For now let’s have a look at some price vs. performance scatter plots before wrapping this review up. Let’s take the POVray data as the 2990WX had its best showing here, it’s much faster than the 7980XE while costing slightly less. So for rendering tasks the 2990WX is the bees knees and while it might not offer the best value overall, it certainly provides the best value at the top end of the scale....
In addition to including more games, we’re also adding results for the 1800X and 1700X with SMT disabled as Anandtech forum-goers have discovered a problem with the Windows 10 scheduler that can cause Ryzen to perform worse in lightly-threaded applications with SMT enabled. Apparently Windows 10 treats all Ryzen threads the same (not identifying SMT from physical cores) and thus the operating system thinks all threads have access to their own L2 and L3 cache when in fact they don’t....
Although not due out until later this year, Apple has revealed several additions to the accessibility settings for Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. While the features are intended to help those with disabilities more easily use Apple devices, some are intriguing alternatives for those looking for more convenient input methods — particularly the new gesture controls for Apple Watches, but more on that in a minute. One of the first features revealed is door detection....
This new iPad mini comes with a Retina display: a high-resolution 7.9-inch panel whose resolution is on-par with the Air at 2048 x 1536, bringing 326 pixels per inch. Not only that, but Apple’s new A7 system on a chip is included, alongside a larger battery in a shell that’s nearly identical in size to the original iPad mini. Some aspects of the device remain the same, such as the camera and the connectivity options, but it still has many new features that will hopefully satisfy....
Steve Jobs unveiled the first MacBook Air in early 2008 to mixed reviews, but a series of redesigns and hardware refreshes through the years have resulted in a product line that has had a huge impact on the industry. PC makers have struggled to match the Air’s extremely thin and simplistic design, prompting Intel to announce the ultrabook initiative at Computex in 2011. New for the 2012 MacBook Air is the Intel Ivy Bridge processor sporting HD 4000 graphics, higher capacity storage and memory options, as well as an improved 720p Facetime HD camera, and support for USB 3....
Coming from near bankrupcy during the 90’s, it took several years to turn Apple around, but perhaps most important, it took several innovations and breakthrough products to rebuild their image as a tech pioneer. Today, Apple gets much deserved respect from its competitors, and within the industry, there’s unsaid expectation that they are the ones paving the way towards the next big thing. During the past 10 years Apple has systematically attacked and conquered from several fronts....
Apple announced its iPhone 14 family on September 7 ahead of a September 16 launch. It has been a bit of a roller coaster ride for the new handsets as reports surfaced in late September that Apple was dialing back plans to increase production due to lower-than-anticipated demand. Last month, The Information claimed Apple had instructed suppliers to cease production of the iPhone 14 Plus less than a month after it went on sale....
Over the past few years we have reviewed many great Mini-ITX cases with the Silverstone Raven RVZ01 being a personal favorite for its internal design, which is similar to the Asrock M8 series except the RVZ01 isn’t a barebones box. The Raven RVZ01 impressed us by providing excellent cooling performance for both the CPU and GPU, making it possible to not only install high-end CPUs but also full-length graphics cards....
The Z87 Extreme11/ac’s memory bandwidth performance is about as good as it gets using the Core i7-4770K without any overclocking at 30.65GB/s. The Asrock Fatal1ty Z87 Killer for example was limited to 29.83GB/s and the Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H just 29.08GB/s. When running SiSoftware Sandra’s cache benchmark we see that the Asrock Z87 Extreme11/ac is on par with the Asrock Fatal1ty Z87 Killer and MSI Z87 XPower for L1 performance, while it is slightly faster when measuring L2 results....
While the trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or even later, with the introduction of the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card AMD claims they are breaking Moore’s Law – and rightly so. Specifically, they are going from a transistor count of roughly 956 million to a staggering 2150 million within a 15 month period between 2008 and 2009....
Bahamas Attorney General L. Ryan Pinder spoke out over the weekend regarding the FTX collapse and the public’s interest in the legally “free” status of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). The AG live-streamed the presser via the Bahamas Office of the Prime Minister’s Facebook page, where it racked up a whopping 623 views (embedded below via YouTube repost). Pinder assured the public and investors that Bahamian regulators are doing their jobs by conducting due process and not buying into the mob mentality that wants to see SBF hung by the neck until dead....
Batman: Arkham Origins utilizes four threads/cores, so you’ll naturally want a quad-core processor. Using the GTX Titan for maximum frame rate performance, the Core i7-4770K allowed for 178fps, the old i7-3770K wasn’t much slower at 175fps, while the i7-3960X managed 165fp and the Core i5-3570K trailed by 1fps. AMD’s fastest offering (the FX-8350) produced 144fps, or slightly faster than the archaic Core i7-920 and an i3. The Phenom II X4 980 allowed for just 98fps, the Phenom II X6 1100T dipped to 91fps, the Phenom II X2 570 slipped further to 72fps and the Athlon II X4 640 offered only 68fps....
Similar to previous entries in the series, Battlefield 1 has a fun but brief single-player campaign that serves more as a tutorial for the game’s online multiplayer, which should be particularly polished this time around considering an multi-platform open beta was available for weeks ahead of release and drew over 13 million players. Such an active participation level so early on pointed toward an upcoming success and that indeed appears to be the case judging by reviews, with the game currently getting an aggregated rating of 86/100 according to critics from around the web....
The launch of a new Battlefield title has rarely gone smoothly for EA and DICE, but the latest entry in the series has arguably been the most controversial, given all the headlines it managed to create up till now. Unsurprisingly, the disappointment was also reflected in EA’s most recent earnings call, where CEO Andrew Wilson revealed that the game’s launch had not met expectations. Citing challenging work-from-home conditions during development, Wilson said the game had strong stability at launch but ran into unanticipated performance issues as more players came on board....
The only problem we faced with that test was that our benchmarks were limited to the multiplayer portion, which makes gathering accurate and reliable data quite challenging. For testing a single hardware configuration, the multiplayer portion of the game is useful as it’s very taxing, and it’ll give you a good idea of how that setup handles the game. But directly comparing that data with a second system is difficult and time consuming to do accurately as the margin of error is larger....
Today we are revisiting the franchise, as 2K Games unveiled BioShock 2 last week. The original game used the Unreal Engine 2.5 with some Unreal Engine 3 features incorporated into it, and it appears that the second installment will do the same. There are a number of older video games that are based on the same game engine, so BioShock 2 is not meant to raise the bar considerably in the graphics department....
So the shopping list included five BitFenix Spectre Blue 140mm fans, BitFenix Fury 750G power supply, BitFenix Alchemy Blue Sleeved cables and BitFenix Alchemy White LED Strips. Not stopping there we had Asrock send over their Z97M-Pro4, a neat little mATX motherboard that sells for just $100. Providing all the memory we could handle was Kingston with a pair of their 8GB HyperX Fury Blue (HX318C10FK2/8) kits. Keeping the Core i5-4690K processor cool is the Phanteks PH-TC14PE CPU cooler, in blue of course....
Frankly, the older 8-core 5960X was difficult to justify at $1,050, so the slightly updated 6900K for $1,100 doesn’t exactly have us whipping our wallets out. Spending over $600 on the 6-core 6850K isn’t too appealing either… So, what’s an enthusiast to do if they require more than the 4 cores in Intel’s mainstream desktop Core i7 processors? One solution would be building our beastly 16-core/32-thread Xeon E5-2670 workstation featured back in April....
Despite the small footprint, the Euler tips the scales at 2.2kg, which is surprisingly heavy for a 100% aluminium design. This is better explained when you learn that the Euler acts as one big passively cooled heatsink. In fact it looks very much like one. Rather than featuring a flat outer shell the Euler is ribbed, featuring a series of 15mm tall fins. But before we get inside the Euler let’s just have a quick look at its external design....
Sources told Insider Gaming this week that Bungie Software is planning the first new entry in its classic Marathon series in over 25 years. The reports describe the new title as an “extraction” shooter, not unlike Battlestate’s Escape from Tarkov or Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown. For those unfamiliar, Bungie released a trilogy of first-person shooters for Macintosh in the 90s called Marathon. Some considered the initial 1994 entry the Mac’s answer to Doom, which popularized first-person shooters the year prior....
