I’ve been officially testing monitors at Igor’sLab for almost two years now. I started out quite rudimentary with a very cheap colorimeter, the SpyderX and a mixture of DisplayCal and the SpyderX software. Everyone starts small, of course. The whole thing then developed quite quickly and we gradually upgraded and managed to get [...]
How accurate are my material analyses? Calibration is mandatory!
The big Radiator Material Test: Even more lead, a popular hiding place and 2.5 bright spots | Part 2
The big radiator material test: Between promise, reality and the forbidden – Water Cooling tested more in Detail! | Part 1
Database of the best electrolytic capacitors – Are Japanese capacitors really better than Chinese or Taiwanese ones?
Category - Basics
Today I would like to dispel a few myths and, above all, explain why thermal compound is not just about the fillers and why there is a lot of marketing and even more inconsistencies and untruths in this gold-digger business. The article is also intended to raise awareness and help to separate honest and diligent suppliers from third-party [...]
I had already written a very similar article almost a year ago about the binning of the GeForce RTX 4070 and the difference between MSRP and OC cards. However, the theoretical part on the second page was somewhat neglected, very wrongly in my opinion. The launch of the super cards is coming up soon and the question is always being asked as to how [...]
Is that really almost 10 years ago? One is really amazed again and again how quickly time passes. And has the quality changed in the meantime? The participants of the then trötenwanderung, in which most headsets got under the wheels acoustically, were long ago disposed of and scrapped by the customers defectively and new generations followed with [...]
After numerous articles, explanations, and follow-up tests, today we’re taking a different approach. I have three intriguing topics for you: the possible origin story of the 12VHPWR connector, the deliberate ignorance of the originally intended 8-pin EPS connector, which continues to prove its resilience against defeat in power supplies and [...]
Today’s article is the result of several months of laboratory work, extensive measurement series, development work, and constant cross-checking. The matter of the 12-volt connectors is unfortunately so complex that I had to look for a new approach to complete the picture. And no, there isn’t THE one cause, but always a causal chain of [...]
Today’s article refers to the two articles already published and linked again in the footer about the unsuccessful purchase of an item declared to be in stock and the subsequent hurdles for the customer, which should actually not be any, because here the process is very clearly regulated by law. But since most customers do not know the [...]
I wrote today’s article less than a year ago, so it’s not really “retro” yet, but somehow it’s time to bring it back up in this section on Saturday. I receive so many letters and enquiries on the subject that I think this article simply deserves to be here, and it certainly takes some of the pressure off me because I [...]
Update from 19.07.2023 – 02:30 pm Since the Cryo Fuze is supposed to be mainly composed of aluminium (I will, of course, not disclose the actual recipe for certain reasons), the absence of any aluminium traces over so many measurement points is indeed interesting and an important finding for Cooler Master. In consultation with the [...]
The king is dead, long live the king. Or the other way around: The findings of the last few months are finally taken seriously and the connector is modified, work is done on a new standardization and tests are carried out ad nauseam. The product is given a new name, although in the end it is only a further development that should have been [...]
Over 13 years ago, I was concerned with the elimination of 2D hardware acceleration in Windows Vista and XP and made no friends for life with the driver team at (then) ATI in Toronto. The good thing about the two articles that hit like a bomb back then is that both AMD and NVIDIA started reacting frantically back then and also took remedial action [...]
More than 13 years ago, I published two articles that dealt with the problem of the lack of 2D performance of ATI graphics cards in particular at that time and also shed more light on the background. Because the upheaval at that time was enormous: graphics cards with the Unified Shaders instead of special 2D hardware features, operating systems [...]
AMD’s Scalable Voltage Interface 3 (SVI3) for Dummies and how to check if your AM5 Mainboard is SAFE
Terrible SoC voltages everywhere! AMD’s new horror! Say some YouTubers. But to learn more about this problem and understand why at first glance everything seems different than it actually is, we need to go back to the source, which is none other than SVI3. In this article today I will try to shed more light on this power interface used by [...]
If the sound card drops out or cracks, USB devices do not work or only work sporadically or the performance drops, then interrupt conflicts are usually the cause. This is something that Windows users have long since ignored out of sheer convenience, although the problem is as old as PCs and has only shifted under the colorful operating system [...]
Sometimes unusual situations require unusual solutions. In the circle of relatives there was a momentous accident. A glass of a certain brand of cola had tipped over and the broth ran straight from the desk into the perforated PC case. Igor’s LAB rushed to the rescue and tried to save what could be saved. When I receive calls for help from [...]
This summer, AMD’s Vega graphics cards will celebrate their fifth birthday. Always standing in the shadow of Nvidia’s Pascal cards, the power-hungry cards were never really popular with gamers. Currently, the small models with 56 shader clusters change hands for just over 100€ on the second-hand market. Without further ado, we [...]
Why there haven’t been any RAM tests from me/us for a while, why we won’t have any gaming benchmarks in our RAM tests and how we want to test RAM kits for their real differences in the future, you’ll learn in the following piece. In addition, this should serve as a basic article, which will be linked accordingly in upcoming [...]
Groundhog day, again and again. Today, I’m pushing up a classic review for you to enjoy on a cold winter Sunday, and it was a very interesting experiment. Already 12 years ago I had tested various things up to the adhesive cream for the third for their thermal conductivity. However, this time I have modified the classics a bit and included [...]
To be able to cover the higher TDP classes of processors in the future, I upgraded my testbench from a Ryzen 5 3600 to a Ryzen 9 3950X. However, so that the compact or budget coolers are not completely overtaxed, testing is done in three stages. This article serves as a reference and basis for future comparisons so that tested air and water [...]
The 12VHPWR adapter for the GeForce RTX 4090 is unfortunately already a kind of running gag and so the topic is meanwhile beaten by all more or less well-informed media. A little unemotional reappraisal would certainly not be a bad idea to calm heated tempers and put the whole thing back on its feet. Therefore, today’s article is not only an [...]