AMD FX line of processors today, and two gaming hardware builders have already jumped at the chance to provide the world's first gaming rig powered by a native 8-core desktop processor.
Utilizing AMD's Bulldozer multi-core architecture, the new FX series of AMD CPUs sets its sights on high-end PC gaming, with up to eight completely unlocked native cores ready to tackling the toughest in HD multimedia creation and multi-display PC gaming at a relatively low price.
At least that's what the marketing materials tell us. It all sounds good on paper, but the FX chips aren't quite the new power revolution they were expected to be.
That won't stop high-end PC gaming machine makers from jumping on the FX bandwagon. Both Origin PC and CyberpowerPC sent out announcements this morning, letting the world know that they were ready to build systems featuring the new four, six, and eight core chips.
CyberpowerPC's Gamer Scorpius line of gaming PCs (pictured above because they sent pictures) start at $576 and feature all four of the new chip models: The AMD FX-8150 3.60 GHz 8-Core CPU; AMD FX-8120 3.10 GHz 8-Core CPU; AMD FX-6100 3.30 GHz 6-Core CPU; and the AMD FX-4100 3.6 GHz Quad-Core CPU.
Origin PC will also be featuring all four chips in its systems, and while they don't do dedicated product lines they do offer quotes.
"Origin PC works directly with the best companies in the industry to deliver our customers with the latest technology first" said Kevin Wasielewski Origin PC CEO and cofounder. "AMD's new unlocked 8-core processors deliver the best price to performance value that we have ever seen."
Of course these aren't the only companies employing the new processor line; they're just the ones that showed up in my inbox this morning. I'm sure every gaming hardware manufacturer will be tossing these things about like popcorn by the end of the day.
I'll probably be sticking with my Intel Core i7 for another couple of years. It's served me well so far, and I've not had an AMD-powered desktop since the turn of the millennium.by kotaku
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Big Loss For RAMBUS Case
few companies in the tech world as infamous as Rambus, an IP-only RAM development firm. For the better part of 10 years now they have been engaged in court cases with virtually every RAM and x86 chipset manufacturer around over the violation of their patents. Through a long series of events SDRAM did end up implementing RAMBUS technologies, and the American courts have generally upheld the view that in spite of everything that happened while Rambus was a member of the JEDEC trade group that their patents and claims against other manufacturers for infringement are legitimate. At this point most companies using SDRAM have settled with Rambus on these matters.
Since then Rambus has moved on to a new round of lawsuits, focusing on the aftermath of Rambus’s disastrous attempt to get RDRAM adopted as the standard RAM technology for computers. Rambus has long held that they did not fail for market reasons, but rather because of collusion and widespread price fixing by RAM manufacturers, who purposely wanted to drive Rambus out of the market in favor of their SDRAM businesses. The price fixing issue was investigated by the Department of Justice – who found the RAM manufacturers guilty – which in turn Rambus is using in their suits as further proof of collusion against Rambus.
The biggest of these suits was filed in 2004 against the quartet of Samsung, Infineon, Hynix, and Micron. In 2005 Infineon settled with Rambus for $150 million while in 2010 Samsung settled with Rambus for $900 million, leaving just Hynix and Micron to defend. That suit finally went to court in 2011, with Rambus claiming that collusion resulted in them losing $4 billion in sales, which as a result of California’s treble damage policy potentially put Hynix and Micron on the line for just shy of $12 billion in damages.
Today a verdict was finally announced in the case, and it was against Rambus. A 12 member jury found in a 9-3 vote that Hynix and Micron did not conspire against Rambus, effectively refuting the idea that RAM manufacturers were responsible for Rambus’s market failure. As Rambus’s business relies primarily on litigation – their own RAM designs bring in relatively little due to the limited use of RDRAM and XDR – this is a significant blow for the company.
Rambus can of course file an appeal, as they have done in the past when they’ve lost cases, but the consensus is that Rambus is extremely unlikely to win such an appeal. If that’s the case this could mean that this is the beginning of a significant shift in business practices for Rambus, as while they have other outstanding cases – most notably against NVIDIA – the anti-trust suit was the largest and most important of them. Not surprising their stock also took a heavy hit as a result, as it ended the day down 60%. Rambus winning the anti-trust suit had long been factored into the stock price, so the loss significantly reduced the perceived value of the company.by ryan smith
Since then Rambus has moved on to a new round of lawsuits, focusing on the aftermath of Rambus’s disastrous attempt to get RDRAM adopted as the standard RAM technology for computers. Rambus has long held that they did not fail for market reasons, but rather because of collusion and widespread price fixing by RAM manufacturers, who purposely wanted to drive Rambus out of the market in favor of their SDRAM businesses. The price fixing issue was investigated by the Department of Justice – who found the RAM manufacturers guilty – which in turn Rambus is using in their suits as further proof of collusion against Rambus.
The biggest of these suits was filed in 2004 against the quartet of Samsung, Infineon, Hynix, and Micron. In 2005 Infineon settled with Rambus for $150 million while in 2010 Samsung settled with Rambus for $900 million, leaving just Hynix and Micron to defend. That suit finally went to court in 2011, with Rambus claiming that collusion resulted in them losing $4 billion in sales, which as a result of California’s treble damage policy potentially put Hynix and Micron on the line for just shy of $12 billion in damages.
Today a verdict was finally announced in the case, and it was against Rambus. A 12 member jury found in a 9-3 vote that Hynix and Micron did not conspire against Rambus, effectively refuting the idea that RAM manufacturers were responsible for Rambus’s market failure. As Rambus’s business relies primarily on litigation – their own RAM designs bring in relatively little due to the limited use of RDRAM and XDR – this is a significant blow for the company.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition
Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture stole the limelight this year, summarily trouncing its predecessors--and the best that AMD had to offer--with considerable performance boosts and power savings. Today Intel is announcing the Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition: a $990 CPU that distills the lessons the company has learned over the past year into a single piece of premium silicon.
It's a time-honored tradition: Take all the improvements from the most recent architecture shift, and drop them into an unlocked processor aimed at overclockers and workstations with considerable computational workloads.
Sitting at the top of the Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition lineup is the 3.3GHz Core i7-3960X. Here are the specs for it and the other two newcomers (the Core i7-3930K and the Core i7-3820), in handy chart form.
Core i7-3960X up close.The new processors are built on the Sandy Bridge architecture, and the fundamentals haven't changed. Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition offers two CPUs with six cores, and one CPU with four cores. The Core i7-3960X I examined offers 15MB of L3 cache shared between the cores--up from 12MB in last year's variant, or from 8MB in the Core i7-2600K. That larger L3 cache permits quicker data exchanges among the cores, which improves performance in applications that are optimized for multiple cores.
With new processors comes the new X79 chipset, and Socket 2011. Yes, a brand-new socket; the sound you hear is a legion of serial upgraders howling with rage. For them, the new socket means having to spring for new motherboard, but the news it isn't entirely bad. When I met with Intel representatives, I was assured that the performance-oriented Socket 2011 will be with us for a few years -- at least until an Extreme Edition of the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge architecture makes the rounds.
For the frugal enthusiast, picking up a Core i7-3820 CPU is an intriguing option. That CPU is likely to be priced competitively with the existing Core i7-2600K--in the neighborhood of $300. Grab one of them when they're available, save your pennies, and you'll be ready to dive into whatever 22nm-based Extreme Edition goodness Intel comes up with a year from now.
Intel parked its test Core i7-3960X CPU on a DX79SI "Siler" motherboard. The Siler is well equipped, to say the least. Eight DIMM slots offer a potential 64GB of RAM, with four DIMMs arranged on each side of the processor. This could pose a problem for some larger CPU fans. For my tests Intel provided an Asetek liquid cooling kit, but plenty of alternative cooling systems and motherboards supporting Socket 2011 will undoubtedly be available at or near launch.
The X79 chipset.Two USB 3.0 ports occupy the rear of the motherboard, with onboard connectors providing another pair for your case. The Siler supports a total of 14 USB ports--six on the rear, and eight on three onboard headers--with room for two FireWire ports as well. The available SATA channels are fairly standard: two 6.0GB/s SATA ports, four 3.0GB/s SATA ports.
For expansion the motherboard offers three PCI Express 3.0 x16 connectors for triple-SLI and Crossfire graphics card configurations, plus a few PCI Express and PCI connectors. The board also provides dual gigabit ethernet jacks, and an IR transmitter/receiver.
Turbo Boost returns, with some improvements. This is how it works: Processors have heat and power thresholds beyond which they become unstable and shut down, or worse. But since processors don't always hit the peak of their thermal design power (TDP), there is some headroom for overclocking.
Turbo Boost (and AMD's variant, dubbed Turbo Core) take advantage of that performance gap, boosting the performance of the operating cores until the TDP is reached, or until the task at hand is done. In the Core i7-3960X, Turbo Boost means a bump of 300MHz per core when five to six cores are active, and a bump of 600MHz per core when only one or two cores are active.
I paired the Core i7-3960X with the Radeon HD 6990 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. To get an idea of where SandyBridge E sits in the grand scheme of things, I tested it against the 3.46GHz Core i7-990X, last year's Extreme Edition processor. For mere mortals there's the 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K, the cream of the current Sandy Bridge crop. With the exception of their motherboards our testbeds were identical, and all tests were performed on systems attached to a 30-inch display.
Testing: Gaming
Of the games we used in our testing was Codemasters' Dirt 3, the latest entry in the software maker's rally racing series. Dirt 3 has everything we want in a DirectX 11 game: gorgeous visuals, frenetic pacing, and lots of knobs and levers to fiddle with, to make the most of the hardware we have on hand. here are our test results for this game.
Dirt 3 test results.
At resolutions of 1680 by 1050 pixels and 1920 by 1080 pixels, the Core i7-3960X finished at the top of the heap, followed by the Core i7-2600K in second place, and the Core i7-990X in third. This is exactly what we expected. Applications that are designed to scale across a plethora of cores will show better results with six-core processors, as will future game engines (as we saw in the Unigine Heaven benchmark). But the most advanced games available today may not take full advantage of the extra headroom yet. And at these resolutions and settings, we're CPU-bound: We've squeezed out just about all the performance we can from the Radeon HD 6990, leaving the games to eke out as much power as they can draw from the processors.
At 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution, the Core i7-2600K actually climbed ahead of the Core i7-3690X by 5 frames per second, with 138.5 frames per second versus 133.1 fps. At the Ultra setting, the Core i7-2600K netted 76.5 frames per second, against the Core i7-3690X's 72.8.
The difference is negligible. Bear in mind that these tests run at stock speeds; the Core i7-3960X is an unlocked processor that's born and bred for overclocking, and those 4 to 5 frames per second will melt away once the CPU gets pushed beyond its meager 3.3GHz (or 3.9GHz, with Turbo Boost).
Crytek's Crysis 2 is a decidedly more strenuous game than Dirt 3, but in running it we're still CPU-bound. Here are our Crysis 2 results.
Crysis 2 test results.
At 2560 by 1600 pixels, the Core i7-3690X maintained a frame rate of 67.4 fps, while the Core i7-2600K delivered 68.0 fps. With the settings ratcheted up another notch to Ultra, the Core i7-3690X netted 41.7 fps, to the Core i7-2600K's 41.8 fps.
When I put Sandy Bridge to the test earlier this year, I was especially impressed by Intel's Quick Sync technology. Quick Sync was designed to speed up video transcoding efforts without requiring a discrete graphics card, and it works well -- but it doesn't show up on Intel's higher-end wares. The company's rationale is that, if you're buying a $300 (or $1000) processor, you probably plan to pair it with a proper graphics card.
I converted a 1080p version of Big Buck Bunny to an iPad friendly 720p, using Arcsoft's Media Converter 7 software. As Quick Sync wasn't available, I went with AMD Stream hardware acceleration technology, built for AMD's graphics cards. The results: The Core i7-3960X transcoded the video in an average of 2 minutes, 13 seconds, while the Core i7-990X took 3 minutes, 12 seconds, and the Core i7-2600K took 2 minutes, 17 seconds.
Usually, with great performance comes great power consumption. That said, though the Core i7-3960X sports a 130W TDP, those specs don't represent too much of a leap over the Core i7-2600K and its 95W TDP.
When sitting idle, the Core i7-3960X drew 112 watts of power, the Core i7-990X drew 119 watts, and the Core i7-2600K drew 93.6 watts. That works out to a 20 percent jump over the 2600K for the 3960X--considerable, but hardly beyond the pale. The greater offender against power efficiency here is the Core i7-990X, but again this result just goes to show Sandy Bridge's improved power savings.
Power consumption while under load maintained roughly the same pattern for the three CPUs. Over the course of a strenuous workload, the Core i7-3690X used 5 percent less power than the Core i7-990X, and 24 percent more power than the Core i7-2600K.
The Core i7-3960X is a worthy successor to last year's Extreme Edition processors, but the same caveats apply to it as to them. You'll see the greatest benefit in programs that are heavily threaded--computation-heavy spreadsheets, video encoding applications like Sony Vegas Pro, and 3D rendering applications like Maxon Cinema 4D, for example.
On the gaming front, whether you use Intel's excellent overclocking assistant or muck about in the BIOS, you'll be able to cobble together a nauseatingly potent performance machine. And if a $1000 CPU is within your gaming budget, you can't go wrong. This processor is poised to be the foundation of many of 2012's performance desktop juggernauts, and a few early efforts that have already trickled into the lab are sure to make waves. But if you aren't overclocking--or looking to get some gaming done--you don't need this much power.
Ivy Bridge does throw a wrench into the works. At the moment, we know very little about the platform: It'll be shrunk down to the 22nm processor, which should cut power consumption a bit.
Is Sandy Bridge E worth it? Even at $1000, the answer is a resounding yes--if you're using the right apps, are a dedicated overclocker, or have barrels of cash that you simply can't spend fast enough.by nate ralph,pc world
It's a time-honored tradition: Take all the improvements from the most recent architecture shift, and drop them into an unlocked processor aimed at overclockers and workstations with considerable computational workloads.
Sitting at the top of the Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition lineup is the 3.3GHz Core i7-3960X. Here are the specs for it and the other two newcomers (the Core i7-3930K and the Core i7-3820), in handy chart form.
Core i7-3960X up close.The new processors are built on the Sandy Bridge architecture, and the fundamentals haven't changed. Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition offers two CPUs with six cores, and one CPU with four cores. The Core i7-3960X I examined offers 15MB of L3 cache shared between the cores--up from 12MB in last year's variant, or from 8MB in the Core i7-2600K. That larger L3 cache permits quicker data exchanges among the cores, which improves performance in applications that are optimized for multiple cores.With new processors comes the new X79 chipset, and Socket 2011. Yes, a brand-new socket; the sound you hear is a legion of serial upgraders howling with rage. For them, the new socket means having to spring for new motherboard, but the news it isn't entirely bad. When I met with Intel representatives, I was assured that the performance-oriented Socket 2011 will be with us for a few years -- at least until an Extreme Edition of the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge architecture makes the rounds.
For the frugal enthusiast, picking up a Core i7-3820 CPU is an intriguing option. That CPU is likely to be priced competitively with the existing Core i7-2600K--in the neighborhood of $300. Grab one of them when they're available, save your pennies, and you'll be ready to dive into whatever 22nm-based Extreme Edition goodness Intel comes up with a year from now.
What's New?
Intel parked its test Core i7-3960X CPU on a DX79SI "Siler" motherboard. The Siler is well equipped, to say the least. Eight DIMM slots offer a potential 64GB of RAM, with four DIMMs arranged on each side of the processor. This could pose a problem for some larger CPU fans. For my tests Intel provided an Asetek liquid cooling kit, but plenty of alternative cooling systems and motherboards supporting Socket 2011 will undoubtedly be available at or near launch.
The X79 chipset.Two USB 3.0 ports occupy the rear of the motherboard, with onboard connectors providing another pair for your case. The Siler supports a total of 14 USB ports--six on the rear, and eight on three onboard headers--with room for two FireWire ports as well. The available SATA channels are fairly standard: two 6.0GB/s SATA ports, four 3.0GB/s SATA ports.For expansion the motherboard offers three PCI Express 3.0 x16 connectors for triple-SLI and Crossfire graphics card configurations, plus a few PCI Express and PCI connectors. The board also provides dual gigabit ethernet jacks, and an IR transmitter/receiver.
Turbo Boost returns, with some improvements. This is how it works: Processors have heat and power thresholds beyond which they become unstable and shut down, or worse. But since processors don't always hit the peak of their thermal design power (TDP), there is some headroom for overclocking.
Turbo Boost (and AMD's variant, dubbed Turbo Core) take advantage of that performance gap, boosting the performance of the operating cores until the TDP is reached, or until the task at hand is done. In the Core i7-3960X, Turbo Boost means a bump of 300MHz per core when five to six cores are active, and a bump of 600MHz per core when only one or two cores are active.
I paired the Core i7-3960X with the Radeon HD 6990 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. To get an idea of where SandyBridge E sits in the grand scheme of things, I tested it against the 3.46GHz Core i7-990X, last year's Extreme Edition processor. For mere mortals there's the 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K, the cream of the current Sandy Bridge crop. With the exception of their motherboards our testbeds were identical, and all tests were performed on systems attached to a 30-inch display.
Testing: Gaming
Of the games we used in our testing was Codemasters' Dirt 3, the latest entry in the software maker's rally racing series. Dirt 3 has everything we want in a DirectX 11 game: gorgeous visuals, frenetic pacing, and lots of knobs and levers to fiddle with, to make the most of the hardware we have on hand. here are our test results for this game.
Dirt 3 test results.At resolutions of 1680 by 1050 pixels and 1920 by 1080 pixels, the Core i7-3960X finished at the top of the heap, followed by the Core i7-2600K in second place, and the Core i7-990X in third. This is exactly what we expected. Applications that are designed to scale across a plethora of cores will show better results with six-core processors, as will future game engines (as we saw in the Unigine Heaven benchmark). But the most advanced games available today may not take full advantage of the extra headroom yet. And at these resolutions and settings, we're CPU-bound: We've squeezed out just about all the performance we can from the Radeon HD 6990, leaving the games to eke out as much power as they can draw from the processors.
At 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution, the Core i7-2600K actually climbed ahead of the Core i7-3690X by 5 frames per second, with 138.5 frames per second versus 133.1 fps. At the Ultra setting, the Core i7-2600K netted 76.5 frames per second, against the Core i7-3690X's 72.8.
The difference is negligible. Bear in mind that these tests run at stock speeds; the Core i7-3960X is an unlocked processor that's born and bred for overclocking, and those 4 to 5 frames per second will melt away once the CPU gets pushed beyond its meager 3.3GHz (or 3.9GHz, with Turbo Boost).
Crytek's Crysis 2 is a decidedly more strenuous game than Dirt 3, but in running it we're still CPU-bound. Here are our Crysis 2 results.
Crysis 2 test results.At 2560 by 1600 pixels, the Core i7-3690X maintained a frame rate of 67.4 fps, while the Core i7-2600K delivered 68.0 fps. With the settings ratcheted up another notch to Ultra, the Core i7-3690X netted 41.7 fps, to the Core i7-2600K's 41.8 fps.
Testing: Media and Power
When I put Sandy Bridge to the test earlier this year, I was especially impressed by Intel's Quick Sync technology. Quick Sync was designed to speed up video transcoding efforts without requiring a discrete graphics card, and it works well -- but it doesn't show up on Intel's higher-end wares. The company's rationale is that, if you're buying a $300 (or $1000) processor, you probably plan to pair it with a proper graphics card.
I converted a 1080p version of Big Buck Bunny to an iPad friendly 720p, using Arcsoft's Media Converter 7 software. As Quick Sync wasn't available, I went with AMD Stream hardware acceleration technology, built for AMD's graphics cards. The results: The Core i7-3960X transcoded the video in an average of 2 minutes, 13 seconds, while the Core i7-990X took 3 minutes, 12 seconds, and the Core i7-2600K took 2 minutes, 17 seconds.
Usually, with great performance comes great power consumption. That said, though the Core i7-3960X sports a 130W TDP, those specs don't represent too much of a leap over the Core i7-2600K and its 95W TDP.
When sitting idle, the Core i7-3960X drew 112 watts of power, the Core i7-990X drew 119 watts, and the Core i7-2600K drew 93.6 watts. That works out to a 20 percent jump over the 2600K for the 3960X--considerable, but hardly beyond the pale. The greater offender against power efficiency here is the Core i7-990X, but again this result just goes to show Sandy Bridge's improved power savings.
Power consumption while under load maintained roughly the same pattern for the three CPUs. Over the course of a strenuous workload, the Core i7-3690X used 5 percent less power than the Core i7-990X, and 24 percent more power than the Core i7-2600K.
Serious Inquiries Only
The Core i7-3960X is a worthy successor to last year's Extreme Edition processors, but the same caveats apply to it as to them. You'll see the greatest benefit in programs that are heavily threaded--computation-heavy spreadsheets, video encoding applications like Sony Vegas Pro, and 3D rendering applications like Maxon Cinema 4D, for example.
On the gaming front, whether you use Intel's excellent overclocking assistant or muck about in the BIOS, you'll be able to cobble together a nauseatingly potent performance machine. And if a $1000 CPU is within your gaming budget, you can't go wrong. This processor is poised to be the foundation of many of 2012's performance desktop juggernauts, and a few early efforts that have already trickled into the lab are sure to make waves. But if you aren't overclocking--or looking to get some gaming done--you don't need this much power.
Ivy Bridge does throw a wrench into the works. At the moment, we know very little about the platform: It'll be shrunk down to the 22nm processor, which should cut power consumption a bit.
Is Sandy Bridge E worth it? Even at $1000, the answer is a resounding yes--if you're using the right apps, are a dedicated overclocker, or have barrels of cash that you simply can't spend fast enough.by nate ralph,pc world
Monday, November 21, 2011
Logitech G9X Mouse for Gaming
Now twitching in your hands, it’s about time we told you about it’s game playing assistive abilities, and they do not disappoint.
The Dual Mode scroll wheel allows precise selection when required yet can spin like the moon if you ask it. A simple light click down alternates between the 2 modes. Hyper Scroll – Click to Click.
For this part of the review we obviously require a game, so, one of my favourites, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3 is loading, and I pile straight into my favourite map, Overgrown; I notice straight away how well the mouse glides on the gaming mat, pure smooth slipper feet made from teflon are no doubt the reason, but I can tell you this, it is super silky smooth. It even works fairly well on the bare desk and my slacks so no worries there.
The mouse is as accurate as you’d expect from a G-Series rodent, with the 5700dpi sensor seemingly underwhelmed at my playing ability. At a little under 4″ x 3″ in size it is a full size mouse, with yet another plus point being the Logitech G9x’s ergonomic design, even after an hour of play I can hardly feel any strain on my wrist or fingers.
The Dual Mode scroll wheel allows precise selection when required yet can spin like the moon if you ask it. A simple light click down alternates between the 2 modes. Hyper Scroll – Click to Click.Logitech have also quoted a polling rate of 1000hz, pretty darn quick, so absolutely no problems with communications lag, and the potential 165″ second tracking ability is not only beyond my arms, but well beyond the reach of this, and most likely any, desk.
The G9x is an Optical Laser Gaming Mouse, which means it uses a Laser and Sensor that read the surface the mouse is gliding across, with a superior 5700dpi engine the accuracy is stunning and a relative maximum acceleration of 30g is enough to make sure the pointer sits exactly where you ask it too.
It’s Windows XP, Vista and 7 Ready, Plug and Play if you feel like doing without the SetPoint software, which I would personally recommend.
It’s Windows XP, Vista and 7 Ready, Plug and Play if you feel like doing without the SetPoint software, which I would personally recommend.In conclusion, the Logitech G9x Gaming Mouse is without doubt an excellent piece of Kit, capable of not least impressing your friends but also making your gaming experiences that bit more enjoyable.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Best 24 Inch Monitor ASUS ML248H 1920x1080 LED Monitor
One of our favorite monitors of the year is the ML248H. This inexpensive and ultra-thin LED gaming monitor has a 2ms response time, is full 1080p in 1920x1080 resolution and and includes a HDMI connector input for easy connectivity.
The ML248H also comes with a ring stand that allows the monitor to easily tilt and swivel in any direction that you see fit. While this monitor has been on the bestselling list for the first part of the year, recently the Viewsonic VX2453MH-LED, the 24 inch version of the monitor reviewed above, has taken it's place.
Product Details: 2ms response time, full hd 1920x1080 resolution. Ring stand that allows full tilt and swivel. Save money with low power consumption with LED backlighting (less than 30 watts). Includes a 3 year parts and labor warranty.
The ML248H also comes with a ring stand that allows the monitor to easily tilt and swivel in any direction that you see fit. While this monitor has been on the bestselling list for the first part of the year, recently the Viewsonic VX2453MH-LED, the 24 inch version of the monitor reviewed above, has taken it's place.Product Details: 2ms response time, full hd 1920x1080 resolution. Ring stand that allows full tilt and swivel. Save money with low power consumption with LED backlighting (less than 30 watts). Includes a 3 year parts and labor warranty.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Logitech Z906 Surround-Sound Computer speakers
Best surround-sound computer speakers
Pros
- Sturdy speakers
- Easy to set up and use
- Good surround sound for games and movies
- Multichannel analog inputs
Cons
- Not as great for playing music in one test
- No HDMI connectivity
- No HD audio decoding
- Home theater speakers sound better
Reviews say surround-sound computer speakers can't match the sound quality of a dedicated home theater system, but the Logitech Z906 does a good job bringing home theater-like experience to your desktop. This 5.1 system (five speakers plus subwoofer) works especially well for movies and games, with bass that's punchy but that doesn't drown out everything else. TrustedReviews.com says the Z906 delivers rich-sounding music, too, although MaximumPC magazine's tester detects harsh, brittle highs with pianos and vocals. Several experts and owners are disappointed that Logitech didn't include any HDMI ports or the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, both of which would have made it better to use with Blu-ray players and game consoles. It does, however, have multichannel analog inputs for those devices, including some Blu-ray players, that have those ports. If you're not dead-set on surround sound, reviews recommend several PC speaker sets with fewer speakers but better sound quality
Saturday, November 12, 2011
ATI Crossfire Explained
ATI CrossFire technology, which works similar to NVIDIA's SLI. Just like SLI, CrossFire uses multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to improve 3D graphics performance. In this article we take a look at the different generations of CrossFire and the different modes of this great technology.
First CrossFire Cards
When ATI CrossFire first came out it worked like this: You needed a CrossFire compatible motherboard, a 'master' CrossFire Edition video card, and another regular 'slave' video card. The master video card contains a compositing engine that combines the two GPU outputs and displays it to the screen.
The master and slave video cards did not have to be the same, but they must be of the same GPU family. The two video cards are connected together via a Y-dongle which connects into each card's DVI port.
Native CrossFire
The next generation of CrossFire did not require a master card. You just needed two PCI-Express video cards with CrossFire capability, and the dongle connection that was present in the first generation was removed and a bridge was used to connect the two video cards (similar to NVIDIA SLI).
CrossFireX
Part of the AMD spider platform is the recently released CrossFireX which allows you to connect four video cards for fast gaming performance.
Different CrossFire Modes
ATI CrossFire can be set to function in different modes.
First CrossFire Cards
When ATI CrossFire first came out it worked like this: You needed a CrossFire compatible motherboard, a 'master' CrossFire Edition video card, and another regular 'slave' video card. The master video card contains a compositing engine that combines the two GPU outputs and displays it to the screen.
The master and slave video cards did not have to be the same, but they must be of the same GPU family. The two video cards are connected together via a Y-dongle which connects into each card's DVI port.
Native CrossFire
The next generation of CrossFire did not require a master card. You just needed two PCI-Express video cards with CrossFire capability, and the dongle connection that was present in the first generation was removed and a bridge was used to connect the two video cards (similar to NVIDIA SLI).
CrossFireX
Part of the AMD spider platform is the recently released CrossFireX which allows you to connect four video cards for fast gaming performance.
Different CrossFire Modes
ATI CrossFire can be set to function in different modes.
- Alternate Frame Rendering - Just like with SLI's Alternate Frame Rendering mode, each frame is rendered by each GPU one after the other. For example, the first GPU will render all the even frames while the second GPU will render all the odd frames.
- Supertiling Mode - Supertiling works by dividing the screen/frame into small squares of pixels and spreading them evenly to each GPU for processing.
- Scissor Mode - In scissor mode the frame is split up into two pieces, depending on rendering effort. The two GPUs are given each half of the frame for processing.
- Antialiasing - Same as the SLI antialiasing mode, this increases the quality of the image instead of the rendering speed. You can enable up to 14x of antialiasing.
- by buid-gaming-computers.com
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