Intel Gen 11 Graphics Takes Fight To AMD In Dell XPS 13 2-In-1

It's no secret that Intel has a lot riding on its "Ice Lake" 10th generation Core CPUs manufactured on its 10-nanometer fabrication process. The chipmaker got by on squeezing more power and efficiency out of its 14-nm node for what seemed like an eternity, but we're talking about a mobile sector that relentlessly demands more performance and longer battery life. This oft-delayed Intel process node promises to reduce power consumption and increase performance by a wide margin over the Kaby Lake Refresh processors that previously served as the brains for thin and light PCs. Dell's XPS 13 2-In-1 Gets...

How To Overclock Raspberry Pi 4 Over 2GHz For A Tasty Speed Bump

by Ben Funk - Mon, Oct 07, 2019

The Raspberry Pi 4 is one of the cheapest single-board computers around, and thanks to its substantial performance boost over its predecessors, it also represents a good bang for the buck if you're interested in learning Linux, or just want to kick back and play some of your favorite retro games in Lakka. The good news is, the latest version of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Linux distribution, Raspbian Buster, comes with a new firmware revision for the tiny system which removes the previously imposed 2 GHz clock speed limit and loosens restrictions on voltage boosts, so of course we had to...

Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 Review: Ultra Fast, Affordable Next-Gen Wi-Fi

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Oct 01, 2019

Over the past few months, we have seen a spattering of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) routers enter the fray, including the ASUS ROG GT-AX11000 and Netgear Nighthawk AX8, both of which we recently put to the test. There was a caveat to our testing, however—we had to benchmark them using Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) hardware, because at the time, Wi-Fi 6 had not yet really permeated the marketplace on the client side. That's to say, practically every modern device with Wi-Fi connectivity is sporting a Wi-Fi 5 adapter. In a sense, companies like ASUS and Netgear had put the cart before the horse. It is not that...

Kingston KC2000 NVMe SSD Review: Competitive Pricing And Performance

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Sep 26, 2019

Kingston recently expanded its portfolio of solid state drives, with a new family of products targeting high-performance desktop and workstation applications. The Kingston KC2000 series of drives feature a PCI Express Gen 3.0 x 4 controller, 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory, and boast of peak transfer speeds north of 3GB/s. The drives are offered in an array of capacities, ranging from 250GB all the way on up to 2TB, and they support a number of security-conscious features as well. All told, the Kingston KC2000 series drives try to cater to a myriad of use cases, from mainstream consumer desktops,...

Integer Scaling Explored: Sharper Pixels For Retro And Modern Games

by Ben Funk - Tue, Sep 24, 2019

It'd be a gross understatement to say that retro gaming has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. Nintendo's NES Classic and SNES Classic mini-consoles or the Switch Online's NES and SNES catalogs might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about older games, but the House of Mario is hardly alone. Sony stumbled into the retro scene last year, and both the Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 (by way of rights-holder Konami) will get their respective official love letters shortly. We'd be remiss, however, if we didn't think about the technology at the heart of...

Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING OC Review: RGB Custom Navi Power

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Sep 13, 2019

Custom Radeon RX 5700 series boards have been arriving at a steady clip over the last few weeks. Some of the most commonly voiced concerns regarding AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 reference designs were the noise output and relatively high junction temperatures offered by the stock, blower-style cooler. Partner boards promised quieter, more robust cooling solutions, however, designed to address exactly those concerns. We took a look at the PowerColor Red Devil RX 5700 XT a couple of weeks back, and save for its wider footprint and slightly higher price, we found it to be an across-the-board upgrade...

Gears 5 Review: UE4 Performance, Guts And Glory Explored

by Ben Funk - Tue, Sep 10, 2019

Gears 5 officially drops on Tuesday, September 10th, but if you've got Xbox Ultimate Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass for PC you may have already played quite a bit of it. The newest Xbox One and PC exclusive launched for Microsoft's subscription service on Friday. The Coalition's newest Gears title brings with it a whole host of new graphical effects and HDR lighting to both the console and PC alike, thanks to the latest iteration of Epic's Unreal Engine 4. We took the PC version for a spin and spent some time testing how the latest Gears title runs.   Gears 5 features lots of details in the characters...

Asura Genesis Xtreme SSD Review: Speedy NVMe With RBG Bling

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Sep 06, 2019

Now that SSDs and their components have been substantially cost-reduced and essentially gone mainstream, there are more and more players in the space. What was once a market reserved for but a few top-tier semiconductor manufacturers, is now increasingly crowded by new, lesser-known third-party companies looking to capitalize on the increasing demand for super-fast storage. One such company is Asura Technology. Asura was founded less than a year ago, and has developed a high-end, NVMe SSD with a handful of interesting features, targeted specifically at gamers and performance enthusiasts -- the...

ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 Router Review: A WiFi 6 Monster

by Paul Lilly - Wed, Aug 28, 2019

We are no longer on the cusp of Wi-Fi 6 (otherwise known as 802.11ax) connectivity -- it has arrived -- just not in earnest yet. It will take some time before the Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) standard is truly shoved aside in favor of the new kid on the block, the one that is faster and more adept at juggling multiple wireless devices simultaneously. Nevertheless, early adopters who want to live on the bleeding edge have options. One of them is the beastly ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 we will be showing you here. As you might have surmised from the ROG branding, the GT-AX11000 is geared towards power...

Control: A Visually Stunning Ray Traced Gem Of A Game Explored

by Ben Funk - Mon, Aug 26, 2019

Finnish game studio Remedy Entertainment makes some of the finest-looking, quirkiest games around. Perhaps best known for the Max Payne series (but not Max Payne 3, which was developed solely by Rockstar), Remedy has been publishing its games exclusively on Xbox and PC for the last several years. The studio has delivered interesting, story-driven games more recently in the form of cult survival classic Alan Wake and the more recent sci-fi thriller Quantum Break. Both games featured cutting-edge graphics for their respective times. For that reason, maybe it's no surprise that the...

PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil Review: Custom Navi Arrives

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Aug 15, 2019

A little over a month ago, AMD launched the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 series to mostly good reviews. The cards offered competitive performance at their respective price points, with power efficiency that was vastly superior to AMD’s previous-generation Vega-based Radeons. One of the things some folks took issue with in regard to AMD’s reference Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT cards, however, was their cooling. As we (and many others) mentioned in our initial reviews, the cards were noisier than their NVIDIA-made counterparts, and although temperatures were within spec, peak junction temps...

Toshiba BG4 SSD Review: Mini But Mighty NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Aug 14, 2019

Toshiba announced its next-generation BG4 solid state drive all the way back at CES in early January of this year. The diminutive, little Toshiba BG4 isn’t about the latest and greatest in bleeding-edge SSD storage performance or pushing the envelope in terms of throughput. However, it does still represent a significant step forward in regard to power and performance in the smallest of form factors – you’ll see exactly what we mean in a couple of the photos below. The 1TB Toshiba BG4 we will be showing you here is essentially a single-chip solution, cable of multi-gigabyte per...

Gigabyte Aorus CV27F Monitor Review: 27" Of 165Hz Curved Gaming Bliss

by Ben Funk - Fri, Aug 09, 2019

It seems like a great time to buy a shiny new monitor for a gaming PC. FreeSync 2-certified monitors are plentiful on the open market and multiple companies are actively pushing them out the door to fight for your hard-earned dollars. Since NVIDIA started supporting FreeSync earlier this year, both GeForce and Radeon owners can take full advantage of variable refresh rate goodness without paying the price premiums associated with buying certain displays with G-Sync modules inside. If you haven't already, the time is right to start shopping for a high-refresh-rate FreeSync display -- the...

AMD EPYC 7002 Series Zen 2 Architecture Doubles Data Center Performance And Density

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Aug 07, 2019

AMD has officially taken the wraps off its second generation EPYC 7002 series processors. The EPYC 7002 series builds upon the success of the original EPYC processors by leveraging the Zen 2 microarchitecture, which is also at the heart of the recently released Ryzen 3000 series desktop parts. EPYC 7002 series processors maintain platform compatibility with existing first-gen EPYC parts, but significantly increase the platform’s capabilities in aggregate and per socket, and introduce a number of new features as well. In terms of the microarchitecture, all of the benefits Zen 2 afforded the...