Why USB 3.1 Type-C Isn’t on More Cases & Cable Factory Tour in Dongguan, China
By Steve Burke Published March 25, 2019 at 11:25 pmThis is the article version of our recent tour of a cable factory in Dongguan, China. The factory is SanDian, used by Cooler Master (and other companies you know) to manufacture front panel connectors, USB cables, Type-C cables, and more. This script was written for the video that's embedded below, but we have also pulled screenshots to make a written version. Note that references to "on screen" will be referring to the video portion.
USB 3.1 Type-C front panel cables are between 4x and 10x more expensive than USB2.0 front panel cables, which explains why Type-C is still somewhat rare in PC cases. For USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C connectors with fully validated speeds, the cost is about 7x as expensive as the original USB3.0 cables. That cost is all because of how the cables are made: Raw materials have an expense, but there’s also tremendous time expense to manufacture and assemble USB 3.1 Type-C cables. Today’s tour of SanDian, a cable factory that partners with Cooler Master, shows how cables are made. This includes USB 3.1 Type-C, USB 2.0, and front panel connectors. Note that USB 3.1 is being rebranded to USB 3.2 going forward, but it’s the same process.
HW News - Record Intel CPU Shortages & Record DRAM Price Drops Since 2011
By Eric HamiltonOur hardware news coverage has some more uplifting stories this week, primarily driven by the steepest price drop in DRAM since 2011. System builders who've looked on in horror as prices steadily climbed to 2x and 3x the 2016 rate may finally find some peace in 2019's price projections, most of which are becoming reality with each passing week. Other news is less positive, like that of Intel's record CPU shortages causing further trouble for the wider-reaching partnerships, or hackers exploiting WinRAR, but it can't all be good.
Find the show notes below the video embed, as always.
EVGA GTX 1660 Review vs. GTX 1660 Ti, RX 590, & More
By Steve BurkeWe’re still in China for our factory and lab tours, but we managed to coordinate with home base to get enough testing on the GTX 1660 done that a review became possible. Patrick ran the tests this time, then we just put the charts and script together from Dongguan, China.
This is a partner launch, so no NVIDIA direct sampling was done and, to our knowledge, no Founders Edition board will exist. Reference PCBs will exist, as always, but partners have control over most of the cooler design for this launch.
Our review will look at the EVGA GTX 1660 dual-fan model, which has an MSRP of $250 and lands $30 cheaper than the baseline GTX 1660 Ti pricing. The cheapest GTX 1660s will sell for about $220, but our $250 unit today has a higher power target allowance for overclocking and a better cooler. The higher power target is the most interesting, as overclocking performance can stretch upwards toward a GTX 1660 Ti at the $280 price-point.
We’ll get straight to the review today. Our focus will be on games, with some additional thermal and power tests toward the end. Again, as a reminder, we’re doing this remotely, so we don’t have as many non-gaming charts as normally, but we still have a complete review.
Corsair 680X RGB Case Review vs. Lian Li O11 Dynamic
By Patrick LathanThe Corsair Crystal 680X is the newer, larger sibling to the 280X, a micro-ATX case that we reviewed back in June. The similarity in appearance is obvious, but Corsair has used the past year to make many changes, and the result is something more than just a scaled-up 280X and perhaps closer to a Lian Li O11 Dynamic.
First is the door, which is a step up from the old version. Instead of four thumbscrews, the panel is set on hinges and held shut with a magnet. This is a better-looking and better-functioning option. It’d be nice to have a way to lock the door in place even more securely during transportation, but that’s a minor issue and systems of this size rarely move.
Removing the front panel is a more elaborate process than usual, but it’s also unnecessary. The filter and fans are both mounted on a removable tray, and everything else is easily accessible through the side of the case. Fan trays (or radiator brackets, or whatever you want to call them) are always an improvement. If for some reason the panel does need to be removed, it involves removing three screws from inside the case, popping the plastic section off, and removing a further four screws from outside. The plastic half is held on by metal clips that function the same way as the plastic clips in the 280X, but are easier to release. Despite appearances, the glass pane is still not intended to be slid out, although it could be freed from its frame by removing many more screws.
AMD Radeon VII Powerplay Overclocking & Water Cooling Results
By Steve Burke Published March 02, 2019 at 10:44 pmOur initial AMD Radeon VII liquid cooling mod was modified after the coverage went live. We ended up switching to a Thermaltake Floe 360 radiator (with different fans) due to uneven contact and manufacturing defects in the Alphacool GPX coldplate. Going with the Asetek cooler worked much better, dropping our thermals significantly and allowing increased overclocking and stock boosting headroom. The new drivers (19.2.3) also fixed most of the overclocking defects we originally found, making it possible to actually progress with this mod.
As an important foreword, note that overclocking with AMD’s drivers must be validated with performance at every step of the way. Configured frequencies are not the same as actual frequencies, so you might type “2030MHz” for core and get, for instance, 1950-2000MHz out. For this reason, and because frequency regularly misreports (e.g. “16000MHz”), it is critical that any overclock be validated with performance. Without validation, some “overclocks” can actually be bringing performance below stock while appearing to be boosted in frequency. This is very important for overclocking Radeon VII properly.
HW News - GTX 1650 4GB, DDR5 6400MT/s, USB 3.2 Gen2, & Quantum CPUs
By Eric HamiltonHardware news is busy this week, as it always is, but we also have some news of our own. Part of GN's team will be in Taiwan and China over the next few weeks, with the rest at home base taking care of testing. For the Taiwan and China trip, we'll be visiting numerous factories for tour videos, walkthroughs, and showcases of how products are made at a lower-level. We have several excursions to tech landmarks also planned, so you'll want to check back regularly as we make this special trip. Check our YT channel daily for uploads. The trip to Asia will likely start its broadcast around 3/6 for us.
HW News - Memory Prices Finally Decreasing, AMD Clarifies Vega Price, & WinRAR Malware
By Eric HamiltonThe best news of the week is undoubtedly the expected and continued decrease in memory prices, particularly DRAM prices, as 2019 trudges onward. DRAMeXchange, the leading source of memory prices in the industry, now points toward an overall downtrend in pricing even for desktop system memory. This follows significantly inflated memory prices of the past few years, which was predated by yet unprecedented low prices c. 2016. Aside from this (uplifting) news topic, we also talk about the GN #SomethingPositive charity drive, AMD's price clarifications on Vega, and WinRAR's elimination of a 14-year-old exploit that has existed in third party libraries in its software.
Show notes below the video embed, as always.
NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti in 2019: Benchmarks vs. RTX 2060, 2080, Vega, & More
By Steve Burke Published February 24, 2019 at 8:48 pmWe recently revisited the AMD R9 290X from October of 2013, and now it’s time to look back at the GTX 780 Ti from November of 2013. The 780 Ti shipped for $700 MSRP and landed as NVIDIA’s flagship against AMD’s freshly-launched flagship. It was a different era: Memory capacity was limited to 3GB on the 780 Ti, memory frequency was a blazing 7Gbps, and core clock was 875MHz stock or 928MHz boost, using the old Boost 2.0 algorithm that kept a fixed clock in gaming. Overclocking was also more extensible, giving us a bigger upward punch than modern NVIDIA overclocking might permit. Our overclocks on the 780 Ti reference (with fan set to 93%) allowed it to exceed expected performance of the average partner model board, so we have a fairly full range of performance on the 780 Ti.
NVIDIA’s architecture has undergone significant changes since Kepler and the 780 Ti, one of which has been a change in CUDA core efficiency. When NVIDIA moved from Kepler to Maxwell, there was nearly a 40% efficiency gain when CUDA cores are processing input. A 1:1 Maxwell versus Kepler comparison, were such a thing possible, would position Maxwell as superior in efficiency and performance-per-watt, if not just outright performance. It is no surprise then that the 780 Ti’s 2880 CUDA cores, although high even by today’s standards (an RTX 2060 has 1920, but outperforms the 780 Ti), will underperform when compared to modern architectures. This is amplified by significant memory changes, capacity being the most notable, where the GTX 780 Ti’s standard configuration was limited to 3GB and ~7Gbps GDDR5.
EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC Review vs. RX 590, Vega 56, GTX 980 Ti, & More
By Steve BurkeToday, we’re reviewing the GTX 1660 Ti, whose name is going to trip us up for the entirety of its existence. The GTX 1660 Ti is NVIDIA’s mid-step between Pascal and Turing, keeping most of the Turing architectural changes to the SMs and memory subsystem, but dropping the official RTX support and RT cores in favor of a lower price. The EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC that we’re reviewing today should have a list price of $280, sticking it between the $350 baseline of the RTX 2060 and the rough $200 price-point of modern 1060s, although sometimes that’s higher. For further reference, Vega 56 should now sell closer to $280, with the RX 590 still around the $260 range.
New Video: DLSS Analysis in Battlefield V & Memory Leak Issues
By Steve BurkeWe won't be writing an article for this one, so just wanted to run a quick post on our new DLSS comparison in Battlefield V. This was easier to relegate to video format, seeing as it required more detailed visual comparisons than anything else. Some charts are present, but the goal is to compare DLSS on vs. off across two GPUs: The RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 2060, each of which has different allowances for DLSS enablement.
The RTX 2060 can run DLSS at 1080p or 1440p, whereas the RTX 2080 Ti can only run DLSS at 4K, as an FPS which is too high will not allow for DLSS processing to complete before frame present (and so the 2080 Ti cannot step lower than 4K). Comparisons primarily try to find where the major upsides might be with DLSS, and they seem to mostly exist with very thin objects that have limited geometry in far distances, where DLSS can create a smoother image and eliminate some of the "marching ants" effect. On the flip-side, DLSS seems to introduce some blur to the image and doesn't outperform natively running at the lower resolution instead.
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