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The A8-7600 is slightly slower than the A10-6800K in SiSoftware’s memory bandwidth test, which is surprising since it previously managed to matched the A10-6800K with its clock speed disadvantage. Still, the A8-7600 was just 4% slower – hardly a significant margin. Things turned around for the A8-7600 when measuring L1 and L2 cache bandwidth with Kaveri offering almost 50% more bandwidth than the A10-6800K. Although the clock-to-clock results show that the A8-7600 is just 4% slower than the A10-6800K, we’re surprised it’s slower at all....

Good news for gamers: the A8-7600 outpaced the higher clocked A10-6800K in Company of Heroes 2 with a frame rate of 24.5fps at 1280x800 on medium. Hardly record-setting, but we’ll take a 10% boost over the A10-6800K. With 25fps at 1280x800, the A8-7600 was 9% faster than the A10-6800K and 14% faster than the Intel Core i5-4430 in Metro: Last Light. The A8-7600 came second to the higher clocked A10-6800K in Hitman: Absolution, though keep in mind it was armed with higher clocked DDR3 memory that gives it a distinct advantage....

When paired with DDR3-2133 memory and running in its 65W mode, the A8-7600 managed a bandwidth of 15.73GB/s, which is comparable to the A10-6800K with DDR3-2400 memory. It’s worth noting that we didn’t test the A8-7600 with 2400MHz memory because we couldn’t get it to work. This is either a limitation of our early engineering sample or an issue with the motherboards that may get corrected through a BIOS update....

Then when it comes to decompression performance the 200GE is comparable to the Core i3-7100 and Ryzen 3 1200 thanks to its SMT support. Next up we have the Excel results and here the Athlon 200GE was almost 20% slower than the Pentium G4560, though it was 33% faster than the A12-9800. So as expected not a beast in Excel but for most users it will be capable enough....

Phenom Test System Specs - AMD Phenom II X4 945 (AM3) - AMD Phenom II X2 550 (AM3) - AMD Athlon II X4 620 (AM3) - x2 Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR3-1333 (CAS 8-8-8-24) - Asus M3A79-T Deluxe (AMD 790FX) - OCZ GameXStream (700 watt) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - Asus GeForce GTX 285 (1GB) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - Nvidia Forceware 190.38

Using 3Dmark 11 we measured the performance of the new Radeon HD 6990 using the Performance and Extreme profiles. The Extreme test saw the Radeon HD 6990 score 3353pts which is the highest figure generated by any single graphics card to date. This made it 34% faster than the Radeon HD 5970 and 71% faster than the GeForce GTX 580. However, when put against the Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire configuration the Radeon HD 6990 was 4% slower....

Although the HD 7770 Crossfire setup provided an average of 61fps, it was just 20% faster than the GTX 560 Ti and 22% faster than the Radeon HD 6870 at 1920x1200. We expected the HD 7770 duo to do better, but they were just 49% faster than a single card. The HD 7750 fared better in Crossfire, providing a 68% boost over one card and outperforming the HD 6870 by 4% and the GTX 560 Ti by 2%....

The R9 Fury X is now on sale and while most retailers have been able to meet the $650 MSRP, major stores including Newegg are fresh out of stock at this point so getting your hands on a Fury X might be challenging. AMD’s $650 asking price seems reasonable considering it’s the same as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti, the Fury X’s primary competition. The two cards offer similar performance: at 1600p the Fury X was just 5% slower on average, while it was just 1% faster at 4K....

The Nano delivered a mere 19fps average in Total War Attila at 4K, 5% slower than the Fury but 19% faster than the R9 390X. Compared to Nvidia’s offerings the Nano was 12% faster than the GTX 980 but 10% slower than the 980 Ti. Those wanting to play Assassin’s Creed Unity at 4K will be required to reduce the quality settings slightly as a 30fps average isn’t that smooth, although reducing the visual settings any lower defeats the point of gaming at 4K....

The RX 470 breaks the 100fps barrier at 1080p in Overwatch using the ultra quality settings. In fact it is able to maintain inexcess of 100fps. This meant that the RX 470 wasn’t a great deal slower than the GTX 970 and RX 480. Now at 1440p the RX 470 is almost able to match the GTX 970 and again wasn’t a great deal slower than the RX 480. It was however much faster than the R9 380 and GTX 960....

Those looking for an affordable graphics card to crack the 60fps barrier in Star Wars: Battlefront at 1080p with all the eye candy turned up will be pleased with what the RX 470 has to offer. Here we saw an average of 70fps with minimums of 61fps. Even at 1440p we see a respectable 46fps average which placed the RX 470 just 3fps behind the R9 390. The RX 470 averaged 51fps at 1080p in Ashes of the Singularity when running in DX12 mode, just 1fps slower than the GTX 970 and 10fps faster than the R9 380....

Maybe just maybe there was something worse along the way. Stuff like the DDR4 version of the GT 1030 could be considered worse, but that was because it was a horrible anti-consumer tactic by Nvidia. But as far as new product releases go, I can’t think of anything worse. The Radeon RX 6500 XT is so bad I don’t even know where to begin, and I know I’m kind of doing this review in reverse, but damn it I’m just flawed by AMD here....

The Ryzen 7 6800H is AMD’s latest mainstream CPU for performance-oriented laptops. It has 8 cores and 16 threads using a Zen 3+ design, clocked at a 3.2 GHz base and 4.7 GHz boost, 16MB of L3 cache plus 4MB of L2, and a 12 compute unit RDNA2 integrated GPU – though we expect most laptops featuring the 6800H to also pack a discrete GPU. Compared to the Ryzen 9 parts above it, the 6800H is only slower in terms of clock speeds, and typically it has slightly lower efficiency as it’s a less carefully binned CPU....

In case you missed it, we already checked out the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600X yesterday, with the 7700X and 7900X reviews coming over the next few days. Compared to the mainstream 7600X, the TDP is increased from 105w from a single CCD to a whopping 170w, though do note because the same I/O die has been used the same 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes are supported. The Ryzen 9 7950X is set to replace the well-regarded 5950X, but quite surprisingly the launch price or MSRP has been dropped from $800 the previous generation to $700 for the 7950X – that’s a healthy 13% discount for what should be a much faster processor....

Before we jump into the benchmarks, here’s how we’ve set up the comparison. For this review, we’ll be testing the new Threadripper 1950X and 1920X along with the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1800X, as well as Intel’s competing Core i7-7800X, 7820X and Core i9-7900X. Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which until now was leading AMD’s pack, the Threadripper 1920X comes at a 75% price premium and offers 50% more cores....

Moving on to Blender’s Ryzen Graphic 27 test, the 1950X offered a massive 29% performance improvement over the 7900X, and in fact even the 1920X bested the Core i9 CPU, albeit by a slim margin, but a solid result for AMD nonetheless. Let’s move on to check out a more extreme Blender workload. The Gooseberry workload takes some serious firepower to complete in around half an hour and we see this as the 1950X turns in a time of almost 32 minutes but that’s a decent improvement on the 36 minutes it takes the Core i9-7900X, a 13% improvement in fact....

PCMark 10 has been included just to check general performance. There are no oddities here as the 2990WX is comparable to the Core i9-7960X which is perfectly acceptable for a super core heavy CPU. The 2950X does do much better though it comes in just behind the 1920X. Excel is a real-world application we’ve been using to benchmark CPUs for year and years now, so why not try the Monte Carlo simulation with the 2nd gen Threadripper CPUs....

Both AMD and Nvidia are expected to launch their next-gen graphics cards later this year. We’ve already had plenty of leaks involving Nvidia’s GPUs, so today, we’re focusing on news involving AMD’s upcoming RDNA3-based cards. Judging by past releases, AMD is probably going to announce the higher-end models first, which are going to be based on the Navi 31 GPU. Rumors are that it will feature a 384-bit memory bus, and it will ship with up to 24 GB of VRAM....

We’ve split the Anatomy of a Storage Drive in three parts, all published simultaneously to dissect hard disk drives, solid state storage, and optical drives. Links to the articles published in the series so far is below. Blinded by the light You don’t have to use magnetism or electrical charge to store data. It can be done using light, or more rather, the reflection of it. Okay, if you want to be really specific, it’s done using the interference of infrared and visible electromagnetic waves, but let’s not worry too much about that!...