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We’re less than a week away from the expected release of AMD’s refreshed RDNA 2 graphics cards. As we inch closer to the actual launch, more details are popping up online, particularly in terms of power consumption. Several variants of the upcoming Radeon RX 6950 XT have been confirmed to have a total board power (TBP) of 335 watts — a 35 watts boost over the RX 6900 XT. Previous rumors pointed to a TBP of 350 watts, but it appears that AMD opted for a more modest increase in terms of power budget compared to Nvidia’s-100 watt boost for the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti....

I should note that all Ryzen 5 overclocking was done using the Wraith Spire for the 1500X and the Wraith Max for the 1600X, but I will talk more about CPU coolers more toward the end of the article. It’s also worth keeping in mind that I’m using a power bug program to over-stress the CPU, so when gaming your temps shouldn’t get this high. When paired with the Wraith Max, the 1600X idled at 36 degrees and maxed out at just 61 degrees at the stock frequencies....

The idea of the original comparison review was to see how latest and greatest AMD and Intel 8-core/16-thread processors do against each other and where each company stands in terms of gaming performance. That’s not to say we’re recommending you race out and buy either of those CPUs right now. In fact, in our recent update to the Top 5 Best CPUs we chose the Core i7-10700 series as the best value choice for gamers on a budget....

We’ve heard from multiple sources that sales for Zen 4 processors are weaker than expected, even factoring in current market conditions, so let’s talk about that and why this might be occurring. AMD processors remain very popular and continue to outsell Intel equivalents in the enthusiast DIY market. It’s estimated AMD currently has a ~70% share of desktop CPU sales with some variation depending on the source you look at, however the vast majority of these parts, even in the days after AMD’s Zen 4 launch are for older AM4 processors....

Unfortunately, I was only able to get my setup stable with DDR4-2666 memory and even that was a bit of a pain to achieve. Naturally, the XMP profiles for all the memory I tried failed, so we had to do things the old fashion way. The system was stable briefly using DDR4-3000 and saw a memory bandwidth of 32GB/s. Using DDR4-2666 memory, both Ryzen processors churned out 29GB/s, which is respectable and if equipped with equivalent memory they would be on par with the Skylake and Kaby Lake processors....

Excel can utilize many threads, especially when running the extreme Monte Carlo simulation. Here the 1920X just edged out the 7900X, taking an impressive 1.86 seconds to complete the workload. That said, it was 12% slower than the 1950X which took just 1.66 seconds making it the fastest desktop CPU we’ve ever tested here. For those of you unaware, VeraCrypt is an open-source utility used for on-the-fly encryption and features optimized implementations of cryptographic hash functions and ciphers which boost performance on modern CPUs....

We’ve split the anatomy of storage in three parts, all published simultaneously to dissect hard disk drives, solid state storage, and optical drives. Solid, solid as a rock Just as transistors revolutionized computers, by increasing the speed at which circuits could switch and perform math operations, the use of semiconductor devices in storage devices was aimed at producing the same outcome. Anatomy of a Motherboard Anatomy of a Power Supply (PSU) Anatomy of a Hard Disk Drive Anatomy of a Solid State Drive Anatomy of an Optical Drive Anatomy of a Graphics Card Anatomy of a CPU Anatomy of RAM Anatomy of a Monitor Anatomy of a Mouse Anatomy of a Keyboard Anatomy of a Gamepad...

On this page we’re looking at improvements in CPU and system bound benchmarks. As a refresher, the Moto X 2014, Galaxy S5 and LG G3 come with Snapdragon 801 SoCs inside with 2.5 GHz quad-core Krait 400 CPUs and Adreno 330 graphics. The LG G3 is the only device with 3 GB of RAM and a 1440p display, with the Moto X and Galaxy S5 coming with 2 GB and 1080p displays....

Earnings per share dropped to $1.20 from $1.31 during the same period last year but still beat FactSet estimates of $1.16 per share. Apple’s board also declared a cash dividend of $0.23 per share that is payable on August 11. iPhone sales revenue increased 2.77 percent year-over-year to $40.67 billion. Its services division saw even more impressive growth of 12.11 percent, from $17.49 billion in Q3 2021 to $19.6 billion in the most recent three-month period....

Last year we examined the Vision 3D, the successor to the Core 100HT and Asrock’s first mini PC to stray from the norm by dropping Intel’s Atom processor for a much snappier Core Mobile chip. With significantly more CPU power, the results were impressive, but the Core 100HT still had one major weakness: Intel’s HD Graphics. To give you a quick rundown of Asrock’s previous models, the Core 100HT used Intel’s HM55 chipset and without the support of a discrete graphics card, it was forced to use the integrated graphics exclusively....

Apple could face a new antitrust lawsuit in the coming months. Bloomberg notes that Affinity Credit Union (ACU), out of Iowa, has hired representation to contest Apple’s tap-to-pay system. Its lawyers are looking into whether they can create a class-action case of the complaint. The plaintiff argues that Apple has created an illegal monopoly with the iPhone’s near-field communication (NFC) payment system. Customers can add their ACU credit and debit cards to their iPhone wallets, but Apple charges fees for every purchase....

We covered the state of online privacy in a recent mini-series, outlining particulars about covering your tracks on services like Facebook, search engines, and even torrents. Adding to those articles, we thought it’d be handy to provide a short tip explaining how you can automatically start today’s most popular browsers in private mode. Note that in Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 5 there is more than one way of doing this, so you only need to choose one of the methods listed....

So, if for a second you were left wondering when was that you missed the first Bad Company game, now you know why as there was no PC version to talk about. Instead we received Battlefield 2142 in 2006, and the cartoon-style free to play Battlefield Heroes last year. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 made it to store shelves just last week, built around the Frostbite 1.5 engine, the same engine used in Battlefield 1943....

The Radeon HD 6990 and Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire configurations were substantially faster, but not on par of the GeForce GTX 590 and GTX 580 SLI setups that cracked the 100fps barrier. At 1920x1200 the Radeon HD 6970 was only able to average 41fps, which is much slower than the 53fps managed by the GeForce GTX 580. The minimum frame rate on the Radeon dropped to 31fps which was still playable but far from ideal....

Let’s just admit it. Battlefield 4 was never a game you were going to play for the single-player. And thank god for that, because in DICE’s latest entry in their fantastic, consistently polished military first-person shooter series, the campaign is useless and forgettable. There are these big set-piece moments—the Michael Bay explosions and extravagantly violent and precarious situations you and your squadmates find yourselves in—that set an exciting tone for all of a few seconds....

This might surprise a few of you given that the Athlon X4 860K is a quad-core chip clocked up to 4.0GHz, while the Pentium G3258 is a lowly dual-core that runs at 3.2GHz out of the box. The problem for AMD, which we have seen time and time again, is core efficiency. Having more cores available isn’t much use if they are slower. Moreover, just because a game can use four cores (and all the games we tested could) doesn’t mean a dual-core will be inferior if two cores are working harder than four....

To date all our TR 3990X testing has been conducted using a large 360mm custom loop setup with Corsair’s HydroX bits. This allowed us to keep the 64-core part under 70C during an hour-long Blender stress test, though as expected temperatures did climb rapidly when overclocking, peaking at over 90 degrees. This had us wondering just how practical air-cooling the 3990X would be, especially for those wanting to overclock. As luck would have it, on hand we had four purpose-built Threadripper air-coolers from the likes of Noctua, Arctic, DeepCool and Cooler Master....

Ideally, we’re after an average of 60fps for smooth gameplay, but it is possible to enjoy BioShock Infinite with less. That said, we don’t recommend going below 40fps, which means you’ll want at least a GTX 650 Ti or HD 7850. At this point, Nvidia cards appear to be working better in BioShock Infinite as the HD 7790 shouldn’t be much slower than the GTX 650 Ti, yet at 1680x1050 it lagged behind by 6fps or 15%....

The National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) of Brazil has launched an open public consultation on a proposal to make USB-C the required standard for all smartphones sold in the South American nation. Earlier this month, lawmakers in the European Union finally reached an agreement requiring all new phones, tablets, and other small electronics sold in the region to use USB-C as the charging port. The EU is giving device makers until the fall of 2024 to comply with the rule, which follows over a decade of arguments pushing for a universal charging solution....

AMD’s Turbo Core technology has been enhanced for FX processors to include a new mode that boosts all Cores when there’s enough thermal headroom. This allows new highly threaded scenarios to take advantage of the extra frequency. AMD Power Manager inside the CPU monitors the processor states as seen below. The Max Turbo mode is activated on lightly threaded applications by increasing frequency on half the cores. AMD has enhanced the highest clock level of its Turbo Core Technology to remain in a higher frequency state than in previous AMD Phenom II Processors....