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Best Graphics Cards For The Money: June 2015 (VGA Chart)

2015-06-26T04:03:00.001-07:00

What about this other card that’s not on the list? How do I know if it’s a good deal or not? This will happen. In fact, because inventory levels and prices change quickly, it’s guaranteed to happen. So how do you know if that card you’ve got your eye on is a good buy in its price range? Here is a resource to help you judge if a card is a good buy or not. The graphics card hierarchy chart groups graphics cards with similar overall performance levels into tiers. The top tier contains the highest-performing cards available, and performance decreases as you go down the tiers from there. You can use this hierarchy to compare the pricing between two cards, to see which one is a better deal, and also to determine if an upgrade is worthwhile. I don’t recommend upgrading your graphics card unless the replacement card is at least three tiers higher.

Otherwise, the upgrade is somewhat parallel, and you may not even notice any worthwhile difference in performance. At the request of readers, we've added mobile graphics and integrated chipsets to the hierarchy chart. We want to make it clear that there is very little performance data available for these graphics solutions. While the discrete video cards in the chart are placed in tiers based on a lot of information, many of the mobile and integrated devices in the chart are guesstimates based on their specifications.

At worst, we doubt they’re more than one tier away from their actual performance, but this is something to keep in mind when considering mobile graphics chipsets. - See more at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html#sthash.eumLyC7g.dpuf

Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart
GeForce	Radeon	Intel
Discrete: GTX Titan Z	Discrete: R9 295X2
Discrete: GTX 690, Titan X, 980 Ti	Discrete: HD 7990
Discrete: GTX 780 Ti, 980, Titan Black
Discrete: GTX 780, 970, Titan	Discrete: R9 290, 290X, 390X, 390
Discrete: GTX 590, 680, 770	Discrete: HD 6990, 7970 GHz Ed, R9 280X, 380
Go (mobile): 980M	Discrete: HD 6990, 7970 GHz Ed, R9 280X, 380
Discrete: GTX 580, GTX 670, GTX 960	Discrete: HD 5970, 7870 LE (XT), 7950, 280, 285
Go (mobile): 970M	Discrete: HD 5970, 7870 LE (XT), 7950, 280, 285
Discrete: GTX 660 Ti, GTX 760	Discrete: HD 7870, R9 270, R9 270X, R7 370
Go (mobile): 880M	Discrete: HD 7870, R9 270, R9 270X, R7 370
Discrete: GTX 295, 480, 570, 660	Discrete: HD 4870 X2, 6970, 7850, R7 265,
Go (mobile): 680M, 780M	Mobility: 7970M
Discrete: GTX 470, 560 Ti, 560 Ti 448 Core, 650 Ti Boost, 750 Ti	Discrete: HD 4850 X2, 5870, 6950, R7 260X
	Mobility: 7950M
Discrete: GTX 560, 650 Ti, 750	Discrete: HD 5850, 6870, 7790
Go (mobile): 580M, 675M	Mobility: 6990M
Discrete: 9800 GX2, 285, 460 256-bit, 465	Discrete: HD 6850, 7770, R7 260, R7 360
Discrete: 9800 GX2, 285, 460 256-bit, 465	Mobility: 6900M
Discrete: GTX 260, 275, 280, 460 192-bit, 460 SE, 550 Ti, 560 SE, GT 650, GT 740 GDDR5	Discrete: HD 4870, 5770, 4890, 5830, 6770, 6790, 7750 (GDDR5), R7 250 (GDDR5), R7 250E	Iris Pro Graphics 6200
Go (mobile): 570M, 670M	Mobility: HD 5870, 6800M	Iris Pro Graphics 6200
Discrete: 8800 Ultra, 9800 GTX, 9800 GTX+, GTS 250, GTS 450	Discrete: HD 3870 X2, 4850, 5750, 6750, 7750 (DDR3), R7 250 (DDR3)
Go (mobile): 560M, 660M	Mobility: HD 4850, 5850, 7870M
Discrete: 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS 512 MB, GT 545 (GDDR5), GT 730 64-bit GDDR5	Discrete: HD 4770
Go (mobile): GTX 280M, 285M, 555M (GDDR5)	Mobility: HD 4860, 7770M, 7850M
Discrete: 8800 GT 512 MB, 9800 GT, GT 545 (DDR3), GT 640 (DDR3), GT 740 DDR3	Discrete: HD 4830, HD 5670, HD 6670 (GDDR5), HD 7730 (GDDR5)
Go (mobile): 9800M GTX, GTX 260M (112), GTS 360M (GDDR5), 555M (DDR3)	Mobility: HD 5770, HD 5750, 6600M/6700M (GDDR5), 7750M
Discrete: 8800 GTS 640 MB, 9600 GT, GT 240 (GDDR5)	Discrete: HD 2900 XT, HD 3870, HD 5570 (GDDR5), HD 6570 (GDDR5)
Go (mobile): 9800M GTS, GTX 160M	Mobility: 6500M (GDDR5), 6600M/6700M (DDR3), 7730M
Discrete: 8800 GS, 9600 GSO, GT 240 (DDR3)	Discrete: HD 3850 512 MB, HD 4670, HD 5570 (DDR3), HD 6570 (DDR3), HD 6670 (DDR3), HD 7730 (DDR3), R7 240
Go (mobile): GTX 260M (96), GTS 150M, GTS 360M (DDR3)	Mobility: HD 3870, HD 5730, HD 5650, 6500M (DDR3)
Discrete: 8800 GT 256 MB, 8800 GTS 320 MB, GT 440 GDDR5, GT 630 GDDR5, GT 730 128-bit GDDR5	Discrete: HD 2900 PRO, HD 3850 256 MB, 5550 (GDDR5)
Go (mobile): 8800M	Mobility: HD 3850
Discrete: 7950 GX2, GT 440 DDR3, GT 630 DDR3, GT 730 128-bit DDR3	Discrete: X1950 XTX, HD 4650 (DDR3), 5550 (DDR3)
	Integrated: HD 7660D
Discrete: 7800 GTX 512, 7900 GTO, 7900 GTX, GT 430, GT 530	Discrete: X1900 XT, X1950 XT, X1900 XTX
Go (mobile): 550M	Discrete: X1900 XT, X1950 XT, X1900 XTX
Discrete: 7800 GTX, 7900 GT, 7950 G, GT 220 (DDR3)	Discrete: X1800 XT, X1900 AIW, X1900 GT, X1950 Pro, HD 2900 GT, HD 5550 (DDR2)
Go (mobile): 525M, 540M	Integrated: HD 7560D
Discrete: 7800 GT, 7900 GS, 8600 GTS, 9500 GT (GDDR3), GT 220 (DDR2)	Discrete: X1800 XL, X1950 GT, HD 4650 (DDR2), HD 6450, R5 230
Go (mobile): 7950 GTX	Mobility: X1800 XT, HD 4650, HD 5165, 6400M
	Integrated: HD 6620G, 6550D, 7540D
Discrete: 6800 Ultra, 7600 GT, 7800 GS, 8600 GS, 8600 GT (GDDR3), 9500 GT (DDR2)	Discrete: X800 XT (& PE), X850 XT (& PE), X1650 XT, X1800 GTO, HD 2600 XT, HD 3650 (DDR3), HD 3670	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics 4000
Go (mobile): 7800 GTX, 7900 GTX	Mobility: X1900, 3670
	Integrated: 6520G, 6530D, 7480D
Discrete: 6800 GT, 6800 GS (PCIe), 8600 GT (DDR2), GT 520	Discrete: X800 XL, X800 GTO2/GTO16, HD 2600 Pro, HD 3650 (DDR2),
Go (mobile): 7800, Go 7900 GS, 520M, 520MX	Mobility: X800 XT, HD 2600 XT, 3650
	Integrated: 6410D, 6480G
Discrete: 6800 GS (AGP)	Discrete: X800 GTO 256 MB, X800 PRO, X850 Pro, X1650 GT
Go (mobile): 6800 Ultra, 7600 GT, 8600M GT, 8700M GT, 410M	Mobility: HD 2600
	Integrated: 6370D, 6380G
Discrete: 6800, 7300 GT GDDR3, 7600 GS, 8600M GS	Discrete: X800, X800 GTO 128 MB, X1600 XT, X1650 Pro
Go (mobile): 6800, 7700	Mobility: X1800, HD 5145, HD 5470 (GDDR5)
Discrete: 6600 GT, 6800LE, 6800 XT, 7300 GT (DDR2), 8500 GT, 9400 GT	Discrete: 9800 XT, X700 PRO, X800 GT, X800 SE, X1300 XT, X1600 PRO, HD 2400 XT, HD 4350, HD 4550, HD 5450	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics 3000
Go (mobile): 7600 (128-bit)	Mobility: X800, 3470, HD 5470 (DDR3), HD 5450, HD 5430, 6300M
	Integrated: HD 6310, HD 6320
Discrete: FX 5900, FX 5900 Ultra, FX 5950 Ultra, 6600 (128-bit)	Discrete: 9700, 9700 Pro, 9800, 9800 Pro, X700, X1300 Pro, X1550, HD 2400 Pro
Go (mobile): 6800 (128-bit)	Mobility: X1450, X1600, X1700, 2400 XT, X2500, 3450
Integrated: 9300, 9400	Integrated: HD 3200, HD 3300, HD 4200, HD 4250, HD 4290, HD 6250, HD 6290
Discrete: FX 5800 Ultra, FX 5900 XT	Discrete: 9500 Pro, 9600 XT, 9800 Pro (128-bit), X600 XT, X1050 (128-bit)	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics (Core i5-6x1), 2000
Go (mobile): 6600, Go 7600 (64-bit)	Mobility: 9800, X700, X1350, X1400, X2300, HD 2400	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics (Core i5-6x1), 2000
Discrete: 4 Ti 4600, 4 Ti 4800, FX 5700 Ultra, 6200, 8300, 8400 G, G 210, G 310	Discrete: 9600 PRO, 9800 LE, X600 PRO, HD 2300	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics (Core i3 5x0, Core i5-6x0)
Go (mobile): 315M	Mobility: 9700 (128-bit), X600, X1300
	Integrated: Xpress 1250
Discrete: 4 Ti4200, 4 Ti4400, 4 Ti4800 SE, FX 5600 Ultra, FX 5700, 6600 (64-bit), 7300 GS, 8400M GS, 9300M G, 9300M GS	Discrete: 9500, 9550, 9600, X300, X1050 (64-bit)	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics (Pentium G)
	Mobility: 9600	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics (Pentium G)
Discrete: 3 Ti500, FX 5200 Ultra, FX 5600, FX 5700 LE, 6200 TC, 6600 LE, 7200 GS, 7300 LE	Discrete: 8500, 9100, 9000 PRO, 9600 LE, X300 SE, X1150	Integrated: GMA X4500
Go (mobile): 5700, 8200M, 9200M GS, 9100	Mobility 9700 (64-bit)
Integrated: 8200, 8300
Discrete: 3, 3 Ti200, FX 5200 (128-bit), FX 5500,	Discrete: 9000, 9200, 9250
Go (mobile): 5600, 6200, 6400, 7200, 7300, 7400 (64-bit)	Mobility: 9600 (64-bit), X300
Discrete: FX 5200 (64 bit)	Discrete: 9200 SE	Integrated: GMA X3000, X3100, X3500
Go (mobile): 7200, 7400 (32-bit)	Integrated: Xpress 200M, Xpress 1000, Xpress 1150
Integrated: 6100, 6150, 7025, 7050
Discrete: 2 GTS, 4 MX 440, 2 Ultra, 2 Ti, 2 Ti 200	Discrete: 7500	Integrated: GMA 3000, 3100
Discrete: 256, 2 MX 200, 4 MX 420, 2 MX 400	Discrete: SDR, LE, DDR, 7000, 7200	Integrated: GMA 500, 900, 950
Discrete: Nvidia TNT	Discrete: Rage 128	Discrete: Intel 740

Now all that’s left to do is compare performance to your budget, and you'll be able to confidently decide which board is right for you - we even put in the legwork to help find you the best prices! - See more at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html#sthash.eumLyC7g.dpuf

Source: Tom's Hardware

Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: June 2015 (CPUs Hierarchy Chart / Processors Hierarchy Chart)

2015-06-26T03:17:00.001-07:00

What about this other CPU that’s not on the list? How do I know if it’s a good deal or not?
This will happen. In fact, it’s guaranteed to happen because availability and prices change quickly. So how do you know if that CPU you have your eye on is a good buy in its price range?
Here is a resource to help you judge if a CPU is a reasonable value or not: the gaming CPU hierarchy chart, which groups CPUs with similar overall gaming performance levels into tiers. The top tier contains the highest-performing gaming CPUs available and gaming performance decreases as you go down the tiers from there.
This hierarchy was originally based on the average performance each CPU achieved in our test suite. We have since incorporated new game data into our criteria, but it should be known that any specific game title will likely perform differently depending on its unique programming. Some games, for example, will be severely graphics subsystem-limited, while others may react positively to more CPU cores, larger amounts of CPU cache, or even a specific architecture. We also did not have access to every CPU on the market, so some of the CPU performance estimates are based on the numbers similar architectures deliver. Indeed, this hierarchy chart is useful as a general guideline, but certainly not as a one-size-fits-all CPU comparison resource. For that, we recommend you check out our CPU Performance Charts.
- See more at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html#sthash.69bkXp0H.dpuf

You can use this hierarchy to compare the pricing between two processors, to see which one is a better deal, and also to determine if an upgrade is worthwhile. I don’t recommend upgrading your CPU unless the potential replacement is at least three tiers higher. Otherwise, the upgrade is somewhat parallel and you may not notice a worthwhile difference in game performance. - See more at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html#sthash.69bkXp0H.dpuf

Summary
There you have it folks: the best gaming CPUs for the money this month. Now all that’s left to do is compare their performance to your budget before you decide which one is right for you. We even put in the work to help find the best prices.
Also remember that the stores don’t follow this list. Things will change over the course of the month and you’ll probably have to adapt your buying strategy to deal with fluctuating prices. Good luck!
- See more at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html#sthash.69bkXp0H.dpuf

Source: Tom's Hardware

List CPUs: Core i7-2600, -2600K, -2700K, -3770, -3770K, -3820, -3930K, -3960X, -3970X, -4770, -4770K, -4790K, -5775C, -5820K, 5930K, -5960X, Core i7-965, -975 Extreme, -980X Extreme, -990X Extreme, Core i5-5675C, -4690K, 4670K, -4590, -4670, -4570, -4430, -3570K, -3570, -3550, -3470, -3450P, -3450, -3350P, -3330, 2550K, -2500K, -2500, -2450P, -2400, -2380P, -2320, -2310, -2300, Core i7-980, -970, -960, Core i7-870, -875K, Core i3-4370, -4170, -4160, -3250, -3245, -3240, -3225, -3220, -3210, -2100, -2105, -2120, -2125, -2130 FX-9590, 9370, 8370, 8350, 8320, 8150, 6350, 4350, Phenom II X6 1100T BE, 1090T BE, Phenom II X4 Black Edition 980, 975, Core i7-860, -920, -930, -940, -950, Core i5-3220T, -750, -760, -2405S, -2400S, Core 2 Extreme QX9775, QX9770, QX9650, Core 2 Quad Q9650, FX-8120, 8320e, 8370e, 6200, 6300, 4170, 4300, Phenom II X6 1075T, Phenom II X4 Black Edition 970, 965, 955 , A10-6800K, 6790K, 6700, 5800K, -5700, -7800, -7850K, A8-3850, -3870K, -5600K, 6600K, -7600, -7650K, Athlon X4 651K, 645, 641, 640, 740, 750K, 860K, Core 2 Extreme QX6850, QX6800, Core 2 Quad Q9550, Q9450, Q9400, Core i5-650, -655K, -660, -661, -670, -680, Core i3-2100T, -2120T, FX-6100, -4100, -4130, Phenom II X6 1055T, 1045T, Phenom II X4 945, 940, 920, Phenom II X3 Black Edition 720, 740, A8-5500, 6500, A6-3650, -3670K, -7400K, Athlon II X4 635, 630, Core 2 Extreme QX6700, Core 2 Quad Q6700, Q9300, Q8400, Q6600, Q8300, Core 2 Duo E8600, E8500, E8400, E7600, Core i3 -530, -540, -550, Pentium G3460, G3260, G3258, G3250, G3220, G3420, G3430, G2130, G2120, G2020, G2010, G870, G860, G850, G840, G645, G640, G630,Phenom II X4 910, 910e, 810, Athlon II X4 620, 631, Athlon II X3 460, Core 2 Extreme X6800, Core 2 Quad Q8200, Core 2 Duo E8300, E8200, E8190, E7500, E7400, E6850, E6750, Pentium G620, Celeron G1630, G1620, G1610, G555, G550, G540, G530, Phenom II X4 905e, 805, Phenom II X3 710, 705e, Phenom II X2 565 BE, 560 BE, 555 BE, 550 BE, 545, Phenom X4 9950, Athlon II X3 455, 450, 445, 440, 435, 425, Core 2 Duo E7200, E6550, E7300, E6540, E6700, Pentium Dual-Core E5700, E5800, E6300, E6500, E6600, E6700, Pentium G9650, Phenom X4 9850, 9750, 9650, 9600, Phenom X3 8850, 8750, Athlon II X2 265, 260, 255, 370K, A6-5500K, A4-6400K, 6300, 5400K, 5300, 4400, 4000, 3400, 3300, Athlon 64 X2 6400+, Core 2 Duo E4700, E4600, E6600, E4500, E6420, Pentium Dual-Core E5400, E5300, E5200, G620T, Phenom X4 9500, 9550, 9450e, 9350e, Phenom X3 8650, 8600, 8550, 8450e, 8450, 8400, 8250e, Athlon II X2 240, 245, 250, Athlon X2 7850, 7750, Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 5600+, Core 2 Duo E4400, E4300, E6400, E6320, Celeron E3300, Phenom X4 9150e, 9100e, Athlon X2 7550, 7450, 5050e, 4850e/b, Athlon 64 X2 5400+, 5200+, 5000+, 4800+, Core 2 Duo E5500, E6300, Pentium Dual-Core E2220, E2200, E2210, Celeron E3200, Athlon X2 6550, 6500, 4450e/b, Athlon X2 4600+, 4400+, 4200+, BE-2400, Pentium Dual-Core E2180, Celeron E1600, G440, Athlon 64 X2 4000+, 3800+, Athlon X2 4050e, BE-2300, Pentium Dual-Core E2160, E2140, Celeron E1500, E1400, E1200

The Asus X99 Rampage V Extreme ROG Review

2015-06-22T20:41:00.000-07:00

For a number of generations, each motherboard company has had its halo product that pushes boundaries and wallets. For ASUS, the Rampage IV Extreme, based on X79, was a resounding success for sales. We sourced the next chipset iteration, the X99 based Rampage V Extreme, for review to see if ASUS can follow the trend.

The Republic of Gamers Ethos
ASUS has been developing their Republic of Gamers brand for over eight years. What started off as a single motherboard is now a range of components including graphics cards, monitors, peripherals and even for storage. On the motherboard side of the equation for Intel platforms, there have been three stalwart models in the line: the micro-ATX Gene, the sound and gaming-focused Formula (ATX) and the gaming/overclocking Extreme (ATX or EATX). This has been added to in recent quarters with the Impact (mini-ITX), the Hero (cheap ATX) and the Ranger (cheap ATX also). Depending on the focus of the platform, some, none or all of these focal points are used. Traditionally the Extreme line was on all the major Intel chipsets, but this changed last year.

When Intel released the Haswell line of processors, the new LGA1150 socket was paired with the Z87 chipset and ASUS went all in with every ROG model. The purpose of Z87 was to facilitate the Haswell processor line but to also provide an upgrade to Broadwell when released. Z97 was launched when Broadwell was expected to hit the shelves, offering a similar sort of package to Z87 but with minor transitional updates. Similar circumstances happened on LGA1155 with Sandy Bridge (P67/Z68) to Ivy Bridge (Z77) in the two generations previous. What made Z97 and Intel's mainstream 9-series different for the ROG line is that only a few models were launched, and an Extreme version was absent.

At the time, although we couldn't publish it, our sources stated that it was for a singular reason: they wanted the X99 launch model to be the best, and insisted in skipping Z97 to spend more time developing the X99 model. Arguably the Z87 Extreme model existed to fill the gap anyway. This makes sense in the context that the X79 Rampage IV Extreme was the best-selling motherboard for that chipset - the need to get it right for X99 was paramount to continue.

The launch of X99 came and went in September 2014, with ASUS focusing on very few models for launch. We reviewed the X99 Deluxe, which was well received, and within the next month the X99 Pro, X99-A and the Rampage V Extreme were launched. Compared to X79, this is very few models. Depending on who you ask, the new edition of the Extreme has also not been getting as much excitement as the previous model, even with Haswell-E giving eight cores in the hands of the user.

One of the arguments for the lack of excitement might be that X79 and Sandy Bridge overclocking turned out to be a fairly big draw to gamers and enthusiasts, whereas Haswell-E’s overclocking prowess is slightly tempered. The appeal of a chipset and motherboard stack is ultimately limited by the processors the power it, so it might be the fact that Haswell-E is not as fun to overclock, or the entry price is too high, or any other number of factors. We've seen a reasonable response to our X99 coverage, which might suggest that users are still interested.

All this aside, with ASUS not even releasing an X99 based Rampage V Gene, and the launch X99 Deluxe was set at an MSRP of $400 meaning that they went all in at the high end of the most extreme platform. Personally one might feel this is slightly an oversight, especially with several other overclocking motherboards mopping up the cheaper aspect of the range. However with the mentality of the halo product, the new X99 Extreme sits exactly where it means to.

Overview
For anyone who has never invested into an ROG Extreme platform before, opening the box and playing with the contents is certainly a lot of fun. The appeal of an external OC panel, multiple bundled cables and an entry into the ROG ecosystem yields several measurable benefits. For users upgrading from a mid-range platform, such as the Z77 or Z87 models, will have the novel benefits of the extreme platform and quad channel DDR4 to have fun with. For X79 users, they might wonder why the X99 Extreme is slightly smaller, and that comes from some of the modifications that X79 Black Edition users will identify.

ASUS has been advertising (at least via their technical marketing) that the Rampage V Extreme is the culmination of many months of effort by a variety of specialists. This includes in-house experts Shamino, TL, elmor, and even former AnandTech motherboard senior editor Rajinder Gill. The results of this effort should result in a wide range of memory compatibility due to increased testing, memory overclocking due to the use of the OC socket, other board level optimizations, cleaner power delivery and tools which should allow the most extreme overclockers the control they request. In this sense, the Rampage V Extreme should build on its predecessor.

For pure functionality, the Extreme is the second Asus motherboard to be fitted with a three antenna Wi-Fi solution, a 3T3R 802.11ac. This remains a premium add-on over the now standard 2T2R and by virtue of moving from 2 to 3 should allow for a 50% bandwidth improvement when facilities allow, as well as increasing potential range in complex environments and beam forming. Alongside the Wi-Fi is SupremeFX, the upgraded Realtek ALC1150 audio solution with increased EMI shielding and PCB separation across the left hand side of the motherboard as well as a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot driven through the CPU.

As with most ASUS motherboards, all the fan headers are DC and PWM capable with four extra fan headers coming from the OC Panel, which saves space on the motherboard itself. Fans can be controlled via the BIOS using the interactive tool or through software.

The BIOS and software also get the ROG treatment, increasing the number of options for overclockers in the former and an array of gaming utilities for the operating system. This includes the newer features such as KeyBot, SoundStage and an update to Sonic Radar.

The Extreme is a formidable weapon in the arsenal, courting a $100 premium in launch price over the X99 Deluxe with that going to the OC Panel, the ROG BIOS/software packages and full support for four-way graphics in an x16/x8/x8/x8 arrangement.

Visual Inspection
As with any purchase of a high end motherboard for gaming, taking it out of the box is an experience. Only a system builder that has to put together 50 systems a week would get bored of it. Similar to other EATX motherboards, the size of the Extreme is sometimes something to be wary of, because holding it at one end causes the mass to influence torque, and you would rather not drop something that costs $500

Taking the motherboard out of the box instantly gave me a sense of bulk, as well as the imposing black and red to which the Extreme line has been using for years. The motherboard PCB does look a bit busy, but users of substantially older Extreme models will note that a number of onboard overclock buttons are removed as they have migrated onto the OC Panel, similar to what we saw with the X79-based Rampage IV Black Edition.

The heatsink arrangement puts the eight-phase power delivery connected to the extended rear-IO cover, with the main purpose of this cover to remove the look of the normal silver on the tops of the IO ports and keep the look intact. There is another heatsink below the socket and another for the chipset. The heatsink below the socket is in an awkward location as it kind of blocks the latch for the first PCIe slot when a large GPU is installed, making it difficult to remove GPUs without a screwdriver which could, with a slip of the hand, end up removing a component.

The DRAM slots are color coded in red and black with an onboard listing to show which slots should be populated first (in this case, the red ones). These DRAM slots use single-sided latches in order to facilitate the first PCIe card, so users should ensure that the memory is firmly installed when building. The motherboard has eight fan headers, all 4-pin, with two CPU headers in the top right of the board, a CHA3B header just underneath that, two CHA1 headers to the left of the 24-pin ATX power connector, a CHA3A header to the bottom-left of the DRAM slots and two CHA2 headers at the bottom. This makes an interesting element to the design, something I have been mentioning to motherboard manufacturers on and off for about a year – one way to add headers on board is to have two connected to the same control, meaning they act together and have the same voltage applied depending on the settings. Here the Extreme has three sets of chassis headers (CHA1, CHA2, CHA3) which act as groups when it comes to fan speed and response settings for hardware and software. It is an incredibly easy design choice to make, and I am surprised it has taken one of the high end ASUS models to use the paradigm to its fullest.

At the top right of the motherboard is the ‘OC Section’, giving power/reset buttons, a two-digit debug display, PCIe disabling switches, a slow mode switch, a MemOK button, a retry button, a safe boot button and voltage read points. There is also a small number of LEDs beneath the voltage read points to indicate which part of the POST process is currently in action.

On the X79 Extreme, all the overclocking options were onboard and a bundled display adapter for DVI-D was provided. However the X99 Extreme has gone the way of the X79 Black Edition which uses a separate bundled OC Panel with a display to be able to change and view frequencies and voltages on the fly. It also doubles up as a fan controller for system builds.

We covered the OC Panel is great detail in our review of the X79 Black Edition so we won’t say much more here, except that if we look under the panel:

Here we get four additional fan headers, a slow mode switch, a pause switch, two VGA headers for voltage sensing and manipulation, with voltage points and supplementary SATA power as well. By partitioning some of these elements off to the panel, it allows for less complexity on the board for design as well as when it comes to RMA. At this point it might be worth mentioning that I rarely see extreme overclockers using the OC Panel outside of the basic controls due to the increase in VGA capabilities of external power cards. That being said, the OC Panel is designed to work as a display in a case as well with fan options, information on CPU temperatures and so forth.

Moving below the OC section on the motherboard gives us a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot which accepts PCIe drives at 2260, 2280 and 22110 dimensions (22x60mm, 22x80mm, 22x110mm). One of the USB 3.0 headers is here in red, and then follows a total of twelve SATA ports. The X99 chipset supports two AHCI controllers – one with RAID for six SATA ports, and one without for four SATA ports. Here the top six have RAID, whereas the next two do not. The X99 Extreme also has two SATA Express ports – one from the chipset and another via an ASMedia controller. Given the state of the market on SATA Express, it makes me wonder if we will ever see any commercial drives for it.

Below the SATA ports is the Keybot reset button, two SATA Express clock connections and a Thunderbolt header required for Thunderbolt use. The main bottom side of the motherboard also includes a BIOS Switch button for flicking between the BIOS chips, a front panel header, the OC Panel header (called ROG_EXT) which also has a USB 2.0 header, another USB 2.0 header, a second USB 3.0 header, the two Winbond 128Mb BIOS chips, a Soundstage button, a thermistor temperature sensor header, a TPM header, a four-pin molex for extra PCIe power and the front panel audio. Perhaps somewhat unfortunately we get a molex PCIe power connecter here for VGA power in 3-4 card situations – personally I prefer an extra 6-pin PCIe or a SATA power connector, but at this point due to how the board is designed the molex is the easiest to accomplish here.

The audio subsystem uses SupremeFX, ASUS’ brand for an enhanced Realtek ALC1150 solution with several added features. On the top are standard improved features – PCB separation of the audio channels as well as analog/digital signals, an electromagnetic shield for the codec itself, filter caps for the front panel audio and automatic headphone detection for low and high impedance headsets. The feature that users might not be familiar with is SoundStage which performs a configurable hardware based transform on the audio signal though the software. It comes with for presets for typical gaming scenarios (Driving, FPS and so on), although users can configure their own.

The PCIe layout might be a little difficult to get around. With 40 PCIe lane CPUs, the processor supplies x16/x8/x16/- in tri-GPU mode through the red slots or x16/x8/x8/x8 in quad mode. When the M.2 x4 is connected, the bottom PCIe slot reduces down to x4 mode, which means that quad-SLI is only available when the M.2 is not in use. With the i7-5820K, this reduces down to x16/-/x8 for dual graphics and x8/x8/x8 for three-way, leaving the bottom red slot disabled.

The black slot in the middle is a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot, which also comes with its own oddities. It can work in x1, x2 or x4 mode, and shares bandwidth with the first PCIe 2.0 x1 slot, two USB 3.0 ports on the rear panel and the top ASMedia SATA Express connector. When the PCIe x4 slot is in x4 mode, the USB ports, the PCIe x1 and the SATA Express are all disabled. When the PCIe x4 slot is in x2 or x1 mode, the PCIe x1 and USB3 ports are enabled, and SATA Express is only enabled with the PCIe x4 slot is disabled. In other words:

Here lies on of the fundamental issues to supporting many technologies on the same product. At some point you run out of bandwidth or space for routing, so in the end some features become an either/or scenario. The product is marketed as having them all, but the reality is split. Luckily in this case SATA Express is of limited use, and losing two SATA ports out of 12 is not that much of a loss when there are other PCIe slots available

The rear panel is practically full, and it comes enclosed in the shroud fitted to the motherboard. The shroud is designed to complete the look of the motherboard by removing the silvery IO ports from sight. On the back itself we get Clear CMOS and ROG Connect buttons, two USB 2.0 ports (bottom port for ROG Connect), a PS/2 combination port, 10 USB 3.0 ports (from ASMedia hubs), an Intel I218-V network port, the 802.11ac 3T3R dual band WiFi module and the audio jacks with an more gold plating. Two things are worth noting here – the network port is part of ASUS’ GameFirst III strategy which includes LANGuard shielding and surge protection, but also that the BIOS Flashback utility has been moved from a rear button to the same as the ROG Connect and USB port.

Board Features

ASUS ROG Rampage V Extreme (X99)
Price	US
Size	E-ATX
CPU Interface	LGA2011-3
Chipset	Intel X99
Memory Slots	Eight DDR4 DIMM slots supporting up to 64 GB Up to Quad Channel, 1600-3300 MHz
Video Outputs	None
Network Connectivity	Intel I218-V Dual Band 3T3R 802.11ac
Onboard Audio	Realtek ALC1150 (via SupremeFX)
Expansion Slots	4 x PCIe 3.0 x16 - 40 PCIe CPU: x16, x16/x16, x16/x8/x8, x16/x8/x8/x8 - 28 PCIe CPU: x16, x16/x8, x8/x8/x8 1 x PCIe 2.0 x4 1 x PCIe 2.0 x1
Onboard Storage	6 x SATA 6 Gbps, RAID 0/1/5/10 4 x S_SATA 6 Gbps, no RAID 2 x SATA 6 Gbps via ASMedia 1 x SATA Express (PCH) 1 x SATA Express (ASMedia) 1 x PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 (2260/2280/22110)
USB 3.0	6 x USB 3.0 via PCH (2 headers, 2 rear panel ports) 10 x USB 3.0 via ASMedia Hubs (8 rear panel ports)
Onboard	12 x SATA 6 Gbps 2 x SATA Express 1 x M.2 x4 2 x USB 3.0 Headers 2 x USB 2.0 Headers 8 x Fan Headers TPM Header Thunderbolt Header MemOK! Button Slow Mode Switch 9 x Voltage Measurement Points 3 x Thernal Sensors Power/Reset Buttons BIOS Switch LN2 Mode Jumper ROG Extension Header Keybot Button SoundStage Button Safe Boot Button ReTry Button Front Panel Audio Header Front Panel Header
Power Connectors	1 x 24-pin ATX 1 x 8-pin CPU 1 x Molex (for PCIe)
Fan Headers	1 x CPU (4-pin) 1 x CPU_OPT (4-pin) 6 x CHA (4-pin)
IO Panel	1 x PS/2 Combination Port 1 x Intel I218-V Network Port 2 x USB 2.0 10 x USB 3.0 via ASMedia Clear CMOS Button ROG Connect Button WiFi Module (3T3R 802.11ac) Audio Jacks
Warranty Period	3 Years
Product Page	Link

ASUS Rampage V Extreme BIOS

There are a couple of interesting statistics that I want to see but I bet I’ll never be able to get a representative sample. These questions include, but are not limited to:

- How many users ever use the BIOS?

- How many users overclock? Using the BIOS, Software or other?

- What percentage of users ever update the BIOS?

- To those that do not use the BIOS, what stops you?

Actually, that last question might come with an answer, perhaps relating to fear, lack of experience or lack of interest. The same thing goes with the bundled software, incidentally enough. But the simple matter of this comes down to the fact that these motherboards are designed to plug and play, without any user needing to configure options. Bundle in a CPU, some DRAM, a graphics card, storage and an operating system and you’re pretty much set – at least that’s the theory.

Motherboard manufacturers update the BIOS as new hardware comes out to improve compatibility, fix bugs or introduce new features. Some of these are under-the-hood, others have a more active role, especially when compatibility is concerned. This often requires a user to go through the BIOS to update it, or using the manufacturer software. A decade ago, the issue was always that firmware updates could brick the motherboard if they fail in the middle, and I would envisage that an element of that still exists in the zeitgeist. Over the past decade, we now get dual BIOS chips on most reasonable motherboards in case this happens, but the process is still a little cumbersome on all but a few implementations. Is there a way to fix this?

The reason I bring this up is partly the reason I like to go through a manufacturer’s BIOS. (Personally I always refer to it as a BIOS, rather than a UEFI/EFI, as to avoid confusion.) As part of the firmware we essentially have the essence of the motherboard, and it holds a number of key enhancements or marketable features that the manufacturers like to promote. It can also be the source of many woes, which I have found to my detriment in the past, or wholly influence the performance of a product from BIOS to BIOS, making testing and reviewing a little difficult without a rigid procedure in place. Despite the fact that (I believe) few users ever update the BIOS, before we test we do typically update it to the latest public release. Unless there are serious problems, I refuse to use emailed BIOSes, merely to avoid the opportunity of a ‘media enhanced’ firmware. I want to use what our readers end up with after all.

As a motherboard manufacturer, ASUS like the others does like to promote its BIOS features. Every year, for good reason, several tech media outlets are introduced by the ASUS technical marketing and engineers through the latest updates, how to use them, and why they have implemented them. The goal here is for writers like myself to accurately portray the features at hand, rather than stumble across something at review time and write it off due to lack of knowledge. Of course, some features make sense and are actually pretty good, and others might need another design cycle, but most of the motherboard manufacturers are at least reactive to our thoughts here at AnandTech, including those of our readers. Fundamental changes to the BIOS take time, sometimes in the order of quarters, but other tweaks can occur in weeks or days, depending on what they are. I’m happy to say that ASUS and others have at least implemented a few of our thoughts, or at least the essence of them, over the years.

One of the benefits of the BIOS, being what it is means that some features are platform agnostic and easier to transfer over. As a result, for example on the ASUS boards, we see a consistent EZ Mode/Advanced Mode design, with features like QFan controls being pervasive across most of the range:

This front screen is the EZ Mode of ASUS’ BIOS, implemented to give somewhat of a ‘system-at-a-glance’ for users. We get the board name, BIOS version, CPU installed, CPU frequency, CPU temperature, CPU voltage, DRAM installed on a per module basis, SATA information, boot order, fan speeds, a boot menu and the fan profile for the CPU fan. I have remarked on the level of detail I like to see when entering the BIOS, and what ASUS provides upon entry is essentially what I need if I am examining a system for the first time without opening the case. From this screen users can also enable XMP on the left hand side, adjust the boot order by drag and drop, perform quick tuning or move into the graphical fan controls.

Selecting QFan Control shows the four different CPU fan groups, all controllable by PWM or DC, and here I have selected the manual fan option which allows the gradient adjustment.

One of my gripes about fan controls over the past two years is that the output of the fan can be given in two ways – either by RPM (or % of max RPM) or by voltage input. What annoys me is when motherboard manufacturers confuse the two, because voltage input is not proportional to RPM and most fans have a dead-zone or a non-linear curve. As a result, 50% power might be 30% RPM or 60% RPM, depending on how the fan is made. This can be confusing to a non-expert, and the only way to ensure you have it right is to appropriately label the axes on the graph but also to perform fan testing. ASUS does provide a fan testing tool, but this graph only shows ‘%’ as the axis and says ‘fan’s operating speed’ at the top, which makes no mention of RPM, % of RPM or applied fan voltage. /end gripe

For easier overclocking, ASUS did introduce the EZ Tuning Wizard last year to help people overclock their system. In OC mode, it asks the user to choose from a list of system uses (Office, Gaming) and then the type of CPU cooler being used (box cooler, tower cooler, water cooler, unknown). Using this information and what the BIOS already knows in the system, it will suggest and implement an appropriate overclock that should factor 95%+ of production processors and DRAM. In the lucky event when you might not have a good processor, the system is designed to automatically recover from a failed boot.

Here it suggested a 23% CPU increase, and no improvement on the DRAM. Users can either cancel, go back and adjust the options, or implement the overclock with a reboot by clicking Next.

For experienced users, the Advanced mode is the place to go to have better granularity for overclocking and chipset options. By virtue of the ROG line and the fact that this is the X99 Rampage V Extreme, there will be a few more overclocking options compared to regular channel motherboards.

At the top of the Advanced Mode is a more stereotypical front page for a motherboard, giving lists of numbers associated with firmware versions and basic system information

Extreme Tweaker holds the overclocking options, implemented somewhat as a long list with several sub-menu options. At the top we have the ‘target’ numbers showing the user what speed the system will be if the options are saved. Personally I think this info needs to move into the Hardware Monitor section on the right, so it stays persistent when the user scrolls through the options.

Also at the top is a sub-menu for overclocking presets, which in our BIOS offered the following:

Because the Rampage V Extreme is for gamers, overclockers and extreme overclockers (those who use liquid nitrogen to get frequency and performance records), there are options for all. In this case a gamer can implement the OC Profiles for either a 6-core (5820K) or 8-core (5930K, 5960X) CPUs, whereas extreme overclockers might want the DRAM OC profiles.

The ROG teams who work on the X99 Extreme are very proud of their DRAM knowledge, and so one of the focal points for this board is the memory section which derives from the board design to firmware capability. Here we have our regular list of sub-timings, along with an indication of the per-channel numbers. The Memory Presets menu gives an interesting list:

ASUS has gone through most of the high end memory kits and provided overclocking sub-timing packages for them. Some extreme overclockers find this useful, and so it is included. Also it is worth noting that at the top we have an IC Analyzer option, which states the following:

It gives a set of instructions so the user can find out if they have Micron, Hynix or Samsung integrated circuits on their DRAM. Unfortunately DRAM vendors like to hide/obfuscate the memory they are using due to the way the market is highly competitive, and different ICs can overclock at different rates, so having a way to determine which is which can be very helpful if you know what you are doing

At the bottom of the DRAM tuning sub-menu are a series of options relating to memory training when the machine is first turned on. X99 as a platform has stricter requirements for DRAM than previous platforms, and various parameters need to be optimized during post. These can technically be disabled here in order to improve POST times but it is not recommended as the user may end up with a less stable system as a result. Many of these optimizations are due to how silicon behaves as a function of temperature and age, and by doing them it enables the system to read and write knowing that there’s less chance of an error by aligning correctly.

A feature on most of ASUS’ models over last few years has been related to digital power, and the control therein. This allows the user, who is typically an overclocker, to adjust how the processor reacts to voltage drop as a result of load, or switching frequencies when load is applied. The power phases for the system can also be pushed beyond regular limitations, as well as thermal control. Normally for simple overclocking we adjust the load line calibration to ensure consistent voltage application when overclocked. This typically comes at the expense of power consumption and temperature, but improves stability.

Overclockers can also adjust the turbo mode parameters, in particular the CPU response to high power drain loads and whether to keep turbo mode active in such scenarios.

One feature ASUS likes to promote, particularly for overclockers that only require a few cores, is that ASUS can enable/disable each of the cores on the CPU individually. This allows the user to select the best 1/2/3/4 cores on the silicon die to get the best frequencies.

One feature I enjoy is being able to see what is installed where and at what speed. We have some of that with the DRAM in EZ mode, but ASUS does not implement something like Board Explorer which we see on ASRock and MSI products. Instead we get a feature like this shown above, where it shows the PCIe slots, which ones are installed and at what speed. Users can adjust the linked speed of each slot as well. Normally a user might adjust this due to compatibility with some PCIe cards, or if an internal failure caused the CPU to no longer support high PCIe speed.

In the previous page we noted that the PCIe configuration, particularly when multiple GPUs, the M.2 slot or the black PCIe 2.0 x4 are in use. The Onboard Devices Configuration menu is where the user can enable and disable various features in order to make sure they have the right stuff enabled and where the bandwidth goes. In the last page I mentioned that despite motherboards being advertised with X, Y and Z, sometimes not all of them can be enabled at once – this onboard devices menu is where the fate of your features is decided. It is worth noting that ASMedia’s battery charging support for the two rear IO USB 3.0 ports was disabled by default in our BIOS. Users will need to re-enable it to get access to this feature.

The Monitor menu gives a long list of all the temperature sensors, fan speeds and voltages detectable on the motherboard, including the data from the three optional thermal sensors if a user implements thermistors on the appropriate headers. We also get the basic implementation of the fan controls, similar to the old style we used to see:

Users can select which mode the fan group is in, a minimum speed, a preset profile or a manual adjustment based on a two point gradient.

The Boot tab gives options for fast booting modes, adjustment of the boot logo, what do to in the event of a booting error and boot override that allows for a one-time boot from a different storage device.

A lot of the ROG specific features can be found in the Tool menu. We’ve covered a lot of these before, but a brief rundown:

GPU Post: More detailed information about PCIe devices
EZ Flash 2: Update the BIOS
Secure Erase: Perform a complete wipe-to-zero for an SSD, restoring performance but losing data
OC Profile: Save sets overclocking settings for use in different scenarios
BIOS Flashback: Restore/update from the other BIOS
OC Panel H-Key: Implement a set of overclock options at push of a button
SPD Information: Detail about the DRAM installed

One last feature to mention is My Favorites:

Overclockers can indicate a series of options they like and get them copied into a custom menu, making it easier to scroll through the options that matter to their overclock. For example, these are the options we usually adjust for manual 24/7 overclocking. The only downside here is that there is not an option to boot straight into the My Favorites menu – instead the user needs to navigate each time.

ASUS Rampage V Extreme Software

At the beginning of the previous section, I asked some perhaps unanswerable questions relating to BIOS usage. I could easily flip them around and point them in the direction of the bundled software that comes with motherboards:

- How many users ever use the software?
- How many users overclock? Using the BIOS, Software or other?
- What percentage of users ever update the software?
- To those that do not use the software, what stops you?

Some of these numbers could be obtained by the manufacturer automatically if the user was connected to the internet (but they do not get this info, no need to worry). But the last question we could get some responses to. Off the top of my head, the three most common that I have heard come down to usability (or lack thereof), or that it’s useless, or they don’t want to use it. Similar to the smartphone space, there’s a general element of malaise that comes with buying hardware from a manufacturer but also then using software from the same company. In this case we’re not fighting complete UI rearrangement, but a couple of tools that might improve usage / update software as required. On one side it is a little baffling as it is such a minor thing, but on the other it only takes a bad experience to be put off.

Getting the right balance of usability, suitability of tools and design can be a tough one, especially when it used to be so bad. Now most of the manufacturers get users to access their tools through a singular interface, or at least a repetitive designed interface, rather than bundling 7 different tools at once. The problem here lies in the fact that there are two different tools: ones made by the manufacturer, and ones to which the manufacturer has a license to distribute. For example, with the right Realtek license, a motherboard manufacturer can reskin the audio software and even code in their own features. Similarly on the networking side, depending on what sort of redistribution license the manufacturer has with cFos, they can just bundle the cFos software, or enhance it with a manufacturer logo/skin, or add in their own algorithms and tools. Actually, most manufacturers bundle cFos because it is network controller agnostic, and the Realtek software is relatively bad. In this circumstance, Killer sits in the middle (but on the bad side of middle).

ASUS attacks the software front harder than most other manufacturers. This isn’t just as a result of iterative gains – over the past four years there has been a couple of complete redesigns and adjustments (moving from one coding platform to another, for example) in an attempt to realign itself with the customer base. Most of ASUS’ tools come under the AI Suite banner, though there are a few which have separate icons on the desktop.

ASUS Boot Setting is a tool to enable Fast Boot without going into the BIOS, but also allows users to go into the BIOS with a reboot and without having to press DEL/F2 in order to get there. I actually use the DirectBIOS button a fair amount when testing, particularly after a completed overclock test and when it’s time to adjust the settings.

Bundled on the CD is a version of CPU-Z, software commonly used by overclockers for frequency verification of the CPU and DRAM. This is an example of licensed software that ASUS has been able to reskin and add a logo for. The purpose of this was to make the screenshots proving overclockers’ scores and to promote the use of ROG hardware for those scores. That being said, the software is platform agnostic and works just as well in competitor brand G, M and ASR, some of whom also have their own variants of CPU-Z.

Keybot was launched last year with ROG motherboards, allowing users to assign macros to the various F keys on the keyboard. Here’s an interesting statistic for you: I have been running the program WhatPulse for 6+ years and it tracks my key presses and clicks on each of my systems separately. I am writing this on my UX301 which I purchased Q2 last year, and since then I have typed 1.12 million keys, and this is the rate of which I have pressed the F1 to F10 keys in that time:

F1: 5
F2: 2228
F3: 13
F4: 24
F5: 350
F6: 5
F7: 8
F8: 0
F9: 1
F10: 0

The evidence is in. I press F2 a lot because it’s the shortcut to rename a file or a cell in Excel, and F5 for webpage refreshing. F5 might seem low, but I have a touch screen which is perhaps a little easier to refresh with large buttons installed. (For those interested, the space bar came out top with 137k, and the backspace at 54k. I make a lot of mistakes.)

My point here about using F-keys for macros is this: I hardly ever use most of my F-keys. That makes them the perfect target for macros, and it somewhat alleviates the need for a keyboard with macros. Keybot stores its macros within a chip on the motherboard, allowing for persistent use in other operating systems or when the software isn’t running.

The macros can be assigned to keys, programs or quick-use features such as ‘Block WinKey’ which can be an important feature in gaming.

On the grand scheme of things, Keybot is a simple macro recorder that uses onboard hardware to keep persistent macros. Something like AutoHotKey is invariably a lot more powerful, but lacks that persistent implementation feature.

It is worth noting that the Smart Input method allows a string of characters to be input at once, something that might be used for passwords and such. ASUS has noted on this page that the recorded sequence stored on the Keybot chip is not encrypted, so if you subsequently sell the motherboard without resetting the Keybot profile, the new user might get a hold of it (if they figure out what it is). I also do not suggest realigning each macro to a funny phrase when you sell the motherboard either. I mean you can do it, and it would be quite funny if you’re selling to a friend, but I don’t suggest it.

MemTweakIt falls under the overclocking realm of the software package, allowing users to adjust most of the timings of their DRAM on the fly. None of these options have guidelines over how to adjust them – MemTweakIt is thus reliant on the user doing some research into what each option means and how to adjust it appropriately.

In previous generations, ASUS has used a skinned version of cFos as its network management software, but on the release of GameFirst III, I was told that it was a wholly new program built in-house. It would seem that ASUS found it more cost effective to start from the ground up in basic network management than continue to pay for cFos licenses. It was launched with the Z97 ROG series, and we also get it here. Due to the way it works, it requests a speed test to begin and then asks which workload is a priority:

This implements a predefined hierarchy for various common programs, but allows users to add their own.

With the recent launch of large memory kits, such as those from G.Skill and Corsair using 16GB modules for a peak total of 128GB in an X99 system, now would be the best time to bring up the concept of RAMDisks. For those new to the term, a RAMDisk is a section of DRAM that can be used like a storage device. It offers lightning fast access times, but the downside is that the contents are purged when the system is rebooted (and you are also limited by space). RAMDisks can help when it comes to temporary file generation for these reasons. There are a variety of RAMDisk software in the market, most of them are not free ($30+) or have limitations (e.g. 4GB max), but ASUS bundles some with ROG motherboards.

The software determines the maximum memory in the system (in this case 16GB), how much is currently in use, and how much is free. The user can then select a drive letter, how much memory to allocate, and then off you go. In the screenshot above, we created the Q: drive with 8GB of storage. There is a small danger that using a RAMDisk will deplete available memory for the system, and as a result ASUS has an option for dynamic memory allocation which will adjust the size of the RAMDisk if you are hitting limits.

It is worth noting that it takes some time for RAMDisks to be enabled. When launching the program a warning pops up, stating that if RAMDisks are loaded when the machine is turned on, it can delay startup time by 2 minutes for a 16GB RAMDisk, so keep this in mind.

ASUS also offers a tool to create symbolic links between directories in the drive and the RAMDisk, which is how temp file arrangement would happen. The software would dump the temp file into the regular spot, but the symbolic link causes it to be redirected automatically (without the program knowing) into the RAMDisk. As mentioned previously, contents are wiped when the system is restarted.

Sonic Radar II is the next iteration of the tool that ASUS has bundled that allows for an onscreen display of localized audio. It half sounds complicated, but what this means is that during a game, if someone is walking down a path to your right, the onscreen display would show that the noise you hear is coming from your right. For people involved in twitch type gaming (such as first person shooters) who do not have a directional audio setup, it might aid reaction times as long as the display is not a distraction. With SR2, the visual implementation can be adjusted in size/transparency, but also the response can be altered.

Sonic Radar can be optimized for different frequency ranges depending on the game, as shown above. It is worth noting that some of this requires numerical transformation of audio signals from the time domain to the frequency domain, and as a result might take some CPU cycles.

AI Suite

The main software package is AI Suite. This first section is part of ASUS’ 5 Way Optimization, giving five tools to help with power, performance and control. There are several presets up the top, or the user can manipulate each setting as required.

TPU is first, standing for ‘Turbo Processing Unit’, and is the heart of the overclocking options. A lot of what we see here is similar to the list we saw in the BIOS, perhaps focusing on slightly fewer options that are higher priority. The beauty here is that with software we should be able to represent these values in a more graphical and aesthetically pleasing way, which is somewhat achieved. It is worth noticing that it was more graphical on the Z87 variants of this software.

The fan options are also part of AI Suite, giving presets or the ability to adjust each fan group manually. The option in the bottom left here does some fan testing to allow each graph to tune for the characteristics of the fan.

Here we see a fan that has no response below 20%, and only hits the stride until 40%. ASUS lists the controllable range as 34%-100%, and we can see from the graph that the curve is non-linear.

With this information at hand, the manual fan options show the user that the red area is the ‘dead zone’ with little effect from the fan spinning if it spins at all. As noted in the BIOS, the graph axis here just says ‘%’, not indicating if it is fan power or a % of fan RPM, but based on the testing on the right hand side it is clear that we have the y-axis as fan power.

Another element to AI Suite is the digital power management, and much like the BIOS we have options here for power phase control, thermal control, switching frequencies and load-line calibration. These options all have detailed explanations on the right hand side but are also represented slightly graphically to make them easier to see.

A newer element to AI Suite is Turbo App which implements overclocks based on software priority. Much in the same way that GameFirst prioritizes network traffic, TurboApp finds the program currently running with the highest priority and implements an overclock or priority setting appropriately. The purpose for this is mainly older games that focus on single core speed rather than overall overclock.

For example here we can select the overclock for a program, but also determine the Audio effect, the network priority and the fan profile to implement, integrating many features at once. If anything, even without overclocking, it allows the user to run different network and fan profiles for gaming and non-gaming.

The EPU, or Energy Processing Unit, runs a series of sensors around the motherboard to monitor efficiency and allows the user to focus on several areas that might improve power usage such as disabling ports when not in use.

Also as part of the 5-Way Optimization ethos, AI Suite has an automatic overclock mode which uses the five programs above to hit various overclocks. We list our results on the next page in the overclock section.

AI Suite also comes with several more options by clicking the link in the top right of the software. We’ve been over these extensively in previous reviews, though a quick rundown on each:

AI Charger: Allows quick charging on BC1.1 compliant devices on certain USB ports.
USB 3.1 Boost: For suitable devices, implements a newer USB protocol to improve USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 speed.
EZ Update: Connect to the web to download updates. I’ve never had it work though.
System Information: Breakdown of the hardware specifications for motherboard, CPU and DRAM.
USB BIOS Flashback: Prepare a USB with a BIOS for updating, or save the current BIOS.
USB Charger: Allows for fast charging while in sleep/hibernate on certain ports only.
Push Notice: Setup a messaging system to another device in case of system errors.

ASUS Rampage V Extreme In The Box

For the products that attempt to encompass both gaming and overclocking in one big mental Venn diagram, the box contents should be aptly scrutinized. Any extra has to be suitable to both parties in order to optimize the value of the product, but also the extras have to introduce a community feeling should users want to take that route. Perhaps ASUS could sell a plain packaged Rampage V Extreme and it would sell just as well, but for buying the big bundle we get the following:

Driver CD
Manuals
Rear IO Panel
ROG OC Panel + ODD Bay Adapter
ROG Door Hanger
WiFi Antenna
Three Thermistors
Ten SATA Cables
Flexi-SLI Bridge
Flexi-CFX Bridge
Rigid 2-way SLI Bridge
Rigid 3-way SLI Bridge

Being a multi-GPU gaming motherboard, it would have been a little naughty to not include 3 or 4-way bridges, but they are included. I’m surprised by the ten SATA cables, but then again as a high end motherboard you might expect the most and more of it. ASUS is pushing the thermal control by bundling three thermistor cables, otherwise users would have to source them elsewhere. Notice that there is no longer any ROG Connect cable bundled.

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:

Thank you to AMD for providing us with the R9 290X 4GB GPUs.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with GTX 980 Strix GPUs and the R7 240 DDR3 GPU.
Thank you to ASRock and ASUS for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU.
Thank you to Crucial for providing us with MX200 SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill and Corsair for providing us with memory.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.

For our 2015 testing, I must give shout-outs to a couple of companies for providing us with test bed equipment.

First up is ASUS, who sourced us three of their GTX 980 Strix 4GB cards. The GTX 980 sits second in the NVIDIA graphics card stack below the Titan X, but each card is designed to push gaming to the maximum settings in single monitor scenarios. Specifically with the Strix, ASUS is targeting it more along their mainstream line, compared to some of the highly overclocked cards, but the feature I like is the fact that the fans do not spin until some serious graphics rendering is required. Sitting on the test bed it almost seems odd to be doing most of the desktop oriented benchmarks and have the fans for the graphics card not spinning. Two fans per card and large heatpipes help with heat distribution, and the GTX 980 Strix can be picked up at Amazon or Newegg for around $550 a piece.

Since I started reviewing as the Senior Editor for AnandTech back in 2011, some of the first samples I received were SSDs from OCZ for our testbeds. These have been rocksteady since then, but due to our new gaming regimen, 128GB for an OS drive and 128GB for a benchmark drive started becoming too little. After meeting with Crucial at CES this year, they volunteered four of their highest capacity 1TB MX200 SSDs which we partition into 250GB/750GB segments. This suits our 300GB gaming suite just great, as well as room for expansion in the future. The MX200 builds on the success of the MX100, with Kristian’s recent reviewhighlighting its features. The drives currently retail for around $110 for 250GB, $200 for 500GB and $427 for the 1TB model.

Test Setup

Test Setup
Processor	Intel Core i7-5960X ES 8 Cores, 16 Threads, 3.0 GHz (3.5 GHz Turbo)
Motherboards	ASUS Rampage V Extreme (X99)
Cooling	Cooler Master Nepton 140XL
Power Supply	OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU
Memory	Corsair DDR4-2133 C15 4x8 GB 1.2V or G.Skill Ripjaws 4 DDR4-2133 C15 4x8 GB 1.2V
Memory Settings	JEDEC @ 2133
Video Cards	MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) ASUS R7 240 2GB
Hard Drive	Crucial MX200 1TB
Optical Drive	LG GH22NS50
Case	Open Test Bed
Operating System	Windows 7 64-bit SP1

ASUS Rampage V Extreme Overclocking

Experience with ASUS Rampage V Extreme

The Extreme has always been about overclocking, and thus for the casual gamer ASUS provides both the Turbo Processing Unit (TPU) physically on the motherboard and CPU Level Up in software for an easier method to get to 4.0-4.4 GHz.

Options are expanded in software for enthusiasts, though for the meat of the pie you have to go into the BIOS. With LN2 mode enabled, sub-zero and competitive coolers should be satisfied with the level of options. Here's where we perform our manual overclocking tests. Extreme users can also equip the OC Panel which allows for voltage, multiplier and base frequency adjustments on the fly.

On the whole, our experience with the Extreme was reasonable in auto overclocking but manual settings somehow gave our mediocre CPU a not-so-impressive result. I double checked with both of our processors which are almost as bad as each other, but I wasn't able to gain anything secret through the system. We are using the Extreme in our DDR4 memory reviews (keep an eye out for those) and we've already seen DDR4-2133 at CL9 and some other modules at DDR4-3333, meaning it can stretch its legs in that regard.

Methodology

Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with PovRay and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.

For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+). Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.

Overclock Results

Since we have started reviewing X99 motherboards, I have had three i7-5960X CPUs. The first one, CPU1, was our better overclocking sample but has gone the way of the dodo and lives in some version of a silicon afterlife. I think it went where all the calculators go. The second CPU, CPU2, is a really bad overclocker so we use that for mildly overclocked DRAM testing. When CPU1 went belly up, we immediately sourced a third CPU. After testing CPU3 on a number of motherboards, it wasn’t much better than CPU2. But with the Rampage V Extreme, we tested CPU3 first:

Performance wasn’t anything spectacular, by virtue of the poor CPU, but my initial response was for at least 4.4 GHz. I also thought I had put in the wrong CPU to test, but I then put in CPU2 and got worse:

This isn’t a knock at the Rampage V Extreme, but my CPUs are pretty bad. In most boards CPU3 gets 4.3-4.4 GHz, so we can only point to the fact that our voltage was a little higher in the RVE than other boards, resulting in an overheat/BSOD during our high CPU stability test. Perhaps I should build a cold box, or move to Canada/Finland – it might be worth a few MHz here and there.

System Performance

Power Consumption

Power consumption was tested on the system while in a single MSI GTX 770 Lightning GPU configuration with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.

While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.

Power Consumption for X99 seems to hover around three points in our test – 200W, 220W and 240W. This puts the Rampage V Extreme in the middle, with similarly placed idle and long idle results.

Windows 7 POST Time

Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we look at the POST Boot Time using a stopwatch. This is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 7 starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.)

Typically the more hardware features we have, the longer the time to post. In this circumstance the Extreme does well, and the holy grail of 20 seconds for X99 is not too far away. One of the big issues with X99, as we mentioned earlier in the review, is that DRAM training can take up to 50% of this time but is a necessary part in order to ensure stability.

Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5

Rightmark:AA indicates how well the sound system is built and isolated from electrical interference (either internally or externally). For this test we connect the Line Out to the Line In using a short six inch 3.5mm to 3.5mm high-quality jack, turn the OS speaker volume to 100%, and run the Rightmark default test suite at 192 kHz, 24-bit. The OS is tuned to 192 kHz/24-bit input and output, and the Line-In volume is adjusted until we have the best RMAA value in the mini-pretest. We look specifically at the Dynamic Range of the audio codec used on board, as well as the Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise.

Similar to the X99 Deluxe, the Extreme performs very well here.

USB Backup

For this benchmark, we transfer a set size of files from the SSD to the USB drive using DiskBench, which monitors the time taken to transfer. The files transferred are a 1.52 GB set of 2867 files across 320 folders – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second HD videos. In an update to pre-Z87 testing, we also run MaxCPU to load up one of the threads during the test which improves general performance up to 15% by causing all the internal pathways to run at full speed.

All of our USB 3.0 results have hovered between 11.4 and 12.0 with a couple of outliers, so it is good to see an 11.4 second result.

DPC Latency

Deferred Procedure Call latency is a way in which Windows handles interrupt servicing. In order to wait for a processor to acknowledge the request, the system will queue all interrupt requests by priority. Critical interrupts will be handled as soon as possible, whereas lesser priority requests such as audio will be further down the line. If the audio device requires data, it will have to wait until the request is processed before the buffer is filled.

If the device drivers of higher priority components in a system are poorly implemented, this can cause delays in request scheduling and process time. This can lead to an empty audio buffer and characteristic audible pauses, pops and clicks. The DPC latency checker measures how much time is taken processing DPCs from driver invocation. The lower the value will result in better audio transfer at smaller buffer sizes. Results are measured in microseconds.

Under 100 microseconds. Tick.

CPU Performance

Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.

For reference, the ASUS X99 Rampage V Extreme does implement MultiCore Turbo.

Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link

Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. The principle today is still the same, primarily as an output for H.264 + AAC/MP3 audio within an MKV container. In our test we use the same videos as in the Xilisoft test, and results are given in frames per second.

Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link

The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.

Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link

3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.

Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link

Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.

Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link

Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.

Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link

As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.

Gaming Performance 2014 on GTX 770

F1 2013

First up is F1 2013 by Codemasters. I am a big Formula 1 fan in my spare time, and nothing makes me happier than carving up the field in a Caterham, waving to the Red Bulls as I drive by (because I play on easy and take shortcuts). F1 2013 uses the EGO Engine, and like other Codemasters games ends up being very playable on old hardware quite easily. In order to beef up the benchmark a bit, we devised the following scenario for the benchmark mode: one lap of Spa-Francorchamps in the heavy wet, the benchmark follows Jenson Button in the McLaren who starts on the grid in 22nd place, with the field made up of 11 Williams cars, 5 Marussia and 5 Caterham in that order. This puts emphasis on the CPU to handle the AI in the wet, and allows for a good amount of overtaking during the automated benchmark. We test at 1920x1080 on Ultra graphical settings.

Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite was Zero Punctuation’s Game of the Year for 2013, uses the Unreal Engine 3, and is designed to scale with both cores and graphical prowess. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.

Tomb Raider

The next benchmark in our test is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider is an AMD optimized game, lauded for its use of TressFX creating dynamic hair to increase the immersion in game. Tomb Raider uses a modified version of the Crystal Engine, and enjoys raw horsepower. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.

Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs is a benchmarking wet dream – a highly complex benchmark that can bring the toughest setup and high resolutions down into single figures. Having an extreme SSAO setting can do that, but at the right settings Sleeping Dogs is highly playable and enjoyable. We run the basic benchmark program laid out in the Adrenaline benchmark tool, and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.

Gaming Performance 2015

As we have not tested our mid-2015 suite on many products yet, we have relatively few results and these are included here for completeness. I've included a few CPU based results as well, to see perspective.

Alien: Isolation

If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled.

For low end graphics, we test at 720p with Ultra settings, whereas for mid and high range graphics we bump this up to 1080p, taking the average frame rate as our marker with a scripted version of the built-in benchmark.

Total War: Attila

The Total War franchise moves on to Attila, another The Creative Assembly development, and is a stand-alone strategy title set in 395AD where the main story line lets the gamer take control of the leader of the Huns in order to conquer parts of the world. Graphically the game can render hundreds/thousands of units on screen at once, all with their individual actions and can put some of the big cards to task.

For low end graphics, we test at 720p with performance settings, recording the average frame rate. With mid and high range graphics, we test at 1080p with the quality setting. In both circumstances, unlimited video memory is enabled and the in-game scripted benchmark is used.

GRID: Autosport

No graphics tests are complete without some input from Codemasters and the EGO engine, which means for this round of testing we point towards GRID: Autosport, the next iteration in the GRID and racing genre. As with our previous racing testing, each update to the engine aims to add in effects, reflections, detail and realism, with Codemasters making ‘authenticity’ a main focal point for this version.

GRID’s benchmark mode is very flexible, and as a result we created a test race using a shortened version of the Red Bull Ring with twelve cars doing two laps. The car is focus starts last and is quite fast, but usually finishes second or third. For low end graphics we test at 1080p medium settings, whereas mid and high end graphics get the full 1080p maximum. Both the average and minimum frame rates are recorded.

Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor

The final title in our testing is another battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Shadows of Mordor. Produced by Monolith using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity to a large extent, despite having to be cut down from the original plans. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.

For testing purposes, SoM gives a dynamic screen resolution setting, allowing us to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. As a result, we get several tests using the in-game benchmark. For low end graphics we examine at 720p with low settings, whereas mid and high end graphics get 1080p Ultra. The top graphics test is also redone at 3840x2160, also with Ultra settings, and we also test two cards at 4K where possible.

Conclusion

Having used the last two Extreme versions of the top of the ROG line, the Rampage IV Extreme and the Rampage IV Black Edition, it subsequently occurs perhaps the Rampage V Extreme comes across as a little underwhelming. If you've been there, seen that, it's hard to get as pumped up as the first time. The Extreme is a very good motherboard, and comes across as well engineered and with some fun stuff to play with that new users will enjoy. If you were happy with the X79 Extreme and need a comparable hardware option for X99 then the Extreme is ready to take that place. My fear is that it the Rampage V Extreme isn't as breathtaking as the X79 was.

The measure of breathtaking-ness isn't the defining feature of a motherboard however. In terms of kit we get ASUS' enhanced OC socket at the front and center, which reportedly gives better overclocking margins as well as high end memory support which we covered in our initial X99 coverage as it also featured on the X99 Deluxe. Another big feature is the use of three-stream dual band 802.11ac Wi-Fi which will aid throughput and beam forming for routers that are capable. ASUS is using tri-stream as a defining feature on the top end of its product stack, which means it is also on the Deluxe as well. To complete the trifecta, the OC Panel allows gamers to get hardware information and implement fan controls at the touch of a button while extreme overclockers can adjust voltages and frequencies on the fly.

Other features in play include eight fan headers with DC and PWM support, with four extra headers on the OC Panel, SupremeFX audio via an upgraded ALC1150 solution (PCB separation, extended EMI shield, upgraded filter caps, headphone impedance detection) as well as SoundStage and Keybot. Storage comes from the 10 SATA ports provided by the chipset as well as two more from an ASMedia controller and two SATA Express ports therein. An M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slot is also here for 2260, 2280 and 22110 drives, but shares bandwidth with the bottom PCIe 3.0 port in red. This has implications when multiple graphics cards are in play and SLI limitations, but the subset of M.2 users and 4-way SLI users should actually be fairly small. A total of 14 USB 3.0 ports populate the board, two from headers and ten on the rear panel from ASMedia controllers/hubs.

The BIOS and Software packages from ASUS still continue to be on the better side of interactive and informative, with the ROG packages aiming for something a little bit more than the standard. Due to the overclocking nature of the Extreme, there is the potential to get bogged down in all the overclocking options for new users. To this end there are several automatic overclocking options, both in the BIOS and software, as well as assistance through the ROG forums. Our overclocking performance showed that a mediocre CPU is still a mediocre CPU, whichever way you slice it, but good luck to those who scored nice silicon. We’ve tested the X99 Extreme up to DDR4-3333 on the latest BIOS as of testing, although our contacts at ASUS have stated that they are working on the new higher-end kits (3400 and up) to add to the QVL.

Whatever the X-Factor (or Y-Factor, or Z-Factor) is, I’m not getting the same feeling as I did from the X79 Extreme. In the words of James May of ex-Top Gear fame, there’s no fizzing root here. Part of that may be the saturation of high-end boards in the market, always going for halo, or the lack of a 4.7+ GHz overclocking CPU architecture when testing as was the case with Sandy Bridge-E and X79, but I’m not sure. It will be interesting to see the sales numbers this time around, and whether ASUS can hold that high end lead. Overall, the Rampage V Extreme continues the trend of the ROG Extreme halo series and builds on the nicely designed X99 Deluxe with an ROG garnish. For users looking for that direct, high-end upgrade from X58 or X79, it will have to be in the list for consideration.

It is also worth noting that since we received this sample, ASUS has released a USB 3.1 edition with a bundled USB 3.1 card in preparation for when the appropriate devices hit the market.

Source: Anandtech com

AMD Launches Retail Radeon 300 Series: A Prelude To Fury

2015-06-21T23:15:00.002-07:00

Throughout the last couple of months AMD has been in the process of carefully and deliberately rolling out their latest generation of video cards. In a multi-staged process we have seen AMD engage in a what is best described as a drawn-out teaser and an early technical briefing, announcing their intention to roll out a new high-end video card this quarter, further teasing the public with pictures of the card, and then in the middle of all of that giving the technical press an in-depth briefing on AMD’s key next-generation memory technology, High Bandwidth Memory. While AMD did their best to make sure the details of the cards were kept under wraps – with varying results – AMD definitely wanted to make sure the world would know that their card was coming.

Catching up to the present, earlier this week AMD held their 2015 GPU product showcase, dubbed “The New Era of PC Gaming.” As the latest stage in AMD’s master plan, AMD held a public event in Los Angeles similar to their 2014 GPU product showcase in Hawaii, where the company announced their product lineup ahead of the full launch of the products in question. In the presentation we learned some (but not all) of the details surrounding AMD’s Radeon 300 series, including the numbered products from 360 to 390, and of course the company’s new high-end flagship video card, the Radeon R9 Fury X.

All told the showcase itself was something of a teaser itself – we got prices, but not complete specifications – but we also received confirmation of AMD’s rollout plans. The next stage, coinciding with today’s article, is the formal launch of the numbered members of the Radeon 300 series, which are product refreshes based on existing AMD GPUs, similar to what we saw with the 200 series in 2013. Meanwhile today is also the greater unveiling (but not the launch) of the Fury series, with AMD allowing us to share more details about the new card and its specifications. Following today’s announcements and launches, the Radeon R9 Fury X will be launching in just under a week from now, on June 24th, and then after that the R9 Fury (vanilla) will be launching on July 14th.

Overall AMD is launching an almost top-to-bottom refresh of its product lineup overnight. Between now and July 14th the company and its partners will introduce cards from $109 to $649, and while there are a few gaps that AMD is almost certainly purposely leaving in place to give them something to announce later this year, overall we’re seeing more or less AMD’s entire hand for 2015 and early 2016 in one go.

As for the subjects at hand today, there are really two stories to talk about. The first is of course the Radeon R9 Fury series, the products that will house AMD’s newest flagship GPU, Fiji. While I won’t butter up Fiji from an architectural standpoint at this time, what Fiji does bring to the table are two very big changes for AMD. The first of these is of course high bandwidth memory, which not only gives AMD more VRAM bandwidth than ever before, but it outright changes how GPUs video cards are constructed. The second big change is that Fiji is just very big. At 596mm2 AMD went right to the reticle limit, putting AMD squarely into the big GPU race.

But before Fury comes the rest of the 300 series. We'll take a look at Fury in due time - while we've been briefed on the subject and have been authorized to discuss it, we want to hold back for when we have the hardware in hand - so our focus for today will be on what's launching today, and that's the Radeon 300 series.

Being released today are five new cards from AMD’s partners, which will form the backbone of the Radeon 300 series from $109 to $429. To our regular readers these parts will be familiar – and to some, perhaps more familiar than they’d like – while for AMD the 300 series represents their 3rd generation of retail 28nm products.

Radeon R7 360, R7 370, & R9 380

Launching today is the bulk of the Radeon 300 series, the so-called “numbered” parts like 390, which are categorically distinct from the Fury products. As we mentioned in the introduction, from a volume standpoint these cards are the backbone of AMD’s lineup and will be where the majority of their sales take place. The attention may be on Fiji as AMD’s newest and fastest part, but it’s here where AMD makes the most in sales.

To cut right to the chase then, for better or worse all of the numbered parts – 360, 370, 380, and the 390 series – are refresh products based on existing AMD GPUs. The only new GPU AMD is launching for desktop video cards is Fiji for the Fury parts, which leads us to the current situation.

Since the launch of the original GCN 1.0 cards in 2012, AMD has gone about refreshing their lineup in an unusual piecemeal fashion. All-told AMD has launched three new desktop GPUs in the last two years – Bonaire, Hawaii, and Tonga – and next week Fiji will make number 4. So AMD hasn’t stayed idle since 2012, but because they’re releasing 1-2 GPUs a year each year, they none the less end up releasing refresh products such as is the case with the 300 series.

AMD Radeon Product Evolution
Predecessor	GPU	Successor
Radeon R9 290X	Hawaii	Radeon R9 390X
Radeon R9 285	Tonga	Radeon R9 380
Radeon R9 265 Radeon HD 7850	Pitcairn	Radeon R9 370
Radeon R9 260	Bonaire	Radeon R9 360

Along these lines, because AMD is not releasing new GPUs in this range, the company is also forgoing releasing reference cards. Reference cards were built for testing/promotional purposes, but all of the cards being launched today will be fully-custom cards tailored to the 300 series specifications, a number of which will be similar to existing 200 series cards. This means AMD’s partners are offering a significant variety of cards right off the bat, a pure virtual launch, as it is sometimes called.

However because AMD isn’t producing any retail reference cards they have also opted to not pre-sample the press ahead of time for reviews. And while we’ll be looking at partner cards over the coming weeks, for today’s launch we do not have any cards or benchmarks in hand, and for the immediate future our focus is going to be on Fury.

So with that out of the way, let’s get started on AMD’s new Radeon 300 series lineup, starting from the bottom and working our way up.

At the bottom of the 300 series stack is the R7 360. This is a cut-down Bonaire based card featuring 12 of Bonaire’s 14 CUs active, for a total of 768 SPs. This part is essentially the replacement for the R7 260, which was similarly a cut-down Bonaire based part.

Like the other refresh cards in the 300 series, the R7 360 pushes the envelope just a bit harder to offer an incremental improvement in performance over its predecessor. AMD has turned up the GPU and memory clockspeeds slightly, from 1000MHz/6Gbps on R7 260 to 1050MHz/6.5Gbps on R7 360. Both the GPU and memory clockspeeds essentially close in on the gap between this card and AMD’s top tier Bonaire card, R7 260X, so everything here is within what we’ve seen the best of Bonaire designs do before.

At a typical board power (TBP) of 100W, R7 360 is spec’d to draw just a bit more power than its predecessor, in line with its clockspeed increases. Meanwhile AMD is telling us that we should see cards with 2GB of VRAM, and from the product lists I’ve seen in advance I’m expecting that this will be the default, at-MSRP configuration for this product. And with an MSRP of $109, it will be a drop-in replacement for the R7 260 from an MSRP standpoint.

Finally, as AMD’s entry-level video card, expect to see AMD targeting this at budget buyers and/or MOBA/F2P gamers. Both AMD and NVIDIA are well aware of how much money DOTA2, League of Legends, and other games within that space have been able to pull in, and they want a piece of that pie themselves. All of these games are designed to be able to run decently on iGPUs, so the company’s marketing focus is on being able to play these games at higher framerates with better image quality.

Up next is the Radeon R7 370. Based on AMD’s venerable Pitcairn GPU, this card is essentially a rework of the R7 265, AMD’s sole cut-down 16 CU (1024 SP) Pitcairn card in the 200 series.

Compared to the R7 265, the R7 370 sees a 5% GPU clockspeed bump, up from the R7 265’s 925MHz boost clock to an “engine clock” (and what we’re assuming is a boost clock) for the R7 370 of 975MHz. Meanwhile memory speeds remain unchanged at 5.6Gbps, which after AMD’s Pitcairn board rework for the 200 series, is about as much as Pitcairn’s memory controllers are up to the task of driving.

Perhaps the most interesting change here is that AMD’s official TBP is spec’d for 110W; this is sharply lower than the official 150W TBP for the R7 265. Truth be told I question whether this number is grounded in reality – even with some hearty BIOS-level optimizations, that’s a 26% reduction – but we’ll have to see what the retail cards are like once we can get our hands on them.

The big issue for R7 370 right now is that Pitcairn is venerable, but it’s also old. It’s the one GCN 1.0 GPU in the 300 series, and that means it lacks all of the feature updates and optimizations that have come since then. Consequently compared to newer products it doesn’t feature fine-grained clockspeed domains, support for Freesync or True Audio, support for decoding any video over 1080p, nor does it possess performance optimizations like delta color compression.

Pitcairn continues to be a workhorse for AMD in large part because it does its job so well, but the differences between it and the newer GCN GPUs become more readily apparent with each generation. Along with lacking Freesync support, it’s also the only GPU in the 300 series lineup not to support DirectX 12 feature level 12_0 (instead it’s an 11_1 part), so while none of these feature deficits are deal-breakers, it does none the less highlight the fact that like the workhorses that have come before it (e.g. G92), Pitcairn is on its last generation.

Anyhow, AMD’s specifications call for the R7 370 to be offered with both 2GB and 4GB configurations. Based on the early pricing we’ve seen, it looks like the 2GB card will be the common configuration, with 4GB being an option, though less likely. Expect to see 2GB cards hit the market at $149, the same price as the R7 265 before it, with 4GB pricing around $169.

Going up the ladder once more, we have the R9 380. This card is based on AMD’s Tonga GPU, their first GCN 1.2 GPU, and is the descendant of the R9 285, which was launched back in September.

Like the other cards in today’s launch, the R9 380 has seen a spec bump compared to its predecessor. The boost clock is up by about 6% from 918MHz to 970MHz, and the memory clock is unchanged, holding at 5.5Gbps. No other changes have been made, and the other specifications such as the number of CUs (28), the number of ROPs.(32), and the number of memory controllers (4) remains identical to R9 285.

Update 06/18: We have since corrected the memory clocks for the R9 380. AMD's marketing material lists two different values; 5.5Gbps and 5.7Gbps. The original guide we based our information on listed just 5.7, so that is the original value we used. As we always list the minimum specifications for a product, we have corrected this to 5.5Gbps. Our apologies for the confusion.

Unfortunately this also means that we’ll be waiting for another day to see what a fully-enabled Tonga would be like. AMD has to date not shipped a fully enabled chip; it has since become clear that Tonga does in fact have 6 memory controllers (for a 384-bit bus) as opposed to the 4 we see active here, and on the desktop in particular we’ve never seen a part with all 32 CUs (2048 SPs) enabled. The closest thing to a full Tonga remains the R9 M295X in the Apple iMac. Despite being the oldest of the GCN 1.2 chips, Tonga for now also remains the most mysterious.

Moving on, compared to the R9 285 the TBP of the R9 380 holds at 190W. Whatever power optimizations AMD has been able to make have essentially been consumed by the clockspeed increases. In the 300 series lineup this makes the R9 380 AMD’s premiere sub-225W card, as these cards can be driven by a pair of 6-pin connectors, or on more forward-looking models a single 8-pin connector.

As far as memory configurations and pricing goes, like the other 300 series cards, R9 380 gets an optional memory bump. The base MSRP of $199 is for the 2GB card, while you can expect to see 4GB cards for $219-$229 or so. Since AMD’s partners are also offering 4GB R7 370s, a 4GB R9 380 is not all that surprising, and it gives buyers an option for a card that's going to be a little more future-proof than a 2GB card in 2015.

Finally, expect to see AMD pitch the R9 380 as a 1440p card. While we haven’t benchmarked this card yet, based on what we’ve seen with the R9 285, I’m expecting similar results. In which case like the R9 285, AMD is likely overshooting in their expectations. In 2015 Tonga is a good GPU for 1080p gaming, but even with 4GB I’m not sure the performance is there to keep 1440p with high quality settings playable over the next 2-3 years.

Overall it’s interesting to note that of the first 3 300 series cards, all of them ended up being close (if not identical) to the 300 series OEM cards AMD quietly launched back at the start of May. The 360 and 370 are identical, whereas the retail 380 is clocked a bit higher relative to its OEM counterpart. So for anyone who was expecting the retail cards to be similar to the OEM cards, they were right in this case. Though the upside here at least is that the OEM cards don’t significantly deviate from the retail cards, which is a great relief given what we’ve seen in some of the previous generations.

But like the OEM cards, this also means that there are some obvious gaps in AMD’s current lineup from a hardware standpoint. None of these first 3 parts utilizes a fully-enabled GPU; each and every card uses a cut-down GPU of some kind. From a pricing standpoint this is likely a good thing for AMD and its partners since it ensures clear tiers of cards, but when we have single-card entries this is also typically done with fully-enabled GPUs, not cut-down GPUs. If we don’t eventually see X cards for some of these series I will be shocked, but then again we never did get a R9 285X…

In any case, this means that the coexistence of the 200 and 300 series will be an odd one to begin with. Along with the generally lower pricing of the 200 series, you can find fully-enabled Pitcairn and Bonaire cards there that don’t yet exist in the 300 series lineup, so the relative performance of the two series is a bit of a mess for the moment.

Radeon R9 390 Series: Return To Hawaii

Last but not least among the numbered 300 series stack are the top two cards and the only cards not to exist in some form in the OEM lineup, the R9 390 and R9 390X. These two cards are based on AMD’s Hawaii GPU, previously used for the R9 290 series, and of all of the cards in this refresh, these cards may very well attract the most interest for a couple of different reasons.

The first reason is simply because as AMD’s former flagship GPU, it was Hawaii and the 290 series that took the brunt of the blow from the launch of NVIDIA’s Maxwell 2 architecture launch in 2014. NVIDIA undercut AMD on price while beating them at performance and acoustics, which put AMD in a difficult situation. And since AMD is not replacing Hawaii with another chip at this performance level any time soon, this means that Hawaii is what AMD has available to throw at the sub-Fury market.

Meanwhile the other factor at play here is that AMD significantly cut 290 series prices in the months since the Maxwell 2 launch to recover from the situation and improve the competitive positioning of the products since they lacked the performance edge. This led to prices around $319 and $249 for the R9 290X and R9 290 as recently as the GTX 980 Ti launch, for example. However with the 300 series, AMD now wants to get card prices up to $429 and $329 respectively, which means that AMD needs to be able to do something special to justify a price hike of $100. Short of RAM and NAND flash memory, where cyclical commodity pressure leads to gluts and shortages of supplies, driving up the cost of existing computer components is very difficult to do, so how AMD is going to achieve this is of great interest.

Anyhow, without further ado, let’s take a look at AMD’s plans for the R9 390 series.

As with the 290 series, the 390 series is split between two cards, with the difference coming down to clockspeeds and the number of CUs enabled. R9 390X and R9 390 are direct successors to R9 290 and R9 290X in this respect, with the former being a higher clocked part with all 44 CUs (2816 SPs) enabled, while the latter is lower clocked with 40 CUs (2560 SPs) enabled.

The biggest change from a specifications perspective is that AMD has cranked up both the GPU and memory clockspeeds in order to further improve performance. With partners already regularly offering higher-end factory overclocked cards with boost clockspeeds at 1050MHz (or more) for the R9 290X, AMD has essentially crafted a new SKU from this mark for the 390X. Meanwhile the R9 390 sees its boost clockspeed go from 947MHz to a flat 1000MHz, a slightly larger bump up in clockspeeds on both an absolute and relative basis.

More surprising is the fact that AMD has increased the memory clockspeeds from 5Gbps to 6Gbps, a full 1Gbps (20%) increase in memory clockspeeds. As you may recall from our R9 290X review, one of the architectural decisions made with Hawaii was to build its memory controllers wider and slower in order to make more efficient use of die space and to keep power consumption in check. The end result was a rather large 512-bit memory bus running at a slower 5Gbps, while on the chip itself Hawaii’s memory controller was smaller than Tahiti’s thanks to the lower memory clockspeed.

Consequently pushing 6Gbps is a surprising move from AMD. Since Hawaii’s memory controllers were not designed to be high clocking, AMD is certainly squeezing out everything they can from Hawaii in the process. The end result however is that AMD now has 20% more memory bandwidth to play with, for a total of 384GB/sec. This is more memory bandwidth than any other GDDR5 card in existence, and in memory bandwidth bottlenecked scenarios, this will definitely be to AMD’s advantage.

Speaking of memory, for the 390 series AMD has also made 8GB configurations the baseline for the series, whereas on the 290 series it was an optional value added feature for board partners. While one could write a small tome on the matter of memory capacity, especially in light of the fact that the Fury series only has 4GB of memory, ultimately the fact that the 390 series has 8GB now is due to a couple of factors. The first of which is the fact that 4GB Hawaii cards require 2Gb GDDR5 chips (2x16), a capacity that is slowly going away in favor of the 4Gb chips used on the Playstation 4 and many of the 2015 video cards. The other reason is that it allows AMD to exploit NVIDIA’s traditional stinginess with VRAM; just as with the 290 series versus the GTX 780/770, this means AMD once again has a memory capacity advantage, which helps to shore up the value of their cards versus what NVIDIA offers at the same price.

Meanwhile with the above in mind, based on comments from AMD product managers, it sounds like the use of 4Gb chips also plays a part in the memory clockspeed increases we’re seeing on the 390 series. Later generation chips don’t just get bigger, but they get faster and operate at lower voltages as well, and from what we’ve seen it looks like AMD is taking advantage of all of these factors.

Moving on, let’s talk about power consumption. Both of the 390 series cards have been labeled with a typical board power of 275W. The fact that AMD is actually publishing a number this time around is a welcome change – the TBP for the 290 series wasn't originally published – but absent a review sample this also makes it hard to compare these cards to the 290 series. AMD’s guidance essentially suggests that total power consumption hasn’t come down at all (though perf-per-watt should have gone up), and in fact power consumption may be slightly up. Meanwhile this also happens to be identical to Fury X’s TBP, to give you an idea of how the 390 series compares to the Fury series.

In any case, this guidance gives us little reason to expect that 390’s per-per-watt situation is significantly improved from the 290 series. Consequently, expect to see AMD focus on producing a powerful card and selling it for a good price, as those are the best attributes that AMD can use to promote the 390 series and card sales.

Pricing on the other hand is going to be a mixed bag depending on which direction you’re looking from. As we mentioned a bit ago, AMD’s MSRPs for the 390 series is $329 for the R9 390 and $429 for the R9 390X. These prices essentially put the 390 cards in competition with the GTX 970 and GTX 980, with the R9 390 lining up perfectly with the former, and the R9 390X undercutting the latter by some $70. With the 290 series on the other hand AMD essentially had to price the 290X at GTX 970 levels and the 290 below that, so these 390 series prices represent a significant increase over the 290 series.

Ultimately AMD is banking on the improved performance of the 390 series to justify these higher price tags and allow them to recover on margins. Unfortunately we don’t have any review samples at this time, but if the performance is right then this would be a significant coup for AMD, as it would improve their situation and at the same time put significant new pressure on NVIDIA, which is the kind of situation that AMD thrives in.

One thing AMD won’t have to worry about is the card design situation. With the 290 series AMD shot themselves in the foot with an underperforming reference cooler, and although the underlying chip hasn’t really changed from 290 to 390, leaving card designs entirely in the hands of their partners means that AMD shouldn’t have a repeat of that aspect of the 290 series launch. All of the air-cooled 390 designs will be open air coolers with 2 or 3 fans, and usually the same designs as partners already used for their 290 series cards. Open air coolers do not solve the heat dissipation problem on their own – that 275W of heat needs to go somewhere – but at the very least for AMD it’s going to make for a quieter situation.

Last but certainly not least however, we want to talk a bit more about the performance optimizations AMD has been working on for the 390 series. While we’re still tracking down more details on just what changes AMD has made, AMD had told us that there are a number of small changes from the 290 series to the 390 series that should improve performance by several percent on a clock-for-clock, apples-to-apples basis. That means along with the 20% memory clockspeed increase and 5% GPU clockspeed increase, we should see further performance improvements from these lower-level changes, which is also why we can’t just overclock a 290X and call it a 390X.

So what are those changes? From our discussions with AMD, we have been told that the clock-for-clock performance gains comes from a multitude of small factors, things the company has learned from and been able to optimize for over the last 2 years. AMD did not name all of those factors, but there were a couple of optimizations in particular that were pointed out.

The first optimization is that AMD has gone back and refined their process for identifying the operating voltages of Hawaii chips, with the net outcome being that Hawaii voltages should be down a hair, reducing power and/or thermal throttling. The second optimization mentioned is that the 4Gb GDDR5 chips being used offer better timings than the 2Gb chips, which can depending on the timings improve various aspects of memory performance. Most likely AMD has reinvested these timing gains into improving the memory clockspeeds, but until we get our hands on a 390X card we won’t know for sure.

Shifting gears for a moment to marketing/promotion, expect to see AMD promote the 390 series on the basis of 4K gaming and VR. As far as VR goes there’s a good reason for this, as the R9 290 was the AMD card used in the Oculus Rift recommended hardware specification. So as long as developers stick to Oculus’s recommendations, then the 390 series will deliver the full performance necessary for VR gaming. Meanwhile for 4K gaming, the fact that AMD is promoting the 390 series for 4K is largely a rehash of AMD’s marketing angle from the 290 series, and not unlike the 380, I believe AMD is overshooting, especially as the Fury X should be a far better card for 4K gaming. But we’ll have to see what the performance numbers are like with retail cards.

Finally, to wrap things up we have our standard price comparison table below. Overall, while not every AMD card perfectly maps to an existing NVIDIA card, for the most part AMD is aiming the 300 series to go directly against the bulk of NVIDIA’s 900 series lineup. With the exception of the R9 390X AMD is not attempting to significantly undercut NVIDIA’s pricing, so it will be interesting to see if the performance of these refreshed cards is high enough to give the 300 series the competitive footing it needs. Otherwise AMD will need to deal with the spoiler effect of the 200 series, especially the R9 290X and R9 290.

Summer 2015 GPU Pricing Comparison
AMD	Price	NVIDIA
Radeon R9 Fury X	$649	GeForce GTX 980 Ti
	$499	GeForce GTX 980
Radeon R9 390X	$429
Radeon R9 290X Radeon R9 390	$329	GeForce GTX 970
Radeon R9 290	$250
Radeon R9 380	$200	GeFroce GTX 960
Radeon R7 370 Radeon R9 270	$150
	$130	GeForce GTX 750 Ti
Radeon R7 360	$110

Source : Anandtech com

Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart : September 2012

2012-09-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

What about this other card that’s not on the list? How do I know if it’s a good deal or not?

This will happen. In fact, it’s guaranteed to happen, because inventory levels and prices change quickly. So how do you know if that card you’ve got your eye on is a good buy in its price range?

Here is a resource to help you judge if a card is a good buy or not. The graphics card hierarchy chartgroups graphics cards with similar overall performance levels into tiers. The top tier contains the highest-performing cards available and performance decreases as you go down the tiers from there.

You can use this hierarchy to compare the pricing between two cards, to see which one is a better deal, and also to determine if an upgrade is worthwhile. I don’t recommend upgrading your graphics card unless the replacement card is at least three tiers higher. Otherwise, the upgrade is somewhat parallel and you may not notice a worthwhile difference in performance.

At the request of readers, I have added mobile graphics and integrated chipsets to the hierarchy chart. I want to make it clear that there is very little performance data available for these graphics solutions. While the discrete video cards in the chart are placed in tiers based on a lot of information, many of the mobile and integrated devices in the chart are guesstimates based on their specifications. At worst, I don’t think they’re more than one tier away from their actual performance, but this is something to keep in mind when considering mobile graphics chipsets.

Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart
GeForce	Radeon	Intel
Discrete: GTX 690
Discrete: GTX 590, GTX 680	Discrete: HD 6990, HD 7970 GHz Ed.
Discrete: GTX 670	Discrete: HD 7970
Discrete: GTX 580, 660 Ti	Discrete: HD 5970, HD 7870, HD 7950
Discrete: GTX 295, GTX 480, GTX 570 Go (mobile): 680M	Discrete: HD 4870 X2, HD 6970, HD 7850 Mobility: 7970M
Discrete: GTX 470, GTX 560 Ti, GTX 560 Ti 448 Core	Discrete: HD 4850 X2, HD 5870, HD 6950 Mobility: 7950M
Discrete: GTX 560 Go (mobile): 580M	Discrete: HD 5850, HD 6870 Mobility: 6990M
Discrete: 9800 GX2, GTX 285, GTX 460 256-bit, GTX 465 Go (mobile): 675M	Discrete: HD 6850 Mobility: 6900M
Discrete: GTX 260, GTX 275, GTX 280, GTX 460 192-bit, GTX 460 SE, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 560 SE Go (mobile): 570M, 670M	Discrete: HD 4870, HD 5770, HD 4890, HD 5830, HD 6770, HD 6790, HD 7770 Mobility: HD 5870, 6800M
Discrete: 8800 Ultra, 9800 GTX, 9800 GTX+, GTS 250, GTS 450 Go (mobile): 560M, 660M	Discrete: HD 3870 X2, HD 4850, HD 5750, HD 6750, HD 7750 Mobility: HD 4850, HD 5850, 7870M
Discrete: 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS 512 MB, GT 545 (GDDR5) Go (mobile): GTX 280M, GTX 285M, 555M (GDDR5)	Discrete: HD 4770 Mobility: HD 4860, 7770M, 7850M
Discrete: 8800 GT 512 MB, 9800 GT, GT 545 (DDR3), GT 640 (DDR3) Go (mobile): 9800M GTX, GTX 260M (112), GTS 360M (GDDR5), 555M (DDR3)	Discrete: HD 4830, HD 5670, HD 6670 (GDDR5) Mobility: HD 5770, HD 5750, 6600M/6700M (GDDR5), 7750M
Discrete: 8800 GTS 640 MB, 9600 GT, GT 240 (GDDR5) Go (mobile): 9800M GTS, GTX 160M	Discrete: HD 2900 XT, HD 3870, HD 5570 (GDDR5), HD 6570 (GDDR5) Mobility: 6500M (GDDR5), 6600M/6700M (DDR3), 7730M
Discrete: 8800 GS, 9600 GSO, GT 240 (DDR3) Go (mobile): GTX 260M (96), GTS 150M, GTS 360M (DDR3)	Discrete: HD 3850 512 MB, HD 4670, HD 5570 (DDR3), HD 6570 (DDR3), HD 6670 (DDR3) Mobility: HD 3870, HD 5730, HD 5650, 6500M (DDR3)
Discrete: 8800 GT 256 MB, 8800 GTS 320 MB, GT 440 GDDR5 Go (mobile): 8800M	Discrete: HD 2900 PRO, HD 3850 256 MB, 5550 (GDDR5) Mobility: HD 3850
Discrete: 7950 GX2, GT 440 DDR3	Discrete: X1950 XTX, HD 4650 (DDR3), 5550 (DDR3)
Discrete: 7800 GTX 512, 7900 GTO, 7900 GTX, GT 430, GT 530 Go (mobile): 550M	Discrete: X1900 XT, X1950 XT, X1900 XTX
Discrete: 7800 GTX, 7900 GT, 7950 G, GT 220 (DDR3) Go (mobile): 525M, 540M	Discrete: X1800 XT, X1900 AIW, X1900 GT, X1950 PRO, HD 2900 GT, HD 5550 (DDR2)
Discrete: 7800 GT, 7900 GS, 8600 GTS, 9500 GT (GDDR3), GT 220 (DDR2) Go (mobile): 7950 GTX	Discrete: X1800 XL, X1950 GT, HD 4650 (DDR2), HD 6450 Mobility: X1800 XT, HD 4650, HD 5165, 6400M Integrated: 6620G, 6550D
Discrete: 6800 Ultra, 7600 GT, 7800 GS, 8600 GS, 8600 GT (GDDR3), 9500 GT (DDR2) Go (mobile): 7800 GTX, 7900 GTX	Discrete: X800 XT (& PE), X850 XT (& PE), X1650 XT, X1800 GTO, HD 2600 XT, HD 3650 (DDR3), HD 3670 Mobility: X1900, 3670 Integrated: 6520G, 6530D	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics 4000
Discrete: 6800 GT, 6800 GS (PCIe), 8600 GT (DDR2), GT 520 Go (mobile): 7800, Go 7900 GS, 520M, 520MX	Discrete: X800 XL, X800 GTO2/GTO16, HD 2600 PRO, HD 3650 (DDR2), Mobility: X800 XT, HD 2600 XT, 3650 Integrated: 6410D, 6480G
Discrete: 6800 GS (AGP) Go (mobile): 6800 Ultra, 7600 GT, 8600M GT, 8700M GT, 410M	Discrete: X800 GTO 256 MB, X800 PRO, X850 PRO, X1650 GT Mobility: HD 2600 Integrated: 6370D, 6380G
Discrete: 6800, 7300 GT GDDR3, 7600 GS, 8600M GS Go (mobile): 6800, 7700	Discrete: X800, X800 GTO 128 MB, X1600 XT, X1650 PRO Mobility: X1800, HD 5145, HD 5470 (GDDR5), HD 5450,
Discrete: 6600 GT, 6800LE, 6800 XT, 7300 GT (DDR2), 8500 GT, 9400 GT Go (mobile): 7600 (128-bit)	Discrete: 9800 XT, X700 PRO, X800 GT, X800 SE, X1300 XT, X1600 PRO, HD 2400 XT, HD 4350, HD 4550, HD 5450 Mobility: X800, 3470, HD 5470 (DDR3), HD 5430, 6300M Integrated: HD 6310, HD 6320	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics 3000
Discrete: FX 5900, FX 5900 Ultra, FX 5950 Ultra, 6600 (128-bit) Go (mobile): 6800 (128-bit) Integrated: 9300, 9400	Discrete: 9700, 9700 PRO, 9800, 9800 PRO, X700, X1300 PRO, X1550, HD 2400 PRO Mobility: X1450, X1600, X1700, 2400 XT, X2500, 3450 Integrated: HD 3200, HD 3300, HD 4200, HD 4250, HD 4290, HD 6250, HD 6290
Discrete: FX 5800 Ultra, FX 5900 XT Go (mobile): 6600, Go 7600 (64-bit)	Discrete: 9500 PRO, 9600 XT, 9800 PRO (128-bit), X600 XT, X1050 (128-bit) Mobility: 9800, X700, X1350, X1400, X2300, HD 2400	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics (Core i5-6x1), 2000
Discrete: 4 Ti 4600, 4 Ti 4800, FX 5700 Ultra, 6200, 8300, 8400 G, G 210, G 310 Go (mobile): 315M	Discrete: 9600 PRO, 9800 LE, X600 PRO, HD 2300 Mobility: 9700 (128-bit), X600, X1300 Integrated: Xpress 1250	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics (Core i3 5x0, Core i5-6x0)
Discrete: 4 Ti4200, 4 Ti4400, 4 Ti4800 SE, FX 5600 Ultra, FX 5700, 6600 (64-bit), 7300 GS, 8400M GS, 9300M G, 9300M GS	Discrete: 9500, 9550, 9600, X300, X1050 (64-bit) Mobility: 9600	Integrated: Intel HD Graphics (Pentium G)
Discrete: 3 Ti500, FX 5200 Ultra, FX 5600, FX 5700 LE, 6200 TC, 6600 LE, 7200 GS, 7300 LE Go (mobile): 5700, 8200M, 9200M GS, 9100 Integrated: 8200, 8300	Discrete: 8500, 9100, 9000 PRO, 9600 LE, X300 SE, X1150 Mobility 9700 (64-bit)	Integrated: GMA X4500
Discrete: 3, 3 Ti200, FX 5200 (128-bit), FX 5500, Go (mobile): 5600, 6200, 6400, 7200, 7300, 7400 (64-bit)	Discrete: 9000, 9200, 9250 Mobility: 9600 (64-bit), X300
Discrete: FX 5200 (64 bit) Go (mobile): 7200, 7400 (32-bit) Integrated: 6100, 6150, 7025, 7050	Discrete: 9200 SE Integrated: Xpress 200M, Xpress 1000, Xpress 1150	Integrated: GMA X3000, X3100, X3500
Discrete: 2 GTS, 4 MX 440, 2 Ultra, 2 Ti, 2 Ti 200	Discrete: 7500	Integrated: GMA 3000, 3100
Discrete: 256, 2 MX 200, 4 MX 420, 2 MX 400	Discrete: SDR, LE, DDR, 7000, 7200	Integrated: GMA 500, 900, 950
Discrete: Nvidia TNT	Discrete: Rage 128	Discrete: Intel 740

Summary

There you have it folks; the best cards for the money this month. Now all that’s left to do is to find and purchase them.

Don’t worry too much about which brand you choose, because all of the cards out there are close to Nvidia’s and ATI’s reference designs. Just pay attention to price, warranty, and the manufacturer’s reputation for honoring the warranty if something goes wrong.

Also remember that the stores don’t follow this list. Things will change over the course of the month and you’ll probably have to adapt your buying strategy to deal with fluctuating prices. Good luck!

Source: Tom's Hardware

Gigabyte Launches Flagship Z77X-UP7 Motherboard

2012-08-28T03:00:00.000-07:00

Gigabyte's latest motherboard features a robust 32+3+2 power design using Ultra Durable 5 high current capable components.

On Monday Gigabyte announced the release of its current flagship motherboard, the Z77X-UP7. It offers a robust 32+3+2 power design (32 CPU phases, 3 Intel HD Graphics, 2 VTT phases) using Ultra Durable 5 high current capable components including 60A rated IR3550 PowIRstages chips from IR. This high phase count allows the board to share the workload between 32 phases, ensuring lower working temperatures and maximum CPU power delivery.
"With the Z77X-UP7 and its 32+3+2 power phase design featuring Ultra Durable 5 technology, we have created the very best CPU power design of any motherboard available today,” commented HiCookie, Gigabyte In-house Overclocking Expert. "Not only does this help extreme overclockers to reach 7 GHz+ on their Intel Core i7-3770K CPUs and take down benchmark records, but it also provides System Integrators with a platform cool and stable enough to withstand the rigors of an always-on, overclocked water cooled system for their customers."
Featuring an LGA 1155 CPU socket and the Intel Z77 chipset, the motherboard supports Intel 22-nm 3rd and 2nd generation Core CPUs. It also has four slots for 2 channel DDR3 RAM sticks, ten USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, six SATA 3 connectors and four SATA 2 connectors. It also offers PCI Express 3.0 x8 connectivity on 4 slots, supporting both 4-way ATI CrossFireX and Nvidia SLI configurations, or PCI Express 3.0 x16 connectivity using 2 slots.
"The Z77X-UP7 delivers ultra smooth 3D rendering, blazing-fast frame rates and enhanced graphics capabilities for users wanting to get the highest levels of graphics performance from their system, Gigabyte said on Monday. "The Single black PCI Express x16 slot provides a direct link to the CPU, enabling it to bypass the PLX chip. This provides the fastest possible connection for single graphics card benching."
The board also features an exclusive in-house designed UEFI BIOS sporting a GUI capable of 32-bit color imaging and user-friendly mouse navigation. The BIOS also provides two different levels of access, depending on the end-user: 3D mode for novice and casual users, and a more comprehensive Advanced Mode designed specifically for overclockers and power users. The 3D mode is a bit more simplistic so that it's easier to understand how the BIOS functions, and how each setting affects the motherboard.
"At the heart of this exciting 3D BIOS technology is a pair of physical BIOS ROMs containing Gigabyte’s exclusive in-house designed Dual UEFI BIOS technology, featuring the patented Gigabyte DualBIOS technology that automatically recovers BIOS data when main BIOS has crashed or failed," the company said.
For overclockers, the OC-Touch buttons allow overclockers to manually adjust the CPU ratio, BCLK settings as well as adjustments to the BCLK stepping ratio, to either 1 MHz or 0.3 MHz increments. These changes can be made in real-time, whether in BIOS, DOS, or Windows without the need for rebooting. Also included are onboard voltage measurement modules, and an onboard LN2 Mode switch for dropping the CPU frequency to x16 multiplier during extreme overclocking.
For more information about Gigabyte's new Z77X-UP7 Windows 8-ready motherboard, head here.

Source: Tom's Hardware

AMD ''Vishera'' FX-Series CPU Specifications Confirmed

2012-08-28T02:57:00.002-07:00

A leaked AMD document coming out of EXPreview, shows the details on the first three FX "Vishera" based processors by AMD.

The new CPUs incorporate AMD's "Piledriver" architecture, and will be available on launch as an eight-core, six-core, and four-core processors. In a document received by Chinese site EXPreview titled "2012 consumer-level desktop platform Quick Reference Guide for Desktops", AMD listed FX processors and the upcoming release of the APU model, the core number, frequency, and the TDP specifications.
The flagship FX-8350 is listed with a 4.00 GHz clock speed (4.20 GHz TurboCore speed), eight-cores, and TDP of 125W. The FX-6300 features 3.50 GHz clock speed (4.10 GHz TurboCore speed), six-cores and TDP of 95W. To round off the list, the FX-4320 features 4.00 GHz clock speed (4.20 GHz TurboCore speed), four-cores and TDP of 95W. None of the FX processors support integrated GPU, but support a full list of "Piledriver" features, such as AMD Perfect Picture HD, AMD Steady Video 2.0 Technology and AMD Wireless Display.
In addition, the leaked document confirms clock speeds, integrated GPU, and GPU cores of several FM2 A-series APUs, such as the A10-5700, A8-5500 and E2-1800.

Source: Tom's Hardware

ASRock X79 Extreme4-M and X79 Extreme4 Review – Sandy Bridge-E meets mATX

2011-12-11T06:34:00.001-08:00

In our series of X79 reviews, the next boards to face scrutiny are a pair of ASRock boards – the X79 Extreme4-M, one of the first mATX solutions to X79, and the X79 Extreme4, a full size ATX model. The main interesting point to consider starts with whether the power consumption and heat generation are applicable to the Sandy Bridge-E platform in a mATX format. With the socket and quad channel memory taking up serious PCB real estate, it is interesting to see how ASRock have tackled heat dissipation issues. We also compare the Extreme4-M to the Extreme4, its bigger brother. Both boards offer amazing value in X79 land, coming in at a recommended retail of $224.99 and $234.99 respectively.
In terms of the initial ASRock release into the world of X79, we are promised five boards ranging from the value X79 Extreme3, the mATX Extreme4-M, to the premium Extreme9. ASRock have never made an ‘Extreme9’ board before – perhaps they are looking at Gigabyte’s UD9 advertising and wanting some of that. The other aspect is that typical high end ASRock boards (barring the Fatal1ty editions) are usually priced in the mid range area of other SKU lists, with performance and utilities to match.
A simple comparison between the boards gives us the following:

ASRock X79 Series
	Extreme3	Extreme4-M	Extreme4	Extreme7	Extreme9
Release Date	Dec 2011	Nov 2011	Nov 2011	Soon	Nov 2011
Price	$216	$225	$235	$294	$355
Size	ATX	Micro ATX	ATX	ATX	ATX
Power Phase	5+1	6+2	6+2	12+2	16+2
Memory	4 x DDR3	4 x DDR3	4 x DDR3	6 x DDR3	8 x DDR3
PCIe	x16/x16/x8	x16/x8/x16	x16/x16/x8	x8/x8/x8/x8/x8 x16/-/x16/-/x8	x8/x8/x8/x8/x8 x16/-/x16/-/x8
CrossfireX	2x, 3x, 4x	2x, 4x	2x, 3x, 4x	2x, 3x, 4x	2x, 3x, 4x
SLI	2x, 3x, 4x	2x, 4x	2x, 3x, 4x	2x, 3x, 4x	2x, 3x, 4x
Audio	ALC 898	ALC 898	ALC 898	ALC 898	Creative Sound Core3D
LAN	Single	Single	Single	Dual	Dual
SATA 6 Gbps	3	4	5	7	8
USB 3.0	4	4	4	6	8
USB 2.0	12	10	12	12	12
XFast Software	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Digital PWM	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Dr. Debug	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

There are some interesting points to make from this table. For a start, the prices of the entry level boards start to resemble something for the mild enthusiast, especially when considering the cheaper processor SKUs due to ship in Q1 2012. Each of the boards as we go up the scale seems to offer more in the way of features, especially when considering NICs, SATA 6 Gbps ports, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 – even the Audio jumps from a Realtek ALC898 to a Creative solution on the Extreme9.
One thing that may seem a little odd is the X79 Extreme7, and its DDR3 solution. X79 and Sandy Bridge-E supports quad channel memory, either in terms of one DIMM per channel or two DIMMs per channel, and thus boards would expect to have 4 DIMM slots or 8. The X79 Extreme7 has six DIMM slots for memory, so I had to ask ASRock for an explanation of the layout and the reasoning. Essentially, they wanted to make a board for people who are jumping from X58 to X79, who were using six sticks of good tri-channel memory. The layout is such that two channels are one DIMM per channel, and the other two channels are two DIMMs per channel. ASRock assures me there are no compatibility or speed issues.

All the boards are sporting black aesthetics, which is a somewhat detour to ASRock’s blue and white philosophy of old. As expected, all the boards will receive the range of software including XFast USB, XFast LAN, and the new XFast RAM, some of which we have seen before.
So without further ado, let us get cracking onto the specifics behind the X79 Extreme4-M and X79 Extreme4.

Overview
I was not too sure what to expect from the X79 Extreme4-M. One of the biggest LGA2011 features, 40 PCIe lanes, would not be fully exploited by the mATX layout. I then looked at the retail price, and compared to other boards we have looked at, could come in at quite a steal. For users who want pure CPU/memory throughput and are not too concerned with the PCIe layout could pick up a cheap mATX board and an LGA2011 CPU to get the best performance in minimal space.
However, all is not as it seems with the X79 Extreme4-M. To be honest, I only had two major issues with the board – the first being the overclocking. ASRock usually cater users well in this department, offering a wide range of choices in BIOS for a user to select. However, Intel has a feature whereby if a user requires a Turbo mode for a substantial period of time, in order to preserve life and reduce heat, the CPU will clock back. In previous experience on other motherboards, this is automatically disabled on any sort of overclock. However, there is not an option here, and the CPU will go back to below stock CPU frequency at high stresses. I will explain in more detail later. The second point is the default fan speed, which is at 100% for the CPU, potentially causing noise issues.
Feature wise, the user is well catered for at this price range – there are a SATA 6 Gbps controller and a USB 3.0 controller are added on top of the default chipset, six fan headers onboard, and the range of software provided under the ASRock banner is quite good. XFast USB is a nice technology to boost a single USB socket throughput (as tested in the review), XFast LAN allows the user to manipulate packet priority and monitor network usage, and a new addition to the scene, XFast RAM, which allows users to create a RAMDisk for quick temporary file storage.
At $224.99, we are starting to see more agreeable prices for X79 motherboards, which can only be a good thing as long as we are getting as much of the benefit of the new platform as possible. The ASRock X79 Extreme4-M has a few teething issues to begin with, especially at any sort of significant full CPU load plus overclock, which could put a dampener on prospective sales.
Visual Inspection

If ASRock were going for the ‘black gold’ metaphor of valuable commodities, they have at least got the styling right, with all black ports (bar two grey SATA) and gold caps everywhere, splashed with gold writing on the heatsinks. In order to save space, we have only got 4 DIMMs here, which equates to one per channel. Despite this extra ‘room’, there is a lack of significant extra features on board, such as beefier heatsinks or extra ports. The 6+2 phase power solution is behind the very small (13/16ths of an inch x 3.5 inch) heatsink which gets extremely hot to touch under full load even at stock – it may have been wise for ASRock to extend this heatsink via a heatpipe to take advantage of the extra space.
One thing we can enjoy though is the abundance of fan headers for a mATX board – the X79 Extreme4-M has six of them. There are two CPU fan headers north of the right bank of memory slots, along with a power header. Two of the three chassis headers are beside the 24-pin ATX power connector (presumably for front chassis fans), and the other is on the bottom end of the board next to the power/reset switches. Control of these is through the BIOS, or the ASRock eXtreme Tuning Utility (AXTU) software in the operating system.
Alongside the 24-pin ATX power connector is a USB 3.0 header, and a seventh SATA port from an ASMedia controller. This controller also gives an eSATA 6 Gbps port at the back of the IO panel. Beside these are the six SATA ports from the PCH, four SATA 3 Gbps (black) and two SATA 6 Gbps (grey). These are all shadowed by the chipset cooler, also in black and gold livery, sporting a small ‘X-Fan’. This is more substantial than other chipset coolers we have seen (which often use a heatpipe to transfer heat to another heatsink), and the default setting is that the fan only turns on when it reaches 50ºC. Personally, I didn’t hear it, because the CPU fan defaults at maximum speed.

The bottom end of the board sports the power/reset/debug LED trio I love, alongside headers for the Clear CMOS, COM and IEEE 1394. Above these is the PCIe layout, which tries to maximize the 40 PCIe lanes as much as possible. In order, we have an x16, x8 and x16, and PCI, but in reality dual GPU users will populate slots one and three to get their maximum throughput. The layout does bode well for users of one GPU and another PCIe device, though probably at the expense of cooling – ideally the PCIe device would be in the first slot and the GPU in the second or third slots for optimum efficiency. Users will also note the additional 4-pin molex power connector on board to aid in power to the PCIe slots. I was able to run dual GTX580s, without issue, with having nothing plugged into the molex connector. This raises some issues – a) is it really necessary and b) if it is, are other power connectors not suitable? A 4-pin molex is quite substantial to put into the board over other components, especially when devices typically using 4-pin molex connectors are not anywhere near this part of the board.

The IO panel is pretty standard, especially in comparison to most of the Cougar Point chipset motherboards we have seen this year. From left to right, we see two PS/2 connectors, a clear CMOS button, a coaxial SPDIF out, an optical SPDIF out, two USB 3.0 ports, six USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet (Broadcom BCM57781), eSATA 6 Gbps, FireWire, and audio headers. For a board this price and on X79, we do not see much extra from what we would expect to be the standard.

In The Box
Back in the P67 days, if you remember the P67 Extreme4 by ASRock, for ~$160, we got a substantial haul in the box, including a front panel USB 3.0 panel and SSD holder. No such luck for the low end here, as we have:
2 x SATA Cables
IO Panel
Driver CD
2 Slot SLI Bridge
I am a little disappointed to be honest, given ASRock’s previous tenacity when it comes to box bundling.
Board Features

ASRock X79 Extreme4-M
Size	mATX
CPU Interface	LGA2011
CPU Support	Intel Second Generation Core i7 Sandy Bridge E
Chipset	Intel X79
Base Clock Frequency	100.0 MHz
Core Voltage	Default, 0.6 V to 1.7 V
CPU Clock Multiplier	Auto, 12x to 60x
DRAM Voltage	Auto, 1.207 V to 1.806 V
DRAM Command Rate	Auto, 1N to 3N
Memory Slots	Four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 32 GB Up to Quad Channel Support for DDR3, 800-2400 MHz
Expansion Slots	2 x PCIe Gen 3 x16 1 x PCIe Gen 3 x8 1 x PCI
Onboard SATA/RAID	2 x SATA 6 Gbps, Support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 4 x SATA 3 Gbps, Support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 1 x SATA 6 Gbps (Controller)
Onboard	4 x SATA 3 Gbps (PCH) 3 x SATA 6 Gbps (2 PCH, 1 Controller) 6 x Fan Headers 1 x 4-pin Molex CFX/SLI Power Connector 1 x HDMI_SPDIF Header 1 x Front Panel Header 1 x Front Panel Audio Header 2 x USB 2.0 Headers 1 x USB 3.0 Header 1 x COM Header 1 x IEEE 1394a Header Power / Reset / Clear CMOS Buttons + Debug LED
Onboard LAN	Broadcom BCM57781 Gigabit LAN
Onboard Audio	Realtek ALC898 7.1 Ch HD, Supports THX TruStudio
Power Connectors	1 x 24-pin ATX connector 1 x 8-pin 12V connector 1 x 4-pin Molex CFX/SLI Power Connector
Fan Headers	2 x CPU Fan Header 3 x Chassis Headers 1 x SB Header (occupied)
IO Panel	1 x PS/2 Mouse Port 1 x PS/2 Keyboard Port 1 x Optical S/PDIF Out Port 1 x Coaxial S/PDIF Out Port 6 x USB 2.0 2 x USB 3.0 1 x eSATA 6 Gbps 1 x Gigabit Ethernet 1 x Firewire 1 x Clear CMOS Audio Jacks
BIOS Version	1.4
Warranty Period	2 Years

ASRock are starting to use Broadcom NICs on their products, as you will see with the Extreme4 later in this review and the Extreme9 in a later review. As mentioned in the intro, it is nice to see a high end Realtek Audio Codec in there, even on a mATX board. On the flip side, with the 4-pin molex CFX/SLI power connector on board in an odd position, one has to wonder whether it is really needed when other boards do not require it.
Overclocking
Over this year, I have had a number of ASRock Sandy Bridge boards through my hands. On the whole, they tend to overclock well with one button settings, even if not able to overclock to the absolute extreme. This is usually useful for system builders or amateur users wanting some extra bang for their buck. But as we have already seen on the Patsburg chipset, these LGA2011 chips are hot beasts waiting to be tamed. In order to keep everything the same, we are testing the same exact processor on the exact same cooling – the Intel All-In-One Liquid Cooler.
Initial impressions for the X79 Extreme4-M looked good, however it does suffer from various throttling modes to prevent high temperatures. What I mean by this is that if you set the processor frequency high enough, and the cooler cannot deal with it properly (either it is not a good cooler, or clogged with dust), the system will reduce the multiplier to compensate for temperature. This is all well and good on the majority of systems, however there was no option to turn it off in the BIOS (think extreme overclocking, or perhaps just experienced users). So for example, if we set 4.6 GHz in BIOS, it would run at that speed in single threaded scenarios, but in multi-threaded tasks it would reduce back to 3.9 GHz. Then, as per Intel specifications, the CPU would reduce to stock (3.3 GHz) if it was at full load for a certain time. There seemed to be no way to turn any of these options off – the last point for 3.3 GHz is usually controlled by a timer stating how long Turbo can be engaged, but ASRock have not offered an option to disable it for ‘safety’. Each to their own, but it really hurts anyone who overclocks the system. The only way around this reduction to 3.3 GHz seemed to be to leave the CPU at stock frequencies, then it would only reduce to 3.6 GHz, as per Turbo core rules. It is rather disappointing.
Nevertheless, I did go through the Auto and Manual OC tasks as usual to see what was possible. In our Auto tests, we keep everything untouched as much as possible except the one setting. During our manual OC of X79, we set a CPU voltage limit of 1.4 V for a balance of performance and temperature.
In Auto OC mode, the BIOS offers several options from 4.0 GHz to 5.2 GHz in 200 MHz jumps, with the final three in a red font, showing their ‘extreme’ nature. I was able to start at 4.8 GHz; however the automatic settings on board gave the CPU 1.54 volts! This was quite extreme, resulting in throttling almost immediately, but still reaching 83ºC in our multithreaded 3DPM test, with 3.3 GHz scores.
At 4.6 GHz, these issues still persisted, and the CPU was still receiving 1.54 volts. However at 4.4 GHz, the system seemed stable, even if the CPU was getting 1.48 volts. No throttling took place, until the turbo period was up and the CPU cut back to 3.3 GHz.
In terms of Manual OC, I set the board to give the CPU 1.4 volts, and rose the Core Current Limit to 500A, to stop as much throttling as possible. Using this, I was able to reach a 47x multiplier, giving 4.7 GHz. In the OS, the CPU was recorded as receiving 1.456 volts at load, presumably due to load line calibration. At full multithreaded load, the CPU would reduce back to 3.9 GHz, and reach 71ºC when under 3DPM. After the allotted turbo time, the CPU would again reduce back to 3.3 GHz.
For the memory overclock, this was a bit frustrating. I am currently using a 4x4 GB set of GSkill RipjawsZ (DDR3-2133 9-11-9-28 1.65 V), in which I have had them running at 2752 MHz (even though at silly timings of 13-13-14, but still with 1.65 V) with Llano. However, it seems the Integrated Memory Controller with my LGA2011 chip is not that good. While we were able to set our XMP profiles on the memory, the next divider up was at DDR3-2400. In order to be comparable to XMP, I reduced the timings to 10-12-10-31 2T, but after one successful boot, it failed to get into the OS after many attempts, and thus is not stable.

source: AnandTech

Introducing AMD’s Memory Brand

2011-11-28T16:40:00.001-08:00

We discussed the availability of AMD branded memory modules earlier this month, but today AMD is officially unveiling information on their memory platform. There are a few major questions many will have: why is AMD entering the memory market at all, and what do they hope to offer that we can’t already get from other vendors? Let’s take those in turns.
The reason for AMD’s entry into the memory market comes from two areas. First, AMD’s APUs are now shipping in large volumes and can definitely benefit from higher bandwidth memory modules. We’ve already shown the sort of performance scaling you can get from an A8-3850 with higher clocked DRAM, but many people buy A-series APUs as part of a prebuilt system, and right now lots of OEMs are still cutting corners on the RAM and using DDR3-1333. That’s the second aspect of the move: AMD wants to enable a [buzzword alert!] “holistic customer platform experience”, and they may be able to help drive down costs for AMD platforms. A final element AMD mentions is a desire to drive and enable future memory product developments.
The other item to discuss is what AMD offers that we may not already have. Here the distinction between AMD branded memory and other options isn’t quite so clear, but AMD will be doing testing and validation in their labs using AMD platforms. AMD also notes that they will not be using any ETT (Effectively TesTed) or gray market RAM. The latter is used as a term to collectively group hardware that may be less desirable; as an example, Intel unboxed CPUs are “gray market” because they are intended for OEM use but can still end up being sold at retail. Basically, gray market parts would cut out some of the supply channel (in the example just cited, gray box processors typically cut out AMD/Intel and only have a short warranty from the seller). ETT parts on the other hand are a way of cutting costs by skipping branding; the RAM is still tested and is supposed to be high quality, but without branding it’s one small way to reduce costs. Generally speaking, ETT memory is destined for value RAM modules, so basically AMD is saying is that their AMD RAM will start out a step above value RAM. AMD also states that they will take end-to-end ownership of the AMD Memory ecosystem, working with module manufacturers, memory partners, IC partners, distributors, and VARs (value added resellers).
With that out of the way, let’s discuss the specifics of what AMD Memory will be available and the target markets. Here’s a slide from AMD’s presentation summarizing things:

As you would expect from any memory, the AMD RAM will work with both AMD and Intel platforms; the main difference between the tiers will be the speed and packaging. Entertainment Edition memory will target the mainstream/value segment, come in single 2GB and 4GB DIMM packages, and is rated for CL9 operation at DDR3-1333 and/or DDR3-1600; Entertainment Edition memory is already available, starting in October. The Performance Edition memory should start shipping this month, and it will come in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB capacities (these are presumably two-DIMM kits with 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB total capacities; Bulldozer could potentially use four-DIMM kits). The main difference with Performance Edition memory is that it is rated for CL8 operation at DDR3-1333/1600 speeds. Last is the Radeon Edition memory, which will come in 4GB and 8GB kits and offer DDR3-1866 and up to DDR3-2133 support with CL9 operation (and presumably CL7/8 operation at lower speeds). The Radeon Edition parts will also have support for overclocking via AMD OverDrive software; availability is expected in Jan/Feb 2012.
So what does all of this really mean? That’s the difficult part. If all AMD memory supported speeds of at least DDR3-1600, that would be a clear break from the current offerings, but the press release indicates that there will be both DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1600 parts. The upgrade to DDR3-1600 provides a significant performance increase; we linked our Llano A8-3850 article above showing some of our own results, but here are some charts of our testing along with AMD’s results:

Holiday Desktop PC Buying Guide: The Specs Explained

2011-11-24T00:45:00.001-08:00

We help you identify the key specifications and components you need to consider when shopping for a desktop PC.

Once you've determined the type of desktop system you want--a compact PC, a budget system, a mainstream all-purpose model, or a performance crackerjack--you need to know what components to look for. The processor and graphics card you choose will determine many of your machine's capabilities, as will the system's memory and hard drive. Understanding those components will help you get the performance you need, without paying for things you don't. (Our holiday buying guide includes further shopping tips for purchasing a desktop PC.)
You'll also want to consider details like the layout of the case, which can make the difference between a pleasant workstation and a nightmare PC.

Processor

The CPU is one of your PC's most important components. The processor you choose is likely to have a major impact on your PC's shape and size, and it will definitely influence its price. Generally, the higher the CPU clock speed, the faster the performance you may see--and the higher the price. A 3.4GHz Core i7-2600 PC will trounce a 3.10 GHz Core i3-2100 system, but you'll pay nearly twice as much for the faster CPU. Another spec to watch is cache size: More is better, here: Core i3 parts have 4MB caches, Core i5 parts have 6MB caches, and performance-geared Core i7 chips have 8MB caches.
Compact PCs and some all-in-ones use relatively puny netbook or laptop processors. Though these CPUs deliver weaker performance than desktop processors do, they're also smaller and generate less heat, which makes them ideal for small machines. A PC packing an Intel Atom or AMD Fusion processor should be fine for basic word processing, Web surfing, and limited media playback--but little more.
Intel's new Sandy Bridge line of desktop processors run the gamut from Budget PCs to Performance PCs. Most users will find something they like in the Core i3 and Core i5 lines, as these CPUs offer dual-core performance at palatable prices. Core i3 chips are the cheaper, lower-powered models, so you'll generally find them in less expensive machines.
The quad- and six-core Core i7 targets users who need a workhorse processor. If you play high-end games or edit hours of audio or video, you'll benefit from the Core i7. The lowliest Core i3 CPU can easily handle basic computing tasks, so stay within a reasonable price range when possible.
Desktop PCs use either Intel or AMD processors. Intel currently holds the performance crown, but AMD has priced its new quad- and six-core chips aggressively. If you're looking for multicore performance on a budget, AMD-based offerings are certainly worth checking out.

Graphics Cards

The GPU (graphics processing unit) is responsible for everything you see on your display, whether you play games, watch videos, or just stare at the Aero desktop baked into Windows 7.
If you aren't interested in gaming on your PC, integrated graphics built onto the motherboard--or in the CPU itself--are the way to go. Integrated graphics help keep a system's cost low, and they deliver enough power to run simple games or high-definition Flash video.
If you plan to render your own high-definition content or to play Skyrim, you'll need a discrete graphics card. Such cards, which come installed in a PCIe x16 slot on your motherboard, deliver significantly more power than integrated graphics do. Both AMD and Nvidia offer plenty of options to choose from.
Variables such as power consumption, size, and the brand of your motherboard (which may limit which cards you can use) will help determine the GPU that's right for you. Gamers with deep pockets can opt for a multiple-graphics-card setup using either Nvidia's SLI or AMD's CrossFire technology, either of which sets multiple cards to work in tandem for vastly improved performance. For buying options, check out our "Top-Rated Graphics Cards."

Memory

If you use your computer for little more than light Web browsing and email, 2GB of RAM will suffice, whether the system has Windows XP or Windows 7. More RAM will allow you to run more programs simultaneously, and it will generally improve the speed and performance of your machine. Systems today typically come with at least 4GB of RAM, though some small PCs and budget systems may be limited to 2GB or 3GB.
People who like to multitask or play games will want at least 4GB of RAM. If you play graphics-intensive games or do serious video or image editing, you may want to spring for even more RAM--some performance systems include 8GB or even 16GB of memory.
Buying more than 4GB of RAM makes sense only if the system ships with Microsoft's 64-bit Windows 7 operating system; a 32-bit OS will recognize only a little more than 3GB of whatever RAM your system has. If you purchase a new machine, it will probably come bundled with a 64-bit OS, as more retailers move toward including 4GB of RAM. Budget systems are likelier to lean toward a 32-bit OS--but even in this category we've seen a shift to 64-bit. The advantage of 64-bit Windows 7 in a budget system is that if you decide to upgrade your system memory later, the operating system will be able to handle it.
If you intend to upgrade your PC yourself, make sure that your system's motherboard can support additional RAM modules. Check your computer's specs to see how many user-accessible DIMM connectors are available; you'll find this information on a system's technical specifications page. Our how-to guide on installing more memory will help you along the way.

Desktop Case

A good case can make your everyday work easier and can simplify such tasks as upgrading and servicing components in a workplace. A well-designed case provides tool-less access to the interior, hard drives mounted on easy-to-slide-out trays, readily accessible USB ports and memory card slots, and color-coded cables for internal and external parts.
The most common cases are minitower and tower designs that use ATX. The ATX specification dictates where the connectors on the back of the motherboard should be (to line up with the holes in the case), and it encompasses details such as the power-supply connector.
Slimline systems and other smaller PCs may use Micro-ATX, which follows the basic ATX specification but includes fewer expansion slots. Mini-ITX is smaller still; Mini-ITX motherboards often appear in small PCs, where they offer quiet, low-power performance (making these systems a great choice for a home-theater PCs).
If you're buying a minitower or tower system, you may have more flexibility in configuring it, whether you want to specify optional components to fill the slots or you want to leave room for future expansion. You should reserve at least a couple of open hard drive bays and a free PCI slot, too. And just as motherboards come in different shapes and sizes, so do case designs.
If you're buying an all-in-one or a small PC, or you're ordering a traditional tower from a major vendor such as HP or Dell, you rarely have much say about your machine's chassis. If the case's size and weight are important to you, try to inspect the machine in a store, or take note of its dimensions when shopping online.

Operating System

It may be a decade old, but Windows XP remains a stalwart--even on some new systems. Nevertheless, most systems on the market today run Windows 7. Microsoft's latest operating system has received generally positive reviews, improving on many of Windows Vista's foibles.
Microsoft sells six different versions of Windows 7, but only three--Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional, and Windows 7 Ultimate--are available to most desktop buyers. Windows 7 Home Premium, the standard offering, includes the visually appealing Aero Glass UI, plus enhancements to Windows Media Center. Advanced users should consider Windows 7 Professional, typically a $75 to $100 step up; it offers location-aware printing and improved security features that many business users like. Windows 7 Ultimate--which costs about $150 more--is a good choice for power users and business users, thanks to its wealth of networking and encryption tools. Consult a full list of OS features before settling on a particular version.
Once again, if you're running a 32-bit operating system, your computer can use only slightly more than 3GB of RAM, regardless of how much RAM your system carries. So be sure to pick a 64-bit OS; you'll be glad you did when you're ready to upgrade.
Don't forget Windows 8! It's on the horizon now (though still at least a year away), and it promises to be a bold new approach to getting things done with our tech.

Hard Drive

Even a basic full-size PC should offer at least 320GB of hard drive space. Compact PCs, however, tend to start at the low end with capacities of around 160GB. At the upper end of the performance spectrum, Performance PCs may offer space for 2TB of storage--or more--along with choices of RAID for data redundancy (RAID 1) or speed optimization (RAID 0), or an option to combine a solid-state drive with a hard drive.
When shopping for a PC, check the specifications to see how many internal hard drive bays are available. Many all-in-one and small PCs limit you to just one. But with additional internal hard drives, you can store more data and create RAID arrays to safeguard your data from hardware failure, deliver faster performance, or do both.
Most drives today are Serial ATA-300 models, which spin at 7200 rpm. When shopping, pay close attention to the speed of the PC's hard drive: Small PCs may use 2.5-inch hard drives that spin at 5400 rpm, and the potential money savings may not justify the performance hit if you plan to do a lot disk-intensive tasks. For people who care more about speed than about capacity, Western Digital's VelociRaptor line offers 10,000-rpm drives, though these max out at 600GB.
Another option for speed-conscious buyers is a solid-state drive. The cost-per-gigabyte for SSDs is still far greater than for traditional hard-disk drives, but prices continue to fall. Some PC makers offer an SSD in tandem with a hard-disk drive--a low-capacity SSD to store applications and the OS, and a high-capacity HDD for data storage duties.

Networking

The days of dial-up are done. Broadband speed and performance vary by service provider and location, but you can maximize your PC's connectivity by choosing the right networking options. Fortunately, the options are clear-cut: wired or wireless.
Every system comes with a wired ethernet connection--generally gigabit ethernet, though inexpensive models may be saddled with a slower 10/100 ethernet connection. Wireless connectivity is an attractive option for small PCs and all-in-ones, and also for some tower and minitower systems (though you'll need it only if your system will be nowhere near your router). If you'd rather not tie down your otherwise svelte machine with an ethernet cable, go wireless and opt for 802.11n; this wireless standard offers better performance than the older 802.11b/g standards.
Wireless performance still has limitations. If you plan to use your PC to stream high-definition Internet content from sites like Hulu and Netflix, consider using a wired connection for best performance. You'll get measurably superior performance, and you'll future-proof your machine in case you later upgrade to network-attached machines with faster transfer speeds.

Keyboard and Mouse

Your keyboard and mouse are crucial devices, so get a set that works for you. But if you're buying a PC online, don't pay the upgrade price that the vendor offers: You can usually find a better deal by shopping around. If you aren't sure what your keyboard or a mouse options are, visit your local PC or electronics retailer and try out a few of the display models.
The desirability of most physical attributes of keyboards and mice varies from user to user, so keep in mind where and how you'll be using your machine. Every system comes with at least a basic mouse and keyboard. At build-to-order PC sites, though, you usually have relatively few options.
If you plan to use a small PC to stream media, consider a small, lightweight wireless keyboard and mouse combo--or a wireless keyboard with built-in pointing device--so you can operate it from the comfort of a couch. Wireless keyboards and mice use either radio-frequency (RF) or Bluetooth technology, and they require you to plug a USB receiver into a USB port on your machine.
When shopping for a keyboard, watch for handy media keys. These put media playback buttons and volume controls on your keyboard, heightening the couch-based computing experience.
If you plan to buy a tower PC, you'll likely have space on your desk for a full-size keyboard with number pad. If comfort is an issue or if you struggle with wrist pain, look for ergonomic keyboards and mice that conform to the shape of your hands, and workspace. If you're an avid gaming fan, consider keyboards and mice from brands like Razer and Logitech that offer backlit keys, programmable macro buttons, and other features that may give you a competitive edge.

Removable Storage

Your operating system and system restore disks (if any) will ship on a DVD; consequently all but a handful of compact PCs ship with a dual-layer multiformat DVD burner. If you're a fan of high-definition media, consider adding a Blu-ray reader/DVD burner combo drive (for about $100 extra) to store data on your own CDs and DVDs and to watch media stored on Blu-ray discs.
To take advantage of the massive storage opportunities offered by Blu-ray discs, you'll need a Blu-ray writer--a $200 add-on that lets you read and write in every disc-based media format.
HP and other companies market portable media drives, ranging in price from less than $100 to as high as $250. These hard-drive models work with a USB cable, but they are designed to slide into a media drive bay included on select desktop models. Portable hard drives are and crucial to anyone who wants to protect data from hard-drive failure or to transport lots of content. Consult our "Top 10 Portable Hard Drives" chart for further options.

Sound

The integrated sound provided on a typical PC's motherboard today supports 5.1-channel audio. This should suffice for users who don't want to spend a lot of money on their PC's audio system. But a dedicated sound card will improve the dynamic range of compressed audio, add rich environmental effects to games, and improve system performance when you record or mix audio.
On most PCs above the budget level, motherboards come with 7.1-channel audio. A sound card can increase your PC's initial cost by $40 to $80, depending on the technology that the card uses. Higher-end cards can cost more than $200, but these generally target creative professionals or gamers who require 3D environmental audio effects for competitive play.
If you do opt for a sound card, make sure that your motherboard has a spare PCI or PCI-Express slot, depending on the requirements of the card that you've chosen. The manufacturer's specifications for the machine or motherboard you're buying will list the slots it has available.
As with all upgrade options, comparison-shop before you settle on a particular sound card or set of speakers. You may find a better deal elsewhere. On the other hand, if you buy the card yourself, you'll have to crack open your system to install the card.
Speaker preferences are personal, and the physical dimensions of the room your computer is in may limit your options. PCs of all shapes and sizes have analog audio outputs, and some models include a digital optical connection, reducing the number of cables you'll need.
Many all-in-one PCs include a speaker bar attached to the screen. Audio from these sound bars varies from model to model, but in general the quality will be akin to that of laptop speakers, with deeper, richer sound from more-expensive models. If sound quality isn't a high priority, the included speaker bar will perform adequately, just as built-in speakers usually suffice for an HDTV. But if you plan to use your all-in-one as a primary media machine, we recommend choosing dedicated speakers with a subwoofer.

Source: PC World

Razer Building Smaller Gaming Devices Besides Laptops

2011-11-24T00:36:00.001-08:00

Razer's CEO hinted that the company will release small form factor systems once the Razer Blade laptop hits the market next month.
ZoomIn a short interview with PC World, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said that the company plans to release additional systems once its 17.3-inch Razer Blade laptop lands on North American store shelves in December. Although he didn’t provide specific details on the future products, he confirmed that they would be "small form factor systems."
Earlier this year at CES 2011, the company revealed a concept device called the Razer Switchblade. Based on Intel's Atom processor, the netbook-like device promised to bring traditional PC desktop gaming to a portable form factor. Razer replaced the typical mouse and keyboard interface with an "ultra-sensitive multi-touch screen, dynamic tactile keyboard, and an intelligent user interface that adjusts the configuration and key layout on-the-fly based on game content and user requirements."
According to the company, the 7-inch Switchblade concept measures 172 x 115 x 25-mm, and features both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. As of this writing, the product page indicates that Razer is still working with selected partners to design and launch products based on the concept design. However the company announced back in April that the Switchblade would launch in China first with several pre-installed games.
"We think we have a phenomenal opportunity in China," he said. "I think that our focus is on China, and then we'll explore the rest of the world."
That said, there's a good chance Tan's recent comment to PC World about upcoming "small form factor systems" in North America could mean the Switchblade is finally landing stateside. That's just speculation of course, and for now US-based customers will have to make due with Razer's $2,800 gaming laptop, the Razer Blade. It will feature a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, a Nvidia GeForce GT 55M GPU, and a programmable LCD panel mounted next to the keyboard when it ships in December.
Recently, Razer was broken into and two Blade prototypes were stolen.

Source: Tom's Hardware

SSD (Solid Storage) Hierarchy Chart

2011-11-24T00:24:00.001-08:00

We understand that SSD prices make it difficult to adopt the latest technology. Maybe that's why you aren't too keen on blowing a couple hundred dollars on solid-state storage, especially when you can spend the same amount and buy four 2 TB hard drives or a high-performance processor. That's why it's important to put things into perspective.
Over the past five years, CPU performance has hit new and unforeseen heights, and processors are increasingly spending time waiting on data from hard drives. This is what makes storage today's most glaring bottleneck. Overcoming it requires an SSD.
Zoom
As a point of comparison, a file operation completes 85% faster on a low-end SSD than it does on a high-end hard drive, but there is only an 88% speed difference between a high-end hard drive and a high-end SSD. That why you shouldn't let less aggressive benchmark results at the low-end deter you from making the switch. You don't have to have the best SSD to get great performance relative to a hard drive.
This hierarchy chart relies on information provided in our Storage Bench v1.0, as it ranks performance in a way that reflects average daily use for a consumer workload. This applies to gamers and home office users. The chart has been structured so that each tier represents a 10% difference in performance. Some rankings are educated guesses based on information from testing a model at a different capacity or a drive of similar architecture. As such, it is possible that an SSD may shift one tier once we actually get a chance to test it. Furthermore, SSDs within a tier are listed alphabetically.
There are several drives that we're going to intentionally leave out of our hierarchy list. Enterprise-oriented SLC- and 512 GB MLC-based SSDs are ignored due to the extreme price they command (and the difficult we have getting samples in from vendors). Furthermore, SSDs with a capacity lower than 60 GB are left off because of the budget nature of that price range.

SSD Performance Hierarchy Chart
Tier 1	Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240 GB Patriot WildFire 240 GB Samsung 830 SSD 256 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Toggle NAND
Tier 2	Adata S511 240 GB Corsair Force GT 240 GB Kingston HyperX SSD 240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Sync ONFi NAND
Tier 3	Crucial m4 256 GB Intel SSD 510 250 GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 120 GB Patriot WildFire 120 GB Samsung 830 SSD 128 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Toggle NAND
Tier 4	Corsair Force 3 240 GB OCZ Agility 3 240 GB Patriot Pyro 240 GB Other 240 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND
Tier 5	Intel SSD 510 120 GB Crucial m4 128 GB
Tier 6	Adata S511 120 GB Corsair Force GT 120 GB Kingston HyperX SSD 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB Samsung 470 SSD 256 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Sync ONFi NAND
Tier 7	OCZ Agility 2 240 GB OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB
Tier 8	Corsair Force 3 120 GB Intel SSD 320 300 GB OCZ Agility 3 120 GB OCZ Solid 3 120 GB Patriot Pyro 120 GB Samsung 470 SSD 128 GB Other 120 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND
Tier 9	Corsair Force 3 60 GB Crucial m4 64 GB Kingston SSDNow V+100 128 GB Intel SSD 320 160 GB OCZ Agility 3 60 GB Patriot Pyro 60 GB Other 60 GB second-gen SandForce SSDs with Async ONFi NAND
Tier 10	Intel SSD 320 80 GB OCZ Agility 2 120 GB OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB OCZ Solid 3 60 GB Other 120 GB first-gen SandForce SSDs

Do you transcode video, copy large amounts of data, or run your own Web server? If you consistently perform I/O-intensive tasks, SSDs are a great way to improve speed. But even if you only browse the Internet, SSDs still offer tangible benefits in performance and power. Take a look at the CPU utilization and power consumption results from one of our recent reviews:

A disk-based drive will always consume more power absolutely. At the system level, an SSD increases power consumption because CPU and memory utilization rises in response to increased I/O activity (they're not sitting there, waiting on a hard drive to send data). But remember that an SSD-based configuration will always finish those operations faster. You see that reflected in the charts above. At the end of the day, an SSD lowers power consumption. This is why performance and power go hand-in-hand.

PCMark Vantage (x64) HDD Suite	Average Power Rating (W)	Actual Power Used (mW)	Average CPU utilization (%)	Completion Time (mm:ss)
Kingston SSDNow 100 V+	0.6	85	14.7	8:06
OCZ Agility 2	1.4	186	10.9	7:54
Intel X25-M	1.4	242	10.8	10:17
OCZ Vertex 3 Pro	1.6	207	15.1	7:41
OCZ Vertex 2	1.9	269	13.9	8:28
Seagate Momentus 5400.6	2.2	426	10.4	11:40
OCZ Vertex 3	2.3	305	15.1	7:50
G.Skill SATA II FM-25S2S-64GB	2.6	369	13.5	8:40

Best prices for tested products

Source: Tom's Hardware

Puget Systems Deluge: Revisiting the Art of Custom With X79

2011-11-24T00:17:00.001-08:00

Introducing the Puget Systems Deluge
It's been a little while since we've had a Puget Systems desktop in, and so far we haven't yet tested any of their big dog gaming machines. Everything else we've tested, we've liked, but what happens when the fine folks over at Puget Systems pull out all the stops and put together a high end gaming machine? The answer: the Deluge, an X79-based rig in a modified Antec P183, employing a custom liquid-cooling loop. It's big, powerful, and expensive. Did Puget Systems hit another custom out of the park, and is Sandy Bridge-E the enthusiast platform we were waiting for?

While we're used to seeing liquid-cooled systems around here, the Puget Systems Deluge is one of the few we've had in with a fully custom solution. Puget Systems modified the Antec P183 enclosure substantially, planting a 360mm Koolance radiator in the top and adding a window to the side (complete with intake fan). This is really the first tricked-out system we've received from them, and it's a doozy aimed at demonstrating what Intel's new Sandy Bridge-E and X79 platform can do. Needless to say, the rap sheet comes packed with all the latest and greatest hardware.

Puget Systems Deluge L2 Specifications
Chassis	Antec P183, Modified
Processor	Intel Core i7-3960X (6x3.3GHz + HTT, Turbo to 3.9GHz, 4.6GHz Overclock, 32nm, 15MB L3, 130W)
Motherboard	ASUS Sabertooth X79 (X79 chipset)
Memory	8x4GB Patriot Viper Xtreme DDR3-1600 @ 1500MHz (expandable to 64GB)
Graphics	2x NVIDIA eVGA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB GDDR5 in SLI (2x 512 CUDA Cores, 772/1544/4008MHz core/shaders/RAM, 384-bit memory bus)
Hard Drive(s)	Intel 510 250GB SATA 6Gbps SSD Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB 7200-RPM SATA 6Gbps HDD
Optical Drive(s)	ASUS BD-RE (BW-12B1ST)
Networking	Intel 82579V Gigabit Ethernet
Audio	ASUS Xonar DX Speaker, mic/line-in, surround jacks, optical out for 7.1 sound
Front Side	Optical drive Card reader USB 3.0 2x USB 2.0 Headphone and mic jacks
Top	-
Back Side	PS/2 5x USB 3.0 6x USB 2.0 6-pin FireWire Optical out 2x eSATA Ethernet 4x DVI-D 2x Mini-HDMI Speaker, mic/line-in, surround, and optical jacks
Operating System	Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
Dimensions	19.9" x 8.1" x 22" (WxDxH)
Extras	Card reader Antec CP1000 PSU Custom liquid-cooling loop with 360mm radiator
Warranty	1-year parts, Lifetime labor and tech support (extendable by up to three years)
Pricing	Starts at $3,945 Review system configured at $7,254

Well, I believe that's officially the most expensive configuration I've yet tested, so if you don't need a car but can afford to buy one, Puget Systems is willing to sell you a tricked out desktop in its stead.
We start at the top with Intel's shiny new top-of-the-line Core i7-3960X. Built on a 32nm process, the new chip features eight hyper-threaded Sandy Bridge cores and 20MB of L3 cache, although in this chip 5MB of L3 and two of the cores are disabled. There's an unlocked multiplier and quad-channel memory, and it runs at a nominal 3.3GHz clock speed. Puget Systems, however, pushed this baby to 4.6GHz, and strapped to the four memory channels is 32GB of Patriot DDR3 in eight 4GB DIMMs, running at 1.5GHz due to a tweaked BCLK.
Handling graphics duties are a pair of eVGA GeForce GTX 580s with Koolance waterblocks attached to them. For the first time, I think I'm actually mildly surprised the video cards themselves haven't been overclocked, especially given how much headroom there can be on the GTX 580 (my own is pushing 880MHz on stock voltage). The stock clock speeds of 772MHz on the core (resulting in 1544MHz on the shaders) and 4GHZ on the 1.5GB of GDDR5 is actually kind of disappointing, especially knowing that all of Puget Systems' suppliers offer factory overclocked cards. Even a mild bump, as is found on eVGA's SuperClocked GTX 580, would've been appreciated. But they're running in SLI and the stupefying amount of CPU power on hand should hopefully alleviate any CPU limitations in gaming.
As I've come to expect from Puget Systems, the SSD is an Intel 510. Other manufacturers will use SSDs by Crucial, Corsair, or OCZ, and I personally run a Corsair in my desktop, but Puget is serious about hardware reliability and thus far Intel is one of the best for SSDs. The 510 is rated for 500MB/sec in read speed and 315MB/sec in write speed, making it more than adequate for our purposes. Mass storage is handled by a Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB drive, and given the current shortages in the industry as a result of the Thailand flooding, you pay dearly for the privilege.
Rouding out the Deluge is an ASUS Xonar DX on audio duty and an ASUS BD-RE drive. While I can definitely vouch firsthand for the quality of the Xonar DX (and it's a popular choice among enthusiasts), I'm keen to point out that it becomes a lot less attractive if you're using optical out instead of analog. I use a pair of Antec Soundscience Rockus speakers with the digital out on my motherboard, and found it to be a bit less of a hassle than keeping my Xonar DX installed.
Of course, one of the big things you're paying for is the 360mm Koolance radiator custom mounted to the top of the P183 V3 enclosure along with the 3/8" tubing used for the liquid-cooling loop that runs between the CPU and pair of GeForce GTX 580s. There's also a reservoir mounted in one of the front 5.25" drive bays. It's a very slick and clean installation.
Application and Futuremark Performance
On the processor side, the Puget Systems Deluge we have on hand is undoubtedly the fastest system we've yet tested. That's a given: Sandy Bridge-E is the fastest desktop processor available, and Puget Systems overclocked it to a speedy 4.6GHz. That's higher than any i7-990X we've ever seen, and combined with the new platform and other enhancements (relative to Bloomfield/Gulftown and X58) that should give the Deluge a comfortable lead. And it does, for the most part.

Generally speaking, the new X79 monster from Puget Systems takes the lead, but what's interesting is the comparison between the Deluge and the DigitalStorm Enix. The Enix is using a quad-core i7-2600K that's been overclocked to 4.7GHz, up 100MHz from the Deluge's i7-3960X's 4.6GHz. In places where SSD performance and graphics performance may also come into play, the Deluge actually has a hard time climbing to the top of the charts...which is where a $7,200 desktop really belongs. Still, particularly in heavily threaded workloads, Sandy Bridge-E can't be beat.

3DMark06 gets by on the increased CPU power, but Vantage and 3DMark11 are happier with the quad-GPU configurations we've tested. That's to be expected, but performance is pretty excellent and in Vantage the Deluge is even able to just barely best AVADirect's i7-990X-based system with a pair of AMD Radeon HD 6990s. Let's see how things pan out with some actual gaming tests.

Gaming Performance
Things should get interesting with gaming performance, but unfortunately we hit a snag when testing the Puget Systems Deluge, and it's a snag that you'll uncover if you start checking out other forums: as of this writing, surround gaming in SLI doesn't work on X79 and Sandy Bridge-E. I'm not sure exactly where to place the blame; it's hard to argue that Sandy Bridge-E didn't feel rushed (especially with how disappointing X79 turned out to be), but shouldn't this also have been something NVIDIA was on top of? It's tough to tell. NVIDIA has confirmed that a driver which enables surround on this platform will be available soon, so at least we know they're working on it, but it really should've been working when Sandy Bridge-E launched. That leaves us with 1080p testing for now, which is something of a joke when you're packing this much hardware.

In most cases on our soon-to-be-retired "high" testbed, we find the systems essentially CPU-limited, producing results that are academic at best. At these settings even the GeForce GTX 460 768MB in the budget WarFactory Sentinel is able to produce a playable experience. Let's see how things work out when we start to shift more of the load to the graphics subsystem.

From the looks of things, our testbed is definitely a bit long in the tooth. Performance is excellent across the board, though, right where it should be, although the extra 100MHz (and perhaps better platform optimizations) on the i7-2600K in the DigitalStorm Enix seems to be paying off in StarCraft II. Hey Blizzard, you think maybe someday you'll release a game that scales beyond two threads? Guess we'll know when the next chapter in the StarCraft II saga comes out.

Build, Heat, and Power Consumption
Cutting to the chase, the Deluge's physical build quality is, as has been the case with all Puget Systems machines we've tested, basically unimpeachable. The modifications made to the Antec P183 enclosure are clean, and the wiring and liquid-cooling routing are top notch. I was actually impressed with the work they did installing a window on the side panel; the P183's inside panels are acoustically padded in a way that might make modification challenging, but you wouldn't know it to look at the Deluge.
I'm also impressed they were able to make a computer with a window on the side and glowing blue fans and tubing not look incredibly gaudy. While I think blue LEDs are starting to feel played out, this looks and feels like a powerful custom machine. It's hard not to be taken aback when you look at it. The thing weighs a ton, but what did you expect?

Where Puget Systems unfortunately falters is the overclock. They don't allow the idle voltage to drop on the i7-3960X, forcing it to constantly run between 1.41 and 1.46 volts. Ignoring for a moment that those are pretty high voltages (and undoubtedly necessary to hit the punishing 4.6GHz overclock), I'm actually disheartened to see a company that's normally a wonderful citizen where power consumption is concerned trip up in this area. I gripe about lazy overclocks pretty frequently, but this is really a situation where they should've known better and done more tuning. Blame the newness of the platform if you want (which is almost certainly a factor), but the result is a processor that's running hotter at idle than it needs to, a cooling system that has to work a little harder than it should, and power consumption that's pretty dire.

Despite the custom liquid-cooling loop with a 360mm radiator and an additional 120mm radiator in the front, the i7-3960X still runs a bit toasty under load, and those idle temperatures are quite poor. Again, though, that's what happens when you dump so much voltage into a processor and don't let it scale down at idle. The Deluge essentially needs the liquid-cooling loop to maintain the overclock. Higher temperatures generally go hand in hand with higher power consumption, and that's precisely what we see.

Given the improvements in SNB-E and X79 relative to Gulftown and X58, we were hoping for a better showing. At idle, only the last generation Nehalem in the DigitalStorm BlackOps and Gulftowns in the CyberPower and AVADirect rigs are worse, and the CyberPower and AVADirect rigs are both powering four GPUs.
Things get even worse under load; only the quad-GPU rigs running Gulftown are able to draw more power than the Puget Deluge. You can argue that DigitalStorm's Enix makes things at least look a little better, but we actually took DigitalStorm to task over the overclock in their system: its voltage idles low but shoots through the roof when the i7-2600K is placed under load.
I'm going to keep dinging boutiques on these overclocks until they start paying attention: "fastest" does not mean "best," especially not when it results in this kind of heat and power consumption. It's one thing to set a speed record for the Futuremark ORB or an overclocking competition, but it's quite another matter to sell a system designed to run daily tasks for the next few years. The Deluge is plenty fast, but long-term it could really benefit from some additional tuning.

Conclusion: Too Much in Every Way
I've spoken with a couple of boutiques about Sandy Bridge-E and the general consensus is a feeling of being underwhelmed. Gulftown this isn't; when Gulftown came out there was a very clear reason to go for it, but Sandy Bridge-E has a harder time making a case for itself when good old fashioned 95W Sandy Bridge has been getting the job done and done well for almost a year now. It's also clear that Sandy Bridge never really suffered in multi-GPU rigs from low bandwidth as a result of splitting the PCI Express 2.0 x16 lanes. I even had one boutique cancel on sending me a Sandy Bridge-E rig in favor of one with an i7-2700K, and that one's due in house soon. I don't blame them.
The fact is, a hex-core processor is overkill for gaming. The system we have on hand from Puget Systems is clearly able to do far more, and would probably rule the school at some heavy duty tasks, but video editors are likely going to want a RAIDed storage system and potentially a Quadro or FireGL GPU, and that takes the Deluge, at least in this configuration, out of contention. Bottom line: the Deluge L2, based on Sandy Bridge-E, is grossly overpriced and the final performance fails to impress. That's before we even take into account the fixed voltage overclock that causes it to put off an uncomfortable amount of heat. It's a beautiful build with a beautiful liquid-cooling system, but I have a very hard time justifying its existence.
Puget Systems does offer a Deluge A2 based on mainstream Sandy Bridge, but you sacrifice the fancy custom liquid-cooling that tags the video cards in favor of a single closed loop CPU cooler: more than a little disappointing. On the flipside, though, the stock Deluge A2 starts $2,000 under the L2, and when you configure it into a fairly comparable build, it winds up being nearly $3,000 less. That's not an insignificant difference. You lose the multi-threaded performance that benefits from having six cores, but it's not like anyone gamers have been crying that a 4GHz+ i7-2600K isn't enough.
Unfortunately, as we noted in our launch article, we think Sandy Bridge-E is more or less a bust for the majority of enthusiasts. If you need the performance a hex-core CPU can offer, there's a good chance you're already running Gulftown anyway, in which case SNB-E doesn't offer a huge upgrade. There are also several areas where the platform as a whole feels rushed (e.g. NVIDIA's Surround Gaming not working, the chipset lacking native support for USB 3.0, and only a coulple native SATA 6.0Gbps ports). As such, the Puget Deluge L2 winds up being a "more money than sense" kind of investment. While I would happily continue to recommend Puget Systems as a boutique and the build quality here is stellar, this Deluge is so far beyond the pale and so excessive in its configuration that I can't in good conscience recommend it.

Source: AnandTech

Zotac Introduces Passively Cooled GTS 450 Zone Edition

2011-11-24T00:11:00.001-08:00

Passively cooled high performance GPUs are quite popular with the HTPC community. NVIDIA GPUs are preferred by many HTPC users because of good software support (LAV CUVID, for example) and the ability to use custom renderers like madVR without losing out on hardware decode acceleration. I have already covered this in detail in a previous piece.

A look at the list of passively cooled GPUs on Newegg reveals that higher end NVIDIA GPUs are not represented well. In fact, we have a number of GT 430 and GT 520 passive models, but only one GT 440 model. On the other hand, AMD's GPUs seem to be quite popular in this space. We have a large number of 6450s. There are two models each of the 6570 and 6670. The 6750, 6770 and even the 6850 have one passively cooled model each.

Zotac is trying to level the playing field here with the introduction of a passively cooled GTS 450.

The GTS 450 Zone Edition comes with a GTS 450 GPU (192 shaders) underclocked to 600 MHz / 1200 MHz. The 128-bit 1 GB DDR3 memory runs at 1333 MHz. Unlike other GTS 450 units, this one will not require a PCI-E power connector. The GTS 450 Zone Edition will have a MSRP of 99 Euros in the EU (with the pricing in the NA market yet to be determined). The unit is currently shipping to retailers and is expected to be out on sale in time for the Christmas shopping season. Given that even the NVIDIA GT 5xx models seem to be looking a bit dated right now, we asked Zotac as to why this cooling mechanism wasn't put on one of the more recent NVIDIA GPUs. It appears that the thermal limitations of passive cooling required underclocking which NVIDIA wouldn't allow on the 500 series. We are sure this will turn out to be better than the GT 430 models we have been recommending for HTPC use so far (particularly if you want to use madVR with 1080i60 streams). Will the lower speed DDR3 memory and core clock speeds hurt it when compared to the passively cooled GT440 (for HTPC purposes) ? We will know as soon as the card hits the market.

Source: AnandTech

The OCZ Octane Review (512GB)

2011-11-24T00:01:00.001-08:00

I have to hand it to OCZ's CEO, Ryan Petersen, I never thought he'd turn the company around in the way that he did. When I first met Ryan around a decade ago, he wanted to know why I wouldn't allow him to advertise OCZ on AnandTech. The company at that time had an extremely bad reputation. It was among the worst I'd ever seen. It was so bad that not only would we not review their products (memory, at the time) but I wouldn't allow OCZ ads to run on the site. Although all advertising on AnandTech is handled through a third party, I still have the ultimate say on what ends up on the site. Back then, OCZ wasn't allowed.

Having just taken over the company, Ryan was eager to know what he had to change to fix OCZ's reputation. I gave him a long list of issues to address. Most of my suggestions were obvious, just to go above and beyond the call of duty in taking care of his customers and our readers. He agreed to do everything on the list, with one exception. I told him that if he really wanted to succeed, he needed to abandon the OCZ name and start fresh. He told me that he didn't believe it was necessary. We agreed to disagree.

I remember leaving that meeting thinking that Ryan didn't stand a chance. Memory companies were a dime a dozen. Differentiation was bordering on impossible. Having to overcome a bad reputation on top of that didn't make things any easier.

Ryan is headstrong. He'll sow a bunch of seed with the hopes of seeing just one blade of grass grow. I consider myself an optimist, but he's a different breed of one. He's had his share of failures over the years. Remember the OCZ brain mouse? The foray into notebook PCs? No one ever succeeded without trying.

Since then OCZ has abandoned memory altogether. It focuses on two product lines: power supplies and SSDs, the latter making up the bulk of its revenue. And earlier this year, OCZ bought one of the first high-performance SSD controller manufacturers - Indilinx.

OCZ's strategy there didn't make sense to me. I knew Ryan wanted to buy SandForce, but SF was too expensive. I asked Ryan why bother with Indilinx if what he really wanted was SandForce? He told me that the best way to drive the price down on SF was to buy Indilinx. It didn't add up until now.

Ryan took a big risk on Indilinx. They had a promising controller in 2009 and he bought up the bulk of what they could make in exchange for exclusivity rights. OCZ made Indilinx, and Indilinx made OCZ. As Indilinx began courting more vendors, OCZ went after SandForce. As soon as a first generation controller was ready, OCZ began shifting its volume from Indilinx to SandForce. More partners stepped up to fill the gap left by OCZ, but by then no one wanted Indilinx - they wanted SandForce based drives.

Simultaneously (perhaps a result?) Indilinx's execution suffered, the stumble was irrecoverable. The value of Indilinx went down, and Ryan got the company for cheap.

I can only assume the strategy was to rinse and repeat. I had heard rumors of OCZ working on its own controller for the past two years. The Indilinx acquisition sped things up considerably. If the Indilinx solution was good enough, OCZ would shift its volume away from SandForce to its own controller. Starve SandForce and swoop back in later to buy them at a more reasonable price. Competition makes for competitive prices on both sides of the fence it seems.

Things of course didn't work out that way. OCZ took a while to get its own controller design done and it was still very dependent on SandForce. At the same time, SandForce had diversified its portfolio. Since the announcement of the Indilinx acquisition, SandForce brought on a number of new partners to sell its drives. Even Kingston signed up. Finally, LSI agreed to purchase SandForce at a number well in the range of what SF was looking to sell for.

The situation didn't play out exactly how Ryan had hoped, I'm sure. But the result actually isn't all that bad. LSI has no intentions of stopping its supply of SandForce controllers to OCZ (or other partners), and all of the work OCZ put into its own controller finally paid off. Personally, it's hard to believe that I'm writing about the company I once advised to completely abandon their brand. Furthermore, I'm not just writing about them, but I'm writing about their first in-house SSD controller. This is the Indilinx Everest:

There's not much we can tell from looking at the silkscreen on the IC, but it's the first all new SSD controller from Indilinx since 2009. Jetstream was its predecessor, but that part never made it to market.

Everest is Indilinx's first 6Gbps controller and its delivery vehicle is the OCZ Octane SSD. You'll see both 6Gbps and 3Gbps versions of the drive, although what's launching today is the 6Gbps part.

The controller features eight NAND channels, with the ability to interleave multiple requests per channel. The capacities and price breakdown are below:

OCZ Octane Lineup
	1TB	512GB	256GB	128GB
NAND Type	25nm Intel Sync MLC	25nm Intel Sync MLC	25nm Intel Sync MLC	25nm Intel Sync MLC
NAND	1TB	512GB	256GB	128GB
User Capacity	953GiB	476GiB	238GiB	119GiB
Random Read Performance	Up to 45K IOPS	Up to 37K IOPS	Up to 37K IOPS	Up to 37K IOPS
Random Write Performance	Up to 19.5K IOPS	Up to 16K IOPS	Up to 12K IOPS	Up to 7.7K IOPS
Sequential Read Performance	Up to 560 MB/s	Up to 535 MB/s	Up to 535 MB/s	Up to 535 MB/s
Sequential Write Performance	Up to 400 MB/s	Up to 400 MB/s	Up to 270 MB/s	Up to 170 MB/s
MSRP	TBD	$879.99	$369.99	$199.99

If these MSRPs are accurate, the Octane will be price competitive with Crucial's m4 and Samsung's SSD 830. I've learned not to trust early MSRPs when it comes to SSDs so we'll have to just wait and see. I think it's safe to say that with OCZ making the controller, we should see lower prices than OCZ's SandForce based drives. Ultimately SSDs are gated by the price of the NAND, which OCZ's Indilinx acquisition does nothing for.
The 6Gbps drive uses Intel 25nm 2-bit-per-cell MLC synchronous NAND, similar to what you'd find in a Vertex 3. OCZ sent us a 512GB version with sixteen NAND packages and four 8GB die per package. We typically don't see any interleaving benefits beyond two die per package, so I'd expect similar performance between the 512GB drive and the 256GB version (despite the significant difference in specs). Spare area is pretty standard at around 7% of the drive's total NAND.

The Octane PCB is interesting to look at. While OCZ has a history of building its own PCBs, this is the first time that we have an SSD where both the PCB and controller are made by OCZ. The controller-side of the Octane PCB is home to eight TI muxes. OCZ wouldn't tell me their purpose, but I suspect it has to do with enabling interleaving across all of the available NAND packages. With only eight channels directly connected to the controller, accessing more than eight packages will inevitably require some pipelining/interleaving. In typical SSDs I assume that the muxes (switches) to juggle multiple NAND die or packages are internal to the controller. My guess is that OCZ moved them external with Everest, although I'm not entirely sure why. It's also possible that this is somehow related to OCZ's ability to deliver a 1TB version of the drive.

All Octane drives will have a 512MB DRAM cache split into two 256MB chips. OCZ's experience in buying DRAM in bulk from its days as a memory vendor likely comes in handy with securing such a large amount of memory per drive. The amount of cache in use will depend on the capacity of the drive. Larger drives have more LBAs to map to NAND pages, and thus require larger page mapping tables.

OCZ is clearly storing user data in the Octane's on-board DRAM (hence the large size). The verdict isn't out on whether or not this is a good idea. Intel prides itself on not storing any user data in DRAM (only in on-chip caches), while SandForce's technology negates the need for any external DRAMs at all. On the other hand, the Marvell based solutions (e.g. Crucial m4) or Samsung's own controller both keep user data in on-board DRAM. Switching between architectures requires a lot of firmware work and as long as performance can be maintained, I see no reason to choose one over the other. There's always the risk of power related data loss, but that's more of a concern for enterprise customers.
OCZ sent along this block diagram of the Everest controller which indicates there's an AES encryption engine on-chip:

I couldn't get a straight answer as to whether data stored to NAND was encrypted in real time on the Octane or not. I'm going to assume that hardware encryption isn't working until I hear otherwise.
The Octane comes with OCZ's usual toolbox for secure erasing/updating firmware. Both of those processes are very simple thanks to the utility. Unfortunately OCZ is still unable to get the toolbox working if you have Intel's RST driver installed, which significantly diminishes the usability of the software.
Testing OCZ's Octane proved flawless in the short period of time I've had with the drive. That's not saying much other than there's no obvious firmware issues with the drive. The Octane will ship with firmware revision 1315, which is the same firmware revision I tested with.

The Test

CPU	Intel Core i7 2600K running at 3.4GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) - for AT SB 2011, AS SSD & ATTO
Motherboard:	Intel DH67BL Motherboard
Chipset:	Intel H67
Chipset Drivers:	Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2
Memory:	Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1333 2 x 2GB (7-7-7-20)
Video Card:	eVGA GeForce GTX 285
Video Drivers:	NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit
Desktop Resolution:	1920 x 1200
OS:	Windows 7 x64

Random Read/Write Speed

The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.
Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time. We use both standard pseudo randomly generated data for each write as well as fully random data to show you both the maximum and minimum performance offered by SandForce based drives in these tests. The average performance of SF drives will likely be somewhere in between the two values for each drive you see in the graphs. For an understanding of why this matters, read our original SandForce article.

Random read performance is very good on the Octane, matching the Samsung SSD 830 and the Intel SSD 320. Random write performance is no where near as fast as the Samsung, Crucial or SF-2281 based drives, but as we've seen in the past this can be enough performance for a desktop workload.

Many of you have asked for random write performance at higher queue depths. What I have below is our 4KB random write test performed at a queue depth of 32 instead of 3. While the vast majority of desktop usage models experience queue depths of 0 - 5, higher depths are possible in heavy I/O (and multi-user) workloads:

Random write performance at higher queue depths doesn't scale nearly as well as the SandForce based drives. This doesn't really matter for desktop users, but I am curious to see how OCZ will position Everest in the enterprise space against SandForce. Perhaps that's where OCZ will focus its SandForce efforts instead and leave the consumer market to Indilinx.

Sequential Read/Write Speed

To measure sequential performance I ran a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.

Sequential read and write performance is competitive, but not class leading. The Octane effectively performs like a Crucial m4 here, which isn't bad considering the m4 is a far more mature platform.

AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance

The AS-SSD sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers.

I'm not entirely sure why the Octane does so well here when it's unable to deliver these sorts of numbers in Iometer. The big takeaway is that performance doesn't suffer when you throw incompressible data at the controller.

AnandTech Storage Bench 2011

Last year we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. I assembled the traces myself out of frustration with the majority of what we have today in terms of SSD benchmarks.
Although the AnandTech Storage Bench tests did a good job of characterizing SSD performance, they weren't stressful enough. All of the tests performed less than 10GB of reads/writes and typically involved only 4GB of writes specifically. That's not even enough exceed the spare area on most SSDs. Most canned SSD benchmarks don't even come close to writing a single gigabyte of data, but that doesn't mean that simply writing 4GB is acceptable.
Originally I kept the benchmarks short enough that they wouldn't be a burden to run (~30 minutes) but long enough that they were representative of what a power user might do with their system.
Not too long ago I tweeted that I had created what I referred to as the Mother of All SSD Benchmarks (MOASB). Rather than only writing 4GB of data to the drive, this benchmark writes 106.32GB. It's the load you'd put on a drive after nearly two weeks of constant usage. And it takes a *long* time to run.
1) The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on the times when your I/O activity is the highest. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. My thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives.
2) I tried to cover as many bases as possible with the software I incorporated into this test. There's a lot of photo editing in Photoshop, HTML editing in Dreamweaver, web browsing, game playing/level loading (Starcraft II & WoW are both a part of the test) as well as general use stuff (application installing, virus scanning). I included a large amount of email downloading, document creation and editing as well. To top it all off I even use Visual Studio 2008 to build Chromium during the test.
The test has 2,168,893 read operations and 1,783,447 write operations. The IO breakdown is as follows:

AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload IO Breakdown
IO Size	% of Total
4KB	28%
16KB	10%
32KB	10%
64KB	4%

Only 42% of all operations are sequential, the rest range from pseudo to fully random (with most falling in the pseudo-random category). Average queue depth is 4.625 IOs, with 59% of operations taking place in an IO queue of 1.
Many of you have asked for a better way to really characterize performance. Simply looking at IOPS doesn't really say much. As a result I'm going to be presenting Storage Bench 2011 data in a slightly different way. We'll have performance represented as Average MB/s, with higher numbers being better. At the same time I'll be reporting how long the SSD was busy while running this test. These disk busy graphs will show you exactly how much time was shaved off by using a faster drive vs. a slower one during the course of this test. Finally, I will also break out performance into reads, writes and combined. The reason I do this is to help balance out the fact that this test is unusually write intensive, which can often hide the benefits of a drive with good read performance.
There's also a new light workload for 2011. This is a far more reasonable, typical every day use case benchmark. Lots of web browsing, photo editing (but with a greater focus on photo consumption), video playback as well as some application installs and gaming. This test isn't nearly as write intensive as the MOASB but it's still multiple times more write intensive than what we were running last year.
As always I don't believe that these two benchmarks alone are enough to characterize the performance of a drive, but hopefully along with the rest of our tests they will help provide a better idea.
The testbed for Storage Bench 2011 has changed as well. We're now using a Sandy Bridge platform with full 6Gbps support for these tests.

AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload

We'll start out by looking at average data rate throughout our new heavy workload test:

When put to the test the Octane does not disappoint. It's within a couple MB/s of the SF-2281 based Vertex 3, and effectively one of the fastest 6Gbps drives on the market today. I included the old Indilinx Barefoot based Corsair Nova V128 to show just how far Indilinx has come here.

The next three charts just represent the same data, but in a different manner. Instead of looking at average data rate, we're looking at how long the disk was busy for during this entire test. Note that disk busy time excludes any and all idles, this is just how long the SSD was busy doing something:

AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload

Our new light workload actually has more write operations than read operations. The split is as follows: 372,630 reads and 459,709 writes. The relatively close read/write ratio does better mimic a typical light workload (although even lighter workloads would be far more read centric).
The I/O breakdown is similar to the heavy workload at small IOs, however you'll notice that there are far fewer large IO transfers:

AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload IO Breakdown
IO Size	% of Total
4KB	27%
16KB	8%
32KB	6%
64KB	5%

Once again, in our real-world tests the Octane is just as good as the Vertex 3. If OCZ can make this thing super reliable, I can see it being a great option.

Performance Over Time & TRIM

Testing TRIM functionality is important because it gives us insight into the drive's garbage collection algorithms. OCZ insists the Octane has idle time garbage collection, a remnant of the original Indilinx drives, however in my testing I could not get the idle GC to do anything once I put the drive into a highly fragmented state. Let's start at the beginning though. The easiest way to ensure real time garbage collection is working is to fill the drive with data and then write sequentially across the drive. All LBAs will have data in them and any additional writes will force the controller to allocate from the drive's pool of spare area. This path shouldn't have any bottlenecks in it; the process should be seamless. As we've already seen from our Iometer numbers, sequential write performance at low queue depths is around 280MB/s. A quick HD Tach pass of a completely full drive gives us the same result:

The Octane works as expected here, but now what happens if we subject the drive to a ton of 4KB random writes? Unfortunately this is where the Octane falls short. If we just throw a few minutes of random writes, constrained to a small LBA range, at the Octane its performance hardly varies:

However once the Octane passes a threshold of fragmentation, the performance drop is considerable. Our standard test involves a 20 minute, 4KB random write across all LBAs at a queue depth of 32. A sequential write pass across the drive afterwards took place at between 2 and 7MB/s. Since our test drive was a 512GB model, there simply wasn't enough time to conduct a full pass in the course of preparing this review. Instead I did a shorter test with HD Tach to give you some indication of what happens to the Octane under a highy random load without TRIM:

Performance drops considerably. A single TRIM pass restores performance to new. I did have one TRIM test where only the latter half of the drive seemed to TRIM but I couldn't get the same result more than once. Now the question is, what does all of this mean?
If you have TRIM enabled on a desktop platform with a client (read: non-server) workload, none of this should matter to you. TRIM works and there doesn't appear to be any weird lag or bottlenecks in the GC path. If you don't have TRIM enabled (read: OS X) with a client workload, this could warrant a pass. The only reason I'm hesitant to recommend the Octane for use with a TRIM-less OS X installation is because I'm not entirely sure the drive will recover from this ultra low performance state without TRIM. Sequential writing alone may not be enough to adequately restore the Octane's performance. Normally idle GC would be enough, but it seems as if things get slow enough the drive's idle GC can't do much. I suspect all of this is stuff that OCZ can tweak via firmware, but I need more time with the drive to really be certain.
Finally if you're deploying a server with lots of random writes, the Octane isn't for you. OCZ will eventually release an Everest based drive for the enterprise, but the Octane is not that drive.

Power Consumption

As we saw in our Samsung SSD 830 review, power consumption of these 512GB drives can be quite high. The Octane is no exception. At idle the Octane uses a little less power than the 830, but still more than any of the other smaller drives we have:

Under load the Octane is competitive with sequential write power draw (likely due to its suboptimal sequential write speed in Iometer), but during heavy random writes the drive consumes noticeably more power. We can't draw many conclusions here compared to drives at other capacities, but at least compared to the Samsung SSD 830 the Octane draws less power.

Final Words

The Indilinx Everest is a surprisingly competent controller. When OCZ first mentioned its work on the controller to me I wrote it off as yet another low performing alternative that wasn't worth consideration. Based on its performance in our Storage Bench tests, I'd say the OCZ Octane is easily able to hold its own against SandForce based drives. The obvious benefit is you get solid performance regardless of the type of data you're moving around - everything from text to compressed movies can move at the same rate. The benefit is also a downside. SandForce drives tend to have very good average write amplification (0.60 - 0.70) thanks to their real time compression/dedupe of commonly used files. The result is relatively consistent performance over time, something that more traditional SSDs can't offer nearly as well. With TRIM enabled this should be a moot point, but it's still an advantage that no one else can duplicate without SandForce's technology.
Write amplification is a concern, although I suspect it'll only be a problem for enterprise workloads. The bigger issue is that to address these limitations, OCZ will likely have to do a significant redesign of the Octane's firmware architecture. OCZ did let me know that an even faster Octane H drive was due out in the not-too-distant future. It's possible that the Octane H may address my concerns here. I'll find out in due time.

It's clear that the Octane is a powerful competitor, what matters now is its reliability. In the past OCZ has been at the mercy of third party controller makers to fix bugs in their firmware, but now with Indilinx in house I wonder how things will change. I believe OCZ needs a good 12 months of an Intel or Samsung-like track record to really build confidence in its products. The brand definitely took a hit with all of the SandForce BSOD issues (and the wild goose chase interim "solutions" to the problem). OCZ has the opportunity to start fresh with Octane and there can be no finger pointing this time. The controller, firmware and drive are all produced in house. I don't expect the drive to be perfect in every system, but it had better be very close to it.
The good news is that if OCZ is able to deliver reliable and compatible firmware, the Octane is worth owning. It performs at the top of its class, and it's priced more aggressively than OCZ's SandForce based drives. My standard recommendation for any new SSD still applies: wait and see. Let others (myself included, the Octane will be going into a work machine starting today) be the beta testers. If the waters look safe, only then should you jump in.

Source: AnandTech

Toshiba Qosmio F755-3D290: Glasses-Free 3D?

2011-11-23T23:51:00.001-08:00

Introducing the Toshiba Qosmio F755-3D290
Way back in the dark ages of CES 2011, we were able to lay hands on and play with some interesting new technology from Toshiba. They had a prototype notebook on hand that was capable of glasses-free 3D similar to the Nintendo 3DS, but with a bigger screen and the ability to track head movement and adjust viewing angles accordingly. Yet the release of this 3D notebook has been an unusually quiet one. Is the 15-inch Qosmio F755 a sound design, or is there a reason why it's been unceremoniously dropped into the marketplace?

The kind of glasses-free 3D that Toshiba employs in the Qosmio F755-3D290 has thus far been mostly confined to handhelds, like the odd 3D smartphone or the aforementioned Nintendo 3DS. Toshiba even includes a reasonably impressive piece of head-tracking technology that will shift the 3D viewing angle as long as the webcam can see you, at least once you've configured it. So why did Toshiba more or less sneak this one onto the market?

Toshiba Qosmio F755-3D290 Specifications
Processor	Intel Core i7-2630QM (4x2GHz + HTT, Turbo to 2.9GHz, 32nm, 6MB L3, 45W)
Chipset	Intel HM65
Memory	1x2GB Samsung DDR3-1333 and 1x4GB Samsung DDR3-1333 (Max 2x4GB)
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M 1GB DDR3 (96 CUDA cores, 672MHz/1344MHz/1.8GHz core/shader/memory clocks)
Display	15.6" LED Glossy 16:9 1080p, capable of 720p glasses-free 3D TOS508F
Hard Drive(s)	750GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K750 5400-RPM SATA-II HDD
Optical Drive	Matshita BD-RE (UJ240ES)
Networking	Realtek PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Atheros AR9002WB-1NG 802.11b/g/n Bluetooth 3.0
Audio	Realtek ALC272 HD Audio Stereo speakers Mic and headphone jacks
Battery	6-Cell, 11.1V, 48Wh
Front Side	SD/MS/xD card reader
Right Side	Mic and headphone jacks 2x USB 2.0 Optical drive
Left Side	VGA Exhaust vent USB 2.0 USB 3.0 HDMI
Back Side	Kensington lock Ethernet jack AC adaptor
Operating System	Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
Dimensions	15.3" x 10.5" x 1.5" (WxDxH)
Weight	7.5 lbs.
Extras	1.3MP webcam Keyboard with 10-key SD card reader USB 3.0 Glasses-free 3D
Warranty	1-year standard warranty
Pricing	Starting at $1,299 Our model: $1,699

You'll forgive me for my unprofessionalism, but the best word I can think of for the Toshiba Qosmio F755's configuration is "wonky." When I reviewed Toshiba's all-in-one, the DX735, I praised Toshiba for being able to produce a balanced system configuration that was well-suited to its intended purpose, but the F755 in any of its three shipping configurations is the polar opposite.
The bright spot of the F755 is the Intel Core i7-2630QM. The i7-2630QM and its successor the i7-2670QM are, in my opinion, the price/performance/power sweet spot of the mobile market right now. The F755-3D290 configuration employs the i7-2630QM, which is a fast quad-core processor with Hyper-Threading, able to turbo up and provide plenty of juice on two cores, but also capable of being fairly frugal with power consumption. Best of all, the i7-2630QM is reasonably inexpensive and shows up in notebooks across the board. OEMs like it, and I certainly wouldn't ever be unhappy with it.
Unfortunately things wind up being pretty screwy everywhere else. Why just 6GB of DDR3 instead of an even 8GB, especially with prices where they are? Why the dismally slow 5400-RPM hard drive, borderline unforgivable in a $1,700 laptop? Why Atheros's slow wireless solution instead of one of Intel's more capable ones--or at least give us something with support for two spatial streams and 5GHz radios? All this, and then a Blu-ray rewriteable drive? A Blu-ray reader would've sufficed.
Users planning on enjoying 3D Vision with the Qosmio F755 are going to be disappointed on two fronts. The first is the anemic NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M. The 540M is fine for gaming at 1366x768 without 3D, but 3D Vision is very demanding on graphics hardware and the 540M just isn't going to cut it. Fortunately that doesn't matter, because while Toshiba advertises 3D Vision support for the F755, it just plain doesn't work. I actually checked other reviews and they all ran into the same problem; when you click "Enable 3D Vision" on the laptop, it does nothing. I've read that NVIDIA and Toshiba are working together on a 3D Vision driver for the F755, but it hasn't materialized yet...three months after the laptop's release.
Finally, to add insult to injury, the F755 is not Optimus enabled. No intelligent switching between the Sandy Bridge IGP and the GeForce GT 540M, and battery life suffers tremendously as a result. Small wonder the notebook arrived with little fanfare.

A Design Out of Time
Toshiba's Qosmio F755 chassis occupies a strange halfway point between last generation's 18-inch behemoth and the sleeker, modern 17-inch X775. While the F755 is smaller than either, its style is like a slightly muted version of its predecessor yet missing some of the aspects of the X775 that make it more appealing than previous Qosmio notebooks.
The F755 continues Toshiba's ancient commitment to glossy plastic everywhere, but the patterned style used on the lid and palm rest at least helps to shore up some of the major problems of the material. I found the Qomsio F755 to be a lot better about not picking up fingerprints than many of the other glossy notebooks I've tested. The red lid and reddish trim around the body of the notebook is actually fairly attractive, and I like the style of the hinge and the gentle slope upward, allowing Toshiba's engineers to use the back of the notebook for a couple of ports.

What I'm really not a fan of is Toshiba's glossy tile keyboard. While the one used on the F755 is actually reasonably comfortable to use, it's still a major step back from the chiclet keys used in the X775 and most of Toshiba's modern notebooks. The action in the individual keys is good, though, and Toshiba seems to be one of the only manufacturers that's putting real, intelligent thought into keyboard layouts on 15.6" notebooks. Every time I see a notebook at 13.3" or bigger that doesn't have dedicated document navigation keys, I die a little inside, so Toshiba's commitment at a time when other manufacturers' keyboards are getting slimmer and slimmer is much appreciated. I can't seriously be the only person in the world who uses those keys with regularity.
The touchpad is a part of the palm rest (which always looks chintzy to me), but the texture is different and I found it easy enough to use that I never connected an external mouse while I was testing the F755 (except when gaming). The glossy silver plastic used for the buttons picks up fingerprints horribly, though. Truth be told I like the overall aesthetic of the F755 a bit more than many of Toshiba's other notebooks, particularly the use of white LEDs as a tertiary color, and I'm a fan of the style of hinge Toshiba uses here. Yet the overreliance on glossy plastic still bothers me, and the tile keyboard was a horrendous idea that never should've seen the mileage it did. It's not as bad as Acer's old floating island keyboard (you can't imagine how happy I am to see they're migrating away from that disasterpiece), but it was never a good idea and the notion that glossy keys are "premium" is insane. Premium keys are supposed to work better than regular ones, not worse.

Application and Futuremark Performance
We've seen the Intel Core i7-2630QM and NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M paired together enough times that performance is going to be fairly predictable, but unfortunately Toshiba drops the ball hardcore by including a dismally slow 5,400-RPM hard drive, inexcusable on any notebook north of a grand. The result is, as you'll see, a notebook that falls a bit behind competing systems with similar configurations, particularly in PCMark.

Well, that's too bad. You can see the units that were equipped with SSDs fare better at the storage benchmark, but really, the F755's slow hard drive causes it to come in dead last out of this grouping. In a crowd of similarly-configured notebooks, the F755 puts in a weak showing.

PCMark Vantage seems to be a bit more generous with the F755, giving it a score that hangs out nicely in the middle of the road.

I've always been fond of how consistent Cinebench can be; it's actually one of my favorite benchmarks, and I like having both R10 and R11.5 here because R10 feels more absolute in terms of comparative performance while R11.5 seems better at teasing out minor differences in configurations. While it's not any great difference, the F755 is measurably, consistently slower than other i7-2630QM-equipped notebooks.

The 3DMarks are also very consistent across the review units. The GT 540M-equipped notebooks all pretty much line up, with 3DMark06 being the only odd man out, boasting a substantially higher score than the others. This should hopefully offer some confirmation that NVIDIA's Optimus is almost all upside.

Gaming Performance
Without 3D Vision being functional on the Toshiba Qosmio F755, we're reduced to the basics. I elected not to run any of our tests at the notebook's native 1080p resolution because, frankly, the GeForce GT 540M has consistently proven not to be powerful enough to handle it. You'll see it even struggles in our "High" benchmark when we jack up the resolution to 1600x900, high enough that the limited memory bandwidth starts to be a real burden.

In our medium suite, the F755 is able to at least put in a decent showing, with only the Acer TimelineX 3830TG having trouble keeping pace (due to both the i5-2410M and the fact that the notebook throttles the processor pretty heavily). These are really the settings the GT 540M belongs at. Note how rarely the 540M breaks 60fps even at these settings, basically the minimum for a decent 3D Vision experience. Even if Toshiba and NVIDIA do get it working on the F755, it's likely not to be very useful.

Bump the settings up to "High" and things take a turn. Now the GT 540M has a much harder time keeping up, and it's clear it wasn't never meant to run at a resolution this high, let alone the F755's native 1080p. It's just not powerful enough; the GTX 560M is a far better solution and still able to fit into a 15.6" chassis, even though it adds a bit of bulk.

Battery, Noise, and Heat
Where the Toshiba Qosmio F755 unfortunately crashes and burns is in battery life. I was stunned at how fast I was able to put together this review; normally our battery tests wind up taking the lion's share of the testing period, but the F755 depletes its battery alarmingly quickly. Take a look:

The F755 is at the bottom of the heap every time, performing worse than both GTX 460M-equipped notebooks even after relative battery life is taken into account. It stands to reason the complex screen probably tacks a decent amount of power consumption on top of everything, but the bottom line is that this notebook just isn't capable of running off of the mains for any kind of reasonable time. I wonder if Optimus would've helped, but I guess we'll never know.
Thankfully, Toshiba continues to produce notebooks that don't generate a lot of heat or noise. In the majority of Toshiba notebooks I've tested, heat and noise were never a problem, and the F755 continues that trend. The fan never comes on particularly loudly, and during testing the whole unit never felt very warm.

As you can see, idle and load temperatures are for the most part excellent across the board. The GT 540M never gets particularly hot (at least, comparatively speaking), and it's nice to see an i7 hover in the mid-70s rather than going past 80C in a notebook. Meanwhile, the slow-spinning Hitachi hard drive stays remarkably frosty.

The Screen Isn't Ready for Prime Time
Toshiba's Qosmio F755 sports a surprisingly decent screen if you ignore the 3D capability. While running in 2D mode it offers a full 1920x1080 resolution with far superior viewing angles to the traditional TN panel, though it does have a slightly unusual but noticeable texture as a result of also offering the 1366x768 3D mode. I couldn't really capture the texture in photography (and obviously the 3D is impossible to capture that way) so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Color gamut and accuracy aren't the best, but contrast is up there, and honestly this is probably one of the best screens I've seen on any Toshiba notebook, a testament both to its quality and unfortunately to how frequently Toshiba tends to cheap out on this particular component. I'm still happy to see a 1080p screen on a 15.6" laptop.
Viewing angles are also remarkably good, although when looking at the screen dead on it doesn't feel entirely uniform. It does the traditional washing out when looked at from below, identifying it as a TN panel, but from above and from the sides it's still of better quality than most.
Where things get foggy is the 3D support. Unfortunately Toshiba offers next to nothing as far as 3D support or software in the Qosmio F755; with 3D Vision nonfunctional, the best way I could really test the 3D functionality was by using the configuration software and by playing back a DVD and using the notebook's software to "3D" it. So I popped in my DVD of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film with excellent cinematography (Jacques Haitkin's understanding of light and shadow is brilliant) and use of depth. The real-time 3D conversion was...troubled. Part of the problem is that I have difficulty with 3D in general (even NVIDIA's excellent 3D Vision produces ghosting artifacts for me), but the screen is frankly just blurry.
Honestly I think the 3D is a cute gimmick on the F755 but basically utterly impractical. It didn't enhance my viewing of Nightmare, I just left the experience with sore eyes and remembering how much I love the soundtrack. Neither of these speak well for the screen or the experience.

Conclusion: A Clear Miss
Reviewing Toshiba's Qosmio F755-3D290 was unfortunately both very easy and very difficult to do. It's easy for anyone to gripe about something and as a reviewer I take my job seriously; you're going to be a lot more miffed about an unpleasant surprise with your new purchase than a pleasant one. The fact remains, though, that I do have to go back and deal with a product's reps and PR, and I have to explain to them why that product reviewed poorly. I'm also personally a fan of Toshiba's products; Toshiba makes good hardware for people on a budget and I've always been happy with that, even failing my complaints over their stylistic decisions.
The problem is that the Qosmio F755 isn't remotely improved from when I saw the prototype back in January. The demonstration there looked promising, but with the final product in hand all I have to show for my time is mediocre 2D-to-3D video conversion, 3D Vision that appears in software but doesn't actually work, and 3D calibration software written in Engrish. Toshiba makes matters worse by offering the F755 with a baffling hardware configuration. It even goes downhill from there, with the dire battery life. Unfortunately, there's just more to dislike about the F755 than there is to like.
Toshiba's base model is $1,299 and the only loss is on the CPU, downgrading to an i5-2410M. At that price it's still not acceptable and worlds away from alternatives from Dell or Compal. You're paying for the glasses-free 3D screen, but the problem is that the 3D is busted from the factory and barely works. In exchange, you sacrifice battery life, mobility, and overall screen and build quality, and that's before taking the price tag into account. If the 3D at least worked, you could probably make a case for that novelty, but it doesn't and I don't think it's going to be fixed anytime soon.
As I said, I generally love working with Toshiba's hardware because I can usually make a case for it. The Qosmio F755, unfortunately, feels misconceived from top to bottom. The screen technology doesn't appear to be ready for the mass market, at least not from this encounter, and the software underlying it needed a lot more time and polish. With very little to recommend it over competing 15.6" notebooks, I have no choice but to suggest you avoid the F755. Hopefully Toshiba can take another crack at the technology sometime in the future, but right now it's not ready for the marketplace and most definitely not worth opening up your wallet.

Source: AnandTech

Understanding Wireless Storage: Kingston Wi-Drive and Seagate GoFlex Satellite

2011-11-21T22:11:00.001-08:00

Hypothetical situation here: let’s say you bought an iPhone or iPad, but cheaped out and got a 16GB model. You’ve got around 10GB worth of music, a few gigs in photos and applications, and you lose the rest to formatting and the OS itself. Basically, you’re maxed on capacity. Day-to-day, this isn’t a huge issue, but let’s say you’re going on vacation and want to have some movies to watch so that you can avoid the customary in-flight chick flick [or replace with whatever type of movies you dislike]. HD movies aren’t storage friendly, they take a solid chunk of storage space, and you don’t want gut your portable music library for the sake of watching a couple of decent movies on the plane. So what do you do?
Fret not, there is now a solution to that dilemma by way of Kingston and Seagate, among others. Both have recently launched wireless storage devices, streaming your media files to up to three mobile devices via WiFi. Now, both of these are non-ideal solutions to a relatively marginal problem, but that’s to be expected in any newly conceived market. With the shift to cloud-based data and media streaming for mobile devices, there is going to be a gradual de-emphasizing of device storage. We’re already seeing that in a big way with Google’s Cloud OS and Apple’s iCloud service, so wireless storage technologies are going to play an important role in handling media streaming for the future. The two devices we’re looking at today are pricey and aren’t perfect by any means, but they point the way to what the future of local media storage might look like.

Device Hardware

Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite builds off the storage giant’s expertise in hard drives by creating a wireless media streamer based on a portable hard drive. It looks like a larger version of the company’s GoFlex hard drives, albeit with a power switch and an AC adapter input port, and ships in a 500GB configuration with a 5400RPM 2.5" drive inside. Compared to the standard 500GB GoFlex drive, the Satellite is 50% thicker and adds about a half inch to the length and a quarter inch to the width. Interestingly, we noticed a 10mm difference between the listed length dimension and what I measured (130mm versus the 120mm figure quoted in the specsheet). Either way, it’s bigger than the typical 2.5” external drive, but the Satellite shares the same enclosure as the as the 1TB and 1.5TB GoFlex drives, which have thicker hard drives than their lower-capacity brethren.

The additional space goes towards the wireless card, a small web server, and a 2800 mAh battery, definitely a worthwhile trade-off for the minor loss in portability. The main processor is an embedded TI Sitara microprocessor, part of the AM37xx line. It’s the general-purpose computing version of the OMAP 35xx SoCs we got very familiar with on the smartphone side. This particular one is the AM3703, based around a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 core and the NEON SIMD co-processor. Unlike the OMAP 3s and the higher end AM3s, the AM3703 doesn’t have an image/video/audio accelerator or 2D/3D graphics acceleration onboard. However, since the device doesn’t have a display it doesn’t need graphics acceleration. In addition to the TI MPU, there’s 128MB of Samsung Mobile DDR and a WLAN module made by AzureWave. The AW-NH630 in the GoFlex Satellite is a chip targeted towards mobile devices and PMPs, and supports 802.11b/g/n at 2.4GHz frequencies.

The top of the drive is finished in a shiny piano black, with just a Seagate logo and status LEDs for power and wireless connection interrupting the clean casing. At some point, somebody will realize that piano black shows fingerprints like, well, a piano, and then they’ll start making devices out of matte finish plastic again. Until that day comes, I will continue harping on about devices that double as fingerprint magnets. The main body of the device is made up of a matte silver plastic band, with the power button and AC input on the right and left sides respectively. The bottom is matte black, with FCC stickers and four small rubberized feet, underneath which live the screws holding the entire thing together. The back of the drive has an exposed SATA connection, to which a USB 2.0/3.0 adapter is fitted. It adds another half inch to the length to the entire setup. (If you’re playing along at home, we’re up to 5.28” in total, not including the USB cable itself.) The adapter is interesting in that it can be used to plug any SATA drive into a USB port, which is nice to have if you don’t have any SATA-to-USB bridges floating around.

Compared to the Seagate, Kingston’s Wi-Drive looks impossibly svelte. Kingston’s expertise, in contrast to Seagate, lies in memory products. As such, the Wi-Drive is a flash-based wireless storage device offered in 16GB and 32GB flavours. Regardless of how much NAND you spring for, you get a very sleek and stylish package that almost looks like a repurposed iPhone 3G.

I’m serious about that, actually. The organic G2 and G3 curvatures are all there, similar to the previous-generation iPhone body, rendered in the same glossy black plastic with a very familiar looking silver band going around the edge. Set face down, it’s not hard to confuse the two—replace the Apple with the Kingston logo and the iPhone text at the bottom with “Wi-Drive” and you’re basically in the same place. Even the dimensions read similarly: 121.5mm x 61.8mm x 9.8mm for the Wi-Drive, 115.5mm x 62.1mm x 12.3mm for the iPhone 3G/S. It’s actually kind of awesome how well the design language fits with Apple’s last generation devices. (Granted, Apple’s current industrial design represents a clean break from the 3G and 3GS days, but still.)
Both front and back are glossy black plastic and feature curved surfaces, joined by a matte silver band around the center. The band contains the mini-USB port at the top and the tiny green LED power button on the right side. Other than that, there’s an LED wireless status indicator on the front, the FCC sticker on the bottom, and that’s literally all there is to it. It’s about as clean, simple, and elegant as you could make a device like this. My complaint about glossy plastic notwithstanding (seriously guys...come on), I really like the Wi-Drive hardware. It’s basically thin and light enough to be tossed anywhere—jacket, jeans pocket, CD compartment in a backpack, etc.—without any problem at all. It weighs in at a hair under 3 ounces, which is basically nothing. If you want nitpicks, the only one concern I have is with the mini-USB port—a micro-USB port would have been lower profile, so there wouldn’t have needed to be as large of a bump to accommodate it. Also, this is the only handheld device I’ve had come with a mini-USB connection in years, so it was a weird throwback to see anything other than micro-USB. But that’s about the only thing I’d change with the hardware. Well, that and potentially more storage would be useful, as even 32GB may not be enough for certain people.

Internally, we find Realtek’s RTL8188RE single-chip PCI-E WLAN controller, with support for single band wireless connectivity, essentially a bunch of words that says it supports 802.11b/g/n at 2.4GHz. Also on the board is the RTL8196C, a wireless gateway controller with an embedded Lexra 32-bit RISC CPU. Based on the block diagram submitted to the FCC, it looks like the RTL8196C acts as the main microprocessor, with the WLAN chip, NAND modules, and port interfaces all connected to it. Paired together, the RTL8196C and RTL8188RE are a 150Mbps wireless access point/router with a built-in 5-port switch and dynamic power-saving and power-down modes, so idle power consumption should be extremely low when there is no network traffic.

The Kingston’s flash-based storage makes it a significantly more portable choice than the Seagate, but the Seagate has significantly more storage capacity and more versatility when it comes to playback options. While the Kingston is limited to iOS devices at present, Seagate has apps out for both iOS and Android in addition to in-browser streaming to anything that has a WiFi connection. But the real question is this: how well does any of this actually work?
Kingston's iOS Wi-Drive App
Kingston keeps things simple - there’s an app for iOS devices, and that’s it. If you weren’t clued in by the industrial design and packaging, the Wi-Drive is a very iDevice-centric accessory. Specifically, if you don’t have an iDevice, you have no use for it right now. An Android application was promised at launch, but it has yet to materialize.

The setup process is pretty simple. Press and hold the power button to turn it on, wait 15 seconds for it to boot up, then go into your iDevice’s wireless network page and connect to “Wi-Drive”. Then go to the Wi-Drive app, wait for the content to load, and away you go. The menu tree is pretty intuitive, with standard folder traversal as well as filter options for photos, videos, and music.

The settings menu is pretty poorly designed from a UI standpoint, but it gets the job done. You can change the device name (the SSID of the network), whether the SSID is broadcast, the wireless channel, and your choice of WPA or WEP security. There’s also a wireless network passthrough—you can connect to your access point of choice through the network connections menu. After a reboot of the Wi-Drive, you should have a working internet connection. In theory, at least.

In practice, I had some definite issues getting it working; after trying three different wireless networks (mine, my neighbors, and a review device on wireless hotspot), I basically gave up on the feature. I then disabled the security on the wireless hotspot and finally got it working, but that's a pretty big flaw for wireless networking. Once enabled, the passthrough mode was faster than I expected, offering up speeds between 60-80% of the network that was being passed through, varying based on distance and line of sight from the network. The main hit was the latency, which more than doubled.

Left: Speed of my HSPA+ WiFi hotspot. Right: Speed of the same WiFi hotspot, connected through the Kingston Wi-Drive.

Seagate's Satellite iOS, Android, and Browser Apps
Seagate gives you more options than Kingston when it comes to connections—the Satellite has a webserver built in that you can connect to from any device that has a browser. Turn the Satellite on, wait for it to show up in the list of available networks, and connect. This is standard stuff, and it doesn’t matter what device you’re using.

Now if you’re trying to connect from a PC or Mac, just open up a browser window, enter any random URL, and it’ll redirect to the GoFlex Satellite webapp (url: www.goflexsatellite.com). You get a GUI with the file system, as well as filtering files by type—videos, photos, music, and documents. There’s also a "Getting Started" page that contains all the documentation and help files, as well as a settings menu. Inside the settings page, you can reboot or shutdown the device, change the SSID, enable WPA security, or reset the settings to default.

The iPad app is pretty similar to the webapp, except with the additional option to play back local content; the Android app looks identical to its iOS counterpart in every way. It’s nice to have a unified UI over all three platforms; it keeps the user experience consistent and overall Seagate has done a good job to make this feel like a cohesive software platform.

Unfortunately, all three options don't give you the same experience when it comes to playing back media. Photos and music are pretty much old hat, and all three platforms handle them with ease. When it comes to video playback, things start to diverge. The iOS app is by far the most seamless, playing every video the iPad supports with no problem regardless of bitrate or file size. The Honeycomb app works similarly in terms of file compatibility, but it does some weird things with the playback—the media player will sometimes forget it’s streaming from a webserver and try to download the file. That's definitely not what I had in mind. The browser player is better than I expected, but it struggles with higher bitrate HD movies and stuff encoded in x264—and by struggles, I mean they flat out refused to play, so that wasn’t useful. Overall, the in-browser webapp works pretty well as long as you make sure the files you’re trying to play are compatible first.

Storage and Wireless Performance
To test performance, I hooked both drives up to a PC and used HD Tune to get an idea of read performance and access time. The Kingston is USB 2.0 only and ends up performing roughly around the same level as the average USB flash drive. Access times are, as expected, significantly faster than the hard drive-based Seagate, but the NAND here is of the pretty low performance variety. Admittedly, this makes sense—cost and power consumption are far more important than outright speed in this type of application.

The Seagate has a SATA-to-USB 3.0 bridge, so it’s capable of significantly faster I/O speeds than the Wi-Drive. In the HD Tune graph over USB 2.0, we can see it’s basically pegged at the bandwidth limit of the interface (only around 25MB/s in this case, even though USB 2.0 can theoretically hit over 50MB/s). Switch to USB 3.0 and we get transfer rates typical of 5400RPM laptop drives.

GoFlex Satellite, USB 2.0

GoFlex Satellite, USB 3.0

Both drives are more than fast enough to stream high bitrate 720p video over 2.4GHz 802.11g/n, so long as you maintain a decent signal. I found that anything within 10 feet was good enough—I left both in a bag in the overhead bin on a 737 and connected just fine from my iPad at my seat. However, once you lose line of sight and start moving to distances of over 30 feet away from the streamer with a few walls and assorted furniture in between, you'll typically start to see some stuttering in the videos. That’s to be expected though, as it’s an extreme case for wireless range.
Battery Life
Battery life is an interesting topic. Kingston quotes a four hour battery runtime for the Wi-Drive while Seagate claims up to five hours on the Satellite's 10.36Wh battery, but it's not clear what kind of usage those figures represent. I fired up a trusty old loop of The Bourne Identity on each of the streamers playing through my iPad, placed the device two feet in front of the iPad, and unplugged it. I then time how long it is before the video dies, and that’s our winner.

Interestingly, the Kingston actually beat the claimed battery life spec, clocking in at 4:17, while the Seagate gave us pretty disappointing runtime at just under three and a quarter hours. It makes sense that the mechanical hard drive consumes more power, but it’s disappointing that our streaming HD video test undercut the claimed battery figures by that much.

Conclusion
Let’s start with the devices themselves. I’m a huge fan of Kingston’s Wi-Drive design—it’s sleek, elegant, and has everything you’d want in a simple wireless flash drive for iOS devices. But at the same time, it’s impossible to discount the fact that the GoFlex Satellite is a significantly more versatile device, given its capability to stream to different platforms and anything with a web browser. Plus, you get roughly fifteen times more storage capacity compared to the largest Wi-Drive Kingston has on offer.

The GoFlex Satellite, in my mind, is the ultimate roadtrip companion. You get 500GB worth of movie storage space, there’s no issues with the wireless connections (either being barred from using wireless radios on an airplane or having an internet connection that you can’t use), and it conveniently comes with a compact car charger in the box. If you’re going to be driving more than 1000 miles anytime soon, you will definitely appreciate having one of these on hand. However, I suspect that the 1000+ mile roadtrip with an iPad market is pretty limited.
The GoFlex Satellite makes more sense to me as a portable media solution than the Wi-Drive, because you can fit a decent chunk of even a very large media library onto a 500GB drive, whereas the Wi-Drive is more of a companion piece to carry a few documents, pictures, and movies. Even by that standard though, the Satellite is on the pricey side—you can find standard 500GB GoFlex portable drives for sub-$70, putting them at roughly 40% the price of the Satellite. Is the convenience of wireless file access worth paying nearly three times as much? Not for most people, but if you’re in the niche that needs it, the Satellite is a solid choice.
Honestly, I liked the Wi-Drive better. It’s a sleek, well designed, well integrated piece of technology that I greatly enjoyed using. It’s better looking, more portable, and more usable than the Seagate. The option to still connect to the internet, slower as it might be due to the increased network latency, is a rather useful feature that you don’t get with the Satellite (though the need to disable security in the present firmware to get this working needs to be addressed). The Wi-Drive launched at $179 for the 32GB and $129 for the 16GB, prices that happen to fall slightly above Apple’s pricing hierarchy. Apple asks for $100 to go from 16GB to 32GB, and $200 to go from 16GB to 64GB, so on the one hand it's a reasonable idea to survive with a limited amount of storage and put the money towards a higher capacity future-generation iDevice. On the other hand, having built-in storage with faster access and better battery life without the need to carry an extra device isn't without merit.

With the new street prices of $79 and $99 for the 16GB and 32GB models, respectively, it’s a much easier sell, especially for the 32GB model. The value question is simple—you’re undercutting Apple’s own steps between storage capacity rather significantly, so it’s not a senseless financial proposition. As such, it’s not a bad idea to pick up a Wi-Drive as a cool way to expand storage on your mobile device and wow your friends in the process, but going through a separate wireless network and having a wireless passthrough to get internet is a hassle, one that needs to be fixed in future generations.
It’s always difficult to provide a clear conclusion on devices in a completely new category, for a multitude of reasons. Early devices tend to be expensive and functionally limited, but the underlying concept has the potential to go much farther. That basically sums up my feelings for wireless storage at this point: I don’t personally see either of the two devices here as game changers; the Wi-Drive is an interesting toy to pick up given the price drop, but that’s about it.
With that said, I think wireless storage is going to play a big role in the move to cloud-based applications and data, moving storage away from devices and turning them into thin-clients for cloud services. Portable wireless storage is one component for when you have local content to access. It adds another dimension of versatility and portability to the data you store, and it has the potential to become the wireless replacement for flash drives and the like. However, the current solutions, including the Kingston and Seagate we looked at, give up too much of the convenience factor to be worth the hassle unless you really, really need to extend the storage of your mobile device right now.

Source: AnandTech

Toshiba DX735 All-in-One: Notebooks Without Batteries

2011-11-21T21:57:00.001-08:00

Introducing the Toshiba DX735 All-in-One
So far we've tested HP's TouchSmart 610 all-in-one and Dell's Inspiron One all-in-one, and in both cases we've found things to like along with aspects that left us wanting. Today we have on hand Toshiba's DX735 in its least expensive configuration. Starting at under a grand, the DX735 at least superficially suggests a design that's more focused, more streamlined, and less schizophrenic than the competition. Did Toshiba do right where the others stumbled, or is the DX735 just another case of too many compromises?

A Toshiba computer meant to be used solely on the desktop seems like a rare thing, but once you take a look at the specifications you'll see they went in a completely different direction from HP and Dell. While HP and Dell paired desktop processors with underpowered discrete notebook graphics, Toshiba cut a lot of the fat and just went for pure notebook hardware (excepting the hard drive). Here's what we received for review.

Toshiba DX735-D3201 Specifications
Processor	Intel Core i5-2430M (2x2.4GHz + HTT, 3GHz Turbo, 32nm, 3MB L3, 35W)
Chipset	Intel HM65
Memory	2x2GB Samsung DDR3-1333 SODIMM (Max 2x4GB)
Graphics	Intel HD 3000 (12 EUs, turbo up to 1.2GHz)
Display	23" LED Glossy 16:9 1080p Touchscreen TOS508F
Hard Drive(s)	Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB 7200-RPM SATA 6Gbps HDD
Optical Drive	DVD+/-RW writer (HL-DT-ST GT30N)
Networking	Atheros AR8151 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Atheros AR9002WB-1NG 802.11b/g/n Bluetooth 3.0
Audio	Realtek ALC269 HD Audio Stereo speakers Headphone and mic jacks
Front Side	Webcam Speaker grilles Power button
Right Side	Optical drive
Left Side	Input button Brightness control Volume control SD/MMC/XD/MS Pro card reader Headphone and mic jacks 2x USB 3.0
Back Side	Kensington lock HDMI input 5x USB 2.0 (one taken by wireless mouse and keyboard receiver) AC adaptor Ethernet jack
Operating System	Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Dimensions	25.6" x 7.5" x 17.3" (WxDxH)
Weight	17.6 lbs
Extras	Webcam Wireless keyboard and mouse Flash reader (MMC, SD/Mini SD, MS/Duo/Pro/Pro Duo) USB 3.0 Touchscreen
Warranty	1-year basic support
Pricing	$849 online (11/21/2011)

This is going to sound strange after my having taken Dell's Inspiron One to task for using a mediocre, halfway point of a processor, but I actually like the Intel Core i5-2430M that Toshiba employs in the base DX735 model which we have on hand. Where the other manufacturers are experimenting with mixed results, from the get-go you can tell Toshiba has basically grafted a notebook on to the back of a 23" touchscreen, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The dual-core i5-2430M has two cores with Hyper-Threading clocked at 2.4GHz, able to jump to 2.7GHz on both or 3GHz on one. That's not overwhelmingly fast and it's certainly no quad-core replacement, but the decent dual-core processor coupled with a lack of dedicated graphics hardware (or even a dedicated graphics option) makes the DX735's target market clear: this is an internet appliance. Users who want a little more oomph can spend up $100 to get a model that sports a quad-core i7-2670QM that should be more or less comparable in performance to the i5-2400S in Dell's all-in-one, but at a substantially lower wattage.
The Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics are standard across the line and are adequate for the purposes of this all-in-one, while the default 4GB RAM is a perfectly reasonable starting point. I do quibble a bit with Toshiba only offering up to 6GB on their "top end" model; RAM is cheap enough that 8GB should be easily doable.
Where Toshiba wisely diverges from notebook hardware in the DX735 is the use of a full-size hard drive. While it may add heat and weight to the system, Toshiba was frugal enough with their thermal budget that they're able to employ the 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12. The drive is reasonably fast (for a hard drive) while being a good citizen, and it runs 10C cooler than Dell's drive does.
Finally, where Toshiba kills the competition is in offering USB 3.0 connectivity. While overall connectivity is pretty basic, having two USB 3.0 ports for high speed data transfer is a godsend. It's still downright perplexing why the other, more expensive models from the other vendors don't offer USB 3.0, but at least it's here.
Application and Futuremark Performance
While HP and Dell's all-in-ones feature quad-core desktop processors, Toshiba's entry-level DX735 runs a much more miserly mobile dual-core. As a result, it's reasonable to expect that the DX735 is going to finish last in each of our basic benchmarks, especially considering Toshiba opted to stick with Intel's integrated graphics rather than bumping up to a discrete graphics part. This isn't the page where Toshiba's design choices are going to pay off, so try to keep that in mind when you read these results.

What's interesting when looking at these results isn't how the Dell Inspiron One 2320 beat the Toshiba DX735, but how narrowly it did in certain circumstances. Dell's all-in-one enjoys two extra cores, but the only crowd pleaser here is really HP's all-in-one, and it suffers in PCMark due to its substantially slower hard drive. All things considered, the DX735 acquits itself reasonably well. If you're not doing the heavy lifting represented by Cinebench and x264 encoding, even a mobile dual-core Sandy Bridge processor is plenty fast for most tasks.

Of course in 3DMark the DX735 trails its competitors, but again it's worth mentioning that their graphics solutions are still really only adequate for gaming at 1366x768; Toshiba has elected not to even try and compete here. This is not a gaming machine, plain and simple.
Screen Quality
Unfortunately, another area where Toshiba's DX735 may fall short is screen quality. Toshiba opts to employ a glossy TN panel for the DX735, not too dissimilar from Dell's Inspiron One. HP's IPS panel is leaps and bounds superior just by virtue of using superior technology, but Dell's panel was abnormally dire even for TN desktop kit.

Okay, so it's a TN panel, but man does it mop the floor with the dismal panel in Dell's Inspiron One. Toshiba's DX735 was never going to beat the HP TouchSmart 610's screen, but it's not completely awful either. I'm still not a fan of this technology and hate how prevalent it is, but at least the screen here gets the job done and isn't a screaming eyesore. It's also bright enough that the glossy finish doesn't overwhelm the picture.
Viewing angles still leave a lot to be desired, but at least you can face the DX735 dead on with ease and indeed it seems to have been designed that way in mind. It also has decent tilt control and ergonomically just feels a lot better than the Inspiron One.
User Experience
So where does Toshiba really fall short compared to the competition? The software side. I hesitate to ding the DX735 for not performing as well compared to the higher-specced machines from Dell and HP, but the software is where Dell's touchscreen implementation really was best while Toshiba has barely shown up at all.
The fact remains that Windows 7 just isn't very touch friendly. Dell's simple set of widgets and increased font scale dramatically improved the touch computing experience on the Inspiron One, while HP's TouchSmart software felt strangely bloated and gimmicky. Toshiba falls somewhere in the middle as a result of their lackluster showing: they've included a single touch-based application, the "bulletin board," which is cute to play with but ultimately has no real practical use.

What may be the most damning is that the main "board" of the application talks about the all-in-one like it's a laptop; Toshiba didn't even bother to change the software. This is like opening unpatched Crysis 2 and seeing "Press Start" on the main screen; it's just lazy. While I still ultimately like the user interface better than HP's TouchSmart software, really only Dell seems to actually be trying. What you're left with in the case of the DX735 is the vanilla Windows experience, augmented (if you're so inclined) by touch capability.
Thankfully the rest of the all-in-one is a little better. While the keyboard is poor, it's easy enough and cheap enough to replace. Everything else is nice, clean, and simple, and Toshiba crushes the competition in two ways.

First, they include USB 3.0 connectivity where neither HP nor Dell could be bothered. It's a small improvement but nonetheless an important one because it at least allows for high speed external data transfer. The other major point is that the Toshiba is, quite frankly, a bit easier to get into. While the hard drive is still very difficult to access, the RAM slots are covered by a single panel on the back, and the mount is easy enough to remove. HP's TouchSmart was confusing to even try to figure out, as was the Inspiron One. These things don't have to be this difficult and at least you can upgrade the RAM without pulling your hair out.
Heat and Power Consumption
The Toshiba DX735's ace in the hole is really how it manages heat and power. By using a notebook CPU and electing not to include a discrete graphics part, Toshiba has produced an all-in-one that's incredibly light on power, in the process making it vastly more suitable as an appliance.

Toshiba does a good job of keeping the CPU fairly cool without producing a lot of noise in the process. And while 40C on the hard drive isn't exactly cool, it's not roasting either, and nowhere near as poor as Dell's system. Ultimately the DX735 is roughly on par with the HP TouchSmart 610, but remember that it's also lighter, smaller, and cheaper than that competing machine.

Idle power is admirably low, while load power is downright impressive. Remember Toshiba is powering a decently sized screen along with the computer inside it, so 79 watts under load makes the DX735 a nicely efficient piece of kit.
Conclusion: Strattling the Fence
My recommendation for the Toshiba DX735 is a bit of a sideways one. I will say that of the three all-in-ones I've tested recently, I like it the best, because Toshiba was able to find the kind of balance that eluded Dell and HP. Each of those systems had major strengths, but they also felt half-baked in other ways. For better or worse, Toshiba played it safe with the DX735 and came out at the end with a machine that at least seems like a reasonable option.
Where the DX735 falters is honestly the software and the price. Toshiba doesn't seem to have even really tried as far as the software goes; that bulletin board application is a holdover from older touchscreen systems. I reviewed a laptop with a touchscreen for PC World in the summer of 2009 that ran the exact same application, and at least there it made sense that the software referred to the computer as a laptop. There aren't any allowances for taking advantage of the touchscreen, it's just there.
And then there's price. While the DX735 surpasses the HP and Dell units I've tested in some ways, I can tell you right off the bat I wouldn't recommend it. I like the mobile i5 in this particular configuration, but power users are going to want to upgrade to the i7-2670QM model while others will probably be served just fine by a similar unit from a different vendor at a cheaper price that runs an AMD Athlon II or Intel Core i3. (I wouldn't recommend any Dell units using their current chassis given its heat problems with the hard drive.) This Toshiba sells for ~~$899~~ $849 at Best Buy and that's not bad, but it's not stellar. We dinged the Dell and HP units for including subpar discrete GPUs, and Toshiba manages to avoid that pitfall by eschewing discrete graphics entirely; the problem is that the price is such that you'd expect to find a bit more muscle inside.
That leaves our DX735 in kind of a weird space, just like its peers. This is a situation where the old axiom "there are no bad products, only bad prices" would seem relevant, except the price is basically right for the hardware included. Unfortunately, for its intended market I just don't see what good spending up on a mobile Core i5 will really do compared to a desktop Core i3. If you want performance a model that includes an i7-2670QM is also available for under a grand at Best Buy, if you're interested.

Source: AnandTech

Samsung Galaxy S III to Have Quad-core CPU?

2011-11-21T16:48:00.001-08:00

Over the last couple of weeks, we've seen a big increase in talk of quad-core smartphones. Marching on with this trend is the Samsung Galaxy S III, which will apparently have a quad-core processor under the hood.

According to the Samsung-focused Sammy Hub, the first traces of Samsung’s Exynos Quad-core System-on-Chip (SoC), the 4412, have turned up on the Kernal Git page. Sammy Hub reports that the chip, which has apparently entered the testing phase, is similar to the Exynos 4212 and is based on ARM Cortex A9 with four CPU cores. The clock speed is said to match that of the Exynos 4212 at 1.5GHz.
Last week we heard about the HTC Edge, which will purportedly pack Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El processor. The device is said to be just over ten millimeters thick and boasts a 4.7-inch 720p display; 1GB of RAM; an 8-megapixel camera with 28-millimeter and f/2.2 lens; no physical buttons (thanks to Ice Cream Sandwich); 32GB of storage; and the all important Nvidia AP30 Tegra 3 processor. Though HTC has not yet confirmed the Edge's existence, word on the street is that we can expect it to launch late in Q1 or early in Q2 of next year.

Source: Tom's Hardware