Following the trend of other manufacturers, after AMD officially announced 1 GHz variants of their HD 4890, it looks as though XFX will be releasing a Black Edition HD 4890 with the famed 1 GHz GPU clock speed. It would appear that XFX are using a black PCB and a change to red DVI ports as seen on some of their other ATI based graphics cards. Whether or not the PCB uses a reference design is not known at this point but XFX have stuck to the reference cooler with an XFX Black Edition sticker.

XFX continues to show enthusiasm with its ATI Radeon line of products, by coming up with the first Radeon HD 4770 accelerator for the market to use the premium reference design for Radeon HD 4770 (model: XFX 4770ST D5 512MB). AMD had come up with two choices of coolers for its partners. Most of them choose the one which is more cost-effective, so the sales margins could be improved in an already tight pricing-segment.

XFX used the premium reference-design cooler and PCB, with a major difference that it comes in black instead of red. XFX has so far had a knack of trying as hard as it can, to color its cards black. The company did so with the Radeon HD 4870 reference design accelerator recently. This card retains the reference clock speeds of 750 MHz (core), and 800 MHz (memory). Given that XFX chose the more expensive parts in making this card, it will pass on the premium to the consumer, making it slightly more expensive than the reference design cards in its league.

Following ASUS, XFX is another partner breaking away from the reference design mold for the Radeon HD 4770 accelerator soon after its launch. The company is ready with a variant that features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. For now, a picture of only its box can be found from an incomplete promotional page of the company, with links leading to its 512 MB base-model, but what the one picture reveals, is a rather lavish packaging. The "X" shaped box shows no signs of a "XXX" branding, or anything that suggests the card features factory-overclocked speeds, though the "1 GB GDDR5" is legible. The card is backed by the company's "5-star" warranty. Its pricing and availability are not known.

XFX is starting its Radeon HD 4890 lineup with three models graded by the core clock-speed they come with. The base-model will carry reference clock speeds of 850/975 MHz (core/memory), the XFX HD 4890 XT, with clock speeds of 875/975 MHz, and the XFX HD 4890 XXX, with clock speeds of 900/975 MHz.

Something about the XXX model is interesting: almost every other AMD partner has a Radeon HD 4890 variant with the same core clock-speed: A certain ASUS Radeon HD 4890, Sapphire HD 4890 Toxic, HIS HD 4890 Turbo, and MSI HD 4890 OC, and a recent AMD slide exposé showing two distinct grades of Radeon HD 4890, with the second one being a "Radeon HD 4890 OC". This grade, according to Expreview, is believed to have high clock speeds, to increase competitiveness against the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 accelerator.

Coming back to the XFX HD 4890 XXX, the card (not pictured yet) comes in a peculiar "X"-shaped box. It comes with a free copy of Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., and is backed by the company's "5-star support". It is expected to be priced above US $250, which is supposed to be the base-price for Radeon HD 4890.

Pursuing legal action against Intel for bringing its Intel-compatible platform development to a grinding halt due to legal complications, NVIDIA has kept its platform development for AMD on track. The company has made the nForce 980a SLI platform official, that supports the latest Phenom II series processors from AMD. The company published the product page on its website, and has pictured its reference design motherboard based on the chipset. The motherboard carries the "designed by NVIDIA" marking, which makes it a design that several of its AIC partners such as EVGA, XFX, Zotac, etc., can use simultaneously.

The motherboard sports the nForce 980a SLI chipset, paired with the nForce 200 PCI-Express bridge chip. The motherboard features a GeForce 8300-class IGP, with DVI-D and D-Sub outputs. It supports NVIDIA 3-way SLI and Quad-SLI. As an AMD platform, the chipset supports AM2, AM2+ and AM3 socket processors, with DDR3 and DDR2 memory support (depending on the processor). A 5-phase digital PWM circuit powers the processor. The nForce 980a SLI and nForce 200 chips are located adjacent to each other, and are cooled actively by a fan-heatsink. The product design looks production-grade and may attract partners to sell it.

Barely months into being an ATI add-in board partner, XFX refuses to be a newbie to the scene. After starting off the proceedings with non-reference designs for most of its initial product lineup, XFX adds yet another of its own designs to its small yet formidable ATI Radeon HD 4000 series: a passive-cooled design for an HD 4650 model.

Pictured by ATI-Forum at the ongoing CeBIT event, the XFX Radeon HD 4650 silent keeps up with XFX' black and red colour scheme. The PCB stays black, so does the heatsink over the GPU. Two heatpipes convey heat from the heatsink to a dense array of aluminum fins at the back of the card. One can expect reference clock-speeds for the card, considering its USP mainly is its silent cooling, and not exactly its cooling efficiency to aid overclocking. XFX may announce this card shortly.

XFX starts a competition for eveyone that's keen on hardware and in the meantime can draw well. Using basic assets which will be supplied from XFX, you need to draw the coolest wallpaper in one of 4 sizes - 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The only requirement to participate in this competition is to be North America resident. Every day and every week until the final on March 20th, XFX will choose a winner that will receive various bonuses. Daily winners will receive a legal copy of Ubisoft's FarCry 2, weekly winners will earn a XFX Pocker Set and the final winner will win a whole Intel Core 2 Quad computer system by iBuyPower. The competition starts today, for more information click here.

Come March 3, and NVIDIA will have officially renamed the GeForce 9800 GTX+ to GeForce GTS 250. NVIDIA partners will have announced new SKUs based on the GPU throughout March. XFX on its part, seems to have made its GTS 250 accelerator ready, and it looks familiar. Chinese website IT168 caught an early glimpse of the accelerator.

The XFX GeForce GTS 250 series card will use a custom cooling design that looks almost identical to the company's Radeon HD 4850 accelerator. It features a 55 nm G92b graphics processor. Its clock-speeds are expected to be 738/1836/1100 MHz (core/shader/memory) for the base model, though one might expect XFX to come up with factory-overclocked variants. It holds 512 MB of GDDR3 memory across a 256-bit memory bus. XFX may choose the upcoming CeBIT event to launch this accelerator, after of-course, NVIDIA handles the SKU launch on its end of things.

The GeForce 9400 GT graphics processor was originally conceived by the company to serve as an upgrade over the IGP, to provide multi-head HD video connectivity, video acceleration and a reasonable bit of GPU acceleration for CUDA-driven applications. It facilitates only some very casual gaming at low settings. XFX however, is looking to give it a gamer feel with a new Fatal1ty-branded SKU. Brand Fatal1ty represents a range of gamer-oriented hardware carrying the brand-marks of one of the most successful and popular professional gamers of our time: Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel.

The XFX GeForce 9400 GT Fatal1ty takes on the same XFX-design and adds Fatal1ty branding. Featuring 512 MB of DDR2 memory, this card uses clock speeds of 550 MHz core and 800 MHz memory. The features are pretty standard: 16 stream processors, a 128-bit wide DDR2 memory bus, DVI and D-Sub connectors for output, and a low-profile PCB design that makes it slim form-factor friendly. The product will be announced shortly, so we could know its price.

XFX released a special FarCry 2 themed graphics card based on the GeForce 9600 GSO graphics processor. The bundle includes a copy of the popular first-person-shooter title, FarCry 2. Its specifications are spiced-up by its memory: 1.5 GB. The memory however is DDR2 and is clocked at 800 MHz, with a bus width of 192-bits. This G92-based graphics card features 96 shader units clocked at 1,450 MHz, with the core running at 580 MHz. It sports a distinct XFX design with black-coloured PCB and single-slot cooling.

NVIDIA's newest release, the GeForce GTX 285 goes on sale starting today. The graphics card was announced earlier this month along with NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 295 graphics card, choosing CES as an ideal launch platform. Leading NVIDIA add-in card partners such as ASUS, BFGTech, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, XFX and Zotac, etc., put their base-model and factory-overclocked cards on sale, starting from US $379.99 for the XFX base-model, all the way up to $429.99 for the EVGA SSC model, in the US.

The GeForce GTX 285 replaces GeForce GTX 280 as the fastest single-GPU graphics card. It is NVIDIA's second-fastest graphics accelerator, sporting 240 shader cores and 1 GB of GDDR3 memory across a 512-bit wide memory bus. Essentially it resembles the GeForce GTX 280, except for the newer 55nm manufacturing process it's built on, the higher reference clock-speeds, and reduced power-consumption.

XFX, following its recently announced collaboration with AMD, today introduced its first Radeon HD-powered 4000 series cards, the XFX Radeon HD 4870, 4850, 4830, 4650 and 4350.

All five models feature exceptional memory bandwidth, board power and compute power as well as a number of industry-firsts. For example, the XFX Radeon HD 4870 is the first graphics card with GDDR5 memory.

It does come as a surprise to us, that XFX is going to have a full-fledged non-reference design ATI Radeon lineup, barely a month into its official announcement of a tie-up with AMD. Pictured below are XFX Radeon HD 4350, Radeon HD 4650 and Radeon HD 4830. Ideally XFX will use a common design with its Radeon HD 4600 series cards. Both incorporate black-coloured PCBs, and the XFX colour scheme with the coolers.

The XFX Radeon HD 4350 (model: HD435X-YAH2) comes with a core clock speed of 600 MHz and 512 MB of DDR2 memory clocked at 1000 MHz. It is passively cooled and is low-profile friendly. The XFX Radeon HD 4650 / HD 4670 cards use reference AMD clock speeds. The Radeon HD 4850 card comes in two variants, HD465X-YAF2 (512 MB) and HD465X-ZAF2 (1 GB). Also pictured is the XFX Radeon HD 4830 512MB (model: HD483X-YDFC) that looks identical to the XFX Radeon HD 4850, pictured earlier.

XFX seems to be ready with its initial lineup of graphics cards. Some European retailers have even begun listing their products and pricing. While there's nothing really interesting about the way XFX is pricing its cards, the way it's cards seem to be certainly interesting. Pictured below are its first two models based on the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics processors.

Some surprises: Both use black coloured PCB, neither are 100% reference ATI design, and in fact, XFX designed its own cooler for the Radeon HD 4850 512 MB (model: XFX HD485X-YDFC). The Radeon HD 4870 in the picture is the 1 GB variant (model: HD487A-ZDFC). Both accelerators use AMD reference clock speeds. These cards will be released within the first two weeks of this month. More information as we come across.

PINE today announced that its graphics division, XFX, is partnering with AMD. The collaboration will incorporate the award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4000 series GPUs into XFX's already impressive line of extreme performance graphics cards.

"We are delighted as this partnership allows us to incorporate the current and future AMD graphics technology into our future graphics card designs, and enables our R&D teams to develop an even wider range of graphics products for our worldwide customers," said Michael Chiu, Chairman and CEO of Pine Technology Holdings.

A longstanding partner of NVIDIA, XFX would soon embrace AMD to release graphics cards based on the ATI Radeon series. Its plans however are somewhat similar to what Gainward seems to be executing: to maintain strong ties with NVIDIA, while dedicating a smaller portion of its product lineup to those incorporating ATI Radeon GPUs.

Expreview spoke with an XFX official, who confirmed that the company would be taking up projects based around ATI Radeon products, while continuing to maintain its partnership with NVIDIA by continuing to have flagship products using the NVIDIA GeForce. XFX would be going as far as making sure that its products based on ATI Radeon GPUs wouldn't release in the Chinese market (a key market for NVIDIA products). The decision by XFX to work on ATI Radeon products came as a surprise to many, since XFX has been a staunch NVIDIA tier-1 partner.

UK based HEXUS.net has learned that XFX, one of NVIDIA's main AIB partners, is about to start producing AMD/ATI based video cards in the very near future. HEXUS has learned that a formal announcement, detailing the exact relationship between XFX and AMD/ATI, is expected next Tuesday. The AMD/ATI deal won't reflect on XFX's NVIDIA series cards, the company will continue to sell them as it is doing now. Expect more information, when available.

XFX has just released its X58i motherboard, yet another new member of the Intel X58 based guild. Pictures and specs of the motherboard follow below.

Although Pine, the parent company of XFX, isn't new to making motherboards based on Intel chipsets, it could well be the first time it is using the XFX brand and design to sell an LGA 775 socket motherboard based on an Intel chipset, in this case, the entry-level G31.

The XG31i is an entry-level motherboard, in the mATX form-factor. It takes care of the essentials, using a single PCI-Express x16, and two PCI slots, dual-channel DDR2 memory supported by two memory slots, onboard Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 to provide display output through a single D-Sub connector, and 8-channel audio. Interestingly, the clear CMOS button, and diagnostic LED display is provided on the rear-panel. XFX plans to set a modest price to propagate this motherboard through the entry-level market.

GeForce 9500 GT makes for a decent graphics accelerator for HD entertainment, productivity and light-gaming. XFX has released a graphics card (model: PV-T95G-YALG) based on the said GPU, using a half-height PCB that makes it low-profile, and compatible with small form-factor PCs.

The card uses the GeForce 9500 GT running at reference speeds of 550 MHz (core) and 1400 MHz (shader). It sports 512 MB of DDR2 memory clocked at 1400 MHz. It provides a DVI and a D-Sub ports, it can be coupled with the low-profile kits XFX already has in store. The card is available for sale, and is priced as low as €56 in Europe.

Mom may have been able to help you with your algebra, but all the homemade cookies in the world can't compare with the performance features you get with ultimate "mother," the XFX nForce 750i SLI motherboard.

Our motherboard delivers performance straight out of the box, for the ultimate gaming experience. And, the 750i SLI comes with exceptional game support and bar none the fastest multi-GPU gaming platform available in the performance category.

If you happened to have bought a GeForce GTX 280 card when it released for US $649, you'd probably be extremely disgruntled, with people paying as low as $499 for the same thing now, and just weeks after release. Such changes in the tech-industry even cause major legal trouble for card vendors when such customers sue them in this regard. Ironically, the role of NVIDIA is limited to dictating prices, the partners have to bear the brunt of such awkward situations. XFX is the first partner to have announced a cash-back scheme for people who purchased their GTX 200 series products at their old (high) prices.

XFX is widening its NVIDIA graphics card line-up with the introduction of two "Black labeled" GeForce 9 series cards. Available in limited numbers the G92 products include XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 1.0GB DDR3 Black Edition (PV-T98U-ZHB9) overclocked to 700MHz/1700MHz/2.1GHz core/shader/memory clocks and XFX GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB DDR3 Black Edition (PV-T98F-YDB4) with factory clock speeds of 760MHz/1900MHz/2.28GHz for the core, shaders and memory clock speeds. Both cards will come bundled with Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed game.

XFX, one of the main NVIDIA GeForce graphics card manufacturers, has decided to try and outsell rivals by cutting prices on its 8800 GT, 8800 GS and 9600 GT cards. All three standard versions of the cards will now be $30 cheaper thanks to mail-in rebates being offered by online retailers such as Newegg and TigerDirect. This means that the 512MB 8800 GT will now sell for $189 including a copy of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, the 384MB 8800 GS will now cost $119.99 and the 9600 GT has a new price tag of $149. The overclocked versions of the 8800 GS and 9600 GT are also seeing price drops of $30 and $20 respectively, which means they will now be sold for $139.99 and $179.

XFX officially announces its latest brainchild, the XFX Geforce 9600GT yesterday. The first born in the highly anticipated 9-series, the XFX GeForce 9600 GT pushes the gaming experience to new heights with up to 90 percent greater performance than any GeForce card in its class. This prodigal child gives a huge value for its price. The immersive entertainment experience is the powerful product of full Microsoft DirectX 10 support, NVIDIA's Quantum Effects technology, Lumenex engine as well as Unified Architecture, ensuring that this amazing new card can play the hottest games with jaw-dropping speed.