Posts

Only the Phenom II X6 1090T is able to beat the Core i5 750 in the MonteCarlo test, while it was slightly slower for the BigNumberCrunch. Excel is one of the applications where we saw the Core i7 980 XE really shine, and this can again be seen when comparing it to the Phenom II X6 processors. The Phenom II processors do not perform well when testing with WinRAR and as you can see the hexa-core processors perform much like the Phenom II X4 965, which is considerably slower than the Core i5 750....

Sources within AMD have told Moore’s Law is Dead about a new mobile APU the company is developing, calling it a successor to “Van Goh” which powers the Steam Deck. Valve previously said its customers have responded favorably to its handheld’s most expensive variant and may want a higher-end model, so this doesn’t sound too far-fetched. The new chip is supposedly a smaller take on AMD’s Phoenix Point APU which combines the company’s upcoming Zen 4 CPU architecture and RDNA 3 GPU architecture....

When compared to its previous generation board (the Radeon HD 5870), the Radeon HD 6970 was on average 24% faster. Now a year later AMD is launching its Radeon HD 7000 series which has been given the codename ‘Southern Islands’. The Radeon HD 7970 is the first of a series of upcoming graphics cards that are making the jump to the 28nm fabrication process. The new HD 7970 will effectively become AMD’s new flagship single GPU graphics card come January, when the board is expected to ship....

The R9 290 delivered 71.4fps in Max Payne 3, faring 3% worse than the R9 290X but 34% better than the R9 280X while also holding 20% and 37% leads over the GTX 780 and GTX 770. Despite easily defeating the GTX 780 in the frames per second testing, the R9 290 was only a fraction faster in the frame time results. Sleeping Dogs is another game where the new R9 200 series performs well, with the R9 290 delivering 37....

The GPU market has been a nightmare for the past two years or so, but things look like they’re at least headed in the right direction. Availability has improved quite a bit, and a decrease in mining profitability is slowly pushing down pricing, especially for lower-end graphics cards. The folks over at Tom’s Hardware did some scouting for GPUs that were on offer this past weekend and their findings are encouraging for people who have been waiting to upgrade to a more modern graphics card at a more palatable price....

Expect to pay a hefty premium due to the shortages, cryptomining and scalping going around. If we use the 6700 XT as a price guide, you can expect to pay around $600 for the 6600 XT. We’ll save the detailed retail pricing discussion for later when examining the cost per frame data, for now let’s focus on the claimed MSRP, which sees the 6600 XT coming in at a 21% discount when compared to the 6700 XT....

To quickly recap, the Ryzen 5 1600 was released in April 2017 for $220, based on the original 14nm Zen architecture. It’s a 6-core, 12-thread part clocked at 3.2 GHz for the base with an all-core boost clock of 3.4 GHz and cooled using the Wraith Spire. About a year later, AMD replaced it with the Ryzen 5 2600 at $200. It was also a 6-core processor, but featuring updated 12nm Zen+ cores....

Direct competition for the R5 3600 should come from Intel’s Core i5-9600 which is listed at $213, but we don’t have that part on hand and it doesn’t appear to be on sale either, so the more expensive 9600K will have to do. It costs $255 and doesn’t include a box cooler, so it’s not the exact match we were going for, but it will be interesting to see how they stack in terms of raw power....

My 1800X did not run stable at 4.2GHz using 1.45v. The highest clock I could achieve was 4.1GHz and I was able to leave the voltage on auto, which saw the motherboard boosting it to around 1.35v when under load. The 1700X didn’t make 4.1GHz but I was able to get it up to 3.95GHz. Speaking with Bryan from Tech City, he also found 3.95GHz to be the limit for his 1700X chip and he spent quite a bit more time than I did trying to push it further, so this is the likely end of the road when air-cooling....

Although the Gigabyte 870A-UD3 remained the fastest budget AM3 motherboard tested when playing CoH: Opposing Fronts, the margins were too small to make point out any significant differences. Far Cry 2 favored the MSI 870A-G54 by a couple of frames per second, and in the process taking over the second spot on top of the the Phenom II X6 1090T configuration at both tested resolutions. This time testing with Resident Evil 5 the Gigabyte 870A-UD3 and MSI 870A-G54 motherboards both delivered the exact same performance, while the Asrock 880GMH/USB3 was once again a few frames per second behind....

Using the x264 HD Benchmark 3.0 as reference gave the budget AM3 motherboards a clear advantage over the Phenom II X6 1090T and Core i5 750 configurations.

Blender is a better test to show maximum system draw. Here the 2990WX pushed total system consumption to 345 watts while the 2970WX system consumed 10% less power. This time the 12-core model is seen reducing system consumption by 15% which is reasonable given it runs at higher clock speeds with more voltage. In the end when fully utilized the 2970WX only pushed total system consumption 8% higher than that of the 7980XE and remember it was 30% faster in our Blender test....

The included EarPods are an excellent choice if you need a set of headphones. These are the same earbuds that Apple introduced with last year’s model. I typically don’t like in-ear earbuds and never had much luck with the iPod-era ones but these sound really nice and fit comfortably. They aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution but they are more than adequate for most users. Having factored in everything here today, it’s clear that the iPhone 5s is Apple’s new flagship and best iPhone to date....

Needless to say, it’s not a straight line you can draw when Intel and AMD run x86 applications, and M1 runs native Arm code and can also translate x86. Some will dismiss M1 efforts as being only for Apple devices (true), while others may see “magic” happening when Apple has been able to deliver a fast laptop that gets iPad-like battery life on their first attempt (also true). In this article, we’d like to share a few of our thoughts on why Apple M1 is a very relevant development in the world of computer hardware....

Rumors of a partnership with low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite provider Globalstar surfaced just ahead of last year’s iPhone 13 launch but the feature never found its way to the handsets – at least, not publicly. Some believe the phones do in fact have the necessary hardware to enable communication with satellites and could be activated with a software update. Apple and Globalstar eventually worked out a deal leading to yesterday’s feature announcement....

Twitter by user HXL initially pointed out the problem on September 1st. The post highlights a table attached to Asrock’s x670 Steel Legend that described boot times based on the user’s chosen DDR5 RAM configuration and capacity. The boot times ranged from 100 seconds in a 2x16GB configuration to upwards of 400 seconds with a 4x32GB configuration. Fortunately, a September 8th press release claims the motherboard manufacturer has fixed the RAM-related issues and significantly decreased the required boot times....

This is where Asrock’s Vision HT 420D has a clear advantage over other desktop systems thanks to its mobile processor. The Core i5-4200M consumes just 21W at idle, almost 20% less than the Core i3 desktop chip. Under full load the 420D consumed 45W, which was 37% less than the Core i3 desktop and 42% less than AMD’s new A8-7600 APU. With the CPU and GPU fully stressed, the out of the box configuration with single-channel memory consumed 28% less power than a Core i3 desktop system at 59W and that jumped to 69W with dual-channel memory....

Again we see that the Asrock X99E-ITX/ac was a fraction faster than the full size X99 board taking just 2.3 seconds to complete the Excel 2013 workload. It doesn’t make sense that the Asrock X99E-ITX/ac is 6% faster than the Fatal1ty X99X Killer given the massive reduction in memory bandwidth. Perhaps being that this is a much newer X99 motherboard Asrock has been able to better optimize the BIOS and those enhancements are yet to be applied to the older boards....

According to Rubin Observatory Deputy Director Aaron Roodman, both components are in the Guinness Book of World Records due to their unprecedented size. Rubin will collect a mind-melting 20 terabytes of data, each and every night, for 10 years. It’ll have a viewing angle of 18,000 square degrees and see roughly 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars in the Milky Way. The huge treasure trove of data will be used to essentially create a living record of the sky, allowing scientists to chart the progress of cosmic events like the movement of asteroids or comets as well as supernova explosions....

Note that up until a few weeks ago the only product able to match the price of the Eee Pad Transformer was the Acer Iconia Tab A500 (read our review) with all other tablets selling for $500 or more. Lately though, we’ve had the HP TouchPad fire sale and other Honeycomb tablets like the Toshiba Thrive dropping in price. When compared to the iPad 2, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer is roughly $100 less....