AutoCAD 2013 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 desktop and workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
MechWarrior Online (often shortened to MWO) is an upcoming “free to play” action simulator, the latest game in the well known MechWarrior series which is in turn based on the BattleTech tabletop game and novels. For those familiar with the franchise the setting is going to put you right at home: you are a MechWarrior, piloting a 20-100 ton bipedal war machine called a BattleMech. The graphics and controls are greatly updated from previous games, the last of which was published more than a decade ago, but the core game-play is very similar.
The main difference from past games is that they tended to be single player, story-driven games – which had small, tacked-on multi-player game modes. MechWarrior Online lives up to its name in that it is all about online multi-player battles – there is no single player option, and no specific story line. Instead, the game is set within the BattleTech universe at a specific point in the established history. Time in the game’s setting is progressing in a 1:1 fashion with the real world: each day there are news announcements pertaining to events going on in the fictional future time period, and eventually this will be integrated into a meta-game where territory is actively fought over by players. That all has yet to be implemented, but should be a huge draw for both competitive gamers / groups and long-time BattleTech fans when it arrives.
Premiere CS6 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 different video cards. In addition, the list of compatible cards from Adobe has not been updated to include the current NVIDIA 600-series video cards, which is further adding to the confusion of deciding which video card you should use for Premiere CS6.
In this article, we will be benchmarking a variety of video cards to find out how well the MPE in Premiere works with NVIDIA 600-series card, and exactly how much performance difference there is between a wide spectrum of video cards.
Photoshop CS6 utilizes the Mercury Graphics Engine to take advantage of the video card to vastly improve the performance of certain features, but there is currently very little information available regarding the performance of different video cards. In addition, the list of compatible cards from Adobe has not been updated to include the current NVIDIA 600-series video cards, which is further adding to the confusion of deciding which video card you should use for Photoshop CS6.
In this article, we will be benchmarking a variety of video cards to find out if Photoshop is actually compatible with the NVIDIA 600-series, and exactly how much performance difference there is between a wide spectrum of video cards.
Fractal Design’s exclusivity agreement with Newegg has recently ended, so over the past month we have been looking at a number of their chassis to determine if there were any that we would be interested in offering to our customers.
After looking at a number of different models, we found the Define R4. The Define R4 has an emphasis on quiet operation (as evidenced by the front door and built-in acoustic dampening) which fits well in our product line; but the size, number and location of the fan mounts means that it can very easily be converted into a chassis with very powerful cooling. In this article, we will be looking at the features of this chassis and examining it’s cooling potential to see if it is a chassis that could find a place in our product line.
Even before launch of the Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs in April 2012, it was discovered that the CPUs were running a bit hotter than expected. The TIM paste was proven to be the culprit by the Japanese site PC Watch when they reported that by replacing the TIM paste they saw a load temperature drop of 8-11 *C at stock clock speeds, and an amazing 15-20*C drop in load temperatures when overclocked to 4.6 GHz.
We decided that it was time to do our own testing to see if anything has changed in recent months. The result was some very interesting data that caught us a bit by surprise.
The Asus P8C WS is a workstation class motherboard that includes many features sought after by businesses and home users alike. Most notably, it supports Intel E3 Xeon processors and ECC memory, making it a very stable platform. The varied types of ports and headers also makes it great for machines where backwards compatibility with older devices is critical.
With each new generation of Intel processors, the answer to this question gets more complex. There are currently three distinct product lines including processors named ‘Core i5’, three product lines including processors named ‘Core i3’, and a whopping five distinct lines including processors with the ‘Core i7’ name.
It stands to reason that the hotter the ambient air, the hotter a computer will run and the faster the system fans will spin to try to keep the individual components running cool. While this in itself is common sense, exactly how much hotter components run as the ambient temperature increases is not common knowledge. This information is very useful for us at Puget Systems to use when configuring a customer’s computer, but is also useful to determine if reporting thermal testing results as “degrees above ambient” (as many hardware reviewers do) is actually accurate. To find out the exact ratio, we took a common system configuration and tested it across a range of ambient temperature levels.
It’s relatively common for power users and those in the IT industry to have two PCs at their desk. One may be a laptop or maybe just an older machine that runs some necessary legacy software or has a lot of data on it that may be difficult and/or time-consuming to migrate to the newer system. Some use a hardware KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch to change their screen and input device connection from system to system, while others just have a seperate set of peripherals for each machine. Each of those methods has it’s own set of advantages and drawbacks, but both methods are conducive to a cluttered desktop and a nonsensically-segregated style of work.
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