Displaying items by tag: Performance

A Rumor popped up today that claims that Intel’s 14nm Broadwell might be pushed back to 2H 2014. This information comes as a slide that was posted on the site VR-Zone. In the slide it seems to show that the second generation of Haswell is now slated for release later than originally expected 2Q 2014 and with Boradwell slipping with it. The new information (if accurate) means that Intel will be pushing back their expected “tick” for desktop and dropping in a refresh instead (another “tock”?).

High Voltage Software has released the minimum and recommended configuration for Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition, PC Edition of the latest sequel of the famous fighting series. Komplete Edition includes three additional fatalities, 15 new skins, and all the fighters who have appeared on consoles in the DLCs. As far as hardware and software requirements are concerned it is worth noting that Windows XP and DirectX 9.0 are not supported.

Samsung has begun mass producing of the XP941 line of SSDs, the first PCI Express SSD solution for ultrabooks. XP941 SSDs come in M.2 format and offer superior performance for Ultrabook and other thin notebooks.

Although there is the opinion that Haswell is still not ready for devices without a fan, it's not an opinion that everybody shares. Specifically, HP is planning device based on the new Intel-based cooling which will be done passively.

Razer recently introduced refreshed offer of gaming laptops, which now consists of two models. The existing 17-inch Blade model now bears the name Blade Pro, while the "new" Razer Blade is a brand new notebook with 14-inch screen.

G.Skill intends to enter into another market segment. The company announced at the Computex presentation their first product lines of the peripherals for gamers.

When wireless networking was first introduced it was a very cool concept and people bought into it. The problem was that it was also about as slow as dial-up internet was. The good news is that all technologies advance and wireless was non exception. Once the idea caught on we quickly ramped up in speed, but wireless was never quite able to keep up with a wired connection. We saw these connections leap ahead by a factor of 10 while wireless had small incremental speed jumps. All of that changed in 2011 when researchers built up the next specification for wireless speed, 802.11ac. This speed increase more than doubled what wireless was able to do previously. Suddenly wireless was just as fast as a wired connection (in theory). We have a few routers and adapters in the lab and will be taking a look at them. Today we are going to show you the TRENDNet TEW-812DRU AC1750 dual band wireless router.

802.11ac wireless was introduced at CES 2012. Unfortunately when the devices were launched there were no adapters to support it. This meant that people were buying expensive wireless products without having any way to support the speeds they were capable of. Fortunately at CES 2013 a couple of manufacturers started releasing 802.11ac adapters. However, there are two schools of thought about how to implement these adapters. We will be taking a look at both in the next couple of weeks, but we will kick things off with a look at the USB 2.0 NETGEAR A6200 Dual Band 802.11ac WiFi Adapter. Let’s dive in and take a look.

MSI has introduced two interesting keyboards designed for gamers, but also for home and business users. Presented model GK-601 and Classic are the mechanical type keyboards with Cherry MX Red switches.

Some of you might remember the days of the “P” rating CPUs. It was an interesting time when you never really knew what you were actually getting in terms of clock speed. Instead you were able to get a CPU named something like P333 or P500. This was an attempt by some manufacturers to show their “P”erformance rating in relation to Intel’s Pentium. Cyrix, AMD, and a couple of others used this to sell CPUs. Unfortunately everyone knew that the P did not really stand for performance it really meant Pentium equivalency. A Cyrix P667 was supposed to perform as well as an Intel Pentium 667 (at least on paper). Sadly this just confused the market more and we all had the fun of trying to figure out what our CPUs were really doing. Now we might be seeing the trend return, but perhaps in reverse as AMD has announced the Centurion CPU.