connect lcd panel to pc psu site www.tomshardware.com pricelist

As shared by @momomo_us on Twitter,(opens in new tab) ASRock has built a new accessory for PC builders that allows you to turn your PC chassis" side panel into an LCD monitor. The gadget is a 13.3" side panel kit designed to be tapped to the inside of your see-through side panel, giving users an additional display for monitoring system resources and temperatures or being used as a secondary monitor altogether.

The screen is a 16:9 aspect ratio 1080P IPS 60Hz display, measuring 13.3 inches diagonally. This screen is the equivalent of a laptop display. It uses the same connection method as laptops, featuring an embedded DisplayPort (eDP) connector.

Unfortunately, this represents a problem for most PC users. The connector was originally designed specifically for mobile, and embedded PC solutions, meaning the connector is not available on standard desktop motherboards or graphics cards.

As a result, only ASRock motherboards support the side panel, and only a few models at best, with less than ten motherboards featuring the eDP connector. The list includes the following motherboards: Z790 LiveMixer, Z790 Pro RS/D4, Z790M-ITX WiFi, Z790 Steel Legend WiFi, Z790 PG Lightning, Z790 Pro RS, Z790 PG Lightning/D4. H610M-ITX/eDP, and B650E PG-ITX WiFi.

Sadly adapters aren"t a solution either since eDP to DP (or any other display output) adapters don"t exist today. Furthermore, creating an adapter is problematic because eDP runs both power and video signals through a single cable.

It"s a shame this accessory won"t get mainstream popularity due to these compatibility issues. But for the few users with the correct motherboard, this side panel kit can provide a full secondary monitor that takes up no additional space on your desk. The only sacrifice you"ll make is blocking all the shiny RGB lighting inside your chassis.

You can never have have enough screens, even if some of them are inside of your case. Gigabyte"s new Aorus P1200W power supply features a full-color LCD screen, which can display custom text, pictures, GIFs, and even videos on its LCD screen. Yes, just imagine watching your favorite movies on the side of your PSU!

This isn"t the first time we"ve seen a power supply with a screen slapped on it. The ASUS ROG Thor has one, but it only displays power draw, not your favorite films. Of course, the more practical use case for a screen on a PSU is showing stats such as your fan speed or temperature.

Unfortunately, Gigabyte hasn"t listed the exact size or resolution of the screen nor do we know what its refresh rate will be. Could one even play games on it? I guess we"ll have to find out.

Designed to compete with the best power supplies, the P1200W features all of the bells and whistles most high-end power supplies come with: an 80-Plus Platinum rating, fully modular cables, 140mm fan, an input current of 15-7.5A, full-range input voltage, >16ms hold up time, active PFC, and Japanese capacitors.

The P1200W brings a lot in a small package, with one 24-pin and 10-pin connector, two CPU EPS-12v power connectors, six peripheral connectors, and six PCIe connectors, and of course, the LCD screen.

I won"t OC it right off the bat because i probably don"t have to, but for future proofing i would want it. I regretted my poor decision making in getting the i7 4771 instead of the i7 4770K about 5 years ago and I have been regretting that choice for about 2 years now.

Even though I have bought this pc in the late 2011 or 2012, I changed up almost everything except for its ram/Dvd drive / mobo and cpu. Everything else have undergone a upgrade/change.

Now for the question.. based on my needs mentioned above what would be the best choice? (if you refer to these 2 links you can see price list, if you don"t mind! do suggest something from within that list)

Intel"s upcoming Raptor Lake non-K CPUs are reportedly up to 64 percent faster than their Alder Lake counterparts, according to a hardware leaker who shared some performance numbers.

Intel has been hyping up Xe Graphics for about two years, but the Intel Arc Alchemist GPU will finally bring some needed performance and competition from Team Blue to the discrete GPU space. This is the first "real" dedicated Intel GPU since the i740 back in 1998 — or technically, a proper discrete GPU after the Intel Xe DG1 paved the way last. The competition among the best graphics cards is fierce, and Intel"s current integrated graphics solutions basically don"t even rank on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy (UHD Graphics 630 sits at 1.8% of the RTX 3090 based on just 1080p medium performance).

The latest announcement from Intel is that the Arc A770 is coming October 12, starting at $329. That"s a lot lower on pricing than what was initially rumored, but then the A770 is also coming out far later than originally intended. With Intel targeting better than RTX 3060 levels of performance, at a potentially lower price and with more VRAM, things are shaping up nicely for Team Blue.

Could Intel, purveyor of low performance integrated GPUs—"the most popular GPUs in the world"—possibly hope to compete? Yes, it can. Plenty of questions remain, but with the official China-first launch of Intel Arc Alchemist laptops and the desktop Intel Arc A380 now behind us, plus plenty of additional details of the Alchemist GPU architecture, we now have a reasonable idea of what to expect. Intel has been gearing up its driver team for the launch, fixing compatibility and performance issues on existing graphics solutions, hopefully getting ready for the US and "rest of the world" launch. Frankly, there"s nowhere to go from here but up.

The difficulty Intel faces in cracking the dedicated GPU market can"t be underestimated. AMD"s Big Navi / RDNA 2 architecture has competed with Nvidia"s Ampere architecture since late 2020. While the first Xe GPUs arrived in 2020, in the form of Tiger Lake mobile processors, and Xe DG1 showed up by the middle of 2021, neither one can hope to compete with even GPUs from several generations back. Overall, Xe DG1 performed about the same as Nvidia"s GT 1030 GDDR5, a weak-sauce GPU hailing from May 2017. It was also a bit better than half the performance of 2016"s GTX 1050 2GB, despite having twice as much memory.

The Arc A380 did better, but it still only managed to match or slightly exceed the performance of the GTX 1650 (GDDR5 variant) and RX 6400. Video encoding hardware was a high point at least. More importantly, the A380 is potentially about a quarter of the performance of the top-end Arc A770, so there"s still hope.

Intel has a steep mountain to ascend if it wants to be taken seriously in the dedicated GPU space. Here"s the breakdown of the Arc Alchemist architecture, a look at the announced products, some Intel-provided benchmarks, all of which give us a glimpse into how Intel hopes to reach the summit. Truthfully, we"re just hoping Intel can make it to base camp, leaving the actual summiting for the future Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid architectures. But we"ll leave those for a future discussion.

Intel"s Xe Graphics aspirations hit center stage in early 2018, starting with the hiring of Raja Koduri from AMD, followed by chip architect Jim Keller and graphics marketer Chris Hook, to name just a few. Raja was the driving force behind AMD"s Radeon Technologies Group, created in November 2015, along with the Vega and Navi architectures. Clearly, the hope is that he can help lead Intel"s GPU division into new frontiers, and Arc Alchemist represents the results of several years worth of labor.

There"s much more to building a good GPU than just saying you want to make one, and Intel has a lot to prove. Here"s everything we know about the upcoming Intel Arc Alchemist, including specifications, performance expectations, release date, and more.

We"ll get into the details of the Arc Alchemist architecture below, but let"s start with the high-level overview. Intel has two different Arc Alchemist GPU dies, covering three different product families, the 700-series, 500-series, and 300-series. The first letter also denotes the family, so A770 are for Alchemist, and the future Battlemage parts will likely be named Arc B770 or similar.

Here are the specifications for the various desktop Arc GPUs that Intel has revealed. All of the figures are now more or less confirmed, except for A580 power.

These are Intel"s official core specs on the full large and small Arc Alchemist chips. Based on the wafer and die shots, along with other information, we expect Intel to enter the dedicated GPU market with products spanning the entire budget to high-end range.

Intel has five different mobile SKUs, the A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, and A770M. Those are understandably power constrained, while for desktops there will be (at least) A770, A750, A580, and A380 models. Intel also has Pro A40 and Pro A50 variants for professional markets (still using the smaller chip), and we can expect additional models for that market as well.

The Arc A300-series targets entry-level performance, the the A500 series goes after the midrange market, and A700 is for the high-end offerings — though we"ll have to see where they actually land in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy when they launch. Arc mobile GPUs along with the A380 were available in China first, but the desktop A580, A750, and A770 should be full world-wide launches. Releasing the first parts in China wasn"t a good look, especially since one of Intel"s previous "China only" products was Cannon Lake, with the Core i3-8121U that basically only just saw the light of day before getting buried deep under ground.

As shown in our GPU price index, the prices of competing AMD and Nvidia GPUs have plummeted this year. Intel would have been in great shape if it had managed to launch Arc at the start of the year with reasonable prices, which was the original plan (actually, late 2021 was at one point in the cards). Many gamers might have given Intel GPUs a shot if they were priced at half the cost of the competition, even if they were slower.

Intel has provided us with reviewer"s guides for both its mobile Arc GPUs and the desktop Arc A380. As with any manufacturer provided benchmarks, you should expect the games and settings used were selected to show Arc in the best light possible. Intel tested 17 games for laptops and desktops, but the game selection isn"t even identical, which is a bit weird. It then compared performance with two mobile GeForce solutions, and the GTX 1650 and RX 6400 for desktops. There"s a lot of missing data, since the mobile chips represent the two fastest Arc solutions, but let"s get to the actual numbers first.

We"ll start with the mobile benchmarks, since Intel used its two high-end models for these. Based on the numbers, Intel suggests its A770M can outperform the RTX 3060 mobile, and the A730M can outperform the RTX 3050 Ti mobile. The overall scores put the A770M 12% ahead of the RTX 3060, and the A730M was 13% ahead of the RTX 3050 Ti. However, looking at the individual game results, the A770M was anywhere from 15% slower to 30% faster, and the A730M was 21% slower to 48% faster.

That"s a big spread in performance, and tweaks to some settings could have a significant impact on the fps results. Still, overall the list of games and settings used here looks pretty decent. However, Intel used laptops equipped with the older Core i7-11800H CPU on the Nvidia cards, and then used the latest and greatest Core i9-12900HK for the A770M and the Core i7-12700H for the A730M. There"s no question that the Alder Lake CPUs are faster than the previous generation Tiger Lake variants, though without doing our own testing we can"t say for certain how much CPU bottlenecks come into play.

There"s also the question of how much power the various chips used, as the Nvidia GPUs have a wide power range. The RTX 3050 Ti can ran at anywhere from 35W to 80W (Intel used a 60W model), and the RTX 3060 mobile has a range from 60W to 115W (Intel used an 85W model). Intel"s Arc GPUs also have a power range, from 80W to 120W on the A730M and from 120W to 150W on the A770M. While Intel didn"t specifically state the power level of its GPUs, it would have to be higher in both cases.

Switching over to the desktop side of things, Intel provided the above A380 benchmarks. Note that this time the target is much lower, with the GTX 1650 and RX 6400 budget GPUs going up against the A380. Intel still has higher-end cards coming, but here"s how it looks in the budget desktop market.

Even with the usual caveats about manufacturer provided benchmarks, things aren"t looking too good for the A380. The Radeon RX 6400 delivered 9% better performance than the Arc A380, with a range of -9% to +31%. The GTX 1650 did even better, with a 19% overall margin of victory and a range of just -3% up to +37%.

And look at the list of games: Age of Empires 4, Apex Legends, DOTA 2, GTAV, Naraka Bladepoint, NiZhan, PUBG, Warframe, The Witcher 3, and Wolfenstein Youngblood? Some of those are more than five years old, several are known to be pretty light in terms of requirements, and in general that"s not a list of demanding titles. We get the idea of going after esports competitors, sort of, but wouldn"t a serious esports gamer already have something more potent than a GTX 1650?

Keep in mind that Intel potentially has a part that will have four times as much raw compute, which we expect to see in an Arc A770 with a fully enabled ACM-G10 chip. If drivers and performance don"t hold it back, such a card could still theoretically match the RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT, but drivers are very much a concern right now.

Where Intel"s earlier testing showed the A380 falling behind the 1650 and 6400 overall, our own testing gives it a slight lead. Game selection will of course play a role, and the A380 trails the faster GTX 1650 Super and RX 6500 XT by a decent amount despite having more memory and theoretically higher compute performance. Perhaps there"s still room for further driver optimizations to close the gap.

Over the past decade, we"ve seen several instances where Intel"s integrated GPUs have basically doubled in theoretical performance. Despite the improvements, Intel frankly admits that integrated graphics solutions are constrained by many factors: Memory bandwidth and capacity, chip size, and total power requirements all play a role.

While CPUs that consume up to 250W of power exist — Intel"s Core i9-12900K and Core i9-11900K both fall into this category — competing CPUs that top out at around 145W are far more common (e.g., AMD"s Ryzen 5900X or the Core i7-12700K). Plus, integrated graphics have to share all of those resources with the CPU, which means it"s typically limited to about half of the total power budget. In contrast, dedicated graphics solutions have far fewer constraints.

Consider the first generation Xe-LP Graphics found in Tiger Lake (TGL). Most of the chips have a 15W TDP, and even the later-gen 8-core TGL-H chips only use up to 45W (65W configurable TDP). Except TGL-H also cut the GPU budget down to 32 EUs (Execution Units), where the lower power TGL chips had 96 EUs. The new Alder Lake desktop chips also use 32 EUs, though the mobile H-series parts get 96 EUs and a higher power limit.

The top AMD and Nvidia dedicated graphics cards like the Radeon RX 6900 XT and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti have a power budget of 300W to 350W for the reference design, with custom cards pulling as much as 400W. Intel doesn"t plan to go that high for its reference Arc A770/A750 designs, which target just 225W, but we"ll have to see what happens with the third-party AIB cards. Gunnir"s A380 increased the power limit by 23% compared to the reference specs, so a similar increase on the A700 cards could mean a 275W power limit.

Intel may be a newcomer to the dedicated graphics card market, but it"s by no means new to making GPUs. Current Alder Lake (as well as the previous generation Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake) CPUs use the Xe Graphics architecture, the 12th generation of graphics updates from Intel.

The first generation of Intel graphics was found in the i740 and 810/815 chipsets for socket 370, back in 1998-2000. Arc Alchemist, in a sense, is second-gen Xe Graphics (i.e., Gen13 overall), and it"s common for each generation of GPUs to build on the previous architecture, adding various improvements and enhancements. The Arc Alchemist architecture changes are apparently large enough that Intel has ditched the Execution Unit naming of previous architectures and the main building block is now called the Xe-core.

To start, Arc Alchemist will support the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set. That means the addition of several key technologies. The headline item is ray tracing support, though that might not be the most important in practice. Variable rate shading, mesh shaders, and sampler feedback are also required — all of which are also supported by Nvidia"s RTX 20-series Turing architecture from 2018, if you"re wondering. Sampler feedback helps to optimize the way shaders work on data and can improve performance without reducing image quality.

The Xe-core contains 16 Vector Engines (formerly or sometimes still called Execution Units), each of which operates on a 256-bit SIMD chunk (single instruction multiple data). The Vector Engine can process eight FP32 instructions simultaneously, each of which is traditionally called a "GPU core" in AMD and Nvidia architectures, though that"s a misnomer. Other data types are supported by the Vector Engine, including FP16 and DP4a, but it"s joined by a second new pipeline, the XMX Engine (Xe Matrix eXtensions).

Xe-core represents just one of the building blocks used for Intel"s Arc GPUs. Like previous designs, the next level up from the Xe-core is called a render slice (analogous to an Nvidia GPC, sort of) that contains four Xe-core blocks. In total, a render slice contains 64 Vector and Matrix Engines, plus additional hardware. That additional hardware includes four ray tracing units (one per Xe-core), geometry and rasterization pipelines, samplers (TMUs, aka Texture Mapping Units), and the pixel backend (ROPs).

The above block diagrams may or may not be fully accurate down to the individual block level. For example, looking at the diagrams, it would appear each render slice contains 32 TMUs and 16 ROPs. That would make sense, but Intel has not yet confirmed those numbers (even though that"s what we used in the above specs table).

The ray tracing units (RTUs) are another interesting item. Intel detailed their capabilities and says each RTU can do up to 12 ray/box BVH intersections per cycle, along with a single ray/triangle intersection. There"s dedicated BVH hardware as well (unlike on AMD"s RDNA 2 GPUs), so a single Intel RTU should pack substantially more ray tracing power than a single RDNA 2 ray accelerator or maybe even an Nvidia RT core. Except, the maximum number of RTUs is only 32, where AMD has up to 80 ray accelerators and Nvidia has 84 RT cores. But Intel isn"t really looking to compete with the top cards this round.

Finally, Intel uses multiple render slices to create the entire GPU, with the L2 cache and the memory fabric tying everything together. Also not shown are the video processing blocks and output hardware, and those take up additional space on the GPU. The maximum Xe HPG configuration for the initial Arc Alchemist launch will have up to eight render slices. Ignoring the change in naming from EU to Vector Engine, that still gives the same maximum configuration of 512 EU/Vector Engines that"s been rumored for the past 18 months.

Intel includes 2MB of L2 cache per render slice, so 4MB on the smaller ACM-G11 and 16MB total on the ACM-G10. There will be multiple Arc configurations, though. So far, Intel has shown one with two render slices and a larger chip used in the above block diagram that comes with eight render slices. Given how much benefit AMD saw from its Infinity Cache, we have to wonder how much the 16MB cache will help with Arc performance. Even the smaller 4MB L2 cache is larger than what Nvidia uses on its GPUs, where the GTX 1650 only has 1MB of L2 and the RTX 3050 has 2MB.

While it doesn"t sound like Intel has specifically improved throughput on the Vector Engines compared to the EUs in Gen11/Gen12 solutions, that doesn"t mean performance hasn"t improved. DX12 Ultimate includes some new features that can also help performance, but the biggest change comes via boosted clock speeds. We"ve seen Intel"s Arc A380 clock at up to 2.45 GHz (boost clock), even though the official Game Clock is only 2.0 GHz. A770 has a Game Clock of 2.1 GHz, which yields a significant amount of raw compute.

The maximum configuration of Arc Alchemist will have up to eight render slices, each with four Xe-cores, 16 Vector Engines per Xe-core, and each Vector Engine can do eight FP32 operations per clock. Double that for FMA operations (Fused Multiply Add, a common matrix operation used in graphics workloads), then multiply by a 2.1 GHz clock speed, and we get the theoretical performance in GFLOPS:

Obviously, gigaflops (or teraflops) on its own doesn"t tell us everything, but nearly 17.2 TFLOPS for the top configurations is nothing to scoff at. Nvidia"s Ampere GPUs still theoretically have a lot more compute. The RTX 3080, as an example, has a maximum of 29.8 TFLOPS, but some of that gets shared with INT32 calculations. AMD"s RX 6800 XT by comparison "only" has 20.7 TFLOPS, but in many games, it delivers similar performance to the RTX 3080. In other words, raw theoretical compute absolutely doesn"t tell the whole story. Arc Alchemist could punch above — or below! — its theoretical weight class.

Still, let"s give Intel the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Arc Alchemist comes in below the theoretical level of the current top AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but if we skip the most expensive "halo" cards, it looks competitive with the RX 6700 XT and RTX 3060 Ti. On paper, Intel Arc A770 could even land in the vicinity of the RTX 3070 and RX 6800 — assuming drivers and other factors don"t hold it back.

Theoretical compute from the XMX blocks is eight times higher than the GPU"s Vector Engines, except that we"d be looking at FP16 compute rather than FP32. That"s similar to what we"ve seen from Nvidia, although Nvidia also has a "sparsity" feature where zero multiplications (which can happen a lot) get skipped — since the answer"s always zero.

Intel also announced a new upscaling and image enhancement algorithm that it"s calling XeSS: Xe Superscaling. Intel didn"t go deep into the details, but it"s worth mentioning that Intel hired Anton Kaplanyan. He worked at Nvidia and played an important role in creating DLSS before heading over to Facebook to work on VR. It doesn"t take much reading between the lines to conclude that he"s likely doing a lot of the groundwork for XeSS now, and there are many similarities between DLSS and XeSS.

XeSS uses the current rendered frame, motion vectors, and data from previous frames and feeds all of that into a trained neural network that handles the upscaling and enhancement to produce a final image. That sounds basically the same as DLSS 2.0, though the details matter here, and we assume the neural network will end up with different results.

Intel did provide a demo using Unreal Engine showing XeSS in action (see below), and it looked good when comparing 1080p upscaled via XeSS to 4K against the native 4K rendering. Still, that was in one demo, and we"ll have to see XeSS in action in actual shipping games before rendering any verdict.

XeSS also has to compete against AMD"s new and "universal" upscaling solution, FSR 2.0. While we"d still give DLSS the edge in terms of pure image quality, FSR 2.0 comes very close and can work on RX 6000-series GPUs, as well as older RX 500-series, RX Vega, GTX going all the way back to at least the 700-series, and even Intel integrated graphics. It will also work on Arc GPUs.

The good news with DLSS, FSR 2.0, and now XeSS is that they should all take the same basic inputs: the current rendered frame, motion vectors, the depth buffer, and data from previous frames. Any game that supports any of these three algorithms should be able to support the other two with relatively minimum effort on the part of the game"s developers — though politics and GPU vendor support will likely factor in as well.

More important than how it works will be how many game developers choose to use XeSS. They already have access to both DLSS and AMD FSR, which target the same problem of boosting performance and image quality. Adding a third option, from the newcomer to the dedicated GPU market no less, seems like a stretch for developers. However, Intel does offer a potential advantage over DLSS.

XeSS is designed to work in two modes. The highest performance mode utilizes the XMX hardware to do the upscaling and enhancement, but of course, that would only work on Intel"s Arc GPUs. That"s the same problem as DLSS, except with zero existing installation base, which would be a showstopper in terms of developer support. But Intel has a solution: XeSS will also work, in a lower performance mode, using DP4a instructions (four INT8 instructions packed into a single 32-bit register).

The big question will still be developer uptake. We"d love to see similar quality to DLSS 2.x, with support covering a broad range of graphics cards from all competitors. That"s definitely something Nvidia is still missing with DLSS, as it requires an RTX card. But RTX cards already make up a huge chunk of the high-end gaming PC market, probably around 90% or more (depending on how you quantify high-end). So Intel basically has to start from scratch with XeSS, and that makes for a long uphill climb.

Intel has confirmed Arc Alchemist GPUs will use GDDR6 memory. Most of the mobile variants are using 14Gbps speeds, while the A770M runs at 16Gbps and the A380 desktop part uses 15.5Gbps GDDR6. The future desktop models will use 16Gbps memory on the A750 and A580, while the A770 will use 17.5Gbps GDDR6.

There will be multiple Xe HPG / Arc Alchemist solutions, with varying capabilities. The larger chip, which we"ve focused on so far, has eight 32-bit GDDR6 channels, giving it a 256-bit interface. Intel has confirmed that the A770 can be configured with either 8GB or 16GB of memory. Interestingly, the mobile A730M trims that down to a 192-bit interface and the A550M uses a 128-bit interface. However, the desktop models will apparently all stick with the full 256-bit interface, likely for performance reasons.

The smaller Arc GPU only has a 96-bit maximum interface width, though the A370M and A350M cut that to a 64-bit width, while the A380 uses the full 96-bit option and comes with 6GB of GDDR6.

Raja showed a wafer of Arc Alchemist chips at Intel Architecture Day. By snagging a snapshot of the video and zooming in on the wafer, the various chips on the wafer are reasonably clear. We"ve drawn lines to show how large the chips are, and based on our calculations, it looks like the larger Arc die will be around 24x16.5mm (~396mm^2), give or take 5–10% in each dimension. Other reports state that the die size is actually 406mm^2, so we were pretty close.

That"s not a massive GPU — Nvidia"s GA102, for example, measures 628mm^2 and AMD"s Navi 21 measures 520mm^2 — but it"s also not small at all. AMD"s Navi 22 measures 335mm^2, and Nvidia"s GA104 is 393mm^2, so ACM-G10 is larger than AMD"s chip and similar in size to the GA104 — but made on a smaller manufacturing process. Still, putting it bluntly: Size matters.

Besides the wafer shot, Intel also provided these two die shots for Xe HPG. The larger die has eight clusters in the center area that would correlate to the eight render slices. The memory interfaces are along the bottom edge and the bottom half of the left and right edges, and there are four 64-bit interfaces, for 256-bit total. Then there"s a bunch of other stuff that"s a bit more nebulous, for video encoding and decoding, display outputs, etc.

The smaller die has two render slices, giving it just 128 Vector Engines. It also only has a 96-bit memory interface (the blocks in the lower-right edges of the chip), which could put it at a disadvantage relative to other cards. Then there"s the other "miscellaneous" bits and pieces, for things like the QuickSync Video Engine. Obviously, performance will be substantially lower than the bigger chip.

While the smaller chip appears to be slower than all the current RTX 30-series GPUs, it does put Intel in an interesting position. The A380 checks in at a theoretical 4.1 TFLOPS, which means it ought to be able to compete with a GTX 1650 Super, with additional features like AV1 encoding/decoding support that no other GPU currently has. 6GB of VRAM also gives Intel a potential advantage, and on paper the A380 ought to land closer to the RX 6500 XT than the RX 6400.

That"s not currently the case, according to Intel"s own benchmarks as well as our own testing (see above), but perhaps further tuning of the drivers could give a solid boost to performance. We certainly hope so, but let"s not count those chickens before they hatch.

This is hopefully a non-issue at this stage, as the potential profits from cryptocurrency mining have dropped off substantially in recent months. Still, some people might want to know if Intel"s Arc GPUs can be used for mining. Publicly, Intel has said precisely nothing about mining potential and Xe Graphics. However, given the data center roots for Xe HP/HPC (machine learning, High-Performance Compute, etc.), Intel has certainly at least looked into the possibilities mining presents, and its Bonanza Mining chips are further proof Intel isn"t afraid of engaging with crypto miners. There"s also the above image (for the entire Intel Architecture Day presentation), with a physical Bitcoin and the text "Crypto Currencies."

Generally speaking, Xe might work fine for mining, but the most popular algorithms for GPU mining (Ethash mostly, but also Octopus and Kawpow) have performance that"s predicated almost entirely on how much memory bandwidth a GPU has. For example, Intel"s fastest Arc GPUs will use a 256-bit interface. That would yield similar bandwidth to AMD"s RX 6800/6800 XT/6900 XT as well as Nvidia"s RTX 3060 Ti/3070, which would, in turn, lead to performance of around 60-ish MH/s for Ethereum mining.

There"s also at least one piece of mining software that now has support for the Arc A380. While in theory the memory bandwidth would suggest an Ethereum hashrate of around 20-23 MH/s, current tests only showed around 10 MH/s. Further tuning of the software could help, but by the time the larger and faster Arc models arrive, Ethereum should have undergone "The Merge" and transitioned to a full proof of stake algorithm.

If Intel had launched Arc in late 2021 or even early 2022, mining performance might have been a factor. Now, the current crypto-climate suggests that, whatever the mining performance, it won"t really matter.

The core specs for Arc Alchemist are shaping up nicely, and the use of TSMC N6 and a 406mm^2 die with a 256-bit memory interface all point to a card that should be competitive with the current mainstream/high-end GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, but well behind the top performance models.

As the newcomer, Intel needs the first Arc Alchemist GPUs to come out swinging. As we discussed in our Arc A380 review, however, there"s much more to building a good graphics card than hardware. That"s probably why Arc A380 launched in China first, to get the drivers and software ready for the faster offerings as well as the rest of the world.

Alchemist represents the first stage of Intel"s dedicated GPU plans, and there"s more to come. Along with the Alchemist codename, Intel revealed codenames for the next three generations of dedicated GPUs: Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid. Now we know our ABCs, next time won"t you build a GPU with me? Those might not be the most awe-inspiring codenames, but we appreciate the logic of going in alphabetical order.

Tentatively, with Alchemist using TSMC N6, we might see a relatively fast turnaround for Battlemage. It could use TSMC"s N5 process and ship in 2023 — which would perhaps be wise, considering we expect to see Nvidia"s Lovelace RTX 40-series GPUs and AMD"s RX 7000-series RDNA 3 GPUs in the next few months. Shrink the process, add more cores, tweak a few things to improve throughput, and Battlemage could put Intel on even footing with AMD and Nvidia. Or it could arrive woefully late (again) and deliver less performance.

The bottom line is that Intel has its work cut out for it. It may be the 800-pound gorilla of the CPU world, but it has stumbled and faltered even there over the past several years. AMD"s Ryzen gained ground, closed the gap, and took the lead up until Intel finally delivered Alder Lake and desktop 10nm ("Intel 7" now) CPUs. Intel"s manufacturing woes are apparently bad enough that it turned to TSMC to make its dedicated GPU dreams come true.

As the graphics underdog, Intel needs to come out with aggressive performance and pricing, and then iterate and improve at a rapid pace. And please don"t talk about how Intel sells more GPUs than AMD and Nvidia. Technically, that"s true, but only if you count incredibly slow integrated graphics solutions that are at best sufficient for light gaming and office work. Then again, a huge chunk of PCs and laptops are only used for office work, which is why Intel has repeatedly stuck with weak GPU performance.

We now have hard details on all the Arc GPUs, and we"ve tested the desktop A380. We even have Intel"s own performance data, which was less than inspiring. Had Arc launched in Q1 as planned, it could have carved out a niche. The further it slips into 2022, the worse things look.

Again, the critical elements are going to be performance, price, and availability. The latter is already a major problem, because the ideal launch window was last year. Intel"s Xe DG1 was also pretty much a complete bust, even as a vehicle to pave the way for Arc, because driver problems appear to persist. Arc Alchemist sets its sights far higher than the DG1, but every month that passes those targets become less and less compelling.

We should find out how the rest of Intel"s discrete graphics cards stack up to the competition in October. Can Intel capture some of the mainstream market from AMD and Nvidia? Time will tell, but we"re still hopeful Intel can turn the current GPU duopoly into a triopoly in the coming years — if not with Alchemist, then perhaps with Battlemage.

The suitcase-style box protects the MG278Q with plenty of rigid Styrofoam, which should prevent damage from all but the most extreme shipping abuse. The base and upright go together with a captive bolt and snap onto the panel for a tool-less installation. The shiny bits are protected from scratches by peel-off film.

The accessory bundle is quite complete with one each of DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort cables. An IEC power cord sends the juice to an internal power supply. You also get a USB 3.0 cable to connect the monitor"s internal two-port hub. To help you get started there"s a printed quick guide with a full user"s manual on CD.

The MG278Q"s front bezel is quite narrow at only half-an-inch around the sides and top and slightly wider at the bottom. It"s a great choice for multi-screen setups. The only identifying marks are an Asus logo at the bottom center and HDMI and DisplayPort symbols at the lower left. On the lower-right side are small printed icons denoting the control button functions. The keys are around back along with a joystick for OSD navigation. The anti-glare layer is quite aggressive at blocking reflections, but still provides good clarity and detail for text and graphics.

Asus has provided a quality stand with the MG278Q. It offers full tilt, height and swivel adjustments with very firm movements. You can also rotate the panel to portrait mode. In this photo you can see the panel is of average slimness with a large flat area housing the mount. The upright has a small handle-like protrusion at the bottom for cable management. Styling cues are subtle and consist of some polished areas and bits of red trim.

The angular shape of the chassis continues around back where there are no curves to be found. The upright unsnaps to reveal 100mm VESA-compatible bolt holes. The control buttons are visible here along with the super-convenient menu joystick finished in red. The power bulge handles ventilation chores well. We detected no excess heat during our time with the MG278Q. The top vent strip contains two small speakers which fire directly upwards. Like most monitors, they"re tinny and weak with nothing in the way of bass. They are reasonably clear however, and will work fine for general computing tasks.

Video inputs are all digital with two HDMI, one DisplayPort 1.2 and one DVI. FreeSync only works over DisplayPort with a compatible AMD graphics board. 2560x1440 at 144Hz will work over both DisplayPort and HDMI 1 while HDMI 2 is limited to 1920x1080 at 120Hz. On the left there are USB 3.0 upstream and downstream ports; there are none on the sides. On the right are analog audio jacks, including one input and one headphone output.Acer XR341CK: Price Comparison

A name widely known for everything from cases and closed loop liquid cooling solutions to power supplies and memory modules, Corsair sets its three sails on yet another mission: To help consumers build custom watercooling systems emblazoned with the well-known Corsair logo that can work with various cases and other custom watercooling gear. Its Hydro X components and the Corsair system (which we first saw earlier this year at Computex) is definitely worth a look if you"re planning on venturing beyond air cooling or closed-loop alternatives, and you can start your build with the Corsair Hydro X interactive and intuitive custom cooling loop configurator(opens in new tab).

The CPU is a primary piece of hardware to be managed by the cooling loop of most liquid cooling systems. In our build, we utilized the new XC9 RGB block that fits Intel 2011x and 2066 sockets, and includes a mounting plate to convert to AMD Threadripper (TR4) as well.

Corsair"s XD5 RGB pump is based on the widely-popular Laing D5 pump, which has long been considered one of the primary workhorses of custom watercooling builds. Corsair’s version includes a custom top and RGB lighting accenting a clear, 330ml integrated reservoir. An included set of 120mm and 140mm mounting brackets and thumbscrews allows the pump to be mounted to nearly any chassis fan mount (or even a fan itself, as we did) to make placement as universal and simplified as possible. Included with the pump is a G1/4” thermal sensor, which can be connected to a typical 2-pin thermal sensor like the Corsair iCue Commander Pro (We’re beginning to sense a pattern here).

Corsair also shipped its new G7 RGB 10 and 20 series graphics card blocks, which support Nvidia GTX 10-series and RTX 20-series Founder’s Edition (FE) GPUs. These full cover, full copper blocks feature a nickel-plated finish, standard G1/4” fitting ports and a finned aluminum heatsink plate to assist with passive thermal dissipation. Typically sold separately by most competitors, an anodized aluminum backplate featuring the Corsair Hydro X logo is provided in with each XG7 block. Asus Strix and an RX blocks for AMD’s VEGA 64 cards are also available. We assume Corsair will soon offer up blocks for AMD"s new Navi cards as well.

Corsair went the extra mile here, as each XG7 block ships with thermal pads and paste pre-applied to eliminate the time and dexterity required for application. For those of us who have wrestled over the tedious trimming and placement of thermal pads prior to mounting a GPU block, this is a welcome feature.

Once you’ve soaked up all the thermal output generated from your CPU and GPU, your pump needs to move it to a heat exchanger to dissipate it to the ambient air. Corsair’s XR5 radiators are copper + brass, and are manufactured in partnership with HardwareLabs, a name known for producing some of the best-performing watercooling radiators over the years. Corsair"s XR5 radiators are built with an average 16FPI fin density, while the thicker, XR7 radiators use a lower-density 13 FPI design.

The XR5 radiators are 30mm thick (XR7 are available as 54mm thick) and provide a nominal fin count for a balance of cooling performance and airflow silence. Fan mount tabs include a backing shield that prevents long fan screws from piercing a radiator tube, a feature typically seen on most purpose-built PC watercooling radiators. Of course, the XR5 and XR7 model lines each utilize standard G1/4” fitting ports for compatibility with other watercooling hardware, in keeping with the rest of the kit.

Keeping airflow moving over a radiator is not an easy task, and experienced watercooling aficionados will tell you that static pressure and fan speed should be evaluated with the chosen radiator to contribute to optimal airflow for the cooling system. Two sets of Corsair ML120 Pro RGB fans were sent to us to be used, one for each XR5 radiator, and setup through the Corsair Commander Pro fan and RGB lighting controller.

After a quick download and setup of the Corsair iCue software, we were able to adjust lighting and fan RPM, set cooling curves, and see a tremendous volume of system data that includes thermal probes from our reservoir coolant temperature fitting as well as the three additional system probes that are included with the Commander Pro.

When it’s time to connect tubing to all the cooling components, fittings are a requirement. For our testing, we stuck with flexible tubing and normal compression fittings, but we also made use of several 90-degree and 45-degree angled extensions as well. In addition, we also got our hands on a ball-valve for on/off adjustment, typically used in the draining or bleeding of a cooling system.XF Adapter 90° Rotary 2-pack

In addition to soft tubing compression fittings, we also received samples of Corsair’s hardline tubing compression fittings, 90-degree angled compression adapters, a G1/4” fill port fitting and an XF adapter, which is a multi-purpose T-fitting.XF Adapter Rotary Y-splitter

The hardline tubing used by Corsair is a PMMA acrylic which is resistant to higher temperatures and resists breakage. It should be noted that PETG and PMMA tubing heats and bends differently and also often require fittings designed for the type used for your build. Failure to do so can result in an incorrect seal of the tubing, fittings and O-rings.

Soft or flexible tubing is more forgiving, although when using compression fittings, both the I/D (inner diameter) and O/D (outer diameter) of the tubing wall is important. Using a compression fitting for an incorrect tubing wall thickness can mean it either cannot fit over the tubing to secure it, or it fits over the tubing too loosely without being able to provide sufficient compression to secure the tubing when installed.

To compliment its liquid cooling components, Corsair shipped us 2 liters of its clear XL5 coolant and a handy filling bottle for those hard-to-reach-reservoir-ports. The coolant provides inhibitors to prevent any corrosive build-up or microbial growth from causing unsightly buildup or ruin of your newly installed cooling loop.

Since our standard testing chassis is a Corsair Carbide 760T, we were able to fit a dual radiator setup using both the 360 and 240 XR5 radiators, which can easily accommodate one or even two graphics cards in the cooling loop if we opted to do so. Using the included pump mount, we setup the XD5 mount to the front 240mm XR5 radiator to save some space.

Update: There"s never been a better time to buy a chip, as this year"s Black Friday sales are particularly great due to a sudden massive oversupply of processors. If you"re on the hunt for a great deal, be sure to hit our Best Black Friday CPU Deals article, and if you"re specifically interested in buying an AMD processor, check out our recent AMD Ryzen 7000 Chips on Massive Sale article.

Original Article:As you can see in our Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X review, AMD has released its first four new Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series "Raphael" processors. We"ve collected all of the most relevant performance benchmarks and info into this article to give you a broader view. The Zen 4 lineup touts the 16-core $699 Ryzen 9 7950X flagship, which AMD claims is the fastest CPU in the world, to the six-core $299 Ryzen 5 7600X, the lowest bar of entry to the first family of Zen 4 processors. According to our benchmarks, these chips deliver competitive performance, and that"s a needed return to form.

AMD"s previous-gen Ryzen 5000 processors accomplished what was once thought impossible: The chips unseated Intel"s best in every CPU benchmark, including taking the top of our list of best CPUs for gaming, as the company outclassed Intel"s Rocket Lake in every regard.

But then Alder Lake happened. Intel"s new hybrid x86 architecture, featuring a blend of big and powerful cores mixed in with small efficiency cores, pushed the company into the lead in all facets of raw performance and even helped reduce its glaring deficiencies in the power consumption department. But, perhaps most importantly, Alder Lake started a full-on price war with Intel"s new bare-knuckle approach to pricing, particularly in the mid-range that serves as gamer country.

But AMD isn"t standing still, and its Ryzen 7000 chips have taken the race for performance leadership to the next level. Ryzen 7000"s frequencies stretch up to 5.7 GHz - an impressive 800 MHz improvement over the prior generation – paired with an up to 13% improvement in IPC from the new Zen 4 microarchitecture. The chips also come loaded with new tech, like a new integrated Radeon RDNA 2 graphics engine and support AI instructions based on AVX-512.

Here"s a quick preview of how the Zen 4 chips stack up to Intel"s Alder Lake, based on our own more extensive tests that you"ll see below. Going head-to-head with Intel’s Core i9-12900K in 1080p gaming, the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X is 5% faster. In threaded applications, the 7950X is a whopping 44% faster than the Core i9-12900K, and the two chips effectively tie in single-threaded benchmarks.

The Zen 4 Ryzen 5 7600X is equally impressive, being 12% faster than the $289 Core i5-12600K in 1080p gaming, with the lead narrowing to 6% after overclocking both chips. More impressively, the stock 7600X is 4% faster than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K in gaming, bringing a new level of value to the $300 price point — with the caveat that you’ll have to deal with higher platform costs.

Both chips beat Intel’s flagship in gaming. However, as impressive as they are, they aren’t perfect: The Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series has a high $300 entry-level price point and only supports pricey DDR5 memory instead of including less-expensive DDR4 options like Intel. That muddies the value proposition due to the expensive overall platform costs. AMD also dialed up power consumption drastically to boost performance, inevitably resulting in more heat and a more power-hungry system. You do end up with more performance-per-watt, though.

Ryzen 7000 takes the lead in convincing fashion, but its real competitor, Raptor Lake, doesn’t come until next month. Nevertheless, Intel claims its own impressive performance gains of 15% faster single-threaded, 41% faster threaded, and a 40% ‘overall’ performance gain, meaning we’ll see a close battle for desktop PC leadership.

The first four standard desktop PC chips are now available at retail, but the company will also launch at least one 3D V-Cache model by the end of the year. Intel has its Raptor Lake processors poised on the starting blocks, ensuring that AMD"s Ryzen 7000 will have stiff competition when it arrives on October 20. We"ve gathered all of the information we know into this article.

The first four Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 processors arrived on September 27, 2022, accompanied by the high-end X670 and X670E chipsets, while the B650E and the B650 chipsets will arrive in October. New EXPO (EXtended Profiles for Overclocking) DDR5 memory kits are also available, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs will come to market in October.

The Ryzen 7000 chips will mark just the first step of the Zen 4 journey as the company delivers on its CPU roadmap and brings them to the desktop and notebook markets. AMD will also use the Zen 4 architecture for its data center CPU roadmap.

The Ryzen 7000 processors come with the N5 TSMC 5nm process node for the core compute die (CCD) and use the TSMC 6nm process for the I/O Die (IOD). We have a deeper breakdown of the architecture further below. The chips will drop into Socket AM5 motherboards.

Overall, we see the same core counts as the previous-gen models but 16% to 17% higher clock rates across the new range of Ryzen 7000 SKUs. In addition, the chips all have more L2 cache but the same L3 cache capacity.

However, AMD raised the launch pricing of the eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 7700X by $100 over the 5700X. AMD also kept the entry-level pricing at the same $299 with the Ryzen 5 7600X, but that isn’t a complete win – this same high entry-level pricing wasn’t well-received with the Ryzen 5000 family. There"s no mention of a Ryzen 7 7800X to replace the outgoing 5800X. Perhaps AMD is leaving a spot for its V-Cache-enabled X3D model here.

As with all of AMD"s latest chips, that will only occur on two cores: AMD has confirmed that Ryzen 7000 still features Precision Boost 2 to expose the maximum boost frequencies possible at all times. We also know that Intel"s Raptor Lake will boost to 5.8 GHz, though, and perhaps higher.

AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 vs Intel 13th-Gen Raptor LakeRow 0 - Cell 0PriceCores / Threads (P+E)P-Core Base / Boost Clock (GHz)E-Core Base / Boost Clock (GHz)Cache (L2/L3)TDP / PBP / MTPMemory

This is how Ryzen 7000 stacks up against Intel’s existing Alder Lake chips, along with information that we’ve collected about Intel’s yet-to-be-announced Raptor Lake. Be aware that the Raptor Lake specifications in the above table are not yet official.

Intel has also brought E-cores to its value-centric 13400 SKU for the first time, which will make for a significantly more competitive chip on the lower end of the market where AMD isn"t nearly as competitive. Again, pricing and performance are the wild cards, and Intel has yet to make any official announcements. However, it is clear that Intel will use a combination of higher clock speeds and more E-Cores to combat Ryzen 7000.

In many respects, this generation of chips finds the Zen 4 vs Intel Raptor Lake competition returning to an outright frequency war, with both chipmakers pushing their consumer chips to the highest clocks we"ve seen with their modern offerings. That also brings higher power consumption, and we also see higher TDP figures from both chipmakers as they turn up the frequency dial. Naturally, higher peak power figures will be more useful in threaded workloads, so we can expect more from each core with the Zen 4 processors.

AMD"s Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 chips only support DDR5 memory, while Raptor Lake supports DDR4 and DDR5. That gives Intel a leg up in the overall system cost category, as DDR5 still commands a price premium. However, we no longer see DDR5 shortages, and prices continue to plummet as more supply comes online and demand recedes.

The Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 chips seem to have exceptional overclocking headroom, at least according to several early tests made available to the public. We"ve seen the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X set four world records with standard liquid cooling, beating out liquid nitrogen-cooled chips. If you want to go subzero, the chips also appear to have exceptional headroom when you go sub-ambient, with the chips hitting 7.2 GHz on a single core and 6.5 GHz on all cores with LN2.

AMD shared a block diagram of the standard Ryzen 7000 chip, and we took a close-up snip of a bare Ryzen 7000 chip during the company"s Computex keynote. The chip houses two gold-colored 5nm core chiplets, each sporting eight cores. AMD says these are based on an optimized version of TSMC"s high-performance 5nm process technology called N5, and they are placed much closer together than we"ve seen with previous Ryzen core chiplets. In addition, we see what appears to be a shim between the two core chiplets, likely to maintain an even surface atop the two dies. It is also possible that this close orientation is due to some type of advanced packaging interconnect between the two chips.

We can also see a clear outline around the top of each CCD, but we aren"t sure if this is from a new metallization technique. We do know that the gold color is due to Backside Metallization (BSM), which includes an Au coating to prevent oxidation while improving TIM adhesion and lowering thermal impedance. We also see quite a few empty spots for capacitors, which is interesting and could imply heftier designs down the road.

The new I/O die uses the 6nm process and houses the PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory controllers along with a much-needed addition for AMD — the RDNA 2 graphics engine. The new 6nm I/O die also has a low-power architecture based on features pulled in from AMD"s Ryzen 6000 chips, so it has enhanced low power management features and an expanded palette of low-power states. AMD says this chip now consumes around 20W, which is less than it did with Ryzen 5000, and will deliver the majority of the power savings we see in Ryzen 7000.

Surprisingly, the new I/O die appears to be roughly the same size as the previous-gen 12nm I/O die. However, given that the 6nm die is far denser than the 12nm die from GlobalFoundries, meaning it has far more transistors, it"s safe to assume the integrated GPU has consumed a significant portion of the transistor budget (possibly due in part to onboard iGPU cache). The large 6nm I/O die will inevitably add to the cost of the chips, as it will be far more expensive than the mature 12nm I/O die that AMD used in the Ryzen 5000 chips.

AMD has officially confirmed that the Ryzen 7000 series chips will come with at least one model armed with the company"s 3D V-Cachethis year, enabling incredible L3 cache capacity through its innovative 3D-stacked SRAM tech that fuses an L3 chiplet on top of the compute cores. We"ve seen this technology give the Ryzen 7 5800X3D a total of 96MB of L3 cache, providing it with industry-leading gaming performance. We might have already seen signs of this — memory maker TeamGroup recently mentioned the Raphael-X processors in a press release. AMD hasn"t divulged "Raphael-X" as the official name of the 3D V-Cache Ryzen 7000 chips, but it does follow the same naming convention as the Milan-X server chips that have the same tech. It"s certainly possible this is merely a mistake on TeamGroup"s part, but speculation is intense that this will be the codename for the consumer Zen 4 3D V-Cache chips.

The stock memory frequencies for Ryzen 7000 weigh in at DDR5-5200, though the company has touted that it expects to have exceptional DDR5 overclockability. The new AMD EXPO (EXtended Profiles for Overclocking) tech is an alternative to Intel"s XMP branding. Simply put, AMD will support pre-defined memory profiles with dialed-in memory frequencies, timings, and voltages to enable one-click memory overclocks. Several reports indicate that AMD will have "high-bandwidth" and "low-latency" EXPO profiles, which would likely denote the difference between coupled (1:1) and uncoupled (1:2) modes, just like Intel"s Gear 1 and Gear 2 memory modes. That"s a positive development, and it appears that you"ll be able to dial in higher 1:1 memory overclocks — new BIOS revisions have support for a 3GHz fabric frequency, whereas that mostly topped out at 2 GHz with Ryzen 5000. However, these could just be pre-assigned settings that aren"t attainable, so we"ll have to wait for the chips to hit our labs.

The Ryzen 7000 chips support up to 24 lanes of the PCIe 5.0 interface directly from the socket (further details in the motherboard section). AMD is busy enabling the PCIe 5.0 SSD ecosystem with Phison, Micron, and Crucial. Crucial and Micron will have their first PCIe 5.0 SSDs and the constellation of third-party SSDs will also use Phison"s E26 PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers, meaning we"ll soon see wide availability of even speedier drives. That will come in handy for Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 systems — AMD claims a 60% performance gain in sequential read workloads with PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The first PCIe 5.0 SSDs come to market in October.

PCIe 5.0"s sequential performance potential will be great for Microsoft"s DirectStorage because it relies heavily upon read throughput to reduce game loading times to roughly a second. AMD also says Ryzen 7000 will support Smart Access Storage (SAS), which appears to be a slightly tweaked version of DirectStorage that"s built on the same APIs. You can see more information about AMD"s PCIe 5.0 SSD enablement here. Unfortunately, not all of the leading-edge PCIe 5.0 SSDs will fully utilize the bandwidth of the faster interface — Micron"s leading-edge flash doesn"t operate at full speed, constraining SSD performance, but that will be rectified early next year. We expect even faster models to arrive then.

On the security front, AMD"s Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" processors arrived with support for Microsoft"s Pluton, enabling more robust security to helps prevent physical attacks and encryption key theft while protecting against firmware attacks. Pluton originally debuted in the Xbox and AMD"s EPYC data center processors and is complementary to AMD’s other security features, like AMD Secure Processor and Memory Guard, among others. AMD hasn"t officially confirmed that Pluton is present in Ryzen 7000, but it is expected.

The Ryzen 7000 processors come with expanded instructions for AI acceleration through its support of AVX-512 instructions, which can be used for functions like VNNI for neural networks and BFLOAT16 for inference. AMD described its AVX-512 implementation as a "double-pumped" execution of 256-bit wide instructions to defray the frequency penalties typically associated with Intel"s processors when they execute AVX-512 workloads. This could result in lower throughput per clock than Intel"s method, but the higher clocks will obviously offset at least some of the penalty. We"ll have to wait to learn more about the new implementation.

That oddly places Intel"s Alder and Raptor Lake chips at a disadvantage as they have disabled AVX-512 functionality due to the hybrid architecture. Software vendors are already preparing for the new functionality — benchmarking and monitoring tool AIDA64 recently added support for AVX-512 with Zen 4 processors, followed by y-cruncher support.

All Ryzen 7000 chips will support some form of graphics, so it doesn"t appear there will be graphics-less options, like Intel"s F-series, for now. The RDNA 2 engine resides on the IOD (I/O Die) and supports up to four display outputs, including DisplayPort 2 and HDMI 2.1 ports, and Ryzen 7000 has the same video (VCN) and display (DCN) engine as the Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" processors. Even though all Ryzen 7000 chips will have baked-in iGPUs, the company will still release Zen 4 APUs with beefier iGPUs. The company will also bring its Smart Shift ECO tech, which allows shifting the graphical work between the iGPU and a discrete GPU to save power, to the Ryzen 7000 models for the desktop PC.

AMD has tried to temper expectations for the integrated graphics engine, pointing out that the RDNA 2 graphics are only designed to "light up" displays, cautioning that we shouldn"t expect any meaningful gaming performance. The RDNA 2 iGPU comes with two compute units, 4 ACE, and 1 HWS, so that should be pretty apparent.

We tried a few games anyway, which you can see if you flip through the album above, and the results weren’t pretty. We couldn’t get Far Cry 6 to load, for instance, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider could render the benchmark at 1280x720 but wouldn’t run at 1080p. Much like Intel’s graphics, we were treated to a slideshow in the few games that did run. The bar charts don"t do the poor results enough justice -- check out the frametime over time charts for perspective on just how badly the iGPU performs in gaming.

Below you can see the geometric mean of our gaming tests at 1080p and 1440p, with each resolution split into its own chart. Be aware that a different mix of game titles could yield somewhat different results (particularly with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D), but this serves as a solid overall indicator of gaming performance. As usual, we"re testing with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce GPU-imposed bottlenecks as much as possible, and differences between test subjects will shrink with lesser cards or higher resolutions. You"ll find further game-by-game breakdowns below.

The $699 Ryzen 9 7950X takes second place in its stock configuration with a 5% lead over Intel’s fastest gaming chip, the Core i9-12900K. The 7950X is another ~2% faster after overclocking the cores and memory, essentially tying the overclocked 12900K. This marks a big generational improvement — the Ryzen 9 7950X is 17% faster than its prior-gen counterpart, the Zen 3-powered Ryzen 9 5950X, which also comes with 16 cores. However, Intel only needs to gain ~5% with Raptor Lake to match the 7950X in gaming, setting the stage for quite the competition next month.

The $299 Ryzen 5 7600X is 12% faster than the $289 Core i5-12600K, with the lead narrowing to 6% after overclocking both chips. More impressively, the stock 7600X is 4% faster than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K, bringing a new level of value to the $300 price point — with the caveat that you’ll have to deal with higher platform costs.

Notably, the 12900K is ~7% faster than the 7600X in our 1080p 99th percentile measurements, a good indicator of smoothness. The 7600X’s lead over the 12600K also drops to ~4%. However, we don’t see any egregious outliers in the 99th percentile measurements that would significantly alter our overall impressions of the rankings you see in the average fps chart.

The Ryzen 5 7600X also sports a big generational uplift of 18% over the Ryzen 5 5600X, which was once the darling of mid-range gaming builds. Raptor Lake looks enticing in the mid- and low-end price ranges from afar, but the 7600X will go a long way to shoring up AMD’s defenses. You can also tune the 7600X and eke out an extra ~3% of performance, but as always, gains will vary by title and by the quality of your chip.

AMD’s own $430 Ryzen 7 5800X3D remains the fastest gaming chip on the market by a fair margin, but this highly-specialized chip comes with caveats — its 3D V-Cache doesn"t boost performance in all games. Additionally, the 5800X3D is optimized specifically for gaming, but it can"t keep pace with