AGEIA Physics Processing Unit previewed

PURE OVERCLOCK pits the Connect3D X700 Pro against the XFX 6600GT graphics solution. Both of those cards are slightly above the £125 mark and represent probably what most budding gamers will be buying. Both are good overclockers even if the XFX has the edge. The XFX 6600GT seems is head and shoulders above the competition at this price it seems. It even manage to outperform the X700 in HL2.

Singaporean extreme clockers VR-Zone have a one page article on voltage modding the new 512MB Geforce 6800 Ultra. It involves soldering variable resistors as well as playing with some more stuff. Be sure though, as they point out, that you cool your card adequately.

Hardwarezone checks the Gigabyte GV-RX85X256V-B video card which is a X850XT PE version. A 540MHz monster with 1.18GHz memory. HWZ calls it s Vanilla Radeon card rather than one being innovative. It has a poor overclocking performance even if it has some decent softeware titles. Have a look at the HIS ICEQ II rather.

Another Gigabyte video card gets checked at R&B. The GV-RX80256D features the silent pipe cooling technology which is a lightweight and silent approach to active cooling. Granted it is slower than the top end but for a card that combines a honest price, good performance and silence, it is worth a praise, especially if O'c is of no interest to you.

Russian website Digital Daily reviews the Chaintech AE6800 SLIed Apogee Turbo Version. It has faster 2.5ns memory modules as well as 256MB memory. Cooled by Arctic Cooling and separate aluminium radiators and bundled with some good games like Painkiller, Max Payne and Serious Sam2. An overclocked version (450/850) reaches almost X800XL speeds.

Hothardware checks something really hot this time. The Sapphire ATI Radeon X850XT PE will help you build the fastest AGP Rig on earth - no SLI here. They succeeded in overclocking the card to 574/1200 which helped them getting one or two frames. Nothing fatal.

Xtremeresources analyses the Crucial Radeon X850XT PCI-e video card under all possible angles and gives us a useful guide to it. 256MB of GDDR3 memory, twin slot version, a huge fan with exhaust and a price to go with it. No ATI Rage Theater though; strange omission.

PC Perspective has a preview of the forthcoming new graphics revolution. Not the G70 or the 520 but the AGEIA PhysX PPU for Physics processing unit, which promises to revolutionise your games the way 3DFX did it one decade ago. They have some photos and illustrations as well as disadvantages of such a system. Does it means that Integrated Graphics might one day become playable? µ