Power and heat, your GPU nemesis

POWER CONSUMPTION and heat dumps in our systems have leapfrogged their way with the launch of the GTX 200-series and RV770s. Well, Planet X64 has gone off and rounded up several graphics cards from the green and red teams, testing their power efficiency versus overall performance.

Sean deems the HD 4850 the overall performance winner but, for example, a couple of HD 3850s in Crossfire draw the same power as a single HD 4850 and puts out the same amount of heat. Read this if you want to know what works out best for your rig – especially if you’re building an HTPC. Pity there isn’t a GTX280 or HD 4870 in the batch.

It's been officially out for a while now, but Hybrid SLI (780a MCP, in this case) is a matter not many enthusiasts want to get into. HardOCP however, did and came up with some surprising numbers. The board on test was the MSI K9N2 Diamond and Daniel thinks it's God's gift to AMD overclocking. Couple it with a latest generation Nvidia card and you get a really good – self-regulating – system. Overclocking was quite interesting. Daniel took a Phenom X4 9600 to just under 2.8GHz and an X2 6400+ to over 3.2GHz… oddly, memory overclocking was better with the Athlon than on the Phenom (integrated memory controller anyone?). Read it here.

Although building a network at home is a fairly simple deal, building one to support the taxing bitrates of HD video is something you’ll have to think hard about. That or read Small Net Builder's guide to building a really fast NAS. Tim is going DIY for this project, setting up his own box with a massive 4TB of storage space and Windows Home Server. This is Part 1; Part 2 to follow briefly.

Anandtech has something in the works that is bound to spark your interest. Anand himself is writing the article on the performance of H.264 Transcoding on Elemental’s Badaboom. Nvidia pulled this ace out of its sleeve a while back, but it’s taken its time to mature and reach this level. Performance-wise, an 8800GT will do the work almost four times as fast as an E6850 and a GTX280 is at least 3 times faster than a Core 2 Quad Q9450 at 1280x720 res. Unfortunately it’s still lacking a bunch of features we’re used to having on other programmes. Read the article here.

Foxconn's GeForce 9500GT is on test at Benchmark Reviews. It looks like its filling the gap between mainstream and low-budget gaming, with the common sense of having all the G96 family features. It doesn't require additional power, as it operates at 50W and even has SLI capability. It draws just 30W at idle and 104W at load, which bodes well. Performance and price, however, are a problem reckons Olin. Odd little card.

If you're a hardcore enthusiast rolling in money, you might be interested in Samsung's SyncMaster XL30 back-lit LCD, the one on test at Bit Tech. True, it's targeted at imaging pros, rather than gamers of movie-goers, but if money is no object, you won't mind dropping something close to £3,000 for this one. It even comes with Eyeone Display 2 hardware calibration device. It's lacking HDCP infection and has a single DVI input, so it's a bit of a no-no in the entertainment and gaming market (forget hooking up your gaming console). Get it here. µ