Video Card Reviews and Anything Video Related
I remember when wireless video was a thing of the future, well it’s here and it’s in HD! Today for review I’ve got the StreamHD SWP120A Wireless PC to TV Display Adapter. This product allows you to Stream high definition content from your computer to your TV over the air via an HDMI connection to your HDTV. It works wirelessly of course by using an adapter and a receiver that resemble USB thumbdrives to get the signal to your TV.
Hi Everyone, today we are taking a look at the GTS 450 from the guys at Sparkle Computer Corp. Now for those who don’t know Sparkle has been around since 1982 in Taiwan, making them well known around the globe and for slightly over a year now, they are beginning to leave their mark in the USA. Now what I like about Sparkle is the fact that they can keep their prices low on most their products and they have 2 different lines to choose from.
Their standard Graphics card lines which follow NVIDIA’s naming rule and then their Calibre performance lines which has more upgraded cooling as well as better clock setting for the GPU. Now the cards we received today are part of their standard line but has a few modifications compared to other vendors who tend to use NVIDIA’s stock coolers. Now the GTS 450 is NVIDIA’s lowest price Fermi card to date with performance and is focused directly at gamers on a budget.
Today for review I’ve got a video card from Sparkle Computer Corp, it’s an Nvidia based GT240 that has 512MB of ram built-in. With those specs I’m sure you can guess it’s not really a card you’d want for gaming, but it has it’s place nonetheless. It does feature a native HDMI port, along with both VGA and DVI ports on it, so no adapter needed for HDMI which is nice. The card is also rather inexpensive and virtually silent, it would make a good choice for an HTPC I’m sure. So read on…
For those of us that play video games and watch HD content on our computers, video cards are very important to us, we need the best performing we can get. I’ve been using a Diamond Radeon 4870 with 1gig of ram for a little while now, and I was under the impressions that it was a rather high end video card, the thing cost like $400 when I got it after all. If you compare Nvidia and ATI cards, the 4870 was the flagship card, now of course the 4890 is, but one would think that the 4870 was still a decent card to have. If you look at the Nvidia end of things the GTX295 is the highest, then the GTX285, then the GTX275 then the GTX260. Looking at that we see four versions, each with varying levels of performance and you would think that with the numbering, common sense would say that the 4890 is equal to the GTX295, and then the 4870 should be equal to the GTX285 right? Common sense gets thrown out the window though when it comes to VGA model numbers as we all know. Still though you would think that something like the 4870 would easily outperform a GTX260, if you though that you’d be wrong, very wrong, and yes I was wrong as well. The whole numbering system with CPUs and GPUs is something for a rant for another time though…
Up on the review block today I’ve got the Calibre X260 Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 896MB Overclocked Video Card and I can say that for a somewhat low priced card this thing rocks. Before I got the GTX260 for review I was using an ATI 4870 with 1 gig of ram, and I’m truly surprised that the GTX260 with less ram and lower clock speed easily bests it in terms of performance. The 4870 runs 1 gig of DDR5 ram and the GTX260 runs 896Mb of DDR3 ram, you’d think the 4870 would perform better, but you’d be wrong. I’ve put the GTX260 up against my 4870 and a GTS250 for comparison, so read on to learn about a very good video card…
The video card coolers out there
usually look really good, but they’re usually also fairly loud and
they don’t do too good of a job at keeping your card cool really. Yes
they keep the temps below the manufacturers recommendations but
that’s about all they do, and they’re normally loud in the process of
doing so. Some manufacturers have started putting after market
cooling solutions on their cards because they’ve realized that we,
the customers, don’t want a video card that sounds like a small plane
taking off inside of our PC cases. Those types of coolers though are
usually found on special edition cards, or only by certain companies,
not many have really caught on to this yet, and that’s unfortunate
for us, but fortunate for companies like Arctic Cooling who produce
after market VGA coolers.
Yesterday I took a look at a CPU cooler
from Arctic Cooling, the Alpine 11 Pro, today I’ve got the Accelero
L2 Pro VGA cooler for review. I’ve installed it on my ECS
Nvidia GTS250 video card and I can say it does
a better job than the stock cooler and it’s much quieter, but it
takes up three slots because of its height so depending on your setup
you might have an issue with installation.
It’s been along time since I’ve been on the green side of things, or the Nvidia side, I’ve been with the red team, ATI, for a while now so it was nice to get this Nvidia GeForce GTS250 to play with. Video cards play a big role in our computers now, not just for video games, but for physics rendering, folding and even video processing or encoding with compatible programs, so they’ve become much more than something that puts the video on our screens. With all of the tings they can do now, it’s a wonder why budget cards, or cards with low memory are even on the market, then again, not everyone takes advantage of these features and some people just want to play games or watch videos.
A little bit ago I took a look at the Diamond ATI Radeon 4870 1gig video card, a higher end card for sure, today though I’ve got the other side of things, an Nvidia GTS 250 from ECS Elitegroup. It’s totally the other side of things, it costs about half as much and it’s from a different company, still though I was curious as to how it would perform against my current 4870. So read on to see how they compare, you might be a bit surprised as I was...
So yesterday we took a look at a very nice USB to VGA/DVI and HDMI Graphics adapter, today I thought I’d post another review of a similar product. This one is direct from DisplayLink, it’s the DVI/VGA USB Graphics Adapter. Like the one I looked at yesterday, it features the ability to add another display to your system via USB. So let’s just jump right on in…
Multi-monitor setups are very common today because people have learned that you can be more productive with them, but sometimes, especially with laptops it’s not very easy to attached another display. Most laptops only have a VGA output, but what if you wanted to output to DVI or even HDMI? Most likely you’d have to go buy adapters for your laptop and that could be quite expensive. There is another solution though, and an easier one, using your USB port you can use Displaylink to add another monitor to your computer of laptop, or even output to your TV.
Today for review I’ve got the USB 2.0
VGA / DVI / HDMI multi-display Adapter from USBFever, this little device allows you to use your USB port and connect you desktop or laptop to either DVI, VGA or HDMI enabled monitors and TVs. It’s based off the Displaylink chipset, it’s easy to use, and it offers the user an easy way to add a display.
This product though is much more than just to add another monitor to your system, this can be great for work, let’s say you want to use your laptop for a presentation, but the screen is a bit too small. With this product you can connect to virtually any TV, most newer TVs today come equipped with HDMI, DVI or VGA inputs, it’s much nicer showing a presentation on the big screen.
Videocards are something that have
always kind of annoyed me, it seems they’re always releasing a new
one, technology that was hot a few months ago is now obsolete. Then
again, that’s the way it is with most technology so I’m not sure why
it surprises me, but it, the upgrades, just seems to go much faster
with video cards.
Today for review I’ve got the Diamond
ATI Radeon 4870 1gig video card. As you can see be the name it
features 1 gig of ram, so I figured why not make this more of a
comparison review as in how much performance do you gain when going
from 512mb to 1gig of ram. So I put my Sapphire 4870 512mb card up
against the Diamond, both are running the same core and memory
speeds, so they’re pretty much the same cards except for the on board
ram they have. So read one to find out if it’s worth it to grab the
1gig over the 512mb version card…
I’ve got a big ‘ol review for you today, this one has been a few weeks in the making actually, and from my time with this product I’ve found it to be easily one of the best VGA coolers on the market today.
Up on the block today is the GFXChilla VGA Cooler from Coolink and I’ve tested it with my ATI X1800GTO video card and with my two Nvidia 8600GTS video cards as well. I’ve got comparison results with the GFXChilla going up against names like Thermalright, Arctic Cooling, Aerocool and of course the stock coolers. One thing cool (pun intended) about the GFXChilla is that it is small and able to be used with my Nvidia cards in SLI. From my testing I’ve found that the GFXChiila is virtually silent and performs extremely well, especially if you consider just how small it is.
In my testing up against the massive Arctic Cooling Accelero, the GFXChilla is only a couple degrees warmer than the Accelero. The GFXChilla only adds a tiny bit of width to your card due to the heatpipes sticking out and like most does take up the PCI spot below, but it adds no more length to your card and virtually no noise to your system. If you look at the Arctic Cooling Accelero, sure the performance is great, but it is almost doubles the size of your video card, with the fan Turbo Module attached it takes up two PCI slots, and with the Accelero installed it’s a very tight fit in many cases and won’t even fit in some.
The Coolink GFXChilla offers a great combination of performance, minimalist size and silence, the GFXChilla goes to show that your VGA cooler does not have to be massive to provide good, quiet cooling for your videocard.
So continue on to check out all the pictures and testing results from both ATI and Nvida cards I’ve got on hand…
