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Noutăţi, prezentări, teste laptop
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[23 November 2014, 15:48]
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Users: 0Guests: 109Total: 109<p><span style="font-size: small;">A few years ago, we witnessed the return of mechanical keyboards and ever since then companies have been fighting a marketing war about whose keyboard is better. The truth however is that mechanical keyboards, even in their least expensive implementations, remain fairly expensive and such an investment doesn't always makes sense to users. For you that appreciate a good keyboard but do not care about whether it has mechanical key switches or not, Corsair's Raptor K40 is an advanced gaming keyboard that uses rubber dome switches.</span></p>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">The Corsair Raptor K40 is marketed as a fully featured gaming keyboard, with functionality specifically targeting advanced users and gamers. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small;">Corsair has the following list of features posted in their website:</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">Rubber dome keys</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small;">RGB 16.8 million color backlighting with three levels of illumination</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small;">Six dedicated macro keys</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small;">36KB of onboard memory</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small;">Seven easy-access multimedia keys</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small;">Windows Lock key for uninterrupted game play</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">While "rubber dome keys" hardly qualifies as a feature, but the rest of the bullet points are actually good for an advanced keyboard. Regarding the rubber domes, Corsair's Raptor line is the less expensive version of their mechanical Vengeance keyboards, and subjectively there are users that prefer rubber dome keys to mechanical keys — particularly for gaming purposes.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">Corsair supplies the Raptor K40 in a well-designed cardboard box, which also provides adequate protection during shipping. The main marketing theme is the backlighting of the keyboard, and rightfully so. There are plenty of keyboards with backlighting — with either mechanical key switches or rubber domes — but very few RGB backlit keyboards. It can be a very eyecatching feature, though after the initial "wow" factor, most users will likely settle for something functional rather than strobing lights. Let's have a closer look at the K40 and see how it fares.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/7934/corsair-raptor-k40-keyboard-review" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small;">AMD announced earlier in March that it would be launching a socketed desktop Kabini APU. Traditionally the ultra low end/low power SoCs on desktops have come in packages soldered on to motherboards. If you need a faster CPU, you bought a new motherboard with it. With its new AM1 platform, AMD hopes to bring the sort of flexibility enjoyed by the rest of the desktop market to the entry level value segment. </span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">The rationale is simple: the traditional desktop PC is under tremendous price pressure due to the popularity of affordable tablets, notebooks, Chromebooks and Chromeboxes. While there are definitely advantages to a desktop, it's a market that won't grow on its own. The one advantage desktops have over any of the aforementioned modern mainstream computing devices is upgradability. Unfortunately that's a feature that's often lost as we look at the value segment of the desktop market. AM1 attempts to fix that.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/7933/the-desktop-kabini-review-part-1-athlon-5350-am1" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></div>
Although the days of AMD’s “small die” strategy have long since ended, one aspect of AMD’s strategy that they have stuck with since the strategy’s inception has been the concept of a dual-GPU card. AMD’s first modern dual-GPU card, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 (sorry, Rage Fury MAXX), came at a low point for the company where such a product was needed just to close the gap between AMD’s products and NVIDIA’s flagship big die video cards. However with AMD’s greatly improved fortune these days, AMD no longer has to play just to tie but they can play to win. AMD’s dual-GPU cards have evolved accordingly and these days they are the high-flying flagships of AMD’s lineup, embodying the concept of putting as much performance into a single card as is reasonably possible.
The last time we took a look at a new AMD dual-GPU video card was just under a year ago, when AMD launched the Radeon HD 7990. Based on AMD’s then-flagship Tahiti GPUs, the 7990 was a solid design that offered performance competitive with a dual card (7970GHz Edition Crossfire) setup while fixing many of the earlier Radeon HD 6990’s weaknesses. However the 7990 also had its shares of weaknesses and outright bad timing – it came just 2 months after NVIDIA released their blockbuster GeForce GTX Titan, and it also launched at a time right when the FCAT utility became available, enabling reliable frame pacing analysis and exposing the weak points in AMD’s drivers at the time.
Since then AMD has been hard at work on both the software and hardware sides of their business, sorting out their frame pacing problems but also launching new products in the process. Most significant among these was the launch of their newer GCN 1.1 Hawaii GPU, and the Radeon R9 290 series cards that are powered by it. Though Tahiti remains in AMD’s product stack, Hawaii’s greater performance and additional features heralded the retail retirement of the dual-Tahiti 7990, once again leaving an opening in AMD’s product stack.
That brings us to today and the launch of the Radeon R9 295X2. After much consumer speculation and more than a few teasers, AMD is releasing their long-awaited Hawaii-powered entry to their dual-GPU series of cards. With Hawaii AMD has a very powerful (and very power hungry) GPU at their disposal, and for its incarnation in the R9 295X2 AMD is going above and beyond anything they’ve done before, making it very clear that they’re playing to win.
<div><span style="font-size: small;">Corsair is a company that hardly requires an introduction; almost every PC user has heard of their name and a large number own at least one of their products. More advanced users know that Corsair is one of the oldest companies that's still around. The company was established in 1994 as a cache module manufacturer but their focus changed to DRAM modules a few years later. Corsair began a very aggressive diversification scheme over the past decade, which turned the DRAM manufacturer into a giant that markets several dozen technology-related products, their four series of cases being among the most popular of them.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">Depite having over a dozen designs available, Corsair is continuously releasing new cases to enrich their product ranks. It's only been a few months since the release of the Obsidian 250D, a cubic Mini-ITX case, and today yet another product joins the ranks of the Obsidian series. In this review, we'll look at Corsair's newest mid-tower case, the Obsidian 450D, a case designed to bridge the gap between the Micro-ATX Obsidian 350D and the towering Obsidian 750D.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">The Obsidian 450D comes in a rather simple, brown cardboard box. The artwork is limited to a basic schematic of the case itself. Inside the box is the case protected by Styrofoam slabs and wrapped in a nylon bag, which should offer ample shipping protection for a typical ATX case.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">Alongside with the Obsidian 450D, Corsair supplies only the bare essentials. We only found a handful of black screws and a few cable ties supplied with our sample, as well as a basic installation guide. Considering the class of the Obsidian series, the bundle leaves a lot to be desired -- nicer velcro wraps would be appreciated as an example.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/7891/corsair-obsidian-450d-case-review" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></div>
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<p><span style="font-size: small;">While the desktop PC industry has been reported as shrinking these last few quarters, the dichotomy rests in a drive towards the smaller form factors while the large under-the-desk systems market remains steady. This would suggest a split between mini-ITX and ATX users, leaving micro-ATX platforms stranded in the middle. Is there still room in the market for this form factor? Today we review MSI’s take on FM2+ and micro-ATX with the A88XM-E35.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/7914/msi-a88xme35-review" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></p>
Several months ago, we had a quick look at the BlackWidow Ultimate from Razer, a company very well known for their focus on gaming-related products. A few weeks ago, Razer announced that they have developed their own all-new mechanical switches, upgrading most of their keyboards with them in the process. The upgrade involves the BlackWidow Ultimate keyboard, and we have the new "2014" version that we'll be reviewing today. Razer has made plenty of noise about their new switches, and while we'll have more to say on that in a moment, let's start as usual with a look at the packaging and included items.
We received the BlackWidow Ultimate in a nicely designed cardboard box, with a small opening allowing you to test the keys. We especially liked that idea and we wholeheartedly recommend, given that it is possible, that you should visit a retail store and test the switches yourself before purchasing a keyboard. No amount of text can fully describe the feel of a mechanical switch, especially if you have no previous experience with any mechanical keyboard.
The bundle is well presented but minimal; there is a nice envelope with a quick start guide, warranty information and product registration cards, as well as two large stickers, but that is about it. There is not even a disk with the keyboard's software; an internet connection is required to download it.
Last year I spent time with one of the first UltraHD monitors to be come out and came away convinced of the benefits. Even though the screen size was not much larger than my usual display, the extra clarity and detail was totally worth it. It sealed my decision to buy a MacBook Pro Retina when it was updated last fall as well. Now we’ve seen the field of UltraHD displays expand considerably and so we now look at another 32” UltraHD display, the Dell UP3214Q.
During my stint as a researcher at university, the systems under our desks that we used for simulation and writing up reports were all oriented to stability and performance. This meant dual Xeons, large amounts of ECC memory and a motherboard to match. While I had no use for additional connectors beyond USB ports, these sorts of products have to be able to use SAS and RAID in storage, enough network management and be validated for multiple usage scenarios. GIGABYTE is pushing the GA-6PSXV3 as a cheaper variant of the GA-6PSXV2 with different connectors but the focus is on virtualization with a workstation. This points to our dual Intel 82574L NICs, 6 SATA ports, Mini-SAS (for four SATA 3 Gbps ports), support for SLI/Crossfire, a TPM header, a serial port and an ASpeed AST2300 2D management controller which we have seen on GIGABYTE Server motherboards in the past.
One of the motherboard features that GIGABYTE likes to promote is its support for 1866 MHz with a full set of 8 DIMMs on E5 26xx v2 CPUs. As we have noted in our consumer product line memory scaling articles (such as this one on Ivy Bridge), moving beyond 1600 MHz helps get out of a potential performance black hole. Unfortunately we are still bounded by JEDEC specifications at 1866 (so CAS 12/13), but our previous testing points to frequency being more important if the value MHz/CAS is around the same.
For readers who are more used to X79 consumer line products, this C604 based GA-6PXSV3 motherboard might look a bit empty (only two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots), but ultimately the workstation/server side of this platform is on maintenance and longevity. Surprisingly for a socket 2011 motherboard we get two USB 3.0 headers on board and no USB 3.0 on the back panel.
There was one flaw in testing I came across that GIGABYTE has not been able to reproduce. With the gaming benchmarks when using dual GPUs, the Sleeping Dogs benchmarks failed to complete, resetting the system after a couple of seconds of running. For two weeks we went back and forth, however GIGABYTE could not recreate the issue. The error was similar to that of a memory failure on the GPU, and this happened using several GPUs on this motherboard. These GPUs were fine on the same PSU and a different motherboard. This suggests that my motherboard at least had problems supplying power to the PCIe slots when two power hungry devices are present.
For performance we tested the GA-6PXSV3 with two E5 26xx v2 Xeons and a Core i7-4960X. The results of the Xeons were published in a review of those Xeons, and the i7-4960X results will be the focus of this review for comparison against other socket 2011 products. On the whole, we expect consumer products to perform slightly better in our benchmarks than the server parts for two main reasons. On server parts we usually are limited in DRAM speed which decreases performance (unable to set values or no direct XMP support), but also consumer products tend to be more aggressive on CPU Turbo Boost responsiveness whereas server motherboards are more lax. The GIGABYTE GA-6PSXV3 is no different in this regard – the X79 product in our comparison does have a noticeable quantitative advantage in our benchmark tests, but it does not have external management, SAS support, dual Intel NICs or RDIMM ECC support. That is ultimately what you are paying for at the end of the day.
A set of two high-end graphics cards must be a great performer. We had tested SLI setup of two GeForce GTX 780 Ti and now we can tell about our decision. Is this configuration a good choice from price-performance point of view? Where is hidden dangers of it
The board doesn’t looks like any other MicroATX mainboard. But in spite of non-typical interior Gryphon Z87 works as most ASUS products. It’s real ASUS mainboard with usual for this manufacturer set of features and peculiarities.