Reviews 52161 Published by

Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

31-Way NVIDIA GeForce / AMD Radeon Linux OpenGL Comparison - End-Of-Year 2016
Commercial NAS Operating Systems - Exploring Value-Additions - Part I
Corsair Force MP500 480GB M.2 NVMe SSD Review
Corsair Force MP500 480GB M2 SSD Review
NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal) Review
Shadow Warrior 2 Performance Analysis
SteelSeries Arctis 3 Review
Synology, Seagate, and Amcrest's 2016 Surveillance Bundle Capsule Review
Team Group T-Force Night Hawk 3000 MHz DDR4
Zotacs Zbox Magnus EN1070 mini-PC reviewed



31-Way NVIDIA GeForce / AMD Radeon Linux OpenGL Comparison - End-Of-Year 2016

Last week I published some fresh AMD Linux 4.9 + Mesa 13.1-dev benchmarks on many different AMD Radeon GPUs going all the way back to the Radeon HD 4800 series days. Today those numbers are being complemented by an extensive NVIDIA GeForce Fermi / Kepler / Maxwell / Pascal comparison to make up a 31-way NVIDIA/AMD Linux OpenGL performance comparison. If you are curious how the NVIDIA and AMD Linux performance is with the very latest drivers and going back several hardware generations, this holiday article is for you.

As already mentioned, the testing on the AMD side was with their fully open-source driver stack and using the newest code (Linux 4.9 + Mesa 13.1-dev) where this mainline code continues to support all AMD GPUs, even going back to the RV770 days compared to AMDGPU-PRO now just supporting GCN hardware. Overall the open-source AMD Linux driver stack advanced a heck of a lot this year as covered in the many Phoronix articles. The AMD cards tested based upon what I had available and limiting it to the HD 4890 and newer were: the Radeon HD 4890, HD 5830, HD 6870, HD 6950, HD 7750, HD 7950, R7 260X, R9 270X, R9 285, R7 370, RX 460, RX 470, RX 480, and R9 Fury. On the FirePro side I was also able to test the V8750 and V8800 as additional data points but unfortunately have no newer FirePro / Radeon Pro hardware.

Read full article @ Phoronix

Commercial NAS Operating Systems - Exploring Value-Additions - Part I

A comprehensive overview of how various commercial off-the-shelf NAS operating systems address the core requirements was posted last month. From the perspective of addressed features, the core requirements are fulfilled by all vendors in the space. The user-experience, despite varying significantly from vendor to vendor, is difficult to convey from a marketing perspective to consumers. Therefore, there is a reliance on value-additions to sway the purchase decision. In this first follow-up article, we look at three of the most important value-additions that NAS vendors offer in their OS - multimedia support, surveillance recording / NVR capabilities, and remote access / cloud-related features.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Corsair Force MP500 480GB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

Corsair hasn'€™t been that aggressive in the SSD market recently, but all that changed earlier this month when their announced the Force MP500. This drive marks a number of firsts for Corsair as it is their first drive to ever use the M.2 2280 form factor, PCIe interface, and the NVMe protocol. Since this is Corsair€™s first PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSD it has blisteringly fast sequential speeds of up to 3,000 MB/s read and 2,400 MB/s write, which makes it roughly 5 times faster than the Corsair Nuetron Series XTi drives that used to be their flagship storage drive series. Read on to find out more!

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

Corsair Force MP500 480GB M2 SSD Review

M2 is interesting stuff, these smaller form factors storage units are evolving from being "just as fast" as a regular SSD towards double, tripling, heck... even quadrupling that performance. It comes in a different package , M.2. The M.2 interface is so much more capable as it can deal with way more bandwidth using PCI-Express lanes. As such, M.2 solutions are intended for enthusiast class motherboards. The M8Pe series M.2 SSDs are a breathtaking series of storage technology as they offer enthusiast class performance yet remain reasonable in pricing depending on NAND type. Though prices still need to go on-line, we already spotted our tested Corsair Force MP500 480GB for roughly 300 EURO, which would mean 63 cents per GB. Keep in mind you are looking at a product with @ 3.000/2.400MB/s reads and writes respectively. These new M.2 units use the NVMe protocol and that means storage technology at hyper fast speeds while remaining competitive in pricing.

The SSD is Corsair’s first consumer-ready Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) M.2 form factor SSD available in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities. The sticks 'o fun have been fitted with Toshiba NAND (15nm) and is located under product code CSSD-F480GBMP500. The performance numbers a good SATA3 SSD offers these days are simply excellent, but with NVMe you can triple maybe even quadruple performance, which offers serious numbers. The Corsair Force MP500 series M.2 product line is powered by a Phison PS5007-E7 NVMe controller. The SSD follows a smaller M.2 2280 (8cm) form factor so it will fit on most ATX motherboards capable of M.2 just fine. IOPS numbers are now reaching the 250K for read and 210K for writes marker (depends on volume size). At just one-tenth the weight of a traditional 2.5-inch SSD, the M.2 SSDs are ideal for users looking to upgrade their desktop or ultra-thin PCs with high-capacity, high-performance storage. You do need a modern motherboard with capable NVMe supported M.2 (PCIe 3.0 x4 connected) interface though, please do check out your motherboard manufacturer for that. But ever since Z97/Z170/Z270 chipsets have been released, the mainstream to high-end class motherboards mostly all support it very well.

Read full article @ Guru3D

NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal) Review

As of today the NVIDIA Titan X is simply the fastest single GPU money can buy. Based on 3584 CUDA cores this is no wonder, yet - for apparent reasons - we're curious to find out how big the difference between the Titan X and other pixel accelerators is.

Read full article @ ocaholic

Shadow Warrior 2 Performance Analysis

All three of the GPUs I tested were able to handle the game very well, even at its Ultra settings. One technical exception is that the GTX 770 cannot handle the Ultra textures with its only 2 GB of VRAM. The Screen Space Reflections option is also worth disabling on the GTX 770 as it does take a lot to use, but it was not pushing the game into un-playable territory, leaving it at your discretion.

Read full article @ OCC

SteelSeries Arctis 3 Review

Focusing more on the Arctis 3 specifics, it is the analogue, stereo version of the line. It features fully modular cables that uses a proprietary USB joint to ensure fluid movement between various devices. It also offers 7.1 surround via software emulation in the SteelSeries Engine 3.

Read full article @ Vortez

Synology, Seagate, and Amcrest's 2016 Surveillance Bundle Capsule Review

Recent technological advancements have led to a number of cost-effective video surveillance solutions. IP cameras (devices that can capture and stream video over an IP network while keeping latency low) that target home users have been around for the better part of a decade now. They started gaining more traction in the market after the user experience was simplified with the help of cloud-only products from Dropcam and other vendors. Such products have ease of use as their primary selling point. The disadvantage to consumers is their reliance on an always-active Internet connection and the holding of captured footage hostage in the cloud.

Consumers have begun to realize that there are advantages to rolling up their own surveillance system with multiple cameras and a dedicated network video recorder (NVR) or NAS to store the recorded video.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Team Group T-Force Night Hawk 3000 MHz DDR4

Team Group sent us their newly released T-Force Night Hawk 3000 MHz DDR4, which comes with a new look, and other features not common to today's DDR4. T-Force is Team Group's latest focus on bringing something a little bit different for any memory-related gear, including memory and SSDs.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Zotacs Zbox Magnus EN1070 mini-PC reviewed

Zotac's Zbox Magnus EN1070 mini-PC packs a GeForce GTX 1070 and a quad-core Intel CPU into a footprint not much larger than a bare Mini-ITX motherboard. We put it to the test to see whether it offers monster performance from its minuscule form factor.

Read full article @ The Tech Report