| No BS Podcast #218: Microsoft's New CEO, Windows 8.1 News, AMD Unleashes Mantle Posted: 11 Feb 2014 04:36 PM PST |
| EVGA GTX 780 SC w/ACX Review Posted: 11 Feb 2014 03:19 PM PST  As good as it gets
EVGA has unveiled its GeForce GTX 780 as well as a new GPU cooling design dubbed ACX that it plans to stick on all its high-end GPUs for the foreseeable future. The cooler's acronym stands for Active Cooling Extreme since it uses active cooling and it's more extreme than getting a Red Bull enema. Honestly, it's high time EVGA came out with this, as it's been using a slightly modified version of the Nvidia reference "blower" design for way too long, so it'll now be able to compete with Asus's DirectCU II, MSI's Twin Frozr, and Gigabyte's Windforce designs. EVGA says the new cooler offers a 40 percent increase in heatsink volume, which translates to 15 percent lower temps and totally silent operation. The biggest thing it's promoting is that the fans use ball bearings instead of the sleeved variety, allowing for longer life and quieter operation. The new heatsink covers the entire card—all 10.5 inches of it—so the VRMs and RAM are also covered by the cooling apparatus. EVGA offers six variants of this particular card, and this is its flagship air-cooled model, the SuperClocked ACX board. Compared to the stock design, which has a Titan cooler by the way, this silver siren features a 104MHz overclock to the base clock, 118MHz overclock to the boost clock, and the aforementioned extreme cooler. It retains the stock card's 3GB of memory and 6GHz memory clock. That huge-ass fancy cooler only adds $10 to the price of the stock card, too, which is surprising. Sure, we're used to seeing aftermarket coolers go for $10 or $20 more over stock, but this cooler looks so premium we were we expected it to be more expensive, especially since the card is also overclocked. We should point out that the card's hardware "bundle" is, well, crappy and small, but we are coming to terms with the state of video card bundles now—which is to say they're all like this. 
In testing, we saw the ACX-cooled GTX 780 run neck-and-neck with the more expensive GTX Titan, effectively closing the gap between the two cards in a way that just isn't possible on the GTX 780 reference board, at least not in our testing. This is the first card we've ever seen get this close to a Titan, and in the tests where it didn't graze it, the ACX card matched the Titan, which is damn impressive. It was able to match the Titan in Heaven 4.0, Far Cry 3, Tomb Raider, and Battlefield 3. More good news: We were able to overclock the ACX board a fair bit, eventually getting it up to 1,149MHz boost by nudging the power target slider to 106 percent in the superb PrecisionX software, and GPU offset was set to +59MHz. Under full load, overclocked, the ACX cooler kept the card at a steady 75 C, which is about 10 C cooler than stock. Let's recap then: sexy good looks and blistering benchmarks, cool and quiet performance, overclockable, as fast as a Titan, the best overclocking software around, and only $10 more than a stock board. Sounds like what is basically a perfect video card to us. 
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| 'The Day We Fight Back' is an Internet Protest Against Mass Surveillance Posted: 11 Feb 2014 11:50 AM PST  An online attempt to end NSA spying
A number of websites such as Reddit and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have put up banners urging Internet users to join one another in an effort to fight back against mass surveillance. The anti-spying initiative has been dubbed 'The Day We Fight Back' by a broad collection of activist groups, companies, and online platforms that are also seeking to honor and celebrate the late Aaron Swartz, an activist and technologist who helped spur a victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act two years ago. Facing legal action and a potentially lengthy prison sentence for allegedly breaking into a computer network and downloading millions of academic journals, Swartz took his own life on January 11, 2013. "Aaron had a brilliant, inquisitive mind that he employed towards the ends of technology, writing, research, art, and so much more. Near the end of his life, his focus was political activism, in support of civil liberties, democracy, and economic justice," TheDayWeFightBack.org stated in a press release last month. "Aaron sparked and helped guide the movement that would eventually defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act in January 2012. That bill would have destroyed the Internet as we know it, by blocking access to sites that allowed for user-generated content -- the very thing that makes the Internet so dynamic." The coalition hopes that another mass awareness campaign can have a similar effect on NSA spying. As it stands now, the effort mostly revolves around getting the word out by encouraging people to visit the organization's website, signing up to receive updates, installing widgets on on websites, using social media tools to announce participation, and anything else that draw attention to the cause, such as creating memes. For those who want to take a more active role, TheDayWeFightBack.org offers to connect you with legislators with a script you can read, as well as filled out email forms. If you're interested, find out more at TheDayWeFightBack.org. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Microsoft Adds Pair of Critical Windows XP Fixes to Patch Tuesday Posted: 11 Feb 2014 11:07 AM PST  A couple of last minute additions to Patch Tuesday address security holes in Windows XP
Today is the second Tuesday of the month, which means it's time to download a collection of security fixes from Microsoft. Otherwise known as Patch Tuesday, today's collection includes seven security bulletins, including two late additions that fill up patch remote code execution holes in Windows XP. These are some of the last updates Windows XP will ever receive, as Microsoft plans to stop supporting the legacy OS on April 8, 2014. Five of the seven bulletins pertain to Windows 8.1, the latest version of Microsoft's consumer OS. Three of them are rated Critical and also deal with Remote Code Execution, while the other two are rated Important, one of which fixes a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services and the other a security flaw in IPv6 that could allow a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Windows RT is the recipient of three Critical and three Important updates, while Windows RT 8.1 gets three Critical and two Important updates. The updates are available now via Windows Update. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Gigabyte, Asus Fight for Top Spot in Motherboard Shipments Posted: 11 Feb 2014 10:27 AM PST  Gigabyte will try to surpass Asus as the No. 1 motherboard player (in terms of shipments)
Top tier motherboard makers Asus and Gigabyte continue to dominate the mobo market just as they did in 2013, but only one can take the top spot. It was a close race between the two last year, and it could be another photo finish this year, with Gigabyte expecting to ship over 5 million motherboards in the first quarter. If so, that could give Gigabyte an early lead over rival Asus. Just as before, these aren't official figures from either firm, and instead represent estimates by players within the upstream supply chain, Digitimes reports. Those sources say Gigabyte shipped 20 million motherboards last year, 40 percent of which ended up in China. Citing comments made by Gigabyte president Alexander Ma, Digitime says Gigabyte's strategy for this year is to aggressively focus on the mid-range and high-end markets in order to boost its average selling price (ASP), gross margins, and profits. Part of the challenge will be outpacing an overall motherboard industry that's expected to decline 5 percent this year -- Ma hopes Gigabyte can stay flat or even increase its shipments by a small amount. Meanwhile, second-tier vendors ASRock, MSI, ECS, and Biostar are expecting a 10-15 percent drop in sequential shipments, Digitimes says. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H Review Posted: 11 Feb 2014 10:21 AM PST  The Gigabyte Z87X-UD5H offers a lot of features for the price.
The world's economy may be on the mend but a lot of people still want to justify every cubit spent on technology. For some people, spending $280 for the Asus Z87-Deluxe or even $260 for the Intel DZ87KLT-75K may seem exorbitant. Fortunately for you, budget-minded power user, Gigabyte has its GA-Z87X-UD5H board. OK, we'll admit, $210 isn't really budget, but you'll see that it's a pretty modest price given the board's features. The Z87X-UD5H gives you SLI and CrossFireX support, 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports, dual USB 3.0 headers, dual NICs, a POST LED, surface-mounted power and reset buttons, Creative Labs X-Fi MB drivers, and Gigabyte's trademark dual-BIOS setup. We've had the unfortunate need to resort to the dual-BIOS in the past and it's been an automatic affair. The UD5H offers and automatic and manual mode, which we got to use when we bricked the primary BIOS. No problem, flip a switch and you're back up and running on the backup BIOS. From there, you simply flip the switch back to the primary and reflash the BIOS again. It's pretty damned robust. The last time we reviewed a Gigabyte board we complained hardily about the goofy UEFI (hey, that rhymes), with its faux "3D" mode. Gigabyte has since redone its BIOS with a vastly improved interface. Unfortunately, it's still not in the class of Asus's and now Intel's excellent UEFI. In fact, we went back to "classic" BIOS mode because the sheer amount of information on the UEFI screen is overwhelming. One area where Gigabyte has really improved is in its OS utilities. We haven't been happy with the gear-shifter style interface and confusing options for some time and usually just avoided them. With the UD5H, the utilities have gotten a complete makeover that actually makes them competitive with Asus's excellent utilities. Gigabyte, for example, now has its own equivalent of Asus's Fan Xpert2 that's pretty good. It's not as granular or nerdtastic in settings but it's a step in the right direction. And Gigabyte even aces Asus is the update utility, which can find and fetch mobo drivers and utilities for you. This isn't a breakthrough feature, as MSI used to do this (although not very reliably), but it's a welcome feature that we'd love to see other board vendors also implement. The upshot is that the utilities are something to actually be used, not just installed once and ignored. In performance, the Z87X-UD5H holds its own. Both the Intel and Gigabyte boards showed default multipliers of 8-39 on our Core i7-4770K, while the Asus had a default multiplier of 8-43. This gave the Z87-Deluxe a decided advantage in several benchmarks—but the Z87X-UD5H got pretty close. It also managed to smoke the Intel by a good margin. In the audio department, the board uses the same ALC898 as the Intel board, but Gigabyte licenses Creative's software algorithms, including its Crystallizer and voice changing-features, among others. We're fans of the Crystalizer, which is a nice upgrade over the stock Realtek audio applets we usually see. We also did some close listening tests using a set of gaming headsets while hammering the USB 3.0 port with gigabytes of data and couldn't discern any snap, crackle, or pop. Our overall view of the GA-Z87X-UD5H is that it's probably the sweet spot for most enthusiasts who could put the money saved by forgoing Thunderbolt or Wi-Fi into the CPU, GPU, or SSD instead. 
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| ARM Unveils Cortex-A17 Processor for Mid-Range Mobile and Consumer Devices Posted: 11 Feb 2014 09:30 AM PST  New chip from ARM takes aim at smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and more
ARM on Tuesday added to its mobile arsenal by announcing its Cortex-A17 processor, a mid-range part the company hopes will find its way into a number of different devices. According to ARM, the Cortex-A17 boasts a 60 percent performance uplift over Cortex-A9 processors, making it the fastest mid-range solution available. ARM also claims that it offers superior efficiency. "We expect to see a rich set of innovation in the mid-range mobile phone segment which is forecast to become a half a billion unit market annually from 2015 and the Cortex-A17 processor will be a key component in that growth," said Ian Ferguson, vice president of segment marketing, ARM. "To date, the ARM Partnership has shipped more than 50 billion ARM-based chips and the continued broadening of our processor family will enable our partners to further optimize their offerings in existing and new product categories." The 28nm Cortex-A17 is based on the ARMv7-A architecture with support for over 1 million apps. It's scalable up to four cores, each of which offers a full out-of-order 11+ stage pipeline. It also has a fully integrated, low-latency L2 cache controller. ARM says it expects frequencies to run north of 2GHz. 
ARM sees the Cortex-A17 being paired with its high-efficiency Cortex-A7 as part of its big.LITTLE platform, which consists of higher-end processors for CPU intensive tasks and power efficient processors for longer battery life. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Intel Discusses 15-core Ivytown Processor for Servers Posted: 11 Feb 2014 08:53 AM PST  Ivytown will slip into Intel's Xeon E7 chip family
Intel's codenames for processors sound like directions someone might give you if you get lost in the country. Take a wrong turn off of I64 in West Virginia, for example, and you might be told that Ivytown is on the other side of Ivy Bridge, not to be confused with Sandy Bridge. In reality, Ivytown is Intel's codename for an upcoming 15-core Xeon processor based on Ivy Bridge and designed for high-end servers. Intel shared a few more details about Ivytown at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco this week. The Santa Clara chip maker said Ivytown will be part of its Xeon E7 lineup, which it's likely to formally introduce next week, PCWorld reports. The Ivytown part is packing 4.31 billion transistors and has the most cores of any Intel x86 server CPU. Intel says it will likely be its fastest performing CPU for servers with frequencies ranging from 1.4GHz to 3.8GHz, drawing anywhere from 40W to 150W of power. Each of the 15 cores supports multithreading so that each Ivytown chip can run 30 threads at the same time. Intel came to the odd core count by arranging the cores across three columns. It also has 40 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Newegg Daily Deals: Asus GeForce GTX 780 Graphics Card, Intel Core i7 3770K, and More! Posted: 11 Feb 2014 06:11 AM PST |
