Nvidia has just launched its latest 28nm Kepler graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 670.

The follow-up to the terribly powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 represents the second tier of its new generation of graphics cards and it's quite a beast.

Running the same GK104 GPU as the top-end GTX 680 (and the dual-GPU GTX 690) it has all the Kepler goodness its big brother boasts.

Nvidia has also allowed card manufacturers full access to the spec prior to launch, so we should see overclocked versions on release, like the Zotac GTX 670 AMP! edition.

All the GTX 670 is missing from the new architecture is a single SMX module. That means it's down 192 CUDA cores, but that still gives it a rather beefy 1,344 of the tiny processors.

And more importantly it means that, in performance terms, the GTX 670 is only just shy of the gaming frame rates the more expensive card can offer.

Considering the Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 is nearly £100/$100 cheaper than the GTX 680 that's not a bad return.

That £330/$400 price tag puts it in the same ballpark as the AMD Radeon HD 7970, AMD's top graphics card, and the GTX 670's performance puts that card to shame.

Interestingly the SLI performance of the GTX 670 makes the £830/$1,000 Nvidia GTX 690 look even more expensive. You're getting very close in performance terms for a lot less cash.

Sadly though £330/$400 is still a lot of money to be paying for a second tier card; that's been top-end territory up until the last two generations.

Given the performance of the Kepler-based cards though we can't help but be excited about the future release of the lower-caste Kepler cards.

Fingers crossed we'll see the Nvidia GTX 660 after the Summer slump before the gaming glut that drops with the leaves in the Autumn.

We've gone to town in our Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 review, with both standard and SLI testing on show.

Most laptops being updated to Intel's Ivy Bridge processors have come from international brands, so it may be some relief to European PC buyers that Acer's local Packard Bell badge has made the leap as well. The 15.6-inch EasyNote TV and 17.3-inch LV will each use the new 22-nanometer processors both to push performance that little bit farther as well as get a middling five hours of battery life. NVIDIA graphics in GeForce GT 620M and 630M flavors will spruce up the gaming side, however, and Packard Bell is delivering a 20 percent more responsive multi-touch trackpad, dedicated music / social keys and a bamboo-like lid pattern to add a little dose of style. The duo will surface in Europe during June at prices starting from €499 ($656). Acer has sometimes brought Packard Bell PCs to the US as roughly equivalent Gateway models and vice versa, so Americans shouldn't be surprised if they get counterpart laptops before long.

Packard Bell EasyNote LV, TV laptops bring Ivy Bridge to speed-hungry Europeans originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 May 2012 06:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The wait for Vizio's first PC range we first saw at CES may feel like an eternity, but our friends at the FCC have made that wait a little shorter with a pair of approvals. Both the wireless keyboard and its equally cable-free trackpad companion have been given clearance to pair up with your future all-in-one desktop when it reaches the US. There's even a clue as to the release timing baked into the filings: Vizio wants manuals and photos for both kept secret until July 31st to protect the "actual marketing of the device," suggesting we might have our designer PCs in hand by then. You're looking at the keyboard above, and you can read through for a view of the trackpad.

Continue reading Vizio keyboard and mouse roll through the FCC, PCs may ship by July 31st

Vizio keyboard and mouse roll through the FCC, PCs may ship by July 31st originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 May 2012 10:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kodak and Samsung have announced a partnership which will see the pair work together on printers for the European market.

Consumer all-in-one inkjet printers from Samsung will use Kodak's printer and proprietary ink technology.

Previously, Samsung had not been present in the inkjet printing market, only offering laser printers up to now.

Printing technology

The company said that it would benefit from Kodak's experience of inkjet technology.

Earlier this year, Kodak, the iconic photography brand, announced it was stop making cameras to concentrate on its printing business.

Kodak has sued Samsung in the past for patent infringement relating to its imaging portfolio, but Kodak called the new partnership a "win-win" situation which allowed Samsung to take advantage of Kodak technology with the already successful Samsung brand.

The company will continue to invest and market its own range of All-in-One Printers, along with Kodak ink cartridges and inkjet paper.

It is thought that the new printers have already gone on sale in Germany.

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Kodak embraces Google Cloud with new printer line-up

Nvidia GTX 690

The lid has been lifted on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 690. It's undoubtedly the fastest graphics card on planet. And it's priced at an utterly offensive $1,000.

That means that in the UK buyers should be looking at roughly £700 - still a whopping amount - but UK enthusiasts are actually going to have to pay £830 for this dual-GPU monster.

This is offensive not because it rules out the vast majority of the PC gaming population. That, I'm afraid, is life. Porsche prices me out of the wonderous 911 GT3 RS 4.0 to the tune of about £120,000. I make do with a battered Boxster worth perhaps five per cent as much.

The thing is, the RS 4.0 has some seriously high end hardware. And I'm not sure you can say the same of the GTX 690. It's based on a pair of GTX 680 chips in tag teaming SLI configuration. The GTX 680 is the fastest single GPU you can buy, so a pair of them makes this very likely the quickest dual-GPU board on the market.

I haven't tested a 690 yet, but I'm happy to go along with the performance claims. But here's the rub. The GK104 chip that underpins both the 680 and 690 boards is not a high end chip. In fact, at around 300mm2 it's actually smaller than Nvidia's old mid ranger found in the GeForce GTX 560 which measured 360mm2 and can be had for as little as £150.

GK104 is good enough

The GTX 580 – a pukka flagship beast - weighed in well over 500mm2. It's very likely Nvidia has a high end graphics chip derived from the same architecture as GK104. And it's almost definitely much, much larger. Some rumours suggest Nvidia has had problems getting it working. Just as likely, Nvidia hasn't released it because it doesn't need to.

As things stand, it turns out GK104 is good enough to beat all comers. So Nvidia finds itself in the very happy position of being able to sell a mid-range chip at high-end prices. Given that GK104 is smaller than the chip it replaces, the profit margins must be pretty spectacular.

Now, I fully realise that Nvidia is not a charity. It every right to price its products however it wants. And in the short term, pricing GK104 in the stratosphere probably makes sense. But equally, I've every right to be offended that Nvidia isn't passing on at least some of the fruits of its success to loyal customers.

More to the point, I'm not convinced it's necessarily the right thing to do commercially. Currently, GeForce GTX 680 boards are priced around £400 and up with the GTX 690 likely to hit £700. The number of potential customers thin out very rapidly indeed at that level. Hardly anyone buys £400-plus graphics cards.

Equally, those super-high stickers also leave plenty of room for Nvidia's main rival AMD to operate. Admittedly, the graphics chip inside an AMD Radeon HD 7970 measures over 350mm2 and it's not as fast as GK104. But there's plenty of room under £400 to sell 7970s and make money.

What I'd like to see is GeForce GTX 680 at under £250, which is the price point the GK104 chip would have originally been aimed at before Nvidia realised AMD had under delivered this time around, and stick the GTX 690 up at around £400.

They'd sell a shed load – of 680s, at least - and really put the pressure on AMD, which would struggle to make money out of a bigger but slower chip if it was forced to push its pricing down towards £200.

It's particularly odd given that the high end PC segment is currently in decline as all the attention – and money – shifts to mobile computing devices including tablets and smartphones. Why not remind punters what a great platform the PC is by offering fantastic, console-crushing technology at prices they can actually afford?

As it is, the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 and its single-chip GTX 680 sibling are pretty much irrelevant.

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Not willing to let the new Alienware lineup have all the fun with Intel's Ivy Bridge rollout, Dell has seen fit to trot out a pair of new desktop systems using the new 22-nanometer chips. The XPS 8500 is arguably the center of attention here and comes with your pick of the third-generation, quad-core i5 or i7 processors, along with a new choice for a 32GB or 256GB solid-state drive to cut down on those pesky loading times. The more sober-minded among us can opt for the Vostro 470 business desktop, which skips over the raw video prowess of its rebellious XPS cousin in favor of supporting up to 32GB of RAM, not to mention stacking up the extra security and support that makes IT administrators happy. Should you want to take the plunge, $750 will get you into the XPS 8500 fold, while $550 is all it takes for the Vostro 470 line. Head in past the break for a video peep at both PCs.

Update: we've included the full press release after the break.

Continue reading Dell spreads the Ivy Bridge love to new XPS 8500, Vostro 470 PCs (video)

Dell spreads the Ivy Bridge love to new XPS 8500, Vostro 470 PCs (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 May 2012 06:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The My Book Live Duo is one of the best PC or Mac backup drives around – and we recently gave you the chance to win one of the £300 dual-drive devices thanks to Western Digital.

The four winners are:

Toby Ellis – 61 points Maria Molly Taylor – 52 pointsCiaran Gallagher – 37 points Catherine Owen – 32 points

Congratulations to all the winners - you'll be contacted directly through a personal Facebook message in the very near future to organise delivery of your prize!

What they won

The My Book Live Duo's greatest asset is its Personal Cloud access – meaning you can access your files from any internet connected PC, Mac, tablet or smartphone wherever you are!

The Duo's two drives mean your data is always protected – it uses RAID to ensure that even if one drive fails, your files and folders will still be safe. Half the capacity is used to store your data and half is used for a second copy.

What's more, with 4TB of storage, you'll have no problem fitting all your documents, music, movies and photos onto the My Book Live Duo.

For automatic backup Windows users can use the included WD SmartWare software and Mac users can use OS X's built-in backup app Time Machine.

My Book Live Duo connects to your home network to create shared storage, while you can also access your My Book Live Duo on any computer through WD2go.com. There are also WD mobile apps for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. You can also stream movies, photos and music to any DLNA-certified multimedia device such as a PS3 or internet-connected TV.

Western Digital on Facebook

At the Nvidia Game Festival 2012 in Shanghai, Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang pulled back the curtain on the GeForce GTX 690 graphics card.

The company teased the GTX 690 successor earlier this week, and didn't disappoint with the announcement of the successor to the high-end, power efficient GTX 680.

According to Nvidia, the 690 will outperform the 680 in speed, noise reduction, and (chiefly) power efficiency.

However,The 690 will over-perform in price when it becomes available in select stores May 3 for a cool $1,000 (compared to the 680's price of $650).

Nvidia asserts that the cost is well worth the graphical gain.

"When Nvidia set out to build the Kepler GPU architecture more than four years ago," said James Wang of Nvidia, "our primary focus was power efficiency. We found that processors were increasingly being limited by the amount of power they could consume and dissipate.

He continued, "The only way to improve performance was to be able to do more work with the same amount of power."

Thixomolding performance

The specs on this card boast similar components to the GTX 680, but do away with excess noise, heat, and power consumption.

The hearts of the GTX 690 are two 28 nanometer Kepler GPUs, boost-clocking in at 1019 MHz and utilizing 3,072 Cude cores.

It also sports 4GB of GDDR5 memory, though Nvidia said that with FXAA and Adaptive V-Sync on-board, tearing and stuttering are a thing of the past.

This beast can also be paired with another GTX 690 to run up to four 2560x1600 displays. Nvidia's tests claim that with Quad SLI enabled, Battlefield 3 runs at more than 120 fps, Crysis 2 runs just under 100 fps, and Metro 2033 (apparently the most graphically demanding game of this generation) at 56 fps.

And for those unsatisfied by performance alone, the GTX 690 looks as smooth as it (reportedly) runs.

Descriptions like "trivalent chromium-plated aluminum" and "thixomolded magnesium alloy" mean that this graphics card was made with light metals, and "laser-etched LED lighting" means it glows.

Loaded jargon aside, the GeForce GTX 690 has all the purported statistical trappings of the world's fastest graphics card.

Hardcore gamers with high-end rigs and higher-end hardware budgets can look forward to playing at unprecedented speeds May 3, with Nvidia's add-in card partners following suit on May 7.

Via Engadget, Nvidia

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Nvidia's GTX 680: more power, less juiceUpdated: 15 best graphics cards in the world todayIn Depth: The past, present and future of multi-GPU technologyOpinion: Nvidia's $1,000 GeForce GTX 690 is awesome but offensive

Is it time to give up on traditional CPU performance and embrace alternative methods?

That's what I've been pondering of late thanks to Intel QuickSync video feature, reprised in its latest Ivy Bridge processors, the Intel Core i5-3750K and the Intel Core i7-3770K.

QuickSync, of course, is far from new. It's in Intel's previous Sandy Bridge generation of CPUs and therefore it's been around for over a year. But in raw performance terms, it was still the most impressive single feature in the new Ivy Bridge processors.

In part that's because Ivy Bridge brings very little extra in terms of plain old CPU performance, something that I see becoming more and more of a trend as Intel switches its focus to mobile and ultramobile computing. But there's more to it than that.

For my testing, I transcoded an hour-long full-HD episode of a certain swords and just-a-little sorcery that's proving popular at the moment. Using the four CPU cores in the 3770K, which is the fastest of the new Ivy Bridge chips, the task takes around 10 to 15 minutes depending on setting.

Not bad and probably four or five times faster than you might expect from a typical PC with a dual core chip with a couple of years under its belt. However, flick the switch on QuickSync and accelerate the work in hardware and the time tumbles to just a few minutes.

In other words, it's become quick enough to do as a last moment thing before you pop out the door. Fancy catching up on your favourite show in the train that day? No real planning required. If you remember that you wanted to do it at all, you've probably got time thanks to QuickSync.

What about AMD and Nvidia?

Of course, there are a few provisos. Intel does make more powerful PC processors than the 3770K. The Intel Core i7-3960X, for instance, has six cores and will give you around 30 per cent better performance in CPU-encoding mode. But that's still miles off the performance of the 3770K using QuickSync. And the 3960X is based on a server-derived architecture and completely lacks the QuickSync feature.

It's also intriguing to note that QuickSync performance holds up pretty well in lower spec Intel processors. I've a pretty weedy Ultrabook knocking about that will transcode video at about half the pace of the 3770K in QuickSync mode. That means it's faster than that 3960X as it brute forces the job in its six cores.

The marketing suits at AMD and Nvidia would of course argue that they've been offering similar capabilities via their discrete graphics chips for yonks. Which is true. But not everyone has discrete graphics. Integrated graphics is where the market is at for the most part. Moreover, it won't be too long before the vast majority of client and consumer PCs have QuickSync capability in some form or vintage.

No the real problem with QuickSync is software support. It's gotten better since the disappointing pair of applications available at launch a year or so ago (here's a list of the most popular QuickSync applications.

But QuickSync will only be really effective fro most people when compatibility is virtually 100 per cent, when the whole thing is almost invisible to end users. It just works, no need to click boxes or check settings.

In the meantime, it's an absolutely killer feature for those in the know.

Ivy got news for you

Intel's boffins have been busy: the chip goliath has released its latest quad-core processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge. The codename is much better than the real name, which is "3rd generation of Intel Core Microarchitecture".

The tech behind Ivy Bridge is impressive — where Sandy Bridge processors used 32nm architecture, Ivy Bridge uses Intel's 22nm Tri-Gate technology — but is it a great leap forward? Jeremy Laird isn't convinced that it is.

"As predicted, Ivy Bridge is a case of no more cores. Four is your lot," he says. That's not a big deal - "the future of PC processing probably doesn't involve an inexorable rise in the core count" - but Ivy Bridge is "not nearly as good as it could have been. Instead, it's been carefully positioned to be merely as good as it needs to be."

As Laird explains in his in-depth analysis, "Ivy Bridge is not all new. On the CPU side, not a lot has changed". Ivy Bridge does get more graphics power, but that's about it. That "begs the question of whether Ivy Bridge deserves its status as the '3rd generation' of Intel's Core processors."

Laird says: you won't be unhappy if your next PC has an Ivy Bridge in it, but the difference between it and Sandy Bridge isn't dramatic.

What about AMD, Intel's arch-rival? Is there hope for tougher competition from AMD any time soon? "In a word," Laird says, "No."

Eye on smartphones

Intel's ambitions aren't just on the desktop. Its Medfield processors are designed to power smartphones and other mobile devices, and early benchmarks suggest that it's faster than the processors inside the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S II. However, by the time Medfield devices actually reach the shelves there will be newer, faster processors inside iPhones and other ARM-powered kit.

It seems that everybody has an eye on the smartphone market: even Facebook, which according to rumours is working on a Facebook phone with HTC. As Kate Solomon points out, that means history is repeating: "Hello and welcome to 2010," she writes. That's when HTC's ChaCha was released with a big blue Facebook button on it.

Google Phone? Isn't that the Nexus?

Here's another blast from the past: a Google Phone from 2006. As Chris Smith reports, the device was a prototype for what became Android, "with Google proposing an open source operating system packed with Google apps like Maps, Gmail and Google Talk." What's particularly interesting about the prototype is that, one year before the iPhone was released, Google clearly didn't think touchscreens were the way forward: "The initial device looks a little bit like a strange BlackBerry Bold," Smith points out.

One of Google's big mobile ideas is mobile payments, and O2 has joined the payment party with the launch of O2 Wallet.

The service isn't just for O2 customers: it's available to all UK mobile phone users, or at least it is provided they aren't running Windows Phone: the app for that platform is still in development, along with apps for tablets (we're assuming iPads and Android).

So how does it work? If you're on an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device you'll be able to add your credit and debit card details to the service and "send" money to people; if the payment isn't received within five days it's automatically credited back to you.

According to O2 Money MD James Le Brocq, "additional functionality will soon enable consumers to use O2 Wallet to top-up mobile airtime, buy train tickets and make mobile contactless payments via NFC technology." We've been promised mobile payments for years, so it'll be interesting to see if O2 can be the firm to make it work.

There's just one problem in the move from real wallets to mobile ones: as Patrick Goss asks, "What will the comedy moths fly out of now?"