Next up we have Dawn of War III and here the stock 2600K makes out quite poorly, dipping below 60fps. Interestingly, memory speed has no impact here either, not something I would have guessed to be honest. Evidently a big part of the issue here is clock speed as the 2600K saw a nice 28% boost in average frame rate and 26% for the 1% low once overclocked. It was still 23% slower than the overclocked 8700K but that’s the closest we’ve seen yet across our medium quality tests....

There are literally hundreds of options to choose from, though not all of them will deliver the desired results. Numerous times we’ve found third party coolers that perform no better than the standard box cooler, or worse, improve things at the cost of increased noise output, making them impractical upgrades. But first things first, you need to make sure that the cooler you are considering is compatible with your platform of choice and that it will fit inside your case....

The Z77 Extreme6 features four DIMM slots for up to 32GB of RAM. Using the chipset’s dual-channel memory architecture, it supports frequencies of 1066, 1333 and 1600MHz, while 2133, 2400 and 2800MHz are possible through overclocking. Whereas the Z77 chipset provides six SATA ports (two 6Gb/s), Asrock uses the ASMedia ASM1061 6Gb/s controller for an additional three ports, though this chip only supports two 6Gb/s ports, so really only two of the three ports can be used at the same time....

But users don’t just have to worry about hardware failures. There are a range of other unforeseeable problems that could arise when least expected such as theft or even fire. Depending on what your profession or hobby is you may only need to backup a small amount of data, or quite the opposite, and have huge storage requirements. The first group can easily get away with using flash memory drives these days....

Tastes and budgets vary as much as the hardware within. Simply put, one size does not fit all. The best you can realistically hope for is to narrow down your search based on a list of criteria ordered from most to least important and try to tick as many boxes as possible along the way (that’s what we do to put together our Best Cases feature). This article aims to help you construct that list and steer your search in the right direction....

We’ve seen a flurry of 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablets hit the market over the past several months, including the Toshiba Encore and the Lenovo Miix 2 8 (no, that isn’t a typo). Neither of these systems was terribly impressive in recent reviews but that doesn’t mean you should give up on Windows 8.1 slates just yet. Next up to the plate is the Acer Iconia W4, the follow-up to the company’s first Windows 8....

Everything from surfing the web to loading and using apps was a pleasant experience. Microsoft’s Modern UI really shines on a device like this although the desktop is still there if you need it. I found myself going to the desktop interface more often than not out of habit but given more time with the system, I’m sure I’d eventually sway towards the true mobile UI. Open a handful of apps and programs, however, and the experience suddenly isn’t so pleasant....

Headlining the family was the A10-5800K with four cores clocked at 3.80GHz, a 4MB L2 cache and the Radeon HD 7660D. This was one of four quad-core Trinity parts made available at launch, along with a pair of dual-core APU’s known as the A6-5400K and A4-5300. The A10-5800K debuted with an MSRP of just $130, pitting it at the time against the Core i3-3220. The end result was a typical Intel vs....

A similar story is told when the GTX 580 is removed. While running on integrated graphics, the A8-3850 uses considerably more power than the Sandy Bridge processors. However, this is justifiable when you consider the massive performance gains we saw when testing the IGP performance earlier.

The Phenom II X6 1075T fits in the middle of the two existent hexa-core CPUs offered by AMD. We barely found this processor to be faster than the cheaper 1055T model, while it closed in ever slightly against the Phenom II X6 1075T that is clocked 7% faster but costs around 25% more. Neither the Phenom II X6 1075T or 1055T are Black Edition (unlocked) processors, but if you were to increase the FSB of the 1055T by 15MHz you will have reached the operating frequency of the 1075T, and needless to say every 1055T processor is going to be capable of this....

ScienceMark is another test that appears to lack multi-core optimizations. That said, it did favor the new Phenom II X2 550 and Athlon II X2 250 processors. The Athlon II X2 250 was about 19% faster than the Core 2 Duo E7400 which is something. Super PI has always been one of AMD’s greatest weaknesses and as a result the Phenom II X2 550 was slower than Intel’s slowest processor, the Pentium E5400....

The GPU has been fabricated using the 40nm process, except it features 454 million less transistors than the Radeon HD 5870’s Cypress XT core. This allowed AMD to shrink the die from 334mm2 to 255mm2, making the Radeon HD 6870 more fuel-efficient. The core is clocked at an impressive 900MHz, 50MHz higher than the Radeon HD 5870, while the GDDR5 memory operates slightly slower at 1050MHz. Pairing that frequency with a 256-bit wide memory bus gives the Radeon HD 6870 134....

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition was 10% faster than the standard 7970 at 2560x1600 when testing with DiRT 3 as it averaged 68fps. Despite that gain it was still 6% slower than the GeForce GTX 670 and 11% slower than the GTX 680. DiRT Showdown is the world’s first game to use Global Illumination while it also supports Advanced Lighting via Forward+ Rendering, High Definition Ambient Occulation (HDAO) and Contact Hardening Shadows....

Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz) x4 2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20) Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79) OCZ ZX Series (1250w) Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gainward GeForce GTX 680 Phantom (2048MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 670 Phantom (2048MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB) AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB) HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6990 (4096MB) HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB) HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB) Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Nvidia Forceware 301....

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare provided little fight for these mid-range GPU’s, as the Radeon R9 380X spat out 119fps and yet it was still 2% slower than the R9 280X while beating the almost 4 year old Radeon HD 7970 by a single frame. Again the R9 380X lead the 380 by a 9% margin while losing to the R9 390 by a 25% deficit. The Civilization: Beyond Earth results are very interesting for a few reasons....

The RX 480 was just 7fps slower than the RX 480 when playing Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1080p. More importaintly it sustained over 60fps in our benchmark with an average of 63fps. At 1440p performance drops to just 43fps though we are running very high quality settings with SMAA enabled, so it shouldn’t take much to reach or even exceed 60fps with the RX 470 at this resolution....

Our custom overclock boosted the Far Cry Primal 1080p performance by 12%, allowing the RX 470 to match the performance of the RX 480 at 55fps. This time we saw a 14% boost in performance when testing with Star Wars Battlefront as the average frame rate was increased from 70fps to 80fps. Again this meant the RX 470 was able to match the stock performance of the RX 480....

When compared to the previous model, the 5700 XT, we’re looking at around 30% more performance on average, for a 20% increase in price, so not great value for a generational leap but still solid performance delivery. When you consider that the 5700 XT and 6700 XT feature the exact same core configuration using the exact TSMC 7nm manufacturing process, a 30% performance uplift is nothing short of amazing....

Although For Honor is mostly a GPU-bound game and all three CPUs are able to deliver around the same average frame rate, there is some variance when looking at the minimum. What’s really interesting here is that the R5 1600 actually beats not just the 7800X but also the 7700K, when stock and overclocked. This is a curious result indeed, especially in a title where the CPU isn’t that heavily taxed....

The short version is that the R5 5500 was quietly released back in April and AMD didn’t sample media in time for a day-one review, instead we got our sample a week after they hit shelves. At that point it was kind of old news, so we moved on to other things. Recently though, after comparing the Ryzen 5 3600 and 5600 we were asked by many for a comparison with the 5500, given it can be snapped up for $140....