Shuttle SX58H7 Pro review: first look

Friday, May 6th, 2011

What do you reckon you’d need to cool a PC powered by one of Intel’s most powerful enthusiast processors and a £200 graphics card? A chunky heatsink? A pair of 120mm fans at the front, another at the back and maybe a fourth at the top to ensure maximum airflow?

Ordinarily, yes – but Shuttle doesn’t like to use the big tower cases that have room for all that. Instead, the SX58H7 Pro has a specification we never thought we’d see in a small-form-factor chassis.

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Core i7-980X PC versus eight-core Xeon workstation

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Having been writing about photo-realistic 3D graphics rendering for issue 192 of the magazine, I’ve been getting myself back up to speed with the state of 3D graphics and looking into the absolute best techniques for achieving realistic lighting. And along the way I’ve got a new insight into the sheer speed of the latest CPUs.

Turns out the best 3D rendering algorithm is a hugely intensive method known as path tracing, which is sort of like ray tracing’s dad. The theory behind the method actually pre-dates ray tracing, but it’s only now that PCs are getting fast enough for experimental dabbling at home.

The good part is that, while it needs a heck of a lot of computing power to do, path tracing is actually a fairly simple technique to implement.

But where to get a path-tracing application to play with?

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Toshiba Portégé R700: first-look review

Monday, June 21st, 2010

While the Toshiba Libretto W100 and AC100 are both radically different products to what has gone before, the R700 treads more established ground. This is the successor to Toshiba’s Portégé R600 and R500, both of which were targeted at top executives from generously endowed companies.

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Taking the hype out of Hyper-Threading

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

In my recent review of AMD’s six-core Phenom II X6 1090T processor, I noted that, although this CPU has the same number of physical cores as Intel’s Core i7-980X, Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology lets the Core i7 service twice as many concurrent threads.

This prompted one commenter (giving his name as Wilbert3) to raise an insightful point. Hyper-Threading is great for everyday multi-tasking: for example, it lets a dual-core Core i5 CPU service four concurrent processes. But it works by presenting each core’s spare execution capacity to the OS as a virtual second core. Under heavy load, where there is no spare capacity, it would seem unable to offer any benefit. In such cases we shouldn’t expect to see a Core i5 achieve performance anywhere near what a true quad-core architecture would provide.

That analysis sounds persuasive, but is it borne out by the evidence? (more…)

Intel Core i7 for laptops: first review

Friday, September 18th, 2009

When it arrived on the desktop scene, Intel’s Core i7 levelled the opposition. With enough power to embarrass Intel’s own Core 2 architecture, not to mention AMD’s efforts, and coming at a cost that would make even a banker weep, Core i7 set the benchmark and set it high. Now, with the new Clarksfield range of processors it’s set to repeat the trick in the laptop market, and we’ve got our hands on a sample boasting the mid-range quad-core 1.73GHz i7-820QM.

The first processors to arrive will be quad-cores based on a 45nm process, with 32nm dual-core models following in early 2010. Intel has kept the quad-core line-up refreshingly simple too, with the 1.73GHz i7-820QM flanked on both sides by the 1.6GHz i7-720QM and the top of the range 2GHz i7-920XM. Unlike their Core 2 Quad predecessors, all four cores boast Hyper-Threading; a move that allows the processors to handle as many as eight separate threads at once.

A perfunctory look at the modest-looking clockspeeds is enough to leave the keen bystander a mite underwhelmed, but those figures don’t take any account of the ace resting up Core i7s sleeve – Turbo Boost.

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