01/31/2023 at 00:01 by Henner Schröder – The return of Via and Michael Dell as well as the first pictures of the 3D Mark Vantage and the first tests of AMD’s Radeon HD 7950 – that happened on January 31st. Every day, PC Games Hardware dares to take a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.
…2005: Via Technologies hardly has a chance against the increasing competition from Nvidia, Ati and above all Intel on the chipset market. Nevertheless, the company is not giving up and is launching three new models for the Pentium 4 on January 31st: while the PT894 with one and the PT894 Pro with two PCI Express x16 slots are aimed at the middle and upper price segment The PT880 Pro is aimed at entry-level systems – and offers them a special feature: In addition to PCI Express, it also supports the old graphics card standard AGP, if desired even both at the same time. Only this smallest model achieves notable success, for example on Asrock mainboards.
…2007: He turned a garage company into what was at times the largest PC manufacturer in the world – but in 2004 Michael Dell withdrew from the position of managing director and became a member of the supervisory board of his company. Apparently not a good decision, because Dell got into trouble: irregularities in the balance sheet called the stock exchange regulator onto the scene, and a massive recall of fire-prone notebook batteries damaged the company’s image. And so, on January 31, Michael Dell returns to the top post.
…2008: After the presumably fake 3DMark 08 shots had already been reported, Futuremark released the first, guaranteed authentic screenshots to the waiting fan community of 3D Mark Vantage (as it was then really called). Despite the visual splendor, Futuremark itself is not yet satisfied and points out that this picture only represents a “work-in-progress” version. On April 28th, 2008 the time had come: 3DMark Vantage was the first (and so far only) DirectX 10 benchmark from Futuremark to be released.
…2012: This was the first coup and the second follows immediately… that seemed to be the motto behind AMD’s salami presentation of the current Graphics Core Next-based Radeon models. While the top model, the Radeon HD 7970, was already presented on December 22nd, the slimmed-down HD 7950 was launched on January 31st – which was initially the third-, but with the following drivers the second-fastest card behind its sister, before Nvidia can counter . The GCN chip Tahiti Pro has 28 of 32 compute units and is operated at 800 MHz, the 384-bit wide memory interface provides ample transfer rates for the remaining computing power. AMD’s partners recognize the potential right from the launch and offer their own models that are properly overclocked and still quiet. With the good availability and the comparatively low prices as well as the now impeccable image quality, you are fighting your way back into the hearts of the users.
