AMD Smart Access Memory Tested, Benchmarked
Today we're taking a detailed look at how AMD's Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology influences performance in a wide range of games. All in all, we plan to benchmark 36 games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K.
Today we're taking a detailed look at how AMD's Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology influences performance in a wide range of games. All in all, we plan to benchmark 36 games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K.
The average desktop PC has over 10 different types of connections and often sports over 30 individual sockets. Whether you're wanting to sort out SATA from M.2, or DVI-D from DisplayPort, welcome to our quick guide to sockets and ports.
What sort of storage do you need to play today's games and provide the best loading times? Do you need a PCIe drive? Do you need something with a DRAM cache? Let's find out.
With the launch of the new GeForce 30 series, PCI Express 4.0 performance has come up into the discussion. To find out exactly what we're talking about, we've taken a deeper look.
Nvidia will introduce faster next-gen Ampere GPUs next month. That's exciting, but we've got a tough choice to make. The new graphics cards will support PCIe 4.0, but our GPU test system that was just upgraded to a Core i9-10900K, doesn't. Should we go Ryzen 9 instead?
Is it 25W, 75W, 150W or up to 300W?
Computer storage has come a long way since our last roundup. We have new PCIe 4.0 SSDs, NVMe drives are becoming the de facto standard for new machines, and prices for legacy drives have plummeted. Rather than just focusing on high-end drives, this time we decided to take a step back and explore the entire storage market from top to bottom.
High performance storage is in transition as the industry is beginning to adopt the PCIe 4.0 standard. In this roundup, we'll be taking a look at the new Corsair MP600, Sabrent Rocket and Gigabyte Aorus SSDs, all new PCIe NVMe 4.0 drives pitted against the excellent Samsung 970 Pro SSD and Intel's top of the line Optane SSD 905P.
Since the arrival of the these initial M.2 SSD products, we've been waiting for a more affordable mainstream release, and that's exactly what the Samsung SSD 950 Pro delivers. Made exclusively in the M.2 2280 form factor, the SSD 950 Pro comes in 256GB or 512GB capacities.
SSD technology grew stale after saturating the SATA 6Gb/s bus, bringing minor improvements and making up for it with price cuts. With new PCIe and M.2 drives presenting a high performance alternative, it's time for a roundup. We review fourteen of the best consumer-grade SSDs using the SATA, PCI Express or M.2 interfaces and tell you what to buy.
Had Samsung's SM951 arrived before we reviewed the Intel SSD 750 Series 1.2TB I think our conclusion might have been a little less favorable for the Intel drive. The SSD 750 may tout NVMe support, but Samsung's SM951 is generally faster while being more affordable.
Designed for enthusiasts and workstations, the key feature of Intel's SSD 750 Series is its adoption of Non-Volatile Memory Express or NVMe, bringing multiple queues and lower latency with a direct path from the storage to the CPU. The drive is rated to deliver sequential read performance of up to 2.4GB/s with sequential writes hitting 1.2GB/s.