NVIDIA 3D Vision machines get 3D YouTube video support on Firefox

NVIDIA and YouTube made a rather caveat-heavy announcement today that promises to bring stereoscopic 3D YouTube videos to NVIDIA 3D Vision PCs and notebooks, running Firefox 4. If you're rocking an NVIDIA GeForce GPU-equipped machine, sporting driver release 275 or later, a 3D Vision monitor, notebook, projector, or DLP HDTV, and Firefox 4 with streaming HTML5, you've got access to all the 3D goodness YouTube has to offer -- given you're not trying to access content via a standard YouTube channel, as the outfit's HTML5 support is still limited. And don't forget, you'll need your active shutter 3D glasses handy, too. So, if you fit all of the aforementioned criteria, check out the demo video after break (and make sure to hit the HTML5 function under options) -- otherwise, feel free to go on using the old cyan and red method for viewing YouTube in 3D.

NVIDIA

ASUS Matrix GTX 580 and MARS II desktop graphics cards revealed, devour PCI slots

With all the talk of ASUS's tablets recently it's easy to forget the company also dabbles in graphics cards, some large enough to blot out the sun. We've got some details on its latest contestants for your PC gaming dollar, the MARS II and Matrix GTX 580 (above), and you might have to buy a new case just squeeze these unwieldy pixel-pushers inside. The Matrix will come in two flavors -- standard and Platinum -- both with 1.5GB of RAM and an enormous dual-fan cooling solution that eats up a jaw-dropping three PCI slots. But, hey, it should afford you some serious overclocking headroom. Though we've yet to seen any pics of the MARS II, the 3GB, dual-GPU behemoth is bound to be even more massive -- we wouldn't be surprised if ASUS had to provide a breakout box for whatever cooler it strapped to those pair of GTX 580 cores. Prices and release dates are still up in the air, but we're sure all will be revealed during the official announcement at Computex. Check out the image after the break for more detailed specs.

VR-Zone, TechConnect

Dell XPS 15z review

For years, Dell's been teasing supermodel-thin laptops, each one flawed out of the gate: too pricey, too underpowered, and with underwhelming battery life. This time, Dell told us we'd get something different: a laptop without compromise. Recently, Round Rock killed off the Adamo and nixed the XPS 14, and then rumors started to spin -- a spiritual successor would be the slimmest 15.6-inch notebook we'd ever seen, be crafted from "special materials" and yet cost less than $1,000. Dell even stated that it would have an "innovative new form factor" of some sort.

The company neglected to mention it would look like a MacBook Pro.

This is the Dell XPS 15z, and we're sorry to say it's not a thin-and-light -- it's actually a few hairs thicker than a 15-inch MacBook Pro, wider, and at 5.54 pounds, it weighs practically the same. It is, however, constructed of aluminum and magnesium alloy and carries some pretty peppy silicon inside, and the base model really does ring up at $999. That's a pretty low price to garner comparisons to Apple's flagship, and yet here we are. Has Dell set a new bar for the notebook PC market? Find out after the break.

Dell XPS 15z unboxing and hands-on

Design

Clean lines, smooth curves, and vast expanses of beautifully textured metal, cool to the touch -- the MacBook Pro has captivated Apple fans for years, and there's no doubt Dell's trying to capture much of the same charm. From the aluminum chassis to the placement of the speakers, DVD drives and majority of ports... heck, even the tiny arrow key bars on the backlit keyboard and feet on the bottom of the chassis are cribbed from Apple's product.


It's honestly difficult to find anything on the entire notebook that feels wholly original, though there are a few Dell tweaks -- the speakers and vents have the same pattern as those on the Inspiron Duo, and last year's XPS lineup contributed its distinctive hinged screen, which lies flat on top of the notebook rather than forming a traditional clamshell case. You'll also find plenty of chrome trim, ringing both the chassis and the oversized touchpad.

But let's get this out of the way right now: though the XPS 15z most definitely looks like a MacBook Pro and sports similar materials, you'll wind up disappointed if you're expecting the same exacting attention to detail. You're looking at an aluminum and magnesium alloy sandwich here, not a unibody frame, and much of that metal is thin enough to flex under a little bit of pressure. While typing, we noticed that if we put a little weight on the keyboard, we'd oh-so-slightly squish the whole frame, not enough to make a lasting impression, but enough to audibly restrict airflow to the system fan. And -- at least in our pre-production model -- that aforementioned chrome trim had rough edges that slightly chafed our wrists. We also have to laugh at Dell's decision to place all the I/O ports in a row on the left-hand side, just like Apple's rig, as we've often felt Cupertino sacrificed function for form in so doing.

Dell XPS 15z vs. 15-inch MacBook Pro (2011)

Still, it's a very attractive machine...

Display / Speakers / Keyboard / Trackpad

...and it looks even better when you lift the lid to find this optional 300-nit 1920 x 1080 screen. Yes, while Apple fans still have to settle for a 1680 x 1050 pixel picture in a 15-inch chassis, an extra $150 buys the XPS 15z a full 1080p display, allowing for high-res movies, games, and wonderfully roomy split-screen multitasking. It's a pretty bright, beautiful picture on this particular screen, too, and though the contrast isn't quite as high as we'd like, Dell's software will automatically adjust the backlight to give you the best out of your blacks and whites. It's also quite glossy, unfortunately, and viewing angles are pretty terrible here, as the picture becomes far less vibrant if you shift your head even slightly to the left or right.

That's a shame, considering that the XPS 15z's speakers sound like they're designed to be shared. We're not sure what kind of drivers lie beneath those patterned grilles, but they sure are loud, and create a wide soundstage perfect for movies and games even though they have little bass to speak of. They're also a little shrill at maximum volume, but they're still a cut above most laptop speakers we've used.

Dell's been on a chiclet keyboard bent as of late -- following the global trend -- and while opinions differ regarding whether floating islands or distinct grids make for better typing, we can't complain about the sea of squares on the XPS 15z. As we've already alluded to, Mac users will find themselves completely at home with the layout, and the keys themselves are fairly friendly, too -- rounded, comfortable, slightly convex little squares and rectangles with a smooth, rubbery action and nice big tactile guides on the home row. There's no dedicated numpad here, a bit of a shame considering that there's definitely space, but we suppose some things have to be sacrificed for symmetry and a pair of speakers loud enough to fill the room.

Speaking of symmetry, you'll find the XPS 15z trackpad front and center in the experience, and we're happy to say it's a fairly pleasant one -- the oversized Cypress pad is quick, responsive and accurate for single-finger input, and comes with a pair of large, clicky and satisfying mouse buttons. What's more, it does two, three and four-finger multitouch gestures, though you'll note we didn't include them in the "quick, responsive and accurate" part. Some work amazingly well (swipe four fingers sideways to engage Windows Flip 3D, then drag one to flip through your open apps) and some fail miserably (far too often, the trackpad detected a pinch-to-zoom motion when we intended to do two-finger scrolling). You can tailor gestures at whim in the Cypress settings page, but we were surprised to find that our changes didn't stick. The next time we rebooted the machine, those problematic default settings were back again.

Did we mention that the entire palmrest is made of magnesium alloy, including those speaker grilles? The whole surface you interact with is smooth, durable, and dirt-resistant too, as the only way we were able to leave a visible fingerprint was by touching the glossy screen itself. We should note, however, that the metallic surface is a double-edged sword here. We noticed that our fingers were getting mighty toasty during a benchmark, as if the computer was venting hot air right right onto our skin, and during an intensive session of Bulletstorm, we found the magnesium spacers between the crucial WASD keys was burning hot to the touch. It seems that Dell may have put some important silicon right underneath those keys, so you may want an external keyboard at your next LAN party.

Performance and battery life

Yes, you heard us right, a LAN -- the XPS 15z may not be a gaming rig per se, but for $999 there's more than enough power under the hood for a few frag sessions. Even the base model is loaded with a dual-core 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-2410M processor, switchable NVIDIA GeForce GT525M graphics with 1GB of memory, and 6GB of DDR3 RAM, a 7200RPM hard drive and loads of high-end connectivity. You'll find a gigabit Ethernet jack keeping the power socket company around back, two USB 3.0 ports on the left-hand side, along with one eSATA / USB 2.0 combo port, one Mini DisplayPort, and an HDMI 1.4 jack, a pair of 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks on the right, and a dual-band Intel 802.11a/g/n WiFi radio inside.

What can all that do in practice? Well, we're actually not quite sure about those particular specs, since we actually received the 2.7GHz Core i7-2620M version with 2GB of dedicated graphics memory and 8GB of RAM. That kind of rig will run you $1,534, but it'll also do some potent processing.

Case in point: We launched our Chrome browser with a dozen Engadget tabs, started playing a DVD copy of Hitch, fired up a 720p windowed version of Batman: Arkham Asylum, and started opening windowed 1080p movie trailers for The Dark Knight all at the same time... and it was only after the third concurrent trailer on top of our perfectly playable game session and DVD movie that we started noticing a little slowdown. In other words, multitasking is a go, and in case you're wondering, Windows told us that particular load still only used 80 percent of our available CPU cycles.

The XPS 15z also pulled its weight in a dedicated gaming scenario, playing that same Batman: Arkham Asylum at 1080p with all settings maxed save AA, and managed to deliver 30FPS on average. Similarly, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare gave us around 40FPS with 4xAA and all settings maxed. Bulletstorm proved pretty taxing, though: we had to drop resolution to 1366 x 768 and reduce details to medium to make that game playable. If you're aching for some more theoretical benchmarks, our XPS 15z pulled scores of E1511, P894 and X282 in 3DMark11, and earned 8023 PCMarks in PCMark Vantage and 7,317 in 3DMark06. By the by, boot times weren't amazing, but they're certainly not bad, as we clocked 40 seconds for the machine to load into Windows, or about a minute for the machine to finish loading startup programs and be completely ready for use.

	PCMarkVantage	3DMark06	Battery Life
Dell XPS M15z (Core i7-2620M, GeForce GT525M 2GB)	8,023	7,317	3:41 / 4:26
MacBook Pro (Core i7-2720QM, Radeon 6750M)	8,041	10,262	7:27
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 (Core i5-2410M)	7,787	3,726	3:31 / 6:57
Samsung Series 9 (Core i5-2537M)	7,582	2,240	4:20
Lenovo ThinkPad X220 (Core i5-2520M)	7,635	3,517	7:19
ASUS U36Jc (Core i5 / NVIDIA GeForce 310M)	5,981	2,048 / 3,524	5:30
ASUS U33Jc-A1 (Core i3-370M, GeForce 310M)	5,574	1,860 / 3,403	5:10
Toshiba Portege R705 (Core i3-350M)	5,024	1,739 / 3,686	4:25
Notes: the higher the score the better. For 3DMark06, the first number reflects score with GPU off, the second with it on.

We'd mentioned that Dell's previous attempts at premium systems failed price, power and battery life tests. With the XPS 15z, well... two out of three ain't bad. Despite the fact that the NVIDIA Optimus GPU turns off when not fully taxed (powering the laptop's display with integrated Intel HD 3000 Graphics instead), we weren't able to get much more than three and a half hours of regular use out of our review unit. Turning to our standard battery drain test (where we loop a standard-definition video with the screen at roughly 65 percent brightness, and with WiFi on), we saw much the same thing -- 3 hours, 41 minutes of use from the sealed 8-cell, 2.6Ah battery. It occurred to us that perhaps Optimus wasn't actually switching off the discrete GPU at the most appropriate intervals, and sure enough, we were able to eke out a little more runtime by completely disabling it, but you're still looking at 4 hours, 26 minutes of use. That's not bad, all things considered, but it's a good sight worse than the 8 hours of life that Dell's advertising here, and if the company wants to make a dent in the MacBook Pro's armor, it'll have to do better than that.

Software and Stage UI

The XPS 15z comes with the usual array of mostly unobtrusive bloatware, including a trial subscription to Norton Antivirus, the token copies of Microsoft Office Starter and Roxio for your disc burning needs -- but there is one thing out of the ordinary, and that's Dell's Stage UI. That's right -- the company's divorced its custom touchscreen interface from the Inspiron Duo and Streak, and turned it into a launcher bar that sits at the bottom of your desktop. There's no need to fear for your Windows 7 taskbar, though, as Stage buttons are just shortcuts to quickly launch your favorite multimedia, and the gallery, audio, video and podcast players are actually rather good-looking in our honest opinion. If you don't care for the bloat, it's all quickly uninstalled. Everybody wins.

Dell XPS 15z Stage UI and benchmarks

Wrap-up

These two laptops are not equals, but they never had to be -- for hundreds upon hundreds of dollars less than the Mac competition, Dell's unleashed an attractive, powerful and definitely desirable Windows PC. It's perhaps desirable enough to woo buyers who prefer Windows but love the Mac aesthetic. We suspect that's Dell's plan here, because while we really appreciate the XPS 15z's metal construction and choice parts, it hasn't really changed the game.

It's no lighter, thinner or particularly better armed than the competition, and when it tried to borrow the MacBook Pro's flair, it picked up some of Apple's failings along the way. We're not just talking about the inability to having chunky USB peripherals plugged in at the same time, but rather the ability to configure and upgrade the machine. While that dual-core Core i7 processor, GeForce GT525M GPU, 8-cell battery and DVD drive are nice to have, that's the best you'll get here -- even though Dell's slightly chunkier XPS 15 is configurable with quad-core processors, faster video options and a Blu-ray drive to deliver extra value to that 1080p screen.

When Dell tells you that the XPS 15z has no compromises, that's not quite the case -- it's a solid choice at this price point, but corners were cut to get here.

Dell XPS 14 review

When Dell told us of its plans to revive its tried and true XPS laptop line we were pretty darn excited. With so much brand dilution in the past few years -- there's been the Adamo XPS and the Studio XPS -- the products have noticeably strayed from providing the rock solid gaming and multimedia experience they were once known for. There's a reason XPS stands for Xtreme Performance System, right?! The new line, which includes 14-, 15-, 17-inch systems, has all the ingredients to set it back on track -- including Core i5 / i7 processors, NVIDIA GeForce 400M graphics with Optimus, JBL speakers, a backlit keyboard, an HD webcam and a solid aluminum lid – but has Dell succeeded in creating a well-rounded multimedia machine? And does it rival our oh-so-adored HP Envy line? We've spent the last week using the more mobile $899 XPS 14, so read on to find out in our full review!

Dell XPS 14 review

Look and feel

If you want our honest opinion -- and we're assuming you do -- the new Dell XPS machines aren't gorgeous, but they're not hideous, either. These rigs are fairly middle-of-the-road in terms of design, and that's probably the reason that the bigwigs in Round Rock haven't gone out of their way to highlight design on Dell's website or in ads. All of the machines have anodized aluminum lids and bottom panels, while the rest of the chassis is made of black and gray plastic. Similar to the Inspiron 14R and M101z, the design takes on more of a wedge shape as the battery is built-in to the base of the system so that it doesn't jut out. We tend to fancy the flared look, but it does give it a chunkier trunk. We'll say it flat out: if you're seeking a more attractive 14-inch PC, you really don't have to look any further than the HP Envy 14, but if you're content with a laptop that doesn't turn heads, the Dell XPS will fit the bill.

The 13.9 x 9.7 x 1.3-inch / 5.35-pound XPS 14 is the most mobile system within the new XPS line, but it's still larger and thicker than some comparable 14-inch laptops out there – the Envy 14 is thinner at 1.09-inches and the ASUS U43jc measures 13.7 x 9.6 x 1.2 inches. That said, it's not as heavy as HP's alternative, and Apple's 5.6-pound MacBook Pro 15 will weigh you down a pinch more. That extra girth does leave quite a bit of port space – the system is surrounded by two USB 2.0 ports, a USB / eSATA combo jack as well as HDMI, Ethernet and DisplayPort sockets. Where's the VGA port? That's the question we've been asking ourselves for the last week. It's a pretty big bummer considering there's quite a bit of leftover room to fit one in. There's also a headphone and headphone / mic ports, but you'll definitely prefer listening to music through the speakers – more on that soon. Lastly, the DVD drive and SD card slot live on the right edge. You can add a Blu-ray drive to the configuration for a whopping $450. (That price seems to go down if you go with an XPS 15 or 17.)

Keyboard, touchpad and screen

Unlike every other laptop coming out of the gate, the XPS 14 doesn't have a chiclet keyboard. Not having the extra gaps between the keys was an adjustment -- we've gotten extremely adept at typing on those keyboards -- however, one we were able to make. The keyboard itself is quite firm, and there's no noticeable flex – although, the plastic keys have a slightly too much give. What happened to the rubbery feeling keys on the M1530 is beyond us, but we're happy to sign a petition to get Dell to bring 'em back! Still, we typed the entirety of this review at a very decent clip and we're big (big!) fans of the backlight. The backlight can be adjusted or turned off by either tapping the F6 key or sliding the toggle in Windows Mobility Center. The top row of function keys doubles as multimedia controls, and there's a strip of LED touch controls above it which includes shortcuts to WavesMax Audio settings, Windows Mobility Center and another that can be customized to launch a program or website of your choice.

Dell gets a major point in our book for using an "old school" touchpad with dedicated right and left mouse buttons. As we've said before, we've become increasingly fed up with the flaky integrated mouse button designs or ClickPads. The 3.2 by 1.8-inch pad isn't as wide as it could have been, but it does the trick for navigating the display. The two mouse buttons are slightly mushy, but we'd rather that than uncomfortable, firm buttons that have to be broken in.

The 1366x768-resolution, 14.0-inch WLED display is quite bright, and was crisp enough when watching a 720p Jackass 3D trailer. There's no higher resolution screen option on the 14 -- you've got to go up to the 15 or 17 to nab a 1920 x 1080-resolution display. The panel itself is decent, although vertical viewing angles are a bit problematic – tilting the screen back a bit while sitting on a table caused color distortion. Horizontal angles were better. Our biggest complaint about the screen comes with its glossy plastic bezel – we just would have liked to see a flush glass bezel here or something a lot less shiny and fingerprint prone. The hinge, which sits on top of the system to apparently bring it closer to you, feels solid and doesn't wobble much.

Smack in the center of the top bezel is an HD webcam – the first one ever to ship on a laptop. As you'd expect, the quality of our video in a video call over Skype was quite good – our buddy in San Francisco said he could tell that we had woken up early and that we'd recently gone to the dentist. It's hard for us to say if the native cam is better than some of the peripheral HD cams from Logitech and FreeTalk since we couldn't compare them side by side, but it's much better than the average VGA or 1.3 megapixel webcams, that's for sure. If you're a vlogger – you know, a video blogger! -- you'll love the fact that you can record 720p video right through Dell's Webcam Central software and upload straight to YouTube. Speaking of that software, it's definitely a time killer – we spent more time than we care to share distorting our face and putting on different accessories.

Speakers

Rarely do we dedicate a section of a laptop review to speakers, but the built-in high-fidelity JBL speakers on the XPS 14 are so impressive it only seemed right. Dell claims the speakers are the loudest, clearest and cleanest found in any laptop out there, and we have to admit they may just be right. Of course, we're waiting for a rebuttal from the HP Beats team in a matter of moments. The two 3W speakers above the keyboard (the XPS 15 and 17 both have subwoofers on the bottom) along with the Waves MaxxAudio technology software produced some of the best audio we've heard on a laptop...maybe ever. Keep in mind we are yet to test ASUS's giant NX90 with Bang & Olufsen speakers. Compared to our MacBook Pro 13 and the Envy 17, music in Windows Media Player and Pandora was noticeably fuller and more detailed. It is almost a faux surround sound, and even when we played Mafia II on the rig we were hearing voices from one speaker and the screeching of our tires through another. It's just an awesome audio experience.

Performance and graphics

The Dell XPS 14's 2.53GHz Core i5 460M processor and 4GB of DDR3 RAM didn't leave us with any performance complaints. Our typical day-to-day activities, which included simultaneously surfing the web with over ten tabs open in Firefox, checking Twitter via TweetDeck, chatting in Trillian, writing in Microsoft Word 2010 Starter, and light photo editing using Gimp, all went off without a hitch. The 500GB 7,200rpm hard drive was also quick to open applications, but it appears that you can easily swap it out for a faster SSD if that's your wont.

	PCMarkVantage	3DMark06	Battery Life
Dell XPS 14 (Core i5-460M, NVIDIA 420M)	5796	6827 / 1955	2:58
HP Envy 14 (Core i5-450M, ATI HD 5650)	6038	6899/1928	3:51
Sony VAIO Z (Core i5-450M, NVIDIA 330M)	9949	6193	4:25
ASUS U33Jc (Core i3-370M, NVIDIA 310M)	5574	1860/3403	5:10
Toshiba Portege R705 (Intel Core i3-350M)	5024	1759	4:25

Being one of the first laptops to enter our "lab" with NVIDIA's newest GeForce 400M graphics cards, we were pretty eager to see how this guy fared against older systems and just how well it could power through some of our favorite games. As you can see in the chart above, the GeForce GT 420M card scored noticeably higher on 3DMark06, which just tests graphics, than the other systems we've reviewed with the previous generation GT 300M cards. However, it didn't score as high as the Envy 14's ATI HD 5650 GPU. Nevertheless, the GT 420M card blew through Batman: Arkham Asylum at 30fps and Shattered Horizon at 42fps. Our new favorite title – Mafia II – looked glorious on the screen and we were crusin' in our Smith Custom at 42fps and shooting our MP40 at 34fps. Obviously, the card was also able handle both 720p and 1080p video flawlessly.

Of course, we never had to lift a finger when it came to switching between Intel's integrated graphics and the discrete GPU, thanks to NVIDIA's Optimus. The GPU automatically flipped on when we launched the demo version of Mafia and even a 1080p clip. However, we should mention we couldn't get it to kick on when trying out the demo version of Lara Croft: Guardian of Light -- the software isn't listed in NVIDIA's profiles. We had to go into the Steam folder, find the game, and right click to launch it with the GPU on. Oh, how did we know the GPU wasn't on? Well, the lower frame rates were a good indicator, but also NVIDIA's got that new tool up there to help with that. Up until now, when we've wanted to see if the GPU was on or off we'd have to use a tool that NVIDIA designed for reviewers, however, the XPS comes with NVIDIA's latest Verde drivers, which actually displays the GPU activity at the moment as well as which programs are using it.

The G420M card also supports NVIDIA's new 3DTV Play technology, which allows you to plug in the laptop via HDMI to a three-dee TV and play your favorite 3D games or movies. Sadly, we don't own a 3DTV and thus, couldn't test it out. We're willing to bet that most of you are in the same boat.

The XPS 14 isn't immune to warm temperature and high fan noise. The system got considerably toasty when playing Mafia. The fan on the left side did go into overdrive, but the warm air got annoying enough on our lap that we opted to put it on a desk. During regular usage, the system was much cooler, though the palmrest did get a bit warm overtime.

Battery life and software

To be honest, we expected the Dell XPS 14 to last longer on a charge. On our video rundown test, which loops the same video at 65 percent brightness, the six-cell 56Wh battery with the GPU off lasted just shy of three hours. During regular use, we got closer to four hours before we had to scour around for an outlet. There are certainly other laptops with similar parts that last longer (eh hem, Envy 14!), and given the fact that Dell went with Optimus, it's a bit puzzling why the system didn't actually have better endurance. Dell does offer a nine-cell 92Wh battery for the XPS 14 for an extra $40, but, of course, that will add a bit more weight to the chassis.

Like most of Dell's recent machines, the XPS 14 boots to a very clean desktop with just Dell's dock centered at the top of the screen. As for deleteware, we're happy to say we didn't find all that much of it hiding within the Start menu. Dell does throw on Skype, CyberLink PowerDVD, Roxio Easy CD and DVD and McAfee, but there were no signs of website shortcuts disguised as programs!

Wrap-up

Without a doubt, the Dell XPS 14 packs some extremely attractive features: the system's JBL speakers are some of the best ever put into a laptop, its Core i5 processor combined with NVIDIA GeForce GT400M provides seriously solid gaming and performance muscle, and its HD webcam captures crisp video and pictures. When you consider you get all that for $899 it sounds rather amazing, but it's far from a perfect system – it's chunkier than the others out there, doesn't top the style charts, and its standard battery is gonna keep you close to a wall. If you're after a better combo of beauty and brawns, we have to say the $999 HP Envy 14 or $1,299 Envy 17 are your best bets, but the XPS certainly has enough going for it to make it worthy of its moniker.

NVIDIA's GTX 560 desktop GPU fills an exceedingly narrow pricing niche

With Tegra 2 hogging the spotlight, sometimes it's easy to forget that NVIDIA is still primarily in the business of making GPUs for computers. Yet, here it is with the GeForce GTX 560, another graphics chip ready to be inserted into mid-range gaming rigs. This smaller sibling of the GTX 560 Ti is designed to plug right into a small price gap in the company's lineup -- right around the $200 mark. The 336 CUDA cores inside this second-gen Fermi card, predictably, perform slightly better than the GTX 460 and fall just short of the 560 Ti, but it does eke out a victory over similarly priced competition from AMD. The only thing that kept reviewers from wholeheartedly endorsing the various (and often overclocked) flavors of the 560 was the tiny difference in price between it and its relatives -- tacking on the letters Ti and its 48 additional stream processors costs as little as $15 after a mail-in rebate. Check out the reviews below for all the benchmarks your little nerd heart can handle. And don't miss the video of a GTX 560 plowing through Duke Nukem Forever, Alice: Madness Returns, and Dungeon Siege III at the more coverage link.

Read - Tech Report
Read - AnandTech
Read - Tom's Hardware
Read - Guru 3D

SOURCE: Engadget

Nvidia unveils GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics processor

A good news for people who like PC gaming as the can take advantage of Nvidia's latest graphic processor wiht enhanced performance and new price tag. Nvidia unveils GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics processor and a new version of 3D vision wireless glasses kit for $ 149 each.

For DX11 titles this graphic processor is claimed to have the fastest performance in its own class. GeForce GTX 550 Ti is 38% faster than DX9 and DX10 generation games and 50% faster in DX11 games. GeForce GTX 550 Ti will take the PC gaming to an entire new level for the gamers.
Drew Henry, the general manager of Nvidia GPU business said "The GTX 550 Ti paired with our 3D vision technology provides gamers with an amazing low-cost platform that delivers an awesome immersive experience."