AMD launched their newest Ryzen CPUs to great fanfare back in March and while we found performance to be good in our launch review of the Ryzen 1700, we noted that there were quite a few growing pains that needed to be fixed before Ryzen could really shine against Intel. As such, rather than publishing another review of Ryzen on motherboards using incomplete BIOS firmware and badly optimized Windows, we decided to wait it out until AMD and its motherboard partners roll out the badly needed updates to allow Ryzen to really shine in all its glory.

As such, today we’ll be finally reviewing the AMD Ryzen 7 1700X and 1800X, the flagship AMD [...]

Well, this is it ladies and gentlemen. We’ve been waiting anxiously for over a year now for AMD’s latest Processor, after the disappointment of Bulldozer the PC building scene became primarily an Intel favored one for most serious workloads. While AMD’s APUs have found a pleasant place in the budget market and the FX lineup became a decent option for gamers looking for good bang for the buck, AMD remained way behind Intel in technology for what seams like forever. That changes today. Today we will be looking at Ryzen, will it live up to the hype? Will it fall flat on it’s face?

Although AMD’s Ryzen CPU is the hot topic of the tech world at the moment, let’s not forget about Intel, which recently launched their new beast of a processor, the Xeon E7-8894 v4.

Designed for scale-up workloads in an enterprise environment, the new 14nm Broadwell based Xeon E7-8894 v4 is a socket FCLGA2011 socket processor featuring a clock speed of 2.4GHz with boost clocks up to 3.4GHz, support for a whopping 24TB of DDR4 ECC memory, a monstrous 60MB of onboard cache, and a whopping 24-cores with Hyper-Threading allowing it to crunch up to 48-threads simultaneously all at a TDP of 165W.

Want one? Yeah, me too. The Intel Xeon E7-8894 v4 is [...]

When Intel launched the Broadwell-E platform earlier this year, Intel’s X99 chipset saw a surge in interest as many users became interested in upgrading their systems which required a suitable motherboard to match. Today we have an X99 platform motherboard that sits at below the $250 pricepoint and has the features to keep up with most users needs.

Today we’ll be reviewing the Gigabyte X99P SLI which is a motherboard that falls into the $200 range with a fairly extensive list of features making it quite competitive on paper.

The original X99 SLI motherboard from Gigabyte was priced at the $200 price point but [...]

The tech community has recently gone up in arms against Microsoft after their reaffirmation that they will not be supporting CPUs newer than Intel Haswell on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. While many has seen this as a power play by Microsoft to force users to upgrade to Windows 10, HotHardware recently presented a possible alternate explanation with much less malicious intent.

According to HotHardware, the decision not to support newer CPUs on older operating systems boils down to additional features that were added to the new CPUs. This largely includes the newest power saving features from both Intel and AMD as well as SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) from [...]

Although this week is Intel Developer Forum week, it hasn’t stopped AMD from stealing the thunder by unveiling a host of new details about their highly anticipated Zen CPU architecture.

As you’d expect, AMD has done quite a bit in terms of redesigning the entire CPU architecture with Zen when compared to previous CPU architectures to greatly improve performance.

The biggest improvement here is likely going to be the micro-op cache. This allows the Zen cores to decode up to 4 instructions per cycle with an additional 2 thanks to the new micro-op cache. Previously, the [...]

Several years ago, we reviewed the Patriot Viper 3 which was a great memory kit with aggressive styling, good performance, and a reasonable cost. Since then, we’ve seen the launch of DDR4 alongside several new platforms which support the new memory including Intel’s Skylake and Broadwell-E platforms.

The switch to DDR4 brings on several new features, the most notable benefit is that DDR4 dies are expected to be significantly higher density than DDR3, allowing manufacturer to achieve higher capacities per DIMM. DDR4 also operates at higher frequencies yet requires lower operating voltages paving way for higher performance [...]

Broadwell-E launched just last month, but rumors of its successor is already swirling around on the interwebs.

According to a recent article by Chinese technology publication, BenchLife, Intel will be launching three different product ranges on their upcoming Basin Falls-X platform.

This will include Skylake-X, Skylake-W and Kaby Lake-X. Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X will feature the new LGA2066 Socket AKA Socket R4 and use the Kaby Lake-X PCH. Skylake-W is targeted towards workstations and won’t have much impact on the consumer market.

The successor to Broadwell-E will be Skylake-X, which is fairly similar to what we see from [...]

During our stay at Computex we stopped by the Gigabyte suite and took a look at their motherboards.

The Designare series is a class of motherboards aimed at those looking for productivity, which is a very interesting step from Gigabyte. While very similar to their “Gaming” focused boards, this one has a focus on faster storage with dual SATA Express slots and support for U.2 and M.2 storage under the white shroud. It also supports the new Broadwell-E 10 core with a beefy 8+1 phase power design, which we would assume is from International Rectifier. Gigabyte boasts that with this board it won’t take a professional overclocker to [...]

With Intel’s Skylake looming right around the corner, everyone has all but forgotten about Broadwell… until now. Thanks to Chinese hardware site XFastest, some new leaked slides have surfaced detailing the possible specifications of the rumored Broadwell-E processors.

According to the slides, Intel’s Broadwell-E will have a maximum core count of 8 cores and will be built on the 14nm fabrication process. The highest end Broadwell-E CPU will have up to 20MB of cache and 40 PCI-E lanes. If Broadwell-E follows suit with Haswell-E, the 6 core model of Broadwell-E will also have a similar cache size and PCI-E lane counts. Broadwell-E will also [...]