The GeForce GT240 official debut

Pending renewal of high-end GeForce, NVIDIA gives today officially launched a new benchmark, the GeForce GT240, a low-budget card that will be broken down into GDDR3 or GDDR5 according to the manufacturers. Compatible with DirectX 10.1, the map is engraved in 40 nanometers. The GPU is clocked at 550 MHz, 1360 MHz cons for the 96 shader units it shipped. In RAM, NVIDIA recommends combining the 128 bit interface card in the 1000 MHz GDDR3 or GDDR5 to 1700 MHz, which offer a maximum bandwidth of 54.4 GB / s depending on manufacturer.

In simple format slot, the card ignores the SLI connector. It is in contrast with features of decompression of video material, but also the capacity of general calculations associated with CUDA. Also compatible 3D Vision, the GT240 can be used for physics calculations with PhysX card as extra. In terms of multimedia, we note the inclusion of native HDMI and an audio controller. As for performance, NVIDIA claims that its youngest surpasses the Radeon HD 4670, that we should check in the week. The price finally expected to be below 100 euros.

Among partners, Gigabyte has already started the ball rolling ads with two references equipped with VGA, DVI and HDMI. The first offers 1 GB of GDDR3 memory, while the second set of 512 MB of GDDR5. Here, the Taiwanese manufacturer opts for cooling relatively large, which puts the map in double slot. ECS is also in two models with a card with 512 MB GDDR5 and the other from 1 GB Most manufacturers partner with NVIDIA should also announce a few references to this GT240 in the week.

AMD: Catalyst 9.11 acceleration Flash

AMD comes instantly to the online version of November of Catalyst drivers for graphics cards of the Radeon series. This milling, stamped 9.11, provides the main novelty as support for hardware acceleration of H.264 authorized last few hours the beta of Flash Player 10.1.

This new batch of pilots, which is currently available for Windows XP, Vista and 7 in 32 and 64 bit, also fixes a number of shortcomings identified by users of various editions of Microsoft operating system. Regarding Windows 7, we may for example bring the bug fix that prevented Cyberlink PowerDVD correctly read Blu-ray in some settings, but also return to its rightful place as the option to activate the anti - aliasing, sometimes lost in another menu than his.

The problem could cause the system to crash when changing screen resolution while the real time protection was enabled in Microsoft Security Essentials is also arranged. Vista is not forgotten, with the correction of malfunctions that could, under certain conditions, affect Crysis in DirectX 10 and The Witcher on the card series Radeon HD 58xx.

AMD does not report any improvement in contrast performance in games, having clear favorite just for the month of November to work on support for hardware acceleration of video in Flash, something that should delight users machines with a little old. At AMD, this acceleration is available from the cards and controllers integrated Radeon HD 3xxx series / Radeon HD 4xxx and higher.

We can download these drivers from the page following, and view the release notes in English in this PDF.

OCZ Technology Launches Colossus 3.5" SSD Line

OCZ Technology today released the Colossus 3.5" Solid State Drive (SSD) Series, designed to meet the performance and storage demands of high-end desktop users and enterprise clients.

"The new Colossus Series is designed to boost desktop and workstation performance and is for high power users that put a premium on speed, reliability and maximum storage capacity," said Eugene Chang, VP of Product Management at the OCZ Technology Group. "The Colossus core-architecture is also available to enterprise clients with locked BOMs (build of materials) and customized firmware to match their unique applications."

In addition to capacities up to 1TB, the OCZ Colossus delivers high performance made possible by an internal RAID 0 architecture:

The Colossus line is built with cost-effective multi-level cell (MLC) flash to make it a viable option for enterprise clients.

The Colossus SSD is available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB solutions to accommodate a broader spectrum of applications than current 2.5? SSD products; the 3.5" housing is a straight drop in for many existing rack systems. The Colossus SSD series has a 1.5 million hour mean time between failures (MTBF) and comes backed by a 3-year warranty. 

New Fermi-based GPUs by Nvidia

Nvidia unveiled the Tesla 20-series of parallel processors for the high performance computing
(HPC) market, based on its new generation CUDA processor architecture, codenamed "Fermi".

Designed from the ground-up for parallel computing, the NVIDIA? Tesla 20-series GPUs slash the cost of computing by delivering the same performance of a traditional CPU-based cluster at one-tenth the cost and one-twentieth the power, the company claims.

The Tesla 20-series introduces features that enable many new applications to perform dramatically faster using GPU Computing. These include ray tracing, 3D cloud computing, video encoding, database search, data analytics, computer-aided engineering and virus scanning.

The Tesla 20-series GPUs offer support for the next generation IEEE 754-2008 double precision floating point standard, ECC (error correcting codes), multi-level cache hierarchy with L1 and L2 caches, support for the C++ programming language as well as up to to 1 terabyte of memory, concurrent kernel execution, fast context switching, 10x faster atomic instructions, 64-bit virtual address space, system calls and recursive functions.

At their core, Tesla GPUs are based on the parallel CUDA computing architecture.

The family of Tesla 20-series GPUs includes:

- Tesla C2050 & C2070 GPU Computing Processors

• Single GPU PCI-Express Gen-2 cards for workstation configurations
•   Up to 3GB and 6GB (respectively) on-board GDDR5 memory
•   Double precision performance in the range of 520GFlops - 630 GFlops

- Tesla S2050 & S2070 GPU Computing Systems

• Four Tesla GPUs in a 1U system product for cluster and datacenter deployments
• Up to 12 GB and 24 GB (respectively) total system memory on board GDDR5 memory
• Double precision performance in the range of 2.1 TFlops - 2.5 TFlops

The Tesla C2050 and C2070 products will retail for $2,499 and $3,999 and the Tesla S2050 and S2070 will retail for $12,995 and $18,995. Products will be available in Q2 2010.

As Nvidia has previously announced, the first Fermi-based consumer (GeForce) products are expected to be available first quarter 2010.