Nvidia GTX 1080 vs GTX 1070

Nvidia's original GTX 970 was long hounded as the best value for money card you could get last generation. Packing a meaty 1,664 CUDA cores and a final boost clock coming in at a respectable 1,178 MHz, this 4GB card was fully capable of powering practically all AAA titles at 1080p at fairly respectable frame rates.

The GTX 1070 is its successor and the new generation of young blood poised to take the crown off its value-oriented older cousin. So what's new?

Well, there's an additional 256 CUDA cores this time round, a higher boost clock running up to 1683 MHz (1797 MHz on the MSI Variant we have in OC Mode) and an additional 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM.

Of course, it's running off of Pascal's mighty 16nm FinFET manufacturing node, enabling 6.5 TFLOPS of overall performance, or thereabouts. That's close enough to a Titan X in spec, but for half the price.

If you take a look back at our first review of the GTX 1080 that launched at the beginning of this June, you'll know our biggest complaint was with the price. The Founder's Edition looks fantastic and really does wonders to reinvigorate the now ageing metallic cooler we first saw with the launch of the GTX 680 way back in the day.

• Nvidia GTX 1080 vs GTX 1070

The problem with Founder's Edition cards is that you end up paying an absolute premium for the sake of what? A few weeks early access and a slightly worse cooler? Color us not convinced. Unfortunately the story rings true again with the GTX 1070.

UK-based retailer Overclockers will be selling the Founder's Edition version at £410 (around $584 or AUS$792). There is a reason to be optimistic, however, as partner cards will be coming in at a far lower price.

MSI's Aero Cooler for instance, with a default blower style cooler is priced at £380 (around $541 or AUS$734), while an aftermarket Twin Frozr will set you back 10 pounds (around $14/AUS$19) more.

X marks the spot

The GTX 1070 variant we have here is non-other than MSI's top of the line Gaming X that comes with a fully custom PCB, improved fan design, LED lighting and stock overclock as standard. And, a meaty one at that. Thanks to MSI's Afterburner software, you have access to three different modes: Silent, Gaming and OC mode.

I'm a little confused as to why these exist, as once buried in your case you'll barely hear this thing. Especially coupled with its 0dB fan technology keeping the fans entirely subdued until post 60 degree temps hit the core.

The extra megahertz on that core clock will net you a good 20% improvement to frame rates in-game. Now, we know that doesn't sound like a lot, but as far as minimum frame rates go, the higher they are the smoother your overall experience will be.

Nvidia GTX 1080 vs GTX 1070

Unknown samedi 11 juin 2016

Hands on: Dell Precision 7710 review

Hardware vendors have annual refresh cycles, both for consumer and professional products. While that's a fairly easy exercise for the former, trying to innovate too much with a niche professional audience can backfire – and sometimes badly.

Dell somehow took the risk and completely revisited its 17-inch workstation, although we feel the company didn't push the envelope as far as it could, maybe because it wanted to trickle improvements rather than deliver everything in one go.

The Dell Precision range could learn a trick or two from the XPS series but the shoe-in replacement of the M6800 sticks to what it does best, delivering the ultimate performance, using the best components, in a portable form factor with little regard for budget.

Since this is a 17.3-inch model, it is a sizeable laptop weighing just over 4.5kg with its 240 Watt brick-like power supply unit, and the device barely fits on an A3 (yes, A3) sheet. It's almost as thick as a ream of paper as well with a 35mm thickness.

Open it and a 17.3-inch anti-glare backlit LED – linked to the base unit via two massive hinges – welcomes you. You can opt for a full HD IPS display or a 4K IGZO panel, a £160.30 (around $230, or AU$310) option. Ours had a full HD display, glare-free with an adequate brightness and minimal screen bleed. A HD webcam and microphone array sit on the frame just above the unit.

You get a dedicated numeric keypad on the Precision 7710 but you lose the Home and End keys, and there are no dedicated function keys despite the size of thisbeast .

We were flabbergasted to find out that the keyboards on the XPS 13 and the Precision 7710 are almost the same size (roughly 270mm x 105mm). We understand the logic behind a compact keyboard layout on one of the world's smallest 13-inch laptops but on a 17.3-inch monster, it simply doesn't make sense, not when you have acres of space to play with.

The keys themselves are slightly curved, mushier than we were expecting with decent feedback and barely any flex. I like the rubber finish of the palm rest which uses the same material as the cover. Other than the standard normal trackpad, the 7710 also comes with a TrackPoint mouse stick, both of which are slightly eccentric. Note that both sport a middle button (the equivalent of scroll button on a mouse).

There are plenty of ports and slots as you'd expect: a memory card reader, a combo audio jack, four USB 3.0 ports, a security lock, a headphone jack, an Ethernet port, HDMI (1.4 not 2.0) and mini DP; Thunderbolt 3 and a smartcard reader are optional extras. No legacy ports are present: VGA, ExpressCard, eSATA and Firewire have been made redundant.

Flip the laptop upside-down and you will see the removable battery (either 72Whr with express charge or 91Whr) as well as plenty of air vents and a pair of speakers. Opening up the notebook is as easy as it gets and is done by removing two screws – that's great if you want to change any parts.

Inside the Dell Precision 7710 are some of the best components available for mobile products. An Intel Xeon E3-1575M processor, one with Iris Pro graphics, a 3GHz base speed and 8MB cache, can be added for a cool £884 (around $1,280, or AU$1,730) – the base model has a Core i5 CPU.

Upgrading from the bundled AMD FirePro W5170M to the beefier Nvidia Quadro M5000M will cost a whopping £847 (around $1,220, or AU$1,650). The Quadro M5500, which is already available on the MSI WT72 6QN, and is a 'VR-Ready' component, is not available as an option sadly.

The whole thing is cooled via what Dell calls a "revolutionary thermal cooling system [which] takes performance and comfort to never before seen levels in a laptop". In the brief time we had with this machine in the office, we didn't notice any significant issues with power dissipation.

Designed to withstand the MIL-STD 810G certification, the Precision 7710 also sticks to ISV certification, as you'd expect from a product sporting either a Quadro or a FirePro GPU.

64GB of RAM can cost as little as £541 (around $780, or AU$1,060), but swapping it for an ECC type memory almost doubles the price. The base configuration comes with only 8GB of RAM which is likely to be restrictive for most if not all software applications the Dell Precision 7710 is expected to run.

As expected, the workstation offers multiple RAID options (RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-5 but no RAID-0 Plus 1). Intriguingly, should you choose RAID-5, all three storage components must be an M.2 card. You can't have SATA devices, whether SSD or spinning disks. You can't actually have spinners in any RAID configuration but you can have a fast system drive coupled with a slow high capacity drive for storage.

We also tried to get a pair of 2TB drives (to reach the maximum 4TB claimed by Dell) but the configuration tool didn't allow that option, and despite the price of the device (£1,662 excluding VAT and delivery – around $2,400, or AU$3,240) and its sheer volume, there's no optical drive on the Precision 7710.

802.11ac connectivity (courtesy of Intel), Bluetooth 4.0 and optional 4G connectivity round off the specification sheet.

Dell has bundled a three-year ProSupport and Next Business Day onsite service as standard with Windows 10 Pro as the OS (and a downgrade path to Windows 7 Pro). You can also save the cost of the Windows license by going Ubuntu.

We didn't test battery life extensively but at rest, even after two hours, there was still plenty of juice – 75% to be precise – left. We suspect however that things would be very different under load and with the GPU in full swing. Note that not once did we hear the fan – but then again, the Precision 7710 was not under load.

Early verdict

The Dell Precision 7710 is not a bad workstation but then it is not a head-turning effort either. The competition is fierce even at this end of the market with existing (Lenovo and HP) and new (MSI) challengers so Dell engineers better be watching their backs.

The Precision 7710 feels like a compromised solution that doesn't quite deliver the goods. Sure, it is plenty powerful, has great battery life and comes with fantastic aftersales support out of the box. And there are only a handful of workstations (Lenovo ThinkPad P50, HP ZBook Studio G3) that can deliver 64GB of RAM, a Xeon CPU and a workstation-class GPU.

But it is far bigger (and heavier) than we'd like and we still don't understand why it can't be configured with two HDDs simultaneously. The layout of the keyboard – as well as its size – is also likely to attract some criticism.

Dell should take a leaf out of the XPS book (or the Alienware series) and design something strikingly different. Alas, even the smaller Precision 5510 could provide the firm with some inspiration. You can buy the Precision 7710 direct from Dell.

Hands on: Dell Precision 7710 review

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Dell Inspiron 15 7559 review: Overpriced, but reliable; a tough sell

We’re seeing an influx of high-end gaming laptops off-late. MSI, Asus and Dell have quite a few devices lined-up in this category and the competition is very fierce. It’s actually quite hard to pick a device based on specs alone because many of the devices in this segment boast of very similar specifications at a very similar price.

The Dell Inspiron 15 7559 is a more expensive entrant in this space, crossing the Rs 1,00,000 mark. Does it offer enough to justify the premium, however? Let’s find out.

Build and design: 7.5/10

The first thing you notice with the Del Inspiron 15 7559 is the weight. At almost 2.7kg, it’s quite heavy. It’s also not a slim device and at least 1 inch thick. Once you get over the size and weight, you realise that it’s quite a handsome device in its own right.

The lid features a black, vaguely rubberized finish—you’ll know when you feel it—and the rest of seems to be made from some sort of hard plastic. The plastic covering the hinge does flex quite a bit, but the hinge itself is sturdy.

The bottom and the rear of the device are interesting however. The bottom is at least 50 percent grill (plastic) that serves as an intake and the rear features a plastic grill and red painted copper fins for cooling.

The overall cooling solution does look beefy and as we discovered, it was actually quite capable.

The only real downside to the build quality is the display unit, which does flex a bit. We would have preferred the sturdiness of a metal frame, especially at the premium that Dell is demanding for this laptop.

Keyboard and trackpad 7.5/10

Given that this is a gaming laptop, we were expecting a really good keyboard—MSI packs in some really nice ones from SteelSeries for example. Sadly, the keyboard was a bit of a let-down. It’s not a bad keyboard as such. The keys are backlit with white LEDs and the keys are evenly spaced. You also get a full-sized number pad and even segregated arrow keys.

The keyboard felt like a let-down due to the fact that the keys aren’t as good as what we’ve come to expect at this price. The keyboard even flexes in the centre while typing. It’s not much, but it’s noticeable and if the laptop was cheaper, we wouldn’t have minded as much.Other manufacturers pack in better quality keyboards in laptops that are around 70 percent the price of this one.

The trackpad itself is fine. It’s large and responsive and sufficient for our needs.

Features: 6/10

The laptop’s hardware is very good. It packs in a 45W Intel Core i7 6700HQ processor, 16GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. The GPU is an Nvidia GTX 960M, which is a bit disappointing considering the price of the device. We were rather hoping for a 970M or even a 980M.

You get 3x USB 3.0 ports (no USB Type-C or Thunderbolt), a combo 3.5mm jack, an SD card reader and an HDMI output. It was also nice to see a LAN port thrown in.

You don’t really get anything extra in terms of accessories and the battery is built into the device itself.

The speakers come in a 2.1 variety, which is nice. Though we’ll tell you right now that the iPad Pro still takes the cake as far as speakers are concerned.

Display: 7.5/10

The display is a high-resolution UHD display (3840×2160) and looks stunning. Black levels are a bit of a sore spot as darker shades of black simply merge into one another. Response time was quite decent for a UHD display though. The colours are vibrant and the brightness levels were also great.

As long as you’re not looking at too many dark scenes on the device, you should have no complaints. If you’re not very particular about contrast you will also have no complaints.

Again, like the keyboard, it’s not that the display is bad, it’s just that we’ve seen better at a much lower price.

Performance: 6.5/10

Performance was a mixed bag, but regardless of the figures, do bear in mind that the results were consistent and repeatable. The frame-rates were also very stable, which leads to a more fluid gaming experience.

We’ll be comparing the Dell Inspiron 15 7559’s performance with the ASUS G501VW as the two of them are virtually identical in terms of configuration. Also bear in mind that the G501 sells for Rs 20,000 less than the Dell and offers a blisteringly fast NVME SSD as well.

In gaming tests, the Dell’s performance was lower than that of the ASUS in most games. We saw a performance drop of between 10 percent and 20 percent in games like Grid: Autosport,Hitman: Absolution and Bioshock Infinite.

The surprise came with Metro: Last Light however, where we saw the Dell thrash the G501VW with a 120 percent increase in performance. Metro Last Light is a very CPU intensive game and since the CPU didn’t throttle, performance numbers were higher and more consistent. In the case of the G501, erratic CPU throttling brought down the performance.

This is where the 7559’s strength lies. While the frame-rates were lower than the competition, the average frame-rate was consistent because the device could maintain a certain minimum amount of power under all load conditions.

Our temperature tests indicated just that, with external temperatures barely crossing 35 degree Celsius even under heavy loads (Furmark and Prime95). The CPU hit 71 degrees and the GPU stayed at a little under 67 throughout testing.

This is also where we discovered the problem with the Inspiron 15’s performance. The clocks were very stable, but the GPU seems to be underclocked to maintain operating temperatures. The laptop aced any test involving CPU-only tasks, but lost ground to the ASUS G501 the moment the GPU was brought into the picture.

The fans do get a little noisy under full load, but it’s not too bad.

The speakers also held their own. They’re loud enough to be able to hear dialogue and most environmental sounds in games. They’re also not bad for movies and games. Regardless, Apple’s 12.9 inch iPad Pro is still king as far as speaker volume and quality is concerned in the portable device segment though.

Battery life: 4.5/10

Our battery life test indicated a figure of two and a half hours, which is, frankly, terrible when you consider that the slimmer, lighter, cheaper G501 managed to eke out almost 4 hours in the same test.

In a normal workday, we managed about 4 and a half hours from the device.

Verdict and price in India

More than the weight, the biggest consideration with the Dell Inspiron 15 7559 is the price. At around Rs 1,20,000, this is not a cheap device. Even more worryingly, both of Dell’s major rivals, ASUS and MSI, offer laptops with the exact same configuration in the Rs 90,000 to Rs 1,00,000 range.

With that in mind, it’s hard to justify the premium that the Dell Inspiron 15 7559 demands. The real problem is that it offers nothing for that premium. The cooling solution is really good, but the laptop is heavier, slower (albeit more consistent), more expensive than and not as well-built as the competition.

Shave Rs 20,000 off the price and I’ll heartily recommend this to anyone who doesn’t mind the bulk. To everyone else, I’d suggest they take a peek at what MSI has to offer.

Tags: Dell Inspiron 15 7559, Dell Inspiron 15 7559 avialability, Dell Inspiron 15 7559 features, Dell Inspiron 15 7559 gaming, Dell Inspiron 15 7559 performance, Dell Inspiron 15 7559 price, Dell Inspiron 15 7559 review, Dell Inspiron 15 7559 specifications

Dell Inspiron 15 7559 review: Overpriced, but reliable; a tough sell

Unknown vendredi 10 juin 2016

ASUS ROG G501VW review: An excellent laptop, if you don’t mind the heat

At Rs 96,000, the ASUS G501V is not a cheap toy. Justifying that price however are beefy specs and a UHD display, both packed into a relatively slim—for a gaming laptop—form factor and lightweight body. But is it the best one for you? Let’s find out.

Build and design: 7/10

The laptop is quite nicely built. An all-aluminium body is marred by a plastic hinge that does feel a little flimsy. Moving past that however, you get a simple, black, brushed aluminium finish and red highlights for the trackpad, logo and keyboard.

The keyboard itself is backlit by red lighting.

The left of the device sees a single USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Type C port, as well as an HDMI port and power jack. The right sees two USB 3.0 ports, a microSD card slot and a 3.5mm combo jack. Fairly standard as far as design goes.

Speakers are placed at the bottom and a non-removable battery pack is embedded near the front of the device.

The laptop is quite large, featuring a 15.6-inch screen and is a little heavy, but still lighter than would expect from a beast of a gaming machine.

Keyboard and trackpad: 7/10

The keys on the keyboard are well spaced and respond uniformly to the touch. They’re not perfect, but they’re very good. The red backlight certainly fits well with the theme and the highlights around the WSAD keys, while gratuitous, are a nice touch. We did appreciate the touchpad, but would have preferred slightly more spacing for the arrow keys because the left arrow key ends up under the 1 key on the numpad.

The trackpad is large and comfortable to use. Using it to scroll and swipe is comfortable and the response was always spot on. The clicks are another matter though. Tap to click wasn’t reliable on the entire surface of the trackpad. It was oversensitive in some areas and unresponsive in others. The buttons themselves were fine.

Features: 7/10

The laptop is slim, but packs in an Intel i7 6700HQ processor, which is a very powerful, 45W TDP processor capable of boosting to 3.5GHz. Also thrown in is 16GB of RAM and a blisteringly fast NVME SSD from Samsung. The graphics horsepower is provided by an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M.

The display is a gorgeous UHD display with a resolution of 3840×2160—a bit overkill we might add—and you get two speakers on the bottom. The inlet and exhaust are towards the rear.

You get a grand total of three USB 3.0 ports and for good measure, ASUS threw in a USB Type-C with USB 3.1 and DisplayPort support as well. You get an HDMI port, a multi-card reader and, duh, a webcam.

You don’t get a LAN port, but ASUS did provide a USB to LAN adapter. It’s certainly a good package for the price.

Display: 8/10

The display is lovely and extremely sharp, as would be expected from a UHD display. However, it’s Windows that lets it down. 4K on a 32-inch display is great when you’re using Windows 10 because you won’t need to use DPI scaling. On a 15.6-inch screen, you definitely need DPI scaling. Text is so small that you have to squint to read and Microsoft, in all its wisdom, refuses to implement a reasonable scaling mechanism in their OS.

Ignoring Windows’ shortcomings however, the display is very good. Everything is crisp and clear and viewing angles are also very good. The display does lose some points for not managing black levels properly though. A great many of the test blocks melded into one.

The average person will have no complaints and unless you’re a designer, you won’t mind in the least.

One area where the display does suffer is in response time. Our test indicated a very poor response time compared to ASUS’ own 1080p laptop displays. This is probably a side-effect of the high-resolution display—we haven’t seen many low-latency 4K displays.

Again, the response time is relatively bad and you’ll only notice it if you’re a hardcore gamer who’s dependent on that response time.

Colours, white levels, banding, etc., were all in control and any media looked spectacular on that display.

Performance: 6.5/10

Purely in terms of gaming in short bursts, the laptop is excellent. We easily crossed the 100fps mark in lighter games like Bioshock Infinite and GRID: Autosport. Hitman: Absolutionsaw frame-rates between 70 and 80, which was also very good. Metro: Last Light is a very heavy game that brings most gaming desktops to their knees and as expected, the G501V struggled to cross the 50fps mark even at the lowest settings.

All gaming tests were conducted at 720p and as can be seen from the results, the laptop should be able to handle 1080p gaming at medium settings. Gaming at 4K is completely out of the question though. You’d need a 980Ti for that (or maybe even the newer 1070 and 1080), and even then your PC will struggle.

When it comes to storage, the device is very capable as ASUS has seen fit to equip the G501V with a 512GB NVME SSD. That’s an M.2 drive running on PCIe 4x lanes. The result? Read and write speeds that exceeded 1500Mbps. You obviously can’t take advantage of such speeds in real world scenarios. Does it give you bragging rights? Oh yes it does.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the laptop has major issues with thermal management. While the i7 6700HQ is perfectly capable of ramping up to 3.5GHz, the temperatures under load cross 87 degrees Celsius and the CPU just barely manages to cross the 2.8GHz mark under sustained load. Even under light loads, the laptop never once crossed the 3.1GHz mark.

In bursts, the performance is great. To put the throttling in perspective however, we got 48000 points in 3DMark’s IceStorm Extreme, but we only managed 33,000 points when the laptop was heated up. That’s a performance drop of 31 percent.

We noticed sudden hiccups throughout our gaming sessions. Sudden frame-rate dips, especially in games like Metro: LL, were the norm. Games like GRID didn’t seem to be affected.

This drop in performance was most evident in our video encoding test. A test that took 14 minutes on an i7 6500U (a 15W CPU), took 34 minutes on the ROG G501V’s i7 6700HQ (a 45W CPU).

While not a deal-breaker, it certainly feels like you’ve been cheated out of 20-30% of your performance. It’s like buying a 250kph Ferrari and then being told that you can only travel at that speed for a minute at a time because the engine gets too hot.

That 87 degree load temperature will affect your thighs as well. The base of the device would routinely hit 50 degrees Celsius under load, making lap usage very uncomfortable when gaming. Even with regular browsing, the base gets noticeably hot, though not as badly as when gaming.

If the thermal issues weren’t bad enough, the laptop’s speakers were a major disappointment. ASUS uses a bunch of software to manage the audio “quality,” but all it ended up doing was turn the volume down so low that we could barely hear it even in a quiet room. Getting rid of the audio management program brought a noticeable improvement in volume levels, but it still wasn’t enough. Audio in movies and YouTube was certainly audible, but that’s all that can really be said about it.

In games, the volume levels were simply too low to provide any sort of ambience and a lot of the dialogue in games like The Witcher 3 would get muffled out.

For a device claiming to be a gaming laptop, this is simply not acceptable.

Battery Life: 6.5/10

Our PCMark Home battery test pegged the G501V’s battery life at just under 4 hours. This is not a bad result for a laptop as powerful as this one. In real-life usage involving browsing, Word and light gaming, we easily managed 6 hours of usage.

This is a better figure than on the ASUS UX303UB, which actually uses a low-power i5 and a 940M.

Verdict and price in India

The ASUS G501VW offers a good package at its price point. The display is great, the SSD is phenomenal and the laptop isn’t actually that thick or heavy for a gaming device. The thermal throttling issues and quiet speakers take away a lot from the overall experience, however.

If you can live with that, this is a great device. If not, you’re better off looking elsewhere.

Tags: ASUS ROG G501VW availability, ASUS ROG G501VW display, ASUS ROG G501VW performance, ASUS ROG G501VW price, ASUS ROG G501VW review, ASUS ROG G501VW speakers, ASUS ROG G501VW specifications, ASUS ROG G501VW SSD

ASUS ROG G501VW review: An excellent laptop, if you don’t mind the heat

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