Today, we do not have an entirely dissimilar situation. The Athlon II X4 620 is just $20 cheaper than the Phenom II X3 720; and while it has the advantage of shipping with all four cores enabled, it also lacks the massive 6MB L3 cache of the Phenom II X3 720. Thus in terms of performance the triple-core chip will likely be faster than the Athlon II X4 620 in most cases, as it is also clocked 200MHz higher....
AMD’s Phenom II and Athlon II X4 620 processors fared poorly in the single-thread performance test using the MaxxPI² benchmark. However, when running the multi-thread test the Athlon II X4 620 stormed home, taking just 14.5 seconds to complete the calculation – 2 and 6 seconds faster than the Q6600 and E4700, respectively. Single-thread throughput was also quite weak on the Athlon II X4 620, as it managed just 102K/sec, but again when running the multi-thread test performance reached an impressive 564K/sec....
Decent performance gains were also seen when testing with Far Cry 2, though the boost was not enough to help the Phenom II X6 1090T overtake the Core i5 750 processor in this game. HandBrake was one of the best applications that fully utilized all six-cores and when overclocking the Phenom II X6 1090T all the way to 4.02GHz we saw tremendous performance gains. Not only was performance boosted by 22%, but the 1090T was almost on par with the more expensive Core i7 980 XE that also has twice as many threads at its disposal....
Cooling the Antilles GPUs is a pair of large aluminum heatsinks made up of 37 fins each. The heatsinks are separated by a blower fan which is positioned in-between them rather than at the end of the card. This design is said to be more efficient as it will allow the fan to spin at a lower RPM yet provide the same amount of air across both heatsinks. The real key to this design is the use of vapor chambers and high endurance thermal compound....
When running the Hard Reset benchmark at 2560x1600 the Radeon HD 7870 was found to be 8% slower than the Radeon HD 7950 and GeForce GTX 580. That said it was 13% faster than the GeForce GTX 570 and Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards. The Radeon HD 7850 was 6% slower than the GeForce GTX 570 and HD 6970, while it was 4% faster than the GTX 560 Ti....
The Radeon HD 7850 on the other hand didn’t overclock quite as well. The core went from 860MHz to 975MHz, and the memory faced the same limitation as the HD 7870. Even with a 13% core overclock we expect to see a reasonable gain from the HD 7850. On average our overclocked Radeon HD 7870 delivered 10% more performance, which in some cases was enough to make it faster than the Radeon HD 7950....
As expected the Radeon HD 7990 consumes roughly as much power as a pair of Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics cards. Total system consumption was 491 watts, which is 22% more than the GeForce GTX 690 and 36% more than a single 7970 GHz Edition card. Compared to graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 690, GTX Titan and even the 7970 GHz Edition, the 7990 ran quite cool....
The R9 295X2 rendered 135fps at 2560x1600 when playing Battlefield 3, 99% faster than a single R9 290X – almost perfect scaling. Even compared to a pair of GTX 780 SLI cards, the R9 295X2 was still 22% faster, while it was 75% faster than the GTX 780 Ti. Compared to the previous-generation dual-GPU graphics cards, the R9 295X2 was an impressive 42% faster than the HD 7990 and 48% faster than the GTX 690....
The R9 Fury X was 11% slower than the GTX 980 Ti at 1600p and just 7% slower at 4K. Meanwhile it was 31% slower than the R9 295X2 at both resolutions. Please note all results are sorted by the 4K results which is why the graph above looks a little messy. For some reason the AMD GPUs run into some kind of bottleneck at 1600p that limits the Fury X to just 78fps, just 3% faster than the R9 390X and 12% slower than the GTX 980 Ti....
That’s good news considering the 3950X is not inexpensive. At $750 it still does well relative to the Intel competition though. The 8-core 9900K, for example, currently retails for $500, so paying 50% more for 100% more cores, that might end up being a rather good deal. The Ryzen 9 3950X does look to bridge the gap between mainstream and high-end desktop platforms, at least existing high-end desktop platforms. Third-gen Threadripper will change that later this month....
Over the weekend, Android and web developer kdrag0n demonstrated a virtualized Windows 11 running on a Google Pixel 6 phone. They accomplished the feat using the Android 13 preview build with a new feature called KVM. With screenshots and a short video, kdrag0n shows off things like the task manager and a web browser, which seem entirely functional. They even managed to run Doom (using the chocolate Doom source port), playing with a physical keyboard connected to the phone....
European regulators are preparing sweeping legislation that could force open Apple’s walled garden, among other things. The Cupertino giant has long maintained that iOS is safer than Android because of an insistence on only allowing users to install apps from the App Store, but the new rules will put that claim to the test. The EU’s Digital Markets Act will also allow app makers to offer alternative payment methods for their services, despite Apple vehemently opposing the idea....
Apple introduced the butterfly keyboards in the 2015 MacBooks and 2016 MacBook Pros. The thinner mechanisms beneath each key were designed to apply more pressure, thereby increasing responsiveness and lowering the profile. But it also led to sticky keys, repeating characters, keystrokes not appearing, and complete keyboard failures. Unsurprisingly, this led to class-action lawsuits against Cupertino. The one launched in 2018 claimed Apple was aware of the problem with its MacBook keyboards shortly after the launch of the 2015 models but failed to disclose the defect to customers....
Over the past few years, Apple has focused almost exclusively on the mobile gaming experience of its users. Hyper-casual games thrive on iOS and that’s why the company created Apple Arcade, a subscription service that removes the manipulative monetization systems that are present in a lot of mobile games. In the meantime, the Cupertino giant had been working on custom silicon for its Macs to bring them more in line with iPhone and iPad....
Again we find that the Beebox was slightly faster than the N3050-ITX motherboard which should be using the faster Celeron N3050. The Beebox was also considerably faster than the ECS Liva X in our Excel test. The Beebox isn’t a bad little PowerPoint box taking just 10.3 seconds to complete the workload which is 3 seconds faster than the LivaX, just 3 seconds slower than the Pentium G3220 and only twice the time it took the Core i3-4130....
The DeskMini makes for a great little encoding machine despite its lack of a discrete GPU. When compared to the Cubi 2 Plus using the Core i3-6100T processor, the DeskMini was 10% faster. It was also over 50% faster than the AMD APUs and over four times faster than the Beebox. Running the x264 HD Benchmark shows us that the Core i5-6500 processor gives the DeskMini a serious advantage over the other small form factor systems tested....
The latter drive supports read speeds of 24x CD, 8x DVD and write speeds of 8x DVD+/-R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 6x DVD+R DL and 24x CD. It also features a relatively small 2MB buffer with access times of 180ms for DVDs and 180ms for CDs. At the heart of the Vision HT 420D is the mobile Intel Core i5-4200M, which is based on Haswell, runs at 2.5GHz (3.10GHz via Turbo Boost) and has two cores (with Hyper-Threading) as well as a 3MB L3 cache....
I recently purchased the premium Gigabyte F2A85XN-Wi-Fi motherboard which only came with a pair of SATA cables and an antenna for the wireless card. Although that’s a Mini-ITX board, when you look at most desktop motherboards the packages aren’t much better. This is where the extreme motherboards such as the Z87 Extreme11/ac stand out. For over $500, you’d expect the Z87 Extreme11/ac to come with more than a few SATA cables and Asrock doesn’t disappoint....
The Phenom II X6 performs very well in the POV-Ray benchmark and as a result, the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme scores better than the LGA1156 and LGA1366 motherboards. As we expected, the Formula version performed on par with the Extreme. It’s the same story in CINEBENCH R.10: the Phenom II X6 1090T performs very well, giving the AMD boards an edge in the graph, while the Asus Crosshair IV Extreme and Formula are closely matched....
