Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

It’s been awhile (or a long while, in the case of the ARES CG6155) since we’ve heard about these machines, but ASUS has at long last decided to start shipping ‘em to retailers. The aforesaid gaming desktop still doesn’t have a publicly available price tag, but ASUS assures us that it’s out there now for those who know where to look. Thankfully, it was a bit (and we stress “bit”) more forthcoming with details on the G50 and G71 gaming notebooks, which are also available as we speak for $1,249.99 and take-your-best-guess, respectively.

Read - ASUS ARES CG6155
Read - ASUS G50 and G71

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Filed under: Desktops, Displays

Check it Donnie, Nvidia just launched its Quadro CX accelerator card for Adobe’s Creative Suite 4. The optimized GPU fits into your PC’s PCIe slot to smooth image navigation and manipulation in Photoshop while accelerating effects in Adobe’s After Effects and Premier Pro. Nvidia claims that the new GPU helps encode H.264 video at “lightning-fast speeds” when using Nvidia’s Cuda-enabled CS4 plug-in while giving professionals accurate video previews with uncompressed 30-bit color or 10-/12-bit SDI (for professional video equipment) before final output. The Quadro CX features a 1.5GB (GDDR3) frame buffer and 76.8GBps memory bandwidth with dual-DisplayPort connectors (up to 2560 x 1600 pixels) and a single dual-link DVI with support for panels up to 3,840 x 2,400 @24Hz. Look, we know this sounds all stupid-hard advanced to those of you using Photoshop to hotten-up your Facebook pic, but the pros are going to love it. $1,999 and available today — video demonstration just beyond the read link.

[Via InformationWeek]

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Filed under: Desktops, Displays

Check it Donnie, Nvidia just launched its Quadro CX accelerator card for Adobe’s Creative Suite 4. The optimized GPU fits into your PC’s PCIe slot to smooth image navigation and manipulation in Photoshop while accelerating effects in Adobe’s After Effects and Premier Pro. Nvidia claims that the new GPU helps encode H.264 video at “lightning-fast speeds” when using Nvidia’s Cuda-enabled CS4 plug-in while giving professionals accurate video previews with uncompressed 30-bit color or 10-/12-bit SDI (for professional video equipment) before final output. The Quadro CX features a 1.5GB (GDDR3) frame buffer and 76.8GBps memory bandwidth with dual-DisplayPort connectors (up to 2560 x 1600 pixels) and a single dual-link DVI with support for panels up to 3,840 x 2,400 @24Hz. Look, we know this sounds all stupid-hard advanced to those of you using Photoshop to hotten-up your Facebook pic, but the pros are going to love it. $1,999 and available today — video demonstration just beyond the read link.

[Via InformationWeek]

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Elcomsoft has been using NVIDIA’s CUDA GPU computing architecture to accelerate its Distributed Password Recovery tool for a while now, but it looks like the latest version of the cracking utility takes it to the next level — it can break a WPA2 password using two GeForce GTX 280-based boards 100 times faster than with just a CPU. It’s still a brute-force crack, but only a few packets need be sniffed, and the GPU accelerates the algorithm used to generate keys significantly — even laptop-grade 8800M and 9800M GPUs speed things up 10 to 15 times. We wouldn’t worry too much about wardrivers with trunk-mounted bladeservers going nuts, however — the base version of the software costs $599, and things ramp up to $5,000 pretty quickly.

[Via HotHardware]

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Filed under: Desktops

Sure, it’s all well and good to play around with the Folding@Home client on toys like the PS3, but if you’re really serious about out-nerding the rest of the pack, you need big-boy hardware, like this 51-card NVIDIA-based rig built by nitteo of the overclock.net forums. That’s 51 8800-series GPUs on 13 MSI P6N Diamond mobos, enough for an estimated 265,200 folding points per day when they all go online — and we’re guessing that number will go up when that new CUDA-based folding client released yesterday is installed. Now let’s just hope all those cards can stand the heat, hmm? More pics at the read link — and remember, we’re always down for more help on the Engadget Folding@Home team!

[Via x64bit.net]

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Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals

NVIDIA’s really pushing the GPU-as-CPU angle at SIGGRAPH this year — we’ve already seen the PhysX and CUDA-powered GeForce Power Pack for consumers, and the company is also updating the Quadro Plex series of visual co-processors for workstation customers. The new Quadro Plex 2200 D2, designed for large datasets and models, crunches data through two Quadro FX 5800 GPUs (totalling 480 CUDA cores) and 8GB of RAM, while the Quadro Plex 2100 D2 is optimized for large multidisplay rigs with four Quadro FX 4700 GPUs and support for up to eight monitors. Sounds fun — and we’re guessing the people who can justify the $10,500 starting price for these rigs think so too.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Gaming

It’s not a direct response to AMD unveiling the HD Radeon 4850 X2 and 4870 X2 yesterday, but NVIDIA also came to play at SIGGRAPH, and it’s got lots of new GPU-as-CPU toys for us this morning — and what’s more, they’re free. Like we’d been hearing, GeForce 8, 9, and 200-series cards are all getting PhysX support as of today via a free GeForce Power Pack that contains a free full copy of Warmonger, three PhysX-enabled Unreal Tournament 3 maps, demos of Metal Knight Zero and the Nurien UT3-based social networking service, and a couple tech demos. The Power Pack also includes some new CUDA apps to play with, including a new Folding@Home client (ahem) and a trial version of the Badaboom video transcoder. That’s a lot of new toys, so get downloading and let us know what you think!

Read - PhysX GeForce Power Pack apps
Read - CUDA GeForce Power Pack apps

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

NVIDIA’s Tesla GPU-based high-performance computing workstations and add-in cards have been on the market for a whole year now, and to celebrate, they’re getting birthday cake, balloons, and an upgrade to GT200-based chipsets. Like AMD’s recently-announced FireStream 9250, the new T10P processing units are capable of breaking the teraflop barrier, up from the first gen’s paltry 518 GFlops, and they’re up to 240 cores from the first gen’s 128. You’ll have to shell out to get all that horsepower, though: the entry-level, 900GFlops C1060 PCI card will sell for $1699, while the four-GPU 1U S1070 blade will sell for $7995 for two PCIe-interface version or $8295 for the single PCIe connect model. The standalone Tesla workstation has been discontinued, as customers were increasingly buying the cards, so it looks like those are really fast collectors’ items for now. So, who’s going to be the first to add one of these bad boys to the Engadget Folding@Home team?

[Via Tom’s Hardware, thanks Matan]

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Filed under: Laptops

Desktop gamers weren’t the only ones scoring a little love from NVIDIA today — the company also rolled out the Quadro FX 3600M laptop graphics GPU, which it says provides professional workstation-level performance on the road. The CUDA-capable chip is designed to be mounted on a standard mobile graphics board, and the stock configuration sports 512MB of RAM, power-management features, and a 256-bit memory interface that opens up 51.2GB/s of graphic memory bandwidth. Sadly, there’s no word on price, but the first machine out the gate with the new GPU will be the 17-inch HP Compaq 8710w, which currently runs in the $2,500 - $3,000 range.

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