Yes, absent is one of the most sought after fan of them all, the Gentle Typhoon AP-15. I could not get these for testing, and to be honest, did not really try, as they have been nearly impossible to find for awhile now. With the Yate Loon fans being used, I feel this will bring a somewhat solid measuring point of what the other fans need to live up to, or surpass, in order to even be considered for use in a water cooled setup. All fans are considered medium speed, even though my XSPC radiator calls for low speed, and are rated at about the same CFM. All in all, this will be a pretty even test and will find out, for sure, who wins the battle among these three fans. Enough of the jibber-jabber now, let’s get on with the good stuff!

Setup:

Hardware:

• ASUS Rampage III Extreme
• Intel 920 @ 4.3GHz / 1.33Vcore
• Silverstone TJ11

Water Cooling:

• Swiftech Apogee XT Rev2
• XSPC RX 480 Quad 120mm Radiator
• Enzotech 1/2ID – 3/4OD Black Compression Fittings
• Bitspower Water Tank Z- Multi 250
• PrimoFlex Pro Tubing 1/2ID – 3/4OD Black
• 2x Phobya Temperature Sensors

Software:

• Real Temp 3.6
• Prime95

Testing Procedure:

• Fans installed in Push/Pull (8 Fans)
• Tests ran for an hour
• Temperatures taken every minute for 60 minutes, plus a couple idle readings before/after

Fans:

Fans shown:

• Arctic Cooling F12
• Coolermaster Blade Master
• Coolermaster Excalibur
• Coolermaster Turbine Master Mach 1.8
• Enermax Magma
  
• Gelid Wing 12 UV Blue
• Noctua NF-12 PWM
  
• Noiseblocker BlackSilentFan XL2
• Thermaltake 12CM Turbo Fan
• Thermaltake Duramax 12
• Thermaltake Pure Silence ISGC Fan 12
• Thermaltake Smart Case Fan
• Thermaltake Standard Case Fan
• Thermaltake Thunderblade
  
• YATE LOON D12SM-12

Next: Fans and Specifications.

Today we have an exclusive Cooler Master release product on the bench. The H612PWM is an ambitious attempt to take the cooling crown. We are very proud to be one of the first to have it to get an exclusive look at what could be the future of the air cooling market.

Looks like sheer size and the brutal force of 6 heat pipes is the magic behind the Cooler Master H612. The cooler was not intended for small cases but performance was the primary idea behind this design. The H612 features a 120mm fan with a clip on retention clip. The package also comes with a second set of clips and screws to enable a second fan to be installed in the rear of the cooler. This will further enhance the cooling characteristic and ability of this cooler.

The Cooler Master H612 is actually released in two different versions. The H612S and the H612PWM. The two version differ visually by the two top most fins which are silver or chrome on the H612S and black with the H612PWM. The physical difference between the two boils down the difference in fans. The H612″S” includes a single speed fan spinning at a mere 1300 RPM. The H612″PWM” however sports a variable speed fan running anywhere from 600 RPM all the way up to 2000 RPM. The model we received is the later.

The cooler does not feature the popular HDT design and instead provides a uncoated full copper base.The 6 uncoated full copper heatpipes add up to a full 1 foot in length if put together. The H612 also features a broad range of applications and installation options.

Features:

• Power Management Fan
• Fan Clips for fast and easy Fan installation
• 2nd Fan installation option
• 6 Heatpipe design
• Full copper base
• Performance Optimized
• Redesigned Heatpipe Array
• Improved Airflow

Supported Sockets:

Next: Unboxing, Packaging and Accessories

The Hybrid Transformer incorporates the transformer with the heat sink, not only reducing the size by 25% over traditional transformers, but by keenly conducting heat, increasing efficiency. The Heat Transfer Technology crafted especially for powerful, demanding power units utilizes an L-shaped design to route air flow by the heat sink, resulting in greater heat dissipation and therefore providing optimal performance. The Hyper Path adeptly places the integrated circuits tightly to the transformers, shortening the path and creating a more direct energy channel, reducing the energy loss to nearly nothing. Combining these elements with the integrated active PFC with PWN controller, a 120/135 mm speed-adjustable fan, a powerful single rail engaging the most energy-greedy peripherals with ease, and countless other features, the Silent Pro Gold Series should easily handle all your computer power needs.

Packaging:

Specifications and Features:

Definitions of Terms:

• Hybrid Transformer™: Specially design transformer to improve thermal and efficiency. Patent design transformer mount with heat sink, the size was reduced by up to 25% than the traditional transformer providing lesser energy consumption, while conducting the heat for better overall efficiency
• HTT™ – Heat Transfer technology: Patent design “L” shaped heat sink layout. This technology helps to guide the air flow along the heat sink to improve the air circulation for maximum performance.
• Hyper Path™: Patent design hyper link between IC and the relative components. Patent energy conversion design path provides super efficient connection from the transformer to components. The signal can be transfer directly without any energy loss.
• Single 12 V Power Rail: Tackling challenges from the most power-intensive peripherals head on, this solitary 12 V power rail provides ample power and strong resistance to any overloading.
• Double-Layer EMI Filter: Dual protection from electromagnetic interference, thus restraining noise and interference for greater protection for you and your connections.
• Intel Compliant: ATX12V v 2.3 and EPS version 2.91 compliant.
• Intelligent Fan Speed Control: Speed control makes the 120 mm fan adept for any user’s circumstances and need.
• Active PFC+ PWM Combo Controller: Integrating this active controller will increase the efficiency of any computer, making PFC higher than 99%.
• Multiple Protection Design: Over Voltage Protection (OVP), Under Voltage Protection (UVP), Over Power Protection (OPP), Over Temperature Protection (OTP), Short Circuit Protection (SCP) and Over Current Protection (OCP).
• Efficient Transformer: Adeptly holding power for minimal loss in the 5V standby voltage so the system is promptly up and ready from power on or sleep modes. Highly efficient design on par with 80Plus Gold requirements (90% typical).

Next: A Look At The Cooler Master 1200W Silent Pro Gold

Moving on to video cards, we have a new HD6870 Hawk Edition, HD6950 Twin Frozr II, HD6970 Lightning Edition and GTX580 Lightning Edition.  Each of these cards features slightly improved versions of their coolers from the previous generation of cards, primarily having to do with the fan shrouds.  MSI decided that there was too much plastic on the fan shrouds and had them changed to use more aluminum for a firmer construction and cleaner look.

Next up we’ll take a look at MSI’s new flagship for the P67 chipset, the Big Bang Marshall.

MSI P67 Big Bang Marshall

Big Bang Marshall

Here she is, in all her glory.  MSI has gone with SFC-chokes and Hi-C caps for the P67 lineup, especially on the Marshall.  You can see how clean the socket is with the new, upgraded chokes and caps, and it’s really a visual upgrade that is also extremely functional.  The board features no less than 8 PCI-E x16 slots and utilizes a new chip from Lucid Hydra as a bridge for additional PCI-E lanes (P67 only supports 8x times 2 by default).  With up to four slots populated, users can expect full x16 support, while with all eight slots populated, each lane will default to 8x.  Slots/PCI-E lanes can also be disabled with the flip of a switch.  This feature can be useful for extreme overclocking situations.

Triple BIOS + OCGenie 2

Triple BIOS feature is also implemented with the Marshall.  With this, the user can essentially use one BIOS entirely for their tweaking and overclocking settings, while still maintaining two totally stable BIOS’ as a fail safe to prevent the user from having to clear CMOS after a failed overclocked.  This is also useful in the case of a bad BIOS flash.

OCGenie II is also included from a hardware level, allowing both beginners and advanced users easier methods of tweaking their boards to get the most out of them.  MSI is very proud of OCGenie II, and we’ll be sure to check it out in detail once we have this board in our hands for review.

The Marshall should be available by next month, or even potentially end of January for a price roughly in the $300 range.  If we could guess, we’d guess more like $350, but maybe MSI will surprise us.  Look for a review on this board from us in the future.

Next up, new AMD board?  But for what?

MSI Big Bang Conquerer

MSI has one more very interesting board on display, this time for the AMD platform.  No details were available on the board, so what I have here is entirely on my own assumptions.  The socket is AM3+, there are 6x SATA 6GBps ports, 10 Phase DrMOS PWM, OCGenie II, and what’s under those heatsinks…well…we’ll have to leave that to your imagination.

Big Bang Conquerer

Black Socket...Cool

The board is already a revision v2.0, which tells me there was some significant update to it since it’s first incarnation, but specifics I do not know, nor can I really speculate.  None the less, if this is a glimpse into the future, the future is certainly a bright one.

Thanks for reading, stay tuned for much more from CES 2011.

I know some of you saw my recent dry ice runs on my Phenom II rig. In a few threads I discussed that for my next run I will have a different pot to play around with — and I assure you that promise was kept.

The video is up! Click here:

|Deep Freeze| – |LN2Cooling.com Evaporator| – |Phenom II X6 1090T @ 5.625GHz|

I got in touch with a friend and he agreed to let me take one of his cooling pots for a spin. Aaron Schradin of LN2Cooling.com has lent me an excellent pot to play around with and review for all of you guys. This pot is usually meant for the purpose of running under LN2 and LHe4. This is seen in the many AMD world record breaking overclocking attempts, which can all be seen over at amdblackops.com. However I will be playing around with the dry ice performance of this pot, which has mostly been overlooked until now.

The new little toy in town is in fact not little at all. This pot is huge. Much larger than the previous aluminum cooling pot I have been benchmarking with. There is also a lot of mass to work with which in turn equals to better cooling. Combine that mass with high quality copper and lots of surface area and you have yourself an excellent cooling pot.

The Pot

I was interested in the packing, a shipping tube made specifically to ensure this evaporator can be safely shipped anywhere.

Here’s a look at whats was included with my package. The hardware, mounting kit, and of course the copper base and aluminum reservoir.

Here is a closeup of the base. A little tarnished, but nothing a little bit of polish can clean up. Usually tarnished copper can be cleaned with ketchup as well.

This pot comes with a drilled in temperature probe hole for to ensure the pot is cooling to maximum capacity.

Here is the base cleaned up. A perfect mirror. It also shows the mounting hardware close up. These springs tightened up will ensure just the right amount of pressure bearing down on the cpu.

The mounting kit comes with the ability to use this pot with all current sockets on Intel and AMD platforms.

The pot threading. It was important not to tighten the reservoir too much when screwing it on to the base or else it will become extremely difficult to remove.

The pot with both parts screwed together is around 16cm tall. That is also about 6.3 inches.

The diameter of this monster is approximately 8.5cm. Once again that is about 3.3 inches.

And finally a shot of the internals taken from LN2cooling.com

System Setup

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T – Batch 1018EPAW
Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 Rev 2.o
Mushkin Blackline 4GB DDR3 – Stock @ 1600MHz 6-8-6-24
Sapphire Radeon 5870 1GB GDDR5 – Overclocked @ 900MHz/1200MHz
PC Power And Cooling 750W PSU
LN2cooling.com LN2 Evaporator Cooling Pot
20 Pounds Of Dry Ice
Plumbers Putty
Dielectric Grease

The pot is filled with crushed DICE. I used a chopstick to stir the mixture.

Setup during the run.

Slushie anyone?

Frosted over.

I thought this was a pretty cool frost pattern that formed after I removed the cloth from the pot.

At the end of the run. Snow all around.

The Results

Benchmarks:

CPU-Z
SuperPi 1m
SuperPi 32m
wPrime 32m
wPrime 1024m
PiFast
3DMark 06

For the results, I will be comparing the scores on this pot to the scores from my last run on my Duniek Aluminum pot.

CPU-Z  -  Core #1 5.579GHz @ 1.744Vcore – Validation

For this CPU-Z valid I went all out overclocking my chip’s strongest core, core #1. As you can see I disabled all but 2 cores, and ran down a bunch of other settings to get this. Before settling on 5.579GHz, I was able to hit 5.624GHz but was not able to validate without crashing. Maybe I will make this on my next run. My previous run on the aluminum pot only netted me a max validation of 5.547GHz.

CPU-Z  -  All 6 Cores, 5.500GHz @ 1.696Vcore w/ 3000NB and 1000MHz 7-9-6-15 memory

During my last run, I was only able to push 5.4GHz all 6 cores. This goes to display how the increased mass and the copper material of this pot makes for more efficient cooling and coping with the load of all 6 cores pushed to 5.5GHz.

SuperPi 1m  -  12.625 seconds

My old time on the aluminum pot was 12.797. SuperPi 1m is highly inefficient on Gigabyte boards for whatever reason, but I still managed to surpass my old score and net the top 1m DICE score for this processor on hwbot.org.

SuperPi 32m  -  12 minutes 58.219 seconds

Due to the fact that this pot can hold down better temps under load, I was able to increase cpu speed in contrast to my previous run. I broke the 13 minute barrier for 32m on DICE with this processor.

wPrime 32m  -  4.765 seconds

Not much to say here. I’m thinking I could have fine tuned my setup for a higher score, but I settled at this time. For my next run I will get a faster time.

wPrime 1024m  -  151.25 seconds

I was astonished at the pots ability to handle the load of all 6 cores stressed. All extreme benchers know that 1024 takes a bit of work to pass at higher frequencies. I managed to pass at 5.125GHz. The previous pot would not budge at over 5GHz.

PiFast  -  20.50 seconds

Once again, another untuned run. However I surpassed all of my personal bests with this one.

3DMark 06  -  28306 3DMarks

For the first time in a long time, I decided to test out some 3d stuff again. I did this mainly to gauge how the evaporator handles 3d load. This is where I saw my biggest improvement from my old pot. During one of my 955 X4 BE runs, I found myself only able to run 06 at 4.520Ghz using the aluminum pot. I was able to push out and run 5.25GHz stable under the load of 3dmark06.

That is all for the results. However, here are the improvements I made with the new pot summarized into one chart:

Conclusion

This is an excellent pot for all types of extreme cooling. Remember that this pot is not primarily for DICE. It begins to shine once under LN2 and LHe. The 99% pure copper design, combined with the excellent internal surface area and the mass of the base makes for extremely efficient cooling. The install is pretty straightforward as well.

This pot helped me break all my personal best’s that I made on my previous aluminum pot. Half of these runs still have headroom to tune as this pot is very efficient. In the BIOS it read -75C at almost all times, which is only 4C above the actual temp of dry ice itself. This is next to impeccable cooling performance. Any extreme bencher would love this evaporator.

I would like to thank Aaron Schradin over at LN2cooling.com for lending me this pot to play with.

Also, I should have another overclocking video of this run posted up on my youtube channel soon.

My HWBot.org Profile

My Personal Blog

Asus launched the first of the Republic of Gamers (ROG) series for the AMD platform way back in 2007, calling it the Asus Crosshair for the AM2 platform, which was based on the Nvidia nForce 590 chipset. The second in the series was the Asus Crosshair II Formula, which was based on the Nvidia 780a chipset. The third in the series is the Crosshair III Formula and this time Asus did the smart thing and ditched the Nvidia chipsets. They went ahead with the brand new 790FX chipset and made one of the best overclocking and feature rich boards for the AM3 platform.

The ROG series has always been the top end of the Asus line up of motherboards and the Crosshair III lived up to it’s pedigree. Today, we have the opportunity to take a quick look at Asus Crosshair IV Formula, which is the latest iteration in the legendary series of AMD based ROG boards.

The Crosshair IV is now based on the latest high end 890FX chipset from AMD along with an 850 series southbridge, allowing a total of 32 usable PCI-E lanes, 6 Gbp/s SATA III and USB 3.0 support. Let’s take a quick look at the specifications before going ahead:

Model Name

• ROG Crosshair IV Formula

CPU

• AMD socket AM3 Phenom™ II /Athlon™ X4 /Athlon™ X3 /Athlon™ X2 processors

Chipset

• AMD 890FX/SB850

System bus

• Up to 5200 MT/s HyperTransport™ 3.0

Memory

• 4 x DIMM, dual channel, up to 16GB, DDR3 1866 (OC)/1600(OC)/1333/1066MHz
  

Expansion

• 3 x PCIe 2.0 x16 slots (@ dual x16, triple @ x16, x8, x8) with ATI CrossFireX™ technology
• 1 x PCIe 2.0 x4
• 2 x PCI 2.2

Storage

• 6 x SATA 6Gb/s with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10
• 1 x SATA 3Gb/s
• 1 x eSATA 3Gb/s

LAN

• Marvell Gigabit LAN

Audio

• SupremeFX X-Fi 8-channel audio built-in with EAX 4.0 support

USB/ IEEE1394a

• 2 x USB 3.0, 12 x USB 2.0 (7 at back I/O, 5 onboard)
• 2 x 1394a ports (1 at back I/O, 1 onboard)

Software

• Kaspersky antivirus 1 year license

Features

• ROG Connect
• GameFirst
• Core Unlocker
• Turbo Key II
• MemOK!
• CPU Level Up
• SupremeFX X-Fi built-in
• Extreme Tweaker
• iROG
• Loadline Calibration
• Voltiminder LED

Form Factor

• ATX, 12” x 9.6” (30.5cm x 24.4cm)

As you can see, this board comes with all the features that were available on the previous Crosshair series, with a few differences. We will get into that in the next part of our review.

Unboxing

The Asus Crosshair IV Formula comes in a box very similar to almost all the ROG series motherboards. The only difference is the AMD/ATI badges at the bottom.

The rear of the box has a whole list of specifications, along with pictures of the more innovative features of this board.

Once we open the box, we are greeted by two small black boxes, stacked one on top of the other. The first one contains all of the accessories and the second, the board itself. Let’s first take a look at the accessories.

The list of accessories is quite large and consists of everything that you could ever want or need with a new motherboard. They have even included stickers for your SATA drive cables, a large ROG sticker for your cabinet, and a smaller ROG sticker for your case or what have you. They have also included six SATA III cables and they are thankfully black in color. The only thing missing from this accessory list is the LCD screen, which I did miss during my OC session. There is also a white USB connector, which is used for the ROG connect feature.

Now let’s move on to the highlight of this preview and that’s the board itself.

Beautiful right? Asus has changed the colors on this board from Blue/Black to Red/Black and this in my opinion only goes better for all of the AMD/ATI fans around. On to a closer look at some of the features of this board.

A Closer Look

Lets start with the rear connectors first and contrary to expectations, there are a few things worth checking out here.

To start with, we have the usual sets of USB, LAN, 1394 and Audio connectors. What I would like to draw your attention to are the USB 3.0 connectors, marked in blue, the clear CMOS button (it’s extremely helpful in a closed case) and the ROG connect button. The ROG button is a new feature on an AMD board, which basically helps you to monitor and overclock the system using another computer. Now this is quite an interesting idea and Asus did demonstrate this earlier this year, using an Asus Eee PC to overclock an i7 system. The system uses a special USB connector, which is a part of the accessories list.

Moving on to the board, let’s look at the CPU area.

The board uses a single 8 Pin E-ATX connector for power. The PWM area has a beefy heatsink which keeps the 10+2 phase VRM’s cool. You also have the Game First chip, which helps to give priority to your online gaming sessions and maintain a low ping time, even as you use the internet for other tasks.

Moving on, the CPU area remains the same as previous generations, with AMD stubbornly holding on to the same bracket type, which in a way is great news for those who want to carry over their existing cooling setups. The things to look out for are the alternate slot arrangement for memory. AMD boards have had adjacent slots running dual channel for a while now on most boards, but in this board it’s the alternate slots which provide the same feature. Asus has also made it so that the ram slots need only one side to be closed now which makes it a bit easier to install ram.

The second important feature is the “Probe It” points, which will give you accurate and real time information on all the major voltages using a multimeter. The CPU area does look a little cluttered, but I did use a Noctua NH D14 on the board and it cleared everything fine. Ram using tall heatsinks will probably cause a problem however. If you look carefully, you will also notice that Asus has done away with the IDE/Floppy drive connectors and that in my mind is not a bad idea at all.

We can see the NB heatsink in the picture above with the three heatsinks on this board being connected by a heatpipe. This should help to dissipate the heat better than individual heatsinks can, but mostly it’s just for flash. The heatsink does look a bit close to the first PCI-E slot, but it does not interfere with the 5850 that I installed there.

I would have loved to take the heatsinks off to show you the new chips, but that’s not possible at this point in time.

As we get closer to the bottom of the board, we can see the southbridge heatsink as well as the six sata ports. The SB heatsink covers the new 850 series SB chip. There is also a small red “GO” button, which will help to configure your ram for optimal performance settings automatically. Moving along to the bottom, we can see the ROG chips, as well as a bunch of headers for various front panel connectors.

And finally we come to one of the last parts of this preview, the on board buttons area.

The board comes with a total of five on board buttons or switches. We have already seen the first, which is the “GO” switch. The other four are at the bottom of the board and consist of the start, reset, core unlocker and the turbo key. The first two are pretty straight forward. The third switch, which is the core unlocker, is used to unlock hidden cores on AMD chips. Theoretically AMD had disabled the ACC unlocking functionality on the 890 series chipsets, but Asus was able to re-implement this feature on their own.

The last switch is the Turbo Key, which is also a pretty nifty feature to have. The Turbo key helps to overclock the computer while in the OS. You have to set a predefined OC, which is then activated at the press of a button.

A little higher up we see a VIA chip, which is part of the Supreme X-Fi chipset for the audio. This should provide a superior audio solution to what most boards offer with Realtek HD Audio solutions.

Conclusion

This is one good looking board which also brings a lot of the features from the high-end Intel line up to AMD. In the final review we will take a look at various benchmarks as compared to the MSI GD70, which has been one of the top selling, high performing 790FX boards on the market. As of now we have the following list of benchmarks that we will be working on:

1. 3D Mark ‘06
2. 3D Mark Vantage
3. PC Mark Vantage
4. HD Tune Pro
5. Crystalmark
6. Everest Memory and System Benchmarks

And of course we will also be trying to OC the hell out of it.

Overall, this looks and feels like a really solid board, which should work well for both beginners as well as advanced users. There are a lot of features built in and we will be spending a lot of time on benchmarking this board, so do come back for the final review.

Thanks for reading!

The most attractive thing was the Bluetooth IRog module

The I/O section and the bundle are pretty stuffed

The power sections for CPU and RAM are fully enforced

Firstable started some test  on air-cooling to check the capability of Bclock and Ram frequency ( different sets of timing)

let’s see how far is possible to push the RAM

230 bclock and 2300 RAM 3D benchable on air …..not bad right ?

Keep your eyes peeled on this page, be sure to digg and retweet, and we’ll see you at PAX!

Nvidia Fermi Launch Event Updates:

6:08PM – Waiting for show to begin…fans going crazy with noise makers.

6:11PM – “Please take your seats, show will start in 1 minute”

6:13PM – Drew Henry (General Manager, GeForce GPU’s) is coming on stage to begin the event…

6:14PM – Drew is telling everyone how awesome us gamers and Bostonians are.

6:15PM -  Nvidia snuggies are confirmed for giveaway….lol

6:17Pm – Here comes the spin, discussing why Fermi was delayed.  “We wanted to make something great for gamers”.

6:19PM – Showing off Fermi.  “The GeForce GTX480…is something you are really going to be delighted with.”

6:20PM – ” It’s the most complicated GPU we have ever built.”  3 Billion transistors.

6:21PM – “And we have the GeForce GTX470..it’s little brother, also a great gaming GPU.”

6:22PM – Performance Numbers: GTX480 compared to 285, “sometimes more than 2x performance, no less than 1.5x”

6:23PM – “2x performance in overall gaming is cool, but it’s not just a GPU for gaming.”  “We’ve invested a lot in physics, to allow you to blow things up. “  “Up to 2.5x the gpu physx processing performance of the last generation”

6:24PM – “Real-time interactive ray tracing…”  Is this a Larrabee conference?

6:25PM – New Nvidia “Crank that S#it up!” t-shirts.

6:26PM – This next part is in 3D.  Now he’s talking about he feels the PC can lead the industry in 3D, with 3D VISION.

6:27PM – EA’s Gordon Van Dyke here now, showing off BF:BC2 in 3D.  Showing how they were able to incorporate 3D VISION into their latest hit.

6:28PM – Showing BC2 in Nvidia 3D Surround, that’s three screens, full 3D.  Looks VERY impressive actually.

6:29PM – Showing BC2 jungle fight scene with the militants when you hold out in the shack.  Again, very impressive, but the full surround sound is certainly adding to the effect.

6:30PM – Basically 3D Vision Surroind is 3D Vision meets ATI’s Eyefinity.

6:31PM – Going to show WoW in 3D Vision now.  Allll of the nerds are going berzerk.

6:32PM – Little LOL as the frame rates totally suck as they are in flight mode in WoW in 3D Vision Surround.  Not sure what that’s about…but they say it’s fresh support, just added, so perhaps it’s still in “beta”.

6:33PM  – Jesse Addly (?) from EA.  Does Tech Dev at EA for the PC platform.  So, engine development.  Going to talk about Need For Speed now, also in 3D Vision Surround.

6:34PM – Ooooh, going to show off real-time ray tracing, with cars in Need For Speed.  It’s in 2D, but it’s showing you interactive Ray Tracing, in what looks like a few frames under 30fps.  It’s allowing you to customize a ray traced car in game.

6:36PM – This is a downloadable app with the entire NFS Garage inside, you can customize and collect your cars, add your creations to in-game NFS.

6:37PM – Apparently this app will ship with every GTX480 and GTX470, so a bundled app, but not a full game by any means.  Interesting.

6:38PM -  “Working with the guys in the game industry is really important for us.”  “Often times what we’ll do is put together technology demonstrations to show what they can do with our technology in their game”

6:39PM  – Next up “This is what we call Super Sonic Sled”.  This is a full game they are going to include with every GeForce card.  This is the rocket sled demo everyone saw a few weeks ago.  It’s in full 3D Vision Surround.  All the latest DX11 technology and lots of tesselation.

6:40PM – Showing off different parts of the game world they created.  Showing off the rocket sled, Barney (the sled driver), the millions of pieces of the bridge that gets destroyed.  Showing the details in wire frame as well, so the viewers have an idea of the complexity.

6:42PM – They are using the chicken gun that they have implemented in the game to blow off pieces of the rocket sled, which destroys the sled as he takes off.

6:45PM – Added a million particles to the bridge and blew it up to show the capability of the GPU’s Physx processing.

6:47PM – Next up Metro 2033.  Louis Giglioti (?) from THQ to discuss.

6:48PM – “Let’s see the game…”  Metro 2033 running in full 3D Vision Surround.  Lot’s of game background talk, the author, the story, blah blah..go read the review.

6:53PM – Ok, that demo is finally over.  Just a game promo essentially.

6:53PM – “With this generation architecture, we have them in full production, full launch today, the reviews will be posted in about 10 mins. ” And they will be in stores in about 14 days.

6:54PM – Something with green nailpolish on their 3d glasses just won a GTX 480.  Now they are tossing out tosses. I just punched out some nerd to get one!  “Sucks to be you nerd”  j/k…or am I?

6:55PM -  Show is clearing out, it appears it might already be over, even though it hasn’t been officially stated yet.

6:56PM – It’s over, good night.

Be sure to check our Interview with Nvidia’s Bryan Del Rizzo here