Displaying items by tag: Benchmarking

Tuesday, 15 October 2013 19:07

3DMark for Windows RT

Futuremark according to earlier announcements continues to expand the availability of 3DMark benchmark tools on other platforms. Following versions for Windows, Android and iOS, the company presented the issue of 3DMark for Windows RT and tablets powered by these operating systems.

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AnandTech did a research on benchmark tests for mobile phones, and when they finished with analysing data which was collected from July to September this year, confirmation came that almost every manufacturer of smart devices cheats when performing benchmark tests.

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3dmark

Futuremark announced that they have just released a patch v1.1.0 for the new 3DMark, which as the most important news emphasize the possibility to operate on  the computers with three or four graphics processors. In such situations the tests until now gave less than expected. At first it was thought to be a minor problem in the video drivers, but after months of browsing through 3Dmark Engine they found out that the problem was still in its code.

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Monday, 04 March 2013 12:50

3DMark 11 for Windows 8

Futuremark logo white bg

Futuremark recently released a new version of 3DMark 11 for testing the performance of graphics cards. 3DMark 11 version 1.0.4 is now fully compatible with Windows 8, The good news is that the scoring system has not been changed so that the results obtained are comparable with the previous test made in the version 1.0.3.

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Thursday, 01 November 2012 12:11

Danger Den Closing Up Shop After 12 Years

DangerDen

There is sad news in the computer enthusiast world today as Danger Den, one of the original water cooling companies has made the formal announcement that it will cease trading; they are closing shop. For many, Danger Den was the “got-to” company for high quality off-the-shelf water blocks. Their solid designs and attention to detail marked all of their products. I first started working with Danger Den when I was writing for the website Planetx64 (now closed also). We covered their CPU water blocks and even were fortunate enough to test some of their first multi-GPU cooling products. They were always great to work with and were parts that we highly recommended.

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Halo4-01

Not all that long ago and in the same spot I have been doing work for the last 10 years I developed a concept called the short attention span review. This became a stock feature at one of the sites that I used to write for. The concept was simple; take a product or software and dive into it for 20 minutes. After that time period tell if this product was able to capture someone’s attention. It was based off of research that said the average person had a 20-minute attention span when dealing with new concepts. Sounds pretty simple right?

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MS-Myth

Gamers there is great news for you! According to Microsoft your text will now render up to 336% faster than in Windows 7! This means that if you are playing a text based game you are going to get blazing fast performance.  Although not related to gamers the announcement that Windows 8 now renders text faster than Windows 7 due to DirectWrite has been used to create headlines that read Windows 8 Smokes Windows 7. Unfortunately Microsoft is only talking about 2D graphic and the user interface. Microsoft has also done something that is very disingenuous; they used percentages instead of raw numbers.

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board06Earlier this year when we visited Gigabyte during CES they reiterated something that they said about three years ago. They are committed to providing a much better performing product and are gearing themselves more and more toward the enthusiast and gamer’s market. We have watched them make this shift since we first started working with them back in early 2005. Now 6+ years later we can say they have made this transition well. Their lineup has become much more diversified with a good separation of products. We have already shown you some of the top end boards like the G1.Assassin2 and the X79-UD5 and have goe though the design and features of the X79-UD3 so now we can tell you how this board really performs. Let’s take a look.

 

 

01Overclocking is a big deal these days. I can remember when it was just a bunch of crazed guys with too much money and free time on their hands. We used to do things like solder new resistors onto CPUs (the Slot A Athlons), swap out caps and resistors on motherboards to get more voltage through the boards and to the CPU.  I vividly remember building water cooling kits with pool pumps and tubing bought from Home Depot. Once I even pulled a radiator from a Coke vending machine (old and broken) for a rig I was building. Well thankfully those days are over (but it would still be fun to do some of this). Motherboard makers are now designing and building motherboards with top of the line components voltage regulation systems and tracing that is laid out for business. Many have world class overclockers that work for them to get the most performance out of each and every motherboard. Every now and then they get to build something special from the ground up. We are taking a look at one of these boards that has been built for speed. The one we have in-house was designed by HiCookie; the resident overclocker at Gigabyte. This is the X58A-OC (the OC is for Overclocking as if you could not guess).