I would like to thank Nanoxia for supplying the review sample.
We may have not heard from Nanoxia in a while, but that does not mean that they were not working on new products. With our last review dating back a whooping five years, the excitement was great when we received the Nanoxia Deep Silence 8 Pro to see if their latest product can keep up with the modern times and offer quality, storage, and silence at a competitive price. With the Pro variant only costing around 10% more than the noticeably less capable basic version, things look promising, so let’s dive right in.
Home/Tech News/Competitions/KitGuru Advent Calendar Day 22: Win an iiyama 144Hz Ultra-Wide Gaming Monitor!
Matthew Wilson 7 hours ago Competitions, Featured Announcement
For Day 22 of the KitGuru Advent Calendar 2020, we’re teaming up with iiyama to give away a G-MASTER RED EAGLE GB3466WQSU-B1 gaming monitor! This is a 34-inch Ultra-Wide display with a 144Hz refresh rate, making it an excellent PC gaming upgrade.
Aside from a 3440×1440 ultra-wide resolution and 144Hz refresh rate, this monitor is also DisplayHDR 400 certified, so you can switch on and benefit from HDR in supported games. You also get a swift 1ms response time and FreeSync to remove screen tearing. The monitor stand has height adjustment but also supports VESA mounts, so you can use a third-party monitor stand/arm if you prefer.
Entering this giveaway is simple, all you need to do is head over to THIS POST on our Facebook page and leave a comment. We plan to have a new discussion topic each day, today we are asking you guys to tell us – what monitor are you currently gaming on?. This competition is open in Europe.
The winner will be picked at random by 10am December 23rd, and a new competition will also be announced for Day 23.
Terms and Conditions:This competition is open in Europe, starting at 10AM on December 22nd and ending at 9:59AM on December 23rd. Due to the busy Christmas season and the COVID-19 situation, prize deliveries could take longer than usual. In compliance with GDPR, we will not collect or store any personal information as part of this competition. Once the winner has been contacted and their prize received, personal details will be deleted from our email servers. Your details will not be shared, we respect your privacy.
KitGuru Says: Good luck to everyone entering today’s competition! We’ll be back to announce the winner tomorrow morning and open the door for Advent Calendar Day 23!
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KitGuru Advent Calendar Day 21: Win an NZXT H1 Mini-ITX Case! (closed)
For Day 21 of the KitGuru Advent Calendar 2020, we’re teaming up with NZXT to give away a H1 Mini-ITX chassis, which also comes with a 650W 80Plus Gold rated SFF PSU, creating the perfect starting point for a small form-factor build.
I would like to thank Corsair for supplying the review sample.
The Corsair TBT100 Thunderbolt dock in many ways reminds us of the Elgato Thunderbolt 3 docks, but offers a different set of I/O. Corsair acquired Elgato a while back, so the TBT100 is a result of having that knowledge and expertise in-house now as well. The Corsair TBT100 is a bit more compact than the Elgato Thunderbolt 3 Pro dock and comes in at a much lower price point to boot.
Packaging, Contents and A Closer Look
A yellow box will certainly draw your attention on a retailer’s shelf, with an image of the device on front and two further shots of it on the rear for you to clearly see which connectivity the unit provides. There is another, inner package you have to pull out, inside of which the device and all its accessories are stored neatly.
Corsair ships the unit with a passive Thunderbolt 3 cable alongside the power cable. As the TBT100 also offers power delivery via Thunderbolt, you will find an external 100 W unit to provide it. That means you no longer have to use your laptop’s power adapter—it will all be done through a single cable.
A warranty guide and basic manual round out the extras within the package.
As previously mentioned, the Corsair TBT100 feels a bit more compact than the Elgato units and comes with an edgier design as well. The housing is made out of metal and sports a similar “gunmetal gray” color tone as those found on Apple notebooks, so the unit should match nicely on your desktop in such a scenario. On the scale, we can see that the TBT100 is rather hefty, weighing 430 grams.
Looking at the front, you will find a power switch alongside a USB-C 10 Gbps connector, SD card reader, and 3.5 mm audio-combo port. In the rear, where the bulk of I/O is located, are two USB 3.0 Type A, a Gigabit Ethernet, another USB-C 10 Gbps, two 4K@60Hz capable HDMI ports, and the Thunderbolt 3 port to interface with the host system. To the very right is the power port and a hole to secure the TBT100 with a Kensington lock.
Inner Workings
There is no need for you to take apart the device as it is essentially plug and play, but for the sake of this article, we have disassembled it to show you the insides. The metal casing holds both the PCB and a metal heatspreader, which comes with a few thermal pads to keep things cool enough even when utilizing all the ports. The PCB is clearly Corsair branded and extremely clean, with most of the ICs on the top of the multi-layered PCB.
At the core of the device is the Intel JHL 7440 Thunderbolt IC, which offers a dual-port configuration with a TDP of 2.4 W and DisplayPort 1.4 support even though the TBT100 does not offer such an interface. Right next to it is the Texas Instruments TPS65983BA power delivery IC, so you may charge your notebook by passing electricity from the external PSU through the TBT100 and its Thunderbolt 3 interface.
In the center of the PCB is the VLI VL822-Q8 USB 3.1 controller which also supports vendor specific charging via USB profiles, like those from Apple and Samsung.
The VLI VL817 Q7 USB 3.1 Gen1 hub controller ensures the TBT100 has all those aforementioned Type-A ports with modern interface speeds. Next to that is the Realtek ALC4050, which is a USB-C to audio jack interface DAC, so you can plug your classic headphones straight into the TBT100.
The Realtek RTL8153B—you may have guessed it—offers the 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet interface by translating it to USB on the internal side. In essence, it is the sort of IC you would find in a modern USB-C to Ethernet dongle as well. Close to the physical port itself, Corsair employs a GST5009M LF discrete LAN magnetics IC, which allows for long-haul connectivity and offers quite a few additional features, like POE. It is great to see, and I welcome this amount of over-kill.
Remember that the Intel Thunderbolt IC can handle DisplayPort? Because the TBT100 utilizes HDMI, there are two ITE IT6563FN DP receiver to HDMI transmitter ICs, one for each port, at the back of the device.
The GL3232S is a USB 3.1 Gen1 memory card controller with UHS-I interface support, so you can throw pretty much any modern SD card at it without issue.
Lastly, there is another smaller IC on the other end of the PCB, which I was unable to identify fully, but it could have something to do with the power button and its LED.
Software
While the Corsair TBT100 works right out of the box without any software applications, you may also download an app to make ejecting/disconnecting devices easier. It shows up as a little Corsair logo in the status bar on Mac OS and literally only offers the option “Unplug Thunderbolt Dock.” This way, you won’t have to worry about having to disconnect every attached device within your operating system, but can do so in a controlled and automated fashion, in one fell swoop before pulling the cable out of your notebook, for example. Within the simple application, you may set it to start automatically as well.
Up and Running
Using the Corsair TBT100 is incredibly easy, which is the essential point really. The single Thunderbolt 3 cable connects to the notebook and immediately starts charging it as needed as well. The power button lights up with a tiny white LED as soon as turned on and operational, so you will always know about the state of the unit by looking at it. The SD card reader holds the card securely, and since it is soldered to the top of the PCB, you don’t need to flip the card over to slide it in. Any of the rear ports instantly work as soon as you plug anything in, be it an HDMI monitor, Ethernet cable, or a USB storage device.
Once in place, the Corsair TBT100 will quickly become an essential part of your desktop environment, especially if you are using a notebook as the brains of your setup. In my scenario, I am utilized the unit for this review with an HDMI-based 27″ 1440P monitor, one USB-C based NVMe drive, one USB-A-based Time Capsule 2.5″ spinning storage unit, and the USB 3.0 hub of the monitor via the second USB-A connector, as well as the SD-Card reader to pull pictures onto the notebook. Lastly, the audio port turned out to be extremely useful, allowing me to keep a headset attached at all times for my “work from home” setup for quick and functional Microsoft Teams chats, or even audio when watching Netflix or playing games in Bootcamp using my Razer eGPU.
With all that and proper charging of the 13″ Macbook Pro, all I had to worry about was a single Thunderbolt cable so that my actual charging adapter stays inside my notebook bag when I am on the go. So while the $230 (MSRP $259) for the Corsair TBT100 is quite the investment, it is absolutely worth it for elaborate setups like this.
Earlier this year, Lian Li updated its fully RGB lit Strimer PSU cable extensions for both your motherboard and graphics card. But all you could get at the time was a 24 pin motherboard extension and dual 8-pin GPU extension kit. Fortunately, Lian Li has now updated its product lineup with a new Strimer+ Triple kit that includes a triple 8-pin GPU extension cable and an RGB hub. The kit is designed specifically for aftermarket RTX 3080s and RTX 3090s that are equipped with triple 8 pin power connectors.
(Image credit: Newegg)
If you are unaware of how these extensions work, they don’t actually light up the physical PSU extension cable itself, rather the cables themselves are covered by RGB-lit strips. So in reality, you have two sets of cables running from your PSU cables to the system components. But in the end, the cables do look pretty with all that extra mass.
This new Strimer+ Triple kit also includes a little RGB hub that allows you to control the RGB lights however you want. The hub requires a SATA power connection, as well as an ARGB header on your motherboard. If you need to connect other ARGB devices and want to sync them to the hub, you can do that as well.
Keep in mind, this only includes the triple in pin extension for your graphics card. If you want the 24 pin motherboard RGB extension cable, you’ll have to buy that separately. The Strimer+ Triple kit goes for $59.99 right now on Newegg.com, and the Strimer 24-pin SKU goes for $10 less at $49.99.
Matthew Wilson 53 mins ago Competitions, Featured Announcement
For Day 21 of the KitGuru Advent Calendar 2020, we’re teaming up with NZXT to give away a H1 Mini-ITX chassis, which also comes with a pre-installed 650W 80Plus Gold rated SFF PSU, creating the perfect starting point for a small form-factor build.
Back when NZXT announced the H1 case, the company said that its aim was to take Mini-ITX PC building to the next level. We had the opportunity to review the case earlier in the year and it came away with our highest ‘MUST HAVE’ award.
We do have to note that in November, there was an issue found with a small number of H1 cases. NZXT has since fixed the problem, so the H1 case our winner receives is an updated version with the fix in place.
Entering this giveaway is simple, all you need to do is head over to THIS POST on our Facebook page and leave a comment. We plan to have a new discussion topic each day, today we are asking you guys to tell us what case you are currently using. This competition is open to the UK.
The winner will be picked at random by 10am December 22nd, and a new competition will also be announced for Day 22.
Terms and Conditions:This competition is open in the UK, starting at 10AM on December 21st and ending at 9:59AM on December 22nd. Due to the busy Christmas season and the COVID-19 situation, prize deliveries could take longer than usual. In compliance with GDPR, we will not collect or store any personal information as part of this competition. Once the winner has been contacted and their prize received, personal details will be deleted from our email servers. Your details will not be shared, we respect your privacy.
KitGuru Says: Good luck to everyone entering today’s competition! We’ll be back to announce the winner tomorrow morning and open the door for Advent Calendar Day 22!
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KitGuru Advent Calendar Day 20: Win a Corsair peripheral bundle! (closed)
For Day 20 of the KitGuru Advent Calendar 2020, we’re teaming up with CORSAIR to give away an excellent peripheral bundle! The bundle includes a K100 Optical-mechanical keyboard, a Dark Core Pro SE mouse, an MM350 Extended mouse pad and a Virtuoso SE headset!
I would like to thank Enermax for supplying the review sample.
The Enermax MarbleShell MS30 focuses on being a compact ATX case and is available in either white or black, with an interestingly designed front resembling a stone wall through which the ARGB fans glow. With a focus on design, the MarbleShell MS30 also aims to provide ample airflow and plenty of room for storage. We got the Enermax MarbleShell MS30 in white for review.
Specifications
Enermax MarbleShell MS30
Case Type:
Mid-Tower
Material:
Steel, plastic, and tempered glass
Weight:
5.75 kg
Slots:
7
Drive Bays:
2x Internal 3.5″ 4x Internal 2.5″
Motherboard Form Factors:
ATX, Micro-ATX, and Mini-ITX
Dimensions:
407 x 215 x 460 mm
Front Door/Cover:
N/A
Front Fans:
2x 140 mm / 3x 120 mm (3x 120 mm ARGB fans pre-installed)
Rear Fans:
1x 140 mm / 1x 120 mm (1x 120 mm non-LED fan pre-installed)
Matthew Wilson 52 mins ago Competitions, Featured Announcement
For Day 15 of the KitGuru Advent Calendar 2020, we’re teaming up with SEASONIC to give away THREE prizes today. We have three excellent power supplies up for grabs – one 1000W model, one 850W model and a 650W model.
The prize list begins with the Seasonic PRIME TX-1000 with 80+ Titanium efficiency. Next we have the Seasonic Focus PX-850 with 80+ Platinum efficiency and finally, we also have the Seasonic Focus GX-650 with 80+ Gold efficiency. Each power supply unit is fully modular and if you’ve been around KitGuru for long, you know that we think very highly of Seasonic power supplies overall.
Entering this giveaway is simple, all you need to do is head over to THIS POST on our Facebook page and leave a comment. We plan to have a new discussion topic each day, today we are asking you guys to tell us what power supply you are currently using. This competition is open worldwide.
A winner will be picked at random by 10am December 16th, and a new competition will also be announced for Day 16.
Terms and Conditions: This competition is open worldwide, starting at 10AM on December 15th and ending at 9:59AM on December 16th. Due to the busy Christmas season and the COVID-19 situation, prize deliveries could take longer than usual. In compliance with GDPR, we will not collect or store any personal information as part of this competition. Once the winner has been contacted and their prize received, personal details will be deleted from our email servers. Your details will not be shared, we respect your privacy.
KitGuru Says: Good luck to everyone entering today’s competition! We’ll be back to announce the winner tomorrow morning and open the door for Advent Calendar Day 16!
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Razer Tomahawk ITX System Build – And Giveaway!
Want to win a custom-built gaming PC? Of course you do!
There are music lovers who dream of a hi-fi sound and all the possibilities, but who do not want a large music system that dominates the living room. Based on this observation, Cyrus Audio has been working on compact all-rounders that still perform at a high level for almost forty years now. Now there are more brands that occasionally market a device with modest dimensions, but the British of Cyrus are convinced believers in the so-called ‘half width form factor’; everything they build is about half the width and height of a traditional hi-fi device. The depth of this new Cyrus does not differ from large stereo amplifiers, but that is not so bad in itself. And perhaps also inevitable; you can reduce a lot, but in the end you have to give the electronics and power supply the place.
It The end result is in any case a device that is spectacularly small. Something that can easily get an inconspicuous place on or in a TV cabinet. Is all innovation then aimed at miniaturization? No, says the manufacturer. Despite its small size, the i9-XR is truly meant to be a premium device, thanks to underlying technology worked on over the past decade.
Cyrus Audio i9-XR The Cyrus i9-XR positions itself with a suggested retail price of 3. 399 euro so as a challenger for established (and bigger) rivals to brands such as Hegel, NAD and many others. One thing you have to admit: it competes with a set of unique assets.
The i9-XR is the first all-in-one amplifier in the all-new premium XR family, along with the i7-XR of 2. 500 euros. There are other XR devices, including the Pre-XR preamplifier, two CD players (with and without their own DAC) and the PSU-XR. And Cyrus hints that more may follow. The PSU-XR has a special place in this family story. It is an external power supply that you can optionally combine with the i9-XR. It is an option that the manufacturer also offered in the past for Classic devices, intended to remove a potential source of interference from the housing and thus improve the display. Unusually, the PSU-XR is not just a replacement power supply for this one amplifier. It is compatible with four current XR devices (only the i7-XR not) and will also power future XR products.
With its modest size, multitude of connections, extra attention to the headphone output and With an idiosyncratic design, we find the i9-XR a striking appearance in the extensive hi-fi landscape. Compared to the devices from the two other Cyrus series, the more expensive XR family really has its own look and design. The Classic line is full-blooded Cyrus with a similar size and the distinctive green display, while the One devices combine a sleek no-nonsense design with the latest features, such as Chromecast streaming and an HDMI port. Cyrus himself describes his three lines in the Apples way: One is â ???? goodâ ????, Classic is â ???? betterâ ???? and XR is “best”. Even in the hi-fi world, you cannot escape the influences from Cupertino.
With the i9-XR, Cyrus has tackled various parts to lift the devices to a premium level. You have to, because at this price point there are simply worthy rivals. The first target was to combat noise, nutrition was also improved. The company always had its own implementation of ESS-DACs, called QXR, paying extra attention to the filters and analog buffers that followed the DA converters. The latter part has been completely redesigned in the second generation QXR in this new Cyrus. It can therefore handle the highest resolutions via the USB port. New is that you can switch between five filters, so you can tweak the sound in a modest way to your taste.
Maximize Minimalism It is almost a natural law of the hi-fi: if the device is compact, then a manufacturer has fewer opportunities to tempt the hi-fi enthusiast. With flashy design elements such as large VU meters â ???? whether or not it emits blue light â ???? or with massive volume buttons that just fit an adult hand, that is quite easy. A mastodon of 40 kilos of shiny steel is more noticeable than a small box of a few kilograms. So that’s a disadvantage if your name is Cyrus and net bet on compact devices. But just like say TEAC with its Reference 750 series, the British know how to make much of little.
In concrete terms: the i9-XR comes in a relatively heavy housing with a very solid and yet refined appearance. This also has to do with the material used (die-cast metal) and its shape. No, it is not just any rectangular box. Corners have been flattened, a minor change that makes the device more modern and intriguing to look at. An eye-catcher is undoubtedly also the front: in the bottom half the panel shows a bend forward and the corners are even more chamfered. That immediately gives the device a little more character and it is also a functional plus. The operating buttons are better presented to the user by the tilted front panel. By the way, they are keys that almost look like touch-sensitive touch buttons. A light touch is enough to operate them.
At the front, the focus is also on the screen, flanked on the right by a volume knob that also doubles as a selection knob when you dive into the menus. The display is not black on green as with classic Cyrus devices, but black on white. Do you like white letters on a dark background better? Through the settings you can swap the colors, a small but nice option. The brightness is also adjustable or you can turn off the screen completely. Handy, because the LCD screen can be quite bright. The high contrast means you can read it from further away than you would expect, but it still remains small print.
Thanks to all these things, the i9-XR has a more valuable look than previous Cyrus- devices. The bling-bling content is limited, but you can see that this is a premium product.
Greater impact than you might expect You must be prepared you can put your prejudices about small devices away when you listen to the i9-XR. This class AB amplifier promises 2x 399 Watt (6 Ohm) of power, which is certainly not too little. We connect a set of KEF R3â € ™ s, great upright speakers that also matched the One Cast well. Why not a large floorstander? We quietly suspect that music lovers who opt for a small hi-fi device will not suddenly opt for man-sized speakers. Although that contrast between small and large also has something, of course.
Packed with connectors Turn the i9-XR over , then you will discover a small disadvantage of the modest size. Since Cyrus is committed to maximum connectivity, many inputs have been crammed into a small area. It’s actually unbelievable what you can discover here: four analog cinch pairs one one phono connection, four digital inputs (2 x optical, 2 x coaxial) and a USB class B. Cyrus sees the i9-XR also plays a role as a preamplifier, as two pre-outs are provided (with fixed and variable output level).
With only a few square centimeters of empty space left, Cyrus has provided M-Bus connectors (so you can operate multiple Cyrus products together) and a separate connection that is somewhat reminiscent of a VGA port of antique computers but it is for the optional PSU-XR power supply. In short, also in terms of connectivity, the small i9-XR is not inferior to big rivals.
If you like the majority of people connect everything and then never touch those cables again, it is huge range of connections on a small surface, no huge problem. If you are plugging in and pulling out plugs more often, you will have to do that with more attention. Okay, in most cases you plug in an amplifier and don’t look at those connections anymore. Then you will not really be bothered by the busy back panel.
The only exception is if you want to listen with headphones from time to time. That connection is also placed at the back and is a little less convenient to reach. That seems very unfortunate at first, because Cyrus has paid extra attention to the headphone amplification with this device. But then our eye falls on the “Phones” button on the front. If you dive into the settings, you can set the headphone output to turn on (and turn off the speakers) when you tap this button. For example, you can leave a small adapter / extension cable connected, so that you can quickly connect your headphones. By the way, Cyrus chose to place the headphone output at the rear because it makes the front more aesthetically pleasing.
We notice that the main output is of good quality when we connect the Focal Stellia. With an integrated amplifier you can never be guaranteed that the headphone output will sound the same, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case in this case.
Also for TV Unlike the Cyrus One Cast that we tested in March, the i9-XR does not have an HDMI-ARC input. When we peek at the busy back panel, we wonder where you might lose it anyway. In terms of integration with your television, you have fewer options, but it is not very difficult. You can simply bring the television sound to the Cyrus amplifier via an optical cable.
That may sound cumbersome to some, but that is not too bad. We wrote it before this year: the result you get can be very good. This is also the case with the i9-XR. Even with the Sony KD – 65 AF9 that hangs in our test room, you get a nice sound upgrade. That TV comes with Acoustic Surface speakers and a separate subwoofer, and yet it is much nicer to see Bruce Springsteen’s â € œLetter to Youâ € – documentary that you can find on Apple TV + via the Cyrus and the KEF R3- speakers.
In this documentary you can see how Springsteen and the E Street Band are working on their new album, a process in which there is a lot of chattering and of course some music. It is mainly a documentary with a lot of atmosphere, and you get a much larger portion of it through those separate speakers. Not only when songs from Letter to You are played, but also during the playful chatter between recording sessions. Dialogues are also easier to understand in a stereo setup like this one, if you make sure that the speakers are well placed in relation to your screen. In the case of the R3’s, that meant they were also screwed in a bit.
Conclusion Cyrus wants to prove with the i9-XR that you can also expect high-end performance from something that is a fraction of the size of a typical hi-fi device. A mission in which the British largely succeed, because small clearly does not stand for muscleless here. The small size has some consequences for user comfort, such as a smaller screen (which is very contrasting) and a busy back panel. However, these do not detract from the core values of the Cyrus i9-XR: play your music in high quality and in a warm, intimate way, also on Goliath speakers many times larger than this little David.
Cyrus Audio i9-XR
3. 399 euro | Â www.cyrusaudio.com
Rating 4.5 / 5
Page 1: realme 7 and realme 7 Pro in a double test: cheap and good?
realme is a young Chinese company that wants to convince in the smartphone segment with an attractive price-performance ratio. The two models realme 7 and realme 7 Pro currently make this particularly clear. In the price range around the 200 to 300 euros they can offer promising features – but do the cheap Android smartphones also convince overall?
Despite the low prices, realme 7 and realme 7 Pro attract with features that are anything but self-evident in this price range. The 6.5-inch display of the realme 7 comes with 89 Hz updated, the quad camera triggers with up to 48 MP on and an octa-core processor also promises good performance. The realme 7 Pro can come up with a Super AMOLED display, photos with up to 64 MP and selfies with 32 Shoot MP and with considerable 65 W load particularly quickly. Fingerprint reader, card slot with dual SIM support and additional space for a microSD card as well as the classic headphone connection are offered by both models.
In terms of price, entry into the realme 7 family begins at 179 Euro. For this you get the realme 7 with 6 GB of RAM and 64 GB large memory. The upgraded version with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB of storage costs just 20 Euro surcharge, is therefore a 199 – Euro smartphone. Both equipment variants are available in two color variants: Mist Blue and Mist White. The realme 7 Pro is also available in two color variants, but they are called Mirror Silver and Mirror Blue. This model is only available with 8 GB RAM and with 128 GB of storage – and at a price of 299 Euro.
realme delivers the smartphones with documentation, charger, charging cable (USB Type-A to Type-C), SIM card tool and a suitable protective cover. Most noticeable difference: The realme 7 (accessory on the left in the picture) receives a 30 – W-Dart-Charge-PSU, the realme 7 Pro is a bit more massive 65 W SuperDart Charge power pack.
<> realme 7 and realme 7 Pro in double test: cheap and good? The smartphones in detail
João Silva 3 hours ago Featured Tech News, Graphics
MSI is getting ready to launch a new budget-oriented series of cards called Twin Fan. For now, it will only be available in RTX 3070 form, but we would expect to see a version for the rumoured RTX 3060Ti too eventually.
Once available, the Twin Fan graphics card will feature a dual-slot, dual-fan design with a clean black shroud, allowing it to fit in any build. To protect and prevent damage to the PCB and improve passive cooling, there’s a backplate that “complements the design”, making it look even better.
The fans generate more airflow and air pressure than common fans thanks to a “unique curve”. The GPU transfers the heat generated to a solid baseplate that connects to the heatsink through 3x copper heat pipes.
The RTX 3070 Twin Fan comes clocked 1500Mhz for the base clock and 1725MHz for the boost clock. The OC variant comes with the same base clock, but boosts up to 1740Mhz. The memory clock of both graphics cards come at the stock 14Gbps. Available video outputs include 3x DisplayPort 1.4a and an HDMI 2.1 port. To power the card, there’s an 8-pin power connector and a 6-pin power connector. The TDP is set at 220W for the standard version and 250W for the OC variant.
MSI hasn’t disclosed the pricing and availability of these cards yet. You can learn more about the MSI RTX 3070 Twin Fan HERE, and MSI RTX 3070 Twin Fan OC HERE.
KitGuru says: Are you looking to upgrade your system with an RTX 3070 graphics card? Will you consider the MSI Twin Fan series cards?
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Streacom introduces the DB1 Mini-ITX chassis and Nano90 PSU
Streacom has designed a new Mini-ITX fanless case in a small form factor of just …
Home/Component/Cases/Streacom introduces the DB1 Mini-ITX chassis and Nano90 PSU
João Silva 5 hours ago Cases, Featured Tech News
Streacom has designed a new Mini-ITX fanless case in a small form factor of just 5L. The DB1 is Streacom’s “most compact fanless case”, giving up to “45W of cooling”, making it the perfect case for power-efficient systems based on the likes of the latest Ryzen APUs and Intel CPUs with integrated graphics.
Measuring in at 222 x 222 x 101mm, the DB1 is made using 4 mm thick aluminium panels, solid aluminium pillars, and a 21mm “thick extruded heatsink”. All the construction components are made using CNC milling and feature an anodized/sandblasted finishing. The 4x aluminium pillars connect the heatsink and the side panel while also holding together the rear, front, upper, and lower panels.
The CPU cooling is made by the case itself by using the same copper CPU shim, adjustable CPU mount and heatsink mount as Streacom’s DB4. The heat generated by the CPU is transferred to the heatsink (side panel) through 6mm copper heat pipes, which is then dissipated to the rest of the case and its surroundings.
The CPU mount is compatible with “all current desktop sockets”, but there’s also an optional CPU mount to further increase the compatibility to other less known sockets. The included front I/O module only has a single port USB-A port, but users can replace it with another module featuring a USB-C or or faster USB standards.
To power such a small case, Streacom also developed the 90W Nano90 PSU. The small Nano90 PSU is plugged directly into the 24-pin power connector of a motherboard, reducing the overall space needed to place a PSU thanks to its compact size.
The Streacom DB1 chassis and Nano90 PSU will be available in Q1 2021, priced at €109/$129 and €68/$79, respectively. You can learn more about the Streacom DB1 HERE.
KitGuru says: Would you like to build a PC using the Streacom DB1 chassis? What components would you use in it?
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MSI announces value-oriented RTX 3070 Twin Fan graphics card
MSI is getting ready to launch a new budget-oriented series of cards called Twin Fan. …
The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 have arrived, joining the ranks of the best graphics cards and making some headway into the top positions in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Nvidia has had a virtual stranglehold on the GPU market for cards priced $500 or more, going back to at least the GTX 700-series in 2013. That’s left AMD to mostly compete in the high-end, mid-range, and budget GPU markets. “No longer!” says Team Red.
Big Navi, aka Navi 21, aka RDNA2, has arrived, bringing some impressive performance gains. AMD also finally joins the ray tracing fray, both with its PC desktop graphics cards and the next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles. How do AMD’s latest GPUs stack up to the competition, and could this be AMD’s GPU equivalent of the Ryzen debut of 2017? That’s what we’re here to find out.
We’ve previously discussed many aspects of today’s launch, including details of the RDNA2 architecture, the GPU specifications, features, and more. Now, it’s time to take all the theoretical aspects and lay some rubber on the track. If you want to know more about the finer details of RDNA2, we’ll cover that as well. If you’re just here for the benchmarks, skip down a few screens because, hell yeah, do we have some benchmarks. We’ve got our standard testbed using an ‘ancient’ Core i9-9900K CPU, but we wanted something a bit more for the fastest graphics cards on the planet. We’ve added more benchmarks on both Core i9-10900K and Ryzen 9 5900X. With the arrival of Zen 3, running AMD GPUs with AMD CPUs finally means no compromises.
Update: We’ve added additional results to the CPU scaling charts. This review was originally published on November 18, 2020, but we’ll continue to update related details as needed.
AMD Radeon RX 6800 Series: Specifications and Architecture
Let’s start with a quick look at the specifications, which have been mostly known for at least a month. We’ve also included the previous generation RX 5700 XT as a reference point.
Graphics Card
RX 6800 XT
RX 6800
RX 5700 XT
GPU
Navi 21 (XT)
Navi 21 (XL)
Navi 10 (XT)
Process (nm)
7
7
7
Transistors (billion)
26.8
26.8
10.3
Die size (mm^2)
519
519
251
CUs
72
60
40
GPU cores
4608
3840
2560
Ray Accelerators
72
60
N/A
Game Clock (MHz)
2015
1815
1755
Boost Clock (MHz)
2250
2105
1905
VRAM Speed (MT/s)
16000
16000
14000
VRAM (GB)
16
16
8
Bus width
256
256
256
Infinity Cache (MB)
128
128
N/A
ROPs
128
96
64
TMUs
288
240
160
TFLOPS (boost)
20.7
16.2
9.7
Bandwidth (GB/s)
512
512
448
TBP (watts)
300
250
225
Launch Date
Nov. 2020
Nov. 2020
Jul-19
Launch Price
$649
$579
$399
When AMD fans started talking about “Big Navi” as far back as last year, this is pretty much what they hoped to see. AMD has just about doubled down on every important aspect of its architecture, plus adding in a huge amount of L3 cache and Ray Accelerators to handle ray tracing ray/triangle intersection calculations. Clock speeds are also higher, and — spoiler alert! — the 6800 series cards actually exceed the Game Clock and can even go past the Boost Clock in some cases. Memory capacity has doubled, ROPs have doubled, TFLOPS has more than doubled, and the die size is also more than double.
Support for ray tracing is probably the most visible new feature, but RDNA2 also supports Variable Rate Shading (VRS), mesh shaders, and everything else that’s part of the DirectX 12 Ultimate spec. There are other tweaks to the architecture, like support for 8K AV1 decode and 8K HEVC encode. But a lot of the underlying changes don’t show up as an easily digestible number.
For example, AMD says it reworked much of the architecture to focus on a high speed design. That’s where the greater than 2GHz clocks come from, but those aren’t just fantasy numbers. Playing around with overclocking a bit — and the software to do this is still missing, so we had to stick with AMD’s built-in overclocking tools — we actually hit clocks of over 2.5GHz. Yeah. I saw the supposed leaks before the launch claiming 2.4GHz and 2.5GHz and thought, “There’s no way.” I was wrong.
AMD’s cache hierarchy is arguably one of the biggest changes. Besides a shared 1MB L1 cache for each cluster of 20 dual-CUs, there’s a 4MB L2 cache and a whopping 128MB L3 cache that AMD calls the Infinity Cache. It also ties into the Infinity Fabric, but fundamentally, it helps optimize memory access latency and improve the effective bandwidth. Thanks to the 128MB cache, the framebuffer mostly ends up being cached, which drastically cuts down memory access. AMD says the effective bandwidth of the GDDR6 memory ends up being 119 percent higher than what the raw bandwidth would suggest.
The large cache also helps to reduce power consumption, which all ties into AMD’s targeted 50 percent performance per Watt improvements. This doesn’t mean power requirements stayed the same — RX 6800 has a slightly higher TBP (Total Board Power) than the RX 5700 XT, and the 6800 XT and upcoming 6900 XT are back at 300W (like the Vega 64). However, AMD still comes in at a lower power level than Nvidia’s competing GPUs, which is a bit of a change of pace from previous generation architectures.
It’s not entirely clear how AMD’s Ray Accelerators stack up against Nvidia’s RT cores. Much like Nvidia, AMD is putting one Ray Accelerator into each CU. (It seems we’re missing an acronym. Should we call the ray accelerators RA? The sun god, casting down rays! Sorry, been up all night, getting a bit loopy here…) The thing is, Nvidia is on its second-gen RT cores that are supposed to be around 1.7X as fast as its first-gen RT cores. AMD’s Ray Accelerators are supposedly 10 times as fast as doing the RT calculations via shader hardware, which is similar to what Nvidia said with its Turing RT cores. In practice, it looks as though Nvidia will maintain a lead in ray tracing performance.
That doesn’t even get into the whole DLSS and Tensor core discussion. AMD’s RDNA2 chips can do FP16 via shaders, but they’re still a far cry from the computational throughput of Tensor cores. That may or may not matter, as perhaps the FP16 throughput is enough for real-time inference to do something akin to DLSS. AMD has talked about FidelityFX Super Resolution, which it’s working on with Microsoft, but it’s not available yet, and of course, no games are shipping with it yet either. Meanwhile, DLSS is in a couple of dozen games now, and it’s also in Unreal Engine, which means uptake of DLSS could explode over the coming year.
Anyway, that’s enough of the architectural talk for now. Let’s meet the actual cards.
Meet the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 Reference Cards
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We’ve already posted an unboxing of the RX 6800 cards, which you can see in the above video. The design is pretty traditional, building on previous cards like the Radeon VII. There’s no blower this round, which is probably for the best if you’re worried about noise levels. Otherwise, you get a similar industrial design and aesthetic with both the reference 6800 and 6800 XT. The only real change is that the 6800 XT has a fatter heatsink and weighs 115g more, which helps it cope with the higher TBP.
Both cards are triple fan designs, using custom 77mm fans that have an integrated rim. We saw the same style of fan on many of the RTX 30-series GPUs, and it looks like the engineers have discovered a better way to direct airflow. Both cards have a Radeon logo that lights up in red, but it looks like the 6800 XT might have an RGB logo — it’s not exposed in software yet, but maybe that will come.
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Otherwise, you get dual 8-pin PEG power connections, which might seem a bit overkill on the 6800 — it’s a 250W card, after all, why should it need the potential for up to 375W of power? But we’ll get into the power stuff later. If you’re into collecting hardware boxes, the 6800 XT box is also larger and a bit nicer, but there’s no real benefit otherwise.
The one potential concern with AMD’s reference design is the video ports. There are two DisplayPort outputs, a single HDMI 2.1 connector, and a USB Type-C port. It’s possible to use four displays with the cards, but the most popular gaming displays still use DisplayPort, and very few options exist for the Type-C connector. There also aren’t any HDMI 2.1 monitors that I’m aware of, unless you want to use a TV for your monitor. But those will eventually come. Anyway, if you want a different port selection, keep an eye on the third party cards, as I’m sure they’ll cover other configurations.
And now, on to the benchmarks.
Radeon RX 6800 Series Test Systems
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It seems AMD is having a microprocessor renaissance of sorts right now. First, it has Zen 3 coming out and basically demolishing Intel in every meaningful way in the CPU realm. Sure, Intel can compete on a per-core basis … but only up to 10-core chips without moving into HEDT territory. The new RX 6800 cards might just be the equivalent of AMD’s Ryzen CPU launch. This time, AMD isn’t making any apologies. It intends to go up against Nvidia’s best. And of course, if we’re going to test the best GPUs, maybe we ought to look at the best CPUs as well?
For this launch, we have three test systems. First is our old and reliable Core i9-9900K setup, which we still use as the baseline and for power testing. We’re adding both AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Intel Core i9-10900K builds to flesh things out. In retrospect, trying to do two new testbeds may have been a bit too ambitious, as we have to test each GPU on each testbed. We had to cut a bunch of previous-gen cards from our testing, and the hardware varies a bit among the PCs.
For the AMD build, we’ve got an MSI X570 Godlike motherboard, which is one of only a handful that supports AMD’s new Smart Memory Access technology. Patriot supplied us with two kits of single bank DDR4-4000 memory, which means we have 4x8GB instead of our normal 2x16GB configuration. We also have the Patriot Viper VP4100 2TB SSD holding all of our games. Remember when 1TB used to feel like a huge amount of SSD storage? And then Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) happened, sucking down over 200GB. Which is why we need 2TB drives.
Meanwhile, the Intel LGA1200 PC has an Asus Maximum XII Extreme motherboard, 2x16GB DDR4-3600 HyperX memory, and a 2TB XPG SX8200 Pro SSD. (I’m not sure if it’s the old ‘fast’ version or the revised ‘slow’ variant, but it shouldn’t matter for these GPU tests.) Full specs are in the table below.
Anyway, the slightly slower RAM might be a bit of a handicap on the Intel PCs, but this isn’t a CPU review — we just wanted to use the two fastest CPUs, and time constraints and lack of duplicate hardware prevented us from going full apples-to-apples. The internal comparisons among GPUs on each testbed will still be consistent. Frankly, there’s not a huge difference between the CPUs when it comes to gaming performance, especially at 1440p and 4K.
Besides the testbeds, I’ve also got a bunch of additional gaming tests. First is the suite of nine games we’ve used on recent GPU reviews like the RTX 30-series launch. We’ve done some ‘bonus’ tests on each of the Founders Edition reviews, but we’re shifting gears this round. We’re adding four new/recent games that will be tested on each of the CPU testbeds: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Dirt 5, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Watch Dogs Legion — and we’ve enabled DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on Dirt 5 and Watch Dogs Legion.
There are some definite caveats, however. First, the beta DXR support in Dirt 5 doesn’t look all that different from the regular mode, and it’s an AMD promoted game. Coincidence? Maybe, but it’s probably more likely that AMD is working with Codemasters to ensure it runs suitably on the RX 6800 cards. The other problem is probably just a bug, but AMD’s RX 6800 cards seem to render the reflections in Watch Dogs Legion with a bit less fidelity.
Besides the above, we have a third suite of ray tracing tests: nine games (or benchmarks of future games) and 3DMark Port Royal. Of note, Wolfenstein Youngblood with ray tracing (which uses Nvidia’s pre-VulkanRT extensions) wouldn’t work on the AMD cards, and neither would the Bright Memory Infinite benchmark. Also, Crysis Remastered had some rendering errors with ray tracing enabled (on the nanosuits). Again, that’s a known bug.
Radeon RX 6800 Gaming Performance
We’ve retested all of the RTX 30-series cards on our Core i9-9900K testbed … but we didn’t have time to retest the RTX 20-series or RX 5700 series GPUs. The system has been updated with the latest 457.30 Nvidia drivers and AMD’s pre-launch RX 6800 drivers, as well as Windows 10 20H2 (the October 2020 update to Windows). It looks like the combination of drivers and/or Windows updates may have dropped performance by about 1-2 percent overall, though there are other variables in play. Anyway, the older GPUs are included mostly as a point of reference.
We have 1080p, 1440p, and 4K ultra results for each of the games, as well as the combined average of the nine titles. We’re going to dispense with the commentary for individual games right now (because of a time crunch), but we’ll discuss the overall trends below.
9 Game Average
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Borderlands 3
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The Division 2
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Far Cry 5
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Final Fantasy XIV
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Forza Horizon 4
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Metro Exodus
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Red Dead Redemption 2
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Shadow Of The TombRaider
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Strange Brigade
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AMD’s new GPUs definitely make a good showing in traditional rasterization games. At 4K, Nvidia’s 3080 leads the 6800 XT by three percent, but it’s not a clean sweep — AMD comes out on top in Borderlands 3, Far Cry 5, and Forza Horizon 4. Meanwhile, Nvidia gets modest wins in The Division 2, Final Fantasy XIV, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the largest lead is in Strange Brigade. But that’s only at the highest resolution, where AMD’s Infinity Cache may not be quite as effective.
Dropping to 1440p, the RTX 3080 and 6800 XT are effectively tied — again, AMD wins several games, Nvidia wins others, but the average performance is the same. At 1080p, AMD even pulls ahead by two percent overall. Not that we really expect most gamers forking over $650 or $700 or more on a graphics card to stick with a 1080p display, unless it’s a 240Hz or 360Hz model.
Flipping over to the vanilla RX 6800 and the RTX 3070, AMD does even better. On average, the RX 6800 leads by 11 percent at 4K ultra, nine percent at 1440p ultra, and seven percent at 1080p ultra. Here the 8GB of GDDR6 memory on the RTX 3070 simply can’t keep pace with the 16GB of higher clocked memory — and the Infinity Cache — that AMD brings to the party. The best Nvidia can do is one or two minor wins (e.g., Far Cry 5 at 1080p, where the GPUs are more CPU limited) and slightly higher minimum fps in FFXIV and Strange Brigade.
But as good as the RX 6800 looks against the RTX 3070, we prefer the RX 6800 XT from AMD. It only costs $70 more, which is basically the cost of one game and a fast food lunch. Or put another way, it’s 12 percent more money, for 12 percent more performance at 1080p, 14 percent more performance at 1440p, and 16 percent better 4K performance. You also get AMD’s Rage Mode pseudo-overclocking (really just increased power limits).
Radeon RX 6800 CPU Scaling and Overclocking
Our traditional gaming suite is due for retirement, but we didn’t want to toss it out at the same time as a major GPU launch — it might look suspicious. We didn’t have time to do a full suite of CPU scaling tests, but we did run 13 games on the five most recent high-end/extreme GPUs on our three test PCs. Here’s the next series of charts, again with commentary below.
13-Game Average
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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
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Borderlands 3
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The Division 2
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Dirt 5
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Far Cry 5
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Final Fantasy XIV
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Forza Horizon 4
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Horizon Zero Dawn
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Metro Exodus
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Red Dead Redemption 2
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Shadow of the Tomb Raider
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Strange Brigade
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Watch Dogs Legion
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These charts are a bit busy, perhaps, with five GPUs and three CPUs each, plus overclocking. Take your time. We won’t judge. Nine of the games are from the existing suite, and the trends noted earlier basically continue.
Looking just at the four new games, AMD gets a big win in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (it’s an AMD promotional title, so future updates may change the standings). Dirt 5 is also a bit of an odd duck for Nvidia, with the RTX 3090 actually doing quite badly on the Ryzen 9 5900X and Core i9-10900K for some reason. Horizon Zero Dawn ends up favoring Nvidia quite a bit (but not the 3070), and lastly, we have Watch Dogs Legion, which favors Nvidia a bit (more at 4K), but it might have some bugs that are currently helping AMD’s performance.
Overall, the 3090 still maintains its (gold-plated) crown, which you’d sort of expect from a $1,500 graphics card that you can’t even buy right now. Meanwhile, the RX 6800 XT mixes it up with the RTX 3080, coming out slightly ahead overall at 1080p and 1440p but barely trailing at 4K. Meanwhile, the RX 6800 easily outperforms the RTX 3070 across the suite, though a few games and/or lower resolutions do go the other way.
Oddly, my test systems ended up with the Core i9-10900K and even the Core i9-9900K often leading the Ryzen 9 5900X. The 3090 did best with the 5900X at 1080p, but then went to the 10900K at 1440p and both the 9900K and 10900K at 4K. The other GPUs also swap places, though usually the difference between CPU is pretty negligible (and a few results just look a bit buggy).
It may be that the beta BIOS for the MSI X570 board (which enables Smart Memory Access) still needs more tuning, or that the differences in memory came into play. I didn’t have time to check performance without enabling the large PCIe BAR feature either. But these are mostly very small differences, and any of the three CPUs tested here are sufficient for gaming.
As for overclocking, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. Increase the power limit, GPU core clocks, and GDDR6 clocks and you get more performance. It’s not a huge improvement, though. Overall, the RX 6800 XT was 4-6 percent faster when overclocked (the higher results were at 4K). The RX 6800 did slightly better, improving by 6 percent at 1080p and 1440p, and 8 percent at 4K. GPU clocks were also above 2.5GHz for most of the testing of the RX 6800, and it’s default lower boost clock gave it a bit more room for improvement.
Radeon RX 6800 Series Ray Tracing Performance
So far, most of the games haven’t had ray tracing enabled. But that’s the big new feature for RDNA2 and the Radeon RX 6000 series, so we definitely wanted to look into ray tracing performance more. Here’s where things take a turn for the worse because ray tracing is very demanding, and Nvidia has DLSS to help overcome some of the difficulty by doing AI-enhanced upscaling. AMD can’t do DLSS since it’s Nvidia proprietary tech, which means to do apples-to-apples comparisons, we have to turn off DLSS on the Nvidia cards.
That’s not really fair because DLSS 2.0 and later actually look quite nice, particularly when using the Balanced or Quality modes. What’s more, native 4K gaming with ray tracing enabled is going to be a stretch for just about any current GPU, including the RTX 3090 — unless you’re playing a lighter game like Pumpkin Jack. Anyway, we’ve looked at ray tracing performance with DLSS in a bunch of these games, and performance improves by anywhere from 20 percent to as much as 80 percent (or more) in some cases. DLSS may not always look better, but a slight drop in visual fidelity for a big boost in framerates is usually hard to pass up.
We’ll have to see if AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution can match DLSS in the future, and how many developers make use of it. Considering AMD’s RDNA2 GPUs are also in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, we wouldn’t count AMD out, but for now, Nvidia has the technology lead. Which brings us to native ray tracing performance.
10-game DXR Average
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3DMark Port Royal
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Boundary Benchmark
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Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War
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Control
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Crysis Remastered
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Dirt 5
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Fortnite
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Metro Exodus
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Shadow of the Tomb Raider
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WatchDogs
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Well. So much for AMD’s comparable performance. AMD’s RX 6800 series can definitely hold its own against Nvidia’s RTX 30-series GPUs in traditional rasterization modes. Turn on ray tracing, even without DLSS, and things can get ugly. AMD’s RX 6800 XT does tend to come out ahead of the RTX 3070, but then it should — it costs more, and it has twice the VRAM. But again, DLSS (which is supported in seven of the ten games/tests we used) would turn the tables, and even the DLSS quality mode usually improves performance by 20-40 percent (provided the game isn’t bottlenecked elsewhere).
Ignoring the often-too-low framerates, overall, the RTX 3080 is nearly 25 percent faster than the RX 6800 XT at 1080p, and that lead only grows at 1440p (26 percent) and 4K (30 percent). The RTX 3090 is another 10-15 percent ahead of the 3080, which is very much out of AMD’s reach if you care at all about ray tracing performance — ignoring price, of course.
The RTX 3070 comes out with a 10-15 percent lead over the RX 6800, but individual games can behave quite differently. Take the new Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. It supports multiple ray tracing effects, and even the RTX 3070 holds a significant 30 percent lead over the 6800 XT at 1080p and 1440p. Boundary, Control, Crysis Remastered, and (to a lesser extent) Fortnite also have the 3070 leading the AMD cards. But Dirt 5, Metro Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Watch Dogs Legion have the 3070 falling behind the 6800 XT at least, and sometimes the RX 6800 as well.
There is a real question about whether the GPUs are doing the same work, though. We haven’t had time to really dig into the image quality, but Watch Dogs Legion for sure doesn’t look the same on AMD compared to Nvidia with ray tracing enabled. Check out these comparisons:
Apparently Ubisoft knows about the problem. In a statement to us, it said, “We are aware of the issue and are working to address it in a patch in December.” But right now, there’s a good chance that AMD’s performance in Watch Dogs Legion at least is higher than it should be with ray tracing enabled.
Overall, AMD’s ray tracing performance looks more like Nvidia’s RTX 20-series GPUs than the new Ampere GPUs, which was sort of what we expected. This is first gen ray tracing for AMD, after all, while Nvidia is on round two. Frankly, looking at games like Fortnite, where ray traced shadows, reflections, global illumination, and ambient occlusion are available, we probably need fourth gen ray tracing hardware before we’ll be hitting playable framerates with all the bells and whistles. And we’ll likely still need DLSS, or AMD’s Super Resolution, to hit acceptable frame rates at 4K.
Radeon RX 6800 Series: Power, Temps, Clocks, and Fans
We’ve got our usual collection of power, temperature, clock speed, and fan speed testing using Metro Exodus running at 1440p, and FurMark running at 1600×900 in stress test mode. While Metro is generally indicative of how other games behave, we loop the benchmark five times, and there are dips where the test restarts and the GPU gets to rest for a few seconds. FurMark, on the other hand, is basically a worst-case scenario for power and thermals. We collect the power data using Powenetics software and hardware, which uses GPU-Z to monitor GPU temperatures, clocks, and fan speeds.
GPU Total Power
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AMD basically sticks to the advertised 300W TBP on the 6800 XT with Metro Exodus, and even comes in slightly below the 250W TBP on the RX 6800. Enabling Rage Mode on the 6800 XT obviously changes things, and you can also see our power figures for the manual overclocks. Basically, Big Navi can match RTX 3080 when it comes to power if you relax increase the power limits.
FurMark pushes power on both cards a bit higher, which is pretty typical. If you check the line graphs, you can see our 6800 XT OC starts off at nearly 360W in FurMark before it throttles down a bit and ends up at closer to 350W. There are some transient power spikes that can go a bit higher as well, which we’ll discuss more later.
GPU Core Clocks
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Looking at the GPU clocks, AMD is pushing some serious MHz for a change. This is now easily the highest clocked GPU we’ve ever seen, and when we manually overclocked the RX 6800, we were able to hit a relatively stable 2550 MHz. That’s pretty damn impressive, especially considering power use isn’t higher than Nvidia’s GPUs. Both cards also clear their respective Game Clocks and Boost Clocks, which is a nice change of pace.
GPU Core Temp
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GPU Fan Speed
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Temperatures and fan speeds are directly related to each other. Ramp of fan speed — which we did for the overclocked 6800 cards — and you can get lower temperatures, at the cost of noise levels. We’re still investigating overclocking as well, as there’s a bit of odd behavior so far. The cards will run fine for a while, and then suddenly drop into a weak performance mode where performance might be half the normal level, or even worse. That’s probably due to the lack of overclocking support in MSI Afterburner for the time being. By default, though, the cards have a good balance of cooling with noise. We’ll get exact SPL readings later (still benchmarking a few other bits), but it’s interesting that all of the new GPUs (RTX 30-series and RX 6000) have lower fan speeds than the previous generation.
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We observed some larger-than-expected transient power spikes with the RX 6800 XT, but to be absolutely clear, these transient power spikes shouldn’t be an issue — particularly if you don’t plan on overclocking. However, it is important to keep these peak power measurements in mind when you spec out your power supply.
Transient power spikes are common but are usually of such short duration (in the millisecond range) that our power measurement gear, which records measurements at roughly a 100ms granularity, can’t catch them. Typically you’d need a quality oscilloscope to measure transient power spikes accurately, but we did record several spikes even with our comparatively relaxed polling.
The charts above show total power consumption of the RX 6800XT at stock settings, overclocked, and with Rage Mode enabled. In terms of transient power spikes, we don’t see any issues at all with Metro Exodus, but we see brief peaks during Furmark of 425W with the manually overclocked config, 373W with Rage Mode, and 366W with the stock setup. Again, these peaks were measured within one 100ms polling cycle, which means they could certainly trip a PSU’s over power protection if you’re running at close to max power delivery.
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To drill down on the topic, we split out our power measurements from each power source, which you’ll see above. The RX 6800 XT draws power from the PCIe slot and two eight-pin PCIe connectors (PEG1/PEG2).
Power consumption over the PCIe slot is well managed during all the tests (as a general rule of thumb, this value shouldn’t exceed 71W, and the 6800 XT is well below that mark). We also didn’t catch any notable transient spikes during our real-world Metro Exodus gaming test at either stock or overclocked settings.
However, during our FurMark test at stock settings, we see a power consumption spike to 206W on one of the PCIe cables for a very brief period (we picked up a single measurement of the spike during each run). After overclocking, we measured a simultaneous spike of 231W on one cable and 206W on the other for a period of one measurement taken at a 100ms polling rate. Naturally, those same spikes are much less pronounced with Rage Mode overclocking, measuring only 210W and 173W. A PCIe cable can easily deliver ~225W safely (even with 18AWG), so these transient power spikes aren’t going to melt connectors, wires, or harm the GPU in any way — they would need to be of much longer duration to have that type of impact.
But the transient spikes are noteworthy because some CPUs, like the Intel Core i9-9900K and i9-10900K, can consume more than 300W, adding to the total system power draw. If you plan on overclocking, it would be best to factor the RX6800 XT’s transient power consumption into the total system power.
Power spikes of 5-10ms can trip the overcurrent protection (OCP) on some multi-rail power supplies because they tend to have relatively low OCP thresholds. As usual, a PSU with a single 12V rail tends to be the best solution because they have much better OCP mechanisms, and you’re also better off using dedicated PCIe cables for each 8-pin connector.
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Radeon RX 6800 Series: Prioritizing Rasterization Over Ray Tracing
It’s been a long time since AMD had a legitimate contender for the GPU throne. The last time AMD was this close … well, maybe Hawaii (Radeon R9 290X) was competitive in performance at least, while using quite a bit more power. That’s sort of been the standard disclaimer for AMD GPUs for quite a few years. Yes, AMD has some fast GPUs, but they tend to use a lot of power. The other alternative was best illustrated by one of the best budget GPUs of the past couple of years: AMD isn’t the fastest, but dang, look how cheap the RX 570 is! With the Radeon RX 6800 series, AMD is mostly able to put questions of power and performance behind it. Mostly.
The RX 6800 XT ends up just a bit slower than the RTX 3080 overall in traditional rendering, but it costs less, and it uses a bit less power (unless you kick on Rage Mode, in which case it’s a tie). There are enough games where AMD comes out ahead that you can make a legitimate case for AMD having the better card. Plus, 16GB of VRAM is definitely helpful in a few of the games we tested — or at least, 8GB isn’t enough in some cases. The RX 6800 does even better against the RTX 3070, generally winning most benchmarks by a decent margin. Of course, it costs more, but if you have to pick between the 6800 and 3070, we’d spend the extra $80.
The problem is, that’s a slippery slope. At that point, we’d also spend an extra $70 to go to the RX 6800 XT … and $50 more for the RTX 3080, with its superior ray tracing and support for DLSS, is easy enough to justify. Now we’re looking at a $700 graphics card instead of a $500 graphics card, but at least it’s a decent jump in performance.
Of course, you can’t buy any of the Nvidia RTX 30-series GPUs right now. Well, you can, if you get lucky. It’s not that Nvidia isn’t producing cards; it’s just not producing enough cards to satisfy the demand. And, let’s be real for a moment: There’s not a chance in hell AMD’s RX 6800 series are going to do any better. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but these cards are going to sell out. You know, just like every other high-end GPU and CPU launched in the past couple of months. (Update: Yup, every RX 6800 series GPU sold out within minutes.)
What’s more, AMD is better off producing more Ryzen 5000 series CPUs than Radeon RX 6000 GPUs. Just look at the chip sizes and other components. A Ryzen 9 5900X has two 80mm square compute die with a 12nm IO die in a relatively compact package, and AMD is currently selling every single one of those CPUs for $550 — or $800 for the 5950X. The Navi 21 GPU, by comparison, is made on the same TSMC N7 wafers, and it uses 519mm square, plus it needs GDDR6 memory, a beefy cooler and fan, and all sorts of other components. And it still only sells for roughly the same price as the 5900X.
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Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t want to buy an RX 6800 card. It’s really going to come down to personal opinions on how important ray tracing will become in the coming years. The consoles now support the technology, but even the Xbox Series X can’t keep up with an RX 6800, never mind an RTX 3080. Plus, while some games like Control make great use of ray tracing effects, in many other games, the ray tracing could be disabled, and most people wouldn’t really miss it. We’re still quite a ways off from anything approaching Hollywood levels of fidelity rendered in real time.
In terms of features, Nvidia still comes out ahead. Faster ray tracing, plus DLSS — and whatever else those Tensor cores might be used for in the future — seems like the safer bet long term. But there are still a lot of games forgoing ray tracing effects, or games where ray tracing doesn’t make a lot of sense considering how it causes frame rates to plummet. Fortnite in creative mode might be fine for ray tracing, but I can’t imagine many competitive players being willing to tank performance just for some eye candy. The same goes for Call of Duty. But then there’s Cyberpunk 2077 looming, which could be the killer game that ray tracing hardware needs.
We asked earlier if Big Navi, aka RDNA2, was AMD’s Ryzen moment for its GPUs. In a lot of ways, it’s exactly that. The first generation Ryzen CPUs brought 8-core CPUs to mainstream platforms, with aggressive prices that Intel had avoided. But the first generation Zen CPUs and motherboards were raw and had some issues, and it wasn’t until Zen 2 that AMD really started winning key matchups, and Zen 3 finally has AMD in the lead. Perhaps it’s better to say that Navi, in general, is AMD trying to repeat what it did on the CPU side of things.
RX 6800 (Navi 21) is literally a bigger, enhanced version of last year’s Navi 10 GPUs. It’s up to twice the CUs, twice the memory, and is at least a big step closer to feature parity with Nvidia now. If you can find a Radeon RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT in stock any time before 2021, it’s definitely worth considering. RX 6800 and Big Navi aren’t priced particularly aggressively, but they do slot in nicely just above and below Nvidia’s competing RTX 3070 and 3080.
The Italian audio company Gold Note designs and builds its products in Florence, the capital of the Tuscany region. The company claims to be influenced by the culture and (art) history of this region on the one hand, but at the same time incorporates modern and digital insights and technology into its products. In our test room are the DS – 12, a DA converter also streamer also headphone amplifier and PA – 10, a two-channel power amplifier. The devices have the same shape and dimensions and are relatively compact. How do these Tuscan products sound? We’re going the DS – 12 and PA – 10 View and Investigate. Â
Gold Note: Italian audio equipment manufacturer
The Italian audio company Gold Note was founded by Maurizio Aterini and is based in Florence. In their own words, the onset is already about 32 years ago due to the fact that founder Aterini, as a technical student, was dissatisfied with the performance level of the then turntables. After gaining the necessary design experience and work experience in the audio industry, Aterini established 2012 together with his wife Elena and his partner Alessio Gold Note op.
According to the company’s website, audio equipment often has a dual focus. On the one hand, this is a longing for the past, which can sometimes be found in the design. On the other hand, new developments and technology are often eagerly embraced. In the case of Gold Note, the appearance of the products is, according to them, inspired by the (art) history of the Italian region of Tuscany. In particular, the Gold Note turntables and speakers show smooth lines and a traditional construction method that looks artistic. We see that more often with Italian loudspeaker manufacturers. At the same time, Gold Note looks emphatically at modern technology and the company has a number of digital products. All products are designed and built in Italy.
Ease of use also plays a role. After all, Gold Note also has (pre) amplifiers with analog and digital inputs and streaming functions on board. In our test room is the DS – 12, a DA converter also streamer and headphone amplifier. This is a good example of many and easy to operate (modern) functions housed in a small housing. We’re going the DS – 12 in a moment, together with the PA – 10 a compact power amplifier.
Gold Note: portfolio of sources, amplifiers and speakers Gold Note’s portfolio covers everything today’s music lover needs. Well come on, Gold Note doesn’t build reel recorders, cassette decks and tuners, but it does build speakers, amplifiers (front, end and integrated), turntables, tonearms, cartridges, DA converters and streamers. The portfolio is not very large and does not change very frequently. Gold Note is not the kind of manufacturer that is constantly releasing new models. That is positive because a manufacturer that has models followed in quick succession gives the impression that it is not doing its homework properly. After all, barring one exception, a well-built device cannot be greatly improved a short time later.
Gold Note currently offers four speakers. A vinyl enthusiast can choose from five turntables, five pickups, two tone arms and two phono amps. Gold Note also offers one CD player, three DA converters as well as streamers, one integrated amplifier and a streamer that also has a phono stage on board, one preamplifier and two power amplifiers. . Gold Note also provides the ability to power the DS – 12, DS – 10 Plus, PH – 10, PH-1, CD – 1000, DS – 1000 upgradeable by external power supply. Recently the PSU 12 EVO announced, the external power supply for the DS – 10 and DS – 12 Plus, whose delivery should start soon. A customer can choose to immediately purchase an external power supply with his Gold Note device, but a customer can also do so later.
One of these power amplifiers is the compact model PA – 10 which is in our test room. The dad-10 is eight inches wide. Also in our test room is the DS – 10, a DA converter, streamer and headphone amplifier with volume control. Both devices have the same dimensions and can be supplied in the same color. Gold Note claims to have made two flexible and easy to operate devices. We look at the technology of both devices and then listen to music.
Gold Note PA – 12: power amplifier
The 2-channel PA – 10 works in class AB and can be used twice 125 Deliver watts into eight ohms. At four ohms, the power doubles to 150 Watt. If the impedance is halved again, ie to two ohms, the PA – 10 as stated by Gold Note 300 Deliver watts per channel. There is a small fan on the inside, which starts if the temperature exceeds a certain threshold value by playing at a high volume for a longer period of time. During the test period, we did not hear the fan.
The dad-10 also has the option to bridge the output stages (this is called by Gold Note Bridge-Tied-Load (BTL mode)), causing the PA – 10 becomes a mono amplifier by combining the output stages. The small box can then 384 Deliver watts to eight ohms and 850 Watts at four ohms. BTL mode also allows the user to connect with one PA – 10 and a second PA later – 10 next to it.
The user has the choice of a cinch input and an XLR input, both with an input sensitivity of 1.4 Volt and an impedance of 13 kOhm.
Furthermore, the user can choose a high or low damping factor with a button on the back. The default is a high damping factor, but according to Gold Note, a sensitive or small speaker can benefit from a low damping factor. The explanation of this in the manual is rather brief and we have not investigated this aspect further. We have the PA – 12 used with a high damping factor.
With the supplied trigger cable (called GN Link by Gold Note) the PA – 10 on / off with other devices, such as the DS – 10.
The heavy-duty speaker terminals accept banana plugs, forks and bare wire.
Gold Note DS – 10: DA converter, streamer and headphone amplifier
The DS – 10 has the same shape and aluminum housing as the PA – 12. Gold Note has the DS – 10 packed with modern contemporary features but at the same time trying to keep operation simple. Only one button can be found on the front. By pressing the button functions can be selected by then turning the button. If the button is not pressed, the button works as a volume control. Gold Note delivers a nice IR system remote control with the DS – 10. Let’s walk through the functions of the DS – 10.
The DS – 10, which is therefore equipped with a volume control (which can be bypassed and locked in the highest position), has only digital inputs, for connecting a CD- running gear or a streamer. Connecting a streamer is not very obvious because the DS – 10 is already a very complete streamer, but it is possible. Gold Note allows the user to adjust the sound by setting three parameters as desired. These are 1. the Low Pass filter, 2. High-frequency De-emphasis, and 3. Power line to the DAC chip. Gold Note therefore speaks of a Chameleon Dac. The user can save three profiles in addition to the default setting of the DA converter.
The DS – 10 is quite a complete streamer. The user can connect music to the DS with a computer via UPnP via wired or wireless LAN – 10 or via bluetooth 5.0, or via Apple’s AirPlay. Also, the user can connect a USB HDD or SSD formatted in FAT 32 or NTFS. The DS – 12 easily recognized a Western Digital 1TB USB HDD. The USB-HDD switches on / off with the DS – 10. The usual streaming services such as Spotify, Qobuz, Deezer and Tidal are supported, as well as internet radio via vTuner. The streamer is operated with the MConnect app. More about operation with the MConnect app later.
The DS – 10 supports MQA and is Roon-ready. Music signal may be supplied via the USB-B input in a resolution up to 32-bit/384 kHz. DSD can also be used via this entrance / 128 are delivered and processed. The other inputs (S / PDIF coax, optical and AES / EBU) allow PCM signal up to a maximum of 24-bit/192 kHz are played.
Note: who would need an analog input for the DS – 10 Plus can choose. This device has exactly the same shape and functions as the DS – 10 with addition of an analog line input designed as a 3.5 millimeter jack plug.
As befits a serious streamer, the DS – 10 an RJ 45 LAN terminal. In addition, the DS – 10 also Wi-Fi on board, but we strongly prefer a wired connection because of its inherently better stutter resistance.
The connection to an amplifier is made via the cinch output or the XLR output. On the front panel is a 6, 45 millimeter jack plug headphone connection.
Finally, a few more numbers: Gold Note specifies a signal to noise ratio of 125 dB. The total harmonic distortion is maximum 0, 06 per cent. These are excellent figures, but not exceptional because most modern DA converters have comparable figures. Basically noise and distortion are below the perceptible limit.
Enough talk about technique. Time to connect Gold Note devices and start listening to music.
SilentiumPC presents a new series of enclosures – Ventum VT2. Their distinguishing feature is the fully open front panel ensuring high airflow and the possibility of mounting processor cooling systems, including integrated liquid cooling systems (All-In-One), which is wide in this price range. The family consists of: Ventum VT2, Ventum VT2 TG with a side panel made of tempered glass, Ventum VT2 TG ARGB with a backlit ARGB fan and Ventum VT2 Evo TG ARGB with three illuminating ARGB fans mounted on the front of the case. Prices will range from approximately 135 to 220 . You can find all the details below.
SilentiumPC introduces a new series of cases – Ventum VT2. Their distinguishing feature is a fully open front panel ensuring high air flow and a wide possibility of installing cooling systems in this price range. All at affordable prices.
SPC Gear GK 630 K – TKL keyboard with three types of Kailh switches
The structure of the Ventum VT2 enclosures is to provide enough space for most popular components in this segment: the air cooling system can be as high as 159 mm, and the graphics card may be 290 mm. Thus, Ventum VT2 will prove itself as the basis for even very efficient computers equipped with e.g. 8-core, high-clocked processors and modern graphics cards with extensive cooling systems. The user can also mount the AIO liquid cooling system on the processor. The Ventum VT2 case will fit the following sizes: 120 / 140 / 240 / 280 / 360 mm, and on the top 120 / 240 mm provided the RAM and motherboard heat sinks are not higher than 32 mm.
SilentiumPC Astrum AT6V case test TG – Opus magnum?
Proper ventilation of the housing interior and low temperatures of the installed components is to be achieved not only by the open front, but also by the high-pressure Sigma HP fans 120 mm CF and highlighted : Stella HP ARGB 120 mm CF or P ulsar HP ARGB 120 mm CF. The number of fans and their type depends on the Ventum VT2 housing version:
Ventum VT2: 1x Sigma HP 120 mm CF (rear)
Ventum VT2 TG: 2x Sigma HP 120 mm CF (front and rear)
Ventum VT2 TG ARGB: 1x Pulsar HP ARGB 120 mm CF (rear), 1x Sigma HP 120 mm CF (front)
Ventum VT2 Evo TG ARGB: 3x Stella HP ARGB 120 mm CF (front)
Ventum VT2’s ventilation system can be expanded to a maximum of 8 fans 120 mm (three on the front, two on the top, one on the rear and two on the lower compartment cover) Fans in size 140 mm fit two to the front of the chassis.
A set of dust filters protects against the ingress of dirt inside the computer – under the power supply and on the top of the housing, conveniently attached with magnets. In the lower chamber and the Ventum VT2 service bay, there is space for two SSD carriers or 2.5 “drives, and another 3.5” or 2.5 “drive mounted on anti-vibration rubber mounts on the bottom of the housing. The top I / O panel consists of two USB 3.2 Gen 1 (3.0) ports, audio ports (for headphones and a microphone) as well as the POWER and RESET buttons. Below are the most important points of the case specifications.
SilentiumPC Spartan 4 – Four small CPU coolers
Ventum VT2
Ventum VT2 TG
Ventum VT2 TG ARGB
Ventum VT2 Evo TG ARGB
Dimensions and weight
374 x 211 x 441 mm, 3, 45 kg
374 x 215 x 441 mm, 4.4 kg
374 x 215 x 441 mm, 4, 55 kg
Standard
mITX / microATX / ATX
Number of bays
1x 2.5 “/ 3.5 2x 2.5 ″
Slots for expansion cards
7
Dust Filters
top (magnet), bottom (magnet), front mesh with 0.9 mm holes
Maximum graphics card length
290 mm
Maximum CPU cooling height
159 mm
Maximum PSU Length
180 / 230 mm
Installed cooling system
Rear: 1x Sigma HP 120 mm CF
Front: 1x Sigma HP 120 mm CF Rear: 1x Sigma HP 120 mm CF
Front: 1x Sigma HP 120 mm CF Rear: 1x Pulsar HP ARGB 120 mm CF
Front: 3x Stella HP ARGB 120 mm CF
AIO Compatible
Front: 1x 120 / 140 / 240 / 280 / 360 mm Top: 1x 120 / 240 mm (max. RAM height: 32 mm) Back: 1x 120 mm
Buttons and connectors on the I / O panel
2 × USB 3.2 gen 1 1 × Headphone (HD Audio) 1 × microphone (HD Audio) 1 × POWER button 1 × RESET button Nano-Reset ARGB controller with splitter only for Ventum VT2 Evo TG ARGB
João Silva 2 days ago Featured Tech News, Graphics
EVGA has launched its first graphics card cooled by a 360mm AIO – the RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid. Designed as the “ultimate card for extreme overclocking”, the RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid follows on the success of its predecessors defining the “pinnacle of overclocking engineering and performance”.
Featuring a 12 layer PCB, 3x 8-pin power connectors, integrated Smart PowerStages (23 power phases), and Digital Power Solution, the RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid is a card aimed at those that want to push the boundaries of the RTX 3090 SKU to new heights. Its hybrid design includes a blower-style shroud with a fan and an additional 360mm radiator with 3x 120mm fans.
The built-in flip-up monitor OLED display has a 176x48p resolution, allowing you to monitor important information about your GPU such as temperatures, voltages, clock speeds, and much more. Due to its integration into the card’s PCB, the monitor will always be easy to read regardless of the card’s orientation.
The RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid graphics card has integrated headers to monitor voltages more precisely. Featuring three different BIOS (normal, OC, and LN2 modes) to choose from, this card comes with its memory clocked at stock settings, but the GPU is clocked at 1920MHz, one of the highest clocks of an RTX 3090 card out-of-the-box. Display connectors include an HDMI port and 3x DisplayPorts. Given its 350W TDP, EVGA recommends the use of a 750W PSU, at least.
The EVGA RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid graphics card is available now for $2000.
KitGuru says: Have you ever owned an EVGA KINGPIN graphics card? What do you think of the new RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid so far?
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