Graphics Cards, PC Monitors And Computer Audio Reviews And News
The sights and sounds of the modern computing experience are driven by key user interface technologies like graphics cards, display monitors and various audio solutions. Here you'll find reviews and news on the latest in cutting-technologies for GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), LED and LCD computer display monitors, sound cards, PC and wireless speaker systems and more.
We are only a couple of weeks removed from the launch of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and NVIDIA is already at it again. This time around, we have yet another affordably-priced, Turing-based GPU to show you all, the GeForce GTX 1660 – sans Ti. As its naming suggest, the new GeForce GTX 1660 is very similar to its more-powerful counterpart; they’re both based on the same GPU, but a few cores and other components have been disabled in the GTX 1660. A handful of other changes have been made with the GeForce GTX 1660 as well, which push the card down a rung in terms of performance, but also bring down the price. We have a couple of GeForce GTX 1660 cards on tap for you here, one from EVGA...
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The NVIDIA Titan RTX is a GPU with somewhat of an identity crisis. The card is based on a fully-enabled Turing TU102 GPU, and is technically the most powerful graphics card in NVIDIA’s current line-up for gaming. If you hit NVIDIA’s site and check out the Titan RTX’s landing page, however, it isn’t being targeted at gamers. NVIDIA’s site makes statements like, “TITAN RTX frees you to work at the full speed of your creativity” and “[TITAN RTX] provides a fast and simple start to exploring GPU-accelerated data science workflows on your PC.” The words “game” or "gaming" do not even appear on the Titan RTX page. Although some folks...
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The next installment in the Metro game series is here and for those not familiar, this game franchise is based on author Dmitry Glukhovsky's series of Metro novels that started with Metro 2033 back in 2005. As far as the written lore of the game is concerned, the first installment in the genre was Metro 2033, which was then followed by Metro Last Light (and Last Light Redux) and today we'll be looking at the latest release, Metro Exodus. Like other releases in the Metro series, Metro Exodus follows a post-apocalyptic story line that takes place in the former Russian Federation, where the world has mostly been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. Your character is Artyom, a...
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Although the Turing-based GeForce RTX 2000 series hit store shelves first, it was about a week before their initial unveiling that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage and announced the Quadro RTX family of workstation-class GPUs, targeting professional graphics applications. As of today, Quadro RTX series consists of four graphics cards, ranging from the monstrous Quadro RTX 8000 with its 48GB of GDDR6 to the Quadro RTX 4000, which targets more mainstream content creation professionals. It’s the later that we’ll be showing you here today. Looking at the Quadro RTX 4000 in light of some of NVIDIA’s other pro-graphics cards, it would appear to be a rather tame solutions....
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NVIDIA is expanding its Turing-based GPU lineup today and pushing its latest graphics architecture down into a more affordable price point. Although it does share some similarities with its predecessors, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti we will be showing you here is unlike all of the other Turing-based GPUs that have launched to date in a few meaningful ways. The fact that the card is branded a GeForce GTX, rather than a GeForce RTX, hints at the biggest difference – the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti doesn’t support NVIDIA’s RTX real-time ray tracing technology. What the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti does do, however, is incorporate all of the architectural efficiencies of Turing into an affordable...
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AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su unveiled the Radeon VII during a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show last month. Although the Radeon VII was billed as the first 7nm GPU, fundamentally it is similar to the Radeon Instinct MI50, which was announced late last year. Of course the Radeon Instinct MI50 is targeted at HPC and Deep Learning applications, while the Radeon VII is technically the first enthusiast-class gaming GPU for consumers. Regardless, the fact remains that the same 7nm Vega 20-based chip is at the heart of both cards. Although it is still based on the company’s Vega architecture, the GPU powering the Radeon VII isn’t a simply shrink of an existing design. There have been...
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AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su took the wraps off the company’s first 7nm GPU based on its Vega architecture at CES 2019 in Las Vegas last month. Dr. Su’s keynote underscored the company’s lead against its rivals with respect to silicon process technology, and AMD’s new Radeon VII is one of multiple new products in its graphics and processors portfolios that’s built on a cutting-edge 7nm manufacturing node. And while AMD’s Radeon VII is essentially a process shrink of the company's Radeon Vega architecture with a few tweaks and fixes, along with that process geometry optimization should come optimizations for power consumption, clock speed, performance and other fine...
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Shortly after NVIDIA initially launched the first wave of high-end Turing-based GeForce RTX cards, EVGA announced a dizzying array of new graphics cards featuring the new GPU. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that EVGA did the same when NVIDIA expanded the GeForce RTX family with the more main-stream, GeForce RTX 2060. EVGA already has three RTX 2060s in its line-up, two short-board, single-fan offerings, and a larger, dual-fan model with a GPU that’s clocked significantly higher than NVIDIA’s reference specifications. We’ve got the card in the middle of the stack to show you here today, the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 XC. This card has a somewhat uncommon form factor,...
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EVGA boldly entered a new product category and launched its first sound card at CES, the aptly named EVGA Nu Audio. The Nu Audio card represents the culmination of a few years of co-development efforts with the folks at U.K.-based Audio Note, makers of high-end audio reproduction equipment. Unlike many sounds cards that tweak and massage source material to produce various effects, EVGA’s goal with the NU Audio card was strictly on quality and playing back source material as close to how the original creators intended, with minimal filtering. To that end, the NU Audio card is packing nothing but top-notch components, right down to its Nichicon solid-state capacitors and audio-grade resistors....
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GeForce RTX 2060 rumors began circulating soon after the launch of the initial batch of cards. Some of the news suggested that NVIDIA would do away with the RT and Tensor cores in the more mainstream-targeted RTX 2060, and omit support for real-time Ray Tracing and DLSS as a result. Well, as it turns out, those rumors couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, the new GeForce RTX 2060 we’ll be showing you here today is based on the very same Turing TU106 GPU that powers the higher-end GeForce RTX 2070, with a handful of tweaks, of course. Just like its x60-branded predecessors, the GeForce RTX 2060 offers the very same features as its higher-end counterparts, but the GPU is pared down...
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Post launch, NVIDIA’s board partners ramped-up their custom GeForce RTX designs relatively quickly. It’s not uncommon for some of the larger, premiere partners to have custom cards ready on launch day, but with the GeForce GTX series, some of them had literally dozens of different cards at the ready. Gigabyte didn’t hit the ground running quite as hard as some others right on launch day, but WOW has the Taiwanese manufacturer since hit its strike and shipped a wide array of GeForce RTX cards. The company’s website lists no less than 26 GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards, including everything from small form factor mini-ITX models, on up to factory-overclocked, water-cooled...
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The much anticipated, and sometimes controversial, next installment in the Battlefield franchise is here. There are many aspects to the game, like the World War II setting for example, which have gamers questioning whether or not we need yet another FPS set in the same era in history, especially in light of last year's Call of Duty WWII. The thing that has had most of us tech enthusiasts waiting with baited breath, however, is the chance to finally see NVIDIA's GeForce RTX real-time Ray Tracing effects live, in an actual game. Battlefield is indeed the first publicly available game to use these new DXR/RTX effects and it's exciting to finally see new technology employed, beyond the standard...
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Intel held its 2018 “Architecture Day” yesterday, where top execs plotted out the company’s direction for architecture and product roadmaps in the near-future and further out on the horizon. The event was held at a home once owned by Robert Noyce. Noyce, known as the "Mayor of Silicon Valley" back in the day, co-founded Intel in 1968 with Gordon Moore. This mansion setting was a perfect backdrop for Intel to underscore its new direction for the analysts and journalists in attendance. Intel has been under intense pressure due to delays of volume ramp of its 10nm process fabricated CPU products, but the company apparently has more than a few tricks up its sleeve to stay ahead...
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Last week, we had the opportunity to chat with Ari Rauch, Vice President of the Core And Visual Computing Group and General Manager of the Visual Technologies Team at Intel. We had a long discussion about Intel’s current plans to enter the discrete GPU market in 2020 and what made this most recent endeavor different from the company’s previous attempts. If you’re relatively new to the PC graphics scene, you may be unaware that Intel has tried this before. In 2010, the company cancelled plans to introduce its Larrabee GPU architecture to the consumer market. Larrabee was first and foremost a GPGPU-centric architecture, however, and ultimately didn’t fit in the 3D consumer...
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