At E3 earlier this year, AMD made a huge splash in the graphics market with their new Fury and Fury X graphics cards. These new graphics cards would be the first on the market to boast the revolutionary new HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) technology which AMD is betting will be the future of graphics memory. Alongside the new Fury and Fury X, AMD also quietly launched the Radeon R9 300 series, but focused very little on the new graphics cards.

As it was later revealed, AMD’s upcoming Radeon R9 300 series lineup would pretty much be a re-badge of the Radeon R9 200 series lineup. As such I was honestly a bit disappointed. While I’m [...]

Late last year, AMD introduced the Hawaii based Radeon R9 290/290X along with the Bonaire based Radeon R7 260/260X which utilized AMD’s updated GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. AMD’s updated GCN architecture, which we’ll refer to GCN 1.1, supported new features such as improved compute performance, on die audio processing, and improvements to AMD’s PowerTune technology to offer a faster, more power efficient chip than its GCN 1.0 cousins.

Unfortunately, AMD’s GCN update didn’t cover the mid-range GCN 1.0 based GPUs such as the Radeon R9 270/R9 270X or the Radeon R9 280/280X, which meant [...]

As an enthusiast hardware review site, we generally don’t review low end graphics hardware, but it’s understandable that not everyone needs to have the latest $500+ graphics cards and it’s always interesting to see just how far you could get with a sub-$100 budget.

Today we’ll be reviewing two entry level Radeon R7 series graphics cards from ASUS, the ASUS Radeon R7 240 and R7 250. In terms of specs, both the ASUS Radeon R7 240 and Radeon R7 250 are equipped with 28nm Oland GPUs with a choice between the Radeon R7 250 containing a fully unlocked Oland GPU (aka Oland XT) paired with faster GDDR5 memory, or the Radeon R7 240 with a [...]

Recently, we came away very impressed with the MSI GeForce GTX 750 Gaming GPU, which was our first opportunity to check out a graphics card based off of Nvidia’s new Maxwell based GeForce GTX 750 series GPU. The GTX 750 series GPUs are Nvidia’s first GPUs to use Nvidia’s brand new, highly efficient SMM architecture to replace the older SMX architecture used on Nvidia’s previous generation Kepler based GPUs.

At launch, we unfortunately only got the opportunity to check out the GTX 750, which was the entry level GTX 750 series GPU. Alongside the GTX 750, Nvidia also launched the GTX 750 Ti, which is very [...]

Four years ago Nvidia launched the 40nm based Fermi GPU, two years ago Nvidia launched the 28nm based Kepler GPU, and now, two years after Kepler’s launch, it’s now time for Nvidia to launch their latest and greatest GPU – Maxwell.

Back at GTC of last year, we first officially received confirmation of Nvidia’s Maxwell GPUs, with Maxwell’s main goal of continuing the trend Nvidia began setting with their Kepler GPUs – better performance yet not at the expense of increased power consumption. Prior to Kepler, Nvidia had traditionally not worried too much about power consumption as long as performance increased by [...]

Late last year along with the unveil of AMD’s flagship Radeon R9 290X graphics card, AMD also unveiled a lower cost offering, the Radeon R9 290, which promised only slightly lower performance at a significantly lower price.

Since then the Radeon R9 290 has been extremely popular, and due to high demand and a shortage in components, we haven’t really seen any custom designed Radeon R9 290’s on the market until late last January.

That said, today we’ll be reviewing a the MSI Radeon R9 290 Gaming 4G, which is MSI’s latest custom designed graphics card based off AMD’s Radeon R9 290 GPU. Given that the [...]

Membrane switches and high-end gaming keyboards don’t mix very well; they’re often overshadowed by the much more tactile and responsive mechanical switches. Although we tend to see membrane switches on budget end keyboards, we do encounter a company that tries to break the norm from time to time by putting them on high end gaming keyboards. Gaming peripheral giant ROCCAT is one such company. A couple months ago, we reviewed the ROCCAT Isku gaming keyboard and was fairly impressed by its beautiful styling, huge programmable macro count and great performance.

However, the Isku isn’t ROCCAT’s only trick in the bag; [...]

Last week we were blessed with the opportunity to check out MSI’s R9 270 Gaming, which is an excellent variant of AMD’s recently introduced Radeon R9 270 and this week we’ll be checking out a brand new graphics card from PowerColor, the Devil R9 270X. While the Radeon R9 270X and its variants have been released several weeks ago, PowerColor’s cards were  unfortunately missing from AMD’s initial launch, but for those of you who waited, you’ll have the option of getting what may possibly be the best R9 270X variant out there.

Today we’ll be reviewing the PowerColor Devil R9 270X. As you may expect, the [...]

If you haven’t heard already, over the past couple weeks AMD has been on a graphics card launch frenzy launching a number of new graphics cards including the Radeon R9 270X, R9 280X, R9 290X and the R9 290. While impressive, with the exception of the R9 290X and the R9 290, most of the R9 200 lineup that’s been launched already is still based off AMD’s last generation GPU technology with the R9 280 series based off the Tahiti GPU found in the Radeon HD 7900 series and the R9 270 series based off the Pitcairn GPU found on the Radeon HD 7800 series. Given that AMD is expected to launch around eight GPUs for the R9 200 series before [...]

With Battlefield 4’s exclusive beta starting tomorrow and the open beta starting on October 4, both AMD and Nvidia have released updated beta drivers to ensure that their graphics cards will be able to handle the game at optimal performance.

On AMD’s side, AMD recently unveiled Catalyst 13.10 Beta 2, which includes among other enhancements features “…a 32-bit single GPU, and a AMD Crossfire™ game profile for Battlefield 4™”. Those rocking an AMD Radeon graphics card may download the Catalyst 13.10 Beta 2 here.

On Nvidia’s side, Nvidia recently unveiled the 331.40 Beta Driver, which among other enhancements features [...]