Hardware

Vcore, or core voltage, is the voltage that is supplied to power your CPU. The amount of power the CPU uses and the amount of heat generated are tied to the amount of voltage it draws. The voltage identification definition, or VID, determines the amount of voltage your CPU needs to maintain stability at the default clock speeds.

Today we're looking at high speed storage performance by comparing AMD and Intel mainstream desktop chipsets with ADATA's latest and greatest XPG SX8200 960GB SSD, one of today's favorites drives among enthusiasts, perfect for comparing the storage performance of AMD's X470 and Intel's Z370 chipsets.

As the market leader and long time dominant force in the CPU space, Intel's been able to get away with a lot and this is partly because the competition has allowed them to. In this column we're looking at possible improvements from the consumers' perspective and specific to Intel's personal computing side of the business.

We're looking at CPU offerings once again but this time we're focusing solely on gaming, so we'll be picking each CPU based on almost nothing other than it's gaming performance. For the close fought battles we'll take the platform into account but for the most part it's all about those glorious frames per second.

Heat is an inevitable byproduct of work. Heat is also prevalent in electronics, and when it comes to graphics cards you can manage it using passive cooling, fans and even water. But when these solutions aren't working, your GPU has one more way to beat the heat: thermal throttling.