Winter is coming, and with the power bills stacking up it may be hard to justify gaming on your ulta-powerful gaming rig. But what if we were to tell you that, watt for watt, your gaming PC produces exactly the same amount of heat as a space heater?
How To Make Windows 8.1 Act More Like Windows 7
When Windows 8 launched, there were many users who mourned the loss of the Start button, and many others who claimed that the new Start screen was much more useful than the Start button ever was. As tends to happen on the internet, this caused many heated discussions. With Windows 8.1, Microsoft has (sort of) brought back the Start button in response to the many complaints.
AutoDesk Maya 2014 Professional GPU Acceleration
Maya 2014 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for Maya is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
AutoDesk AutoCAD 2014 Professional GPU Acceleration
AutoCAD 2014 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for AutoCAD is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC Professional GPU Acceleration
Premiere Pro CC utilizes the Mercury Playback Engine to take advantage of the video card to vastly improve both the performance and quality of certain features, but there is currently very little information available regarding the performance of the latest certified workstation video cards. In this article, we will be benchmarking a variety of workstation cards in both single and dual configurations to find out how well the MPE in Premiere Pro CC works with both NVIDIA Quadro and AMD FirePro video cards.
Technology Primer: Intel Ivy Bridge-E CPUs
With Ivy Bridge-E, Intel is finally moving their enthusiast CPUs to their newer 22nm manufacturing process. While this does not greatly increase the raw frequency that the CPUs are able to run at, it does allow them to draw less power while doing so. In addition to the smaller manufacturing process, the new line also has more L2 cache per core and improved memory support.
4K Monitor Requirements and Usage
4k displays have roughly four times the number of pixels as a standard 1080p display which results in a huge improvement in picture quality. But since the technology is still relatively new there are a lot of questions and misunderstandings about what you need to run a 4k monitor. In order to address these questions, we tested a variety of video cards on a 4k monitor to see how the perform at various tasks.
Haswell Laptops
With the recent launch of Intel’s new Haswell line of CPUs, Puget Systems has completely revamped our laptop product line to take advantage of the new improvements in technology. In addition to supporting the latest mobile CPUs from Intel, these laptops also have newer chipsets and have received significant increases in GPU power compared to previous models.
Technology Primer: Intel Haswell Desktop CPUs
Haswell is the codename for Intel’s 4th generation of processors and is the “tock” in Intel’s “tick-tock” development cycle. This means that it uses the same 22nm process as Ivy Bridge, but includes a different mounting socket and many refinements to the chip’s architecture.
Haswell Core i3 vs. i5 vs. i7 – Which is right for you?
Intel has been using the i3, i5, and i7 naming scheme for their CPUs for quite a while now, but what these labels mean tends to slowly change over time as new features are introduced or older ones get replaced. On top of this, the naming scheme between desktop and mobile CPUs is often different as well. In this article, we will go over what differentiates i3, i5, and i7 processors for both mobile and desktop Haswell CPUs.
