Posts

The new RTX 2060 Super is coming in at $400, a small price premium over existing non-Super models. For that 14% bump in price you receive a significant upgrade in terms of specs, though at first glance that may not appear to be the case. We’re receiving a small 13% boost in CUDA cores, however we also see a massive 33% increase in ROPs and this extends the 192-bit wide memory bus of the original RTX 2060 to 256-bit wide for the Super version....

The RTX 3070 was released in October 2020 at an MSRP of $500, which of course we never really saw. Five months later AMD hit back with the 6700 XT at $480, which was another paper MSRP that never reached most prospective buyers. The point is though, these two GPUs are meant to be direct competitors, though current pricing is more favorable towards the 6700 XT as demand for Nvidia GPUs is usually higher....

Nvidia says its latest bundle gives players four games with the purchase of an RTX 3080, 3080 Ti, 3090, 3090 Ti, or systems containing those cards. In reality, it’s just two games and two expansions for one — Steam codes for Doom Eternal with both DLC packs and the recently released Ghostwire: Tokyo, a $120 value. Doom Eternal initially launched in 2020, but an update in 2021 added ray tracing and Nvidia DLSS to the game....

When measuring read performance with Atto Disk Benchmark, the Vertex 4’s mid-range performance was a little sluggish. The drive started out slightly behind the HyperX 3K but fell further behind in the 2K test, further in the 8K test and further still in the 32K test, before completely recovering in the 128K test. The Vertex 4 faced off against the HyperX 3K again when measuring write performance, starting in front to win the 1K, 2K and 8K tests, but eventually falling behind in the 32K and 128K tests....

If you’re wondering what K-9 Mail is, it’s another open source email client, much like Thunderbird. Though it doesn’t tout privacy as one of its key features, it boasts several others – support for Push IMAP, white and dark themes, message flagging, and the ability to set up ‘multiple identities’ for email accounts, to name a few. As for why Thunderbird is absorbing K-9 Mail now – seemingly out of the blue – it turns out that these plans were set in motion years ago....

The Oppo F1 also includes an Adreno 405 clocked at 550 MHz. This GPU is more suited to 1080p displays than 720p displays, which makes it a really good choice for the lower-resolution display of the F1. As for connectivity, there’s single-band Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, and A-GPS, but no NFC. You also get Category 4 LTE in most models, although there is a 3G-only model, and bands vary by region....

Air.0 claims to be a full-size mouse without the bulkiness of a traditional pointer. Laid flat, it measures just 4.5mm across 97 percent of its surface (the sensor bulge is 10mm) and weighs 40 grams (about 1.4 ounces). Fold it in origami-style and it magnetically snaps together to activate, creating a sturdy full-size mouse with mechanical click buttons and a scroll pad sensor. The pointer features gliders on the bottom at each point of contact for improved fluidity and control, and connects wirelessly using Bluetooth 5....

TheGamer reports that an OpenSea user called StakeTheWeb is selling NFTs consisting of images showing influencers and YouTubers from across the internet. Popular YouTube gaming stars Jim Sterling and Caddicarus were some of those included in the collection. While that set of NFTs appear to have been removed by OpenSea, some items featuring less-popular influencers remain. Strangely, the cards include a unique URL that’s nothing more than the featured presenter’s YouTube channel address....

According to Tom’s Hardware, the RAM kits will come in at least two capacities, including 8GB and 32GB modules. The site says both DDR4 and DDR5 versions will exist. If Philips aims to target gamers, a 16GB kit would also be a sensible choice, though we have no evidence of such an offering. In terms of RAM speeds, the 32GB DDR5 Philips kit looks to be clocked at 4800MHz, whereas the lower-capacity DDR4 version comes in at 2666MHz....

For its tenth anniversary the update came in the form of the DeathAdder Elite. The mouse preserves the same comfortable and ergonomic design that we know, with a few improvements inside and out, most importantly endurance. The Elite is around 5 inches long, 1.7 inches high, and 2.7 inches at its widest. Weighing in at 105 grams, it’s among the lightest mice of its size and is a good fit for a variety of hand sizes and grips....

As its name implies, the software lets you tweak the thumbnail previews displayed when hovering over a taskbar icon. After downloading the program, simply extract and run it, no installation is required. You should see a window with a number of adjustable sliders for the thumbnail size, spacing, margins, and delay time. Don’t be intimidated though, because you can get by with only using one or two of the bars to adjust the thumbnail’s dimensions....

In the past few days we’ve seen forums filling up with comments about how unoptimized the game is and this just isn’t true. There might still be room for further optimization, but it’s an excellent port on the whole. Rise of the Tomb Raider is a lot like the original Crysis in that it’s a bit ahead of its time, which is a good thing. If more games were like this the PC gaming world would be more on the cutting edge and enthusiasts who have heavily invested in high-end multi-GPU setups would be able to enjoy an experience worthy of that investment more often....

Moving on to Far Cry 5 and here we see that the 8700K is up to 15% faster at 720p, though just 8% faster for the frame time result and it’s the exact same story at 1080p. Then as we increase the resolution to 1440p the 8700K is now up to just 6% faster, just 2% when comparing frame time performance. Needless to say at 4K you’d find a completely GPU limited senario and both CPUs would deliver the exact same result....

This first lot of power consumption figures is with a GTX 1080 Ti installed. This is how we typically test desktop processors but I’ve conducted some extra benchmarking for these new APUs that we’ll get to in a moment. With the GTX 1080 Ti installed and the 2200G under load in Corona, it consumes slightly less power than the 1500X while the 2400G consumed slightly more than the 1500X. What’s interesting to note is that both consumed less when at idle and I should point out that the same motherboard and power supply was used for this testing....

The sequential read performance of Samsung’s SSD 850 Evo M.2 and mSATA were as good as any SATA SSD that we have tested with a throughput of just over 500MB/s, similar performance to the SanDisk Extreme Pro. Note that the Plextor M6e is able to exceed 700MB/s as it uses a PCI Express controller. The sequential write performance was also strong as the SSD 850 Evo M.2 and mSATA matched the SanDisk Extreme Pro....

The Red Orchestra 2 game installation took 94 seconds using the 850 Evo 500GB and 250GB models, just 4 seconds slower than the 850 Pro and 3 seconds faster than the 840 Evo. This is also the same time we received when testing the competing Crucial MX100. When it comes to virus scanning, the SSD 850 Evo range was 5 seconds slower than the 850 Pro and just 2 seconds faster than the 840 Evo while again matching the Crucial MX100 at 41 seconds....

When comparing the SSD 850 Pro to the 840 Pro using the Atto Disk Benchmark read data we see that the 850 Pro is faster when working with 1K, 2K, 8K and 32K data, while the 128K performance was much the same. The only SSDs to really challenge the SSD 850 Pro was the SanDisk Extreme II and surprisingly the Crucial MX100.

Samsung is now aiming to grab a significant piece of that success by building its own low-cost Android tablet. The catch is that Samsung’s new entry, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, looks anything but low-cost. In fact, it features a much better spec sheet than the Kindle Fire, and uses the same streamlined body design as its more expensive brethren. With a price of $249.99 for the Wi-Fi-only model, the Galaxy Tab 2 7....

Given the software on board, Chromebooks usually do without beefy hardware but instead target budget buyers and students with lightweight designs and decent connectivity for basic computing. Samsung’s latest Chromebook is no different in this regard, which uses a dual-core Intel Celeron N4500 chip and a 4GB/64GB memory configuration in the base $430 version. Buyers have no option to upgrade the CPU or RAM, but they can spend an extra $30 to double the eMMC storage to 128GB....

This is where we found the performance of Intel’s SSD 750 Series 1.2TB to be troubling as it delivers terribly slow 1K, 2K, 8K and even 32K read performance starting out at just 19MB/s, making it much slower than a budget SATA SSD. The Samsung SM951 doesn’t suffer from the same small size file performance starting at 73MB/s when working with 1K data. The SM951 quickly jumps up to 301MB/s for the 2K data test and then a graph-busting 659MB/s for the 8K test....