GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co., Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to launch the latest in-house designed GIGABYTE GV-R577SL-1GD, featuring GIGABYTE’s own Ultra Durable VGA Technology and silent-cell cooling design. GIGABYTE’s GV-R577SL-1GD is built on the highly anticipated ATI Radeon HD 5770 Series GPU, which utilizes the latest 826 million transistors on 40nm fabrication process and GDDR5 memory. GIGABYTE GV-R577SL-1GD is equipped with Microsoft DirectX 11, ATI Eyefinity Technology, ATI Stream technology, ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support, UVD 2 and PowerPlay, setting a new standard for HD gaming performance.

The GIGABYTE GV-R577SL-1GD features GIGABYTE’s own Ultra Durable VGA Technology, which can provide outstanding overclocking capability, lower GPU temperature, and excellent power efficiency. GIGABYTE’s unique technology Ultra Durable VGA features 2 oz copper PCB board, Samsung and Hynix memory, Japanese solid capacitor, Ferrite /Metal Core Chokes, and Low RDS (on) MOSFET. Compared with traditional graphics accelerators, Ultra Durable VGA graphics accelerators can lower GPU temperature by 5%~10%, decrease power switching loss by 10%~30%, and increase overclocking capability by 10%~30%. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA graphics accelerator GV-R577SL-1GD can provide truly “high-performance” and “green” graphic card solutions.

Almost defunct enthusiast PC hardware vendor BFG Technologies may have just hit the final nail in its coffin, after it started sending denials to RMA applicants. The company was best known for its NVIDIA GeForce graphics accelerators, and announced its exit from the graphics industry this May. In rather quick succession, it also stopped shipping other products, while announcing that it will honor its warranties and RMAs.

Much to the disgruntlement of its customers, the company is now reportedly returning products sent for RMA with a covering letter saying that it cannot replace the product since a major supplier stopped doing business with it, apologizing for any inconvenience caused…well, apart from the $100s worth paperweights.

Source: HardwareCanucks

NVIDIA BIOS Editor (also known as NiBiTor) got a scheduled update this month. The popular GeForce BIOS manipulation utility has been updated to version 5.7. As with every new release, version 5.7 brings adds support for new GeForce graphics processors, a number of critical and trivial bug fixes, and an improved ability to work with unsupported hardware in a limited way. Newly supported products include:

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M
• NVIDIA GeForce 9650M
• NVIDIA Quadro FX1700
• NVIDIA Quadro FX380

“NiBiTor is the original and definitive BIOS tweaker that supports the latest NVIDIA graphics cards, and which is updated on a regular basis. NiBiTor allows graphics card enthusiasts, or the hardcore overclockers to have full control over some advanced features and functionality found on firmware of supporting cards. And doing so users gain some extra performance, enable certain hidden features, tweaking memory latencies, provide extensive information, adapt bootup settings, changing fan speed options and/or get extra stability on their NVIDIA based graphics accelerators which will just give them that little extra value,” notes the developer.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA BIOS Editor (NiBiTor) v5.7

NVIDIA released the WHQL-signed GeForce 258.96 driver suite. This particular version of the driver were earlier released in its beta form last week. The drivers provide official support for the GeForce GTX 460, GeForce GTX 480M, GeForce 315/310 series graphics accelerators, apart from supporting every GeForce GPU since 6-series, and ION chipsets. Along with updates to the graphics driver, it also brings along updated PhysX system software, and updated HDMI audio drivers. The release notes documents (for Windows 7/Vista and Windows XP) reveals numerous game-specific performance updates, and bug fixes.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 258.96 WHQL.

Galaxy Microsystems Ltd. a leading global manufacturer of graphics accelerators, today announced the immediate availability of the new Galaxy GTX 460 series of graphics cards featuring the industry’s first detachable fan cooling technology and DirectX 11 support for today’s hottest games.

"Our new Galaxy GTX 460 graphics cards offer out of this world realism and performance at a price that is simply amazing." said Shane Vance, US Sales for Galaxy. "And the new detachable fan makes it even easier to keep your card in peak condition".

Shortly after the Khronos group announced the OpenGL 4.0, the newest version of the multi-platform graphics API, AMD is out with a preview graphics driver for its ATI Radeon, FireGL, FirePro, and Mobility Radeon graphics accelerators, which includes the OpenGL 4.0 ICD (installable client driver). The driver is available for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux. OpenGL 4.0 is comparable and up to times with Microsoft’s DirectX 11 API, it makes use of hardware features such as tessellation on the GPU, per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions, 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations, etc., and has no restrictions on which later version of Windows it can run on. With OpenGL 4.0 for example, one can expect 3D graphics with the complexity comparable to DirectX 11 on Windows XP.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst OpenGL 4.0 Preview Driver for Windows 7/Vista, Windows XP, and Linux.

Czech technology website PCTuning confirmed a few details about NVIDIA’s upcoming performance graphics accelerator, the GeForce GTX 470. It was found out that a beta driver by NVIDIA, GeForce 196.78 supports GeForce 400 series accelerators, and was able run a qualification sample of GeForce GTX 470. The card was using A3 revision GF100 silicon. The driver’s System Information dialog revealed that the card indeed has 448 CUDA cores (SIMD units). Further, it has 1280 MB of memory, and a 320-bit wide memory interface. NVIDIA also changed the way it represents memory clock speeds. Since it is using GDDR5 memory, while the memory has an actual clock speed of 1000 MHz, the data rate (DDR speed) is represented first, as 2000 MHz, and “effective speed” next, which is 4000 MHz.

Given these speeds, at 1000 MHz GDDR5, the GPU has a memory bandwidth of 160 GB/s. Without compromise on looks and quality, NVIDIA kept the cooler design basic. It has a matte finish. Display outputs include two DVI-D, and one mini HDMI. It supports NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround (a technology competitive to ATI Eyefinity, to span a display head across multiple physical displays), just that NVIDIA requires at least two accelerators in SLI to use it. NVIDIA’s GeForce 400 series graphics accelerators will be launched on the 26th of this month.

Source: PCTuning