When running our single large file on-disk file copy test the WD Black 4TB impressed us with a transfer speed of 90.2MB/s, making it 4% faster than the WD Red 3TB and 8% faster than the WD RE 1TB. Meanwhile it was 25% slower than the Velociraptor and 73% slower than the SSD. The WD Back 4TB did exceptionally well in our program copy test with a transfer speed of 57....
The issue has to do with older blocks of data: reading old files is consistently slower than normal - as slow as ~30MB/s - whereas newly written files, like the ones used in benchmarks, perform as fast as new - around 500MB/s for the well regarded SSD 840 EVO. The reason no one had noticed (we reviewed the drive back in September 2013) is that data has to be several weeks old to show the problem....
The first major feature update for Windows 11 is apparently arriving next month. According to Windows Central’s Zac Bowden, there’s nearly a dozen new notable additions and changes that will be accompanied by plenty of under the hood enhancements and bug fixes. In some areas, like the Start Menu and Taskbar, Microsoft is finally bringing Windows 11 up to par with the Windows 10 experience. For instance, the 22H2 update will allow users to create app folders in the Start Menu, as well as let them adjust the number of pinned apps for some added flexibility....
The controller bar comes to Windows 11 insiders today. It’s a new version of the Xbox Game Bar that opens after pressing the home button on an Xbox controller while not in a game. Now, users can start their three most recently-played games or boot up game launchers like Steam and the Epic Games Store. The normal Xbox Game Bar will still appear after pressing the home button in a game....
On Thursday, Microsoft held its “What’s Next For Gaming” presentation outlining what the folks at Xbox have been brewing. The blog post mentioned Project Moorcroft, a venture aiming to bring curated demos to Xbox Game Pass subscribers. The move sounds somewhat like Sony’s idea of timed trials for games over $35 for PS Plus Premium members. However, Moorcroft is focused more on getting indie developers noticed, even going so far as compensating them for creating demos of their games to host on Game Pass....
YouTube is no stranger to paid subscription services. The website launched YouTube Premium (formerly called YouTube Red) in 2015, introducing many perks and features to users who decided to pay for it. The service has proven successful for Google, gaining over 50 million subscribers by Q3 2021. Google also launched YouTube TV to compete with cable companies and other live-television streaming platforms. As of 2022, YouTube TV is the most successful of these services, with an impressive 5 million users, edging out Hulu + Live TV....
The GTX 1080 was a beast, the Pascal architecture was efficient, and the GeForce 10 series was exceptional, especially the GTX 1070 and 1080 models. Admittedly, we have a soft spot for products such as the GTX 1080. We’d go as far as saying that the GTX 1080 Ti has gone down as one of the best GPUs of all time, and we’ll probably revisit it soon. The standard GTX 1080 was also great though… Now for the question....
To see how much headway AMD’s made here, we’re going to neutralize as many variables as we can, while also keeping things as realistic as possible. The first and most obvious step is to remove core frequency from the equation and to do this we’ve locked all CPU cores at 4 GHz. Any type of boost technology has been disabled, meaning the cores cannot go past 4 GHz and all cores are clocked at 4 GHz....
You might remember our reviews of the Acer Predator X27 and Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ, the first monitors ever to pack this combination of a high resolution and high refresh rate. But because they also included proper HDR support and G-Sync Ultimate, they were priced out of reach of many buyers at around the $2,000 mark. The Nitro XV273K is much cheaper, often retailing for around $900. We wouldn’t call this a value offering, but given what’s on offer and at half the cost of the original high-refresh 4K monitors, it is no doubt a tempting proposition for those buying a premium display....
It’s worth noting, there are some graphics cards that are simply not worth putting in the Amplifier. The Alienware 13’s GTX 860M is around the performance of a GTX 750 Ti (~$150 GPU), so anything around or lower than that will make no difference or even reduce performance. On the AMD side, this means anything around or lower than a Radeon R7 265. I would highly recommend spending at least $200 on a graphics card for the Amplifier to get a decent performance boost over what the GPU in the Alienware 13 already provides....
In this article we’ll explain how these chipsets differ and talk about why you may or may not need to upgrade for supporting a Zen 3 processor. You may recall AMD originally announced they’d be axing support for Zen 3 on all 300 and 400 series motherboards. However, due to push back from the community and publications like ours where we strongly suggested AMD to reconsider, they quickly walked back the decision and announced that the 400 series boards (B450 and X470) would receive support for Zen 3 processors, now known as the Ryzen 5000 series....
Following Bulldozer’s mediocre reception, AMD insisted that the new architecture was still young and would serve as a “solid building block” for the FX series. Although hotfixes such as one that addressed an SMT inefficiency have boosted Bulldozer’s performance slightly, little has changed with AMD’s FX series in the last year – until now, anyway, with today marking the arrival of the company’s second-generation FX offerings. AMD is refreshing its desktop processors with Piledriver, an enhanced version of Bulldozer that focuses on improving instructions per clock and frequency – something we witnessed earlier this month when we tested the company’s new Piledriver-powered Trinity APUs....
When all was said and done we felt gamers couldn’t go wrong with either the GeForce GTX 570 or Radeon HD 6970. Both cards provide an impressive level of performance, relatively good value, great efficiency, and both heavily outclassed their previous generation counterparts. The Radeon HD 6950 provides a middle ground of sorts, with a price tag of $299. At 1920x1200 (1920x1080) resolution which is continuing to grow in popularity, the Radeon HD 6950 was on average 10% slower than the HD 6970, which makes it a very good value as it’s also 18% cheaper....
Having pushed our Core i7-4770K system from 351w with a R9 290X to nearly 600w with the R9 295X2, there’s no escaping the card’s power requirements, yet it isn’t something the Silencer Mk III 1200w can’t handle. Meanwhile, temperatures aren’t an issue thanks to the water cooler, which kept the card at 62 degrees or lower after an hour of Crysis 3 with both GPUs running at 1018MHz and nearly 100% utilization....
To evaluate just how good the Radeon RX 5500 XT is, we have one card from MSI and one from Gigabyte. From MSI we have their ‘Gaming X’ model and Gigabyte sent their ‘Gaming OC’ version, both look very good. The RX 5500 XT GPU uses a tiny 158mm2 die packing just 1408 cores and 88 texture units, almost 40% fewer than the RX 5700. There’s also half as many ROPs, which has reduced the memory bus from 256-bit down to 128-bit wide....
So what’s been modified then? Double-precision floating-point (FP64) has been disabled, reducing performance from 6.7 TFLOPS down to just 1.7 TFLOPS, but this has no impact on gaming. AMD has also disabled PCIe 4.0, limiting the Radeon VII to the more commonly used PCIe 3.0 interface, which is not an issue either. When Radeon VII was announced at CES a month ago, it wasn’t met with a lot of fanfare....
Hitman is a game that features a huge number of NPCs and this can be quite taxing on the CPU, which is certainly what we’ve seen in the past with this title. This was another instance where the 7800X fell way behind the 7700K and the same is also true for the R5 1600. That said, whereas the 1600 was 15% slower than the 7800X at the stock clock speeds, overclocking both processors reduced the margin to 0, as both allowed no less than 61fps to be rendered....
As we begin to recover from the roller coaster ride that was Ryzen 7, we now have Ryzen 5 to address. Getting the ball rolling, AMD has announced four models in its more affordable series, including a pair of six-core CPUs as well as two quad-core models. The 1600X is configured similarly to the Core i7-6800K and stands as the flagship of AMD’s Ryzen 5 family, boasting six cores and 12 threads with a base clock frequency of 3....
Full disclosure: while we very much enjoyed the 6950X, we didn’t actually pay for it. Avoiding the hideous $1,700 price tag made the product a whole lot more enjoyable. For that stunning price, Intel basically tacked on two extra cores from the previous two-year-old 5960X, and jacked up the price by 75%. By the time they released their next 10-core part all bets were off as AMD had finally got their act together and had begun kicking goals with the Zen architecture....
