Gigabyte will sell the Aorus fans as standalone products. News of this surfaced earlier this summer, at the launch of the new AIO coolers , but now it’s all in black and white. And admittedly, this may not be a “fancier” hardware category (Aorus). The motors have three-phase torque, a lubricant with supposedly superior durability, and finally, the rotor design looks sensible. Read more “Specs of the first Aorus fans look more than good”
As you probably know, graphic cards come in reference editions with Nvidia or AMD-designed coolers, or in so-called non-reference versions with cooler and PCB designed by the producers (e.g. Evga or Sapphire) themselves. Such designs are often quieter and faster (overclocked). According to recent news you can look forward to the same with the upcoming Intel Arc, which will be produced by multiple well-known companies. Read more “GPU Intel Arc graphic cards produced by Asus, MSI and Gigabyte”
PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs have been on the market for more than 2 years, and the newer ones are even able utilize most of its potential. But PCI Express 5.0 will soon be introduced by Intel Alder Lake processors, though only for GPUs for now (×16 slot). But SSD manufacturers are already preparing PCIe 5.0 storage. Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) has shown a prototype NVMe SSD that uses PCI Express 5.0 and can already get speeds up to 14 GB/s. Read more “Kioxia PCI Express SSD will have speeds up to 14 000 MB/s”
The “popular” topic of HW requirements of Windows 11 is back. Microsoft’s initial draconian position has softened a bit, but uncertainty remains (for example, there are rumours that officially unsupported hardware might not get updates). If you’re planning to upgrade, you may find Microsoft’s new diagnostic app helpful: it clearly tells you which requirements are met by your hardware and which not, requiring upgrades or changes. Read more “Can you run Windows 11? App tells you what’s blocking upgrade”
On Monday we have had an Alder Lake CPU benchmark, based on which, the support for DDR5 memory might pose a dilemma: it has high bandwidth, but might worsen latency, threatening gaming performance. But Alder Lake can also use DDR4. We now have information on the selection of DDR5 and DDR4 mainboards. Apparently getting a quality mainboard for DDR4 should not be a problem, such mainboards might even be in the majority. Read more “There’s plenty of DDR4 Alder Lake mobos. DDR5 only in high end?”
With the advent of Alder Lake CPUs, the socket is changing and LGA 1700 this time changes the situation in terms of mounting. Arctic is currently responding to this with an announcement for current and future owners of coolers from this company. There are two pieces of good news. The first is that you can also install older Arctic coolers on new Intel processors, and the second message refers to an upcoming cooler that will have native support. Read more “We know how Arctic will get on with the Intel LGA 1700 socket”
We have the first benchmark showing what could DDR5 memory be good for. Appearing first with Alder Lake processors and Intel Z690 in November, DDR5 will officialy start at 4800MHz effective clock speed, but a leaked AIDA64 benchmark has already appeared showing the performance at DDR5-6400. It looks like we can expect great bandwidth, but it’s possible that the latency will disappoint, because AIDA shows a scary high value. Read more “DDR5-6400 and Alder Lake test: top bandwidth but high latency”
Alder Lake, a new and significantly improved CPU generation by Intel will be released in a few months (reportedly on 19th of November). The CPUs will be released together with new motherboards using the Z690 chipset and the new LGA 1700 socket. A document leak now shares insight into the features and innovations of this platform. For example we learn that Alder Lake’s memory controller will also use Gear 2 and now even Gear 4. Read more “Intel Z690 chipset for Alder Lake detailed: Gear 4 and other news”
Lately (actually for several years now) we’ve seldom had news about hard disks. An opportunity to write about a new innovation in this area has come now though. Western Digital has introduced OptiNAND technology, which improves the performance of mechanical drives by integrating NAND Flash memory – but not in the way of SSHDs, which only used it for caching. OptiNAND serves other purposes, and it could be much more useful. Read more “OptiNAND: WD adds flash memory to HDDs, but not in the SSHD way”
Last month, the cheapest Radeon graphics card with the RDNA 2 architecture, the RX 6600 XT was released with the Navi 23 GPU. But an even cheaper model could be joining it very soon: the vanilla Radeon RX 6600. Official images of the Eagle Edition graphics card have surfaced on the web, which means that presumably, the release date is getting closer. The leak also confirmed that the cards will still have 8 GB of memory. Read more “Radeon RX 6600 leaked: still 8 GB, release in a month?”
MSI has been intensely committed to application of the 20-gigabit standard of USB 3.2 gen. 2×2 for a long time. So far this was only in regards to the external connectors on the rear panel of motherboards with an Intel chipset. According to current information, this interface will soon be supported internally and MSI even intends to add it to the cases as well. However, this will only apply to the next generation of motherboards. Read more “Most MSI cases will support USB 3.2 gen. 2×2”
Since June, hardware requirements of Windows 11 have been a hot topic—the necessity of having TPM 2.0 and the supported CPU list that leaves out some PCs mere three years old. Fortunately, it looks like the hopes that Microsoft will get more pragmatic about this have come true and the company will allow the new OS to be run on older PCs that do not make the cut officially. But it is going to take an extra bit of work. Read more “MS allows Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, with caveats”
Since the last processor test (including) we have changed the way we evaluate the overall or average performance of all games. You suggested to us in the discussion half a year ago that it would be better for all games to have the same weight. However, the right time to incorporate this new calculation came only recently. So how do we actually do it and why is it better than before? Read more “HWC’s testlab #1: New average CPU score measuring method”
It seems that CPU coolers compatible with AMD AM4 will also fit nicely on the upcoming AM5 socket. And that’s with no modifications or the need for new components. This is indicated by an information leak from the technical documentation with details about the future AMD socket. Its construction changes significantly and is therefore particularly remarkable that the same range of mounting holes for coolers and other hardware is maintained. Read more “Future AMD AM5 socket will likely support current coolers”
Phanteks has released a 120-millimeter fan with an atypical thickness of 30 mm. Thanks to such a profile, the rotor with the same cross-section can have a larger blade area. And since the blade shape on the new Phanteks fan resembles that of the Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM, there was immediate speculation about “the new king” and so on. However, this may not be so clear for several reasons. Read more “Thicker fan, better properties? Phanteks has a 30 mm fan”
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