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The touchable, classy ultrabook is targeted right at the road-warrior, power-hungry, super-user. The S7 is an expensive machine. The starting price hovers near $1400, but our Core i7 configured spec clocks in at $1650. For the price customers do see a superlative spec sheet and a beautifully designed body. I know what you’re thinking. The S7 had better be amazing for that kind of money. Don’t worry, with a few qualifiers, the Aspire S7 easily ranks among the top Windows 8 machines....

Activision and Infinity Ward recently released the system requirements for the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II open multiplayer beta, which starts this weekend. Customers who pre-ordered the game can play the early access beta now, but it will be open to everyone for free from September 24 to September 26. There is a chance the system requirements could change before the full release on October 28, but any differences likely won’t be drastic....

Although we didn’t think twice about stamping the NH-U14S with our Outstanding Award, we’ve since wondered how it would fare against a basic water cooling setup. On paper, closed loop systems simplify the process of diving into water cooling, being about as safe and easy to work with as air cooling while delivering much of the performance you’d expect from an elaborate custom loop at a fraction of the cost....

That hasn’t stopped a number of companies from launching their own console-like PC-based systems running Steam in 2014. They’re not formally called Steam Machines and they don’t run SteamOS, but they are small form factor PCs designed for living room gaming. The most promising of these systems was recently launched, meet the Alienware Alpha. The Alpha is a compact living room gaming PC that’s compelling for a number of reasons....

Here is the real problem with AMD’s processors. With the exception of the integrated graphics test, at no point was the A10-6800K faster than the Core i5-3450. In fact, most of the time it was much slower. Yet despite that the A10-6800K consumed 59% more power than the Core i5-3450 under full load. It also consumed 9% more power than the A10-5800K, but 28% less than the FX-4350. Meanwhile the A4-4000, which displayed a lack of processing power in our benchmarks, still gulped down 89 watts under full load....

The F1A75-V maintained its lead in the 700MB HD video file compression test but Asus and Gigabyte tied for first place in the 400MB benchmark. The A75 Extreme6 was again the slowest of the A75 motherboards, though by a very small margin. Asus’ entrant finished the PhotoShop CS5 test over a second ahead of the A75-UD4H andA75 Extreme6, which were effectively tied at the 51-52s mark.

AM3 Test System Specs - AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.30GHz) - x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20) - Asus Crosshair IV Extreme (AMD 890FX) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC (1536MB) - OCZ ZX Series 850w - Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 280.26 The Asus F1A75-V ranked highest in our memory bandwidth test with a throughput of 10.4GB/s, a notch ahead of Gigabyte’s 10....

This time we found a 9% discrepancy between the RAM speeds and with DDR3-1866, the A8-3850 managed to overcome the Athlon II X4 640 and it was only a hair behind the Core i5 750 and i7 920. The AMD A8-3850 was only able to roughly match the Core i5 655K when using DDR3-1333 memory, but the 1866MHz configuration performed 17% better, elevating the APU just ahead of the Athlon II X4 640....

FurMark shows that all tested processors were able to max the GeForce GTX 285 graphics card out at 186fps. The minimum frame rates did vary on the other hand, though the Athlon II X4 620 fared quite well. The Core 2 Quad Q6600 was the slowest processor tested, while the Phenom II were the fastest, and the Athlon II X4 620 was able to match both the Core 2 Duo E7400 and Core i5 750 processors....

When testing Just Cause 2 at 1920x1200 using the GeForce GTX 580, there was only a 7% performance difference between the slowest and fastest processors, leaving very little room for improvement, so we weren’t surprised to find no real difference between the AMD FX-6300 and FX-6100. That said, the FX-8350’s 11% clock speed advantage made it 3% faster than the FX-8150, and it also managed to provide 1fps more than the i5-3470, though we should note that it was only able to match the Phenom II X4 980....

With an MSRP of $295, the Phenom II X6 1090T was once strategically placed against the Core i7 930, but the latter has since been replaced by the Core i7 950 at this price point. When we first tested the Phenom II X6 1090T processor in April, we found the Core i7 930 to be faster in most of our real-world tests. The Intel CPU dominated all of our application and gaming benchmarks....

On the other side of the fence, the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 arrived months later and weren’t nearly as well accepted as Nvidia hoped. Some two months after entering the DirectX 11 market, Nvidia tried to crank up the heat by unleashing its GeForce GTX 465. Sadly, the card was a flop and it took them six more weeks to finally make headway in the DX11 GPU market with its GeForce GTX 460....

The GPU core runs at 1GHz, which is the highest frequency any Radeon card has been clocked at. The HD 7700 is clocked 18% higher than the HD 6770, while its GDDR5 memory is slightly faster at 1250MHz (5.0GHz DDR). Still, pairing that frequency with a minuscule 128-bit memory bus gives the HD 7770 72GB/s of theoretical bandwidth, which is actually slightly less than the HD 6770. The HD 7770 still only comes loaded with a 1GB frame buffer – the same as previous-gen mid-range cards....

Battlefield 3 fans will enjoy what the Radeon HD 7870 has to offer them, with an average of 32fps at 2560x1600 making it just 11% slower than the HD 7950 and 6% slower than the GeForce GTX 580. However it was 19% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 while matching the performance of the GeForce GTX 570. The Radeon HD 7850 also did well as it was just 4% slower than the Radeon HD 6970 yet 13% faster than the HD 6950 and 8% faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti....

Back when we tested the 7990 in April 2013, it was a formidable rival for the GeForce GTX Titan. The biggest problem the card faced was AMD’s frame latency performance, which was quite poor at the time, especially compared to a single-GPU solution like the Titan. The 7990 also suffered from enormous power consumption figures compared to the Titan, as we found it pulled almost 40% more power. Nonetheless, putting a pair of 28nm GPUs – each containing 4....

The R9 Nano averaged 44fps at 1600p and just 25fps at 4K when testing with Crysis 3, just 2fps slower than the Fury and 3fps slower than the Fury X at 4K. It was also 3fps or 14% faster than the GTX 980 but 3fps slower than the GTX 980 Ti or a -11% deficit. The R9 Nano averaged 84fps at 1600p and 50fps at 4K when testing with BioShock Infinite, just 4% slower than the Fury at 4K and 32% faster than the R9 390X....

Running Total War Warhammer in DX12 mode saw the RX 460 render 39fps on average, making it 45% slower than the RX 470. More crucially, it was slightly faster than the GTX 950 though the GeForce graphics card was faster using DX11. When compared to the R7 370 we saw a nice 22% increase in performance. Vulkan brought the RX 460 to life as we see a 31% increase in performance here over OpenGL....

So not a big deal but it does suggest that those overclocking will want to upgrade the cooler and we’ll explore options in a future article. Additional Testing Before wrapping up the testing there were a few more benchmarks I wanted to squeeze in. These next few graphs compare the Ryzen 7 2700X and 1800X clock for clock at 4GHz on the same X470 motherboard using the same memory and timings....

If you’re wondering what half legacy mode does for applications, here is a quick look at that. Firstly memory bandwidth is increased massively and this is because we have two die using NUMA opposed to the 2950X which uses UMA by default. If we changed the 2950X to the NUMA mode we would see the same 75.9 GB/s. Just to confirm the increased bandwidth here are the AIDA64 results, as you can see peak memory throughput now exceeds 88 GB/s....

For the record-setting run, Taiwanese overclocker TSAIK paired the processor with an MSI WS WRX80 motherboard and 128GB of Corsair DDR4 memory. A low-end Nvidia GeForce GT 640 graphics card was chosen for the run because a powerful GPU isn’t necessary for this type of test. TSAIK was able to achieve a clock speed of 5,150MHz at 1.10 volts running Windows 10. This resulted in a score of 116,142 points in the CPU multi-core test, which was good enough for first place in the category....