Posts

Let’s kick this off with a look at AMD’s desktop announcements and if you’re a CPU enthusiast then the big one for you will be the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the first Zen CPU from AMD to use V-Cache 3D stacking technology. Ryzen 7 5800X3D: AMD’s new top gaming CPU V-Cache was previewed at Computex in 2021, and it works by stacking a cache die on top of the existing 7nm Zen 3 chiplet to significantly increase the amount of L3 cache....

The Discovery reference tablet I was provided with is powered by the A10 Micro-6700T (Mullins) SoC clocked as high as 2.2 GHz. It’s paired with 2 GB of DDR3L-1333 RAM, which is the maximum speed supported by the SoC, and it features a 1080p display, 64 GB of internal NAND and the latest version of Windows 8.1. The main competitor to Mullins is Intel’s Bay Trail-T, which I’ve used several times before in various Windows 8....

These gains had the Phenom II X6 1055T placed above the Core i7 930 for a slight margin. The higher clocked 1090T enjoyed a 10% performance advantage. The x264 HD Benchmark also makes use of all six cores but at around 75% CPU utilization, which didn’t allow the hexa-core processors to provide any significant gains over the quad-core parts. Still the Phenom II X6 1090T was slightly faster than the Core i7 930 processor in this test....

The Radeon R9 270X was 6% faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in DiRT 3 at 1920x1200 while it was 27% faster than the GTX 660 and 5% faster than the GTX 660 Ti. The Radeon R7 260X was just 4% faster than the Radeon HD 7790 but 23% faster than the GTX 650 Ti. Again we see that the Radeon R9 270X is 6% faster than the Radeon HD 7870, this time in Far Cry 3....

Nvidia followed up three months later with the equally impressive GTX 780 for a more plausible $650, where it remains today. Neither of those cards had much of an impact on AMD’s sales as the company’s most expensive offering at the time was a $450 Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (the 7990 arrived a few months later). Eagerly awaiting AMD’s response, we were disappointed that the first run of Rx 200 cards were rebadges....

As discussed in our review, the R7 5700G doesn’t make sense at the rather high $360 asking price, and we feel AMD needs to slash about $100 off that price to even consider it. Although it packs 8 cores and 16 threads, the chip packs only half the L3 cache of fully-fledged Zen 3 parts, such as the Ryzen 7 5800X, meaning the 5700G is much slower for CPU related tasks, including gaming with a discrete GPU....

The R9 5900HX has a similar layout to other Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 APUs this generation: we’re getting 8 CPU cores and 16 threads, 16MB of L3 cache, plus 8 Vega GPU compute units unlocked, all within a 45W default TDP. The 5900HX features upgraded Zen 3 CPU cores, which means a single-CCX design, double the L3 cache and higher IPC, among other improvements. Where the 5900HX differs compared to the 5800H is purely in clock speed: the base clock is increased by 100 MHz, indicating we should get slightly better sustained all-core frequencies at the same power level; while the boost clock has risen from 4....

Right so AMD has stressed, heavily stressed that the 2990WX isn’t a gaming CPU, well yeah no kidding. Games are struggling to utilize the 8-core 2700X, they aren’t going to benefit from 32-cores and they certainly aren’t going to like the design of the 2990WX. Even so the 2990WX isn’t terrible in Ashes of the Singularity and while slower than the 2700X, the performance is perfectly fine. The 2950X takes a small step from the 1950X, tacking on a few more frames and overall delivered a great gaming experience in this title....

The company stopped accepting new subscribers and took the service offline on September 7. Existing Primephonic members were given a free six month subscription to Apple Music to hold them over while developers prepped a dedicated classical music app to launch this year. Code recently found in the Apple Music beta app for Android suggests a launch could be imminent, and that the new app might be called Apple Classical....

While US inflation has soared, hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% in June, Apptopia explains the rise in prices could be more closely linked to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which was a major change to their privacy policy. Introduced in February 2021 and first enforced on iOS 14.5, ATT is an opt-in privacy framework that requires iOS apps to ask users for permission to track them and share their data....

The Washington Post reports that Apple staff at stores across the country are pushing to unionize, a move that stems from wages—between $17 and over $30 per hour—failing to increase alongside inflation. Groups from at least two stores are backed by major national unions and are preparing to file paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), writes the publication, citing sources familiar with the matter. Employees have been meeting in secret and communicating using encrypted messaging services to avoid detection by managers....

Memory performance is right where we would expect it to be for such a system using DDR4-2133 memory. A throughput of 26GB/s makes the Beebox-S about as fast as a desktop Pentium processor in terms of memory performance. The cache performance is also very good, and we found that the Beebox-S wasn’t very much slower than the MSI Cubi 2 Plus.

For Honor: Marching Fire Edition landed on Xbox/PC Game Pass today. It includes both the base game and the Marching Fire expansion that introduces the Wu Lin faction and several heroes. The multiplayer-focused medieval action fighting game remains quite popular and is definitely worth checking out. Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection arrives on Game Pass tomorrow (June 2). It combines Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razer’s Edge in a single collection....

Unfortunately I couldn’t discover the camera manufacturer Asus has used, but I do know it’s a 5-megapixel sensor on the rear with an f/2.4 lens. The front camera is a 2-megapixel sensor that captures 1600 x 1200 images, meaning it’s incapable of 1080p video recording. The quality from the 5-megapixel rear camera is quite bad, with poor color quality and significant artefacting destroying most shots. I can see the camera being potentially useful for photographing documents and other very basic subjects, but having to capture small fonts might be a struggle for the sensor....

High-end tablets tend to capture a lot of attention from the press thanks to their fancy features and top-tier hardware, but sometimes the entry-level products can be the most interesting. The device I’m looking at today is one such entry-level product, the Asus Transformer Book T100, which consists of a 10-inch tablet, Intel ‘Bay Trail’ internals, and a keyboard dock all for under $500. The Transformer line of products has typically been quite solid, so it’ll be interesting to see how an affordable Windows-based model fares....

Cooling the Cypress LE GPU is a fairly large aluminum heatsink, made up of 36 fins measuring 13.5cm long, 6.5cm wide and 2.5cm tall. Connected to the base of the heatsink are four copper heatpipes that help improve efficiency. Finally, cooling this heatsink is a 75x20mm blower fan that draws air in from within the case and pushes it out through the rear of the graphics card. For the most part this fan operates very quietly, helped by the impressively low 25 watt idle consumption of the Radeon HD 5830....

Although the Aegis does focus on cooling support, it only ships with one 120mm fan. This isn’t uncommon. We just reviewed three of the best sub-$70 cases and they all had a single 120mm exhaust fan, including the Silverstone KL05. The thing is, the Aegis isn’t a $70 case – it’s more like $100 to $110 by our estimate (it has yet to go on sale in the US). If that’s accurate, then the Aegis would be 40% pricier than the Silverstone KL05 as well as the new mATX KL06....

BMW and E Ink revealed the BMW iX Flow concept at CES this week, an SUV covered in E Ink’s Prism ePaper, which lets it change colors. E Ink, a company specializing in low-power displays and ePaper, developed Prism as a wallpaper of sorts that can be programmed to display different things. BMW says it could increase personalization options or make the car more noticeable in certain conditions (below). The iX Flow shown at CES can only change between black and white, but those two colors alone could benefit the car’s energy consumption and climate controls....

The Sao Paulo state court handed down a R$100 million ($19 million) decision against Apple on Thursday. It ruled, for the third time in Brazil, that Apple had violated consumer law by selling iPhones without chargers and ordered the Cupertino company to reverse its unpopular policy. Apple said that it was planning to appeal the verdict. “It is evident that, under the justification of a ‘green initiative,’ the defendant imposes on the consumer a required purchase of charger adapters that were previously supplied along with the product,” the court said....