Introduction

Back in 2013, OnePlus jumped into the smartphone scene with a bang, introducing their OnePlus One smartphone, which quickly distinguished itself by offering flagship class smartphone features at a pricepoint of just $299. Thanks to massive community support, OnePlus was able to quickly build a name for itself as the enthusiast class smartphone with the best value possible.

Fast forward to June 2017 and OnePlus has continued this tradition of delivering flagship class smartphones at very reasonable prices. The OnePlus 5 featured all the latest and greatest hardware including a 5.5-inch AMOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, up to 8GB of RAM, [...]

Quiet and Beautiful

AVADirect wasn’t really a systems builder on our radar until late last year when we reviewed their Avant Mini Cube Gaming PC. After extensive testing, we found that the system was well configured, well built, and well priced, quickly propelling AVADirect to the top as one of our favorite custom PC builders.

Recently, AVADirect sent us another one of the systems in their lineup, the AVADirect X370 Quiet Gaming PC, which as its name implies is AVADirect’s quiet gaming PC offering based on AMD’s X370 Ryzen platform.

AVADirect Quiet Gaming PC Specs Desktop AVADirect X370 Quiet Gaming PC Case Phanteks Eclipse P400S CPU AMD [...]

Videocardz has recently discovered a few benchmarks of the hotly rumored upcoming Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti.

The benches are from 3DMark 11, Fire Strike, and Time Spy. When compared against Videocardz own database, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti was shown to be faster than AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 in Time Spy, but was about even in Firestrike.

#gallery-6 { margin: auto; } #gallery-6 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-6 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-6 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php [...]

Geekbench scores for AMD’s Ryzen 5 2500U APU has surfaced, showing almost double the performance of AMD’s current flagship consumer APU, the A12-9800B.

Manufacturer AMD Intel Model Ryzen 5 2500U A12-9800B Core i7-7600U Single-Core Performance 3,561 2,315 4,736 Multi-Core Performance 9,421 5,115 9,314 Core Count 4 Cores/8 Threads 4 Cores/4 Threads 2 Cores/4 Threads Tested Clocks 2GHz/??? 2.69GHz Base / 3.6GHz Turbo 2.89GHz Base / 3.9GHz Turbo TDP TBD 15W 15W

According to the leaked benchmark, the Ryzen 5 2500U scores 3,561 single core and 9,421 in multi-core, beating AMD’s current flagship APU, the A12-9800B, by 54% in single-core [...]

Geekbench scores of to Intel’s upcoming 6-core Coffee Lake family (i7-8700K, i7-8700, i5-8400) has recently been revealed in the Geekbench database.

#gallery-7 { margin: auto; } #gallery-7 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-7 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-7 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Unlike the previous Geekbench leak, which was clearly a very early sample with not even a concrete processor name attached, the new leak now [...]

If you recently purchased or built a new PC, or upgraded an older PC, the most important thing to do aside from stress testing is to benchmark. Whereas stress testing helps ensure the PC is completely stable not only during idle but also during heavy load, benchmarking will help ensure that the PC is operating at the appropriate level of performance for the components installed. As simple issues such as an outdated driver or an improperly configured component may significantly degrade performance, benchmark testing will allow you to quickly catch any issues and to fix them immediately so you can take full advantage of the new hardware that you’ve spent your hard earned [...]

64-Layer 3D NAND, USB 3.1 Gen 2

Last year I was fortunate enough to be among the first to review the Samsung T3 Portable SSD. The drive was small, durable, fast, available in capacities up to 2TB, and relatively good looking making it not only my favorite portable SSD, but also my most highly recommended as well.

Of course, with Samsung’s annual release cycles, Samsung recently launched the new Samsung T5 Portable SSD which we’ll be reviewing today.

Samsung Portable SSD T5 Specifications Manufacturer Samsung Model T5 Capacity 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB Interface Type-C USB 3.1 (Gen 2), USB 3.0, USB 2.0 Transfer Speed Up to [...]

After about a year since we first heard about AMD Vega, AMD has finally announced the new graphics card, marking AMD’s return to the enthusiast graphics market after years of sitting on the sidelines.

AMD’s RX Vega lineup will consist of two new graphics cards, the RX Vega 64 and the RX Vega 56.

 

AMD Radeon RX Vega 64

The Radeon RX Vega 64 is AMD’s flagship RX Vega graphics card. The 64 in its name signifies the number of next generation compute units in the GPU, which in this case is 64. Multiply this number by 64 Stream Processors per compute unit and you get a total of 4096 Stream Processors.

The base [...]

During AMD’s SIGGRAPH event, the company finally revealed the full details, lineup and availability of their highly anticipated Ryzen Threadripper CPUs.

AMD will release three products into the Ryzen Threadripper family. At the top of the stack is the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, which will feature 16-cores/32-threads, a base clock of 3.4GHz, a turbo clock of 4.0GHz + XFR to 4.2GHz, 180w TDP and will retail for $999 starting August 10. In the middle is the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X, which will feature 12-cores/24-threads, a base clock of 3.5GHz, a turbo clock of 4.0GHz + XFR to 4.2GHz, 180w TDP and will retail for $999 starting August 10. Of course, most of [...]