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 have seen a flurry of product launches over the past few months from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. While we get to reap the rewards of technology’s ever steady march of progress, their partners have been hard at work ensuring their offerings can withstand the ever increasing demands of bleeding-end hardware, and appeal to consumers at the same time. In this spirit, Gigabyte recently invited us to a launch event in Miami for its newest Aorus branded motherboards, graphics cards, and peripherals. Technically, everything Gigabyte showed us had already been announced, but the presentations did offer a glimpse into many of the engineering and marketing decisions the company has made in an...
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Intel has been uncharacteristically vocal about its most recent plans to enter the discrete GPU market. Over the last year or so, the company has disclosed some tantalizing information and made a few high-profile hires, in its bid to build-up and flesh-out a plan that was first set in motion a few years ago. Like any major semiconductor player, Intel is continually looking for growth opportunities in areas where the company may potentially shape the future direction of a particular market segment. As GPUs have morphed from targeted gaming and graphics devices alone, into massively-parallel AI and Deep Learning compute powerhouses, it makes sense that Intel wants to get in on the GPU’s expanding...
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AMD has had a fairly sizable hole in its graphics card line-up for quite some time now. Disregarding the craziness crypto-miners caused for a while there, pricing on the Radeon RX 580 has hovered around the $200 mark, whereas most of the Radeon RX Vega 56 cards currently available sell for over $400 – give or take a few bucks. In addition, there have been no current-gen offerings released in between the two. Fortunately, AMD hopes to address this situation today, however, with the launch of a semi-new GPU, the not-so-secret Radeon RX 590. Over the last few weeks, news of the Radeon RX 590 has steadily leaked out to the web. We’ve covered a number of the stories on the news page, but...
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It has been about a month since NVIDIA officially launched the GeForce RTX 2080 and flagship RTX 2080 Ti. Having thoroughly tested the cards, we know that the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in particular is a powerhouse; if you want to see how it compares to other high-end graphics cards, you can check out our numbers right here. Today, however, we are going to dig in a little deeper and see how a pair of GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards perform when linked together in SLI mode over the new second-gen NVLink connectors integrated into NVIDIA Turing cards... The Most Powerful GPUs Available Today -- Dual RTX 2080 Tis With NVLink In this article, we are going to compare the performance of single and dual-card...
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The staggered roll-out of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX series of graphics cards continues today with the release of the GeForce RTX 2070. NVIDIA and its partners are at the ready with a wide array of board designs at price points starting at $499. We’ve got a somewhat pricier, all-custom EVGA board on tap for you here that’s packing a dual-fan cooler, configurable RGB lighting, and interchangeable colored accents, the EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC. EVGA has a few RTX 2070 cards coming down the pipeline with various cooler configurations and clocks. The EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC is actually one of the tamer models, that’s clocked similarly to NVIDIA’s own Founder’s Edition....
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Back in August, during SIGGRAPH, AMD announced the latest addition to its professional graphics card line-up, the Radeon Pro WX 8200. Like its predecessors, the Radeon Pro WX 8200 features the distinctive YInMn blue signature color of other Radeon Pro WX cards and is geared towards content creators and creative professionals. This latest addition to the line-up, however, is actually a slight step-down from the current flagship Radeon Pro WX 9100 – sort of. The two cards are both based on AMD’s Vega GPU architecture, but the core counts and memory configurations differ between the two. AMD’s goal with the Radeon Pro WX 8200 was to drive prices down, while maintaining a similar...
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Although NVIDIA just launched the Turing-based GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti last week, its board partners were at the ready with a wide array of custom offerings right out of the gate. We were lucky enough to show you a couple of custom cards from MSI and EVGA in our initial launch coverage, and today we’ve got a brand new combatant to evaluate from ASUS, namely the GeForce RTX 2080 ROG STRIX Gaming OC Edition. As we’ve come to expect from ASUS, the GeForce RTX 2080 ROG STRIX Gaming OC Edition is about as extreme as an air-cooled GPU can get. Of course the card is factory overclocked, but ASUS also goes all-out with the cooler, power delivery, lighting, and some handy related...
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To date, NVIDIA has disclosed a number of details regarding its GeForce RTX series graphics cards, based on the bleeding-edge Turing GPU architecture. We covered NVIDIA’s official announcements direct from Gamescom, where high-level features like Ray Tracing, DLSS, NVLink, and pricing were initially revealed and followed up with a nice, long podcast chat with NVIDIA’s own Tom Petersen, during which a handful of interesting tid-bits were divulged. We were able to dive into the Turing architecture last week, where we detailed and explained what makes Turing tick in all of its brain-melting glory. Today though, we can finally reveal how the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and GeForce RTX 2080...
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A few weeks back, at an event just prior to the Gamescom kick-off in Cologne, Germany, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang officially unveiled the company’s initial GeForce RTX 2000 series graphics card line-up, based on its new Turing GPU microarchitecture. Jensen discussed a number of the cards’ new features and capabilities, including real-time hardware accelerated ray tracing, a new deep learning assisted anti-aliasing technology dubbed DLSS, and he covered some specific speeds and feeds regarding the upcoming GeForce RTX cards themselves. Many other deeper technical details regarding the Turing GPU microarchitecture were kept closer to the vest and revealed only to smaller group of...
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We have a treat coming up for you all tomorrow afternoon, as we’ll be hosting a livestream chat with Tom Petersen, who serves as the Director of Technical Marketing for NVIDIA. It doesn’t take a cryptologist to figure out what we’re going to be talking about: all things NVIDIA Turing of course. Early last week, NVIDIA announced its next-generation gaming graphics card lineup which includes the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and the RTX 2080 Ti. In addition to promising raw gaming performance gains over the previous generation GeForce GTX 10 series, these new Turing cards also bring NVDIA RTX real-time ray-tracing technology and some new image quality features, like AI-powered...
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This week at Gamescom 2018, NVIDIA held a GeForce Gaming Celebration to unveil its new GeForce RTX 2080 and 2070 series graphics cards, based on its new Turing GPU architecture. The NVIDIA GPU that powers GeForce RTX cards ushers in a wealth of new technologies, enabled by its new processing engines. These new technologies include hardware-accelerated, real-time Ray Tracing and a new form of anti-aliasing called DLSS or Deep Learning Super Sampling, among a few others we can't talk about just yet. What’s interesting about DLSS is that it uses Turing’s Tensor cores to enable a deep learning-powered AI technique to dramatically improve image quality and remove jagged edge artifacts...
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After an epic week of leaks, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX family has finally been unveiled. There were no real surprises given that we've already seen the specs and various cards from OEM partners, but the new Turing family is no less impressive. As its name implies, the GeForce RTX cards are all about bringing real-time ray-tracing to gamers, allowing for more realistic scenes with proper lighting and shadowing effects for more accurate character and object models in games that will support the technology. As expected, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the mack daddy of the family with its whopping 4,352 CUDA cores. The family is further fleshed out with the GeForce RTX 2080 (2,944 CUDA...
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It seems a little late in the game to be reviewing Arctic's Accelero Xtreme IV GPU cooler, so what gives? Well, I recently upgraded my ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition model, and while that is a solid GPU upgrade for sure, it is a downgrade acoustically and thermally. Some people prefer the blower style cooler that ships on Founders Editions cards. I am not one of them. My main system sits in an open air Thermaltake Core P5 chassis, so there really is not a benefit to expelling hot hair out of the rear of the case, as Founders Edition cards do. If anything, the open air design exacerbates the noise since the card and cooler are...
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HDR -- you’ve undoubtedly seen the three letters stamped on the box of the latest 4K monitors and TVs while passing by them in the store, and while it is still relatively new HDR (High-Dynamic Range) technology is, without question, changing the way in which our senses take in next-gen entertainment. NVIDIA is at the forefront of driving this cutting-edge display technology with new G-SYNC monitors that profoundly impact three primary pillars of how visual entertainment is perceived by the human eye: color, brightness, and contrast. How that translates to today’s visually advanced games is a true-to-life spectrum of vibrant colors, dramatically more intense light...
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