Maximum PC - Reviews

Sony Vaio Tap 20 Review

Michael Brown — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:51:21 +0000

Meet the laptablet

Sony markets its Vaio Tap 20 as a mobile desktop, but you could say that about any portable computer. We think “laptablet” is closer to the mark. With its 20-inch display, the Tap 20 is both a big laptop and a gargantuan tablet. And it wouldn’t make any sense at all without Windows 8.

Sony gives you a wireless mouse and keyboard, but who needs them?

Yes, Windows 8 is the operating system PC enthusiasts love to hate, but this machine is proof that Microsoft’s strategy of melding the desktop and mobile experiences can work. The Tap 20 isn’t perfect by a long shot, but it’s pretty darn cool. We challenge you to spend a few minutes with it and not find yourself grinning like a fool in love. And if you pass that test, fire up one of the free pinball games Sony throws in, orient the device in portrait mode, and stroke the screen to pull back the plunger.

The model we tested was outfitted with a 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U mobile processor, but only 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory. Considering the price of memory, and this machine’s occasionally sluggish performance, we think Sony should have doubled it. If you decide to buy one, we’d recommend spending the extra $200 to buy the next model up, which does just that. That model also has a 1.9GHz Intel Core i7 proc and a larger hard drive (1TB versus the 750GB in the model sent for this review; both drives are 5,400rpm spinners).

The Tap 20 features a 20-inch LED-backlit IPS display—with 10 touch points, natch—which is essential when you consider all the angles at which you might end up using it. The 1600x900 touchscreen is very responsive, as we discovered when playing the aforementioned pinball games. And while the integrated graphics aren’t strong enough for playing A-level games, they did a fine job with the more casual variety. We were particularly impressed with the speed at which we were able to operate the flippers. We were thinking it would be even more fun if the games’ physics responded to tilting, but that might have resulted in a little too much reality: It would require holding the device stock still and perfectly level.

You can use the folding stand on the back of the display to position it at an infinite number of angles for reading, or you can fold it completely flat and use the tablet horizontally. The stand does double-duty as a handle when you want to take the device into another room (did we mention it can run on battery power? It lasted three hours in our test). But we wish the handle was a wee bit thicker, had more-rounded edges, or was padded, because we could feel every ounce of the Tap 20’s 11.46-pounds digging into the backs of our fingers as we lugged it around. It’s also a little awkward to set up, because natural movement would have you lay it down flat on its screen—and if you have kids, you know they’re going to do just that. It takes two hands to flip it around and stand it up on its easel.

The speakers mounted on the back of the display are borderline terrible, but that’s typical of even all-in-one desktop PCs. Do yourself a favor and plug in headphones. Speaking of all-in-ones, the Tap 20 could fill that role, too. Its biggest shortcoming is the lack of an HDMI input—although that’s really more of a missed opportunity than a deal-breaker.

There’s nothing else remotely like the Vaio Tap 20, and we applaud Sony’s audacity for bringing it to market. Priced at a cool grand, this machine is hardly an impulse buy; but it reminds us why we love computers so much.

$1,000, www.sony.com

Asus DirectCU II Top Reviews: GeForce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 7970

Josh Norem — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:11:14 +0000

Two overclocked flagship video cards go head to head one last time

Over the past year, the GeForce GTX 680 and the Radeon HD 7970 have served as the respective flagship GPUs for each of their camps, and even though both cards seem a bit like well-aged cheese by now, they are still fast. There have also been quite a few driver updates since these cards were released, so we've decided to pit two of the overclocked versions against one another in a battle royale to settle this feud once and for all. Fighters, touch circuit boards and come out of your PCI Express corners. It's time to get it on!

Asus GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP

There are many flavors of GeForce GTX 680 out in the wild, from cards that have only modified the reference design with pretty stickers to this heavily mutated bad boy from Asus. For those not familiar with Asus nomenclature, this is the DirectCU II version of the GTX 680, meaning it features a heat pipe and fan-based cooler approximately the size of mainland China. The cooler utilizes five copper heat pipes that make direct contact with the GK104 Kepler GPU. The heat pipes fan out above the GPU and to the edge of the card, sending the heat they've collected into two separate heatsinks. Twin 100mm fans then blow into the heatsinks, exhausting the warm air outside of the chassis. It's a superb design that we've lavished praise on before because, even though it's a bit large, it works extremely well, and keeps the GPU just the way we like it—cool and quiet. Asus claims a noise reduction of 14dB compared to the reference design prepared by Nvidia, and we believe it even though we don’t specifically measure sound output. All this cooling takes up a bit of space, though, and this card's triple-slot design makes it the biggest GTX 680 ever to grace our test bench.

The Asus GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP’s name is almost as long as the 11-inch card.

Some of you might be asking, "But wait, the GTX 680 already runs cool and quiet, so why is a cooler the size of Gordon Mah Ung’s anger management therapy bill required in this situation?" That's a good question, and the answer is in the second part of our nomenclature lesson, which is the word TOP in the card's name, which means it's overclocked like a son-of-a-gun to the tune of 112MHz over stock speeds at 1,137MHz. Its Boost Clock gets a gentle massage all the way up to 1,201MHz, as well. Memory is not overclocked, however. The card also comes with Asus's GPU Tweak software that lets you not only monitor the card's temps, fan speeds, voltages, and clock speeds, but also manually adjust all those values. The card even supports an Asus-exclusive feature called VGA Hotwire that’s also supported on several Asus motherboards (it has to be supported on both to work). It lets you adjust the GPU's voltage once you've soldered several wires that run from the motherboard to the video card's PCB. This allows for control at a hardware level instead of using software, and is designed for extreme overclocking enthusiasts, to put it mildly.

During testing, the overclocked Asus GTX 680 held a crystal-clear advantage over the overclocked Radeon HD 7970, which might not be too surprising to you, but it was a surprise to us. When we tested these same video cards (not these exact cards, but reference models at stock clock speeds) just a few months ago using the latest beta drivers from each manufacturer, it was a photo finish in practically every test, with AMD holding a very slight advantage. This was a distinct coup for AMD, which had always trailed Nvidia in these comparisons previously, and it all came down to drivers, essentially. AMD had released its beta 12.11 drivers, claiming they made a significant impact on performance, and they were right.

Perhaps it's fitting then, that this time around it is most likely drivers that have put Nvidia ahead, as we tested this card with the 310.70 version of the drivers, which were released about a month after the 12.10 drivers we used to test the Radeon card. As we were going to press, Nvidia released another version of its drivers numbered 310.90, claiming even further improvements, but they arrived too close to deadline for us to test them. However, the advantage Nvidia holds is clear, both in the benchmark numbers and frequency of driver updates. Drivers are clearly a weak point for AMD, and in this face-off it most likely made all the difference.

We should point out that the Asus card was totally silent at all times during testing, a remarkable feat given its overclocked status and its superb performance. It beat the AMD card in every test except Metro, where it lost by one frame per second, so not much of a loss, really. The numbers don't lie, though, and as we close the book on this era of GPUs, the crown goes to the green camp, and we'll award a crown to Asus too, for making the fastest, and most silent, GTX 680 we've ever tested.

Asus GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP

Fast; totally silent at all times; GPU Tweak software.

Massively huge and heavy, skimpy bundle.

$540, www.asus.com

Asus Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP

In the game of high-stakes poker known as the GPU industry, once a manufacturer reveals its hand, it then waits for the competition to do the same. If the competing manufacturer reveals a more powerful or desirable alternative, due to a combination of price, performance, noise, or all three, the other manufacturer will oftentimes update its lineup with a new Extreme Titanium Platinum FTW Balls-to-the-Wall Edition, which is usually mildly overclocked. We've seen both Nvidia and AMD do this in the past, but in this particular round it's been AMD pulling this maneuver with its GHz edition of the HD 7970. The original HD 7970 shipped with a 925MHz core clock speed, and in order to gain a bit of an edge on the suddenly dominant GeForce GTX 680, or at least attempt to match its performance, AMD overclocked its flagship board to 1GHz and released the Radeon-based Kraken. It achieved its goal, too, as the GHz edition of the card was, for the most part, as fast as the GTX 680, or at least the two were close enough to move the argument away from performance to price and other considerations. Unfortunately for AMD, once people began to consider other factors, such as noise and heat, Nvidia still held the edge with its power-sipping Kepler architecture. While third-party manufacturers can't do much about the card's power output, they could certainly change its noise profile, and that's exactly what Asus has done by adding its sizable DirectCU II cooler to this card.

The Asus HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP’s triple-slot design is an amazing thing to not hear at all.

Like the GTX 680, this card is also overclocked a bit and runs at 1,000MHz, which is 75MHz over its stock speeds. Its memory also has a teeny, tiny overclock up to 1,400MHz from 1,375MHz. The card includes four Display Port connectors along with one single-link DVI port and one dual-link DVI port, giving it a distinct advantage in the multiple-displays department, and allowing you to run all six displays using AMD’s Eyefinity setup for multi-monitor gaming.

During testing, the Asus card showed a mild advantage over the reference design, pulling a few frames per second out of its red-and-black hat in each test. In two games in particular, though—Dirt 3 and Far Cry 2— we saw the most improvement, though in Metro we’re still stuck in the sub-20fps region, which is simply ridiculous but not the fault of the cards, obviously. Given its overclocked nature, it's not too surprising that it's faster than the reference design, but what's most impressive is how utterly silent the card is at all times; a marked improvement over the reference design, and all other HD 7970s we've ever tested. Sadly, the Radeon card still gets its lunch eaten by the GTX 680 in almost every benchmark, and not just by one or two frames but by enough to make it clear which card is faster. As we stated in the GTX review, it could be down to drivers, as we used the 12.10 drivers for these tests, which are the latest "official" drivers. The 12.11 drivers have been in beta for a while now and might have turned the tide had they been released, but we don't test with beta drivers, so for now the crown goes to the green camp. To be clear, this is the best version of the HD 7970 we've tested in this generation of cards, but given its performance deficit to the GTX 680, we're forced to withhold a Kick Ass award for now. Let's hope the company can reclaim one very soon with its HD 8000 series GPUs.

Asus Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP

Whisper quiet; as fast as GHz edition; GPU Tweak software; runs six displays.

Expensive; not as fast as the GTX 680 in our tests.

$490, www.asus.com

Specifications

	Asus GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP	Asus Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II TOP	Reference Radeon HD 7970	Reference GTX 680
3DMark 2011 Performance	10,886	8,700	8,337	9,555
Unigine Heaven 2.5 (fps)	33.1	28.9	28.7	31.2
Shogun 2 (fps)	37.8	29.6	25.7	29.8
Far Cry 2 / Long (fps)	118.6	97.4	91.6	107.3
Dirt 3 (fps)	79.3	75.2	70.5	72.9
Metro 2033 (fps)	17	18.6	18.6	16.3
STALKER: CoP SunShade (fps)	41.5	40.2	38.7	34.3
Just Cause 2 (fps)	57.71	53.1	51	54.7
Batman: Arkham City (fps)	66	62	60	58
Catzilla	5,690	4,427	4,218	4,880
Base Clock	1,137MHz	1,000MHz	925MHz	925MHz
Boost Clock	1,201MHz	N/A	N/A	1,000MHz
Memory Clock	6,008MHz	5,600MHz	5,500MHz	6,000MHz

Best scores are bolded. Our test bed is a 3.33GHz Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition in an Asus P9X79 motherboard with 16GB of DDR3/1600 and a Thermaltake ToughPower 1,050w PSU. The OS is 64-bit Windows Ultimate. All games are run at 2560x1600 with 4xAA except for the 3DMark tests.

Richland Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:50:42 +0000

Richland review: Even the most diehard fan boy can admit AMD’s not in the hunt against Intel’s top-end processors

That doesn’t mean AMD still can’t give Intel a hard time. While AMD can’t compete with the Core i7-3970X or even the Core i7—4770K, the company’s rush to merge CPU and GPU to make the APU has put more pressure on Intel than Intel would probably want to admit.

AMD’s first Brazos APUs, for example, blew away peoples' sales and performance expectations. Since then, AMD has kept its foot on the gas peddle. While it hasn’t eclipsed Intel’s efficiency per core on the x86 side, the graphics portion of the APUs have always lead Intel’s integrated graphics. The company’s Llano parts have been even more competitive, giving up better integrated graphics and fair x86 performance. From Llano, AMD introduced Trinity and the latest sequel: Richland.

Richland doesn’t bring any fancy new 3D transistors or a fabrication process that’s the envy of the technical free world, but it still offers a pretty compelling message: a high-clocked quad-core chip with graphics that’s surprisingly decent.

Richland Benchmarks

Since Richland rolled out just as Intel’s Haswell hit, we had a nice set of systems all ready to go for direct comparison using the latest graphics drivers and UEFIs. Obviously, we’re not making a direct comparison between the $142 A10-6800K, $122 Core Core i3-3220 and three Core i7 procs, but since we had the numbers, we’re including them to give users an idea of how much they’re missing and not missing by spending twice or three times as much on a CPU.

For our testing, we outfitted three different systems with the same GeForce GTX 580 cards, 16GB of Corsair DDR3/1600 and 240GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSDs. Windows 8 was used for all of our testing.

The Upshot

Obviously, you need to dig into the details of our tests. But rather than having you click around looking for the conclusion, we’ll just put it right here. Our impression of Richland is generally good. The graphics performance obviously schools the Intel parts that we’ve seen. Intel’s HD5000 and HD5200 is another story, though, but somehow we doubt you’ll get those in $140 CPUs.

Richland’s big problem from the enthusiast perspective is that we don’t quite get it. The APU, when rolled into a NUC-sized or HTPC mini PC, is a pretty damned decent story. What we don’t get is why you’d ever build with a Richland in a full-sized FM2 board. Our instincts tells us to suck it up and build on AM3+ with discrete graphics for maybe $75 more. Talking to motherboard vendors, though, we’ve heard FM2 boards in full ATX are overwhelmingly favored by consumers. That tells us that most of the people buying FM2 systems have very tight budgets, and putting out another $75 for a GPU is out of the question. And that's really the magic of the FM2 platform and Llano/Richland.

For those on very tight budgets, Richland does the job and it does it very well. For those of us with a bit more scratch, we think AM3+ or even LGA1155 is the better choice for a full-sized desktop box.

Click the next page for our Richland Benchmarks.

A good GPU test shouldn’t vary much from the CPU, and here we see amazingly close scores despite the differences in clock speeds, core counts and generations of cores. We found similar results in the overall scores in 3DMark11 (incorrectly labeled 3DMark2011 in our chart) as well as for the new 3DMark, so we decided to simply skip those charts here. The results is an overall score, and higher is better.

The story changes when we flip over to physics testing. The test is a theoretical physics test and favors core and thread count. Here’s a first glimpse of the steep hill AMD’s Piledriver cores still face: the dual-core Core i3-3220 is a dual-core Hyper-threaded part without Turbo Boost. That means the A10-6800K’s 4.1GHz to 4.4GHz clock speed and quad-core/shared modules don’t give up much more than the i3. The result is an overall score and higher is better.

Echoing 3DMark11, the new 3DMark also favors the higher core count parts, and we found the A10 and Core-i3 on equal footing, despite one being a quad-core. The results is an overall score, and higher is better.

The popular and free 7-Zip has a built-in benchmark mode that gives approximations of how well a processor would perform in compression duties. Here, the quad-core A10 actually proves itself well against the Core i3-3220 and—surprise—comes amazingly close to the new Haswell chip. A10, pat yourself on the back. The result is an overall score of MIPS, and higher is better.

Cinebench 10 is the older version of Maxon’s popular 3D rendering benchmark. It features the ability to render the test on a single core. This should give an idea of the efficiency of each respective CPU microarchitecture. Sandy Bridge is slower than Ivy Bridge, which is slower than Haswell. The Core i3-3220’s weakness is likely due to its inability run at higher clock speeds than 3.30GHz. Seen in red, the A10 single-core performance could use some help, especially when you consider it’s running at 4.1+GHz. The result is an overall score, and higher is better.

Oh, but those cores in the A10 do pay off when it comes to a multi-threaded workload. The A10 outruns the Intel dual-core handily. Those longer bars? You have to pay for those, buddy. The result is an overall score, and higher is better.

Cinebench 11.5 is the newest version of Maxon’s popular benchmark. The A10 again comes out on top of the Core i3, but the more efficient Intel cores and Hyper-Threading make it closer than you’d think. For those wondering if a 6-core Core i7-3930K is even worth it, look at the hexa-cores’ numbers. If you are getting paid to render out a scene, the hexa-core will save you time and money. The result is an overall score, and higher is better.

POV-Ray is a ray-tracing engine that’s been around the block. It favors core and thread count, and the A10’s quad-cores trounces the Core i3’s dual-cores, despite the presence of Hyper-Threading. Count this as a win for AMD. The results are in seconds, and lower is better.

There is an OpenCL version of Handbrake floating around in beta. But for now, we stuck with the public version of the latest build, so you’re seeing purely x86 performance, not GPU performance here. The A10’s quad part comes out on top of the Core i3 dualie, and again, we see the hexa-core part outrun even the new Haswell chip. Did your buddy tell you hexa-core’s are worthless even when you said you intended to transcode a lot of video? He was wrong. The results are in seconds, and lower is better.

For our Premiere Pro CS6 test, we take 1080P video shot on an EOS 5D Mk II and export it as a Blu-ray formatted video. All of the encoding here is done on the CPU rather than the GeForce GTX 580, as we want to see CPU performance. Keep in mind, there is a new version of Premiere Pro coming out with OpenCL support rather than pure CUDA. Still, this test is a pure CPU x86 test, and the A10 gets trashed really, really badly. AMD fans will say that’s Intel’s hand in making compilers that gives them the upper hand. We’ll say that whatever the reason is, it’s pretty clear that if you are using Premiere Pro CS6, you need to be running Intel silicon with at least four cores aboard and Hyper-Threading. This is simply horrible performance from the A10 here. The results are in seconds, and lower is better.

TechARP’s X264 HD 5.01 is a pretty thread-heavy benchmark that tests how fast a CPU can encode using the free X264 encoder library. It makes two passes for the benchmark, and the A10 and Core i3 are pretty much tied. This test also shows that if you intend to encode video, pay more for your CPU. The results are in frames per second, and higher is better.

Pass 2 of the X264 HD 5.01 benchmark favors thread and core count more, so we now see the quad-core A10 outpace the dual-core Core i3 by a healthy clip. The results are in frames per second, and higher is better.

For our Proshow Producer 5 test, we take a couple of hundred images shot with a Canon EOS 5D MkII, create a custom slideshow, and export it to a 1080P video file. ProShow Producer 5 pretty much tops out at four-cores. The A10 is slightly faster than the Core i3 part, but nothing to really text home about. The budget parts do amazingly well on this, considering how much pricier the other parts are in this roundup, which means photoslide show production isn’t something anyone should consider a heavy duty workload anymore. Perhaps ProShow Producer 6 will step it up. The results are in seconds, and lower is better.

HDRs are so popular now, it’s a built-in feature on point-and-shoot digital cameras and phones. Those modes are just fakes, though. If you’re going to make an HDR, you need different exposures, which is what HDR Soft’s PhotoMatix does. Favored by HDR experts, PhotoMatix has a batch mode that’s unavailable in the main interface, because it grinds most machines into the ground. It favors core and thread count, and here we see the A10 outpacing the dual-core Core i3. PhotoMatix is also one of those apps that actually show spending more money on the CPU helps. The Core i7-4770K is roughly twice as much (plus some change) as the A10-6800K, and the performance you get is actually the equivalent too. The results are in seconds, and lower is better.

Bah, we don’t give a damn that your phone has a 16-megapixel sensor. The future is about Gigapixel, so we used a GigaPan EPIC Pro to shoot 263 images with a Canon EOS 7D and stitched them with Stitch.EFx 2.0 to make a 1.1 gigapixel image. Stitch.EFx2.0 is interesting because the first two thirds of it is single-threaded, with the last third exploiting all of the cores available. It’s a good mix that favors efficiency, clock speed, and core count. The A10’s high clocks and more cores hands the dual-core Core i3 -- a pretty handy defeat which, frankly, gives the even the pricier Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge quad chips a good scare. The results are in seconds, and lower is better.

Click the next page to see some Richland game benchmarks.

For some real-world gaming tests, we ran Hitman: Absolution at 13x7 resolution with graphics quality turned way down. We expected the performance to be pretty uniform, but that didn’t pan out. The A10 actually came in last with the Core i3 running at nearly 1GHz lower clock speed, beating it. It’s pretty clear that Hitman: Absolution likes quad-core parts, and not quad-cores that share resources the way AMD’s Piledriver cores do. These are framerates, and higher is better.

Resident Evil 6 also saw the much higher-clocked A10 lose to the Core i3. It’s not by much, but a loss nonetheless. In reality, the gameplay between the six chips would likely be indistinguishable at 1080p with graphics quality turned up. These are framerates, and higher is better.

Total War: Shogun 2 CPU benchmark shows that pricier quad-cores have a pretty heavy advantage over the budget parts. In budgetland, the AMD chip was again slightly trailing the Intel chip, despite its core and clock advantage. This reminds us of a forum post we read on another site that said AMD’s chips were faster in gaming. Our results, and most of the hardware community, would disagree. These are framerates, and higher is better.

Valve’s particle test was created around the time the Core 2 Quad was released and made to show off a pure CPU-based physics engine. Again, the Core i3-3220 running at 3.2GHz or lower owns the A10-6800K running at 4.1GHz to 4.4GHz. We've seen this particular test favor cache size and memory latency, which is why we think the fat hexa-core part beats even the Haswell chip. These are framerates, and higher is better.

Echoing the Core i3’s prowess at gaming, we ran Dirt 3 at low resolution with features turned down to take the GPU out of the equation. The result was an A10 part that is OK with discrete graphics, but it's clearly trailing a chip that’s clocked almost 1GHz lower. Let's also take a moment to admire the Haswell's thrashing of the other quad parts and the hexa-core chip. These are framerates, and higher is better.

PCMark 8 came out just as we finishing our testing, and rather than being even later with this story, we rolled with our existing PCMark 7 numbers. The test has never particularly favored core counts, and here we see it’s mostly a wash between the Core i3 and A10 CPU. These are overall scores, and higher is better.

Click the next page to check out Richland's integrated graphics.

Haswell Integrated Graphics Benchmarks

AMD fans may be ready to declare non-victory and go home, but let’s now look at where the A10-6800K is made to really live: in integrated graphics.

For that test, we ripped the GeForce GTX 580 card from the systems and compared the respective CPUs on their graphics prowess. The Core i3-3220 represented HD2500, the Core i7-3770 flew the flag for HD4000, and the new Haswell Core i7-4770K shows up with HD4600. AMD’s A10-6800K features Radeon HD 8670D graphics. All three were running dual-channel DDR3/1600 RAM. For those who don’t know, if you intend to run integrated graphics only and want the best gaming performance, pay for the fastest RAM you can afford, as DDR3/1866 or DDR3/2133 will give you nice benefits.

The A10 doesn’t disappoint. It simply destroys the HD2500 and HD4000 graphics. Intel’s new HD4600 gets closer, but there’s no cigar. Maybe HD Graphics 5200 aka Iris Pro will beat it, but we didn’t have it to test. These are overall scores, and higher is better.

This test isolates the graphics, and we again see the A10 make a monkey out of all of the Intel parts. Don’t expect this to change much, either. These are overall scores, and higher is better.

We’re actually running out of things to say, as we really aren’t seeing anything change for the Intel graphics here. Maybe it’s just time for Charlie Sheen to step in with a cliché. These are overall scores, and higher is better.

The new 3DMark actually sees the results close up a bit between the A10 and 4000-series Intel graphics, but the A10 still wins, especially against the HD2500 Core i3 CPU. These are overall scores, and higher is better.

Firestrike is the heavy-duty test in the new 3DMark and is more apt for testing discrete graphics, but it’s still interesting to see the Intel parts lose out to the A10. These are overall scores, and higher is better.

3DMark’s Ice Storm Graphics test is intended for mid-range PCs. Here we see HD4600 close up the distance with HD4000. But again, the A10 reigns supreme. These are overall scores, and higher is better.

The Cloudgate test in 3DMark is aimed at entry-level computing. For the first time, the HD4000 and HD4600 outpace the A10. The reason? The emphasis shifts from graphics performance to x86 performance, when the physics is factored into it, and the Intel chips now come out on top. Still don’t get it? If you’re running a game so old and so graphically easy as say Quake III, the Intel graphics and CPUs can actually be faster due to the better x86 performance. Well, except for HD2500 graphics, which is apparently there to insult or tease you. Hmm, maybe Intel shouldn't be allowed to use the word "graphics" with HD2500. Just as you can't call something "juice" unless there's actually fruit in it, maybe the HD2500 should be the purple-colored drink of the graphics world next to the grape juice A10. These are overall scores, and higher is better.

In the graphic’s only portion of Cloud Gate when physics and x86 is not factored in, the A10 actually pulls even with the new HD4600 graphics. That pretty much tells us that Intel’s HD5000 and HD5200 graphics will be faster—they just won’t be cheaper. These are frame rates, and higher is better.

We ran Hitman: Absolution at 13x7 with the image quality trimmed way low, and we still saw pretty sub-par frame rates. It’s pretty clear that as good as integrated graphics has gotten recently, sometimes you really will need a real discrete GPU. These are frame rates, and higher is better.

Resident Evil 6 is surprisingly difficult on integrated graphics, but we think it’s almost playable at a low resolution. Still, count this as a win for the A10. This is an overall score generated by RE6, and higher is better. For what it's worth: Resident Evil 6 benchmark, can you please stop when you're done, rather than looping over and over again?

We ran Dirt 3 at ultra-low quality and 13x7 resolution. Believe it or not, it looks surprisingly good at that resolution. The Haswell’s HD4600 also motors past the A10 a bit, which might be why Intel keeps showing Dirt 3 in its benchmarks. These are frame rates, and higher is better.

Unlike most shooters, driving games don’t really need high frame rates to be playable. We ran Dirt 3 at 1920x1080 resolution and medium quality to see how integrated parts would run. The A10 and Haswell do OK. In fact, it would likely be pretty playable to most people's eyes. The HD4000 graphics in the Core i7-3770K would be pushing it and HD2500? Forget it. These are frame rates, and higher is better.

We’re still turning our OpenCL testing, but we thought CyberLink’s MediaEspresso 6.7 would be a fair test of the chips’s encoding performance, using the graphics side rather than the x86 side. Intel’s QuickSync has always been pretty fast, and here we see even the lowly HD2500 give the A10 a good run for the money. Interestingly the Core i7-3770K and Core i7-4770K are surprisingly close. HD4600’s graphics should be improved for computing tasks such as encoding, so we suspect MediaEspresso just can’t exploit it yet. The results are in seconds, with lower being better.

Sandra has a GPGPU test. It’s purely synthetic but the results actually mirror the A10’s gaming performance, for the most part. We’ll be adding more OpenCL tests using real-world applications as we move forward. The results are expressed as MIPS, and higher is better.

Omerta: City of Gangsters Review

David Murphy — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:25:38 +0000

Fails to execute as a simulation or strategic shooter

When we see a gangster game come out—especially one that blends our love of building a true, bootleggy, 1930s-style criminal empire with our zest for shooting thugs with poorly executed Italian accents—we get a little anxious. It’s true. Give us a game that looks like a cross between Theme Park and Mafia and we’ll be set for quite a long while, cackling with glee as we outrun the cops in old-timey cars while trying to deliver our bootlegged booze to our various speakeasies.

Omerta’s black-market system is fairly easy to exploit, given the seemingly ludicrous offers you receive.

Omerta: City of Gangsters tries to recreate our lovely gangster fantasies and succeeds admirably to a small extent. However, it’s a bit tough to call this game a “game” in the traditional sense, as its main storyline feels more like a giant sandbox that you can exploit to maximum advantage before actually doing anything that requires effort in this half-simulation, half-Fallout hybrid.

The gist of Omerta is simple. You, a fledgling crime lord, are tasked with running through various individual missions within the larger world of Atlantic City. The game follows all the standard archetypes of the genre: Each mission, you’re given a set area to play within (which all look generally similar), and said area is filled with various buildings that you can rent, shoot up, bribe, or perform assorted other actions on depending on what the particular building actually is. You (rather quickly) unlock a ton of different buildings and actions that basically allow you to generate and spend resources.

For example, if you’re big into beer, you can build yourself an (illegal) brewery or two. While your sim-gangster-wannabes get to bootleggin’, you can take the booze they’re storing up and either sell it to a speakeasy yourself, sell it on the game’s version of an ever-present worldwide black market, or sit back and watch it automatically funnel on over to any speakeasies (or other beer-selling buildings) that you happen to own. Get rich, get paid; wash, rinse, repeat.

The game’s buildings can get a bit more complicated. For example, you can throw down Boxing Arenas or Pawn Shops that automatically generate cash depending on the positivity (fame) or negativity (fear) your in-game actions generate. Running charity events and building soup kitchens is going to make your boxers shine, whereas being a jerk to all of your local businesses (and fellow Mafiosos) is going to make you the next Pawn Star/Don Corleone mashup.

While it’s definitely fun to build your little mob city and level up your (creatively named) gangsters, one of the core issues surrounding Omerta is that it’s just too easy, simulation-wise. You can literally take all the time in the world to craft a super-cash-generating, top-of-the-line criminal empire without having much to fear from, well, anything.

The game’s only real motivator is a little element it calls “heat,” which is analogous to the star ratings you receive in your favorite Grand Theft Auto title whenever you perform naughty actions. Stir up too much negativity and the cops will come a-running, and you’ll have to bribe them or use another clever trick (like giving up one of your own hirable henchmen) to avoid losing the game. But, again, given just how easy it is to construct a fairly lucrative criminal empire without interference, it’s not that hard to get the cops off your trail—especially when you can frequently use the aforementioned, ever-present “black market” jobs board to reduce these heat levels before they become a problem.

The game’s characters do have some RPG elements, and period-appropriate names.

Would we pay half of the game’s asking price ($40) for the sim parts? Eh. They’re certainly fun—a good way to spend a solid afternoon. But, devoid of real urgency, the simulation element of the game devolves as a real attention-getter faster than we expected it to at first.

As for the game’s other half, the Fallout bits, we’re referring to the turn-based tactical shooter that the game turns into whenever your business-friendly gangsters need to go, uh, take care of a little business (if you catch our drift). The comparisons to the recently released XCOM Enemy Unknown are easy to make, with a few caveats: The game can be a bit frustrating early on, until you start unlocking “Mobsters with Medkits,” as we call them, because your small gang of fighters is going to go up against a decent number of other criminals without much of a reprieve.

Zoom in and you’ll actually be able to watch your mobsters carry out your assigned missions, including drive-bys.

On the plus side, you can’t die in the game. Your knocked-out gangsters suffer quasi-permanent injuries when they get riddled full of holes, which will impair their ability to be awesome for a bit of time in the future. You’ll likely suffer some injuries yourself, as the gamer, when you’re pounding your fist against the desk at the AI’s idiotic, charge-on-in strategy that seems to leave your gangsters hurtin’ no matter how much cover you think you’ve stuck them behind.

While we do like the variety of abilities—and weapon modes—your gangsters bring to the table, it’s safe to say that XCOM, this game ain’t. The tactical battles aren’t so much frustrating as they are uninteresting; we’d rather make our in-game cash and achieve our objectives by sitting back and letting our breweries churn than bothering with a more shoot-’em-up bank heist. Same reward, fewer annoyances (and less time spent).

It’s puzzling that developer Haemimont Games didn’t decide to add in AI for the game’s high-level business strategy. Going toe-to-toe against an AI that’s also renting buildings, setting up rackets, and doing other sorts of nefarious activity would have made this one a lot more interesting. Instead of bribing the police to keep yourself alive, you could have sent the cops against your hapless fellow mob bosses—sounds like fun to us!

Since the only thing keeping gamers interested in the criminal underworld of Atlantic City is the storyline—which reads more like an extended tutorial than Goodfellas—there’s just not that much compelling about Omerta to keep fledgling gangsters addicted to their screens. Shoot, even the game’s multiplayer is just its tactical shooter bit. Insert one Don Corleone–size yawn here. Omerta, like any upstart mob boss, arrived on the scene with so much potential, but this title feels like someone took a bat to its knees.

$40, www.cityofgangsters.com, ESRB: T

NZXT Kraken X40 Review

Jimmy Thang — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:01:51 +0000

A crackin' cool-and-quiet cooler

The Kraken X40 breaks the current trend of closed-loop water coolers rocking 12cm fans by upping its fan size to 14cm fan, which NZXT promises delivers more heat dissipation and better cooling without subjecting users to deafening fan noise. It’s a lofty promise, but having tested it, we can tell you that this Kraken's bite lives up to its bark.

The X40 offers unrivaled cooling performance on quiet mode.

The X40 is based on Asetek's fourth-generation all-in-one closed-loop design, which features a copper cold plate that has been improved with denser micro-fins and a new center channel to increase coolant flow. A single NZXT FX-140 PWM fan is included, and the cooler supports an optional second fan for a push-pull config. It's compatible with all modern CPU sockets, with the exception of LGA775, but faces a larger compatibility obstacle in that it requires a case with a 14cm fan, such as NZXT's own Phantom 410. The X40 also sports extra-long 16-inch rubber tubing compared to most other closed-loop systems that use tubes measuring around 12 inches. Accompanying the larger fan is a wider radiator that offers 36 percent more surface area than smaller 12cm rads.

Like Corsair's H80i that we reviewed last month, the X40 has an LED on top of the pump that you customize to either remain a solid color or to change color depending on temperature, which is slick. We also appreciate that the software to control it comes bundled on disc, whereas Corsair's software requires a download. The software is easy to use and allows you to adjust fan speeds, but not pump speeds like Corsair's equivalent. While it features only two presets, “silent” (1,000rpm) and "extreme" (1,700rpm), as opposed to the half-dozen with Corsair's software, you can still manually set the fans to run at fixed RPMs and save custom profiles.Installing the X40 was relatively easy. With our LGA2011 backplate preinstalled, we began by inserting four screws through the retention ring that allows the water block to be mounted to the CPU socket. The X40 features a similar retention ring to Thermaltake's Water2.0 Pro, which snaps onto the water block with a retention clip. This mounting process isn't as straightforward as the H80i’s simple magnetic mounting bracket, but the X40’s manual features excellent illustrations that simplify the installation process. Mounting the radiator and fan to the chassis just required tightening four screws through the back of the case. The last step was to connect the CPU fan and USB cables to the mobo headers, and unlike the H80i, all the cables come pre-attached to the water block, and the pump doesn't require additional power (Molex or SATA), making the installation less of a hassle.

In testing, the Kraken X40 was impressive, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that the preset silent mode not only lived up to its name, but cooled extremely well, hitting just 67 C under load. This was enough to whoop our Hyper 212 zero-point air cooler in performance mode by 7 C, and it also bested the 12cm Seidon 120M water cooler running on full blast by 1 C. With the X40’s fan cranked to maximum, it gave Corsair’s H80i a run for its money even though we had it running in push-pull mode with two fans, which was quite impressive. While the X40’s fan can be mistaken for a small leaf blower at full speed, it fortunately doesn't need to operate at its highest speed to cool well.

While the X40 isn't cheap at 100 bones, it’s no costlier than its peers and it outperforms them, making this cooler easy to recommend. If you have a case that supports a 14cm fan, you should definitely release the Kraken!

$100, www.nzxt.com

New MSI Gaming Laptops Get Haswell and Kepler Treatment

Chris Zele — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 23:35:43 +0000

Company announces refreshed GT70 Dragon Edition gaming notebook and more.

MSI launched several new gaming laptops at Computex 2013 featuring Intel’s new Haswell CPUs along with Nvidia’s new 700 series mobile GPUs.

MSI's new GT70 Dragon Edition is the company's flagship gaming PC.

MSI’s flagship gaming notebook is their GT70 Dragon Edition 2 Extreme which boasts a quad-core i7-4930MX CPU clocked at 3.0GHz with a turbo boost of 3.9GHz. On the GPU side, it features an Nvidia GTX 780M video card rocking 1536 CUDA cores and a core clock of 823MHz.

Storage on the GT70 is MSI’s flagship laptop which features its new Super Raid 2 specification that has a read speed of 1,500MB/s with three SSDs in RAID 0.

Rounding out the laptop is a keyboard and touchpad from Steel Series and speakers from Dynaudio.

MSI also launched a portable gaming notebook called the GS70 Stealth that is a slim 0.85 inches thick and a light 5.73 pounds. To give you a frame of reference, most gaming notebooks are 8.5 to 9 pounds, and usually have a thickness of two inches or more.

When it comes to internals, the GS70 will be offered with an i7 configuration, but there is no word on what particular Haswell CPU it will come with. The laptop is also fitted with Nvidia’s new GTX 765M discrete video card which has 768 CUDA cores and a clock speed of 850MHz.

MSI's GS70 is one of a few gaming notebooks under six pounds.

MSI also showed off a few other laptops at Computex 2013 called the GE 40 Dragon Eyes and GE70/GE60 which all feature Haswell CPUs and Kepler GPUs.

Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt 500GB Review

Josh Norem — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 19:50:39 +0000

Designed for Mac users and priced accordingly

PC users have been in a bit of a quandary about the new Thunderbolt interface from Intel. On the one hand, we’re all about maximum performance, so given its sizable speed advantage over USB 3.0, at least on paper, we’re eager to adopt it. On the other hand, there are three issues that have prevented us from jumping on the Thunderbolt bandwagon with both feet. The first is the fact that it debuted on the Apple platform. Granted, we’re a bit sensitive, but this just rubbed us the wrong way. Second, Thunderbolt doesn’t exist on LGA2011 due to a requirement for integrated graphics. And finally, we already have USB 3.0, so do we really need Thunderbolt? Sure, it’s twice as fast on paper (10Gb/s versus 5Gb/s), but will we see that benefit in the real world, and is it worth the cost? To help us answer all these nagging questions we snagged a very special hard drive, the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt, which has both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt ports, allowing us to test both interfaces back-to-back and make an apples-to-apples comparison.

The MiniStation has a belly-mounted white LED that “breathes” when there’s drive activity; we dig it.

Upon first glance, it’s apparent this is a Mac-oriented drive, both in its Thunderbolt support as well as its aluminum exterior and rounded edges. It doesn’t help that the documentation for the drive states that it comes preformatted for Macs, but don’t prejudge the drive just yet—that’s our job. In addition to shipping with both T-bolt and USB 3.0 interfaces, the drive also includes both cables, which is amazing since a Thunderbolt cable costs $50 alone. Inside the enclosure lies a 5,400rpm Samsung hard drive with 8MB of cache. The drive includes a 3-year warranty, is also offered in 1TB capacity, and includes no software whatsoever.

To test the drive, we performed real-world and synthetic tests, and came to a somewhat unsurprising conclusion—in this iteration, with a 5,400rpm hard drive inside of it, this device is hamstrung by the drive itself, not the interface. In every test we ran, the drive performed exactly the same regardless of the interface we used, making the benefit of Thunderbolt in this instance primarily one of convenience rather than performance. For example, it would be useful if you are a person who owns both a Mac with Thunderbolt and a PC with USB 3.0, or an older MacBook with just USB 2.0 ports. Or you could be a PC user who wants the flexibility of using Thunderbolt and USB for file-sharing with buddies. Either way, the drive isn’t any faster on either interface in its current form. Not only did it score the exact same write times down to the second when we copied 30GB of data, but it scored the same read and write speeds in HD Tune and ATTO, as well. For example, HD Tune clocked the drive at 80.7MB/s read speeds via Thunderbolt, and when using USB 3.0 it ran at 80.8MB/s.

Now for the bad news: This drive costs $200 for 500GB, which is wildly expensive since you can get a Toshiba Canvio 1.5TB drive that is just as fast as the MiniStation for just $110. Thunderbolt could one day be the bitchin’ interface we’re all using, but for now it’s too exotic and overpriced compared to USB 3.0.

$200, www.buffalotech.com

GeForce GTX 770 Video Card Roundup

Chris Zele — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:45:43 +0000

Let the overclocking commence!

The GTX 770 was released last week and along with that announcement came a flurry of new cards from video card vendors such as MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, and EVGA.

MSI

MSI has introduced a pair of overclocked cards rocking its newest aftermarket Twin Frozr IV cooler. The two cards by MSI are the GTX 770 Lighting and the GTX 770 Gaming. Both video cards require two 8-pin connectors unlike the reference design which only requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin connector.

MSI’s Lighting GTX 770 is the only card to boast a core boost clock over 1,200MHz.

MSI’s premium GTX 770 is the Lighting Edition card which sports a base clock of 1,150MHz and a boost clock of 1,202MHz sporting a price tag of $460. Meanwhile, the company’s Gaming Edition GTX 770 features a core clock of 1,098MHz and a boost clock of 1150MHz and has a price of $410.

MSI’s Twin Frozr GTX 770 Gaming Edition video card comes in red and black.

MSI also launched a new overclocking tool called MSI Gaming App as a result of many people not knowing how to overclock their GPUs. The company says the new overclocking software is extremely simple and has three predefined profiles called Gaming, Eco, and Default. The Gaming mode overclocks the card automatically while the Eco mode runs the card in silently by reducing the card's power consumption. The default mode runs the card at its normal clock speeds.

Gigabyte’s GTX 770 sports its intense Windforce cooler that comes with three fans for cooling.

Gigabyte

Gigabyte has released its newest GTX 770 the GV-N770OC-2GD which uses a beefy Windforce aftermarket cooler. According to Gigabyte, the cooler as much as 450 Watts. The card’s core and boost clocks are overclocked to 1,137MHz and 1189MHz, respectively and retails for $410.

Asus has brought its’ Direct CU II cooler to the GTX 770.

Asus

Asus's overclocked GTX770-DC2OC-2GD5 GTX 770 features its DirectCU II cooler along with custom VRM and enhanced power efficiency. According to Asus, the card consumes 30% less power and gennerates less noise compared to the reference design, while also offering 2.5 times the durability. The card is priced at $410 and is clocked at 1,050MHz core and 1,110MHz boost, respectively.

Asus also came out with a new version of GPU Tweak which provides a real-time monitoring of your video card’s temperatures, core clocks, and memory clocks. ASUS’s GTX 770 is now supported by this overclocking tool as well.

EVGA uses a ball bearing design for its ACX cooler which according to EVGA allows the card run quieter and cooler.

EVGA

EVGA dispatched ten GTX 770’s following NVidia’s GTX 770 release. Six of EVGA's 770 feature the company’s new ACX cooler which supposedly runs cooler and quieter than a stock GTX 770 cooler. The ACX uses a ball-bearing design instead of a standard sleeved bearing which EVGA says gives the fans a lifespan of 12 years. The company has a couple cards currently on Newegg for sale which include its new ACX cooler and its reference cooler design. EVGA also has a stock-clocked card with its new ACX cooler which retails for $410. The overclocked version of the company's GTX 770 with the new ACX is $420 and features a core clock speed of 1,111MHZ core and 1,163MHz boost clock. EVGA also has a Superclocked GTX 770 with its stock blower cooler which retails for $420 and sports a core base clock of 1,085MHz and a boost clock of 1,137MHz. For the other EVGA GTX 770 cards you can check out its page here.

EVGA also released a new version of its Precision X Software to support the launch of its new GTX 770s. Precision X offers overclocking tools as well as temperature, memory monitoring, and fan controls.

All of the overclocked GTX 770s should provide decent improvement in performance and cooling over the reference design. Look out for the reviews of these cards in the coming months.

Below are a couple of charts showing the differences and similarities between the new GTX 770 cards.

Haswell Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 22:00:25 +0000

Haswell: Can a laptop CPU keep enthusiasts happy?

Faster hardware shouldn’t be this somber. Yet we can’t help but furrow our brow in concern over Intel’s fourth-generation Core i7 CPU, Haswell. Yes, in typical Intel fashion, it’s a tour de force of technical achievement and features that’s the envy of the free world. It’s also, by the way, quite fast.

How fast? *Spoiler alert* Let’s just say that the new Core i7-4770K easily unseats the previous midrange sweetheart, the Core i7-3770K, as the best all-around performer, and even gives the high-end hexa-core part a hard time.

So, why are we so sad? Maybe it’s the continual whispers of the PC’s impending doom—that despite the pure joy a powerful PC can bring the world, its days are numbered.

Or maybe it’s because it’s clear that, while Haswell is fast, it’s a part that is obviously designed primarily to benefit laptops, tablets, and other small-computing needs rather than desktops. Let’s just say, as happy as we are about where Haswell lands in performance, we’re still concerned about Intel’s commitment to performance desktop computing, and that doesn’t make us feel good.

The Haswell Lineup

One new Haswell includes the south bridge inside the package.

Haswell’s Mixed Bag

A new platform is just one of the features that might irk enthusiasts. The most noticeable change for any enthusiast is the introduction of a new socket. LGA1155 has carried us from Sandy Bridge through Ivy Bridge, but as Intel doesn’t like you to ever get too comfortable with a motherboard, it’s shedding that old LGA1155 for a new LGA1150 socket. The two are, of course, incompatible. Why? It’s not just to piss you off, but more likely due to the fact that Intel can’t integrate the new Haswell features in LGA1155. The new socket should come as no surprise to anyone who reads Maximum PC, as we’ve been reporting on Intel’s plan for Haswell for a while, but here it is officially: If you want the new CPU, you need a new motherboard. AMD /AM3+ fanboys can feel free to unleash a big Nelson Muntz–style “ha-ha!” in the faces of Intel fanboys.

You're going to need a new 1150-socket Mobo for Haswell

Got a Spare FIVR, Buddy?

We’ve long said that Intel’s CPUs are gravitational black holes sucking everything into them. Nehalem ate the memory controller. Lynnfield swallowed PCIe. Sandy Bridge gobbled up graphics. And Haswell has a new fully integrated voltage regulator, or FIVR, inside the package. By integrating the voltage regulator, Intel simplifies power inputs into the CPU but also takes a lot of the control out of the motherboard makers’ hands. The FIVR doesn’t eliminate all voltage regulation on the motherboard, as the power to the CPU must still come from somewhere, so you’ll still find boards with beefy caps and voltage regulation circuits.

By integrating the VR, though, Intel is able to regulate power to a much finer degree than has been possible on even the best motherboards. Voltage ripple is practically nil on the design, and the performance of the FIVR outstrips anything that can be done externally. The FIVR also technically lowers the cost of a motherboard, as some of the external voltage regulators are no longer needed.

The FIVR isn’t a free ride, though. It adds more heat to the CPU and raises the TDP of the 4770K to 84 watts compared to the 77 watts of its predecessor.

The bigger question for desktops users is, why? The hard truth is that we suspect the change was not done to benefit desktop PCs. It’s to benefit laptops, all-in-ones, and anything else that really needs precise control over power and voltage in a very thin package. In other words, it’s a move that’s all about mobile and small computing. The good news is that it doesn’t seem to hurt enthusiasts very much. Yes, you’ll need beefy cooling to run Haswell overclocked, but you always needed that.

Overclocking Give and Take

When Intel jumped from Lynnfield to Sandy Bridge chips, it left behind the ability to pump up the base clock to overclock a chip. Overclockers still got unlocked “K” CPUs, but even non-K parts could overclock by four bins through the multiplier on Z-series boards. With Haswell, that feature is now gone, so non-K parts are truly clock-blocked in every way possible.

The good news for enthusiasts is that Intel has added more knobs to K-chip overclocking. Borrowing from the Sandy Bridge-E chips, Haswell K chips will now offer additional CPU straps for overclocking. Rather than being limited to just 100MHz and a few megahertz above it, additional ratios of 125MHz, 160MHz, and 250MHz should be available to help overclock the CPU without overclocking PCIe and other clock-sensitive components.

Big Fat L4—Just Not for You

One of the most exciting developments in the Haswell parts list is the new Core i7-4770R. This one chip features a massive 128MB of embedded DRAM, or eDRAM, to ameliorate memory bandwidth issues in graphics. Don’t care about integrated graphics? You should, because the R part’s eDRAM also acts as a massive L4 cache, which, according to some developers, offers a pretty big boost in performance outside of graphics. The really bad news is that you can’t get it in anything other than a BGA chip today. After hearing the objections of the enthusiast tech press (see, we help you sometimes), Intel is looking at the option of offering a socketed R chip.

TSX for Only Some of Us

Much has been said about Intel’s transactional memory feature, or TSX, in Haswell. TSX essentially makes it easier for programmers to write multithreaded code by addressing the complexities of having to lock portions of an array of data. TSX lets the processor handle much of the grunt work. Now for the bad news: TSX is apparently only available on some Haswell chips. Intel wouldn’t say which chips had it and which didn’t, but a leaked chart on Tom’s Hardware indicates that the only two chips we care about—the two unlocked K parts—don’t have it.

And the Good News?

So, Haswell runs a bit hotter, takes some voltage control out of your hands, eliminates the non-K overclocks, doesn’t give enthusiasts access to the large L4 cache version, doesn’t have TSX in the K parts, and, well, requires a new motherboard, too. You’re probably wondering just where the hell the good news is for enthusiasts with Haswell.

Despite all our bitching, we will say that Intel has at least paid attention to the one metric that counts most: performance. Intel didn’t just take an Ivy Bridge die, erase the name, and pencil in Haswell. The company has added new instructions to Haswell, including AVX2 and FMA2, that will eventually benefit you. The company has also increased the execution ports and generally made a lot of nips and tucks in the name of performance. What this means is that, clock for clock, Haswell offers a noticeable performance boost over Ivy Bridge. The full skinny on Haswell’s performance follows, but let’s just say it again: It’s fast. The apparent lack of TSX, fat L4, and multiplier overclocking might give you a frowny face, but maybe the only people who should really have a frowny face are those who just bought into a full-boat LGA1155 system with a top-of-the-line Core i7-3770K chip.

Click the next page to read about Haswell's integrated graphics.

Haswell Graphics Finally Good Enough? We’re going to kick that football to the moon

Intel’s x86 prowess has almost always been the envy of the free world. We can say that without anyone except the most ardent AMD fanboy objecting, because when it comes to x86 performance, Intel has thoroughly cleaned everyone’s clocks. From PowerPC to 68000K and from SPARC to MIPs, Intel’s x86 parts have sent everyone packing.

When it comes to graphics, though, most agree it’s been the exact opposite. Old salts will remember Intel’s disastrous entrance into discrete graphics with the i740 in late 1990. Despite analyst predictions of an Intel-led graphic-card-ageddon, Intel instead withdrew with its video card between its legs two years later. Though a sucktacular non-success, Intel turned lemons into gold-plated lemonade when it embedded i740 into the 810 chipset. Believe it or not, today, Intel’s integrated graphics dominate in market penetration over AMD and Nvidia graphics chips.

But Intel wants more than to merely excel at sucky graphics, and has been on a steady march to gain some respect. Every year, Intel proclaims its integrated graphics much improved, and usually people shrug it off as Lucy trolling that sap Charlie Brown. With Ivy Bridge, though, Intel’s graphics indeed got better, but overall still couldn't compete with even low-end discrete parts. This time, Lucy says, it’s different. But is it? Are Haswell graphics really, finally good enough to replace discrete graphics? We can’t say—yet.

First, to be fair to Intel graphics, our ability to judge its performance is only based on the HD4600 part embedded in the Core i7-4770K chip—a CPU no one is likely to use without a discrete GPU. The HD 5000 and HD 5200 are actually the “real deal,” but we couldn’t get our mitts on them. HD4600 is indeed better than Ivy Bridge, though. To compare, we used the same rigs we used for the other benchmarks in this story, but ripped out the discrete cards. We saw Haswell offering a healthy increase over Ivy Bridge. In fact, in Portal 2, which we considered unplayable with Ivy Bridge at 1080p resolutions, Haswell gave us reasonable (but not fantastic) frame rates with image quality turned down a few notches. Not bad, honestly. Resident Evil 6 at 1360x768 saw Haswell with twice the performance of Ivy Bridge. Other games also gave Haswell a good leg up over its predecessor. Enough to replace discrete graphics? Hell no. At least, not with HD4600.

The Bantha in the room is really Intel’s HD5200 graphics. With its 128MB of eDRAM, we suspect that it’ll give even AMD’s best APUs a sound thrashing and might finally be the football Charlie Brown has been waiting to kick all these years.

Haswell vs. Ivy Bridge Graphics

Click the next page to see how well Haswell compares to Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E.

Haswell Meets the Benchmarks: A Mobile-friendly Design Doesn’t Diminish Desktop Performance

Picking which CPUs to test was fairly straightforward: We went with the top-end Core i7-4770K, a Core i7-3770K, and to give people a perspective on how LGA2011 chips compare, a Core i7-3820. Even though it’s out of the price band of the three others, we also decided to test the hexa-core Core i7-3930K to show the quad-core boys what they’re missing, or not, by foregoing the two extra cores.

While differing sockets made it impossible to use identical motherboards for our tests, we at least stuck with one vendor in the hopes of achieving some uniformity. For LGA1155, we used an Asus P8Z77-V Premium, for LGA2011 an Asus Sabertooth X79, and Asus’s new Z87-Deluxe board for the LGA1150. Each motherboard was outfitted with 16GB of Corsair DDR3 clocked at 1,600MHz. All three systems were outfitted with identical 240GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSDs, which had the same firmware and were Trimmed before testing began. For graphics, matching GeForce GTX 580 cards were used, with the same driver on each. For OS, we used Windows 8.

The Results

As previously mentioned, in performance, Haswell doesn’t disappoint. For example, we ran Cinebench 10 across just one core to gauge the per-core performance. Haswell gave us about a 17 percent bump over Ivy Bridge. Against the older Sandy Bridge-E cores in the Core i7-3820, Haswell was about 30 percent faster.

In the other benchmarks, Haswell’s advantage remained constant, with the new CPU performing faster than Ivy Bridge in just about every category, and the margins widening against the Sandy Bridge-E chip.

For the most part, Haswell offers an 8 to 15 percent performance boost over Ivy Bridge. In the heavily threaded Premiere Pro CS6 test, Haswell enjoyed a 12 percent advantage. The same 12 percent advantage also popped up in our ProShow Producer test, which tops out at about four threads.

In a search for more real-world results, we decided to throw HDRsoft’s popular PhotoMatix at the CPU. We used a nine-shot RAW file from a Nikon D800 and ran a batch convert on it. From what we can tell, that particular load is heavily multithreaded and literally stops everything else while being run. Haswell pulled out a big win, processing the HDR about 22 percent faster than Ivy Bridge.

In the synthetic 3DMark gaming tests, both CPUs pulled even in the graphics test—no surprise. But in the physics test, Haswell again had a 10 percent gain over Ivy Bridge. In actual game engines, the difference between the two CPUs varied. We ran our tests at low quality and low resolutions to take the GPU out of the equation. In Dirt 3, we saw an astounding 34 percent difference between Haswell and Ivy Bridge, and in Total War: Shogun 2’s CPU test, a 10 percent gain. We could go on, but for the most part, Haswell is across-the-board faster. Part of the performance improvements come from Intel’s under-the-hood tweaks to the chip, but some of it also comes from the Turbo Boost modes. We monitored the chip’s clock speed in some tests and found that sometimes it would run at 4.1GHz for long stretches of time, while the Ivy Bridge chip hung back at 3.8GHz. Combining both the higher Turbo Boost speeds and the efficiency enhancements explains most of its wins against Ivy Bridge.

Haswell already has a leg up over Ivy Bridge, but up against the even older Sandy Bridge-E cores, it’s a bit of a slaughter. If you were to peg the advantage Haswell has over Sandy Bridge-E, we’d say it’s about 20 percent overall when its four cores versus four cores. The only advantage Sandy Bridge-E picks up is when you get to six cores. The Core i7-3930K has an advantage in heavily multithreaded tasks such as 3D rendering and video encoding. In gaming and apps that really can’t exploit all six cores of the Core i7-3930K, Haswell comes out on top.

What Should You Buy?

First, Haswell doesn’t invalidate Ivy Bridge systems. Machines built on Ivy Bridge are still quite fast and offer plenty of performance, but there’s simply no reason to build on an older-generation CPU with a dead socket (good luck getting another LGA1155 out of Intel) with an inferior chipset. Sorry, but that’s the truth, and we know some of you just built Ivy Bridge boxes, too, despite our warning you to wait a month or so.

When it comes to Haswell Core i7-4770K vs. Core i7-3820, it’s a bit more tricky. Haswell flat-out leaves quad-core Sandy Bridge-E in the dust. The only reason to even build a Core i7-3820 box at this point is with an eye toward future upgrades. Intel is expected to push out Ivy Bridge-E or Ivy Town CPUs later this year.

That’s pretty much our guidance for Core i7-3930K, too. The chip is almost twice as expensive as Core i7-4770K but if you work for a living pushing pixels in a 3D renderer, or video encoder, it’s worth it. If you can cut a four-hour video encode down to three hours with Core i7-3930K, you can work on other projects that pay, rather than wait. The only caveat is that Haswell’s higher clock and improved core can actually be as fast, even on multithreaded workloads. Peep our PhotoMatix test that saw the Core i7-4770K actually beat the six-core Core i7-3930K.

Despite all our negativity, we have to say, Haswell can still make us smile. We can’t help but wonder, though, as impressive as Haswell is in performance, what it could have been like if Intel had focused on making Haswell a purely desktop-enthusiast part. We fear those days are behind us, though.

Top Procs Compared

Benchmarks

Click the next page for Haswell vs Ivy Bridge comparison pics and to read about the new 8-series chipset.

Haswell vs. Ivy Bridge in Pictures

The move from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge saw graphics die space eat up a lot more area. On casual examination, Haswell looks almost the same proportionally as Ivy Bridge, but does have an additional 200,000 transistors tucked inside. The onboard fully integrated voltage regulator isn’t actually on the die but is inside the package. Intel chips with the 128MB of embedded DRAM will also show an additional strip of silicon inside the package but outside the actual die area.

8-Series Erases Previous Mistakes

Z87 finally gives us SATA 6Gb/s across all ports!

The new 8-series chipsets finally bring SATA 6Gb/s across all ports!

We’ve bitched about Intel not giving us this or not giving us that, but the company has at least finally fixed our biggest complaint since, well, forever. Intel’s P67 first introduced native SATA 6Gb/s that made third-party drive controllers seem horrible by comparison. The only problem? SATA 6Gb/s was only supported on two ports. Back in 2011, this wasn’t an issue, as who the hell had more than two SSDs that could even push a SATA 6Gb/s interface? Today, with SSD prices truly affordable and capable of saturating SATA 6Gb/s ports, it’s a problem. Oh, that and AMD has had native 6Gb/s across all six SATA ports since 2010 (cue Nelson Muntz again).

The new Z87 chipset corrects that. All six ports are SATA 6Gb/s. Intel has also upped the USB support, going from four USB 3.0 ports to six ports, and from 10 USB 2.0 ports to 14 USB 2.0 ports. The Z87 chipset now also supports per-port disabling for security purposes.

There was news earlier this year that the USB 3.0 support in the Z87 chipset was botched. The apparent bug would put USB 3.0 devices into sleep modes. We’ve queried board makers and OEMs who believe that the issue is mostly resolved now, and only existed in earlier revisions of silicon, which shouldn’t reach consumers' hands.

Other than the elimination of support for PCI, the Z87 chipset doesn’t look too different from its predecessor.

Click the next page for our in-depth Haswell benchmarks.

Haswell Benchmarks

To see how the four top contenders stack up, we’ll get into a deep dive on just how each particular CPU performed.

Cinebench 10 Single Core

Maxon’s Cinebench is based on the engine used in its Cinema 4D 3D modeling program. We use the older version to measure performance on a per core basis. As you can see, it’s a nice generational increase in performance. We don’t get a massive boost but it’s a worthwhile performance difference that likely comes from the under the hood changes to Haswell as well the higher clock speeds the chip seem to hold for far longer than Ivy Bridge.

Cinebench 10 Multi Core

As appoint of reference, here’s Cinebench 10 run across all threads available on the chips. Haswell has a very decent lead but obviously the Core i7-3930K wins. We will note that the even with the four extra threads (two physical and two logical from Hyper-Threading) the 3930K isn’t ahead as far as you would expect in something so heavily multi-threaded.

Cinebench 11.5

Cinebench 11.5 has been updated to support up to 64-threads and obviously the newer engine likes cores. The 6-core Core i7-3930K represents itself a bit better here and should make those who spent $550 on the chip feel a bit better.

POV Ray

POV Ray is a ray tracing engine that’s older than some of our readers. Like any rendering app, it’s heavily multi-threaded but look at how much the Core i7-4770K steps away from the older Sandy Bridge-E/Sandy Bridge core as well as from the Ivy Bridge part. The Core i7-3930K saves much face here and proves that six is still better than four for some tasks.

Handbrake

For our Handbrake run we used 0.9.9 to transcode an existing 1080P resolution MP4 file using the Android profile. The result is in seconds and lower is better. Handbrake loves threads and cores. The Haswell Core i7-4770K again opens up a decent lead over the Core I 7-3770K and Core i7-3320 parts but the 6-core Core i7-3930K steals the show with a hefty, hefty performance advantage over the three quad-core parts. Still, Haswell shows its generational advantage over the two other quad cores here with a respectable lead.

TechARP X264

We’ve been using TechARP’s X264 HD 5.01 encoding test as a benchmark for more than a year and we’ve been pretty with it as a general indicator of encoding performance. The program performs two passes multiple times. We’ve found the first pass to be slightly more sensitive to clock speeds and memory bandwidth in the past. Here, Haswell again come out on top of all the quad cores by a decent amount. The Core i7-3930K again comes out as Charlie Sheen overall, but it also costs almost twice as much too.

TechARP X264 Pass 2

The second pass of X264 HD 5.01 has been more sensitive to the amount of threads so it’s no surprise the Core i7-3930K wins. Still, Haswell steps ahead of Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E/Sandy Bridge by a noticeable amount.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6

Our final video encoding test uses Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to edit and render out a 1080P video with multiple timelines using source material shot at 1080P on a Canon EOS 5D Mk II at 30 fps. It’s no surprise-Hawell steps ahead of the others by noticeable amount. We’d be OK if we had an Ivy Bridge part, but the performance of the Core i7-3820 against Haswell would make us consider popping it out for a Core i7-3930K part.

PC Mark 7

Unfortunately, PC Mark 8 wasn’t out in time for our testing but we did run the older PC Mark 7 across four chips. PC Mark 7 is a synthetic test, but it’s supposedly based on real-world workloads. Haswell is the winner again with the older Sandy Bridge-E cores including the 6-core Core i7-3930K part, bringing up the rear.

Gigapan Stitch.EFx 2.0

In casting about for some real-world, heavy duty workloads, we used Gigapan’s Stitch.EFx 2.0 to stitch together about 263 images shot with a Canon EOS 7D and GigaPan Epic Pro head to make a 1.1 billion pixel image. We like Stitch.Efx 2.0 because the app is an interesting mixture of single threaded and multi-threaded performance. The first two thirds of the process where images are aligned is single-threaded with the remaining third is where the images are actually stitched is multi-threaded. Higher clocked parts should be favored for the first portion with multi-threaded parts favored for the end. The higher clock and efficiency of Haswell gives it a pretty big win over the others. Interestingly, the Core i7-3930K’s two more cores plus two Hyper-Threaded cores just barely pull even with the Core i7-3770K.

PhotoMatrix

HDRsoft’s PhotoMatrix is one of the most popular and powerful applications for creating HDR imagery. For our test, we used a nine-shot sequence shot with a Nikon D800 DSLR. The RAW files were then processed by Photomatix in batch mode using the “realistic” option. This option is heavily multi-threaded and so resource intense that HDRsoft says it’s only available as a batch mode to keep people from thinking their weak machines have locked up (our words actually.) If you look at Haswell’s performance, it easily steps away from the Ivy Bridge part and makes the elderly Sandy Bridge-E/Sandy Bridge core look positively ancient. Even the four extra threads of the Core i7-3930K can’t put it ahead of the Haswell part even though this app is heavily multi-threaded. This is a pretty big win for Haswell.

ProShow Producer 5

Our final photography-realted benchmark uses our old stand-by ProShow Producer 5 to produce and encode a 1080P video photo slide show using images shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mk II. ProShow tops out with four cores so it makes it a pretty good way to measure a more realistic application load as few actually exploit more than four cores today. Hawell has a pretty sizeable lift over Ivy Bridge as well both Sandy Bridge-E chips here. Interestingly, the Core i7-3930K actually outpaces the Core i7-3820 part despite its lower clock speeds. We’re not sure why but it’s possible the larger cache is a factor.

3DMark11

We run an overall score with 3DMark11 to show you that, well, gaming is mostly about the GPU these days. There’s no reason to even read anymore because we’re just writing this to fill space since there’s not much of a difference. Oh, we don’t get paid by the word? Doh. Move along.

3DMark11 Physics

The physics portion of 3DMark11 is multi-threaded and would give you an indication gaming physics. Interestingly, despite its slightly higher clocks on boost and improved core, it’s pretty much a wash with Ivy Bridge. The 6-core pull out in front, but we do really have to wonder if very many games are using all those cores.

3DMark Firestrike

The new 3Dmark is an interesting beast and is a bit of a changeup for us. We’ve long seen the 3DMark series as a GPU test but clearly the CPU matters a lot because look at the length of these bars man.

3DMark Firestrike

Oh wait, that was just a scale issue. When you actually see the whole chart, you can see the CPU’s impact on overall 3DMark scores is pretty much meh. Move along.

Valve Particle Test

Valve’s Particle test is an older test of how well a CPU will run physics in a Valve game. We’ve long suspected that the test is very cache-speed sensitive as well as very main memory latency sensitive but we’re now wondering if it doesn’t just like CPUs with very larges caches since the Core i7-3930K with its 20MB of L3 cache demolishes the others. Haswell still shows a decent improvement though.

Resident Evil 6

The Resident Evil 6 is based on the actual engine from the popular third-person shooter series. We run it at low resolutions and with image quality turned down to take the GPU out of the equation. The end result shows Haswell with a small lead over the Ivy Bridge part but really nothing to write home about.

Total War: Shogun 2

TWS2 has many options to test performance with. For this, we selected the DX9/CPU test. It’s a CPU-heavy filling a battlefield with hundreds of warriors. The result shows Haswell with a decent lead but again, nothing to write home about. The Total War series is one of the few that will use more than four cores so the Core i7-3930K actually pulls up alongside the higher-clocked Ivy Bridge CPU.

Sandra

How much more bandwidth do the LGA2011 CPUs have? A ton more than the LGA1156 parts. It’s a neat synthetic to show you that, yes indeed, quad-channel is actually working. The bigger question is what exactly does that extra bandwidth get you in most of our apps? It’s apparently not helping that much.

What do you think of Intel's new Haswell processor? Let us know in the comments below!

GeForce GTX 770 Benchmarks

Josh Norem — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:00:31 +0000

Nvidia delivers a juiced GK104 in the GeForce GTX 770

Today the embargo lifts on the second GeForce GTX 700 series GPU to be announced in a week's time; the Titan-cooled but GK104-powered GeForce GTX 770. Unlike the GTX 780 announced last week, this card does not use the monstrous GK110 GPU, but instead opts for a highly-clocked version of the GK104 chip found previously in the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 670, and GTX 660 Ti. It's the highest clocked-part of all of those cards though, and also has 7Gb/s memory instead of the 6Gb/s variety found in all the previous Kepler cards, giving it a signficant bump in memory bandwidth.

It also features all the cool features we've already covered in our GTX 780 article, including GPU Boost 2.0 and Adaptive Fan Control. If you haven't read that article, go check it out right here. The GTX 770 will also be offered in both 2GB and 4GB flavors, and Nvidia's board partners will be offering boards that are overclocked even more than the Nvidia reference design as well. The GeForce GTX 770 will retail for $400, though versions that are overclocked or have more memory will obviously cost a bit more, but we don't have the exact prices for you as of press time. Watch this space, as we'll add information about the new cards as it comes in today.

GTX 770 specs

Here are the GTX 770's specs. You will note this is the highest-clocked GK104 GPU to roll off the fab yet, and its memory is also the highest clocked that we've ever seen on a GTX board. And with that sweet Titan cooler, not to mention what third-parties can come up with, you can expect even more overclocking and overvolting goodness. The card is the same 10.5-inch length as the GTX 780 and Titan, and also uses one six-pin and one eight-pin PCIe connector, which is two more pins than what is found on the GTX 670.

How Fast is The GTX 770?

We ran all of our tests on our standard GPU test bench, which consists of an Intel Core i7-3960X CPU, 16GB of RAM and an Asus PX79 motherboard, so this system is no slouch. In our tests we saw what we think is the basic argument for the GTX 770, which is you get GTX 680 performance for $400, which is a great deal. Based on the marketing materials we received from Nvidia prior to launch it seems like the company's target for this card was the HD 7970, though we threw the HD 7950 into our chart too since it was the GTX 670's nemesis. Looking at the chart, all three of these cards - the GTX 770, GTX 680, and HD 7970 GHz are damn close to one another, but the rub is that the GTX 770 is the least expensive, and the most silent, of all of them. The HD 7950 is a lot more competitive though, as a quick check on Newegg shows you can get one for around $300 including Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, and Bioshock Infinite. That's a tough deal to pass up, and we think the GTX 770 will be a bit of a tougher sell for Nvidia than the GTX 780 or the Titan, which for now stand alone as the leaders in their price range. Then there's word of some new AMD cards arriving soon so it looks like the $400 price point is about to get real interesting, especially when prices on the GTX 670 and GTX 680 drop now that the GTX 770 has been announced. Will AMD hit back hard, and will we also see a GTX 760 Ti soon? We certainly can't wait to find out.