GTX 280, 260 dissected for posterity

ALMOST TWO WHOLE MONTHS have gone since the GTX launch, but XBit Labs has finally dissected the GT200 marchitecture in the flesh (or silicon). It’s an interesting read, in particular if you consider the choices Nvidia made while developing this marchitecture, ie: massive monolithic core instead of dual GPUs and low yields as a consequence. There’s a lot of juicy stuff in there, and some things that really only peeps in the know have access to. Read all about it, the GTX 200-series isn’t half bad, it seems.

An experiment in HD 4850 overclocking is taking place at Hillbilly Hardware. George has done his own “TOXIC” thing with a Zalman cooler, plus a bit of the reference cooler and come out with a remarkably cool, highly-overclocked card. Simple enough if you can handle slicing a bit of copper and tweaking the card’s BIOS. Give it an inspection, right here.

Silverstone has a different breed of HDD enclosures, the RFID kind. Yeah, to unlock the secrets hidden within your drive all you need to do is carry around a plastic USB keychain with the RFID transmitter. The name of the beast is the TS01B Treasure, and it’s on display at Benchmark Reviews. You can buy the enclosure plus keys for a paltry $45.99. Not too shabby for 128-bit walkabout security. Read it here.

Nordic Hardware gets to enjoy the biggest LAN party in Europe – the DreamHack Summer 2008 event – and is reporting back on the mad overclocking they performed there. Crotale and Kinc set up a tri-SLI GTX 280 system with a massively overclocked QX9770 CPU – 5.6GHz, to be more precise. That’s 29547 marks in 3DMark Vantage, Performance mode. It’s good to see the pros at work…

Sanjin over there at Fudzilla has landed his first 55nm 9800GT. Yeah, last week we were looking at 65nm parts, and now, Monday the 4th, they magically shrunk (330mm2 to 270mm2). This Sparkle part takes advantage of the 55nm’s thermals to slap a passive cooling system on top. Actually they’d already done the review on the card, but GPU-Z had misreported the card as being built on the older process. Nice pics of the different shrinks, right here.

Metadot – creators of the blank keyboard – are at it again, they’ve just launched Das Keyboard Professional and it’s under examination at Hardware Logic. The maker says it’s the best thing under the sun (for typing), and the key mechanics will allow you to press up to 12 keys simultaneously and avoid lockups and bleeps. We can see gamers taking advantage of this, but Mr Lilly thinks this plank should stick to typing and not gaming. Get his full review, here.

Florent at Les Numériques has gathered up as many laptops as he could and tried to make heads from tails of what suits which task best, and warn you about those features that hype up the product, but do nothing for the user. The article stacks up all the current models in a nice table-like fashion and lets you consult their specs. French, here, English, ici.

Larrabee has been outted pre-Siggraph 2008. The hardware is far from finished, but Intel has been teasing some journos with some details on the upcoming chippery. The teasing goes on to detail that the more CPUs the merrier, and which CPU DNA is being passed on. But Larrabee will be a lot more than just hardware. It’ll require mobilisation in software development, and like Anand mentioned, game publishers need to see return on their investment – and at a quick pace.

We tracked down some sites so’s you can read everything that’s public about the matter. Here they are, in no particular order:

Anandtech

Tom’s Shardware

Extremetech

PC Perps

Hexus