With the new Radeon 7900 cards topping the performance charts, people are getting eager to see how the other cards in the 7000 series stack up. With the 7970 and 7950 currently available, it looks like the 7770 and 7750 will be the next ones to hit the market, according to a leaked slide from MSI.

If it is to be believed, we should see the 77xx cards hitting in just two week’s time. These are on the lower end of the scale, with only a 128-bit memory interface, with 1GB of memory. Pricing should be in the range of $99-$159.

For those with a bit more patience, you’ll find the 78xx cards sometime in March. These are going to be the higher-end of the mainstream cards. Look for 256-bit memory, and 2GB of memory. We should expect these to keep on part with the performance of current 69xx cards, with a better price point, ranging from $179-$249.

When it comes to video cards, most people will spend a good bit of time researching which specific card to get. The last stage of this decision-making process is to decide which of the many companies to actually purchase the card from. After all, aside from varied cooling solutions, it’s basically the same hardware. However, the biggest deciding factor can be the warranty service. For years XFX has been one of the video card kings, thanks to their Double Lifetime Warranty.

Unfortunately it looks as though those days are behind us. After reading through their revised warranty service, it seems that they are no longer interested in staying on top of the game. Rather, they are happy to be “on par or better” by simply offering a Two-Year Limited Warranty. Here’s the full text:

Regarding our revised warranty policy:

1) XFX will transition to a Two-Year Limited Warranty for all new XFX Radeon HD 7000 series models. The standard two-year limited warranty is on par or better than warranties offered by other brands in the industry. While we have had an increasingly small percentage of warranty related occurrences after the two-year mark, we have eliminated the extension and transferable options for these models. Simplifying the operational requirements will allow XFX to commit our resources on developing and manufacturing the highest caliber and best selection of graphics cards available.

2) For the new XFX Radeon HD 7000 series Double D models, we will continue to provide an option to extend as these products are geared for our top-tiered enthusiasts and XFX will continue to offer this benefit on our top products.

3) Most importantly, all XFX Radeon HD 6000, 5000, and 4000 series models also offer the two-year limited warranty as standard, and will continue to be supported by the optional Double Lifetime Limited Warranty (with registration within 30 days of purchase). Restrictions and limitations may apply and specific details are available on our website.

It seems that they will be offering some sort of extended warranty to Double D models, but they haven’t really made that clear. It’s sad to see that one of the warranty champs in the industry has decided to step down like this. Knowing you had the peace of mind of not only great warranty service, but that you could transfer it to someone when you sell the card later was a great feeling.

When you’re looking to upgrade your PC for gaming, as long as you have a moder quad-core processor, you’re probably going to be looking at your GPU. The big question that always seems to come up is whether you should keep the one you have and add a second in Crossfire/SLI, or just toss it out and get a brand spankin new one from the latest series.

I’ve always had a hard time justifying buying a second card and running Crossfire. Sure, it does add a boost in speed, but it’s not as if we’re seeing double frame rates from two GPUs. And buying two top-of-the-line cards is rarely worth your money, for the same reason. But that all might be changing with the new Radeon 7000 series.

Over at Guru3D they’ve managed to get their hands on a pair of Radeon 7970′s, and put them to the test. During their tests of older DX9 and DX10 games, the performance was much as  you’d expect from a Crossfire setup. However, on nearly every DirectX 11 game, the Crossfire setup was getting almost double the FPS when compared to the single GPU. Just to give you an idea, here’s the results of their Battlefield 3 tests (all tests are ran on Ultra):

I have to say, I’m pretty excited for these new cards, even in a single configuration. However, it’s great to see that newer games are able to scale with the addition of a second card. It also gives you an idea of what the upcoming 7990 should be capable of.

With the new Radeon 7000 series on its way soon, we’re all eagerly waiting to find out just how the new 28nm processing technology is going to stack up to what’s on the market right now. We could start seeing official reports as early as the end of the week, but why not jump the gun with some rumors?

According to a couple of charts that GuruHt has discovered, it seems that the 7970 could have a performance gain of 1.6x over the current champ, Nvidia’s GTX580. That’s a hefty boost, if the nubers hold true.

Unfortunately, even if these results are 100% true, we have no real basis for comparison. We don’t know anything about the other hardware used, or what settings each game was tested on. It’s fun to look at these sorts of rumors, but we’ll have to hold out for some solid info before getting too excited.

AMD fans have been eagerly awaiting the next generation of graphics cards from their favorite supplier. Unfortunately, it has been a bumpy road, with delays pushing the first cards back to next year. With the release looking to be only weeks away, everyone is anxious to find out just what these new chips will be packing. If you have a look at the image above, you might have a better idea of what’s under the hood of the 7970.

Then again, you might not. While certain aspects line up with previous reports, such as the 2048 streaming cores and 128 texture units. However, a few things don’t really sit right with me. The first indicator that this is likely a fake is the misspelling of the word “embargo” at the bottom. Another is that they claim the idle power consumption to be only 3W. It’s great if they have managed to do that, as it would be a huge drop from the 6970′s 20W at idle.

As with all supposedly leaked information, you can’t generally put too much stock in it. I’d say that I’m about 95% percent certain that the above image is a fake. We’ll just have to wait until next month to get the official word.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday week has recently passed and that means a bunch of you bought some new computer hardware with all of the awesome deals. If you bought a graphics card though, you may want to rethink it! The new Nvidia GPU architecture titled “Kepler” is coming out early to mid 2012 and they are putting their GTX 580s on sale for a low low price.

With the new architecture right around the corner, Nvidia wants to clean the shelves to make room for the new stuff. Right now Nvidia 580s will run a buyer about $600. After the upcoming discount, 580s will run about $380. Hopefully this decreases the prices of all Nvidia cards for people who are wanting to buy lower end cards as well.

There are four main reasons to this discount. The first one is to make room for the newer models on the shelves which was explained above, the second is to increase the sales volume, the third is to clear previous stocks, and the fourth is to step counter the AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series. This is great news for all Nvidia fans planning to upgrade in the near future. This deal is planned to roll out sometime in December and it’s not known how long it will stay.

I have to admit that in the last year or so, ATI has really shaken things up in the realm of desktop graphics cards. Since the launch of the 38xx series, we’ve slowly upgraded almost all of our gaming rigs around here to ATI cards. That’s not to say that Nvidia isn’t putting out great cards, but the price/ performance barrier that ATI has been hitting is unbeatable. They’re looking to expand that into the sub-$60 price-point with their new round of Radeon HD 4550 and 4350 cards.

The cards will support DirectX 10.1 and each sport an HDMI connection that’s capable of delivering 7.1 channel audio. As for power, the Radeon HD 4550 with its 512MB of DDR3 offers up 96 GFLOPS of power for just $55. Both it and its 4350 cousin with its 256MB of DDR2 will consume less than 20 watts under full load, which makes them cheap, powerful and green.

On paper, these cards sound like they’ll be a great deal for the gamer on a budget. We’ll try to get our hands on one when they hit shelves later this month to see how they stack up against some of the more expensive cards.

If you’re looking for the specs for each GPU, here’s the 4350, and here’s the 4550. Enjoy!

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