Category - Hardware

On bang and drop – power failure as a power supply killer

Who doesn’t know it, that moment of unbridled hatred when the power generally goes out. So when not only the fuse does its work, but the whole place suddenly goes dark? Storm or no storm, it doesn’t even have to be a direct lightning strike, which then gives the domestic electronics the final neck break. This is exactly what happened [...]


USB ports and latency measurements – myths and reality | Practice

After the last article about system latency (NVIDIA Reflex & Boost vs. Radeon Boost and ZERO vs. AMD Anti-Lag), we should urgently discuss a few things about testing. So today we’re going to take a look at NVIDIA LDAT in terms of the USB ports it uses. For this I tested two different possibilities regarding the use of LDAT. The AMD [...]


Slight easing on the hardware market? Current broker prices for graphics cards, processors, motherboards, SSDs and hard drives | Exclusive

I recently introduced you to the hardware brokers and published some internal prices of the “grey” market. Because we now also know where the stocks come from, when for example even the official distributors of the graphics card manufacturers wave off and lie dry. Because, as we now know, there is a kind of parallel universe of the [...]


Successful first attempt? – Acer Predator Talos DDR4-3600 CL18 2x 8 GB Memory Kit | Test with Benchmarks and Teardown

As promised in the middle of the week, today we have the honor of reviewing the new Talos memory kit from Acer Predator, who now want to establish themselves in the storage and memory segment of the hardware industry. The bar is set just as high as the demands the brand places on itself. Whether the first generation of Predator memory modules can [...]


Greek gods and automatons in battle against RAM giants – Acer Predator Talos and Apollo Preview and OC Teaser

Entering and establishing yourself as a new player in an existing industry is no easy feat, even more so in the hardware industry and even more so in today’s times of chronic silicon shortage. But Acer is taking this bold step with the Predator brand and now includes memory and storage products in their extensive portfolio. In the review [...]


Unleashed unicorn on a flight of fancy – Shunt-Mod for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 FE and the Alphacool Eisblock GPX-N | Practice

As threatened last week, the Alphacool ice block GPX-N won’t be the only modification to my RTX 3090 Founders Edition. Today we’re going to look at the shunt resistors, the ones the GPU uses to measure how much power it’s consuming and if necessary downclocks itself if Nvidia’s limits of 350 or 400 W are reached. While [...]


What Ryzen 6000 performance could theoretically look like | Investigative with the MSI B550 Unify-X

Ryzen has been known to be a gluey matter since Zen 2, though not in a conventional way. AMD has been combining CCX chiplets with IO chiplets into one CPU since the Ryzen 3000 series and the glue is the package in the form of copper and fiberglass. Today, we are seperating the glued components of two such CPUs and glueing them back together to [...]


Competition stimulates business – Cybenetics expands certifications for power supplies as a counterpart to 80 Plus

Cybenetics was founded four years ago with the goal of introducing new efficiency and noise certification standards for AC-DC power supplies (PSUs) through its ETA and LAMBDA ratings. In these four years of being in business, nearly 800 power supplies have been certified and over a thousand beta tests have been conducted so far. This was also done [...]


AMD with Navi23 and Navi24 back in the mobile sector? First leaks and exclusive data on AMD’s possible return to the notebook segment

It appears that AMD and its major partners are already internally testing several RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000M mobile GPUs, so that initial information about a discrete Navi23 and Navi24 chip for the laptop segment has been leaked. After first reports from Twitter insider and leaker Patrick Schur, AMD is working on several mobile SKUs based on the [...]


For almost everything that has a plug and much more: from January 2021 the copper price will then also go crazy

In the last few weeks I have been able to talk to some manufacturers who are all complaining (ok, it must always be like this) and try to hoard as much copper or semi-finished copper products as possible for current and future production. Of course, this cannot be done endlessly, if only for logistical and financial reasons. Especially since it is [...]


When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs, console chips and other components as complex trading objects

2020 was actually a first-class year for technological innovation, but it will probably also go down in history as the year of the ultimate frustration of discouraged consumers, when the target group will end up not being able to buy what has been on their wish list for a long time: graphics cards and processors, power supplies and last but not [...]


NVIDIA LDAT – Latency Display Analysis Tool introduced and tested

The fact that you generally use the FPS, i.e. the rendered frames per second, as a benchmark for the gaming performance, is common but actually anything but target-oriented. If you know my metrics in the graphics card tests, you will have noticed that for some years now, I have been using the frame time, i.e. the real render time of each [...]