In an effort to appeal to the enthusiast community, Gigabyte launched the SOC (Super Overclock) series. Checking out which GPUs belong to the series we noted few AMD-based graphics cards are part of the line, with a majority of products branded with Nvidia’s seal, including several variants of the GeForce GTX 560 Ti SOC, the GTX 570 SOC, and most recently the GTX 580 SOC that we’ll be testing today....
Gigabyte’s own overclock delivered 8% more performance when testing with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 2560x1600, pulling an average of 55fps. We squeezed out another 15% performance by manually overclocking the card, making it 24% faster than a stock GTX 580.
The GTX 580 SOC was 8% faster than the reference spec when testing World in Conflict at 2560x1600, while the secondary overclock allowed just a single extra frame per second to be rendered.
The rumor stems from a couple of posts by the same user on a Stadia fan group on Facebook. They were reprinted by Cody Ogden from the Killed by Google Twitter account, part of the website, also called Killed by Google, which lists the 267 apps, services, and pieces of hardware the company has shuttered over the years. The messages claim an old friend of the poster who is now a Google regional manager was informed about Stadia’s upcoming demise at a seminar in California over the weekend....
Complementing this monster SoC is 2 GB of LPDDR3-1600 RAM on a dual-channel 800 MHz bus, which is standard for Snapdragon 800 devices and provides 12.8 GB/s of bandwidth. Thanks to the guys at iFixit we also know the Nexus 5 has 16 GB (or 32 GB) of Sandisk-made NAND, a Broadcom BCM20793M NFC controller, a six-axis IvenSense sensor that provides the gyroscope and accelerometer, and a tri-axis compass....
Pixel is the first time Google is challenging the smartphone market with a product of their own. The Nexus line was always positioned as a niche / price-conscious alternative for developers and enthusiasts, designed to show off the latest features of Android; Pixel, on the other hand, is a full blown consumer product with unique features and a top-end price tag to match. Google wants Pixel to compete with the Apple iPhones and Samsung Galaxies of the world, and they believe this is the hardware and software to do so....
Western Digital and Toshiba had factories in the flood zones whereas Seagate was mainly affected by the resulting supply constraints from business partners who were forced to halt production of related components. Among those was Nidec, which produces ~70% of the world’s hard drive spindle motors. All this resulted in hard drive prices shooting through the roof around the end of October as production became more expensive and limited. With the help of price tracking site Camelegg we’ve checked on a number of mobile and desktop HDDs to get a better overview of how the situation has developed in the last three months....
The HIS R9 290X Hybrid IceQ averaged 38fps at 2560x1600 in Crysis 3 while our custom overclock allowed for 40fps or 5% faster than the factory overclock by HIS and 8% faster than a standard R9 290X while being just 2% slower than the new GTX 980 and 8% faster than the GTX 780 Ti. The overclocked HIS R9 290X Hybrid IceQ averaged 64fps at 2560x1600 and while this was 14% faster than a standard R9 290X, It was still 16% slower than the GTX 980 and 4% slower than the GTX 780 Ti....
Absolution looks stunning and includes tons of highly detailed scenes. As a result, folks hoping to enjoy the game on its highest quality settings will require some serious hardware. While it’s possible to get away with a single GPU solution at 1920x1200, multiple GPUs become a necessity at higher resolutions such as 2560x1600. It’s been some time since we’ve tested a game that makes a single HD 7970 or GTX 680 look obsolete at 2560x1600....
Accomplishing this is going to be a bit easier if you are on Windows 10 because Microsoft has added this ability as a native feature to its latest operating system. However, we’ll also be recommending some third party tools that can get the job done on older versions of Windows. Along with being a quick way to share a bunch of images in a convenient format, the feature is crucial for merging document scans or slides into a single file....
Though it’s a platform that began with the joystick as the dominant control method, over the past twenty years the keyboard and mouse overtook it to become the only way to play most games on the PC. Which is a shame, because there are a lot of them that play better with a control pad. This has become especially true over the past 3-4 years, as the PC has started to get a lot more ports of console titles, thanks to both the relative ease of bringing code over and the increasing popularity of Steam leading to a bigger market....
The HTC 10 marks the start of a new chapter for HTC. The company listened to user feedback - particularly surrounding the disappointing One M9 - to craft an entirely new, high-end device with a competitive and fresh set of features. If there’s any recent product from HTC that could make the company relevant again in the smartphone space, it’s this one. The signature metal body of past HTC smartphones has returned, complete with new additions like a fingerprint scanner and USB Type-C....
During my time using the Desire 816, I found the battery life to be pretty good. The handset appeared to last especially long on Wi-Fi networks, but wasn’t as strong when I took it out of the comfort of my house. At the end of a typical day’s usage I was left with around 40-35% of the charge remaining, although this can fluctuate depending on usage patterns. Of course you’ll get a much better idea of the battery life from our typical tests, the results of which you can find below....
EMUI still comes with heaps of annoying and pointless duplicate apps. There is no need for two email clients, two gallery apps, and two music apps on this phone. It just bogs down the phone with crap and forces you to choose an app through irritating pop-ups. Duplicate apps still aren’t a good experience on Android and it’s something OEMs need to address. There are also a number of spam apps included here....
It’s no secret that Intel’s foray into the discrete GPU market with Arc Alchemist hasn’t gone to plan. Between the underwhelming performance and the broken drivers, many industry watchers believe Team Blue should just eat up the cost of the venture and call it a failed experiment. However, Intel seems determined to march forward at great cost, as it sees graphics hardware as an essential technology for all of its customers — from consumers looking to work and play on their PCs to large enterprises crunching numbers in the data center....
Using a discrete graphics card we saw no performance advantages being offered by the Core i7-6700K when compared to the 4790K which is very disappointing. Comparing power consumption we find that the 6700K consumed just 7% less power and frankly we were hoping for a lot more given the lack of performance. Comparing power consumption when benchmarking with Hybrid lead to even less impressive results for the Core i7-6700K as it was just 4% more efficient than the 4790K while being 2% slower in this test....
The Ryzen 5 1500X looks slow but it still delivered perfectly smooth performance in every title tested with over 60fps at all times. How does it stack up in terms of value, you ask? Before accounting for total platform expenses, the 1500X only delivers about the same bang for your buck as the Core i5-8600K, though the R5 1600 does beat out all the Core i7 CPUs. What happens when you add the cost of a motherboard?...
It’s not quite the same as an APU or SoC, but it does bring together a powerful CPU and highly capable GPU onto a single, compact chip. By now you might have seen a bit of coverage of Intel’s Kaby Lake G NUC, otherwise known as Hades Canyon. That was the first Kaby Lake G product to hit the market, but as a NUC it’s a bit of a niche product and most reviewers got access to just the very top end model with the fastest Kaby Lake G SKU inside....
Intel took the opportunity to announce its upcoming products at its Innovation keynote on Tuesday. Along with its Raptor Lake processors, Pat Gelsinger also revealed Intel’s flagship Arc A-Series graphics card, the Intel Arc A770. The A770 follows up on Intel’s Arc A380, which consumers and reviewers panned on release. Driver issues and poor performance in many AAA games plagued the graphics card’s launch. Thankfully, Intel’s Arc A770 packs a much bigger punch, battling alongside GPUs like Nvidia’s RTX 3060 and AMD’s RX 6600 XT....
Microsoft recently added Intel’s entire 13th-gen Core desktop processor lineup to its Windows 11 compatibility list, including unannounced models. As you might know, Team Blue released its Raptor Lake “K” chips last week but hasn’t said anything about its upcoming lower-end CPUs yet. First, let’s quickly recap what the different suffixes on Intel Core processors mean. K-series CPUs are popular with enthusiasts as they have an unlocked multiplier, allowing them to be (more easily) overclocked....
