PC Components, Peripherals And Gadget Reviews And News
Dig into our deep-dive product reviews and news of PC components from processors, to motherboards, graphics cards (GPUs), sound cards, and storage, along with other gadgets and peripherals that complete the computing experience. Whether you're a DIY PC enthusiast builder or just looking to read-up on what should be inside or connected to your next pre-built PC, here's where you'll find all the nuts and bolts sorted on what makes modern computer systems tick, as well some of the best user interface devices to go with them.
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...
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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....
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Toshiba has released a string of top-notch, affordable NVMe solid state drives over the last couple of years featuring its BiCS flash memory technology, which target a wide array of market segments. We’ve shown you a few recently, like the diminutive, affordable OCZ RC100 and the mainstream OEM targeted, XG5. Today, Toshiba is redoubling its efforts in the OEM segment with yet another new client NVMe drive, the XG6. We first posted news of the XG6 a few weeks back – if you’d like to check out the initial announcement, it is available right here. Like the XG5, this new drive...
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Samsung has been a leader in the solid state storage market for a number of years. Whether you were looking for affordable SATA-based offerings or high-performance NVMe gumsticks, Samsung usually has an answer. And we’re not just talking about internal drives either; Samsung has also released a number of excellent external storage devices, like the T3 and last year’s T5, for example. What Samsung hasn’t had was an ultra-high speed external solid state device that shed the limitations of legacy interfaces – until today, that is. Samsung’s latest storage product, the...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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This may sound a bit over the top to some of you, but in our opinion AMD triggered a true revolution in the high-end enthusiast desktop segment last year, when it first introduced Ryzen to the world. Excluding extremely expensive workstation or enterprise-class processors, in early 2017 the most powerful desktop CPU money could buy was a 10-core Intel Core i7 that retailed for more than $1700, while modern, mainstream desktops at the time typically featured 4 cores. Sure, AMD had six and eight core FX-series processors on the market as well, but their legacy architecture wasn’t competitive...
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Intel has taken another step forward in its perpetual march towards high-capacity, lower-cost solid state drives. Today’s release of the new Intel SSD 660p series of drives marks the first in the company’s line-up to pack its brand-new 64-layer QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND Flash memory, which essentially doubles the capacities available within the same footprint of previous-gen technologies. The Intel SSD 660p series also leverages NVMe technology, the M.2 form factor, and it employs firmware that’s tuned specifically for mainstream, consumer class workloads. These drives...
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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...
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