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Priced at just $90, there is no mistaking the ECS H55H-CM for a high-end motherboard, but it’s a worthy competitor and a welcomed addition to our roundup. As you might have already suspected, with such a low price tag, the vast majority of the features found on this board derive from the H55 chipset itself. We were disappointed by the fact that while the H55H-CM will sell for more or less the same as the Asrock H55M Pro, it lacks many of the features found on the latter....

2017’s most optimized and consumer friendly title, Assassin’s Creed Origins has been included in the list of games tested and although it chews through threads, the 4770K isn’t much faster than the higher clocked 7600K. Overclocking the 4770K only boosted performance by 10% and I suspect once again we’re probably limited by memory bandwidth. Still, when looking at the minimum result, the 8700K was just 8% faster than the overclocked 4770K, so that’s hardly going to be a noticeable margin....

The UEFI opens at a main menu where you can find a lot of information about their system such as firmware version, processor type/speed and system memory. The OC Tweaker menu houses all the common tweakable settings that overclockers like to play with. The only thing we didn’t like about Asrock’s UEFI is that you have to set an option to “manual” before it becomes available. This is an annoying and cumbersome process....

Moving away from gaming for a second to clear up one exception: if you’ve overclocked your 5820K to the max it’s still not getting the job done quickly enough, then yes, an upgrade can help reduce workload times. For productivity workloads, the overclocked 8700K was 20-30% faster, so it’s your call on whether or not it seems worth to buy a new CPU, motherboard and potentially higher-clocked DDR4 memory....

The game I played most on the Alienware 15 was Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, as I hadn’t finished it and it’s well optimized for 4K gaming. At a resolution of 3840 x 2160 I ran the game on mostly high settings (one notch below maximum), and achieved frame rates around 40 FPS, which was adequate for this title. With such a high resolution display, the game looks excellent and is highly detailed, so even though you’re not running the game at maximum settings, you’re still presented with a fantastic gaming experience....

Intel’s first Raport Lake processors are expected to launch later this year, and they’ll be the last to be made using the Intel 7 process node. From that perspective, there isn’t much to expect in terms of performance improvements or new architectural features, and Team Blue was decidedly vague about this when it discussed its roadmap at an investor meeting earlier this year. The rumor mill spilled a few benchmarks run using engineering samples of the upcoming Core i9-13900, and the results look promising for people who are aiming to skip Alder Lake....

The highlight freebie is Mass Effect Legendary Edition. The remastered collection of the epic space opera adds support for 4K, HDR, unlocked refresh rates, and 21:9 displays, along with improvements to the textures, models, lighting, shaders, visual effects, anti-aliasing, and more. It also comes with 40 pieces of DLC, and it all loads a lot quicker, including those once agonizingly slow elevator rides. A trio of classic Star Wars games will also be free to subscribers: Jedi Knight — Jedi Academy, Jedi Knight II — Jedi Outcast, and Star Wars Republic Commando are all part of the giveaway....

Precisely when the event will occur during the fall is unclear, though some sellers say it appears to be scheduled for October, before Black Friday/Cyber Monday and the holiday season is in full swing. It’ll be interesting to see if the Prime Fall Deal Event has any enticing offers or whether people will simply wait until the season’s bigger sales days arrive. In the meantime, the actual Prime Day gets here on July 12 and lasts for two days....

Surprisingly, power consumption levels on the Athlon II X4 620 were only slightly higher than those of the Phenom II X2 550, despite featuring two extra cores. AMD’s latest chip also used considerably less power than the Core 2 processors under full load. In fact if it were not for the Core i5 750, consumption levels on the Athlon II X4 620 would be very impressive, but Intel’s latest platform is the clear winner here....

Using EVEREST Ultimate Edition we look at the memory bandwidth performance of these processors. The results differ from those reported by SiSoftware Sandra, as we test both read and write performance individually. Here the Phenom II X4 processors show considerably better write performance when compared to the Core 2 series, while their read performance is slightly lower. As expected the Phenom II X4 965 was slightly faster than the 955 in the CINEBENCH R10 multi-CPU rendering test, providing just 2% more performance....

Also slated for release are the Phenom II X6 1035T and 1075T processors that will operate at 2.6GHz and 3.0GHz, respectively. Meanwhile today’s release comprises of the Phenom II X6 1090T BE and 1055T processors that work at 3.2GHz and 2.8GHz. All the Thuban processors feature the traditional Phenom II 6MB L3 cache, while each individual core receives its own 512KB L2 cache. Compared to the Phenom II X4 processors that boast a total cache of 8MBs, the newer X6 models carry a total of 9MBs....

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts stressed a single single core further confirming that this game is showing its age. Despite the apparent lack of multi-threading support, the Phenom II X6 processors provided tangible gains against the Phenom II X4 965, particularly the 1090T. Far Cry 2 is one of the better examples of a game optimized for multi-core processors. Having said that we see that only one core is heavily utilized, two more cores are working at over half their capacity, while the other three are doing almost nothing....

As its predecessor, the Radeon HD 6970 GPU has been fabricated using the 40nm process, yet AMD has squeezed in 486 million more transistors and as a result the die size has increased by 16%. The GPU core is clocked at 880MHz, 3.5% higher than the Radeon HD 5870, while the GDDR5 memory also operates slightly faster at 1375MHz. Pairing that frequency with a 256-bit wide memory bus gives the Radeon HD 6970 176GB/s of theoretical bandwidth, a 14....

Nvidia has come a long way with their drivers in Tomb Raider since we first tested the game and we expected that they would make vast improvements here. As a result the Radeon HD 7990 was actually 4% slower than the GeForce GTX 690. Where the Nvidia based graphics cards really dominate is in the Tomb Raider frame time performance, as here the Radeon HD 7990 was 46% slower than the GeForce GTX 690....

The Radeon R9 270X was just 5% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in Tomb Raider and 2% faster than the GTX 660. The Radeon R7 260X was also 5% faster than the Radeon HD 7790 but 10% slower than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti. When testing Resident Evil 6 we found that the Radeon R9 270X was 4% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 and 8% faster than the GeForce GTX 660....

The RX 470 was just 7fps slower than the RX 480 at 1080p in Total War: Warhammer and was able to deliver highly playable performance at 71fps. Increasing the resolution to 1440p dropped the RX 470 down to a 47fps average when using DX12 which was just 1fps slower than the GTX 970 and 5fps slower than the RX 480. Focusing on the Vulkan performance we see that the RX 470 averaged an incredable 123fps at 1080p which put it within 2fps of the GTX 970 and 2fps ahead of the GTX 1060....

The Division is one of the most demanding games we test with and here we see the RX 480 falling just short of the 60fps target at 1080p. Nevertheless, this does put it on par with the R9 390X and GTX 980, which is a tremendous result for AMD. The RX 480 was also 9% faster than the GTX 970 and 12% faster than the R9 390. At 1440p the average frame rate drops to 41fps, which is more comparable with the R9 390 than the R9 390X....

Once we learned about the new Radeon’s operating frequencies, the boost clock of 1266MHz suggested to me that the RX 480 would perform similarly to the GTX 970, and by extension the R9 390. We now know it does. The Radeon RX 480 delivers performance that was previously unseen on this price range. If Nvidia’s Pascal boards pushed the market to lower prices of former $600 flagships, the Radeon further emphasizes this in the mainstream segment, which AMD hopes to reign....

However, since posting the review, a few questions have popped up and the one that I’ve probably seen the most revolves around the Vega GPU’s memory allocation. Unlike a typical discrete graphics card, most integrated solutions don’t have their own dedicated memory. For example, a Vega 64 has 8GB of dedicated memory where it can store data and then access it quickly when it needs to. Because this is a high-end graphics card, not only it has a large 8GB buffer but the bus it uses to access this memory is also quite fast....

What’s more, if we look at power consumption in an application such as Premiere Pro, the 1400 is actually more fuel efficient than the Core i5-7400 given its superior performance in that application, which is both shocking and exciting. The 1400 remained in charge when it came to gaming, especially once overclocked. When paired with the GTX 1080 Ti, the 1400 was vastly superior in CPU-limited scenarios like Ashes of the Singularity, even at stock speeds....