It's Physx pack party time

THERE'S SOME SERIOUS DATA on that Nvidia Physx pack that’s a-comin’ at Guru 3D. You’ll want to know just what the hell is the Physx pack, and how it’ll work out for you. Hilbert gives you a “Physics in Gaming 101” class today. According to him, things have evolved quite a bit and now you have a great excuse to slot in your old graphics card and use it exclusively for the Physics factor. Sure your FPS might take a little hit, but according to Hilbert, Physx is already a very worthwhile technology, here.

It is a fact that DAAMIT has come a long way to balance the odds against the Green Goblin with its RV770 chip, but Crossfire has been stuck in a rut for a while. Hardware Canucks has a State of the Nation address for Crossfirex and all things considered, you’re better off today than you were a while back when it comes to Crossfire performance, stability and compatibility. You’ve got a blow for blow account of what’s right and what’s wrong with Crossfirex, right here.

The 3D Professor is back at it with a review of DAAMIT’s FirePro V5700 midrange professional graphics card. The card is based on the RV770, so a performance boost is in order. It also sports dual Display Ports for multiple hi-res displays. The Prof, as usual, focuses on professional apps like Catia, 3DSMax, SPEC, Cinebench and PC Mark. Although he didn’t have some V5600 (the predecessor) numbers on hand for comparison, he does have the SPEC numbers so you can compare it on the SPEC site. Now, what about that V3700 running in Crossfire, eh Prof? Catch the review here.

Sadly, we feel not enough has been said about Intel’s future relationship with Nvidia, in particular the X58-SLI liaison. FPS Labs has tried to uncover a bit of what will happen in the coming weeks. According to Thomas, Nvidia’s nForce 200 chip is expensive and it will add a lot of complexity to an already complex PCB – where mobo makers will be forced to increase the number of layers to route signals properly. Huge problem for everyone, raising the actual question: is it worth it just to get SLI?

TweakTown is testing an MSI GTX 280 OC card. The overclock on this card took the GPU clock to 650MHz (vs. the reference 600) and 2300MHz memory (vs. the 2200 reference). Results are shown in both Vista and XP, so you get a good idea of what to expect. The really good news is that the overclocked MSI card runs as cool and as quiet as its non-OC’d brethren… Consumption-wise its almost identical. Read Shane’s article, here.

If you guys and gals weren’t at all satisfied with the coverage of 790GX, insofar as it had few game tests, AMDZone threw a link our way. Their review includes not only the 790GX but a Phenom 9950 BE overclocked to 3.4GHz, which, seems like a very good overall OC just by playing with multipliers. Officially 790GX is the HD3300 graphics core, but AMDZone added an HD3450 for Hybrid gratification – it trounced the G45, 780G and 780a (Nvidia’s 8400GS IGP). Good stuff. µ