Asus just released some information about the availability and specifications of the new Matrix R9 290X and GTX 780 Ti GPU’s.

Both the cards come loaded with Asus standard fare stuff on both hardware and software side like the DIGI+ 14 phase VRM,single push bios change,LN2 jumper and Asus GPU tweak.

Prices are stated at 54K for the 290x and 60K for the 780Ti for now.

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However,if the rumors are true then we might see a refresh in the future.

A certain user on Chinese forums have released a few pictures of a Refreshed GTX Titan with a black Cooler. We might see a fully unlocked GK110 with all the 15 SMX clusters unlocked with a bit of tweaked core speed and 6GB of memory. Nothing else will make sense given the point that NVIDIA would keep the MRP as before or more.

What do you guys think? Photoshop or True?

Let us know in the comments below.

Source: VideoCardz

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AMD’s been headlining about their Titan killer r9 290X for a the past few weeks.In an weird turn of event Nvidia announced a few new things of their own including a new “flagship”card : GTX 780 Ti.
in essence its the same GTX 780 with a few tweaked specs. So far nothing was revealed by nvidia about the specifications but one user from chiphell has manged to publish one gpu-z screenshot of the card.

we can see its the same GK 110 core used in the Titan and the GTX 780. The main difference with GTX 780 lies in the fact that where 780 has 2304 Stream processors the 780ti has 2496 stream processors and 204 texture units(TU’s) in place of 780’s 192 TU’s.
Other than that we see an increase in core clock (902 MHz in 780Ti vs 863 MHz in 780) and boost clock(954 MHz in 780Ti vs 900 MHz in 780).
Other than this everything seems all same.
with an expected price tag of $650 its clear that Nvidia wants this one to compete with the r9 290x from AMD.

The post NVIDIA’s GTX 780 Ti Speeds & Specs Leaked appeared first on OCFreaks!.

Presenting the Asus GeForce GTX 780 DirectCU II OC

While the 780 in itself is a bit of downer for me(expected more and got less), the card we have is a piece of engineering.
ASUS as always tried to out do themsleves…and they did.
How they did is what we will see in the review

Over the next few pages we would go through a quick look at the features and specs,a little showcase and then dive into numbers…aight?

next page please.

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Not wanting to stay behind Nvidia released a beta driver just ahead of  BF4 exclusive beta launch.
Main features includes

• Battlefield 4 beta support.
• Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion plus (HBAO+) implementation.

Download link for 331.40

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Graphics Cards :

The choice of this component is actually the most tricky and we see more discussions about this higher than anything else in the communities. Better FPS or smoothness, Compute Performance or raw  performance, single GPU or multi GPU setup you name it and we will find war like situations over it.. In my articles I will try to give you a brief overview of some very important features and concepts regarding graphics processing in general and in turn Graphics Cards.

Please read on to know more..

The post Know your GPU appeared first on OCFreaks!.

Now, before i dive into benchmarks and stuff let’s have a look at the thing we have in hand. The card we would be reviewing is the Direct CU II TOP version from Asus; currently the most aggressively binned card in the market.

Let’s have a look at the specs to start things off:

The main Difference between the reference 660TI and this card is that this card is clocked around 150Mhz higher than the reference version with a better cooler.

The post Asus GTX 660Ti Direct CU II TOP review appeared first on OCFreaks!.

Introduction

The fermi architecture was reavealed by Nvidia way back in 2009 and the first Nvidia GPU series to be based on that architecture was the GTX 4XX series.The first card to be released was the GTX 480,and later on various other cards were released.Then the GTX 5XX series was released not too long ago with the first card being the GTX 580.

Major differences Between previous gen GPU’s like GTX 2XX and the new fermi architecture are as follows :

1. Fermi based cards have GDDR5 memory modules with ECC(Error Correction) capabilities while the older architectures had GDDR3 non ECC modules.
2. Fermi based cards had core clock and shader clock speeds interlocked in the ratio 1:2 while the older architectures need not be so.
3. Fermi based cards were the first ones to support OpenGL4 and DirectX11 API’S(Application Programming Interface).
4. Fermi based cards had tessellation units specifically for its hardware based implementation while the older architectures lacked it.

Well there are many more differences but for the sake of simplicity these are the most important ones to be concerned about.

List of GPU’s based on the Fermi architecture:

1. Dual GPU : GTX 590
2. High End : GTX 580,GTX 480,GTX 570,GTX 470
3. Mid End : GTX 560 TI,GTX 560,GTX 460,GTX 465,GTX 550 TI,GTS 450
4. Low End : GT 545,GT 440,GT 530,GT 430,GT 520,GT 510

Setting Up Your System :

1. Firstly no BIOS adjustments required for the GPU OC unless you have changed your PCI bus frequency,if yes then change the PCI frequency to default.
2. Now login to windows and install some essential Softwares/Utilities(Discussed later on in the next section).
3. Now set all your card Frequencies to default/stock.

Softwares/Utilities Required:

1) Geforce GPU Drivers–Do we need an explanation here .

Download–http://www.geforce.com/Drivers

2) MSI Afterburner–“The” best and “The” most user friendly OC’ing app available on earth.

Download–http://downloads.guru3d.com/MSI-Afte…load-2850.html

3)Unigine Heaven–A very good benchmark for DX11 Tessellation enabled GPU’s.

Download–http://unigine.com/products/heaven/download/

4)OCCT–A gem among stress testing apps,a very versatile GPU testing/stressing Tool.

Download–http://www.ocbase.com/perestroika_en/index.php?Download

5) 3DMark11–A very Good DX11 GPU/CPU stresser.

Download–http://www.3dmark.com/3dmark11/download/

6) GPU-Z–GPU monitoring Tool.

Download–http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/GPU-Z/

Understanding Some Basic Stuff :

Important Voltages

GPU VCORE : Its the amount of volts fed into the GPU’s core,its the most Important voltage for OC’ing GPU’s.

Safe Limit : Stock – 1.1Volts

Mem Volt-Important for OC’ing memory.

PLL Volt-Its just a gimmick by the manufacturers ,till now there has been no evidence of the card being able to OC higher and be stable by increasing the PLL Voltage.

Some Basic Rules Before Moving On

1. Don’t set a target in mind,OC’ing is a recursive process,there is no guarantee you will achieve your desired overclock.
2. Make sure your GPU temps are within 85C before any overclock @ stock,because if your cards already above 85C at stock,there won’t be much overclock headroom available to you,it does not mean your card can’t overclock,but it means that its not too safe to run your GPU at 90-100C 24X7.
3. Make sure your GPU is dust free as dust will add in to the temps of your GPU.

Finally Overclocking

—–Without Messing With The Voltages

• 1) After booting into windows start GPU-Z and Afterburner,close any unnecessary applications,verify your cards stock clocks and voltage.Also update your GPU drivers.

• 2) Now to start OCing bring afterburner into view and you will see 4 sliders by defaults namely

Here our aim will be to stabilize all the clocks one by one.We start with core clock(core and shader clocks are linked so essentially you will be increasing both automatically if you increase any one of those).

• 3) Start raising the core clock speed 10 MHz at a time(you can also increase more if you are feeling adventurous but increasing in lower steps ensure that you will find more stable and safer highest frequency).After each increment run 2 loops of unigine heaven and 3dmark vantage/11 benchmarks,as these will immediately show the stability of your GPU OC by either crashing/slowing down/texture corruption or any graphical anomalies.

• 4) Repeat the above step till you GPU OC passes all the tests without any problem,after you start getting problem reduce the core clock in increments of 5 MHz and again run 2 loops of unigine and 3dmark benchmarks each,and keep decrementing till your card becomes stable and stops artifacting or giving any problem.

• 5) Through the last step we have now successfully found out our stable and highest core clock ceiling.So now in a way we have isolated the core clock from memory clock as memory clock have been untouched till now.So now start incrementing memory clock in increments of 10 MHz(Please don’t be over adventurous with memory like with core clock,memory is the component which can be easily destroyed by the slightest of mistake).Now repeat the same benchmark runs and strategy followed for core clock in earlier steps and you would have found out your memory clock ceiling too.

• 6) Congratulations! you have achieved a stable OC on your GPU without messing with voltages.Now to keep these settings click “Apply Overclocking At Startup” in afterburner,and save the OC settings in a profile represented in afterburner as numbers at the bottom.

—–With Messing With The Voltages

• 1) Here we follow the above 6 steps word to word and follow up from there.Now that we have got stable OC without increasing voltages,and if we need even higher OC then we need to up the voltage in small increments.

• 2) Now for this we need to make some changes in the options of afterburner,click options in afterburner and then under the generals tab check the “unlock voltage and enable voltage monitoring options”.

• 3) After setting up afterburner increase the core clock by 10 MHz again and again benchmark it and see if it crashes,if it does increase the voltage in increments of 5 mV and then again benchmark and see if the card has stabilized or not.

• 4) Repeat the procedure given above till either you reach your desired OC or you reach 1.1 V.

• 5) Once you reach the max possible OC apart from running the benchmarks also run OCCT GPU test for at least 30 minutes and check the stability of the card,if it survives well you have achieved a successful Overclock,if it does not decrement the core clocks by 5 MHz and keep doing this till your GPU is stable.

• 6) Final step enjoy gaming with increased performance .

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