Displaying items by tag: Performance

AMD has been something of an unusual company ever since they first decided to dive into the x86 market with their purchase of NexGen. The would-be CPU maker had an interesting knack of building CPUs that performed well, but were always just a pace behind their rivals. That was the case until AMD pulled off a minor miracle in the form of the Athlon and Athlon64 CPUs. AMD seemed to have stolen the crown from Intel and looked likely to keep it for a long time.

One of the fastest growing verticals in the PC market is the peripherals market. There are so many different companies that are pushing out keyboards, mice, headphones and more to the masses. While this growth is a good thing, it also tends to saturate the market with products that are so similar the only thing that makes them different is the name and the price. This has made manufacturers move to new types of features and also to try and squeeze every last drop of performance they can out of their offerings and at the best price (one that is good for consumers and still make them money). Today we are looking at a gaming keyboard that has some very interesting features, the Tesoro Tizona. This keyboard offers Brown Mechanical switches and also a detachable number pad. So let’s dive in and see where this keyboard falls.

The Flash Memory Summit wound down on Thursday after a four day run at the Santa Clara Convention Center in San Jose. The show floor was fairly crowded with over 5,000 attendees and a sold out exhibition space.

One of the items we have always beat AMD up on is there poor memory performance in their CPUs and APUs. This little issue is what has separated AMD from Intel since the AM2 days. It has always been understood that latency has a massive impact on an internal memory controller. As you latency increases your efficiency decreases. You can offset some of this by enlarging your cache and also optimizing the CPU to use it more efficiently. This is one area that AMD has traditionally had issues with, even going back to the Athlon 64 we saw them reducing cache sizes to remove problems and bump performance.

They say that competition is good for the soul, and they are right. In just about any area you can think of having a little competition makes you better at what you do. In the computer world this is especially noticeable when it comes to motherboards, even more so now that companies like Intel and AMD control the chipsets and their features. The push now comes down to performance tuning (at a very fine level) overclocking an additional features to entice the consumer into picking up a new motherboard. We have had a couple of Z97 based boards in the lab recently, but all have been from the same company. Now we have one in from Gigabyte in the form of the Z97MX Gaming 5. Let’s take a look and see if competition has driven Gigabyte to a higher standard.

While a nice layout, cool colors and a good feature set listed on the box might be nice performance is what most people are looking for in a motherboard. A good feature set does not matter so much if the board is not able to perform to the level you want it to. For the most part Asus has done a good job in balancing out their features and performance. This balance has extended even down to their entry level boards as they trickle down what they learn from their Republic of Gamer’s Boards. So where does the Z97-A fit into all of this? Let’s find out.

The FCC has published a very interesting report. The report which is called Measuring Broadband America is a survey of broadband companies in the US that spanned several months. The purpose is to gauge how well these companies are meeting the speeds their customers are paying for. Overall the industry has done quite well with most true broadband providers meeting or exceeding their advertised speeds even at peak hours. There is one company that, well let’s just say is not doing what it should be. The fact that they have been in the news about this lately only makes the information more damning.

As Intel moves more and more core components to their CPU we are seeing an interesting shift in motherboard design. The manufacturers are all realizing that the performance difference between them are narrowing. The days of seeing a massive difference in benchmark scores are almost gone. However, instead of just pushing out a bunch of cookie cutter boards some motherboard makers are looking for new ways to differentiate their boards. Asus is one of these makers and we will be taking a look at a board that has more than a few departures from the normal motherboard design philosophy. This is the Asus Z97-A. So without too much more delay, let’s dive in and see what Asus has given us.

The small form factor crowd has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. Every day on Facebook or some other spot on the internet you will see some pretty impressive builds with tiny motherboards stuffed in them. However, one of the things that has always seemed to be missing I full chipset support. Most of the time you can find mini-ITX boards running business or consumer chipsets. Fortunately, this trend has been changing and we are seeing more powerful boards hitting the market. We have one of these newer boards in the lab in the form of the Asus Z97I Plus. This Z97 chipset based board is intended to put all the power and features of larger boards into a tiny package. Let’s see how well Asus does at reaching this goal.

A few years ago Thermaltake decided to introduce a new line of hardware, the Level10. The thought behind it was that this was the top of the line, period. The broke into the market with a case that was almost unique in its design. After that case they have released several more products including a pair of gaming mice that are outstanding in design and performance. Now we are taking a look at their headset, the Level10M headset. This gaming headset is designed in the tradition of the original level10 case and the mice that followed it. So let’s take a look and see if this headset deserves to be alongside the other products in the Level10 family.