YugaTech | Philippines, Technology News & Reviews » PC Gaming

Intel launches new Core i5 and i7 Processors

yuga — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:27:23 +0000

Intel Philippines yesterday unveiled a number of new processors under its Core i5 and Core i7 brands. Most interesting feature is the Turbo Boost that automatically overclocks the CPU when you need more juice.

Intel introduced the Core i7 920/940 last year but those were intended for hardcore gamers and enthusiasts. The new ones they’re bringing in is an attempt to make it more mainstream and affordable. But unlike the i7 900 series which is Socket LG1366, the Core i7 800 series is on another Socket LG1156.

Most interesting is the Turbo Boost technology — a capability of the CPU to add extra horsepower when it is needed. For example, a 2.66GHz Core i5 750 can go up to 3.2GHz clockspeed. However, HT (hyper-threading) has been disabled on the i5.

The Core i7 800 series comes in 2 clock speeds and has HT enabled — i7-860 @ 2.8GHz and the i7-870 @ 2.93GHz. With Turbo Boost, the 2.93GHz i7-870 can go up to 3.6GHz.

There’s no final price yet but OEMs who attended the the launching say that the Core i5 750 will cost somewhere between Php10k to Php11k while the i7-860 could be between Php15k to Php16k.

I asked Intel Philippines President Rickey Banaag if this will mean they’re shelving the Core 2 Quad since the i5 and i7 are also 4 cores. He says no and Intel will keep them separate for market segmentation. In short, expect the prices of Core 2 Quads to go down in the next couple of months.

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This is just an excuse for a new PC Case

yuga — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:09:33 +0000

The introduction of Intel’s Core i7 processors prompted new line of motherboards and demand for DDR3 memory as well as some overclocking challenges and hardcore enthusiasts and gamers.

Asus sent in a couple of their stuff so it was a reason for me to built yet another rig.

The one above is a 10-kilogram Storm Sniper case from Cooler Master. It has a knob at front up front that controls the internal LED lights as well as the ventilation fans (see more details here).

Attach an Asus OC Station (Republic of Gamers Over-Clocking Controller) to the case and you get a cool-looking rig.

Problem though is that prices of Core i7 processors are still too steep. The Core i7 940 2.93GHz alone retails for about Php30,000.

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Acer Predator Aspire G7710 Gaming Machine

yuga — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 06:48:07 +0000

We’re at the new Villman Lounge here at the SM North EDSA CyberZone having a match of Crysis and Need For Speed with other media people. The event is sponsored by Intel, Villman, Acer and Microsoft. Spotted in the lounge is the Acer Predator Aspire G7710 Gaming Machine.

The Acer Aspire G7710 is one kick-ass gaming machine. Just take a look at this video we took.

For a whooping Php153,900+, you get the following specs:

Acer Predator Aspire G7710
Intel Core i7 940 @ 2.83GHz 8MB Smart Cache
Intel X58 Chipset
6GB DDR3
24″ G24 LCD monitor (1920 x 1200 pixel)
Nvidia Geforce GTS150 with 1GB VRAM
1 Terabyte SATA II HDD 7200rpm
4x Blue-Ray ROM Drive
16x SuperMulti Optical Drive with LabelFlash
Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit
Gigabit Ethernet
Logitech G11 Gaming Keyboard and G5 Laser Mouse
Delta 750 Watts Power Supply
14-in-1 card reader
4 x USB 2.0 front & 4 x USB 2.0 back (8 in total)
TV Out
1394 IEEE, 2 eSATA, 2 RJ 45 jack
S/PDIF jack, Clear CMOS, 2 DVI port

This rig has 4 drive bays that support 1TB each so you can go as high as 4 terabytes in here. There are also 3 slots for VGA for SLI support of 3 graphics cards.

This place is Villman’s second gaming lounge (first one is in Megamall Cyberzone) but the first one to have Core i7 920 on all machines. Rentals are at Php50 per hour.

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Tetris: Most Popular Time Waster of the 90s

yuga — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:38:51 +0000

Tetris is probably the most popular game in the 90s — and you wouldn’t believe it has been 25 years since it was invented (designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in June 6, 1984).

Back then, everyone was playing Tetris from my 60-year old grandmother to my 6 year-old cousins. Tetris was so simple yet so addictive. The game was everywhere, from Gameboy to PC, and those cheap handheld versions that feature 300-in-1 ways to play Tetris (was it a knockoff called Bricks or Brick Games?).

And up to today, the game is still alive and being played by many. Will all the technology in gaming that we have lately, I think Tetris can still be re-invented (most probably for the Nintendo Wii).

Anybody played any Tetris lately?

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Two Power Supplies in One PC?

yuga — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 07:21:53 +0000

Was having some issues with my current set of power supplies in my PC at home. None of them are able to support the GeForce GTX 280 that was lent to me by Asus a couple of weeks ago.

I got an extra Dynamo Pro 600w and a CoolerMaster 550w Real Power SLI but none of the two are able to carry the juice needed by the Asus GTX 280 on the system.

My idea is to combine the two PSUs to effectively harness about 1,000w of power for the rig (instead of buying another Gigabyte Odin 1200w, which costs pretty expensive). Anybody here has done that? One power supply will run the motherboard and the peripherals while the other PSU will solely power the graphics card.

My concern now is voltage fluctuations between the two PSU might fry the board or some other parts.

Incidentally, I found this Power Supply Calculator from eXtreme. I plugged in my rig specifications and it says I only need 377watts. Now that’s odd.

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Three’s a crowd: AMD Phenom II Family

yuga — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:46:41 +0000

Ever since AMD’s Phenom II was announced I have been looking around for a unit to test on but very not a lot of stores have them on stock. Good thing AMD’s PR contacted me for a review unit and these arrived last week, just before the long Holy Week vacation.

Actually, it’s not one but 3 different CPUs of the AMD Phenom 2.

AMD Phenom II X3 720
Codename: Propus
2.8GHz, 3 cores, 7.5 MB total cache

AMD Phenom II X4 810
Codename: Deneb
2.6GHz, 4 cores, 6MB total cache

AMD Phenom II X4 940
Codename: Deneb
3.0GHz, 4 cores, 8MB total cache

The 940 has an unlocked multiplier so that should be easy to overclock anytime. These 3, plus the X2 7750 I got earlier should be out on a head to head benchmark soon.

Incidentally, AMD’s X4 900 series has a similar naming convention to that of Intel’s Core i7 series. That could get confusing with regular consumers.

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Overclock your Graphics Media Accelerator

yuga — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:16:17 +0000

I’ve tried playing WarCraft 3 on several netbooks and the graphics wasn’t any good but what can you expect from an Intel GMA 950 chip?

GMA Booster though is promising up to 2.4x better performance by overclocking the embedded graphics chip. Though they say that the GMA950 is actually underclocked what they’re doing is just bumping it up to normal speeds.

Anyway, I tried it on one of my netbooks and there was some improvements with the benchmarks. FPS on fullscreen texture rendering went up 11.5% which isn’t much. Will need to try other benchmarking tools and run a round of DOTA again.

Do check it out and see if you get better results.

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Are CRT Monitors being phased out?

yuga — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:54:50 +0000

Over the week-end, a friend and I went out buying sets of PCs for a small internet cafe business we’re putting up in the province. We were mulling between cheap CRT monitors and LCDs but it turns out a lot of shops have them in stock anymore.

We wanted larger screens (17″ or 19″) so getting all flat screen LCDs would be a bit costly compared to the cheaper CRTs. My initial cost consideration at first was power consumption — LCDs spend just about 10% of what the counterpart CRT would consume.

When we asked PC Express, they said they don’t have a single unit in inventory. They have a couple listed on their site and the price list but the sales guy quipped they no longer offer those. He even checked with their centralized online inventory and there wasn’t any.

Shops used to sell big ones that are up to 22″ and 24″ in size. Today, the large screen sizes are already monopolized by LCDs.

I guess it’s high time CRTs be phased out. At home, I already shifted all monitors to LCD over 2 years ago. Now all 4 monitors are LCDs — they saves space and electricity. Anybody out there still using CRTs?

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Athlon X2 7750: AMD’s unnamed Phenom X2

yuga — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 10:25:04 +0000

Yesterday, while scouting around for that elusive Phenom II X4, I chanced upon this new processor SKU from AMD — the Athlon 64 X2 7750 BE @ 2.7GHz. It’s the first time I saw this Black Edition processor in the shelves. Curiosity got the better of me so I grabbed a unit and assembled a rig at home.

As it turns out, the Athlon X2 7750 is a fairly new processor that AMD quietly released last December and codenamed Kuma. A little digging around also revealed that it belongs to the newer Stars (K10) microarchitecture, the same one as the Phenom X3 and the Phenom X4. So while the Phenom X3 is a 4-core CPU with one core disabled, the X2 7750 is like an X4 with 2 cores disabled.

Following the logic above, AMD should ahve actually named the X2 7750 as the Phenom X2. As to why they did not follow that naming convention and went back as far as calling it an Athlon 64 X2 7750, I don’t really know. There were two other SKUs in this category — the X2 7550 @ 2.5GHz and the standard X2 7750 @ 2.7 GHz. The 7750 BE (Black Edition) also runs at 2.7GHz but has an unlocked clock frequency multiplier which means this CPU is ready for overclocking out of the box (as all other Black Edition AMD CPUs have been).

Here’s a screenshot of the CPUZ report:

With a price point of Php4,000, the X2 7750 is lodged in the middle of older AMD CPUs like the X2 5200 (@2.7GHz), the X2 5600 (@2.9GHz) and the X2 6000 (@3.0). The big advantage it has, aside from the newer architecture, is the 3MB of total cache (512KB L2 per core and 2MB of shared L3 cache per chip) compared to the latter which only had 1MB.

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AMD Phenom II X4 out and priced

yuga — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:36:17 +0000

I’ve been on the look-out for the new AMD Phenom II since it was first announced last January. Most of the local stores I drop by don’t have it on stock yet. I even asked their local PR if they’re distributing units around.

Over the week-end I saw them listed over at Rising Sun Computers:

AMD Phenom II X4 920 2.8GHz Quad Core
Price: Php 10,100

AMD Phenom II X4 940 3.0GHz Quad Core
Price: Php 11,600

They’re still on an order basis though. This line will be AMD’s direct competitor for Intel’s Core i7 (they even had the SKUs similar to each other) but the price points are much lower. Would be interesting how the Phenom 2 will stack against Intel’s.

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Thermaltake Level 10 PC Case

yuga — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:01:44 +0000

Showcased at the CEBIT 2009 in Hannover, Germany is this special edition Level 10 PC case, created by Thermaltake and BMW Designworks.

The chassis design has compartmentalized the slots for each part of the PC, each one having its own casing of sorts from the individual hard drive bays to the power supply. It’s like wrapping the innards of a PC with carbon alloy and vaccuum-packed it {via}.

Only problem is see though is ventilation — how will all the exhaust fans (if there are any) work then?

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Asus ENGTX280 with NVidia GTX280 Chip

yuga — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:52:50 +0000

Got a package from Asus yesterday containing a box of motherboard and their new graphics card, the Asus ENGTX280, powered by NVidia’s GTX280 graphics chip.

Will all the other spare parts I have in storage, I should be able to build another rig with these (Asus M4A79T Deluxe Motherboard) although I’m still stuck with how to properly benchmark the video card.

There’s already a newer graphics chip from NVidia (GTX 285 and GTX295) but the GTX280 alone already costs over Php20,000 in the market. Here are some basic specs of the Asus ENGTX280:

NVidia GeForce GTX280
Graphics Memory: 1024 MB GDDR3 (2,200MHz)
Core Clock: 670 MHz
Shader Clock: 1460 MHz
Dual-DVI
PCI-Express 2.0
HDTV-out
D-Sub
HDCP compliant

To those who have a budget for a 20k gaming card, you think this is a worthwhile upgrade?

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Intel Core i7 940 CPU Benchmark

yuga — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 09:17:03 +0000

After a month playing with the new Intel Core i7, here are some benchmark results I got based on comparisons between PC Marks and SuperPi 32M of 4 relatively high-end CPUs. The Core i7 940 is expected to top the results but what would be more interesting is by how much.

The rig that was lent to me by Intel had the following specs:

Intel Core i7 940 2.93GHz
3GB DDR3 RAM
NVidia GeForce 9800 GTX

I then compared results with several other rigs lent to me by Intel and AMD (Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 @ 2.53GHz, AMD Phenom II 9950 X4 @ 2.6GHz and Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz which I own).

SuperPi 2M:
Q6600: 52 seconds
Core i7 940: 29 seconds

Super Pi 32M:
Q6600: 23 mins. 9 secs.
Core i7 940: 12 mins. 17 secs.

With SuperPi 2M and 32M , the Core i7 940 scored between 79% to 88% better than the Q6600. The Core i7 performed better under higher stress with SuperPi 32M.

PCMarks Score
Intel Core 2 Duo E7500: 3633
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz: 3774
Intel Core i7 940 2.93GHz: 5397
AMD Phenom X4 9950 2.6GHz : 4159

With PC Marks, the Core i7 940 performed 43% better than the Q6600 and 30% better than the Phenom 9950 X4.

The Core i7 920 2.66GHz has a price tag of Php16k at PC Express so I can only imagine the 940 to go as high as Php30k (based on SRP released by Intel Philippines).

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The Ultimate Gaming Machine

yuga — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 03:44:20 +0000

Host Leo Laporte of The Screen Savers showed a modded rig they claim to be the ultimate gaming PC. This top of the line UGM costs about $10,000 after all the add-ons.

The specs:
Intel Pentium II 300MHz
128 MB SDRAM
4.1GB + 9.1GB Seagate Cheetah
32x Plextor CDROM
FM synthesis
3D Sound
Adtronics Case

It didn’t say what graphics card they had in there but I reckon it could be one of those S3 Savage 3D with 8MB of RAM.

By the way, this was 10 years ago. The iPhone 3G has a faster CPU and more storage than this gaming machine.

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Far Cry 2 on Intel Core i7

yuga — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:25:04 +0000

Just got a seed unit of the new Intel Core i7 and a copy of Far Cry 2 to play with. Intel announced the release of the new Core i7 quad-core CPUs last Friday which targets enthusiasts and hard-core gamers.

The system came in with the whole battalion of accessories.

The Far Cry 2 installation disks.

A 20″ ViewSonic LCD monitor.

A logitech cordless desktop and laser mouse (LX 710 Laser).

And my favorite Gigabyte 3D Aurora case (I have a similar one bought months ago.)

I still have the Intel E8500 lent to me a couple of months back and with my own Core 2 Quad Q6600, I should be able to compare all 3 CPUs side by side (minus the graphics cards because each system has a different one).

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Intel launches Core i7 Processors

yuga — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:12:30 +0000

In a media launch this afternoon, Intel claims to deliver the fastest desktop processor on the planet ever with the introduction of the Core i7 CPU.

The Intel Core i7 processors are the newest line to go out of the fab under the Nehalem family (45nm process). All 3 new processors are quad cores with the re-introduction of hyperthreading (HT) to effectively deliver 8 cores.

Of course, better speeds always come at a price:

Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz – $284 (~ Php14,200)
Intel Core i7 940 2.93GHz – $562 (~ Php28,100)
Intel Core i7 965 3.2GHz Extreme Edition – $999 (~ Php49,950)

On top of that, the system will only support DDR3 1066MHz which is still a bit expensive today compared to the standard DDR2. With the Extreme Edition (Core i7 965), Intel has also removed the overspeed protection so hard core users and gamers can easily overclock their rig.

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AMD Phenom X4 9950 Benchmark

yuga — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:07:47 +0000

Been using the Phenom x4 9950 CPU sent to me by AMD for over a month now and I have been doing some simple benchmarks with it. I thought I’d share some of the results I got.

What was originally sent to me was the CPU, a mobo and a video card so I had to build the system from scratch and spent more than Php15,000 in the process. Here are the final specs of the rig:

AMD Phenom X4 9950 2.6GHz
Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H
Palit ATI Radeon HD4870 X2 256-bit GDDR5 512GB RAM
Kingston 2GB 800MHz
640GB Western Digital SATA HDD 16MB
CoolerMaster PSU 550 watts SLI
CoolerMaster 690 Chassis

Ran several performance tests specific to the CPU below:

CPU Integer Math: 322.4 MOps/sec
Floating Point Math: 1816 MOps/sec
Find Prime Number: 563 operations per second
SSE/3DNow: 8130.3 million matrices per second
Compression: 8787 KBytes/sec
Encryption: 75.4 MBytes/sec
Image Rotation: 1414.6 rotations/sec
String Sorting: 5355.4 thousand strings/second
CPU Mark: 2281.8
PassMark Rating: 616.1
FutureMark Score: 4159

We compared the scores of the Phenom X4 9950 with that of the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz and the Intel Code 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz. The chart is shown above and the X4 9950 showed some significant performance over the Q6600.

The Phenom X4 9950 is the latest and fastest among AMD’s quad core series. This CPU has been available for some time now and priced at around Php10,430, almost Php4,000 less than the equivalent Core 2 Quad from Intel (Q9400).

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ViewSonic 22″ Super HD Widescreen LCD

yuga — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:24:29 +0000

This LCD monitor was sent in last week for testing — a 22-inch ViewSonic VX2262wmp widescreen LCD. With super HD quality and a contrast-ratio of 20,000:1, my old 22″ Samsung LCD monitor pales in comparison at just 3,000:1 DCR.

The LCD has a resolution of up to 1680×1050 pixels in a 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio (AOC has also announced their own HD LCDs with the same contrast ratio). It has a response time of 2ms which goes well with gaming. The backpanel has ports for analog VGA and HDMI.

There’s also built-in speakers at the back powered by a 2×2-watt SRS WOW HD and connected via the standard audio port. The sound quality is decent but bass seems to be non-existent and a bit broken.

I placed this side-by-side with my own Samsung 22″ 2232gw LCD and the clarity and vibrance of the colors are clearly distinguished. And though I still love the sleek, curvy design of my 22″ Samsung LCD (it’s lightweight too), the crisp colors of the ViewSonic is something to envy. Been calibrating the two for hours just the make the Samsung LCD match that of the ViewSonic to no avail. Either I don’t know how to calibrate or that’s the best it can do.

Don’t have exact price for this model but could fetch above Php15k.

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