Picking some of our benchmarks is easy enough. The x264 HD test is a great guide to video encode performance. It’s straight in. Cinebench gives a glimpse of how CPUs perform in professional applications which major on threading. Stick that on the list. Memory bandwidth is interesting in terms of the insight it gives to platform scalability and, therefore, makes the grade. Then there’s power consumption, which will split opinion in terms of its relevance on the desktop. At the very least, it reveals the underlying efficiency of a CPU architecture. Of course, we’re big fans of overclocking [...]

Continue Reading...

Overview So here it is, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 and, for the time being, it’s the fastest graphics card around. AMD has blinked first and opted to release its brand new graphics card architecture before Nvidia, and just before the new year. It’s a brave move by AMD though. Bringing out a radically different graphics design spec, compared with its previous vector processors, in the same year as it brought us a brand new CPU architecture. Especially given the depressing failure of the AMD FX chips. We’ve seen little bits from AMD about its new architecture, the plainly-named Graphics [...]

Continue Reading...

This new hex-core chip is symptomatic of AMD’s current predicament: that its most expensive PC processors sell for barely one-third the price of Intel’s. And that’s not a situation the new AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition is going to change – despite the fact that it’s officially AMD’s fastest and most expensive chip. With a retail sticker around £215, the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition is priced on a par with the very cheapest of Intel’s Core i7 processors such as the Intel Core i7 870. Nevertheless, it serves up six execution cores to [...]

Continue Reading...