Graphics/Sound
News broke yesterday that AMD’s Raja Koduri would be leaving the company after a brief sabbatical. It turns out that the former head of the Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) won’t be out of work for long – Intel just announced that Koduri would be joining the team to head up a newly formed Core and Visual Computing Group, and as a general manager of a new initiative to drive edge and client visual computing solutions. The rumor we posted this morning turned out to be true.With Koduri’s help, Intel plans to unify and expand its IP across multiple segments including core computing, graphics, media,...
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PC hardware aficionados are no doubt aware of the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti we will be showing you here today. Prior to last week’s official announcement by NVIDIA, information about the card had been leaking for weeks – see for yourself. If you haven’t been keeping up on the scene, the GTX 1070 Ti is NVIDIA’s latest Pascal-powered graphics card for enthusiast gamers, that’s meant to slot in between the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, and take down the recently released AMD Radeon RX Vega 56.For the purposes of this article, we got our hands on a pair of GeForce GTX 1070 Ti cards, a Founder’s...
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Creative Labs was instrumental in evolving PC audio with notable products, like the Sound Blaster 16, AWE 32, AWE64, Live!, Audigy, X-Fi, and Extigy, and algorithms like EAX technology. Most of its competitors through the last three decades, like Yamaha, ESS, Turtle Beach, Auzentech and M-Audio, evolved their product line-ups or faded into obscurity. There were acquisitions of Aureal and Sensaura technologies that further boosted Creative's technology portfolio, too. Sound cards seem passé nowadays, as motherboard manufacturers hop up high-definition audio codecs with higher quality op-amps, capacitors,...
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Today is the day AMD's Radeon Technologies Group has been working towards for a long time. The official launch of the Radeon RX Vega is here, and it's now time for AMD RTG's moment in the spotlight. Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) has been on a tear as of late; the desktop and server processor group executed successful launches of its Ryzen desktop processor, EPYC server platform, and finally the big bang last week with its Ryzen Threadripper enthusiast 12- and 16-core processors, which were met with high praise. Ryzen, EPYC and Threadripper are tough acts to follow, just ask Intel. So too...
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AMD has officially lifted the veil on its new Radeon RX consumer graphics line-up, featuring the company's next-generation Vega GPU architecture. After months of architecture disclosures and rumors, we finally have real specifications and details on the actual Radeon RX Vega graphics card line-up, including pricing, and what AMD is doing to make the cards as attractive as possible for gamers.Initially, there will be four cards in the Radeon RX Vega line-up, the standard air-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64, a Radeon RX Vega 64 Limited Edition with stylized metal fan shroud, the liquid-cooled...
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Today, we are looking at a gaming monitor from Acer with a blazing-fast 240Hz refresh rate and NVIDIA G-SYNC support. The Acer Predator XB252Q gaming monitor speaks clearly to both media buffs and hardcore gamers who have a penchant for fluidity and triple-digit frame rates. This display offers a Full HD (1080p) native resolution and an ultra-quick 240Hz refresh rate to complement the uber-high frame rates possible with a modern, high performance gaming PC. Toss in an attractive set of connectivity options, ports, and a few other key bells and whistles and we have a formidable addition...
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Los Angeles-based Nixeus has been working with AMD on FreeSync since the project’s inception. Nixeus was among the first companies to offer an affordable, Full-HD FreeSync monitor with a wide adaptive-sync frequency range and one of Nixeus’ monitors was used in AMD’s initial FreeSync demos all the way back in 2014. Now the company is readying a brand-new FreeSync-compatible display, the Nixeus EDG 27, that features an IPS panel, 2560x1440 WQHD resolution, and a price point that undercuts competing offerings. That all sounds very appealing, but Nixeus obviously had to make some concessions to bring...
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NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang just delivered a keynote speech at Computex Taipei, during which he unveiled some new mobile technology designed to optimize game performance, in smaller notebook form factors than have been previously possible. NVIDIA calls the technology Max-Q Design, and it enables NVIDIA’s notebook partners to cram high-performance GPUs like the GeForce GTX 1080 into notebooks that are a fraction of the size of previous-gen offerings. Jen Hsun brought out a couple of system to illustrate the differences between older gaming notebooks and next-gen notebooks featuring Max-Q design....
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Soon after NVIDIA's Founder’s Edition GeForce GTX 1080 Ti hit the scene, board partners readied custom cards, like the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 GAMING with iCX technology we’ll be showing you here. We have already taken a look at a powerful behemoth from Gigabyte, and MSI chimed in recently as well. Today’s combatant from EVGA, though slightly more tame in terms of clock speeds, may just be the most attractive to the data junkies and tweakers among you.EVGA’s iCX technology is interesting for a few reasons. It incorporates a plethora of additional sensors onto the card, along with a protection...
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Custom variants of NVIDIA's mighty GeForce GTX 1080 Ti are finally available -- more so than the initial run of the stock clocked Founders Editions. As always, however, fortune favors the prudent buyer or simply those more recently flush with cash. In this custom 1080 Ti offering, MSI marries old form with new function. The MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G has just emerged from our gauntlet of a dozen benches with style and grace, but we have to admit, she looks darn familiar. While other company's are gambling with fancy new fan configurations, RGB lighting and complicated cooling systems,...
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In preparation for the impending launch of AMD's next-generation Vega GPU architecture, which will eventually reside at the top of the company's graphics product stack, AMD is refreshing its mainstream graphics card line-up with some more-powerful Polaris-based offerings. In time, the new Radeon RX 580, RX 570, RX 560, and RX 550 cards launching today will supplant all of the current-generation Radeon RX 400-series cards, though these new cards are not radically different from their predecessors. Their clocks, shader counts, and memory configurations have been tweaked, but they’re still based on...
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NVIDIA shook up the top of the graphics card market a couple of weeks back with the release of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. In its stock, Founder’s Edition form, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti proved to be the fastest consumer-class graphics card available, but that didn’t stop NVIDIA’s board partners from quickly announcing custom versions packing even more horsepower. Case in point: The beastly Gigabyte Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB we will be showing you here. The Gigabyte Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB is the first, fully-custom, factory-overclocked (and ready to rock) GTX 1080 Ti to hit the lab, and...
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NVIDIA is officially launching its most powerful gaming graphics card today, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. It was announced last week at the Game Developers Conference and pre-orders began shortly thereafter. However, the cards will begin shipping tomorrow, from on-line retailers, system builders, and add-in-board partners. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti’s specifications may elicit some quizzical looks in light of previous-gen offerings, with its odd 11GB of GDDR5X RAM and 352-bit memory interface, but rest assured this card is an absolute beast. Though its memory complement, interface, and a few blocks within...
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Update 3/9/2017 - Our full review of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, with copious benchmarks, is live here!If there's one thing that gets the average, self-respecting Tech-geek jazzed, it's the smell of fresh, new PC gaming hardware in the morning. As such, along with your morning dose of caffeinated something-or-other, we're here to unbox the all new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is NVIDIA's new flagship GPU for hardcore gamers that actually sports slightly more gaming horsepower than the mighty Titan X (minus a smallish 1GB of GDDR5X memory), but sells for almost half the price...
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