Tech News
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No Ninjalane Podcast This Month
Just a quick update.
By the looks of it there won't be a Ninjalane Podcast episode this month but Darren and I have plenty to talk about so with any luck February will put us back on track.
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Look What Showed Up Today, GTX 780 Ti Classified KP Edition
I don't normally share review hardware that comes into the lab but this card is just too special to hold on to.
EVGA GTX 780 Ti Classified K|NGP|N edition. I really do love the attention to detail on these Classified video cards. The packaging is perfect and you get the EVGA logo cut into the top cover. Now it is time to see if this card lives up to its reputation.
I should have an inital review ready sometime next week followed by some LN2 testing both single card and SLI with the standard GTX 780 Ti Classified
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Overclocking World Records Broken at GIGABYTE CES 2014 Extreme OC Event
This was an event that I attended before the official start of CES 2014. Check this article for more information and some photos from the event.
GIGABYTE and Co-Sponsors Intel®, G.SKILL and Enermax Bring LN2 to the Las Vegas Desert: Produce Three World Records
City of Industry, California, January 16th, 2014 – GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today announces three World Record Overclocking submissions during its CES 2014 Extreme OC Event at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas. Congrats to Vivi and STEPONZ, along with Dinos22 and HiCookie, who broke world records on 3DMark06, Unigine Heaven Extreme and Cinebench benchmarks.
Held during CES 2104 at the Caesar’s Palace Conference Center, Las Vegas, GIGABYTE invited world class Overclocking talent from around the globe to demonstrate all the skills and experience needed to break world records. GIGABYTE Z87X-OC and GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force motherboards were used at the event alongside processors, memory, SSDs and power supplies provided by event co-sponsors Intel®, G.SKILL and Enermax.
“The CES 2014 Extreme OC Event was a fantastic showcase event for Overclocking, underlining GIGABYTE’s commitment to the extreme PC segment,” commented HiCookie, Chief Overclocking Evangelist, GIGABYTE Motherboard Business Unit. “These new world records prove there is always headroom for improved performance if you have a motherboard designed from the ground up to break records, combined with exceptional gear from Intel, G.SKILL and Enermax.”
“We are excited to have such an excellent turnout at this year's CES 2014 Extreme OC Event. We're also very proud of this year's world record achievements, made possible by using top notch hardware from G.SKILL, GIGABYTE, Intel, and Enermax,” commented Frank Hung, Product Marketing Manager at G.SKILL. “Breaking world records is never easy, so it's a real thrill to watch so many overclocking experts participating in the event!"
“Enermax is honored to participate in the CES 2014 Extreme OC event. We are absolutely ecstatic about the record breaking results by using the premium components from Enermax, GIGABYTE, Intel and G.SKILL,” commented Richard Hwang, Vice President of Enermax N.A. “Thanks to all the overclockers who participated for making this a successful event, and we look forward to being involved in more events like this.”
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It is Game Time for DDR4 and Micron has the Ball
Big news out of Micron related to their involvement in DDR4 and all things memory.
Micron, for its part, is content with being a quiet leader of the computer industry. Its position as a dominant power was solidified by the mid-2012 acquisition of Japan's Elpida Memory Inc. (TYO:6665). Elpida owned several large fabs worldwide, including a fab in the Hiroshima area. Last year Micron finalized that transaction, just in time to capitalize on a surge in memory spot prices.
It will be interesting to see how DDR4 pans out and while the article states that consumer DDR4 memory won't be available until 2015 I did see working memory samples at CES. They also say high-end servers and workstations will have DDR4 first and should make a debut sometime this summer.
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What Happens When You See More Updates from Friends
An ongoing battle in social media is how to attract more attention without getting yourself blocked, banned or discredited. Well, it would seem that facebook has been doing most of the work for us by telling its users what it wants them to see.
And really doing a poor job at that.
its a known fact that posting anything to a fan page on facebook will reach about 15%-25% of their total audience and that you will often never see anything your friends post unless you actually visit their page. It would seem that lately those numbers have gone down and I suspect this recent update is part of the reason.
Over time, we noticed that this effect wasn't true for text status updates from Pages. As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends. We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types.
There is ways to influence the numbers in your favor by "boosting" a post. This costs money and much like gambling you are not guaranteed to have any positive repercussions from it.
Eventually that will change, and until then you might as well save your money rather than spending it on a free service.
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EVGA GTX 780 Ti Classified 3072 MB @ techPowerUp
I am often amazed at how much effort goes into a video card review, esp knowing how much work is actually involved. What I have discovered is that while the long list of benchmarks seems relevant the numbers often reflect a performance curve that can apply to any situation.
That is unless you are dealing with a monster of a GPU on one of the finest PCB designs avialable today. Yes, I am talking about the EVGA GTX 780 Ti Classified.
EVGA's GTX 780 Ti Classified is the fastest GTX 780 Ti we ever tested. It comes with a large overclock out of the box that makes it run above 1175 MHz most of the time. The dual-fan ACX heatsink also provides good cooling, resulting in low temperatures and stable operation at all times.
I'm not really sure what overclocking criteria TPU puts on their video card samples but a max clock of 1090Mhz is not a good representation of what the card can do under normal conditions. They do mention that they didn't mess with any of the fan profiles meaning that the fans were not cranked up to provide the best cooling. Knowing this their overclock will be limited but, should still ramp past 1090Mhz.
Here is our review of the EVGA GTX 780 Ti Classified for comparison purposes.
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ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Motherboard Review @ Bjorn3D
Around the time the EVGA X79 Dark hit the shelves ASUS was busy putting the finishing touches on their own X79 refresh dubbed the Rampage IV Black Edition. The board is very similar to the normal Rampage IV with a few notable differences.
Of course some people swear that the changes are awesome while others don't find them all that appealing. The fact of the matter is, if you are in the market for X79 you will be hard pressed to find anything better because you simply cannot buy them.
Except for the EVGA X79 Dark, that board is awesome.
Echoes of AC/DC ring in my head as I came up with this title, and it took everything in me not to have about a thousand different “Back in black” references but I think we can survive a few. ASUS seems to reserve its “Black Edition” moniker for very special models as im sure some of you saw back when we got a chance to check out the Rampage III Black edition board based on the X58 chipset. That thing was a flat out beast and from looking at the specs on paper the Rampage IV Black edition is no different. Well we can say that in a manner of speaking as it looks to be a flat out beast but it is in terms entirely different as the technology on this board is seemingly light years ahead of the previous generation Black edition board, and even huge leaps ahead of the first Rampage IV Extreme board we viewed what must be 2 years ago now.
Gotta love the long quotes, helps me fill my google quota for text vs link.
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Silverstone Strider Gold S Series 850W @ PureOverclock
I don't normally post PSU reviews but the Silverstone Striders are quite nice and worth a look if you are in the market.
Silverstone is here to tell you that size doesn’t mean everything, and that you can have your cake and eat it, too. Enter their Strider Gold S series power supplies, which are labeled as not only the world’s smallest ATX power supplies, but are also rated to supply as much as 850W of peak output power. For today’s review, we have their top dog on hand: rated at 80 Plus Gold certification and being fully modular with a silent operating 120mm fan and 850W of total power output, we’ll see if this PSU lives up to Silverstone’s legendary quality. We will also be taking a quick look at their new line of PP07 braided cable extensions for those of you who are simply not satisfied with plain looking cables, but lack the skill/time/patience to do your own custom braiding.
The best part of these PSUs is that they are fully modular and available with two lengths of cable to fit any case from the large tower to a SFF mini box.
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AMD Kaveri A10 Launch
It would seem that right after CES there was a processor launch called Kaveri. The processor is an A10 package and drops into all existing motherboards using the FM2+ socket.
Web Reviews
- AMD Kaveri A10 7850K Review @ HCW
- AMD A10-7850K (Kaveri) APU Review featuring GIGABYTE G1.Sniper A88X @ HardwareHeaven
- AMD Kaveri A10 7850K & A8 7600 Review @ Hardware Canucks
- AMD A10-7850K und A10-7700K Kaveri APUs
- AMD A10-7850K 'Kaveri' review: AMD's new APU
- AMD A8 7600 Kaveri APU review
- AMD Kaveri Arrives: A8-7600 APU Review
- AMD's A8-7600 'Kaveri' processor reviewedLooks like I might be in the market for another A10 processor. I'll just need to get more motherboards to support it.
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AMD could counter Nvidia's G-Sync with simpler, free sync tech
You knew this was bound to happen but AMD is claiming that they can offer a simpler version of Nviida G-Sync using freely available technology.
As it would turn out, AMD had the technology built into their chips for several years because it saved power.
Koduri explained that this particular laptop's display happened to support a feature that AMD has had in its graphics chips "for three generations": dynamic refresh rates. AMD built this capability into its GPUs primarily for power-saving reasons, since unnecessary vertical refresh cycles burn power to little benefit. There's even a proposed VESA specification for dynamic refresh, and the feature has been adopted by some panel makers, though not on a consistent or widespread basis. AMD's Catalyst drivers already support it where it's available, which is why an impromptu demo was possible.
Dynamic refresh works much like G-Sync, varying the length of the vertical blank period between display refreshes on a per-frame basis, so the screen can be drawn when the GPU has a finished frame ready to be displayed.We all know that AMD is the king when it comes to paper launches but this looks like something that could very easily derail the G-Sync train before it leaves the station.
Of course you can't discredit the value of G-Sync since it actually resides on the monitor and better matches video hardware with the display but, the downside is cost and certification that is usually passed on to the consumer.
