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The second-generation SandForce SF-2281 is probably best known for its use in the OCZ Vertex 3 and offers respectable performance, but it’s not without shortcomings. SandForce isn’t exactly synonymous with reliability, with many SF-2281 drives having stability issues early on. Additionally, Intel recently discovered that the controller can’t handle AES-256 encryption – an issue that runs deep enough that it can’t be solved with a firmware update. For its latest enthusiast drive, the Vertex 4, OCZ claimed to have used its own in-house Indilinx Everest 2 controller, but this turned out to be a rebadged Marvell chip – presumably the 88SS91874, though this is yet unconfirmed....

Samsung recently confirmed that GDDR7 RAM uses PAM-3 signaling (Pulse Amplitude Modulation 3-level). This will help it give future graphics cards double the data rate of GDDR6. Typical GDDR6 RAM – found in AMD’s new Radeon RX 7000 series – uses NRZ (non-return to zero) signaling to achieve data rates between 14 and 24Gbps. It can carry signals encoded with values of 0 or 1 for 1 bit per cycle....

Oddly, Samsung has gone to quite an effort to obscure the camera sensor model found in the Alpha, making it hard to discern any extra specifications. Both the S5 and Alpha have the same focal length (4.8mm) and same field of view, indicating both sensors are the same size. This means one of two things: either the pixel size has increased from 1.12µm to around 1.3µm; or the sensors are literally the same, with Samsung downscaling each 16-megapixel native capture to 12-megapixels in pre-processing....

The same predicament made doubters believe that the original Galaxy Note was too big to succeed, but millions of phones sold later, that proved to be a false prediction. Despite the magnitude of its build, the Galaxy Note II is not excessive in everyone’s eyes or hands. How does Samsung’s latest super-sized handset manage to tow the line between too big and too good to pass up? Read below to find out....

The most important result here is in Wi-Fi browsing, where the Galaxy S6 Active records a very impressive result of over 20 hours. This is 56% better than the standard Galaxy S6, which indicates Samsung has also achieved some battery life improvements on the software side. It’s not surprising to see the Active top the charts here either, considering the large battery, moderate display size and efficient processor. In PCMark’s battery benchmark, which runs through the performance tests on a constant loop, the Galaxy S6 Active recorded an impressive 59 percent increase in battery life....

The Exynos 9810 is the successor to the Exynos 8895 that first appeared in the Galaxy S8. We’re still looking at a dual quad-core implementation, just with newer core architectures, improved clock speeds and more cache. The ‘big’ performance cores are using the Exynos M3 design, which is a much wider core design with significant IPC improvements over the Exynos M2 in the 8895. There are four of these cores clocked up to 2....

Our first custom file transfer test uses a single large compressed file and has been dominated by the Samsung SSD 840 Pro with a throughput of 330MB/s. The new Evo 840 drives did nothing to change this with their offering of 200MB/s – roughly 40% slower than the SSD 840 Pro. In fact, the performance of the SSD 840 EVO drives was comparable to that of the OCZ Vertex 4, Octane and the much older Samsung SSD 830 series....

Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad is a 17GB game installation that took just 94 seconds when using the Samsung SSD 850 Evo 2TB, which is the same time recorded when using the 500GB, making both faster than the Crucial MX200 and BX100. Scanning the System32 folder in Windows 8.1 took 41 seconds when using the Samsung SSD 850 Evo 2TB, which was the exact same time as the 500GB model....

Although it isn’t quite as groundbreaking, the 960 Pro 1TB still delivered great results. Its 7-Zip file extraction test was particularly impressive, as were the drive’s file copy tests. For those wondering, for the time being we have shied away from including Windows boot time and game level load time tests. Some time ago we discovered that high-speed SSDs were no longer a bottleneck here and before long every drive was performing well within a second of each other – hardly conducive to demonstrating the performance difference between products....

This is the first know material that possesses this ability but others could exist. PhD student Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo was researching phase transitions in vanadium dioxide – specifically, how long it takes the material to transition from one state to another. When the material reaches 68 degrees Celsius, it undergoes a steep insulator-to-metal transition. His tests involved applying an electric current to a material, which heats it up (and causes it to change states) as it moves from one side to the other....

In fact it wasn’t until a fellow TechSpot staff member pointed out Singularity as a game of interest last week that I even knew of its existence. Although Singularity is based on the Unreal Engine 3 - like a few dozen or more games released over the past few years - we were still keen to check out how current hardware handles it. Singularity is getting released just today for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms, generating a lot of buzz as of late for its supposedly exciting single player campaign (we haven’t managed to play the game in full just yet) and the gameplay paradigm that it presents, giving you a “Time Manipulation Device” to play with and use as a weapon....

Excluding the “big five” you’re undoubtedly familiar with (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari), there are many little-known browsers that are potentially even more suitable for your needs, no matter how basic or advanced. This week we are taking a look at six truly alternative browsers and what separates them from the rest of the pack. This is far from an all-inclusive list, and we’d love to hear if you happen to be using any of these yourself or perhaps there’s yet another unheard of browser that we missed....

Tech Field Day, described as “The Independent IT Influencer Event,” allows companies to discuss or reveal information regarding numerous different tech divisions. Categories can include datacenters, cloud and physical storage, and networking, among many others. The conference has been held multiple times per year since 2009, but Solidigm’s announcement may be the biggest in the event’s history. The presentation was led by Senior Product Marketing Manager Yuyang Sun, who kicked off the conference by explaining the differences between triple-level cells (TLC) and quad-level cells (QLC)....

The Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drive took a total of 3 minutes and 34 seconds to copy the 6GB test file, giving it an average transfer rate of 28MB/s. The Intel X25-M for example took 1 minute and 24 seconds to copy the same file, as it produced an average transfer speed of 71.2MB/s. Surprisingly the OCZ Agility was even faster than this, reaching 78.4MB/s, while the A-Data S592 averaged 82....

The Snapdragon 810 features a quad-core CPU that consists of two four-core clusters: one of which is ARM Cortex-A57 cores at 2.0 GHz, and the other is Cortex-A53 cores at 1.56 GHz, giving a mix of high-performance and power-efficient cores in the one SoC. The GPU is an Adreno 430 clocked at 630 MHz, and there’s an LPDDR4 memory controller providing 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth, connected to 3 GB of RAM in the Xperia Z5....

Ground-based observations often involve long exposures to capture light from distant targets. While small, Starlink’s satellites can still reflect enough sunlight to interfere with astronomers’ images, showing up as streaks of light in photos. To quantify the satellites’ impact, a group of researchers analyzed observations collected between November 2019 and September 2021 from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in California. The team found 5,301 streaks from Starlink satellites....

Back in July 2021, we learned that Valve’s Steam Deck has a user-replaceable internal SSD, and this was well received by the gamer community. Modern devices are increasingly hard to repair (or upgrade) and companies have been trying everything in their power to prevent users from attempting to do repairs themselves, and that still holds true to this day. After waiting several months for orders to ship, Steam Deck buyers started receiving their handheld consoles and quickly found some rough edges on an otherwise impressive first-generation product....

The Steam Deck was always going to be one of those items at the mercy of scalpers. Its original launch date for pre-orders was pushed back by two months to February, while those who weren’t as fast when securing a unit were recently told their ‘After Q2’ release window would now be ‘After Q3.’ All of which adds up to a device that many want but few can get hold of—unless you’re willing to pay over the odds on eBay....