WD_Black D50 Game Dock Review: Wicked-Fast External Storage

Notebooks often have limited storage capacity, despite significant advancements over the last few years. An M.2 drive is only the size of a stick of gum, but not every laptop can fit more than one or two drives at a time, and some users aren't comfortable opening up their machine to upgrade them, which ultimately limits their storage capabilities. This is particularly painful in gaming notebooks, when many games can take up dozens of gigabytes a piece. Western Digital thinks it has a solution, though. The WD Black D50 Game Dock is an all-in-one Thunderbolt 3 dock and PCI Express NVMe storage controller...

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Review: Supercharged Midrange Gaming

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jun 09, 2021

After an official unveiling at Computex 2021 and last week’s launch of the powerful GeForce RT 3080 Ti, NVIDIA is ready to go open kimono and spill all of the new, more-mainstream GeForce RTX 3070 Ti’s juicy details. Cards are due to go on sale tomorrow, but we’ve been able to put a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition through its paces and have everything laid out for you on the pages ahead. As its branding suggests, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is an update / upgrade over the original RTX 3070 which launched about seven months ago. NVIDIA didn’t just goose the clocks and call...

Radeon Pro W6800 Review: AMD RDNA 2-Infused Workstation Muscle

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jun 08, 2021

AMD is expanding its line-up of RDNA 2-based GPUs today, with a trio of new Radeon Pro graphics cards targeting the professional workstation market. These new Radeon Pro cards leverage the same GPU architecture as their consumer-class Radeon RX-branded counterparts, but Radeon Pros feature completely different designs, go through additional qualification and are certified for a myriad of pro-vis applications. The new line-up is spearheaded by the Radeon Pro W6800. The Radeon Pro W6800 is packing AMD’s current top-end Navi 21 GPU and a beefy 32GB of GDDR6 RAM with ECC support. Though the Radeon...

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Review: Amped-Up Ampere For Gamers

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jun 02, 2021

During their Computex 2021 keynote, NVIDIA’s Jeff Fisher, GeForce Senior Vice President, and Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, unveiled a number of new enterprise and consumer products, targeting multiple market segments. For all of the gamers though, it was Jeff Fisher’s official unveiling of the oft-rumored GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti cards that most likely got your juices flowing. The new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the spiritual successor to the previous-gen flagship RTX 2080 Ti, while the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti builds upon the popular RTX 3070 with much faster memory and...

AMD Radeon RX 6800M Rips Benchmarks In Powerful All-AMD ASUS Gaming Laptop

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, May 31, 2021

During her Computex 2021 keynote this evening, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, along with compatriots Frank Azor and Scott Herkleman, revealed a number of the company’s new products an initiatives, targeting the server, desktop and mobile markets. For gamers, perhaps the most enticing announcement was the revelation of AMD's Radeon RX 6000M series of mobile GPUs. Though Dr. Su had mentioned that mobile RDNA 2-based Radeons were inbound back at CES earlier this year, it wasn’t until today that the actual line-up with specs, speeds and feeds was announced. The flagship product in the Radeon RX 6000M...

Intel Expands Tiger Lake-U Laptop Line-Up, Teases Vicious Beast Canyon NUC

by Ben Funk - Sun, May 30, 2021

Computex might be a virtual online-only show this year, but you should expect some big announcements from many of the heavy hitters in tech. The virtual show kicks off May 31 at 7:30 AM local time in Taipei, which translates to 10:30 PM Eastern on Sunday the 30th in the U.S. While there will undoubtedly be a ton of announcements over the next few days coming out of the show, we do have some early news tonight from Intel, to get the show started. Intel hosted a press and analyst Performance Workshop, and has lifted the curtain on how it's expanding the Tiger Lake product lineup, with a few new point...

Phison E18 With Micron B47R Preview: Future Of PCIe 4 SSDs

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, May 25, 2021

A number of today’s best performing, PCIe Gen 4 solid state drives are built around Phison’s E18 controller. If you remember, way back when the AMD Ryzen 3000 series debuted, a number of SSD providers also launched Phison PS5016-E16 based drives alongside the processors to highlight some of the benefits of the platform's PCI Express Gen 4 bandwidth. Those early drives paired the Phison E16 with some of Toshiba’s BiCS4 NAND flash memory and SK Hynix DRAM to produce some fast SSDs at the time, but the E16 wasn’t actually a native PCIe 4 solution. Soon thereafter, Phison began...

Intel Optane Memory H20 Review: Performance Where It Matters

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, May 17, 2021

Intel first showed off its Optane Memory H20 solid state drive late last year. Just in case you missed the initial news, Optane Memory H20 is the follow-up to 2019’s Optane Memory H10, which combines 3D Xpoint-based Optane Memory technology and QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND flash on a single M.2 storage device. The Intel Optane Memory H20 is a hybrid solid state drive that leverages Intel’s latest Optane Memory media and 144-layer QLC NAND flash memory, but is designed to offer the benefits of both. Like the first-gen H10, the new Optane Memory H20 will find its way into utlrabooks,...

Intel Core i9-11980HK Preview: 8-Core Tiger Lake-H Unleashed

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, May 17, 2021

Last week, Intel officially unveiled its Tiger Lake-H45 based H-Series 11th Gen Core processor line-up, for high-performance gaming laptops and mobile workstations. The flagship consumer processor in the family is the Core i9-11980HK. The Core i9-11980HK is an 8-core / 16-thread processor, with a base clock of 2.6GHz and maximum turbo clock of 5GHz on one or two cores, when Intel’s Turbo Boost technology kicks in. The Core i9-11980HK supports DDR4 memory at speeds up to 3,200MHz, but this particular “HK” processor is also fully unlocked and overclockable via Intel’s XTU...

How Many CPU Cores Do You Need For Great PC Gaming?

by Ben Funk - Wed, May 12, 2021

Back in The Day, figuring out which PC processor was better for gaming was a matter of architecture and clock speed. More megahertz on a fast CPU architecture generally also meant that the CPU would be better for a whole host of tasks, in addition to games, versus a lower clocked chip. An Intel Pentium II 450 MHz was faster than a Pentium II 366 MHz, and there wasn't much debate about that. First AMD, and later Intel, broke away from this simple equation by creating model families and tiers within those families. Multi-core CPUs were born, integrating two (or more) independent processor cores...

AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 Test Drive: New Features, Refinements Explored

by Ben Funk - Tue, Apr 20, 2021

Over the last few years, AMD has made big changes to its Radeon Software control panel on an almost yearly cadence. This time around it's been a little longer than that, as those updates typically launch around the end of the year, though this specific roll-out was extended to April. What has AMD's Radeon team been up to all this time? We got an early look at the drivers that are shipping today in order to get a feel for what's improved and what's new. Let's take a look together... AMD's New Radeon Software Installer One of the nicer, yet more unexpected, features of the new Radeon Software is...

PowerColor Red Devil Ultimate Radeon RX 6900 XT Review: Speed Demon

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Apr 13, 2021

PowerColor has historically released its high-end, customized Red Devil-branded Radeons in lock-step with AMD. AMD launches a new GPU with one set of specifications, and a short time later, board partners like PowerColor come through with tweaked versions injected with their own special sauce. On the surface, that’s how today’s launch of the PowerColor Red Devil Ultimate Radeon RX 6900 XT also went down, but there is some additional mojo at play here. PowerColor already has a “non-Ultimate” Red Devil 6900 XT in its line-up, but the Red Devil Ultimate Radeon RX 6900 XT takes...

Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Vulcan OC-V Review: Tricked-Out

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Apr 07, 2021

NVIDIA’s board partners have released a wide array of GeForce RTX 30 series cards, with various form factors, aesthetics and differentiating features. Some use higher frequencies to entice gamers and enthusiasts, while others are crammed with flashy lighting or over-the-top cooler designs. The Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Vulcan OC-V we’ll be showing you here today seems to target virtually every type of enthusiast. Whether you’re after peak performance or wild aesthetics, this card has you covered. Factory overclocked? Check. User-Addressable RGB lighting? A high-performance...

Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Launched: 10nm Ice Lake-SP To Supercharge Data Centers

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Apr 06, 2021

Intel is launching its first server products built using its advanced 10nm manufacturing process today: the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. For example, core counts have been significantly increased; Intel 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors feature up to 40 cores per processor versus 28 cores with 2nd gen offerings. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform also supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory, up to 6 terabytes of...

Intel Core i9-11900K And i5-11600K Review: Rocket Lake-S Liftoff

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Mar 30, 2021

After disclosing some architecture details a few months back, and revealing the initial line-up of Rocket Lake-S based 11th Gen processors a few weeks ago, Intel is officially launching its latest family of mainstream desktop CPUs today, along with some new chipsets to enable all of their features in motherboard platforms. As most of you probably know by now, 11th Gen Intel Core processors based on Rocket Lake-S are manufactured using Intel’s mature 14nm process, but they feature the company’s latest microarchitecture and technology, which was backported from 10nm. We’ve got the...

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Review: Impressive 1440p PC Gaming

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Mar 17, 2021

Earlier this month, AMD took the wraps off the latest addition to its RDNA 2-based family of Radeons, the Radeon RX 6700 XT. During the livestreamed event, AMD disclosed that it was targeting high-framerate 1440p gaming with the Radeon RX 6700 XT, and that it would employ a new release strategy in an effort to get as many cards into gamers’ hands as possible at launch. Instead of releasing AMD-built reference cards first and following up sometime later with custom partner boards, AMD and its partners will be launching all flavors of Radeon RX 6700 XT today, across an array of on-line retailers...

AMD EPYC 7003 Series Unveiled: Big Iron Zen 3 Takes Flight

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Mar 15, 2021

AMD just launched its next-generation EPYC server processors, codenamed Milan, based on the company’s leading Zen 3 microarchitecture. The new EPYC 7003 series is an important milestone for AMD. The company has made significant in-roads in servers and data centers in recent years, and the arrival of the EPYC 7003 series brings with it significantly improved IPC and per-core performance, better multi-core scaling, and more flexible memory configuration options (among other new features), in a package that’s socket compatible with previous-gen offerings – existing EPYC platforms...

Samsung SSD 980 Review: Affordable NVMe PC Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Mar 09, 2021

Although the company just recently fleshed out its flagship line of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe solid state drives with the 2TB SSD 980 Pro, Samsung is already back at it, with yet another family of drives that target a different market segment. While the Samsung SSD 980 Pro is intended for workstations types, performance enthusiasts and gamers that crave nothing but the best, the new Samsung SSD 980 drives – sans “Pro” – we’ll be showing you here today, target more mainstream computing applications. The branding of the new Samsung SSD 980s may be reminiscent of their higher-end...

AMD Reveals Radeon RX 6700 XT, A 1440p Gaming Powerhouse

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Mar 03, 2021

The Episode 3 livestream of AMD’s “Where Gaming Begins” series just ended, during which the company revealed some feature updates coming to its Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs and officially announced the latest member of its RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000 family, the forthcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT. But before we dive into the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD also announced updates coming to previous-gen Ryzen 3000 series processors and its Radeon Software suite, that should make more than a few gamers and performance enthusiasts happy... Smart Access Memory Comes To Ryzen 3000 Smart Access Memory...

Intel SSD 670p Review: Snappy, Budget-Friendly NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Mar 01, 2021

Intel is releasing a new family of solid state drives today, targeting mainstream users and everyday computing tasks. The new Intel SSD 670p series leverages the company’s latest 144-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory technology, with an improved dynamic SLC caching algo and updated PCIe Gen 3 controller. Unlike some of the more recent ultra-high-end PCIe Gen 4 SSDs to be released recently, complete with insanely high sequential transfer speeds north of 7GB/s, the Intel SSD 670p eschews the blazing sequentials in favor of optimized performance for random transfers at low queue depths that are...

GeForce RTX 3060 Review: NVIDIA's Most Affordable Ampere Yet

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Feb 25, 2021

NVIDIA is launching its latest Ampere-based GPU today, targeting the sweet-spot of the PC gaming market, the GeForce RTX 3060. The GeForce RTX 3060 was announced post-CES 2021, all the way back in mid-January, but cards are going on sale today. In addition to the relatively early initial reveal, NVIDIA is doing a few other things a bit differently with this launch. For one, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention last week’s announcements regarding specialized CMP HX mining GPUs and the GeForce RTX 3060’s intentionally gimped mining hash rash rate, when it comes to the Ethereum...

Samsung SSD 980 Pro 2TB Review: Flagship PCIe 4 NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Feb 16, 2021

In September of last year, the initial salvo of Samsung SSD 980 Pro drives was launched. At the time, Samsung SSD 980 Pro PCIe 4 NVMe drives in capacities of 250GB on up to 1TB were made available, but a 2TB drive had been announced and was on the roadmap as well. It took a bit of time for Samsung to make the 2TB drive a reality, but nevertheless it is here now, and we’ve got one on hand for some benchmarking and evaluation. Except for its obviously higher capacity, the 2TB Samsung SSD 980 Pro doesn’t differ from the smaller drives that were previously made available. Due to how the...