LiVe LiFe To The FuLLThe world is moving ! Don’t stay behind…

NVIDIA’s Quadro NVS 420 is quite the unique offering — on one hand, it’s rather intriguing that a workstation card has been whittled down to fit within a small form factor PC, but then again, who else outside of advertisers (and their digital signage applications) will even need it? Nevertheless, said card is the industry’s only low-profile professional GPU that can sneak within SFF PCs and still power four 30-inch displays at 2,560 x 1,600 resolution via DisplayPort / dual-link DVI. As for specs, it’s boasting 512MB of memory, 11.2GB/sec (per GPU) of memory bandwidth and a CUDA Parallel Computing Processor. It’ll be available next month for the niche that needs it at $499.

The GTX 285 is what the GTX 280 should have been. In the industry, we call this a “performance kicker”. It’s faster, consumes less and is cheaper to produce - all the ingredients that buyers love. Yet, the little story is that NVIDIA could have made the GTX 280 be that good, but at the time, they didn’t think that the Radeon 4870 would be so good and decided to spend time and resources elsewhere (hey, it’s always easy to criticize in hindsight).

Anyway, this is fixed. The GTX 285 is the new sheriff in town and it sells for about $380, so that’s about 15% more performance for almost half the price of the GTX 280 - not bad huh?

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 295 is only a week old at retail, but that hasn’t stopped the company from turning around and releasing yet another card — the GTX 285 — today. The reviews for both are in and from what we’ve read, the GTX 295 seems to match or outshine its AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 counterpart in most performance tests. As for the GTX 285, the general consesus is that it’s the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market right now. It’s only slightly better-performing than the GTX 280, however, so if you’ve already got that, it’s probably not worth the upgrade. We’re not gonna pretend to understand every benchmark result, but we’ll gladly point you in the right direction.

GTX 285
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Read - PC Perspective
Read - HotHardware

GTX 295
Read - TweakTown
Read - PC Perspective
Read - HotHardware

We’ve been hearing an awful lot about NVIDIA’s Ion platform, but up until now, we haven’t seen an awful lot. HotHardware and PC Perspective were both able to swing by NVIDIA’s booth at CES and get an up close look at the diminutive system. On hand was a half-liter PC that utilized a 1.6GHz Atom 330 CPU and NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M GPU, and it was reportedly being used to push some pretty stellar video on the monitors behind it. Have a look past the break for a couple demonstration vids — if this is the kind of graphical prowess we can expect from nettops of tomorrow, you can color us interested.

We already knew more or less all we needed to know about NVIDIA’s GTX 295, however, despite being already on sale, the company has decided now is a good time to grace the model with a press release. The GTX 285 has been given the formal treatment too — despite not being available until next week. If you missed the earlier specs, the $499(ish) 295 includes dual 55-nm GT200 GPUs and supports nearly 2GB of memory, while the $399 285 makes do with but one processor and an undisclosed RAM ceiling (though the upcoming Winfast, pictured above, comes with 1GB and one yellow robot). Again the 295 is up for order now, while slightly more budget conscious gamers will have to wait until January 15 for the 285.

NVIDIA has announced that it’ll now offer laptop GPU drivers directly via its website — long overdue, if you ask us. These drivers have traditionally been offered through the computer manufacturers since most mobile GPUs are customized to be compatible with the devices’ specific hotkeys and suspend / resume functionality — NVIDIA said it has found a way around with a new modular architecture. First on the menu are beta drivers for GeForce 8M and 9M series as well as Quadro NVS-series laptops that add CUDA and PhysX support, with Windows-certified drivers for all GeForce 7, 8 and 9 series and Quadro NVS series are due out early next year. Now, if only we could download hugs…

NVIDIA still hasn’t gotten official with the less-than-secret card, but it looks like China’s IT168 website has already gotten its hands on an actual GTX 295 and gone ahead and published some early benchmarks, which now seem to have not so mysteriously disappeared. This being the internet, however, there’s already been screenshots taken, and while the benchmarks certainly impress, they’re also rightfully leading folks to wait for some slightly more official numbers. If they are accurate, however, it looks like the GTX 295 will trounce ATI’s top-end HD 4870 X2 in a number of tests, including a stunning 100% boost in performance in Dead Space, all while boasting a considerably lower power consumption too boot (hence the suspicion). We won’t have to wait too much longer to put things to rest, however, as the card is expected to be be officially unveiled at CES, with a whole slew of benchmarks inevitably set to follow shortly thereafter.

At just under two grand, NVIDIA’s new Quadro CX graphics card certainly isn’t for everybody, but its ability to add some GPU acceleration to the apps in Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 has no doubt piqued the interest of quite a few professionals out there and, according to PC Perspective, they likely won’t be disappointed. On the card’s big selling points, PC Perspective found that it mostly delivered as NVIDIA promised, with the stand-out result being a 2x speed increase in H.264 encoding times in Premiere CS4, something NVIDIA and Elemental eventually hope to increase to 10x with a few more updates to the RapidHD software. The card also expectedly provided a significant boost to Photoshop CS4 but, unlike with the RapidHD plug-in for Premiere, many of those performance gains can also be achieved with other OpenGL-supporting GPUs (though obviously not quite to the same degree). Hit up the link below for the complete rundown, plus a few videos that show just what the card (and a suitable system) are capable of.

The next installment of CES is under a month away (crazy, right?), and the leaks around the hinges are already starting to show. The latest dirt on the graphical front is this bit from NVIDIA: a twin-GPU behemoth that’ll likely destroy anything else on the market today. Purportedly dubbed the GeForce GTX295, the device will pack two 55-nanometer GT200 chips, 480 total stream processors, 1,792MB of DDR3 memory and a power consumption rating of 289-watts. Other details are currently missing, but don’t be shocked to see this locked and loaded in a few brand new machines come January 8th.