The HD7790 is a budget replacement for the HD7850 1GB, which AMD recently discontinued because the memory chips were getting too expensive. The company recently launched the HD7790 to much priase from reviewers, but it’s achilles heel is the low VRAM on the current crop of reference models and overclocked editions – 1GB just isn’t enough these days if you’re playing at 1080p and like to inject some AA smoothness into your games. Sapphire’s HD7790 OC 2GB, however, appears to fix that.
In the future, Intel will be slowly moving away from a socketed processor lineup to a non-socketed one, secured by soldering it down into the motherboard using a ball-grid array (BGA) socket. The upside of this is lower production costs for Intel and the third-party OEMs that have to make the sockets and the socket adapters. The downside, however, is that once the processor is in, getting it out or even replacing it are expensive options. Both Intel and AMD have been using BGA sockets for laptops and low-power desktops for years but that doesn’t seem to have impacted or bothered consumers too much. But is the move to BGA really as bad a future as some people think? A recent review of ASRock’s VisionX HTPC offers us something of an answer.
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the System Builders Guide. We’re in the mid-range segment this week and as NAG’s previous surveys have shown, this is where most of the magazine’s readership spending power is concentrated. This also where the sweet-spot is – our R13,000 budget is the de facto standard for gaming rigs and if you’re looking for value for money, this guide will help you get all that and more. Follow me after the jump.
PowerColor is fast becoming a popular brand locally following Wootware’s pushing of the brand’s cards with low pricing and the Never Settle bundle codes guaranteed. I myself recommended that buyers at least consider their offering at the time, since Nvidia had nothing to counter with in the same price range and the game bundles are definitely tempting. PowerColor’s budget overclocked version ups the ante a bit and looks very striking.
For those of you still holding off on buying a new graphics card, AMD has updated its Never Settle bundle, which now includes Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a massive disco-themed, acid-laden trip back in time to ’80s games where there were lots of guns, nothing made sense, bad guys were everywhere and everything was decked out in psychedelic colours.
We’ve been hearing a lot about the new processor families AMD is readying for tablets and notebooks, codenamed Temash and Kabini. At MWC 2013 in conjunction with Compal and Wistron, the company demonstrated some of their products and Temash showed how long its legs really are, with a live demo of Torchlight 2 optimised for touch screens. Hit the jump if you’re ready for some drool today.
We’re back again with another episode in the Laptop Buyers guide and today we’re back into the low-end budget segment, trying to find the maximum value for your money where you’re forced to pick and choose which features matter most to you. The budget segment is the hardest hit whenever price increases take effect and this will be the first month that we’ll see evidence of this. Follow me after the jump to see why.
AMD has been getting more and more attention in the media lately and it’s not because they’d like to be within it’s good books – the company has just been doing and announcing so many things that it’s sometimes difficult to keep up. Over the weekend starting late on Friday, the company showed up in lots of articles that I couldn’t do one for each topic. So hit the jump to get back up to speed and see a new direction the company is now taking in cosying up to developers.
Well if you don’t yet know that there is a Battlefield 4, I’m glad you chose today to come out from under your rock. The internet was set abuzz with posters of the new shooter and there’s even a 17-minute segment of gameplay footage. It looks like Crysis 3, except it’s not Crysis 3. There’s abundant use of lens flare (where are you, J.J. Abrams?) and smoke. Its possibly the most awesome way I’ve seen anyone hype a game before.
Its a bit disconcerting to wake up one morning and find that overnight the entire review scene for both graphics cards and processors has changed dramatically. Together with several websites and writers in the technology field, Nvidia released their in-house frame latency testing tools to the public. Frame latency testing first took off with Tech Report’s Scott Wasson showing the world that frame latencies were to blame with jitters and micro-stutters observed in games, and that FPS averages were being used to mask the otherwise obvious issues to give graphics cards more favourable scores. Over time many sites have begun to include frame latency data using FRAPS, but Nvidia’s solution, designed with the help of PC Perspective, takes things to a different level entirely.
