MSI R9 380 Gaming 2G Review
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NVIDIA PhysX Coming to Killing Floor 2
Adding to the recently announced collaboration with Konami for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, NVIDIA is working with Tripwire Interactive on the team based zombie shooter Killing Floor 2. The game is currently in Early Access on Steam but it follows the same proven formula as the first game, with much better graphics. The graphics are about to get even better with the addition of GameWorks PhysX Flex, "the newest iteration of Nvidia's PhysX physics engine," powering the in game gore effects. An NVIDIA blog post described the improved interactions with the Bloat stating, "As the Bloat waddles towards players he’ll vomit Flex-powered bile as a ranged attack, and when gibbed his lungs, intestines and skull will spew forth, in addition to buckets of blood and smaller giblets. Blood and bile intermix, body parts and fluids are scattered by explosions and the Siren’s scream, and everything interacts realistically with geometry and objects. And should another Bloat be popped, the force of his internals exploding outward will further manipulate the disgusting Flex-powered mess that’s already been created."
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Special Magnetic Bubbles Blown That Could Make New Memory Technology
With electronics rapidly approaching the limit of traditional materials and transistors, many are looking for new ways to store and process data using physical phenomena. One contender is skyrmions, which are small islands of magnetism found in some materials, but the problem is making them is hard to do even in laboratories. Now researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have discovered a new and simple way to make them at room temperature.
Skyrmions were only discovered a few years ago and producing bubbles of them normally requires temperatures approaching 5 K and expensive tools like spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopes. Obviously this is a problem if they are to be put to any practical uses, which there is interest in, since researchers realized skyrmion bubbles tend not to unravel and could be moved using electric currents. The solution the Argonne researchers discovered is a constricted wire consisting of a thin layer of a magnetic material sandwiched between two conductive layers. Stripes of magnetic domains form in the material on one side, and when an electric current is applied this stripes stretch out and break at the constricted channel separating the two halves. On the other side then, the skyrmion bubbles are formed.
The hope is that from this discovery it may be possible to create a memory system based on reading the presence of skyrmions. Such a device could be built very small and require less current than other memory systems, such as racetrack memory.
Source: Argonne National Laboratory
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Hardware Roundup: Friday, June 19, 2015 Edition
We have arrived at the end of another week, one filled with E3 and new video cards from AMD. There are a couple looks at those video cards, with the MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G and Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 390 8GB both put to the test to see what they can bring to the table. If you have a small case and need some cooling, the Noctua NH-L9x65 CPU cooler, with its small profile, could be the one for you. We have a review of the Blackview Zeta smartphone, which features an octa-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. Ending the week is a case mod featuring a CaseLabs Mercury S5 case and a sweet white and blue color scheme.
Video Cards
MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G @ Bjorn3D
Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 390 8GB @ PC Perspective
CPU Cooling
Noctua NH-L9x65 @ Benchmark Reviews
Mobile
Blackview Zeta @ Madshrimps
Miscellany
Case Mod Friday: White Metropolis @ ThinkComputers
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Wrapping Computer Chip Wires in Graphene Improves Performance
When talking about computer chips, many people will think about the transistors within and how they function, forgetting about the wires that exist to connect them all. Currently these wires are made of copper and are wrapped in tantalum nitride, but that may be changing soon, thanks to the work of researchers at Stanford University and more.
First it is worth noting that the wrap around the copper wires is not to keep the current within the wires, like that in our houses, but to prevent copper atoms from entering the transistors. If this happens, the atoms will destroy the transistors. Tantalum nitride does this job well, but it appears that graphene can also do it, and bring with it superior performance. For one thing, a graphene wrapper could be eight times thinner than the smallest tantalum nitride layer, and because graphene is also a conductor, it could help carry the current between transistors.
The researchers estimate that for modern chips, this would amount to just a 4-17% improvement to wire speeds, but in two generations, as chip components shrink, the boost could be 30%. Of course more work needs to be done to take this from proof-of-concept to real-world use, but now that we know what kind of impact there can be, more researchers will likely start investigating the wires as well.
Source: Stanford University
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EVGA X99 Micro2 LGA2011v3 Motherboard Readied
EVGA has announced that it is finishing up the final touches on its X99 Micro2 LGA2011v3 motherboard, which happens to be a micro-ATX form factor product. The latest board from EVGA comes with plenty of expandability and performance features, such as ten SATA 6Gb/s ports, three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, and a 32 Gb/s M.2 slot with NVMe BIOS support. The EVGA X99 Micro2, which offers much of what the original X99 Micro offered customers upon launch, supports 64GB of quad-channel DDR4 memory and comes packed with four rear panel USB 3.0 ports, two USB 3.1 ports, a 10-phase CPU VRM, and 8-channel HD audio with ground-layer isolation and a headphone amp.
Pricing and availability of the X99 Micro2 LGA2011v3 motherboard has not yet been announced by EVGA.
Source: techPowerUp
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AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Benchmarks Appear; Performance Seems Impressive
AMD announced its new Radeon R9 Fury line of video cards earlier this week, along with the R9/R7 300 series, and apart from technical details, didn't discuss what kind of performance we could expect. Given the high price point of the Fury cards and the upcoming launch, many people are looking forward to what they can do. While reviews won't be out until we get to that June 24 launch date, there are some leaks concerning the high-end R9 Fury X's potential performance. I say potential because these numbers are provided directly by AMD, but even then, the results are quite impressive. A number of games were tested at 4K with in-game settings just about as high as they can go, and it looks like AMD has a winner on its hands with the Fury X. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti looks to be outclassed in all the tests, with most games being far closer than others. Things do tend to line up with the past leak, even if the games from that are iffy.
The clock speeds of the Fury X and 980 Ti are not mentioned, so we don't know if the clock speeds of both cards are kept stock or if the Fury X is overclocked above and beyond the 980 Ti. AMD does say the Fury X should be able to handle a 100MHz overclock on the core with ease, thanks to the integrated liquid cooling system, so was that utilized in this benchmark? There is no way to know for sure, so don't take these numbers as gospel until we get something where all the elements are known.
The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X arrives on June 24 for $649, with the air-cooled Fury launching July 14 for $549.
Source: WCCFtech
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Using Boron for Blue OLEDs
Carbon is essential for life, but has been missing in electronics for a number of reasons. This could change in the foreseeable future though, as we better learn how to make carbon compounds with special and desirable properties. Now researchers at Goethe University have discovered that doping boron atoms into graphene can create an organic LED that emits an intense blue light.
Many forms of carbon are of interest for future technologies, and graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon, is one of the better known forms. Typically it is by manipulating the edges of graphene that researchers manipulate its properties, but more recently we have been able to work within the sheet itself. That is what is happening here, as the Goethe researchers have replaced carbon atoms with boron, within graphene nanosheets. The result is an OLED luminophore that produces light in the blue range, and the electron transport is also improved.
Naturally this discovery could be used for displays, and because the films involved are flexible, the displays could be rolled up at will.
Source: Goethe University
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Hardware Roundup: Thursday, June 18, 2015, Edition
We're moving towards the end of the week, but there are plenty of items for you to check out today. There is a review of the Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5P motherboard, a revised and improved upgrade from its past Gaming 5 motherboard. We also have the EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC ACX 2.0+ video card, a high-powered option for the green team featuring a custom cooler and factory overclock. On the AMD side, we have a review covering the Radeon R9 390X, R9 390, and R9 380 video cards, the brand new cards that all feature tweaked cores from past models. There's also a look at AMD's new Fiji video cards and what HBM can help bring to the video card world. Rounding things out is a review of the Cherry MX Board 6.0, a backlit mechanical keyboard featuring a new technology called RealKey.
Motherboards
Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5P @ ThinkComputers
Video Cards
EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC ACX 2.0+ @ Bjorn3D
Radeon R9 390X, R9 390, & R9 380 @ TechSpot
AMD Exposes Fiji to the World: HBM for the Enthusiast @ PC Perspective
Keyboards/Mice
Cherry MX Board 6.0 @ LanOC Reviews
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Graphene Used to Make Thinnest Lightbulb
When Edison was working on the electric light, he experimented with a variety of filaments, an eventually settled on using carbon, though later other materials were selected. Now we may return to carbon in the form of graphene to make nanoscale lightbulb so bright, you can see them with the naked eye. Researchers at Columbia University, Seoul National University, and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science have created a potential on-chip light source using graphene, and it has some useful properties.
Graphene is an atom-thick sheet of carbon many people expect will be used in future devices, because of its numerous desirable properties. I am not sure if any expected it to be used as a nanoscale lightbulb filament though, but it actually does the job very well. To help push technology to smaller scales and faster speeds, there is a drive to use optics in computers, but for that to happen we need reliable light sources that can be integrated into computer chips. Until now, no one has been able to replicate the incandescent lightbulb on this scale, partly because metal filaments would have to get so hot to emit visible light, they would damage nearby circuitry. Graphene does not have this issue though because as it heats up, its heat conductance goes down, causing the temperatures as high as 2500 ºC to stay in small spots. It also helps that the filaments are suspended above the silicon substrate, instead of being in direct contact. This improves the efficiency, and it turns out, allows the light emitted to be tuned by manipulating the distance between the filaments and the substrate, thanks to graphene being transparent.
Even though the graphene filaments are only an atom thick, the light they emit is so bright it is visible to the naked eye. That definitely makes the discovery interesting for many applications, and now the researchers are working to better characterize it, such as determining how quickly it can be switched on and off, for digital communications.
Source: Columbia University
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HDMI 2.0 Support Missing on AMD Fiji Silicon
It has been confirmed by an AMD representative on the OCUK Forums that the latest silicon from the processor and graphics card company will not support HDMI 2.0. The latest standard of the display technology offers ample bandwidth for 4K Ultra HD at 60Hz, but happens to be missing from AMD’s Fiji silicon. Apparently the AMD chip will ship with DisplayPort 1.2a connections as well as HDMI 1.4a, the latter of which is limited to 30Hz when displaying content at 4K. In the end, gamers looking to utilize the card for 4K gaming should find that it works well with displays that support DisplayPort 1.2a, but the lack of HDMI 2.0 support could hurt those looking to utilize the Fiji silicon by AMD in a home theater type environment where the television is the primary display.
Source: techPowerUp
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