deal AMD or Nvidia or their partners. In Europe, however, consumers are not only willing, but actually anxious to make upgrades. And in Asia, particularly in China, a “PC” is thought of as having a graphics board, and it’s even a cachet for a user to have such a thing. In Japan where houses are a bit more constrained, the PC has to serve several needs, and so a graphics board is a requirement there too. The net result is that although we are seeing some fantastic developments in EPGs and HPUs, there will still be a good market for entry-level AIBs in the consumer market.

What do we think?

For this test sequence AMD is the winner. Obviously other tests could be run (or some omitted) that might give different results, but we doubt there would be very much difference in the performance scores, and so when the Pmark is calculated, AMD would win because of its lower power usage.

From the consumer’s point for view, no one is a loser here, these AIBs are great value for the money.

Overall impression

These boards are great value for money. Their scores, physical size, price, power consumption are almost identical.

We summed all the scores (even the lousy ones from “Lost Planet”) to arrive at the performance numbers which are shown in Table 3 to use in the Pmark calculation shown in Table 4.

AMD gets a better Pmark score and that is because they beat Nvidia not only on power consumption, but also on performance.

But a consumer wouldn’t do badly with either board. So we give them both a thumbs up, just that AMD’s thumb is a bit higher.

Read more at Jon Peddie tech Watch

We tested two Nvidia workstation AIBs, the Quadro 4000 and Quadro 5000, and two AMD workstation AIBs, the FirePro V7800 and FirePro V9800, on four benchmarks: CineBench 11.5, SpecViewPerf 11.0, Redway 3D demo, and Unigine Heaven (on OpenGL). We tested the boards on Intel i7 6-Core, 12 threads @ 3.34 GHz system running Windows 7 64-bit. The results are shown in the following charts.

This procedure uses a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase (by renderbaron), which measures the performance of your graphics card in OpenGL mode. The performance depends on various factors, such as the GPU processor on your hardware, but also on the drivers used.

SPECviewperf measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL application programming interface. The benchmark’s test files, called viewsets, are developed by tracing graphics content from actual applications.

RedWay 3D Turbine contains a benchmark, which measures the raster and ray tracing performance of your hardware.

The Heaven benchmark is a GPU benchmark based on the advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp.

We took all the scores and added them up and produced a summary chart.

For the ViewPerf scores we took the average of all the scores, and for the Redway 3D we divided the scores by 100 to normalize them.

What do we think?

In terms of raw power the Nvidia Quadro 5000 is a clear winner on a perf per dollar basis (using our total score and the prices in the table) we found the Nvidia Quadro to be the winner.

Although game enthusiasts would never make a buying purchase on the basis of power consumption and care only about maximum performance, enterprise and SMB customers will take power consumption (and the associated fan noise) into consideration. Therefore we calculate the Pmark for the boards.

Pmark

Where:

• Performance is Total Score
• Price is expressed in US dollars
• Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

So Nvidia takes it all, raw power, performance per dollar, and even the Pmark. A clean sweep across all benchmarks.

Read more at Jon Peddie tech Watch

Benchmarking the Quadro FX 5000 with (for the first time) Viewperf 11

The Quadro 5000 is based on Fermi, Nvidia’s ambitious new architecture covered in detail in the pages of JPR’s Tech Watch and Workstation Report. But the 5000 doesn’t include the maximum number of processing cores the architecture touts. Where Fermi (for now) maxes out a theoretical 512 cores, the Quadro 6000 exploits the most, tapping 448 (similar to the GeForce GTX 470). Nvidia has likely chosen a reduced number to maximize yield and reliability for workstation applications.

With its 352 processing cores and 2.5 GB memory, the Quadro 5000 isn’t intended to be Nvidia’s top performer for the Fermi generation, leaving that role for the 6000. And that begs the question: why did we benchmark the 5000 and not the big gun, the 6000? Well, because at initial launch, only the 4000 and 5000 are immediately available, and we haven’t received a 6000 yet.

But make no mistake, at a $2,249 MSRP, the Quadro 5000 is supposed to be a performer, taking the place of the previous-generation Quadro FX 4800. And how well does the new Quadro 5000 fill the old 4800’s shoes? Quite well, it appears, based on the results of our Viewperf 11 benchmarking. The new model outperforms the old (roughly, based on a comparison to SPEC-submitted Viewperf 11 results for the FX 4800) for the majority of the viewsets by anywhere from 80% to 200%.

Interestingly, in the minority of viewsets where the 5000 didn’t achieve an 80% (or better) speedup, we actually saw performance flat, or even decline slightly. We’d imagine the decline was an anomaly, attributable to one of either: a still-not-completely-tuned driver not taking advantage of all Fermi can do, viewsets that are throttled by I/O, or the possibility that the graphics hardware is so fast that the system can’t issue OpenGL calls fast enough to make them bottleneck. The results do tend to illustrate Fermi has the potential for big speed gains, provided the rest of the system can keep up. And that makes an appropriate segue to SPECapc.

What do we think?

Nvidia’s Fermi has delivered a solid performance boost for conventional 3D graphics. The company touts 8X the geometry performance of the previous generation, a speedup that manifests itself in Viewperf testing. But especially in the context of competitive offerings from rival ATI, new Quadro products built on Fermi are ultimately going to win business based on more than just graphics performance. With a holistic architecture delivering unique features like ECC and 4X double-precision performance—and for the first time enabling a C++ programming environment for high-performance computing—Quadro can tackle a range of computational tasks well beyond rendering. And it’s precisely that proposition that should prove most appealing to prospective professional buyers: buy a high-performance graphics card and get supercomputer-caliber speedups for the many other challenging compute bottlenecks getting in the way of the day’s productivity.

Read more at Jon Peddie tech Watch

AMD has introduced their latest FirePro product for workstations, the V9800. The V9800 includes AMD’s Eyefinity technology that enables up to six independent displays. With this board, AMD is pledging allegiance to OpenCL. AMD’s graphics have an edge for the time being with support for DirectX 11. Direct X 11 brings hardware accelerated tessellation and multithreading to take advantage of multiple processors and DirectX 11 includes the DirectCompute environment and the ability to program to the GPU and the CPU to DirectX. It’s a short lead-time but AMD is making the most of it.

In order to achieve Eyefinity, ATI’s new FirePro boards sport six Mini DisplayPort outputs and requires Windows 7, Windows Vista or Linux for more than two displays.

The V9800 is the newest member of the ATI FirePro family, which also includes the ATI FirePro V8800, V7800, V5800, V4800 and V3800 WS AIBs.

Onboard GPU memory is a major enabler for advanced visualization and AMD has focused on this area for the V9800. The $3,499 workstation AIB has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and can provide an expansive desktop resolution of up to 5760 x 2160 to enable more multitasking and improve visualization applications. The single screen resolution tops out at 2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz. It also supports 30-bit color for wide-gamut displays.

ATI claims the ATI FirePro V9800 features significant performance increases over the previous generation of FirePro products, including 1.25x increased compute stream processor performance, and an increase of 2.27x in single- and double-precision performance. AMD says the ATI FirePro V9800, powered by its 1,600 stream processors—the industry’s highest number—is optimized for stream calculations with full support for OpenCL, DirectCompute, DirectX 11, and OpenGL 4.0.

Like the other products in the ATI FirePro family, the ATI FirePro V9800 offers support for stereo 3D capability, supporting active shutter glasses via the on-board 3-pin connector, as well as passive and auto-stereoscopic displays and projectors. Additionally, with support for the ATI FirePro S400 synchronization module, up to four ATI FirePro V9800 graphics cards can be synchronized (genlock, framelock), delivering up to 24 synchronized outputs from a single computer. The primary applications here are for large dataset visualizations for powerwalls and video wall applications.

What do we think?

AMD is taking aim on the workstation market and intends to regain lost ground. The company believes that its Eyefinity multi-monitor technology is going to cause even dedicated Nvidia-philes to take a look and is banking on its strategy of openness to give it a boost. For instance, AMD says their stereographic 3D technology will work with a variety of systems and 120/240 Hz monitors. In other words, they’re not promoting a proprietary solution like Nvidia does. Rather, they’ll work with vendors to create a system and so there may be different options for glasses and monitors. (There is argument, of course, that this approach further confuses the situation.) However, we do think that desktop S3D, which Nvidia helped pioneer with its proprietary glasses and board products and is now being taken up by AMD under the banner of openness, is going to advance the field of visualization by giving users easily accessible options.

AMD is also banking on DirectX 11 DirectCompute and OpenCL. DirectCompute is an open technology as long as you’re on Windows and OpenCL competes with Nvidia’s CUDA as an open technology to provide access to GPU processors. Nvidia and AMD support these technologies because vendors are looking for cross-platform tools and that includes Nvidia and AMD and Apple/Windows/Linux.

2010 and 2011 are going to be heady years for GPU Compute and by that we really mean heterogeneous systems employing both CPUs and GPUs because that is how the world is going to roll.

Read more at Jon Peddie tech Watch

Hey, I’m using the new Air Mouse Elite keyboard and mouse.

What it is

Wireless optical laser mouse with a gyro that works in mid-air. It uses ST Micro MEMs 3D motion sensors with a 2.4 GHz linked USB stub. It operates up to 100 ft away via the USB RF receiver. Connect it and the KB is like any wireless K-M.

Movea is a provider of motion processing chips, software, embeddable firmware, and IP for the consumer electronics industry. Movea’s is headquarterd in Grenoble, and offers Gyration branded CE products.

What we like

Very slick design, major improvement over the previous versions. Its responsive, motion-sensitive controls; easy set-up; lightweight and comfortable.

Gesture button in the center just below the wheel can be programmed for things like advancing a slide—hold it down, wave your arm to the right—next slide. Gyration calls it “swiping.” The gestures or swipes are all
programmable.

Three programmable buttons, in addition to air operation button in the center. All buttons are centered so it’s easy for a lefty or a righty to use and set up.

Keyboard is nice and thin, Mouse is nice feeling, fast, smooth, and it’s very precise. The mouse has built-in rechargeable batteries that recharge when you put the mouse in the recharging dock, similar to most other wireless mice.

Works on PC or Mac and even has labeled the special function key (to the right of the left shift) with a Windows, SpFx, and the squiggly Apple symbol.

And, it was a 2010 CES innovation honoree.

What we don’t like

Haven’t figured out how to use it with a TV yet.

Don’t like the initial feel of the keyboard—no palm pad, feels strange, and the keyboard uses batteries (two AAA)—why can’t we have an induction recharge keyboard?

Gets tiresome holding your hand out to manipulate web pages or director

What do we think?

The company is Movea, which was formed from the acquisition of the assets of Gyration by Movea SA. Movea SA is a spin-off from the French research institute CEA-Léti, and Movea licenses CEA-Léti’s motion-sensing technology. Gyration is the inventor and patent holder of gyroscopic motion-sensing technology for in-air navigation and cursor control on a screen. CEA is the French Atomic Energy Commission, created in 1945.

The Air Mouse is cool. Like any new tech, it trains you not vice versa, so you have be prepared for the learning curve. It should definitely make delivering presentations easier. You can use it for navigating media on your PC, not sure how useful that’s going to be—again that learning curve thing. It’s $105 in the US, a little higher than no-name K-M, but certainly not a budget buster. You can get just the mouse for $70.

Gyration also make a universal media center remote control and the company plans enable the gesture technology for TV control as well. Movea thinks that embedding its technology into remotes for set-top boxes can enable an interface that competes more effectively with computers pushed into a media-centre role, or even Apple-TV-type plays.

Read more at Jon Peddie tech Watch

As PC games become more and more demanding, gamers are often left behind, unable to play the games they want without spending a good amount of money on new computers and/or graphics boards.

What it is

OnLive, an online gaming service launched in March 2009 is trying to make this frustrating element of PC gaming a thing of the past. Founded by entrepreneur Steve Perlman, OnLive is attempting to change the traditional PC gaming experience, by allowing users to play games via cloud computing on any computer that meets the client’s lenient system requirements. All you need is a dual core system and a screen resolution of 1024×576—settings that most modern PCs have. Your system also needs to be connected to the Internet via direct cable. OnLive is also available to Mac users. On paper, OnLive seems to be the perfect solution for your everyday gamer, providing PC games to mainstream casual gamers who don’t have the technological prowess to play the latest releases via installation from clients such as Valve’s Steam or CDs. Sounds good right? Curious to see if the OnLive service is too good to be true, I conducted multiple tests on two different machines, using both cable Internet and DSL.

The first tests were done by running Ubisoft’s “Prince of Persia” on two different systems through a cable internet connection. The first system was an HP Compaq 2610p, equipped with 2GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 1.2GHz processor with Intel 965 IGP-UMA, with 1280 x 800 resolution in a 14.1 inch screen.

Being a pretty low-end laptop for today’s standards, I wanted to see how “Prince of Persia” would perform with OnLive on this mainstream-computing machine. Running at a steady 40 frames per second, “Prince of Persia” ran impressively on the HP laptop. Despite the steady frame rate, performance issues constantly arose whenever the Internet connection was anything less than perfect. Network error messages would appear about once every ten minutes. Whenever there was any sign of connection lag, the in-game music would skip erratically, and the graphics quality would go down the drain, becoming very pixilated and difficult to play. Even with these annoying issues, OnLive’s cloud system allows a demanding PC game to run on a low-end system that isn’t capable of running the game nearly as well if installed directly.

The second game I tested was “Defense Grid Gold,” a tower defense game that doesn’t demand much computing power. “Defense Grid Gold” consistently ran at a stable 41 frames per second, while sometimes going down to 39. OnLive’s Internet streaming system really performed well while running Defense Grid Gold. There weren’t any network problem notifications, graphical issues or moments of the sound skipping.

Now that I tested two OnLive games on a low-end laptop, I put it up against a high end gaming machine, equipped with the Intel Core i7 960 at 3.67GHz, two Nvidia GeForce GTX 480s and 6GB of RAM, with a 23 inch 1920 x 1080 Acer 120Hz monitor. Using this machine’s high-end hardware, “Prince of Persia” consistently ran at 59 frames per second. The graphics quality was clearer, with fewer network connection problems.

“Defense Grid Gold” ran at pretty inconsistent frame rates, going from 60 to 46 to 50 frames per second. Despite the ups and downs of the frame rates, “Defense Grid Gold” ran smoothly, without any network connection problems or issues with the graphics quality. Comparing the frames per second scores of “Prince of Persia” and “Defense Grid Gold” between these two different machines, it’s clear that hardware plays a role with OnLive. Although the HP Laptop played both games at consistent, playable frame rates, the higher-end desktop computer ran both games at higher frame rates, with less hiccups and network problems.

What do we think?

On paper, the concept of OnLive seems like the casual gamer’s dream. Instant access to a multitude of new games, without having to sacrifice hard drive space, or be fully up to date on today’s latest hardware. Despite this concept, there are some practicality issues with the OnLive client. The first: OnLive requires a direct cable Internet connection in order to run. I believe this is the client’s strongest downfall, because the majority of gamers using OnLive will be casual, low-end laptop users who will most likely be connected to WIFI networks the majority of the time—and OnLive does not currently support WiFi operation. It needs too many connection points for smooth delivery—but OnLive says they’re working on a solution.

Nowadays, it’s the big desktop gaming rigs that are typically connected to direct cable connections, computers that would most likely be capable of playing the games that OnLive has, regardless of the client’s streaming features. Although this statement is a generalization, more and more people of the casual computing mainstream are moving to mobile computing, leaving direct cable desktops behind. OnLive’s inability to work with WIFI networks almost makes it impractical to the everyday computer user.

The second issue with OnLive is its hunger for high speed Internet. Although this issue might seem erroneous due to the fact that OnLive streams games, the client’s demand for bandwidth on the fastest of Internet connections makes the service exclusive to only those who have access to such Internet speeds. Testing on an ordinarily fast direct-cable connection, network error notifications still popped up as graphics and sound quality declined.

Testing “Prince of Persia” on a DSL connection, network errors appeared about every five minutes, the graphics quality went down and the sound became garbled. Although “Prince of Persia” mostly ran at 40 frames per second, all of the problems I was having with an already fast cable connection became much more pronounced when I moved to the slower DSL connection.

Both of these problems considered, OnLive’s openness to casual gamers seem to be overshadowed by exclusivity. Once WiFi connectivity becomes available for OnLive, many more casual users will take advantage of its features. Although it’s unlikely that the client’s demand for bandwidth will decrease, progression to faster internet services will also allow more users to gain access to OnLive. OnLive has a lot of potential to grow into a great casual gaming client for the everyday gamer, but seems too far ahead of its time to compete with major game services such as Steam.

Last but not least, there’s no discount for using OnLive. Games cost just as much from OnLive as they do from Steam or a retail store, plus OnLive’s $15 month fee.

What we like

This is a hard one to call. We like the concept.

What we don’t like

We don’t like being tethered, and don’t like the added costs.

Best we can offer is a neutral on OnLive.

Read more at Jon Peddie tech Watch

Nvidia released their newest AIB this week. The GTS 450 is geared for the LAN gamer and those who are keeping a close watch on their discretionary spending—which is all of us these days isn’t it? The successor to the GTS 250, the GTS 450 is positioned to take on the ATI 5750 at the $130 range.

The GeForce GTS 450 standard clock is 783MHz for the GPU, however third party supplies will have over-clocked versions of up to 925MHz, standard versions can be over-clocked as well. The memory clock runs at 3600MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory with a 128-bit memory bus. We over-clocked the GTS to 900 MHz core clock and 2GHz (4GHz DDR) for the memory and saw a nice performance boost in our benchmarks and we still could have pushed it harder.

The GTS 450 has a 6-pin connector with two DVI ports and mini-HDMI. The GTS 450 is a dual slot card but its short 8.25 length makes it easy to install and doesn’t take up to much room in the case.

Nvidia is continuing with its character branding of cards: The GTX 480 is nicknamed “The Tank” for its heavy hitting capabilities, The GTX 460 as “The Hunter” and the GTS 450 is “The Sniper.” Nvidia believes that this branding has been popular with gamers and simplifies the OTC purchase process for the novice consumer.

Nvidia says that their research shown that LAN and causal gamers spend 90% of their game play time in the 1680×1050 resolution venturing up to 1920×1080—so this is where we performed our benchmarks. This board is specifically designed for “gamers on a budget who game on 17” to 22” monitors (resolutions of 1280×1024 to 1680×1050) and are looking for the best price/performance GPU at these resolutions across all DirectX APIs, including DX11.”

We benchmarked the GTS against the HD 5770 on a Phenom2 Black (6 core) system running at 3.21 GHz with 4GB of RAM and a 750 Power supply. We know the HD 5770 is a slight step above on the food chain coming in at $150 while the GTS is priced at the $130 price point—but we wanted to see how it stacked up. It did so very well: holding its own against the more expensive AMD board and surpassing it in some tests when over-clocked. The HD 5770 runs with a 850 MHz core clock 1.2 GHz memory with 1 GB DDR5. Next week we will run the GTS 450 against a pair of HD-5750s, and post that on our Mt. Tiburon Testing labs web page—Shawnee will notify you when it’s up.

While the HD 5770 slightly bested the new GTS 450 in our “Lost Planet” testing the GTS 450 outperformed the HD 5770 in Unigine Heaven.

What do we think?

The GTS 450 is welcomed addition. It has a price tag that appeals to the price sensitive user looking to have fun, get performance, but keep a little change. Nvidia needed to address the introductory side of the market and did so with a solid performer. The GTS 450 is poised to give the HD 5750 a run for its money. Next week we will be posting numbers of the GTS 450 running in SLi vs. The HD 5750 in Crossfire.

Read more at Jon Peddie tech Watch