General Gaming Article |
- Dell's Oculus-Certified PCs Will Have Radeon GPUs
- Newegg Daily Deals: Asus Core i5 Laptop, Acer 27-Inch Monitor, and More!
- GameStop Stores to Carry Steam Machines in Dedicated Steam Sections
- Watch Microsoft Unveil Surface Pro 4 and Other Hardware on Tuesday
- Patriot Chases Speed Junkies with Viper 4 DDR4-3600 Memory Kit
- Hard Drive vs. SSD Performance
| Dell's Oculus-Certified PCs Will Have Radeon GPUs Posted: 05 Oct 2015 05:52 PM PDT Head over Oculus VR's "Oculus-Ready PCs" page and you'll see three manufacturers listed at the bottom: Alienware, Asus and Dell. Asus will have the cheapest starting price of the trio, costing $949 while the other two will have starting prices of $999. Asus also provides additional information as does Alienware while Dell says more information will be "coming soon." However, thanks to an announcement by AMD, we now have a hint of what's to come from Dell. Basically the chip company said that it has partnered with Oculus and Dell to equip the PC maker's Oculus Ready line with Radeon GPUs. The VR experience will be backed by AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture and LiquidVR technology, which was introduced back in March. "It's an exciting time to be at the heart of all things Virtual Reality," said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, Alliances and Content, AMD. "I'm confident that with Dell and Alienware, we can enable a wide audience of PC users with extraordinary VR capabilities powered by AMD Radeon GPUs." As we've already seen on the Oculus Ready PCs page, the recommended system requirements reveal that in order to have the optimal experience with the Oculus Rift headset, the GPU will need to be an AMD Radeon 290 or better, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or better, or an equivalent GPU. The ideal PC will also need 8GB or RAM or more, an Intel Core i5-4590 equivalent or better, HDMI 1.3 video output, two USB 3.0 ports and Windows 7 SP1 or newer. As for AMD's LiquidVR technology, the company revealed this software at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. LiquidVR is actually a "set" of technologies including Async Shaders and the latest data latch mechanism for smooth head tracking, direct-to-display tech for "intuitively" attaching VR headsets, and multi-GPU support for scalable rendering. With LiquidVR, AMD is pushing to reduce motion-to-photon latency so that users have more of a believable presence within the virtual world. Reducing this latency also makes the user feel more comfortable and lowers the motion sickness that can occur when "moving" around in a virtual environment. "Reducing latency involves the entire processing pipeline, from the GPU, to the application, to the display technology in the headset," AMD explains. "AMD GPU software and hardware subsystems are a major part of improving that latency equation, and with LiquidVR, AMD is helping to solve the challenge by bringing smooth, liquid-like motion and responsiveness to developers and content creators for life-like presence in VR environments powered by AMD hardware." Slated to arrive in Q1 2016, the Oculus Rift is expected to cost more than $350 for the consumer version. That's a bit more than what the developers paid for the first two SDKs. Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey said that the added cost is due to the extra technology the consumer version has compared to the older DK! And DK2 kits. "The Rift is a lot of custom hardware," he told Road to VR. "It's using lenses that are some of the hardest to manufacture lenses in any consumer product you can go out and buy. It's using custom displays we worked on with Samsung that are optimized for virtual reality." That said, consumers wanting the ideal VR experience may end up shelling out $1400 or more if they haven't purchased a compatible PC already. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Newegg Daily Deals: Asus Core i5 Laptop, Acer 27-Inch Monitor, and More! Posted: 05 Oct 2015 11:41 AM PDT Top Deal: Looking to pick up a low cost notebook that doesn't suck? Good news, you have options, and they don't involve putting the words "Chrome" and "book" together. Not that we're hating on Chromebooks -- they're fine for their intended purpose. However, even the best Chromebook models won't be able to keep up with today's top deal for a 15.6-inch Asus Core i5-5200U Laptop for $385 with free shipping (normally $500). This Broadwell-based laptop features 4GB of RAM, 500GB of HDD storage, a DVD burner, and Windows 10 Home 64-bit. Other Deals: Samsung 850 Pro 2.5-inch 1TB SATA III 3-D Vertical Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) for $410 with free shipping (normally $470 - use coupon code: [EMCKAAS26]) Samsung D3 Station 6TB USB 3.0 3.5-inch Desktop External Hard Drive for $185 with free shipping (normally $195) Acer G277HL Black 27-inch 4ms HDMI Widescreen LED Backlight LCD Monitor IPS 250 cd/m2 ACM 100,000,000:1 (1000:1) for $170 with free shipping (normally $180 - use coupon code: [EMCKAAS29]) WD Black Series 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive for $65 with free shipping (normally $70 - use coupon code: [ESCKAAS24]) | ||||||||||||||||||||
| GameStop Stores to Carry Steam Machines in Dedicated Steam Sections Posted: 05 Oct 2015 11:16 AM PDT Invading the retail space It seems like we've talking about Steam Machines for 100 years or so (it's actually been closer to 2 years, which in all fairness is roughly the equivalent of 100 in technology years), and come next month, official Steam hardware devices will finally launch. This is really happening, and it won't be exclusive to online sales. GameStop locations in the U.S. along with GAME UK and EB Games in Canada will all have dedicated sections in their brick-and-mortar stores, Valve announced today. These section will feature official Steam Machines, Steam Controllers, Steam Link devices, and a variety of prepaid Steam cards. "GameStop, GAME UK, and EB Games are leading retail destinations for core gamers and early adopters," said Gabe Newell of Valve. "Creating a 'store within a store' across North America and the UK is a significant win for getting the first generation of Steam Hardware products into gamers' hands." The aforementioned stores will serve as the exclusive non-digital retailers of Steam hardware through the holiday season. It's not clear if Valve will allow other retailers like Best Buy and Walmart to carry Steam hardware once the holiday season is in the rear view mirror. There's been a lot of demand for official Steam Machines and other console-like PCs. First announced in 2013, Valve ended up delaying the launch of official Steam Machines so that it could tweak the controller and fine tune its Linux-based Steam OS. That decision caused OEMs to release console-sized PCs running Windows, some of which have proved popular. More recently, Valve and its hardware partners began taking pre-orders for select Steam Machines starting at $449, along with related hardware. Valve's $100 Steam Link accessory is particularly intriguing because it allows gamers to stream their libraries of Steam games from their PC to their TV. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Watch Microsoft Unveil Surface Pro 4 and Other Hardware on Tuesday Posted: 05 Oct 2015 10:49 AM PDT Swimming in a live-stream Microsoft is planning to unveil new hardware during a special press event tomorrow in New York City, though you won't have to attend in person to see it go down. Instead, you can sit at home in your skivvies and watch the announcements through a live-stream. The event kicks off at 10 AM Eastern. You can bookmark this link to watch it and see what "exciting news" Microsoft has "to share about Windows 10 devices." Rumor has it Microsoft will unveil a Surface Pro 4 tablet, new flagship Lumia handsets, and a second generation fitness wearable (Microsoft Band 2). Microsoft's next Surface device will see a new field of contenders that include Apple with its recently announced 12.9-inch iPad Pro and Google with its 10.1-inch Pixel C. All three should be available to purchase in time for the holiday shopping season. As for the second generation fitness wearable, leaked images purporting to be press renderings show a redesigned Band with a curved display, metal accents, and physical buttons on the side. The current Band features a flat display on top with no metal accents and can be found on sale for just $100. If you don't care about having the latest and greatest hardware, now is a good time to shop. In addition to half-price Microsoft Bands, the Surface Pro 3 family is on sale in the Microsoft Store, presumably to clear out old inventory and make room for the new. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Patriot Chases Speed Junkies with Viper 4 DDR4-3600 Memory Kit Posted: 05 Oct 2015 09:52 AM PDT Breaking the speed limit At the beginning of September, Patriot Memory announced a dual-channel Viper 4 memory kit rated to run at 3400MHz. At the time it was the fastest speed Patriot offered, though that was before the launch of its new 3600MHz RAM. Patriot's new dual-channel kit is also part of the DDR4 Viper 4 series intended for Intel Skylake builds. The 200MHz speed increase comes with only slightly looser timings at 17-18-18-36 versus 16-18-18-36 for the 3400MHz kit, which is partially the result of Patriot's binning process. "Our Viper 4 Line continues to reach new heights with our latest launch of the new 3600MHz kit paired with the new Intel Skylake Platform." Said Les Henry, VP of Engineering at Patriot. "We will continue to prescreen each IC prior to building the modules to ensure stability and provide unsurpassed performance to our customers." At present there's only one 3600MHz kit in the Viper 4 series, that being an 8GB kit consisting of two 4GB modules (there are 16GB and 8GB kits of 3400MHz available). Like the other Viper 4 memory kits, these modules are hand tested and backed by a lifetime warranty. Patriot didn't say when the 3600MHz Viper 4 kit will be available or for how much, though as a point of reference, the 8GB 3400MHz kit streets for around $120. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Hard Drive vs. SSD Performance Posted: 05 Oct 2015 12:00 AM PDT HDD performance in a nutshellLast week, we posted our new SSD test suite with some initial results. We included a few references to hard drive performance, and at the time that seemed sufficient, but let's really put the hard drive vs. solid state performance debate to rest. We all know SSDs are faster, particularly at random accesses; hard drives, in contrast, offer massive amounts of storage at bottom-basement prices. For archiving large files and backups, hard drives can be great, and they've been around so long that they're a proven technology. That doesn't mean they don't fail on occasion, but recovering data from a HDD (via a recovery service) tends to be about half to one-fourth the cost of recovering data from a failed SSD. You've all got a backup strategy in place, right? Good. Moving on…. Even the worst of modern SSDs tend to smoke HDDs when it comes to performance metrics. And over time, HDDs are still prone to file fragmentation, which is why that well-worn copy of Windows 7 running off an HDD can take several minutes to boot up after a few years of use. Many people still use HDDs, however, probably in large part because they simply don't know any better. So here's your chance: The next time someone asks you why they need to pay more money to get an SSD, point them at this article. For the tests today, we've got the same collection of SSDs used in our OCZ Trion 100 480GB review. The Trion costs just $0.33 per GB—and the 960GB model goes even lower at less than $0.32 per GB—but neither one can hope to match the price of HDD storage. Our Seagate 3TB drive, for example, costs just $0.03 per GB. Yes, that's a full order of magnitude more expensive (per GB). Now, we don't like to beat dead horses, but as we noted in the review, the Trion 100 just isn't worth the asking price, considering faster SSDs can be had for roughly the same price. But this does bring up an interesting point: If the Trion 100 is the slowest "modern" SSD we've tested, how does it fare against a decent HDD? To settle the matter, we ran our storage suite on a Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB drive. Let's not mince words: Some of the tests are painfully slow to run. It was so bad that on the random IO testing with AS SSD, we dropped back to a 1GB test instead of 10GB, and it still took over ten times as long to finish the test. There's that order of magnitude business again; it's likely to be a common refrain. Our storage test bed consists of a modern Skylake processor in a Z170 motherboard. It doesn't really affect performance with a hard drive, but we're keeping things consistent. Here's our test bed, and then we'll get to the results of our testing.
Orders of magnitude, in chartsOur benchmarks include a mix of real-world and synthetic testing. We normally run each test multiple times, though we admit that on the HDD we just took the results of a single run for the lengthier tests. Here are the results, with the HDD highlighted in all the charts. The AS SSD Sequential testing gives us the best-case pure transfer performance. This is as good as it gets for both hard drives and solid state drives. Note also that the hard drive (and SSDs) is basically empty at the time of testing; if it were full of fragmented files, performance on the HDD could be substantially lower. The same is only partially true for SSDs; some can get in a degraded performance state after lots of use, but TRIM and other features will keep a modern SSD much closer to "like new" performance. (Note that the SSDs have at least had a full drive's worth of writes, however, so we're not showing absolute best-case SSD performance.) If you look at the sequential transfer rates, hard drives don't look so bad. Sure, a slow SSD is typically twice as fast, but you could live with that, right? Meanwhile, a modern NVMe drive boasts a 10X performance increase, but we're talking about a $90 3TB HDD vs. a $1050 1.2TB SSD—$0.03 per GB vs. $0.87 per GB means it's also 30X as expensive. Interestingly, the Intel SSD 750 "only" costs 3X as much per GB as the OCZ Trion 100 and other inexpensive SSDs, so if you do lots of sequential transfers you don't even get diminishing returns. It's also worth pointing out that write performance on the Trion 100 tends to start high, at over 350MB/s, but over the length of the test sequence the transfer rate steadily declines. For bursty workloads, the Trion actually fares much better; it's just sustained writes where it starts to struggle. Moving over to AS SSD's Random testing, suddenly the problem with HDDs becomes strikingly obvious. The slowest SSD in our charts is over 40x as fast as the HDD in read performance, and over 60x faster in write performance… and that's at a queue depth of one. SSDs shine when they have more stuff going on, and at QD64 the SSDs are 250x to 1,150x (that's over three orders of magnitude!) faster at reads, and 125x to 1,150x faster at writes. Suddenly, that 30x advantage in price per GB that the HDD holds doesn't look quite so compelling, does it? We use IOmeter as a second test of theoretical read/write performance for sequential and random workloads, the difference being that we mix the reads and writes and take the geometric mean of the five mixes. The mixing of reads and writes has a clear impact on all the drives, though it's most pronounced on the HDD and less on the SSDs. Sequential read/write speeds are pretty similar to the pure write speeds shown in AS SSD on several of the drives, though the OCZ Trion and Intel SSD 750 both perform better in the IOmeter write testing. The mixed random read/write, on the other hand, continues to separate the contenders from the pretenders, and the HDD can only look on in wonder. If you're still running a hard drive for your OS, this is a great illustration of why a system with an SSD can boot the OS in under 15 seconds, while you might end up waiting several minutes for a hard drive to become fully ready for use. Windows will load all sorts of drivers and kernel files, and the access pattern ends up looking more random than sequential in many cases. The differences become a bit less pronounced once things settle down—assuming that you have sufficient system RAM, of course—but even mediocre SSDs will easily beat the fastest HDDs. We've covered mostly theoretical testing so far, but what does this mean in the "real world"? We'll start with a file copy test, creating a clone of just shy of 20GB of data (the contents of our Steam Batman: Arkham Origins folder). This provides a split workload of 50/50 reads/writes, though the use of PowerShell tends to deliver results closer to sequential performance than random IO. (Interestingly, doing the file copy within Windows Explorer tends to be about 10–15 percent slower than using PowerShell.) We're back to the slower SSDs only being twice as fast as a clean hard drive, while the fastest NVMe drives are nearly an order of magnitude faster; a moderately fragmented HDD would only make matters worse. Last up is PCMark 8's Storage test. The overall score shows less than a 2x difference between HDDs and SSDs, which makes sense: Over the course of a day using your computer, having an SSD won't usually make you twice as efficient. Certain tasks will go much faster with the SSD, but for office work, most of the time the PC is waiting on you—with or without an SSD. In contrast, the Bandwidth result focuses on the times when you're waiting on the computer, specifically when you're waiting for storage. It illustrates why systems with SSDs feel so much faster: Those times where you're waiting impatiently for the PC to boot your OS or load an application are what you notice the most. Stick a fork in the HDDThere's a saying: "Once you go SSD, you'll never go back." It's absolutely true. Personally, I was fine with my HDD storage (on an old Bloomfield system, if you must know). I didn't usually shut down the system at night (power bills be damned!), so it was right where I left it in the morning. About the most painful aspect was when I would occasionally need to restart Chrome, complete with my 20 or so active tabs—it might take 15–20 seconds before all of the tabs were finished loading. Basically, I didn't really think I needed an SSD enough to warrant the expense. And then I got a decent-sized 120GB SandForce drive and suddenly I needed lots more SSD capacity. 240/256GB is typically enough, at least for my purposes, but 480/512GB is the sweet spot where you mostly stop worrying about how much free space is still available. Several years later, prices on SSDs have fallen to the point where most enthusiasts won't even touch a new PC without one. And as someone who routinely ends up troubleshooting computer problems for my family and friends, doing malware scans on hard drive–based PCs is pure torture. Scan. Reboot. Scan some more. Reboot some more. And speaking of malware, running an active anti-virus utility can often make a huge difference in how fast a PC feels, particularly if you're using a hard drive; all those extra disk accesses to check for malicious files and such quickly add up. Switching to an SSD, again, provides a healthy improvement to the feel of any PC, even systems that go as far back as the Core 2 Duo days! With the talk of Intel and Micron's XPoint Technology, which claims 1,000x increases in endurance and performance, along with a 10x increase in capacity, we're rapidly approaching the point where hard drives may finally stop showing up in most new systems. Similarly, Samsung's increasingly dense V-NAND chips (and other vendor's 3D NAND technology) promise better performance and data densities with reduced pricing. There will still be people that want/need several terabytes of storage (or more), and for archival/backup purposes HDDs are still great. But the days of the spinning disk are numbered. Considering the largest HDDs are currently sitting at 6GB, SSDs have already surpassed that limit and continue to grow—albeit with stratospheric pricing. Samsung, for example, showed off a 16TB 2.5-inch SSD at the recent Flash Memory Summit. We're now at the point where a decent 250GB-class SSD can be had for well under $100. Sure, Crucial's BX100 isn't the fastest kid on the block, but it's better than the Trion and priced to move. For those that don't need more than 100–200GB of storage—and trust me, I've serviced a lot of PCs over the years where the HDD only had 50–100GB of data—such a drive should be a no-brainer. When we get to the point where a 500GB SSD costs around $80, only the pinchiest of penny-pinchers will continue to shun SSDs for their OS and applications. As far as we're concerned, that day can't come fast enough. Here's hoping that 2016 proves to be the year that we cross the tipping point and start seeing SSDs on any new PC priced above $400. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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