Items tagged with enthusiast
With blue skies and warmer weather on its way, it's hard to not get excited for summer. We just saw NVIDIA launch its latest mid-range GPU, the GeForce GTX 1070, and we know that AMD's Polaris will be shown off soon as well. Those launches alone are huge, but Intel wasn't about to be drowned out by them. At Computex, the company finally took the veil off of its latest enthusiast processors built on the Broadwell-E microarchitecture. If you're interested in getting the nitty gritty on all of what Broadwell-E brings to the table, we'd encourage you to read through Marco's excellent write-up, where he doesn't just talk about the new chips, but new motherboards and DDR4 memory that have been released...
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When Intel debuted Haswell this year, it launched its first mobile processor with a massive 128MB L4 cache. Dubbed "Crystal Well," this on-package (not on-die) pool of memory wasn't just a graphics frame buffer, but a giant pool of RAM for the entire core to utilize. The performance impact from doing so is significant, though the Haswell processors that utilize the L4 cache don't appear to account for very much of Intel's total CPU volume. Right now, the L4 cache pool is only available on mobile parts, but that could change next year. According to CPU-World, Broadwell-K will change that. The 14nm desktop chips aren't due until the tail end of next year -- we should see a desktop refresh in the...
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Over the past few years, Corsair has steadily ramped up the number and types of computer chassis it manufacturers. The high-end 700D and 800D have been followed by a number of midrange products and one uber-expensive deluxe model, the massive 900D. The case we're reviewing today, the 750D, is meant to drop into the $200 price bracket, where it faces competition from Corsair's own 650D mid-tower as well as a number of other chassis from manufacturers that offer products at similar or somewhat cheaper price points. Despite the name, the 750D is actually somewhat smaller than the original 700D/800D family. Those chassis were 24 inches long, 24 inches tall, and 9 inches wide, while the 750D...
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Over the past few years, Corsair has steadily ramped up the number and types of computer chassis it manufacturers. The high-end 700D and 800D have been followed by a number of midrange products and one uber-expensive deluxe model, the massive 900D. The case we're reviewing today, the 750D, is meant to drop into the sub-$200 price bracket, where it faces competition from Corsair's own 650D mid-tower as well as a number of other chassis from manufacturers. Despite the name, the 750D is actually somewhat smaller than the original 700D/800D family. Those chassis were 24 inches long, 24 inches tall, and 9 inches wide, while the 750D is 21.5 inches long, 22.1 inches tall, and 9.3 inches wide. The other...
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The maker space has seen its share of modular hardware projects, to be sure, (including ones pertaining to handsets), but one Dave Hakkens is looking to push things even further with Phonebloks, which is essentially a set of modules that create a complete smartphone when combined. The idea is that a handset can be broken down into individual components; for example, there could be a storage module, a battery module, a camera module, a display module, and so on. Thus, if for example you aren’t happy with your smartphone’s terrible camera, instead of replacing the whole unit, you could simply swap in a new camera module and get a nice upgrade. The operating system could be Android,...
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Sandy Bridge processors have been available for eight months, but Intel's highest-end CPU remains based on the older 32nm Westmere architecture, rather than on SB silicon. A report from VR-Zone suggests Intel's Sandy Bridge-E CPUs may have been delayed for thermal reasons. According to the site, Sandy Bridge-E chips will ship without an Intel standard cooler and may dissipate as much as 180W. To date, Intel has said only that the upcoming processors will have a TDP in line with its previous high-end desktop chips. The upcoming socket will span enthusiast and server systems. Despite appearances, the two statements aren't necessarily linked and should be evaluated separately. Any decision Intel...
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Jon Peddie Research has released a report pegging the total value of the PC gaming hardware market at some $27 billion in 2010, up from $20 billion in 2008. Currently, 'enthusiast' class hardware accounts for ~46 percent of that amount. JPR predicts that this will fall to 35 percent in 2013, but because that shift will occur in a growing industry, the total dollar value of hardware sales will grow from $9.5 billion in 2009 to $12.5 billion in 2013. Ted Pollak, Video Game Industry Analyst for JPR, cites a number of influences for this phenomenon. "PC hardware has caught up to most of the software and people are able to play computationally intensive games on Performance level systems. Performance...
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As it stands today, many of the major components in a typical enthusiast class PC have built-in mechanisms for monitoring the health status of the device. Processors and GPUs have internal thermal diodes for monitoring temperatures, and graphics cards and motherboards have sensors for monitoring a myriad of voltages and things like fan speeds. Other components, however, like cases, power supplies, and cooling systems, for example, usually don’t have any such mechanism. And even if they do, odds are it uses a proprietary interface that isn’t universally compatible. To remedy this situation, the crew at NVIDIA has architected a new open standard the company hopes will be adopted...
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NVIDIA has just introduced a new open-industry standard for real-time monitoring and control of PC power supplies, chassis and water cooling systems, dubbed ESA, short for Enthusiast System Architecture. The company hopes ESA will be adopted across the industry and a new wave of ESA compliant hardware than can be monitored and controlled via a standard interface will ensue. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen. For now though, we've got the details for you available for you right here on HotHardware.NVIDIA's ESA - Enthusiast System Architecture Standard...
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OCZ Technology Answers Enthusiast Demands for a Complete High-End Memory Solution with the 4GB Reaper HPC CAS 4 EditionSunnyvale, CA—October 10, 2007—OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today announced the 4GB PC2-6400 CL4 series, the latest edition to the highly-awarded OCZ Reaper HPC (Heat Pipe Conduit) product family. With a proven performance design coupled with the blazing latencies and memory capacity enthusiasts crave, the 4GB PC2-6400 Reaper CL4 series provides rock-solid stability and performance on the latest AMD and Intel platforms. The Reaper CL4 4GB kit is designed to offer consumers a high end, high density...
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OCZ Technology Group Unleashes Enthusiast-Grade DDR3-1333 CL7 Solution Sunnyvale, Calif. — OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today announced the newest OCZ DDR3 product addition. The leading-edge PC3-10666 Platinum Edition was developed to offer the enthusiast community a solution that fully exhausts the capabilities of the Intel P35 and X38 Express chipsets. At 1333MHz, the OCZ PC3-10666 Platinum edition is rated to run CL7-7-7, featuring the ideal balance of sheer DDR3 speed and enhanced timings so users can truly take these next generation platforms to greater heights....
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OCZ Technology Unveils 4GB Platinum Edition Kit with Optimized Timings for Enthusiasts and Overclockers Sunnyvale, CA—OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today announced the PC2-6400 Platinum Vista Performance Edition 4GB (2x2048MB) dual channel kit. These new modules feature enhanced timings and are the ultimate upgrade for gamers transitioning their high-performance systems to Windows Vista. For enthusiasts shifting to Vista and who need the performance of high speed memory, the PC2-6400 Platinum 4GB kit is the ideal upgrade from the standard 2GB of RAM....
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INTEL DELIVERS ITS FASTEST ENTHUSIAST QUAD-CORE PROCESSOR Added Performance Welcomed by 'Hardcore' PC Users and Developers SANTA CLARA, Calif., Apr. 9, 2007 - Intel Corporation today advanced its enthusiast-level quad-core processor family with the introduction of the Intel Core 2 Extreme processor QX6800, the company's twelfth quad-core processor offering. Running at 2.93 GHz -- the fastest native clock speed yet reached with the Intel Core microarchitecture for the quad-core desktop -- this addition to Intel's innovative processor family sets new standards for desktop PC performance. The Intel Core 2 Extreme processor QX6800 is ideal for those gamers, digital design professionals and enthusiasts...
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AMD envisions a "4x4" platform as being the next big step in enthusiast computing. With a dual-socket & dual-core capable motherboard, you'll certainly be getting every drop of performance out of Nvidia's and ATI's top of the line dual card solutions. Well, actually that's thinking a bit small. How about dual-GPU video cards in SLI or CrossFire? The 4x4 platform. "What you are seeing here is a dual-processor system board platform, each using dual-core processors for a total of four logical cores in a single computer. Also included on this slide is the introduction of dual-GPU video cards, similar to what...
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Tonight, X-Bit labs takes a sober look at the recent Nvidia/AEG scandal. With rumors flying around everywhere, it's time to take a look at some of the facts(or lack thereof) surrounding the issue. "In the beginning of week - on the best day for starting a scandal - Nvidia Corp. was accused in seeding shills into forums and communities to promote its products. The fans reportedly received free hardware and officially acted to "educate" users in the forums. We try to attempt to summarize all the information to find out whether advertising methods of hardware companies have reached the point of pretty unfaithful practices"...
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Intel's launch of their next generation Pentium Extreme Edition 955 dual-core processor last month, marked a solid improvement in overall performance for what is to be the last core iteration utilizing the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture. While this Intel dual-core kicker, essentially beefing up a pair or Prescott dies in a single package, was a welcomed addition in performance and an impressive feat in 65nm process technology, thermal characteristics of the new Presler core Pentium were still pretty toasty and performance wasn't enough to catch AMD's high end Athlon 64 FX-57 or their Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual core chip in many of our real world benchmark tests. And today AMD lets...
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