Windows 8 has a host of new features and improvements that are aimed to improve usability. Many of the larger and more important of these are already very well documented by either Microsoft or third party websites, but it is often difficult to locate the best articles. We researched the best articles for each important new Windows 8 features and grouped them in one place to help you find information on whichever feature interests you.
AutoDesk AutoCAD 2013 GPU Acceleration
AutoCAD 2013 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for AutoCAD is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of desktop and workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 GPU Acceleration
Premiere CS6 utilizes the Mercury Playback Engine to take advantage of the video card to vastly improve both the performance and quality of certain features, but there is currently very little information available regarding the performance of different video cards. In addition, the list of compatible cards from Adobe has not been updated to include the current NVIDIA 600-series video cards, which is further adding to the confusion of deciding which video card you should use for Premiere CS6.
In this article, we will be benchmarking a variety of video cards to find out how well the MPE in Premiere works with NVIDIA 600-series card, and exactly how much performance difference there is between a wide spectrum of video cards.
Adobe Photoshop CS6 GPU Acceleration
Photoshop CS6 utilizes the Mercury Graphics Engine to take advantage of the video card to vastly improve the performance of certain features, but there is currently very little information available regarding the performance of different video cards. In addition, the list of compatible cards from Adobe has not been updated to include the current NVIDIA 600-series video cards, which is further adding to the confusion of deciding which video card you should use for Photoshop CS6.
In this article, we will be benchmarking a variety of video cards to find out if Photoshop is actually compatible with the NVIDIA 600-series, and exactly how much performance difference there is between a wide spectrum of video cards.
Product Review: Fractal Design Define R4
Fractal Design’s exclusivity agreement with Newegg has recently ended, so over the past month we have been looking at a number of their chassis to determine if there were any that we would be interested in offering to our customers.
After looking at a number of different models, we found the Define R4. The Define R4 has an emphasis on quiet operation (as evidenced by the front door and built-in acoustic dampening) which fits well in our product line; but the size, number and location of the fan mounts means that it can very easily be converted into a chassis with very powerful cooling. In this article, we will be looking at the features of this chassis and examining it’s cooling potential to see if it is a chassis that could find a place in our product line.
Ivy Bridge CPU TIM Paste Replacement
Even before launch of the Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs in April 2012, it was discovered that the CPUs were running a bit hotter than expected. The TIM paste was proven to be the culprit by the Japanese site PC Watch when they reported that by replacing the TIM paste they saw a load temperature drop of 8-11 *C at stock clock speeds, and an amazing 15-20*C drop in load temperatures when overclocked to 4.6 GHz.
We decided that it was time to do our own testing to see if anything has changed in recent months. The result was some very interesting data that caught us a bit by surprise.
Product Review: Asus P8C WS
The Asus P8C WS is a workstation class motherboard that includes many features sought after by businesses and home users alike. Most notably, it supports Intel E3 Xeon processors and ECC memory, making it a very stable platform. The varied types of ports and headers also makes it great for machines where backwards compatibility with older devices is critical.
How Ambient Temperatures Affect Your PC
It stands to reason that the hotter the ambient air, the hotter a computer will run and the faster the system fans will spin to try to keep the individual components running cool. While this in itself is common sense, exactly how much hotter components run as the ambient temperature increases is not common knowledge. This information is very useful for us at Puget Systems to use when configuring a customer’s computer, but is also useful to determine if reporting thermal testing results as “degrees above ambient” (as many hardware reviewers do) is actually accurate. To find out the exact ratio, we took a common system configuration and tested it across a range of ambient temperature levels.
Navigating Windows 8 on a PC
The new Windows interface 8 is a major point of controversy at the moment, but whether you love it or hate it, there is certainly a learning curve. Since it was largely designed with touch interfaces in mind, there are a few navigation obstacles that come up when using a keyboard and mouse. In this guide, we will go over basic keyboard/mouse navigation as well as some of the more advanced features of the Metro interface.
Product Review: BitFenix Prodigy
The BitFenix Prodigy has received quite a bit of attention on the web recently, but the PC community is divided over whether or not it is actually good chassis. While it is bigger than a normal mini-ITX chassis, it offers a very wide range of cooling and hard drive customization options. In this article we will be looking at these customization options and many other features to determine if this chassis would be a good addition to our current chassis product line.