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Xiaomi’s Mi 11 announced with Snapdragon 888 and 120Hz OLED display

Xiaomi has announced their new flagship for 2021: the Mi 11. The Chinese variant of the phone sports a modified design and upgraded specs that give a good look at the kind of high-end features top Android phones will ship with in the coming year, according to AnandTech. There’s bound to be some changes to the European and global versions of the Mi 11, but for now this is an early peek into what’s likely to be 2021’s first major Android flagship.

The changes to the design of the Mi 11 in comparison to the Mi 10 appear minor. From the front, the display is slightly larger at 6.81-inches in comparison to the Mi 10’s 6.67-inch screen. That extra space seems to have come from shrinking the bezels of the device (always welcome), while increasing the height and maintaining the curved sides and hole-punch camera on the front.

What’s more exciting is the 3200×1440 resolution and 120Hz refresh rate on the new OLED display, two features that have fast become must-haves on modern flagships, though of course they’re sorely missed on the latest iPhones. In another notable difference, the Mi 11 will also feature an under-display fingerprint sensor.

The back of the Mi 11 holds the more visible changes. The iPhone X-esque vertical camera “pill” of the Mi 10 is gone, and in it’s place is a thin glass “layer cake.” The Mi 11 features three rear cameras: a 108 megapixel main sensor, a five megapixel telephoto, and a 13 megapixel ultra-wide. The Mi 11 also has faster 50W wireless charging (previously on the Mi 10 Pro) to pair with its 4600mAh battery.

Moving from the battery to the rest of the internals, the Mi 11 is powered by the Snapdragon 888 and offers either 8GB or 12GB of RAM. Storage starts at 128GB or 256GB, which is unfortunately still generous in the smartphone world. Like most new smartphones, the Mi 11 also has Wi-Fi 6 and support for 5G. Notably missing from the Mi 11 is a charging brick. The CEO of Xiaomi, Lei Jun, confirmed the Mi 11 will follow in Apple and (reportedly) Samsung’s footsteps in removing the charging brick from the box for environmental and cost-saving reasons.

The Chinese version of the Xiaomi Mi 11 is available for pre-order today, and will start shipping January 1st. The price for the entry level 8GB RAM/128GB of storage model is listed at ¥3999.00 (around $611). Details on the pricing and features of the other versions of the Mi 11 will come at a later date.

NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti review: The new king of $399 GPUs

So far, we’ve been nothing but impressed with NVIDIA’s RTX 3000 video cards: The RTX 3080 offers a tremendous amount of performance for anyone willing to shell out $699 for a video card, while the 3070 is more practical at $499 but still offers plenty of power. But as usual, NVIDIA isn’t stopping there. Earlier this month, it unveiled the $399 RTX 3060 Ti, the cheapest entry in its new lineup. Given just how successful NVIDIA’s new Ampere architecture has been, I expected the 3060 Ti to be a solid improvement over its predecessor, the RTX 2060 Super. After a few weeks of testing, I’m somehow even more impressed.

Despite costing just $399, the RTX 3060 Ti is even faster than the RTX 2080 Super, which launched at $700 last year. For most gamers, it’ll be more than enough to play modern titles in 1080p and 1440p, and it should keep them satisfied for years to come. At least, until they start demanding higher resolutions and more frames for high-refresh-rate monitors.

Summary

The RTX 3060 Ti delivers plenty of power for $399, especially if you’re planning to game in 1080p or 1440p. It’s even faster than the 2080 Super, a card that used to sell for $699. Like most of NVIDIA’s GPUs, though, ray tracing can slow things down a bit, but it’s at least more capable than the 2060 Super.

You can think of the RTX 3060 Ti as a stripped-down 3070: They both run NVIDIA’s GA104 GPU and have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM, but the cheaper card has less power overall. It features 4,864 CUDA cores and a boost clock speed of 1.67GHz, whereas the 3070 offers 5,888 CUDA cores and tops out at 1.73GHz. Still, the 3060’s CUDA figure more than doubles the RTX 2060’s 2,176 cores, and its new architecture also includes updated RT cores for ray tracing and tensor cores for AI processing. As with NVIDIA’s other GPUs this year, the 3060 Ti features fewer tensor cores than the card it replaces, but it makes up for that by handling AI tasks more efficiently.

The company is also counting teraflops very differently with its 3000-series GPUs, which makes it tough to directly compare their figures to its older cards. NVIDIA rates the 3060 Ti at 16.2 TFLOPs of shader performance, whereas the 2060 Super offered 7.2 TFLOPs. There’s no doubt that the new GPU is faster, but don’t expect it to literally be over twice as fast, since there’s a lot more behind that performance than raw TFLOPS numbers.

Despite all the differences under the hood, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the RTX 3060 Ti and 3070 Founder’s Edition cards apart. They both feature NVIDIA’s revamped PCB arrangement, which places the bulk of the card towards the front ports. Two large fans keep things cool, with the rear fan blowing air right through the card toward the top of your case. It’s a unique approach — one that’s worked out well so far for NVIDIA. The 3060 Ti typically idled around 41 celsius and reached 74C under heavy loads, with a maximum fan noise that’s far quieter than the RTX 2060 Super. As for ports, the 3060 Ti features three DisplayPort 1.4a connections and a single HDMI 2.1 socket, which supports 4K beyond 60Hz and 8K displays.

After spending much of this fall testing out powerful new GPUs (be sure to check out our reviews of AMD’s Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT), I knew what to expect with the 3060 Ti. It’s just going to be a cheaper take on the 3070, right? But what truly surprised me was how much performance NVIDIA could deliver for $399. As I mentioned before, the 3060 Ti easily bested the RTX 2080 Super in all of our benchmarks, which proves just how much of an upgrade it is over the 2060 Super. But I was also pleased to see that it wasn’t much slower than the 3070 either.

In 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the 3060 Ti came in just 600 points lower than the 3070, whereas the gap between the 3070 and 3080 was about 1,300 points. When it came to 1440p gaming, the cheaper cards were more closely matched. The Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark reached 88fps on the 3060 Ti with maxed graphics settings and ultra RTX shadows. On the 3070, meanwhile, I saw 107fps. That’s a big difference in raw frames, but it’s not something you’d readily notice while you’re playing the game, even with a 120Hz or 144Hz monitor. Similarly, the 3060 Ti hit 85 to 110fps in Destiny 2 with the highest graphics settings in 1440p, whereas the 3070 typically clocked 100 to 120 fps.

I was able to get Cyberpunk 2077 running on the 3060 Ti around 65fps in 1440p with mid-range ray tracing settings and DLSS enabled. Turning off DLSS, which renders games at low resolutions and uses AI supersampling to approximate the look of high resolutions, brought the game to a sluggish 40fps. Pushing the 3060 Ti a bit harder, I hit 55fps on my ultrawide monitor’s native 3,440 by 1,440 resolution with DLSS. To achieve that, though, I had to switch DLSS to its highest performance setting, which at times made the game look like it was being rendered below 1080p. As you can imagine, that wasn’t playable for too long, even if things were running smoothly otherwise.

The 3060 Ti’s limits are more apparent when you start stressing it with 4K gaming. Destiny 2 hovered between 45 and 60fps with the highest graphics settings, while the 3070 was more stable between 70 and 80fps. Throw in ray tracing at 4K, and the 3060 Ti starts to fall apart even more. Shadow of the Tomb Raider crawled at 32fps with ultra ray tracing shadows. I suppose that’s not too bad, though, as the 3070 could only muster 37fps with those same settings. (For what it’s worth, the 3080 also struggled a bit to reach between 55 and 65fps.)

Clearly, the 3060 Ti isn’t the card you’d want to pump out native 4K games to your TV. But at $399, that seems like a decent tradeoff for anyone who’s primarily playing on a 1080p or 1440p monitor. And of course, it’s also only $399 in an ideal world. Right now, the 3060 Ti is out of stock at every major retailer. And even when they’re available, many cards from NVIDIA’s partners will go for $450 and more. It’s always been tough to get your hands on the latest GPUs, but that problem seems even worse this year, as the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed production considerably.

If the idea of 4K gaming intrigues you, it may make more sense to save up for an RTX 3070 (again, whenever those are back in stock). And if you’re married to the idea of true 4K gaming with maxed out ray tracing settings, the RTX 3080 is well worth its $699 starting price.

If anything, the RTX 3060 Ti proves that NVIDIA’s new Ampere architecture can scale down very well. The fact that it’s faster than the company’s last $700 card makes it clear just how much of a deal it is. And while I won’t say it’s enough of a leap to upgrade from an RTX 2060 Super, it’s something everyone who’s held onto their aging GTX 1060s should consider.

Core i5-11400 and i9-11900K Rocket Lake CPUs Show Up in New Benchmarks

Leaks for Intel’s upcoming Core i5-11400 and Core i9-11900K Rocket Lake CPUs are starting to show up, including a few benchmarks. APISAK Tweeted two new benchmarks, one showcasing the i9-11900K running on an RTX 2080 Ti in an Ashes of the Singularity run, and a SiSoftware benchmark result has appeared for the Core i5-11400.

In the Ashes of the Singularity run, the Intel Core i9-11900K, with a base clock of 3.5ghz, scored 6400 points in the benchmark, with an average CPU frame rate of 64 fps. This score seems incredibly low for Intel’s next-gen flagship. For perspective, you can find plenty of Core i7-9700K results with the same settings and GPU with nearly double the frame rates. Presumably, this means the 11900K is an engineering sample and isn’t running beyond its base clock. But at least we now know that 11900K samples are in the testing phase, implying that Intel’s Rocket Lake chips should be getting close to launch.

For the Core i5-11400, we now know this chip rocks six cores and 12 threads, plus a base clock of 2.6GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.4Ghz, not bad for what should be Intel’s lowest-end Core i5 model. The benchmark used is SiSoftware’s Multi-Media workload, and the 11400 came with a score of 646.07Mpix/s.

Intel’s Rocket Lake processors will be built on the upcoming Cypress Cove core architecture, which is simply Intel’s 10nm Sunny cove cores backported to the 14nm node. So yes, for one final time (we hope), Intel is sticking with its 14nm process. But, Intel seems to be focusing entirely on IPC performance this time around, with the i9-11900K only having eight cores and 16 threads, a strange occurrence when the Core i9-10900K came with ten cores and 20 threads.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Review – The Biggest Big Navi

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is here! This is the company’s new flagship graphics card, targeted at maxed out gaming at 4K UHD resolution with raytracing enabled. The Radeon RX 6900 XT was announced alongside the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 back in October—today is the launch. The new RX 6900 XT is based on the same 7 nm “Navi 21” silicon, but maxes it out with all its shaders enabled, the highest clock speeds among the three cards, and the highest possible overclocking headroom. AMD in its October announcement for the RX 6000 series stunned the gaming community by announcing that its latest cards offer competitive performance with NVIDIA—the RX 6800 XT is in the same performance league as the RTX 3080, and the RX 6900 XT gets close to the RTX 3090 while beating the RTX 3080.

For the most part, the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 lived up to their hype, with the RX 6800 beating the RTX 3070 and the RX 6800 XT trading blows with the RTX 3080, but only in the majority of our game tests that lack real-time raytracing. With raytracing enabled, the RX 6800 series cards perform closer to previous-generation high-end “Turing” models, such as the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. Still, there’s enough for AMD to claim a return to the high-end graphics segment after many years. The new RX 6900 XT being launched today offers the very best from this generation and is targeted at enthusiasts or gamers who want the best AMD has to offer for 4K gaming.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is being launched at an SEP price of $999, which lets it sit in the vast pricing gorge between the $700 RTX 3080 and $1,500 RTX 3090. If AMD is claiming that the card trades blows with the RTX 3090, it must beat the RTX 3080 to justify the $300 higher price and get close enough to the RTX 3090 to lure in buyers with the $500 lower price.

The RX 6900 XT is based on AMD’s new RDNA2 graphics architecture, which debuted earlier this year with the GPU that powers the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. This is important for AMD’s RX 6000 series, as game developers build their game engines around consoles first since that’s where the money is, and it minimizes effort for them to optimize their games for the RDNA2 architecture on the PC. The biggest feature addition with RDNA2 is full DirectX 12 Ultimate API support, which includes real-time raytracing using the DXR API, Mesh Shaders, Variable Rate Shading (both tier-1 and tier-2), and Sampler Feedback. AMD has also bolstered the card’s feature set with an updated Radeon Anti-Lag, support for DirectStorage API, and resizable BAR (Smart Access Memory).

In this review, we take a very close look at the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. In its launch presentation, AMD claimed that the RX 6900 XT performs in the same league as NVIDIA’s RTX 3090, but this claim came with a big asterisk—the Smart Access Memory and Radeon Rage mode overclocking features were enabled. In this review, we test the RX 6900 XT out of the box, at stock settings and on our regular VGA test bed, as well as add a data point measured on a Ryzen 9 5900X-powered machine with SAM enabled to show if the RX 6900 XT is capable of competing with the RTX 3090.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Flagship Big Navi Graphics Card Performance Benchmark Leaks Out in Ashes of The Singularity

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card ‘flagship Big Navi GPU’ benchmark was spotted within the Ashes of The Singularity database by TUM_APISAK. The graphics card which launches two days from now will feature the full-fat Big Navi GPU configuration & compete against NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 for $500 US less.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Flagship Big Navi GPU Benchmark Leaks Out Again, Almost As Fast As The GeForce RTX 3090 For $500 US Less

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is the fastest GPU that the red team will have ever produced. It aims for the ultra-enthusiast segment and is directly competing against NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce RTX 3090. The main difference between both cards aside from their vastly different specs is that the RX 6900 XT features a price of $999 US whereas the GeForce RTX 3090 features a price tag of $1499 US.

These are official MSRPs and given all the supply issues affecting AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, it will be hard to find the cards at those prices and that is even if you can find a graphics card. But AMD does have the price advantage over the RTX 3090 so it should all come down to performance.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT AOTS Benchmark Result (Image Credits: Videocardz):

The Ashes of The Singularity benchmark was tested with the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT with a Core i7-8700K CPU and 32 GB of DDR4 memory. The Crazy preset was selected and a 1080p resolution was used. This in no way should tax the GPU but regardless, the RX 6900 XT scored 102.1 FPS. The RTX 3090 scored a slightly higher 105.4 FPS. This shows that the RTX 3090 is 3.33% faster than the RX 6900 XT. The RX 6800 XT is also shown to offer the same performance at 102.0 FPS which could mean that the benchmark is underutilizing these cards at 1080p. Only cards of a lower-tier such as the RX 6800 and RTX 3070 show a bigger difference here.

With all said, both the RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT do have their own advantages. To name a few, the RX 6900 XT should offer higher efficiency, better rasterization performance, and comes with Infinity Cache and SAM support which helps deliver higher frame rates. NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 on the other hand offers insane content creation performance, 24 GB of GDDR6X memory (8 GB more vs RX 6900 XT’s 16 GB), and features faster and better-looking ray-tracing effects.

As such, the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT could end up sitting comfortably ahead of the RTX 3090 at higher resolutions and this is just one title. With the RX 6800 XT, we saw that the card gave the RTX 3080 a hard time and even came close to the RTX 3090. The RX 6900 XT with its higher number of cores and a maximum clock limit of 3 GHz should surpass the RX 6800 XT with ease.

AMD RX 6900 XT “Big Navi 21 XT” GPU Powered 16 GB Graphics Card

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT will come packed with the Navi 21 XTX GPU which is the fully enabled die featuring 80 Compute Units or 5120 SPs. The card will also feature 16 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit bus interface, a 512 GB/s total bandwidth, and clock speeds of 2015 MHz base and 2250 MHz boost at reference specs. There are also 80 Ray accelerators for ray-tracing enablement on the graphics cards (one RA per Compute Unit). The graphics card will feature a TBP of 300W.

In addition to the standard memory, the Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card will also feature 128 MB of Infinity Cache on the GPU die. The cache will help boost bandwidth for higher performance at resolutions beyond 1080p HD. The 128 MB Infinity Cache boosts the standard 512 GB/s bandwidth by 3.25x, delivering an effective bandwidth of up to 1.664 TB/s across all Big Navi GPU based graphics cards.

Overall, it will be good competition from AMD, and overclocking-wise, the RX 6900 XT is going to knock the pants off the RTX 3090 but expect the card to be sold out within minutes of launch since its a very niche and high-end product with limited quantities as we have heard from our sources.

ASRock x Razer: New Razer Taichi Edition X570 and B550 AMD Motherboards

ASRock and Razer have today announced a product collaboration. Two of ASRock’s premium models for AM4 are being updated with Razer styling and Razer Chroma connectivity: the X570 and B550 Taichi Razer Edition. Built upon the popular Taichi series, both of the new Razer Edition variants include a 16-phase power delivery, with official support and compatibility with Razer’s Chroma RGB ecosystem.

Whenever Razer does a collaboration with any company in the hardware industry, it gets people excited and talking. One of the most prominent brands globally with its green inspired peripheral range, as well as its various wacky ideas such as an RGB gaming toaster; I can’t ever be as excited for a toaster as much as the Chroma Edition.

Back to the actual hardware, and it has teamed up with ASRock, a company seemingly fearless when trying new and off-the-wall ideas. This has realised the two new models, the B550 and X570 Taichi Razer Edition. The Taichi series is one of ASRock’s most popular ranges, especially in the premium motherboard space, and the new Razer Editions will build upon this with both the AMD AM4 500 series chipsets being treated to some Chroma.

Both the ASRock X570 and B550 Taichi Razer Edition models will feature much of the same feature set including a large 16-phase VRM, built with premium 60 A chokes and Nichicon 12K black capacitors. In regards to the actual specifications, both of these new models correspond nearly identically with its non Chroma counterparts. The X570 Taichi Razer edition includes three PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, eight SATA ports from the chipset, a 2.5 GbE port as well as a Killer AX1650 Wi-Fi 6 module. For the B550, it is slightly lower down the pecking order due to the PCIe 4.0 support coming only from the CPU. It includes one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, with an additional PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot with eight SATA ports, four from the chipset and four from an ASMedia SATA controller.

The biggest impact and only differences between the standard X570 and B550 Taichi’s compared to the Razer Edition models comes visually, with Razer’s flair located around the board itself. The addition of addressable RGB headers taps into one of the biggest RGB Ecosystems around, the Razer Chroma RGB. On both models, the Razer logo can be found on the rear panel cover and the chipset heatsinks, for a bit of added flair and vibrance that RGB offers. These aren’t OLED screens, just Razer branded vanity plates.

It should be noted that Razer is famous (infamous?) for doing things like green USB ports to unify the branding. That hasn’t happened here however, indicating that this is more of a collaborative branding exercise rather co-design effort.

As it stands, the ASRock X570 and B550 Taichi Razer Editions aren’t on the open market and neither company has opted to announce a release date or pricing. Given that both models include official pages (X570 and B550) on the ASRock website means that this launch for its target markets (TBA) should be imminent.

Sabrent Rocket Q4 NVMe 4.0 review: Blazing fast performance for a reasonable price

Old hard drives, or “spinning rust” as some call it, are good for mass storage, but nobody will ever mistake them for high performance. SATA SSD drives are much faster than the old drives, and were a breakthrough over a decade ago, but pale in comparison to today’s NVMe SSD drives.

Today, we take a look at Sabrent’s 2TB Rocket Q4 NVMe 4.0 SSD drive.

Specifications

The Sabrent Rocket Q4 utilizes the M.2 2280 form factor, which is standard for these types of drives, has a Phison PS5016-E16 controller, and Micron 96L QLC NV memory. It’s available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models. For this review, I’m looking at the 2TB version.

	Rocket Q4 1TB	Rocket Q4 2TB	Rocket Q4 4TB
Form Factor	M.2 2280	M.2 2280	M.2 2280
Interface	PCI 4.0 x4	PCI 4.0 x4	PCI 4.0 x4
Protocol	NVMe 1.3	NVMe 1.3	NVMe 1.3
Controller	Phison PS5016-E16	Phison PS5016-E16	Phison PS5016-E16
DRAM	DDR4	DDR4	DDR4
NV Memory	Micron 96L QLC	Micron 96L QLC	Micron 96L QLC
Sequential Read	Up to 4,700 MB/s	Up to 4,800 MB/s	Up to 4,900 MB/s
Sequential Write	Up to 1,800 MB/s	Up to 3,600 MB/s	Up to 3,700 MB/s
Random Read	Up to 180,000 IOPS	Up to 350,000 IOPS	Up to 350,000 IOPS
Random Write	Up to 450,000 IOPS	Up to 700,000 IOPS	Up to 700,000 IOPS
Endurance	200 TBW	400 TBW	800 TBW
Warranty	5 years (with registration)	5 years (with registration)	5 years (with registration)

Performance varies based on the capacity, so the sweet spot appears to be the 2TB model, which roughly doubles the speed of writes. Current Amazon.com pricing as of this writing is $160 for the 1TB model, $320 for the 2TB version, and $750 for the 4TB drive. That equates to roughly $0.16/GB for both the 1TB and 2TB model and $0.19/GB for the 4TB model, making the 2TB version the sweet spot for both price and performance.

Utilizing QLC, the endurance of the drive is rated at 400TB, which shouldn’t be a concern for most users. The drive comes with a five year warranty, but requires registration; if you don’t register the drive, then the warranty only lasts for one year, which is pretty bad.

The drive requires PCIe 4.0 to run at maximum performance. You can use the Rocket in a PCIe 3.0 motherboard, but will obviously lose some performance by doing so.

Packaging

It’s clear that Sabrent is trying to convey that it is offering a premium product, something that the packaging helps reinforce. While the Samsung and AData NVMe drives I have both came in plastic containers, the Sabrent Rocket Q4 sits inside a copper colored metal clamshell. Inside, the drive itself is nestled in foam padding. While I appreciate the presentation, part of me feels like it’s a waste of material. Regardless, it looks pretty nice.

The copper and white coloring is maintained on the drive itself, giving the drive a very elegant and premium look.

Testing Machine

Here are the details on the machine that I ran the test on.

Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
Memory: G.Skill Triden Z Neo CL16 2x16GB
Video Card: EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER XC GAMING
OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Education 64-bit

Performance

So we know the Sabrent Rocket Q4 looks good and is reasonably priced, but how does it perform? To test that out, I ran a few benchmarks, including Samsung Magician, CrystalDiskMark, and the Final Fantasy XIV benchmark tool that tests loading times.

Overall, results were very good with a few oddities and some caveats.

The machine I tested on currently has a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus as the boot drive, a 2TB ADATA SX8200PNP for my games, and a 6TB Seagate IronWolf ST6000NE0021 for mass storage of music and photos. Running the Samsung Magician benchmark showed the Rocket with a sizable lead of 60% in sequential reads and 80% in sequential writes versus the Samsung 970 EVO Plus. The read performance was even better compared to the ADATA, but write performance didn’t have similar gains – although it was still much better.

After using Samsung Magician, I ran the Sabrent Rocket Q4 through several different CrystalDiskMark benchmarks. In addition to running them on an empty disk, I ran them again when storage was over 70% utilized, to see if there was any performance degradation due to the capacity of the drive.

As you can see from the graphs, performance differences were statistically insignificant regardless of how much storage was being used, which is good. The performance, while not matching the speed shown by Samsung Magician, were still much higher than the other two drives in the test system.

While performance is excellent at 64MiB, read performance drops off considerably at 64GiB. This is especially curious because the ADATA drive performed the SEQ1M Q8T1 test at 3,248MB/s, and the Samsung drive was even better, reading at 3,565MB/s. This means that transferring very large files would have a more noticeable delay on the Sabrent Rocket Q4, although it’s still extremely fast.

Comparing the three drives directly, you can see that the Sabrent Rocket Q4 is by far the fastest of the drives at 64MiB when it comes to reading, and is slightly faster than the Samsung Evo Plus at writing. Aside from the aforementioned 64GiB test, the Sabrent Rocket Q4 either tied or beat the other two drives in all of the tests.

In addition to the raw performance tests, I also ran the Final Fantasy XIV loading time benchmark. This gives a real-world idea of how long it takes to load the game from your hard drive. It can also be used to test the overall performance of your system. The loading times for all of the NVMe drives were within a second of each other, while the “spinning rust” drive was more than 3x slower.

Temperatures

During all of the testing, the Sabrent Rocket Q4 maintained a cool temperature, averaging around 47°C. By comparison, the Samsung drive was 54°C and the ADATA was 52°C. Temperature seemed to have little impact on performance, as testing from a cold boot provided similar results as when the machine was running Folding@Home.

Sabrent offers an optional heatsink for the drive as well.

Conclusion

The Sabrent Rocket Q4 offers excellent performance at a great price. However there are three important caveats to keep in mind.

First, the drive utilizes PCIe 4.0. If you have an older system, or a newer system that doesn’t support the latest PCI standard, your performance metrics will take a hit. The drive will still run at PCIe 3.0 speeds, but you’d be paying for speed you won’t see.

Second, the drive has QLC flash, which means the endurance will suffer, providing only 200 TB of writes per 1 TB drive. For most users, this is probably fine, especially if you use the Rocket Q4 as a gaming drive, but the endurance directly leads to our next consideration.

The warranty requires you to register your drive. If you don’t, it’s a simple one year warranty which is ridiculously low. This is an easy thing to bypass by simply registering the drive for a robust five year warranty, but make sure you don’t overlook that step.

If any of the above three caveats are issues for your particular workloads, then I recommend looking elsewhere. For most people, however, the Sabrent Rocket Q4 is a quality NVMe drive that will provide blazing speeds at competitive pricing, and I can whole-heartedly recommend it.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Flagship ‘Big Navi’ Graphics Card Features 3.0 GHz Maximum GPU Clock Speed

AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT, the flagship Big Navi GPU based graphics card, launches next month & is expected to compete against the GeForce RTX 3090. Twitter fellow, Patrick Schur, managed to get access to the BIOS of the reference AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT which reveals a higher max frequency than the RX 6800 XT.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Max Clocks Rated at 3.0 GHz, 200 MHz Higher Than The Radeon RX 6800 XT

The BIOS was accessed and its specifics were listed within the MorePowerTool which lists down various parameters such as clocks, the power limit, and fan speeds. The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT seems to feature the same fan profiles and power limits as the RX 6800 XT however, the minimum power limit is raised from 6% to 10%.

The most interesting thing is that the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT reference model should come with a maximum graphics clock of 3000 MHz or 3.0 GHz. That’s 200 MHz higher than the 2800 MHz or 2.8 GHz max clock of the Radeon RX 6800 XT. Using LN2 cooling, overclockers were able to achieve the 2.8 GHz maximum clock speed of the RX 6800 XT and able to break the single-GPU 3DMark world-record.

Now having a wall around the limits of the max clock overclocker’s ability to push these graphics cards further since they are hitting the wall easily when running the card on LN2. The RX 6900 XT should allow overclockers slightly higher headroom which is a first for any high-end GPU (to hit 3.0 GHz) but at the same time, overclocking it further would be a no-go unless they can bypass the limit with a custom BIOS.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT features more than just higher clocks. It has more cores and a faster-binned GPU which should allow for faster and more stable clocks. It looks like the Radeon RX 6900 XT will be breaking some big world records when it launches. The card is expected to launch first in reference flavors only but users shouldn’t give up hopes on getting custom models in the future or at least when the RX 6000 series supply gets better.

AMD RX 6900 XT “Big Navi 21 XT” GPU Powered 16 GB Graphics Card

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards will be available starting the 8th of December. The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is said to carry a price tag of $999 US and is expected to be a reference only model for this year unless AMD gives its AIB partners a greenlight for custom variants which may be in the plans.

Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro+ Review

The Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT NITRO+ is the company’s flagship air-cooled custom-design RX 6800 XT “Big Navi” graphics card. It launches today alongside the slightly more value-oriented RX 6800 XT Pulse and numerous other custom RX 6800 series graphics cards by AMD’s board partners. The NITRO+ represents Sapphire’s highest grade of custom engineering, with the most capable cooling solution, best aesthetics, and fastest factory-overclocked speeds. AMD debuted the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 earlier this month, marking the advent of the RDNA2 graphics architecture to the PC. It meets all requirements for DirectX 12 Ultimate features, including raytracing, and shares its DNA with popular next-gen game consoles, such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Real-time raytracing is the next frontier for consumer 3D graphics, and as NVIDIA’s “Turing” and “Ampere” architectures have shown, it takes enormous amounts of compute power and fixed-function hardware. The RDNA2 architecture also calls for a doubling in SIMD power over the previous-generation RDNA architecture and introduces hardware to accelerate certain stages of the GPU’s raytracing processing. Enormous amounts of raster 3D performance make for the obvious dividend in chasing down raytracing goals, and this is where AMD claims to have caught up with NVIDIA’s fastest, stating that the RX 6800 XT plays in the same league as the flagship RTX 3080, and that it has the RTX 2080 Ti, effectively the RTX 3070, beat with the RX 6800.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro+ is based on the 7 nm “Navi 21” RDNA2 silicon and comes with an 80% increase in compute units over the RX 5700 XT, each with Ray Accelerators. The memory amount is doubled to 16 GB, and AMD is using the fastest JEDEC-standard GDDR6 memory running at 16 Gbps. The memory bus width, however, is unchanged from 256-bit. To make up ground, AMD devised an ingenious solution it calls Infinity Cache, which is a 128 MB on-die level 3 cache that runs at an astounding 2 TB/s, accelerating most workloads that aren’t too data-intensive. Our RX 6800 XT reference-design review goes into the details on the RDNA2 architecture as implemented on the RX 6800 series.

The Sapphire RX 6800 XT NITRO+ builds on the solid thermal and noise foundations laid down by the reference design, giving the chip a large triple-slot cooling solution with multiple aluminium fin-stack heatsinks that use both heat pipes and a vapor-chamber base-plate, a trio of fans, and a design that ensures much of the airflow from the third fan flows through. As Sapphire’s premium custom-design RX 6800 XT offering, the NITRO+ also features lavish use of RGB LED embellishments, a dual-BIOS, external RGB headers, and a factory-overclock that boosts the GPU up to 2360 MHz, compared to the 2250 MHz reference. Sapphire is pricing the RX 6800 XT NITRO+ at $770, a $120 premium over the $650 baseline price for the RX 6800 XT. There’s also the $800 Special Edition, which adds RGB fans, and the RX 6800 non-XT Nitro+ costs $640.

Jonsbo Introduces the CR-2100 CPU cooler

Jonsbo introduces the CR-2100 CPU cooler featuring a dual fin-stack CPU cooler and has a total of six 6mm thick copper heat-pipes. These heat pipes made direct contact with the CPU heat spreader allowing for a high thermal conductivity rate. Jonsbo has yet to announce when this CPU cooler will be available for purchase or the retail price for the CR-2100.

Jonsbo announces the CR-2100 CPU cooler, which features a dual fin-stack CPU cooler and uses a total of six copper heat pipes

Jonsbo’s newest CPU cooler, called the CR-2100, utilizes a dual aluminum fin-stack to cool even some of the hottest processors efficiently. The CR-2100 CPU cooler utilizes two 120 mm fans mounted to the dual tower fin-stack. This dual heat sink allows for even a high-end processor to be cooled easily and efficiently.

The included fans feature a 120 mm fan size, which offers a large range of speed, the minimum speed being just 700 RPM with a maximum of 1,500 RPM. These fans create a maximum noise level of 29.5 dBA with a minimum noise level of 18.1 dBA while creating a fan airflow of a maximum of 62.8 CFM while a minimum of 25.5 CFM. This allows for a large amount of air to be moved throughout the fin-stacks.

These fans offer the ability to have RGB lighting has shown through them, and the top of each heat sinks feature a top cover showcasing the Jonsbo logo. These logos aren’t illuminated but can be shown through the RGB lighting on each of the 120 mm fans included with this CPU cooler.

The CR-2100 CPU cooler uses a total of six heat pipes, all featuring 6 mm thickness; these heat pipes make direct contact with the CPU heat spreader. These heat pipes are made using copper, which has a higher thermal conductivity than various other metals.

This CPU cooler’s dimensions are 134 mm of height, a width of 120 mm, and a depth of 159 mm with a weight of 900-grams. These dimensions should fit inside most mATX PC cases and most ATX PC cases.

Jonsbo has yet to reveal any pricing for the CR-2100 CPU cooler or when this CPU cooler will be available for purchase.