Review

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

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

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.

GeForce GTX 780 Benchmarks

josh norem — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:12:01 +0000

Team Green captures the single-GPU crown, again

Today Nvidia pulls the wraps off its $650 GK110-based 700 series flagship card, the GeForce GTX 780. This board slides directly into the yawning chasm that exists between the $500 GK104-based GTX 680 and the $1,000 GK110-based GTX Titan, though despite its price it's actually much closer in specs and performance to the Titan than it is to the GTX 680.

Specifications

Like the Titan, the GTX 780 is a GK110 board, so it has all 7.1 billion transistors, a 384-bit memory bus care of six 64-bit memory controllers and two less SMX clusters with 12 for a total of 2,304 CUDA cores. Its 3GB of memory runs at the usual 6GHz clock speed, and its 863MHz core clock speed is just a smidge higher than the Titan’s 836MHz clock. Its 900MHz boost clock is also a bit faster than the Titan’s 876MHz. Overall, it would be fair to refer to the GTX 780 as the so-called Titan LE that has been rumored for a while now, as it’s a basically a slightly neutered version of the Titan, at least as far as gamers are concerned. Performance in games is extremely competitive with the Titan, more so than we thought it would be given its price. When it comes to compute performance, however, the GTX 780 is heavily neutered compared to the Titan, and for good reason. The 1.5 Teraflops of double precision performance that was so welcome in the Titan is nowhere to be seen in the GTX 780, as Nvidia is reserving that feature for the pricier Titan, and is also billing the GTX 780 as strictly a gaming card. The GTX 780 still offers respectable single precision performance though, clocking in at 4 Teraflops compared to the Titan's 4.5 Teraflops. For comparison, the GK104-based GTX 680 can only push 1 Teraflop of single precision, and its double precision performance is just 1/24th of that by Nvidia's design. It wants these "cheap" cards to be used for gaming, period, and its expensive Tesla cards to be used for Compute. This is why the Titan costs $1,000 and the GTX 780 costs $650.

GTX 780 Specs

Otherwise the card looks, feels, and runs almost exactly like a Titan. It has the same 10.5-inch length, the same six-pin and eight-pin PCIe connectors, and the same HDMI, DisplayPort , and DVI connectors. It supports up to three-way SLI. The minimum power supply required is 600w, and the card's TDP is 250w, just like the Titan.

New Technology

Nvidia is releasing the GTX 780 with a fair bit of cool new technology that helps round out the package a bit, so let's look at each of them one by one.

Adaptive Fan Control

Nvidia's all-new Adaptive Fan Control smooths out the speed at which the fans spin up and down, resulting in less noticeable noise during operation.

Even though the GTX Titan was and is a "quiet" GPU by our standards, Nvidia tells us that it's not necessarily fan noise that people notice as much as changes in fan speed, and we have to say there's some truth to that. Once a fan is spinning at a certain RPM we tend to not notice it, especially as the Titan and the GTX 780's fans never really spin very fast. It is certainly noticeable though when the fans spin up or down suddenly; we all hear that. So on the GTX 780 Nvidia has smoothed out the speed at which the fans spin up and down so you don't hear the change in fan speed.

ShadowPlay

ShadowPlay is designed to improve the in-game video recording experience over FRAPS by consuming less system resources and compressing the videos. It will work with any Kepler GPU and will be released this summer.

Now this is a cool feature, albeit one we have not tested as it was not available just yet. This is software that only works with Kepler GPUs to record your gaming sessions by using the GPU's built-in H.264 video encoder. The software will just record everything you do and keep only the portion that you just played, hence it's name, as it records everything that you just did, like a shadow. You can tell the software to just keep the last five minutes, 10 minutes, or 20 minutes, and it'll intelligently delete what is not needed, helping keep file sizes down by both deleting unneeded video and also through video compression. Nvidia also claims the peformance hit from turning on Shadowplay is less than five percent, so it's main advantages over FRAPS are that it only records what just happened instead of everything, and it requires less system resources to do so. This software will be rolling out this summer and will be available via Nvidia's GeForce Experience software, and will be supported on any Kepler GPU. It should be noted that beginning with this launch driver, the GeForce Experience software will replace the Nvidia Update software in the driver package, and though users can opt out of installing it, by default it will be installed with all Nvidia drivers going forward.

Head on over to page 2 to read about the rest of the new features, see the benchmarks, and our final thoughts.

GPU Boost 2.0

The GTX 780 features GPU Boost 2.0 temperature target settings as well as the ability to overvolt the board.

This feature first appeared on the GTX Titan and it works beautifully. Its main goal is to prevent the GPU from throttling itself due to excessive heat, which results in reduced performance. To prevent this from happening, users can now set the peak temperature for a card, which by default is set to 81C but it can be pushed up to 95C if you like (the card can handle it). Nvidia tells us these cards can go all the way up to 105C before the hardware is damaged, but you'd be lucky to push either a Titan or a GTX 780 past 80C typically since their coolers are so effective. However, the GPU will overclock as high as it can until it reaches that pre-determined temperature, so you can nudge the temperature GPU Boost 2.0 also allows for overvolting a card, so you can overclock it as high as you can get away with by pushing the core clock power target, temperature target, memory, and voltage. Only the Titan and the GTX 780 offers these features at this time. If you try to use them on a GTX 680, for example, they are simply greyed out.

Performance

When we first heard of this card we figured it would land squarely in between the $500 GTX 680 and the $1,000 GTX Titan, both in performance and price. Then Nvidia informed us the card was priced at $650, and we looked at the benchmark charts and thought this was either a very competitively priced product, or the Titan is really overpriced, at least for gamers. Looking at the benchmark chart (below) you can see the GTX 780 is within five to 15 percent of the Titan in all benchmarks, which is seriously impressive given it costs $350 less. In general we run all games at 2560x1600 with 4XAA enabled, which is extremely taxing on even the most hardcore systems, and yet the GTX 780 was just on the cusp of playing all games extremely smoothly, with the exception of Metro: Last Light, which will remain a ball buster for the forseeable future it seems. Even though we'd prefer to have at least 40-50fps, that is just not possible with a single GPU at the resolution we run, and only the Titan can get close to achieving it. That said, the GTX 780 is damn close, and easily puts some distance on both the GTX 680 and the Radeon HD 7970, making it the fastest sub-$1,000 GPU available at this time. It should also be noted that the card ran cool and quiet throughout testing, and we were able to run it at 1,084MHz with no problems at all.

GTX 780 Benchmarks

Final thoughts

This is one wicked fast GPU, and if it was $750 or so like we thought it would be you would see us waffling a bit between this card and the Titan. However, at $650 it is very competitive, though we've yet to compare it to dual GTX 660 Ti cards or GTX 670 cards in SLI, but then you have to deal with dual GPUs. Also, add-in board partners will be releasing their own versions of the GTX 780 with custom cooling solutions, but we do not know at this time whether the boards will be overclocked or offer larger frame buffers.

In our opinion, the best news about the GTX 780 is at the resolution we use for testing there was no such thing as an affordable GPU that could handle it. The GTX 680 and the HD 7970 were all stuck around 20fps or so for newer games, though the Titan could handle them much better. With the GTX 780 we have a truly semi-affordable card that can run newer games at these resolutions and AA settings just fine. Nvidia says the GTX 780 is 34 percent faster than a GTX 680 and that seems about right to us, and 70 percent faster than a GTX 580, so people with older cards will see quite a jump in performance by upgrading. There also might be other 700-series cards in the pipeline, so anyone looking to upgrade might want to wait just a bit before pulling the trigger on a new card.

As far as how AMD will respond, that remains to be seen. The company reminded us that the HD 7970 GHz edition is still the fastest card at its price point of roughly $420, and that is certainly true. Whether or not it will respond with a GCN 2.0 board dubbed Radeon 8790 or similar is anyone's guess, but given the ferocity of the GPU wars as of late we'd be shocked if AMD sat on the sidelines for very long.

PS: Here is a promotional video Nvidia sent us that walks you through the GTX 780's hardware and software.

Eurocom Scorpius Review

Jimmy Thang — Fri, 24 May 2013 18:52:27 +0000

3D notebook offers hefty power for a hefty cost

The Eurocom Scorpius lives a dual life. On one hand, it’s a dull-looking workstation; on the other, this highly configurable laptop can also be outfitted with a 3D monitor and killer gaming specs. We opted for the latter.

The Scorpius has a backlit keyboard that can change to seven different colors.

Along with a 120Hz refresh rate, the 17.3-inch monitor features a built-in 3D emitter that syncs up to a pair of bundled Nvidia 3D Vision 2 glasses. To test the 3D experience, we played the 3D Vision Ready–title Batman: Arkham City and sampled some 3D movie trailers from 3DVisionLive.com. Nvidia’s stereoscopic technology rivals the best that movie theaters have to offer in terms of depth, and never bothered our eyes, but the experience wasn’t perfect. Even though Nvidia purports to have solved the dimming issue with its Vision 2 glasses, you’re still essentially wearing sunglasses, so the experience is going to be darker than viewing content in 2D without glasses. We also feel that wearing glasses in and of itself is cumbersome.

The most vexing problem is that when 3D is enabled, performance suffers greatly. Our frame rate dropped by half, from 50s to mid-20s, when playing Batman in 3D as opposed to 2D. In our opinion, these various issues detract too much from the experience; we’d rather play in 2D mode. As for the TN panel in 2D mode, while some sing the praises of 120Hz’s ability to improve even 2D image quality, we didn’t see any noticeable improvement over 60Hz performance when surfing the web, watching videos, or playing games.

We had little complaint with our system’s internal specs, however, which included a 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-3840QM CPU, 16GB of RAM, and not one, but two GeForce GTX 680Ms in SLI. In our more CPU-intensive tests, the Scorpius scored modest wins of 6–13 percent. However, when it came to the more GPU-intensive applications, our zero-point’s comparatively humble Fermi-based GeForce GTX 670M GPU got severely stung by the Scorpius’s two Kepler beasts. In our STALKER: CoP benchmark, the Scorpius performed an amazing 112.5 percent better than the ZP; the performance gap only widened in our 3DMark 11 test, where it performed an astonishing 248.1 percent better. Because these benchmark stats were so amazing, we loaded up Far Cry 3 to give it a real workout. While the Scorpius wasn’t able to run the super-graphically intensive game on “Ultra” (the game’s highest settings), it ran at “Very High” with frame rates in the mid-40s to low-50s range, and often outperformed a 2.8GHz AMD quad-core gaming desktop armed with a GTX 590. It seems unfair to bring up the fact that the far less expensive ($1,500) GT60 zero-point laptop wasn’t even able to muster a solid 30fps on FC3’s “High” settings. The only performance test where the GT60 bested the Scorpius was in battery life, where Eurocom’s laptop lasted a poor 103 minutes. Something’s got to give when you’re powering two 680Ms.

In terms of storage, the laptop comes with two drives: a 128GB mSATA Micron and 512GB SSD. While the two speedy drives are appreciated, the lack of a hefty HDD really limits the overall package. Luckily, the laptop takes up to three 2.5-inch storage drives and installing an additional HDD requires the removal of just one screw from the bottom of the laptop. Users can also access the motherboard from underneath and swap out the RAM. Eurocom has made the main compartment easily removable, with only four screws holding it in place.

While the laptop certainly performs well, it still has issues. Its trackpad is unresponsive and can be an exercise in frustration to use. Perhaps a bigger problem is that this thing is heavy. With a carry weight of more than 13 pounds, the Scorpius is in backbreaker territory. Finally, at almost $4,000, it’s very expensive.

Fortunately, most of these issues can be mitigated. You can save money by skipping out on the 3D monitor and second SSD. And you can overlook its battery, weight, and trackpad issues by understanding that the Scorpius is best used as a desktop replacement. Its performance is simply off the charts, and complaining about its other problems is like complaining about how a Ferrari is expensive, bad with fuel economy, and doesn’t have enough cup holders. If those issues are enough to bother you, you’re looking at the wrong machine. This laptop is all about performance and here the Scorpius is a stinger.

$3,915, www.eurocom.com

Vizio CA24T-A4 All-in-One PC Review

Michael Brown — Wed, 22 May 2013 22:55:53 +0000

Bringing the sexy back—minus a few key components

Smart TVs are basically dumb PCs, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Vizio—one of the world’s most successful HDTV manufacturers—plans to grow by jumping into the all-in-one PC market. The Vizio CA24T-A4 is a surprisingly good rookie effort, but there is room for improvement.

The tiny keyboard delivers surprisingly good tactile feedback.

The 24-inch, 10-point touchscreen display is crisp, clear, and very thin (about .75 inches). It’s an MVA (multi-domain vertical alignment) model, with an LED backlight. Resolution is 1920x1080 pixels, which is typical of this class of machine (Vizio also offers higher-end models with 27-inch displays at the same resolution).

The display is mounted to a thin stalk rising from the pizza-box base that houses the machine’s guts. The display can tilt from minus-5 degrees to plus-20 degrees, which is fine for using the PC from a seated position, but it doesn’t tilt back far enough to use the machine while standing. Unlike the displays on the Asus ET2300 and Lenovo A720, it can’t be folded flat. It also doesn’t pivot or swivel left to right.

The CA24T-A4’s base is incredibly small—at just 1-inch high, it’s even thinner than the svelte Lenovo A720—but Vizio removed two important components to achieve that profile: The computer has neither a discrete GPU nor an optical drive. You won’t mind integrated graphics unless you’re a hardcore gamer, and the absence of an optical drive won’t matter if you acquire your movies, music, games, and other software online. But Intel’s dual-core 2.5GHz Core i5-3210M CPU and its HD4000 graphics is a 98-pound weakling when it comes to modern gaming with eye candy turned up, and we were grateful to have a USB DVD drive on hand to install some of our benchmarks. Gaming performance on the box could have been helped with higher-clocked RAM, but alas, Vizio went with DDR3/1333.

Vizio outfitted the CA24T-A4 with four USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI inputs (so you can connect both a satellite/cable set-top box and a gaming console or Blu-ray drive), and an eSATA port (which we’d happily trade for Thunderbolt for forward-looking compatibility). Everything except one USB port is in the back of the machine, so you won’t have ugly cables sticking out of its side; and unlike many AiOs we’ve tested, Vizio doesn’t hijack any of its USB ports to host a wireless dongle for keyboard and mouse. Actually, Vizio doesn’t put a mouse in the box—it provides a wireless multitouch trackpad, instead. Vizio tells us that this is to take advantage of Windows 8 gestures, but we can’t say we’re enthused about it: Trackpads are necessary on laptops, but they don’t deliver a lot of benefit paired with a desktop rig (unless you’re using the PC from the couch, and that’s an unlikely scenario with just a 24-inch display).

Vizio’s all-in-one delivers much better sound than we’ve heard from most computers, thanks in part to the presence of a subwoofer cleverly integrated into the computer’s detached power supply (Asus offers a sub for its all-in-ones, but at additional cost with most models). There’s a volume control and an HDMI toggle switch conveniently integrated into both the keyboard and the remote control. That’s a much better solution than integrating these features into the display, as Asus and Lenovo do. You can also use the HDMI display without needing to power up the computer (the keyboard controls don’t function in this situation, but the remote does).

The Vizio CA24T-A4 delivered very weak benchmark numbers. If you care about performance, the similarly priced Asus E2300 crushes it, thanks to its higher base clock, larger cache, and dedicated GPU. But if you anticipate using the Vizio’s HDMI display capabilities as much as its computing power, it’s the better buy.

$1,250, www.vizio.com

Logitech Z323 Review

Michael Brown — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:20:24 +0000

2.1-Channel Speaker System offer cheap thrills

Logitech has built more computer speakers over the years than just about any manufacturer, and it’s learned a thing or two about building decent low-cost models. Take the 2.1-channel Logitech Z323 system: We could name any number of speaker systems that sound better, but few that are priced better.

The satellites tilt up to project sound at your ears.

You can literally see some of the ways that Logitech hit that low price point: The satellite cabinets are made from cheap ABS plastic with permanently attached cables that plug into the subwoofer. Each satellite has dual, 2-inch, concave-dome drivers (one is mounted in the front of the cabinet and the other in the back, to deliver what Logitech describes as “360-degree sound”). So the system performs best if there’s a wall behind the satellites for the sound waves to bounce off. Each satellite also has a front-facing port. There’s a volume control and power switch on the right-hand cabinet, plus one 1/8-inch headphone output and one 1/8-inch stereo input, to support a digital media player.

The compact subwoofer cabinet (it measures 8.7x5.9x7.2 inches) is fabricated from the typical medium-density fiberboard. It houses a small amp and a tiny (for a sub) 4-inch down-firing dome woofer. The amp delivers six watts (RMS) to each of the satellites and 18 watts (RMS) to the subwoofer. The sub has its own volume control, along with a pair of RCA jacks that serve as a second auxiliary input for a gaming console, DVD player, or what have you (handy features in a speaker system priced this low).

The Z323’s favorable price/performance ratio, however, applies to games much more than music. Playing games such as Borderlands 2, we were pleased with the Z323’s ability to render the sound of gunshots and explosions, and the conversations with friendly characters and the taunts of enemies alike were rendered crisp and clear (well, with the exception of those babbling psychos).

When we listened to music, on the other hand, the vocals sounded weirdly detached from the rest of the band—and it didn’t matter whether the singer was male or female or even what style of music was being played. We tried several singer/songwriters, including “Crossing Muddy Waters,” from the John Hiatt album of the same name, Marc Cohn’s “She’s Becoming Gold,” from The Rainy Season, and Nanci Griffith’s cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Techumseh Valley,” from her record Other Voices, Other Rooms (in all three cases, the tracks were ripped from CD and encoded as 16-bit, 44.1kHz FLAC files).

This sonic detachment wasn’t as much of a problem with instrumental selections, but that’s not to say the Z323 system delivered a stellar performance. When we played Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which the composer recently remastered for Bowers & Wilkins’s Society of Sound label, the album (available in both Apple Lossless and 24-bit FLAC formats), sounded somewhat lifeless and flat compared to what we heard on more expensive speakers (including Corsair’s stellar SP2500 system). But you could almost buy four Z323 setups for the cost of one SP2500, so that’s to be expected.

f you’re working with a tight budget and need speakers primarily for gaming, Logitech has a good set in the Z323. If listening to music is your core interest, on the other hand, you should keep looking.

$70, www.logitech.com

Velocity Micro Raptor MultiPlex XL Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:30:48 +0000

Is there still room for big a HTPC?

It’s hard to talk about the Velocity Micro MultiPlex machine without thinking back more than 15 years ago, to the earliest days of “PC-TVs” and “PC Theaters.”

Back in the late 1990s, vendors such as Compaq and Gateway were pushing Pentium II–based PCs capable of watching DVDs, displaying electronic programming guides, and browsing the Internet, along with other futuristic capabilities, on gigantic 36-inch CRT televisions (we say that both literally and sarcastically).

The MultiPlex is a traditional HTPC, but fully capable of playing Big Picture Steam games, too.

In comparison to those early pioneers of living room PCs, the Velocity Micro MultiPlex is like a starship dropping out of warp speed while you look on from a covered wagon trying to get over Donner Pass without having to eat your fellow travelers.

The MultiPlex chassis harkens back to those early PC-TVs, but rather than sporting a 266MHz Pentium II, a whopping 2GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, and an analog TV tuner, the MultiPlex is pretty much state-of-the-art: liquid-cooled Core i7-3770K clocked up to 4.3GHz, 16GB of DDR3/2000, a GeForce GTX 680, 240GB SSD, and 3.6TB of RAID 5 storage. Besides Gigabit and 802.11n, and the Blu-ray drive, Velocity Micro opted for a Ceton quad-channel CableCARD tuner to help fill that massive RAID 5 array.

That RAID array, for the record, is made up of three 2TB WD Caviar Black drives. If one drive fails, you won’t lose it all—we’re just not so sure we’d care if we lost it, though. Since the MultiPlex is intended to quietly sit in the living room sucking up television through the Ceton card, a drive failure wiping out, say, every episode of Glee or The Walking Dead, wouldn’t be as bad as losing 2TB of your family videos and pics. Frankly, we think that a straight 6TB JBOD array would be just fine on a PVR box, but if you do intend to store your memories on the machine, the RAID 5 is warranted.

Performance of the box was in line with our expectations. Obviously, up against our zero-point system’s hexa-core and dual-GPU setup, it’s no contest. But against HTPC/gaming boxes like Digital Storm’s Bolt and Falcon Northwest’s Tiki, it’s pretty much a tie, as all three feature overclocked 3770K parts and GeForce GTX 680 cards. Of course, you might wonder if it’s fair to compare the MultiPlex against those much smaller HTPC machines. That’s a good question. Both the Tiki and Bolt are more likely to be used as simple SFF gaming boxes in your office, or in your living room as “Steam Boxes” running Big Picture mode. Recording terabytes of TV isn’t likely to be high on the list of their usage scenarios.

That’s actually where the MultiPlex comes in. It’s far more traditional-HTPC shaped and sized for the PVR chores, yet has plenty of firepower to run games at 1080p resolutions. Our one complaint might be that it’s a tad loud for pure PVR duties. If you’re watching, say, a Michael Bay flick, you’d never hear the fan and drive noise, but if you’re trying to catch the nuanced acting in, um, Jane Eyre on Blu-ray, you could find those sounds distracting. This won’t be an issue in gaming, of course, but it’s worth noting.

Pricing for the rig is fair. At $3,200 it’s a full grand cheaper than the Falcon Tiki we reviewed last September. The Tiki did, however, pack a pair of 512GB SSDs, which adds up, but then the MultiPlex has three drives plus a CableCARD tuner.

Overall, the MultiPlex brings a lot to the table if you’re still living in a cable world—we’re just not sure how many of us there are in today’s post-cable environment.

$3,200, www.velocitymicro.com

MiniX Neo X5 Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:14:04 +0000

Meet the android on TV box

We have some bad news for you and you’re not going to like it, as few parents ever want to hear anything negative about their baby. Well, here it is: Your so-called Smart TV really isn’t that smart.

The Android on TV box idea may be the future, but probably not this one.

Sure, the guy in the blue shirt said that your fab 60-inch plasma was top of its class and graduated cum laude, but the truth is, your TV spent most of its schooling playing beer pong and is a actually a class-A moron. The only reason it’s called “Smart” is because it was pledged as a legacy.

That’s where the MiniX Neo X5 comes in. Running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, this inexpensive black box gives your TV an actual browser and access to applications that aren’t coded in the language Ass++.

The Neo X5 sports a dual-core Rockchip RK3066 ARM processor with a quad-core Mali 400 graphics chip, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, Bluetooth, HDMI 1.4a, Fast Ethernet, and an optical S/PDIF out. For additional storage, the Neo X5 has an SD slot. MiniX even includes a short HDMI cable and USB OTG cable. For those of you who don’t subscribe to Obscure Ports Quarterly, OTG lets you use the box’s Micro USB port as a standard USB port, or—if we could figure it out—hook the Neo X5 to a PC’s USB port to use as a storage device. Think of it as a USB port that swings both ways.

As we said, we couldn’t figure it out and that’s perhaps one of the most vexing problems with the Neo X5. It’s pretty much stock Ice Cream Sandwich, but a lot of things were simply not intuitive or not working. We couldn’t, for example, figure out how to zoom in or out, and many apps that are intended for touch just didn’t work correctly for us. Granted, we were using it with a wireless keyboard and mouse, but that’s how the device would normally be used in a living room since the remote it ships with feels like it came out of a gumball machine.

The performance of the Neo X5 didn’t impress us, either. It felt sluggish in most instances, with a subpar user interface. Some benchmarks told us otherwise. We compared it to a Tegra 3–based Nexus 7 (admittedly not the most direct comparison, but a good measure of relative Android performance) and the X5 took most of the wins. The Nex7 certainly felt smoother but that’s likely due to Jelly Bean and its Project Butter improvements.

Overall, the Neo X5 feels underspec’d to us. Even the display at 1080p output looked so soft we had to double-check which mode it was in. Security is also an issue, as there is no way to secure the unit. Since you’d be logged into your Gmail account at all times on it, you’re leaving your email fly down for anyone on the device.

The Neo X5 is mainly marketed as a media player and it does fine there—to an extent. We could play various MP4 files, from GoPro cams to handycams to still images without hiccups, and there is an extensive set of codecs supported. Netflix was also fine but did exhibit more compression artifacts than we expected. YouTube videos were also pretty low-res despite being checked off as “HD.”

What we have here is essentially a work in progress. As is, it’s still far more usable and much faster than 95 percent of the “Smart” televisions on the market, but there’s much improvement to be had. MiniX is promising a Jelly Bean update at some point that may greatly change the experience—which it needs.

$110, www.polywell.com

Hitman Absolution review

Chris Zele — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:43:38 +0000

Hitman Absolution review: Equal parts frustration and fun

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything from IO Interactive’s popular stealth hero, Agent 47 (no pun intended). The star of the popular Hitman franchise is back for a fifth installment with Hitman: Absolution, and it’s about time, as the last game—Blood Money—was released way back in 2006. This time around, the agency employing Agent 47 is tired of paying for his benefits package, so they decide to assassinate him. This sets Agent 47 on a mission to dispose of his would-be disposers, taking him, and you, through 20 wide-ranging missions in an effort to stay alive while simultaneously sending the folks who are conspiring against him to the morgue. The premise is great, but we found the game’s execution—again, no pun intended—to be a mixture of awesome and awful.

You’ll need to use your environment well to effectively hide from your enemies.

Like the previous titles, the game consists of missions that require you to assassinate predetermined targets. To help you accomplish your objectives, you’re given a range of weaponry, intel, and abilities, and it’s up to you to put all three to good use. The most useful is a powerful stealth skill called Instinct, which helps you blend into your surroundings, see through walls, and sneak past guards. At the beginning of each mission, you’re given a small amount of this ability—your supply can be monitored on the HUD—which depletes as you use it, but is replenished by incapacitating foes and reaching checkpoints. Instinct’s X-ray vision comes in handy when planning assassinations, allowing you to gaze through a wall at a potential target from relative safety. It’s a really fun skill to use, especially when it lets you slow down time and kill multiple enemies quickly. We were disappointed, however, with how quickly it was depleted—the quick drain forced us to stray from our mission priorities and kill people randomly just to replenish our stores.

In addition to Instinct, there’s an array of weaponry lying around the levels that you can use to your advantage, ranging from a simple kitchen knife to a 50-caliber sniper rifle (both the kitchen knife and sniper rifle provide one-hit kills, whether up close or from a distance. Good times.). Our favorite killing tool was Agent 47’s signature weapon, the Fiber Wire, which we used to garrotte scumbags and then quickly drag them out of sight in order to remain undetected. We also enjoyed his other signature weapon, the Silenced Silver Baller. Its rapid fire-rate combined with the Instinct ability let us take down multiple targets quickly and with plenty of panache. While we preferred the game’s stealth weapons, they aren’t the only options by a long shot. Attention-getting weapons such as a shotgun or 45-caliber handgun are also available. Be warned, however, that using any of these loud hand cannons will almost always result in the arrival of a ridiculous amount of enemy backup—which we consider a flaw in the game’s design. In addition to the weapons provided, you can also use random objects lying around the environment, including a rusty screwdriver, a kitchen knife, and a doctor’s scalpel, to name just a few. We favored the knives because they are silent and reusable from one kill to the next.

In addition to the usual indoor environments, Absolution also has several huge outdoor missions, like this one in a sprawling refinery.

Easily our biggest complaint about Absolution is that it’s not just difficult, it seems unfairly difficult. We were frustrated by the sense that we were playing missions over and over—in what is billed as an “open environment”—just to get through the missions the way the developers apparently felt we should. There’s a tutorial, but it’s of little use once the game drops you into a “real” mission, where you have no idea where enemies or objectives are located. We found that it took almost six hours to really get the hang of the gameplay and the assassination moves necessary to be successful, and getting to that point was a mostly trial-and-error exercise that was simply monotonous. We had to play one of the game’s early missions around 20 times to make it to one of the checkpoints, and almost rage-quit the game many times because it was so aggravating.

The game’s main campaign took us nearly 14 hours to complete, and once we had, there was little reason to return to it, unlike in Dishonored, where there are many ways to progress through the levels, as well as totally different endings according to our playing style. Hitman tries to add replayability by giving you a ranking at the end of each level based on how many people you killed and how many people spotted you, and it automatically uploads your score to a global leader board. This peer-pressure tactic could compel some people to redo levels to get a better score, but we had so much trouble finishing the levels the first time that we had zero desire to try them again. The game also climaxes early, which made the last half of the game drag on way too long.

In Absolution, you often have to use large crowds to conceal yourself.

Aside from the main campaign, there is also a Contracts mode that lets you play missions that you or other players create using the built-in mission editor. This mode is always available, and lets you participate in ranked assassination attempts, but in order to unlock all the necessary weaponry and gadgets, you’ll need to progress through the main campaign first. All in all, it’s an excellent addition to the game, as there are thousands of user-created missions available through the game’s online lobby, which lists them with descriptions and popularity rankings.

The graphics in Hitman are impressive, with sharp textures and a variety of well-made environments, ranging from a dirty inner city to the dusty deserts of the Deep South. The game also played very well on our overclocked Intel Sandy Bridge system with an Nvidia GTX 660 Ti video card, averaging 88fps with all settings maxed-out at 1080p.

In the end, Hitman: Absolution is a challenging stealth action game with impressive visuals, but it’s marred by a steep learning curve, too much trial and error, and a campaign that drags on too long. We liked the open-ended nature of the missions and the variety of options and weapons available to us, but ultimately found ourselves so frustrated we just wanted to finish the game and never play it again. We appreciate the added Contracts missions, but found the overall experience of this game to be underwhelming.

$60, www.hitman.com

Far Cry 3 Review

Josh Norem — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:30:51 +0000

Far Cry 3 review: The best Far Cry game yet—but it’s not without flaws

There we were, driving down a bumpy, pothole-ridden dirt road, when the onscreen indicator for enemies suddenly lit up like the muzzle flashes from the car we had just driven past. Several of the other car’s passengers fired some rounds into our beater car’s engine block, forcing us to bail out while the aggressors flipped a U-turn to come back and finish the job.

Tagging enemies shows their location and status, and planning these ambushes is the best part of the game.

We watched as the car full of enraged maniacs approached, and then giggled as it careened over the edge of the rocky path, its driver unable to control the car’s rapid acceleration on the narrow road. Curious about their fate, we sauntered over to the area where the vehicle swerved off the path and suddenly heard the engine of another car coming toward us from just up ahead, so we instinctively ducked into the bushes since we were low on ammo. As we watched the second car stop right next to our now-burning vehicle, we saw the bad guys dismount to have a look-see; then our car suddenly exploded, which caused their car to explode as well, killing all of them and creating a massive, bloody fireball. As we stared at the smoldering wreckage and bodies strewn everywhere, we were just about to congratulate ourselves for a well-executed skirmish when from out of nowhere a royally pissed-off Cassowary—think Big Bird, but blue—appeared and mistook us for a human scratching post. After putting him down as fast as we could, we took his pelt then leapt off the nearest cliff, gliding in our wingsuit to a camp down below to replenish our ammo.

Blowing up enemy vehicles with a grenade launcher is an orgy of explosive carnage.

Of course, none of this was scripted or even part of the game’s main story; it was just a random encounter we had while en route to an actual part of the game, and it’s what makes Far Cry 3 one of the most entertaining—and unpredictable—games we’ve played since Skyrim. This is one game that, like Skyrim, will be different for everyone who plays it, and the game excels at the times when it lets you do whatever the heck you want to do, which is about 90 percent of the time. Sadly, you can’t always do whatever you want, and are forced to jump through very specific hoops a lot of the time, or sit through cutscenes and boring dream sequences way too often throughout the game’s lackluster main storyline.

Once the main story cuts you loose, you get back to the real meat of the game—hunting wildlife and clearing enemy outposts. However, in order to unlock all of the game’s special skills, such as running faster, taking less falling damage, etc., you must progress through the game’s story, which by the end leaves you cold and ready to leave Rook Island, never to return. To put it bluntly, this is a game that starts out extremely strong, and slowly gets worse as you progress through it, though it is punctuated with some of the best first-person combat we’ve ever experienced on the PC.

The game begins with one of the best opening sequences in recent memory, as it shows you and your friends living it up on a tropical island, only to pan out to discover you’re watching a video of your exploits from the confines of a bamboo tiger cage, held captive by an extremely well-acted psychopath named Vaas. After a harrowing escape from the prison camp and some hand-holding by one of the locals, you’re set free to pursue the main quest, or just explore on your own. And explore you will, as you must climb radio towers to remove scrambling devices that obscure the island’s map, which also allows the local gun shops to receive new shipments. Pirates control local outposts, too, so you have to clear those in order to buy new weapons, replenish your ammo, configure your weapon loadouts, and fast-travel from base to base. Clearing outposts is easily the most thrilling part of the game, and you can clear them at your leisure, too, or not—the game doesn’t punish you either way, but creeping up on a base undetected, tagging all the enemies with your camera, then moving in stealthily to take them out one by one before any of them hits the alarm—or disabling the alarms first—is the highlight of this game. And each of the 34 outposts are a serious challenge and a thesis on open-world gameplay done right.

In addition to clearing outposts, climbing radio towers, and the main quest, you also must hunt wildlife in order to upgrade your ammo packs, wallet, holsters, arrow quiver, and syringe holder. Each lets you hold more ammo, health syringes, grenades, Molotovs, and more. This isn’t Deer Hunter, either, as hunting is a challenge—you have to bag leopards, Cassowarys, rabid dogs, tigers, bears, and lots more. Additionally, clearing outposts opens up Wanted Dead and Path of the Hunter quests that require you to kill certain animals with specific weapons and take down a nearby kingpin using only your knife, but sadly, once all the outposts are clear, not only is the world devoid of bad guys but there are no more of these quests, either.

Just like real wildlife, the animals in the game don’t take too kindly to strangers.

The main problem with the game is that you spend the first half of it going on epic adventures to upgrade your packs, open the map, and increase your skills, but by the time the game is half over, we found ourselves almost maxed out completely in every area possible. We had a huge wallet that was constantly full, all the weapons that were available, and almost every skill on the three separate trees, giving us little motivation to keep exploring. You can also find 120 scattered relics and 20 randomly located letters from WWII-era Japanese soldiers, and compete in contests such as knife-throwing, shooting, and driving, but they provide little benefit aside from a test of skill and extra money, which is usually unnecessary. The game also provides a dozen side missions that are so boring a lot of them left us wondering why the developers even bothered including them.

We absolutely loved this game for the first 15 hours or so, and were even considering it as the Game of the Year. But after plodding through the second half of the game, repeating a lot of the same tasks over and over, and suffering through the game’s hackneyed story and deplorable ending, our opinion changed. We still highly recommend it; just savor your time on the first island—it’s one of the best FPS experiences we’ve ever had.

$60, ubi.com

Computer Cases Roundup

David Murphy — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:39:27 +0000

7 computer cases reviewed: Cooler Master HAF XB,Thermaltake Soprano, Corsair Carbide 200R, and more!

If you thought that the only innovation in modern chassis design was the (long-awaited) switch from USB 2.0 ports to USB 3.0 ports at all price levels, you haven’t seen anything yet. The cases in our roundup this time around really run the gamut of features: From inexpensive cases that attempt to deliver a lot of functionality without fattening up the price tag, to simple-looking chassis that hide a wealth of must-haves, to some of the most eye-opening cases we’ve seen – that don’t quite stack up once you look beyond their crazy offerings. In other words, it’s a typical computer cases roundup.

Just to lay out our criteria a bit, here are some of the elements we’re typically looking for when we run the magnifying glass over a computer case: Features that take time and effort out of the installation or upgrade process, like screwless drive bays. Minimal annoyances – like having to snap off a case’s entire front panel just to remove its drive bay covers. Adequate cooling, ideally positioned such that one’s hard drives, video cards, and general motherboard area all receive a steady stream of air. And, of course, strong cable management: Nobody likes to open up a case and find a Medusa.

Beyond that, the great computer case race is anyone’s to win. As for how each manufacturer balances “cool” with “functional,” you’ll have to read on for all the gory details!

Cooler Master HAF XB

Don’t call this case “stumpy.” It bites.

Cooler Master’s HAF XB computer case is a hybrid design that attempts to kill two PC birds with one stone: An open-air design for system builders who want to be able to swap out their components like a pit stop, and a standard, covered chassis for those who like having four walls and a roof around their system’s precious parts from time to time. For the most part, it works—but we would have love to have seen a few tweaks to make the system even easier to use for the frequent parts-swapper.

The cube-like case leaves little room for error. Its 17.5x13x16.5-inch size split into a top and bottom half on the inside: Your ATX, Micro-ATX, or Mini-ITX motherboard rests up-top—pray you don’t have a huge cooler overtop your CPU, as you get just under six and a half inches of vertical space (from the silicon on your motherboard) to play with if you have any intention of attaching a 20-centimeter fan to the case’s top. The bottom portion of the HAF XB is where you’ll precariously thread your 7-inch-or-shorter power supply; connect up the case’s two front hot-swap bays; stuff your optical drive in one of the case’s two, tool-free 5.25-inch bays; or slap some SSDs in the four additional 2.5-inch bays provided.

It’s not very often you see a manufacturer going for the fabled, “cube design,” but this is not your standard case by any stretch of the imagination.

As for the hybrid bit we previously mentioned, Cooler Master has designed the open-air case to work just like that, with the case’s sides and top bare to the world. However, when you want to transform the chassis into a normal, box-like enclosure, you just need to reattach the case’s sides and top with the provided thumbscrews.

While the process is certainly easy for those who have ever screwed in a side panel before (that’s most of you reading this), we wish that Cooler Master could have used the kind of thumbscrews that remain attached to the case (or panel) after you’ve loosened them. Losing those at a LAN party would be a real nightmare. That, or Cooler Master could have used quick-snap latches instead – an even stronger match for this Transformer of a computer case.

The beauty of Cooler Master’s split-insides concept is that you only have the annoyance of stringing cables around the lower half once. Most of the parts you’ll likely manipulate sit up top.

The case gives you a lot of expandability for its size— including room for seven PCIe devices in all and videocards up to 13.1 inches in length—as well as two USB 3.0 ports on the front and two beefy, 1,800-RPM, 12-centimeter fans directly behind that for air intake. If you’re crazy enough to try water-cooling given the tight confines of this chassis, it does support a single 24-centimeter radiator on the front if you first remove these fans in addition to a single 12-centimeter radiator on the case’s rear. While indentations on the rear of the chassis indicated a place where tubing could have been threaded, Cooler Master oddly omits any rubberized holes for doing so.

The Cooler Master HAF XB isn’t for beginners. You’re going to get to pretend you’re a surgeon when you try to thread wires around the inside of this tight chassis, even given the HAF XB’s system-builder focus. It’s still a compelling case for tinkerers that comes with plenty of useful features, and one that’s worth looking into for those afraid to (or uninterested in) making the switch to a fully open-air design. Just don’t try to water-cool it.

Cooler Master HAF XB

Hot-swap drive bays, easy-to-access motherboard maintenance, excellent cooling

Removable panels need more than thumbscrews, tight chassis for huge CPU coolers and basic PSU installation

$99, www.coolermaster.com

CoolerMaster Scout 2

Cooler Master makes it easy to carry this case around.

There’s no doubt in our minds that the design of Cooler Master’s Storm Scout 2 chassis is going to draw eyeballs. On the outside, it’s a beautiful case – punctuated ever-so-slightly by red LED fan viewable through the case’s windowed side panel and ever-so-dramatically by the case’s unique, rubber-coated steel handle up top.

Looks can be deceiving. From the outside, this case is a winner. But from the inside, we’re a bit skeptical.

The case’s inside is less eye-catching. We love the three screwless 5.25-inch drive bays that merely require you to flick a switch from “open” to “lock” to secure your components in place. However, we’re a little turned off by the flimsier rails that Cooler Master delivers to secure up to seven, 3.5-inch hard drives in place; drive trays would have been better. Additionally, four of the drive bays have to go if you’re using a video card that’s larger than 28.7 centimeters in length – and there’s no easy way to just pull them out sans screwdriver.

Thumbscrews are your new friends for the case’s seven PCIe expansion slots, and you’ll have to install both standoffs and screws for your motherboard. That said, the Storm Scout 2 makes cable management easier with the five holes (three rubberized) Cooler Master cuts right into the motherboard tray–though they could have been a little bigger.

Our biggest problem with the Storm Scout 2 is its cooling—not due to its potential, as the case supports up to nine fans in total (a mix of 12- and 14-centimeter fans, but mostly 12-centimeter). Rather the case ships with just one fan preinstalled: The aforementioned 12-centimeter LED fan on the case’s rear. You can toggle the light on and off, as the flames shooting out from your hot components will be all the dramatic lighting you really need.

Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports adorn the case’s front, which you can hide with a little pull-down cover if you so desire. It’s another one of the many tricks Cooler Master stuffs into the Storm Scout 2’s hat; we just wish we could have some more fans, too.

CoolerMaster Scout 2

Super-mobile case, easy cable management and good connectivity

Poor prebuilt cooling (one fan!), requires sacrifice of drive bays for larger videocards, flimsier rails for hard drive installation

$99, www.coolermaster.com

MSI Stealth

You’ll love this case’s color scheme, we promise

Were there an award for “best case color scheme,” MSI’s Stealth computer case wins by a mile from its lovely black and light-blue-accented aesthetic. As for the case’s design, however, MSI packs in a few problems to balance out the good bits.

Just wait until you pop off the side of this chassis: a pretty world of black and blue awaits you.

We never thought we’d have to struggle so much with this case just to get a simple optical drive secured into one of its three free bays. That involves popping off the front panel just so you can remove the 5.25-inch bay covers–annoyance number one–and then somehow use the case’s big, blue locking mechanisms of fail to roughly secure your drive in place. Spoiler: They not very secure.

MSI does provide full trays for the four hard drives the case supports, which alleviates our frustration somewhat. It also packs two graphics card stabilizers right above that–a fun and quasi-useful addition that allows the case to support video cards up to 31 centimeters in length, but some extra 2.5-inch bays might have been more useful in general.

What the case lacks in big, fat cable routing holes (you get four small, thin ones), it makes up for in the ludicrous amount of space between the rear of the motherboard tray and the case’s right side panel. You could hide a garden hose in this case, not just your power supply cables.

A single 12-centimeter fan in the front balances out a similarly sized blue LED fan in the front, positioned directly next to the hard drive bays. On the top of the case’s front are two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and a special USB port that dovetails with your MSI motherboard’s “SuperCharger” functionality for speedy device charging. If you haven’t drunk MSI’s Flavor Aid, however, it’s just a standard USB 2.0 connection. Great looks, polarizing design: The MSI Stealth chassis leaves us feeling a little blue.

MSI Stealth

Lovely aesthetic, plenty of room for huge videocards, front-panel connectivity with an MSI-themed bonus

Videocard stabilizers seem silly, horrible 5.25-inch bay locking mechanism (and installation process)

$99, us.msi.com

Click the next page to check out our new kick-ass best-of-the-best case!

ThermalTake New Soprano

A soprano could sing inside of this case and you’d never hear it.

Find a chassis that successfully combines practical noise dampening, useful features, and cooling can be a bit of a needle in the haystack sometimes—but in this case (pardon the pun), that’s Thermaltake’s New Soprano. The solid construction of this chassis creates an upgrading or installation experience that’s free of frustration. Our only complaint with the case, if you could really call it that, is that it lacks pizazz.

This case might look fairly simple on the outside, but it has just about everything you’d ever want or need. Trust us.

That said, give us function over pretty lights any day.

The jet-black exterior of the case uses a front-panel door to create a sleek, uncluttered aesthetic by allowing you to hide your components when you aren’t specifically using them. The door doubles as an excellent noise-dampener and, we argue, a heavier-than-you-might-expect blunt object for use when squaring off against midnight intruders or zombie hordes.

Two USB 3.0 ports sit alongside two USB 2.0 ports on the top-front of the case; we’re even more enthusiastic about the built-in hot-swap hard drive docking station for 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives that Thermaltake’s constructed on the top of the chassis itself. It’s a delightful and unexpected addition to the case that brings a lot of additional connectivity without harming the case’s overall look or feel.

On the inside, Thermaltake uses four simple locking mechanisms to keep your 5.25-inch device held tightly. Installing an optical drive requires you to remove the drive bay’s front panels— easily done without having to rip off any part of the case’s front. Four screwless hard drive trays rest behind the case’s secret weapon: A huge, blue-LED, 20-centimeter fan that delivers plenty of air over your drives without blowing out your eardrums to do so. Above the primary 3.5-inch bays rests a single additional 3.5-inch drive bay and a single 2.5-inch bay for your solid-state needs (both not screwless). Thermaltake positions the thumbscrews for the case’s seven expansion slots on the exterior of the case. While that saves you a little room on the inside—giving the case space for a video card up to 12.2-inches in length—it also means that it’s really hard to actually use your fingers to tighten or loosen the screws.

Thermaltake pulls out all the stops to make it as easy as possible for you to install or upgrade parts—minus the expansion slots, which will require a screwdriver.

Motherboard standoffs are built directly into the case–an excellent touch that saves would-be system builders a bit of time and hassle. A huge hole on the upper half of the motherboard tray exposes your CPU area for easier installation of aftermarket coolers, and that’s joined by five other holes on the tray itself (four rubberized) for cable management. There’s plenty of room between the rear of the tray and the case’s right side panel, even including the acoustical foam that Thermaltake’s attached to the panel to give your ears a respite.

The only other fan in the case is a single, 12-centimeter exhaust fan attached to its rear, and the only other fan you can install beyond that would be an optional 12-centimeter intake fan on the case’s bottom. That’s the trade-off of having a “sound-proof” rig: more potential for heat. However, Thermaltake’s done a masterful job of addressing this issue while building out a case that’s packed with just about everything you’d want to have—assuming you care more about function than flash.

Thermaltake New Soprano VO900M1N2N

Good cooling, great soundproofing, mostly easy installation, slick aesthetics

Expansion slots a little fussy with thumbscrews, case isn’t extraordinarily “flashy”

$119, www.thermaltakeusa.com

Xclio Touch 787

Meet the future, and the past, of cases.

This kills us—it absolutely kills us. The Xclio Touch 787 has one of the most innovative, fun-to-use, Star-Trekian features we’ve ever seen on a case. And the substantial air-cooling on this case feels just a few miles per hour short of a category four. It looks good; it’s one of the few cases that we actually really enjoy interacting with on a daily basis.

Words fail us. The touchscreen controls on this case must be seen to be believed.

But why, oh why, does Xclio have no idea how to build hard drive mounts?

Allow us to explain. The single most noteworthy and compelling feature of the Touch 787 is—as the name alludes—the giant touch-sensitive panel on front of the case’s top. It looks as if it was ripped out of a standard Star Trek: TNG episode, and it functions about as well. After wiring up the panel with a standard Molex connection, you can tap its huge, circular buttons to turn the case’s fans on and off; adjust their speeds to low, medium, or high; turn the fans’ lights on and off; or lock and unlock the panel itself (to prevent accidental bumping).

Call it gimmicky if you want, but the responsiveness of the controls – and pretty blue lighting when you’ve activated an option – is just downright cool. Unfortunately, Xclio seems to have spent most of its R&D on this case on just that— the panel. Or perhaps the fans, as this system comes with no fewer than ten 12-centimeter fans in total: One on the case’s rear, two on the top, one in the front, and six (!) on the case’s side panel. Cooling overkill? Yes. We appreciate the enthusiasm, but one large fan on the side panel (for example) could have pushed plenty of air at a lower RPM and noise level.

All the standard features on this case are the same as what you’d expect to find in this price range: Cable mounting holes, motherboard tray cutouts behind the CPU, locking mechanisms for the case’s three free 5.25-inch bays, et cetera. We’re not going to waste words going over these, simply because the design of the case’s 3.5-inch bays—or lack thereof— presents a critical flaw in any user’s enjoyment of this wind tunnel of a chassis.

It’s too bad that Xclio didn't put some more thought into this case’s internals. As is, they’re not very good.

To access the case’s two actual hard drive bays, you have to unscrew and take apart a stupid bar of-sorts that runs vertically from the case’s bottom to just under its 5.25-inch bays. Upon further inspection, however, Xclio actually wants you to mount your drives to this bar as well, just floating out there in mid-air. Presumably, Xclio wants to put nothing between the intake fan and your system’s motherboard, but it’s a bad design concept that’s ugly for cable management, annoying to work with, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever: It’s the very definition of, “If it ain’t broke…”

If it wasn’t for Xclio’s choices in designing its mounting “system” for hard drives, we’d consider this case–loud and over-the-top as it might be–to actually be something worth considering if for nothing else than its uniqueness. The more we think about it, however, the more Xclio’s design decisions tease the idea that they don’t actually know how to build a functional case, just a really cool-looking one.

Xclio Touch 787

Amazing touch-panel controls, good cable management, more cooling than you’ll ever need.

Very loud, horrible design for hard drive mounting, plenty of wiring to manage even before you put any parts into the case.

$149, www.xclio.com

Click the next page to read reviews on the budget computer cases.

The Battle of the Inexpensive Cases

Want a case on the cheap? Be sure you don’t get what you’re paying for…

Here we go—a descent into the budget barrel. It’s understandable that you might be a little concerned about the quality of offerings you’re going to see in the sub-$100 case market. You have every right to be: Just go to your local geeky retailer of choice and check out some of the horrible cases on the shelves that get offered up at rock-bottom prices. We wouldn’t want to put our worst enemy’s motherboard into those; why should you install yours?

Of course, you can find some real diamonds in the rough, but you’re definitely going to have to do a little digging to uncover quality, inexpensive cases – especially given the sacrifices manufacturers typically have to make in order to hit these low price targets. We’ve dragged up two of these budget cases to show you just what we mean by the differences you’ll find at this end of the spectrum: Take a look!

Antec One

This case might be inexpensive, but there’s so much more Antec could have done

One… singular sensation is not this chassis. The mid-tower Antec One feels a little flimsy in a few areas, which otherwise detracts from some of the better elements in this ultra-inexpensive case.

The Antec One comes with three 5.25-inch bays that use pre-attached locking mechanisms to keep your devices all snug and attached. However, this is the kind of case that requires you to pop off the entire front panel in order to remove the grilled covers over the empty bays— be careful with that, as we definitely broke off some of the tabs on these covers when trying to remove them ourselves.

The Antec is light enough that you could probably balance it on your fingers and spin it like a basketball. (You-Tube that, if you try).

Antec positions the entrance for the case’s five 3.5-inch bays on the opposite side of the chassis–the right of the case, if you’re looking at it from the front, rather than the left. This decision boggled us at first, but the more we thought about it, it makes sense: You would have to pop off both sides of the case anyway were you to install the drives from the left side of the chassis (using the provided rails) and this method allows Antec manages to build in some additional space for much-needed cable management. It’s just a little weird at first.

The case’s seven expansion card brackets don’t come with screws pre-installed into the case; a bit of an annoyance for those looking to ensure that the flimsy tabs stay on at all times. We do, however, like the recessed side pane that sits behind a huge hold cut out for the top half of one’s motherboard: Cable-management and CPU cooler installations are a breeze.

Antec slaps two 12-centimeter fans in the top-rear corner of the case; none over the hard drives. You get two USB 3.0 ports on the case’s front; that’s it. That’s the Antec One: A price-conscious chassis that’s good in a pinch, but could be a lot better.

Antec One

Hard drive bay design is odd at first, but functional; screwless 5.25-inch bays; good cable management

Lacks screws on PCI brackets, no cooling on hard drives, frustrating 5.25-inch device installation

$49, www.antec.com

Corsair Carbide 200R

It’s not “super” inexpensive, but it’s worth saving pennies for

Delightful. Truly delightful. That’s the best way to sum up Corsair’s sub-$100 Carbide 200R mid-tower chassis. It’s roomy, it’s well-designed, and—most importantly— it doesn’t invite any annoying features or ill-designed elements along for its inexpensive ride.

The Carbide 200R doesn't win huge points for its looks, but there's a lot going on inside this chassis for its low price.

All of the Carbide 200R’s drive bays are completely screwless, a wonderful touch for those looking to make modifications to their system without busting out the tool kit. Popping off the flat, solid panels covering the case’s three 5.25-inch bays is easy and destruction-free— almost as easy as it is to slide and lock up to four 3.5-inch hard drives into the case’s left-facing bays. You can use screws to attach up to four 2.5-inch drives into a provided internal enclosure if you really don’t want your solid-state-drives to jiggle.

Motherboard standoffs are built directly into the Carbide 200R: Just slap down your board, grab a few screws, and you’re set. Five different cable routing holes cut directly into the tray make it easy for you to hide your ugly wires, and a large area cut out behind the top of the motherboard tray speeds along the (often agonizing) process of aftermarket CPU cooler installation.

The case comes with a single 12-centimeter fan in the rear and the front. While we would have preferred that the front fan was placed to push some air over your hard drives, at least it’s able to direct much-need cooling on your video card (up to 11.8-inches long). You can also stick up to five additional 12- or 14-centimeter fans around the case’s top, side, and bottom, as well as one more 12-centimeter fan in the front (covering your hard drives).

The case comes with two USB 3.0 ports on the front—more importantly, popping off the front panel to do any modifications to the Carbide 200R doesn’t result in a tangle of wires coming with it. It’s these little touches, and more, that make this case such an inexpensive delight.

Corsair Carbide 200R

Plenty of drive bays, lots of options for additional cooling, a great emphasis on reducing the amount of screwdriver time needed

Front preinstalled fan could have pushed more air over the hard drives directly, 2.5-inch bays still require screws

$60, www.corsair.com