October 29, 2007 -- Earlier this month we looked at the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe WiFi motherboard, which featured a new technology called Express Gate that was an instant-on Linux-based desktop environment that supported a web browser and the Skype VoIP client. This motherboard also featured integrated 802.11n wireless, Intel's X38 Chipset, and a variety of ASUS AI features. However, ASUS innovations are not limited to their motherboards but certainly extend to their wide graphics card selection as well. The EN8600GT OC GEAR/HTDP/256M graphics card is based upon NVIDIA's GeForce 8600GT GPU with ASUS OC Gear. OC Gear? This is the world's first hardware-based real-time overclocking device. The PCI Express graphics card ships with a controller device that can be installed into a 5.25" drive bay and via USB, it's able to overclock the graphics card with a turn of a dial. In this review today we'll tell you how well the ASUS EN8600GT OC Gear graphics card works under Linux.

September 26, 2007 -- It is going on two years since support for Scalable Link Interface (SLI) was introduced into NVIDIA's Linux binary display driver. This support had come a year after it was officially launched and supported by the Windows ForceWare display driver. As we had seen at the end of 2005 with two GeForce 6 graphics cards in SLI, its performance was very sluggish, and there were a number of problems to be found with Linux SLI. While we have routinely tested new NVIDIA graphics cards under Linux SLI internally, there hasn't been much to report on as the experience has been very foul. However, things have changed recently and with the recent NVIDIA 100.14.19 display driver release using GeForce 8 hardware -- we finally have some modest numbers to report on in a Linux SLI configuration. Linux SLI is still far from perfect, but in this article we've used two GeForce 8600GT graphics cards in an SLI configuration under both Linux and Windows to compare the single and dual GPU performance under both operating systems.

September 20, 2007 -- This past Tuesday NVIDIA finally delivered an updated Linux and Solaris display driver (100.14.19) after they failed to deliver a newer driver since June of this year -- not even a new beta driver! This new software release does, however, contain a number of fixes especially for the GeForce 8 series. After we're all recovered from Intel's Fall 2007 IDF we will follow up with additional NVIDIA benchmarks, but in between IDF parties we benchmarked a GeForce 8800GTS 640MB with the previous 100.14.11 display driver and then the new 100.14.19 driver release. The performance regression fix is very apparent!

September 18, 2007 -- The open-source Avivo driver is currently bound to supporting the ATI R500 GPU family and with efforts now being focused on the RadeonHD driver, this reverse-engineered driver will likely never support the newer GPUs. However, the RadeonHD driver that was pushed out into the public a few hours ago does support the R600 series. This open-source support does include the flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900XT graphics card. Inside our labs we tried out the Radeon HD 2900XT with the RadeonHD driver on Fedora 7 and it's certainly great to see this progress. The driver still has a climbing road a head, but this driver is already a leap in the right direction.

September 08, 2007 -- All week we have talked about the performance of the 8.41 display driver and the performance on various ATI graphics cards from the R300 series to the latest R600 graphics card. In some of these articles, we have briefly commented on the image quality, but in this article we will be looking exclusively at the image quality while gaming with the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB under Linux.

September 07, 2007 -- This week has been extremely exciting to say the least. We started by telling you about the AMD 8.41 Display Driver which is largely rewritten and offers Radeon HD 2000 product support, performance improvements, and soon will support AIGLX. Four articles looking at the R300/400, R500, and R600 performance under Linux followed that preview. Then yesterday we told you about AMD's new open-source strategy for supporting Linux and the open-source community. Well, what do we have for you today? With the 8.41 display driver we have completed some additional benchmarks using the Radeon HD 2400PRO 256MB and Radeon HD 2600PRO 256MB graphics cards. In this article, we see if these two mid-range ATI Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards are able to compete against NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series.

September 05, 2007 -- Back when the Radeon X1000 "R500" series support finally arrived for Linux, it came six months after the hardware was actually launched and the Linux performance was down the drain. In some benchmarks the ATI Radeon X1800XL 256MB was outperformed by the earlier Radeon X800XL and was clobbered by the NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX being as much as four times faster. As we have been sharing all day, the fglrx 8.41 Linux driver finally turns the table where not only the Radeon X1000 performance is finally in order but all of their supported product families received a very nice performance boost. Four months after the availability of the Radeon HD 2900XT, the 8.41 fglrx driver now supports the R600 product family under Linux. We have multiple Radeon HD 2000 "R600" GPUs at hand for testing, but in this article we are focusing upon AMD's current flagship model, the Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB. The performance of the Radeon HD 2900XT under Linux is certainly astonishing after the previous performance shortcomings by ATI/AMD.

August 20, 2007 -- Two weeks ago we looked at the Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB from Sapphire Technology and in preparation for the new ATI/AMD Linux display driver coming soon, today we are previewing the ASUS EAH2600PRO 256MB graphics card. This PCI Express graphics card has HDMI output support with HDCP compliance, OpenGL 2.0 support, and its core runs at 600MHz with a 1000MHz memory clock. Distinguishing this graphics card from the reference ATI Radeon HD 2600PRO is claims that this ASUS cooling solution is 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the reference model.

August 11, 2007 -- There is no R600 Linux driver yet, but as we have shared before it is coming later this year. When the Linux support does arrive, we will be delivering same-day Linux benchmarks with a plethora of different graphics cards as well as seeing if the new AMD Linux driver can finally outperform NVIDIA's binary driver and hardware, which for years has been faster under Linux. Among the many graphics cards that we will be using to deliver these initial benchmarks is the Sapphire Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB. In this preview while being stuck with the old driver, we have a few words to say on Sapphire's fastest 512MB GPU aside from what we had shared in our launch-day Radeon HD 2900XT coverage.

July 26, 2007 -- A few months back we looked at the Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card, which was a factory-overclocked $100 graphics card from Gigabyte that came topped with a passively cooled copper heatsink. Today we are back with Gigabyte as we look at their step-up from the 8500GT, which is the 8600GT GV-NX86T256D.