53326239
submission
Vigile writes:
Hybrid drives are not new to the computing world as the benefits of a hard drive with a large(-ish) NAND cache are well known. But desktop users will likely agree that having a full capacity SSD as a primary drive with a secondary, spindle based hard drive for mass storage is the most popular solution. For many notebook users that simply isn't an option as space is limited in most laptop chassis but today's brand new Dual Drive, the Black2 from Western Digital, mixes things up. In a single 2.5-in hard drive form factor, WD has packed a 120GB SSD in addition to a 1TB hard drive that share a single SATA connection and that can be installed in systems with a single drive bay. This isn't a hybrid, Windows sees two different partitions. There are some interesting software quirks and the SSD performance is middle of the road based on PC Perspective's testing, but the Black2 performs well enough in both SSD and HDD testing to get their full recommendation.
52882429
submission
Vigile writes:
What do you do when you can't find many partners willing to put the work into your product that you think it deserves? Well if you are NVIDIA, you build your own and sell it. The first product that is part of NVIDIA's Tegra Note platform is being released, a 7-in form factor stock Android tablet called the Tegra Note 7. Based on the Tegra 4 SoC with its 4+1 Cortex-A15 CPU and 72-core GPU design, the Note 7 is among the fastest small tablets on the market and also includes features like DirectStylus support, front facing speakers and a $199 price tag. It does lag behind the Nexus 7 in battery life and screen resolution, but otherwise in PC Perspective's testing the Tegra Note 7 is able to compete in a crowded market quite strongly.
52721695
submission
Vigile writes:
The battle over the discrete graphics card space continues to stay heated. AMD started releasing its new set of graphics cards, culminated with the R9 290X Hawaii flagship just before Halloween. That left a large performance and pricing gap between the $499 GeForce GTX 780 and the $999 GTX TITAN (that was clearly overpriced for gaming). Today's release of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti starts with a $699 price tag and offers performance that is 10-15% higher than the AMD 290X at 2560x1440 and 4K resolutions. This also marks the first consumer part to enable the entire GK110 Kepler GPU which now includes 2,880 cores (25% more than the original GTX 780) running at an 875 MHz base clock, 240 texture units, 48 ROPs and 3GB of GDDR5 running at 7.0 Gbps.
52646463
submission
Vigile writes:
AMD keeps releasing new GPUs, this time in the form of the Radeon R9 290, dropping the 'X' from last month's R9 290X. Based on the same Hawaii GPU that includes 6.2 billion transistors, a 512-bit memory bus and 4GB of GDDR5 memory, the R9 290 drops 256 shader processors (to hit 2,560) and 16 texture units compared to the 290X. However, due to a higher maximum fan speed, the R9 290 will likely run at higher out-of-box, sustained clock speeds than the R9 290X at default settings. As a result, the R9 290 is not only beating the $499 GeForce GTX 780 but rivals the R9 290X at $549. Considering the R9 290 will have an MSRP of just $399 starting today, that is going to sound awfully impressive to enthusiasts.
52267419
submission
Vigile writes:
AMD is releasing its fastest single GPU graphics card today, the $549 R9 290X based on a new, 6.2 billion transistor GPU called Hawaii. The brand new part has 2,816 stream processors and has a peak theoretical performance of 5.6 TFLOPS. PC Perspective has done a full round of testing on the card to see where it stacks up and it does in fact beat the GeForce GTX 780, a card that costs $100 more. In fact, it also compares well to the $999 GTX TITAN flagship. Maybe more interesting is the completely redesigned CrossFire integration that no longer uses a bridge and fixes the CrossFire + Eyefinity/4K pacing issues that have plagued AMD for some time. As it turns out, with this new hardware, 4K tiled display CrossFire appears to be corrected.
51694295
submission
Vigile writes:
Last month AMD publicly shared plans to release a new line of graphics cards including the R9 and R7 series of Radeon GPUs. Today is the first step in that product release with the Radeon R9 280X, R9 270X and R7 260X cards going on sale and being reviewed. PC Perspective has tested all three and compared them to the latest offerings from NVIDIA and found the 280X and 270X to be first class products that offer nearly unparalleled performance per dollar. The $299 Radeon R9 280X is often outperforming the $399 GeForce GTX 770 and the R9 270X at $199 bests the GTX 760 at $249 many times as well. Enthusiasts might be disappointed to learn that all three of these cards use existing silicon previously found in the Radeon HD 7900/7800/7700 series and they will have to wait a bit longer before the hyped AMD Hawaii GPU appears.
50828567
submission
Vigile writes:
Multi-display gaming has really found a niche in the world of high-end PC gaming, starting when AMD released Eyefinity in 2009 in three panel configurations. AMD expanded out to 6 screen options in 2010 and NVIDIA followed shortly thereafter with a similar multi-screen solution called Surround. Over the last 12 months or so GPU performance testing has gone through a sort of revolution as the move from software measurement to hardware capture measurement has taken hold. PC Perspective has done testing with this new technology on AMD Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround configurations at 5760x1080 resolution and found there were some substantial anomalies in the AMD captures. The AMD cards exhibited dropped frames, interleaved frames (jumping back and forth between buffers) and even stepped, non-horizontal vertical sync tearing. The result is a much lower observed frame rate than software like FRAPS would indicate and these problems will also be found when using the current top end dual-head 4K PC displays since they emulate Eyefinity and Surround for setup.
50536099
submission
Vigile writes:
Today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the company officially released the Atom Z3000 series of SoCs (Bay Trail) based on the Silvermont architecture. Unlike previous Atom designs, the Z3000 and Silvermont is a completely re-architected product from the ground up and is no longer based on legacy processors. Changes include a move to an out-of-order x86 architecture with drastically improved single threaded performance but the removal of Intel's HyperThreading technology. Dual-core modules with 1MB of shared cache can be paired up to create a quad-core SoC that also includes upgraded graphics design. Intel is no longer depending on PowerVR for a GPU and has integrated a 4 EU (execution unit) Intel HD Graphics design that is very similar to the one used in Ivy Bridge. As a result, as tested at PC Perspective in both Windows 8.1 and Android 4.2.2, the Bay Trail part is as much as 4x faster in single threaded tasks and 3.5x faster in gaming and graphics. Power consumption remains nearly the same as it did with Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) but with improved power gating and support for Connected Standby, Intel's new Atom looks and feels completely different than any before it.
49182905
submission
Vigile writes:
Over the past year AMD has been getting hammered over its CrossFire technology and the issues the multi-GPU scaling solution has with frame pacing — the ability to present frames evenly to the user and create a smooth gaming experience. As new tools have become available to evaluate the performance of graphics solutions (like capture cards and overlays), the battle between CrossFire and NVIDIA's SLI has really taken new life. After denying the problem existed for quite some time, AMD has put out the first beta driver that implements a software frame pacing solution to more evenly produce animations from CrossFire configurations. PC Perspective has done extensive testing with the Catalyst 13.8 beta and found that it has basically solved the single screen pacing problems. More trouble remains for AMD though as they still need to find a way to fix Eyefinity and 4K displays that are exempt from this driver's improvements.
49131147
submission
Vigile writes:
First shown at CES in January, NVIDIA SHIELD is a purpose built Android gaming device with a few interesting features that help it stand out from your normal phones or tablets. First, it is the only available device to be powered by the Tegra 4 SoC, NVIDIA's latest processor. Second, it merges a console-grade controller with a 5-in touch screen in an attempt to standardize Android gaming with reliable and solid input. Third, users with GeForce GTX graphics cards can stream PC games on their home network to the SHIELD to play games remotely. PC Perspective has published a review of SHIELD and found that not only is Tegra 4 incredibly powerful but that SHIELD actually makes Android gaming interesting for the first time.
48967835
submission
Vigile writes:
Samsung continues with strong releases into the SSD market with the new 840 EVO today. Based on the same TLC (triple level cell) flash that the original Samsung 840 drive used when it launched last year, Samsung has improved the write speeds of this new drive by implementing something called TurboWrite. By accessing a portion of that TLC memory as if it were SLC, it can be written to much faster that MLC or TLC allowing the drive to dump all writes to that area initially and then migrate the data to TLC when idle or when the cache is full. Initial write speeds of this write-back cache can be as high as 520 MB/s but after it's full (during sustained writes) it will drop to as low as 140 MB/s. Through testing at PC Perspective they found that average "flush times" of the cache will change based on the drive capacity and cache sizes which range from 3-12GB.
48802229
submission
Vigile writes:
While 4K displays have been popping up all over the place recently with noticeably lower prices, one thing that kind of limits them all is a 30 Hz refresh rate panel. Sony is selling 4K consumer HDTVs for $5000 and new-comer SEIKI has a 50-in model going for under $1000 but they all share that trait — HDMI 1.4 supporting 3840x2160 at 30 Hz. The new ASUS PQ321Q monitor is a 31.5-in 4K display built on the same platform as the Sharp PN-K321 and utilizes a DisplayPort 1.2 connection capable of MST (multi-stream transport). This allows the screen to include two display heads internally, showing up as two independent monitors to some PCs that can then be merged into a single panel via AMD Eyefinity or NVIDIA Surround. Thus, with dual 1920x2160 60 Hz signals, the PQ321Q can offer 3840x2160 at 60 Hz for a much better viewing experience. PC Perspective got one of the monitors in for testing and review and found that the while there were some hurdles during initial setup (especially with NVIDIA hardware), the advantage of a higher refresh rate made the 4K resolution that much better.
47844889
submission
Vigile writes:
With today's release of the GeForce GTX 760, NVIDIA has now built a total of six individual graphics cards based around the original GK104 GPU proving that you can get a lot of value out of a silicon investment if the market plays out correctly. Kepler has been wildly successful for the company by improving performance per watt quite dramatically over the GF100 Fermi designs and the new GTX 760 completes the life span of the design quite fittingly. With 1152 processing cores and a 256-bit memory bus (running at 6.0 GHz) all packed into the same old 3.54 billion transistor chip, the GTX 760 is running quite a bit faster than the competing Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and equally as fast as the Radeon HD 7950 with Boost. With a price tag of $250 it might finally bring the GK104 design down to price points that everyday gamers are willing to swallow as well.
47324345
submission
Vigile writes:
It looks like the rumors were true, AMD is going to be selling an FX-9590 processor this month that will hit frequencies as high as 5 GHz. Though originally thought to be an 8-module/16-core part, it turns out that the new CPU will have the same 4-module/8-core design that is found on the current lineup of FX-series processors including the FX-8350. But, with an increase of the maximum Turbo Core speed from 4.2 GHz to 5.0 GHz, the new parts will draw quite a bit more power. You can expect the the FX-9590 to need 220 watts or so to run at those speeds and a pretty hefty cooling solution as well. Performance should closely match the recently released Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell processor so AMD users that can handle the 2.5x increase in power consumption can finally claim performance parity.
47033865
submission
Vigile writes:
Earlier this morning Intel officially unveiled the quad-core variations of the new 4th Generation Core architecture, code named Haswell. Haswell is the first step in the ultimate goal of a "converged core: a single design that is flexible enough to be utilized in mobility devices like tablets while also scaling to the performance levels required for workstations and servers." The CPU core microarchitecture is very similar to Sandy Bridge but does add support for AVX2 ISA extensions and transactional memory. The biggest changes come in the processor graphics front where a new GT3 option doubles compute capabilities and the addition of embedded DRAM (128MB) will dramatically affect performance of mobile designs. PC Perspective has posted a performance review and analysis of the Core i7-4770K, the enthusiast-level unlocked processor that uses a new LGA1150 processor socket. Clock for clock, Haswell is about 10-15% faster than Sandy Bridge in CPU heavy tasks but that edge can creep higher than 30% in graphics and gaming workloads.
