Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 on a 17cm board?

Whenever people hear the expression "Gaming PC" they always picture a huge desktop computer case with a lot of ventilation holes and fans, or a very thick laptop with loud cooling fans.
Today ASUS has demonstrated that small gaming PCs can also be built with mini-ITX or mATX mainboards and high end video cards. The ASUS Geforce GTX 670 DirectCU mini video card fits into any computer case that has only space for a mini-ITX mainboard (which is usually 17cm long).

As you can see it doesn't lack any features of the full-sized versions. It has 4 digital output ports, a dual slot cooling system and a 8-pin power connector on the top.

The cooling system is made up of special flat VapourX chambers, aluminum fins and a special cooling fan, which blows right on the video card, but also sideways, in order to get rid of hot air faster. In the picture above the ASUS Geforce GTX 670 DirectCU mini video card is installed into a mini-ITX computer case, but it is right at home in mATX - dual card configurations and even ATX - tri/quad card configurations.

What is truly amazing about this video card is its lower power consumption associated with slightly higher memory and GPU frequencies, when compared to the standard GTX 670 video cards. This is why it will probably come with a significantly larger price tag. Unfortunately we don't know yet when it will be available in shops.

Ivy Bridge for Low Budget Systems - Celeron G1610

Back in the days when Intel Pentium 4 processors were considered high end, the Intel Celeron brand was significantly worse, or should I say incomplete and slow. These early Celeron processors lacked HyperThreading and a decent amount of cache memory, so they only brought about 50% of the speed of Pentium 4 processors from the same generation.

With the introduction of Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors this situation has significantly changed and low end Intel processors began to offer impressive value. The Celeron 400 (code name Conroe-L) processors had only one 35W TDP core active and still managed to outperform previous generation 84W TDP Celerons.

Three generations have passed since then (Core 2 Duo, 1st and 2nd generation iCore) and here we are, Intel has just recently launched its latest desktop Celeron processor model, the G1610, which is a crippled version of the Ivy Bridge Core i3 processor. In this case "crippled" is a bit harsh term, because this ~$43 dual core chip offers an impressive performance: 2652 points in Passmark vs. the 4283 points obtained by the superior Core i3-3220 processor. Considering the $115 approximate price tag of the latter, we can safely say that the Celeron G1610 processor has a much better performance/price ratio. In fact the new low end dual core chip from Intel is more than enough for multimedia playback, office applications and even gaming, with one medium-speed PCI-Express 16X slot video card (like AMD Radeon 7770 or nVidia Geforce GTX 650).

With the mentioned components I'm inclined not to recommend any mainboard or memory brand, because we're not talking about a high end machine, so the only important thing is to use two memory modules in the computer, in order to enable dual channel mode (which makes quite a difference).

The Intel Celeron G1610 processor needs just 55Watts to give its best, including the integrated graphics processor, which is an "Intel HD Graphics" unit, stripped of QuickSync and other Intel technologies. If one of the mentioned video cards is installed, then the total power consumption of the computer will be about 160W maximum, so any cheap computer case and 400W ATX power supply will suffice (assuming that you don't install any major components other than a classic hard drive, SSD and an optical drive).

Intel’s next generation processors – The Haswell platform

In the recent years Intel has pretty much dominated laptop and desktop markets starting with the Intel Core Duo (codename Conroe) platform, which increased performance by more than 100% compared to the previous generation called Pentium D 800/D 900.

In the desktop sector the next three generations came with modest improvements.

First the LGA1156 chips were made from two separate IC units: the processor cores manufactured on 32nm technology and the other unit, made on 45nm technology, which included the memory controller and graphics processor.

The Sandy Bridge processors were the first completely unified (CPU+GPU+memory controller) chips from Intel, completely manufactured on 32nm technology. They also needed a new socket called LGA1155, just one pin less than the LGA1156, but with a completely different pin layout. The improvement in performance was around 50%.

Ivy Bridge processors were launched in 2012 and they are here to stay at least until the end of 2013. They are about 10% faster than the previous generation and they (quad core processors: Core i5 and i7) also consume less energy, just 77W instead of 95W (55W instead of 65W for dual core processors: Celeron G, Pentium G and Core i3), thanks to the improved 22nm manufacturing process.

While in these three generations the integrated graphics processor got a bit faster with every generation (especially with the introduction of QuickSync technology for video compression), the newly announced Haswell processors will have twice as many space allocated inside for the integrated graphics. 

Theoretically this should mean an impressive increase in graphics performance, but unfortunately it’s not that simple, mostly because of the slow system memory the new platform still uses - DDR3. For truly fast graphics the integrated GPU needs its own high speed memory, so all that GPU potential built into the Haswell chips means nothing with shared memory, as the tests bellow will show.

TomsHardware.com got their hands on an unlocked version of the Haswell flagship, the Intel Core i7-4770K. After some serious testing the picture became quite clear.

Two synthetic tests done with the popular SANDRA benchmark utility returned impressive results:

…while other tests revealed modest improvements:

 Popular games with the least demanding 3D engines run reasonably well:

Unfortunately these test results came at a cost, as Haswell processors have a higher power requirement - 84W instead of 77W for Core i5 and i7 Quad Core chips (dual core Celeron, Pentium and Core i3 chips haven’t been announced yet). For processor specs click this link.

The official launch of the 4th generation Intel Core processors is just months away (June 2?), but so far I haven't seen any serious reason why someone would upgrade an Ivy Bridge or even Sandy Bridge platform to a Haswell one. Let's not forget that while Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors use the same LGA1155 socket, the Haswell processors need LGA1150 motherboards and also consume more energy.

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