[Gadget] Qnix QX2710 Evolution II display (Part3-Brightness,overclocking and performance)

I’m splitting this article into three parts because it is going to be a long article. This is the part 3.

• Setting up and powering up the display
• Did it have any dead pixels? What about backlight bleeding?
• Brightness, overclocking and performance

 

Brightness

There are only simple brightness controls on the display. You cannot choose a predefined brightness setting as with other displays. In fact, there is no On-Screen Display or Menu where you can change a million different settings. You have to do all of that through the graphics card’s control panel, which isn't a big deal because all the current gen graphics cards support it. I hope it does not impact the performance of the graphics card though.

With a new display, you are always going to get different colors and brightness value compared to the old one out of the box. It takes a bit of effort to set them up to look identical. I haven't managed to do that yet. But I think the settings that I have set for this new display works well. Besides, in a few days I will get used to the new settings and things would become much easier. Anyways, when it comes to brightness and colors, I’m using a custom ICC profile made by someone at OCN forums. Applying the ICC profile is a bit of a pain in Windows but I managed to apply it just fine. (check out a guide here)

[Rant] Speculating the performance of the upcoming NVidia GTX 780 Ti card

I'm sure most of you know that NVidia is planning to release a high end graphics card to counter the AMD R9 290X graphics card which sometimes even performs faster than the GTX Titan. Contrary to what the common sense product was, the latest rumors suggest that this is going to be a fully unlocked GK110 chip. That means, it will have 2880 sharers operating. The GTX780 has 2304 shaders and the Titan has 2688 shaders. That's 20% higher shaders count over the GTX 780 and 7% higher shaders count over the Titan.

Then, the clock speeds are getting an upgrade as well. The GTX 780 is clocked at 863MHz (900MHz boost) and the Titan is clocked at 836MHz (876MHz boost). The GTX 780 Ti will be clocked at 876MHz (928MHz boost). That's 3% higher clock speed over the GTX 780 and 6% higher clock speed over the Titan.

If you consider 100% scaling, we are looking at 23.6% performance boost over the GTX 780; 13% performance boost over the Titan. Best case, remember. But, we all know that the performance between the GTX 780 and the Titan is about 5%. In raw performance terms, the Titan is like 20% faster than the GTX 780. So, the scaling really sucks!

The GTX 780 Ti would be like 5% faster than the Titan at best. Which means, it would be like 5% faster than the R9 290X.

Basically, the R9 290X would still have a better price to performance ratio. 27% cheaper but only 5% slower. Basically, AMD doesn't have to worry about the GTX 780 Ti. But they sure have to worry about their production volume and the stupid stock cooler.

But then again, the stock cooler on the NVidia  card is very good. The rumor is that the card is capable of over- clocking to very high clocks. The AMD card suck over-clocking, no thanks to the crappy coder. According to this article, the GTX 780 Ti can be over-clocked  to 1240MHz which translates to about 23% performance boast over the R9 290X.And then there's is a GHz edition of the same GTX 780 Ti coming out a some point That would be about 10% faster than the R9 290X out of the box. But at what price? I'm sure NVidia would charge $799 for that card because it would be a heavily binned card and would be an overclocker's dream come true.

All I can say is that the R9 290X's pricing or even the GTX780's pricing (after the price drop) makes sense. Anything higher is just for the people who own a tree of money or who has little brain.

Edit:

Since I’ve posted this article, they have released the real thing and it is much faster than what I anticipated. It has made the Titan obsolete. The Titan was never meant to be a gaming card. I was a great compute card which you could buy without breaking the bank. However, it could do really well in games.

[Article] Probably IvyBridge-E would be a flop as well

Yesterday Tom's Hardware released some preliminary benchmark results of the upcoming IvyBridge-E CPUs. They only compared others with the highest end SKU, namely, the 4960X. The results were very lackluster once again. (Previously, both the SB to IB and IB to Haswell were lackluster) I felt the benefits of IB-E over SB-E were even less than the benefits of IB over SB.

 

Now, there was one important improvement with IB-E over SB-E. Power consumption. At full load, the power consumption delta was more than 80W. This is at the same clock speeds. With the power consumption being lower than the predecessor and the IHS being soldered to the die, we might see some sweet overclocking numbers though. Too bad Tom's Hardware didn't do  any overclocking tests. That could be the deciding factor.

 

But if we assume that IB-E would clock to the same values as the SB-E, this doesn't look like a big upgrade either. You will definitely see a noticeable improvement with multi-threaded applications by upgrading to a 6-core CPU, but at what cost? The sweet spot, the 4930K, will still cost like $600. That's about 70% more than a 4770K, while giving less than 50% better results even at best case. On average, the 4930K would be like 20% faster. Maybe even less. Like I said, it is the overclocking potential that is going to make a difference.

 

Another noteworthy thing though. Why the heck would anyone buy a 4820K over a 4770K? It will perform about the same (because there isn't a noticeable difference between dual channel and quad channel memory and most people will settle for a maximum of 2 graphics cards; the enthusiasts will go for 6-core CPUs anyway), but 4770K has newer motherboards with 6x native SATA-III and USB3.0 support and a lot of fancy stuff. We all know that there is not going to be a x89 chipset, so the IB-E platform will be 2 years behind current technology. Sucks! Intel should have released IB-E last year.

 

I was planning to get the IB-E and now I'm skeptical. I will wait for the overclocking results - retail overclocking results to be precise. (We all know how Haswell retail CPUs clocks worse than the engineering samples.

 

Why, why, why doesn't Intel want my money? :(

[Review] Dell Latitude 10 Essentials Windows 8 tablet user review–part 3: the performance, the camera and battery life

This is the part 3 of the Dell Latitude 10 Essentials Windows 8 tablet user review. This one is about the performance, the camera and battery life.

Note: If you missed the part 1 and 2, click on the following links to read them.

Part 1: Ease of holding the tablet and look & feel

Part 2: Usability

OK, let’s get on with this section then.

Performance

If you want to find out how measurably fast the tablet is, read this review. I will not go into those tests. I will only talk about how I feel, together with Windows 8.

1) CPU

I am a guy that loves fast computers. This tablet definitely isn't fast. That’s mostly due to the Atom Clovertrail 1.8GHz dual core/hyper threaded CPU in there. The specs wise, it doesn’t seem slow, but Clovertrail is an in-order executed CPU, which makes it slow compared to Core series CPUs.  But I knew that before I bought it.

There was no choice, to be honest. ARM doesn't support full version of Windows 8 and Intel Core series CPUs have terrible battery life, need active cooling and all that adds weight. So we all have to put up with the slowness of the Atom chips. Hopefully Baytrail will fix it.

2) Storage

Anyways, the CPU doesn't seem to be the only thing that is slow in this tablet. The storage medium is eMMC which is solid state alright, but doesn't have the raw speed of an SSD. It's pretty slow, just like a USB flash drive.

3) The OS itself

But Windows 8 modern apps are slow to launch anyways. The video app for example takes about 5 seconds to load a video for the first time. The Windows Store is terrible. It is slow and needs a lot of user interactions to get the smallest thing done.

4) Wi-Fi

Downloads are not so fast. Wi-Fi browsing performance is comparable to my iPhone 4S, sometimes even slower. I was expecting more. The current generation devices have better Wi-Fi performance than iPhone 4S.

The Camera

The camera on a tablet doesn’t make much sense and people taking photos with a tablet look like idiots. But nevertheless, some people would like to see how the camera performs. I captured a video and took some photos with it.

Photos:

		Photos from Dell Latitude 10 Essentials tablet VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Video:

Battery life

I haven't measure the battery life accurately but according to the proper reviews, the battery seems to hold for about 8-10hrs. That's good and you should not expect nothing less from a CPU this slow. In other words, you won't have to worry about the battery life.

Next: bundled bloat ware, Windows 8.1 compatibility, recovery and firmware updates

Yay! My iPhone 4S is snappy again.

When I bought my iPhone 4S almost 20 months ago, I straight away felt how fast it was compared to my old iPhone 3GS. But after a while it became slow. In fact, it got so slow that there have been times that I felt like throwing it out the window or dropping it on the floor and crushing it with my feet. I know, it would only make things worse, thus I controlled myself every time the thought occurred to me.

Things got worse with iOS 6 update. It would work well as soon as I restored or updated the OS, but eventually get slow.

When Evasi0n released the Jailbreak for iOS 6.1, I went ahead with the Jailbreak. I didn't feel that the phone got any slower, but the battery went down the hill. After a few months, I gave up the Jailbreak. But disappointingly, I didn't get better performance nor battery life. I only lost the Jailbreak tweaks that I really loved. At this point, I was using iOS 6.1.3, the latest as of this day.

Then WWDC2013 happened. iOS 7 was introduced and I managed to install the developer preview on my phone without paying for a developer account. (Click here to find out how to do it.) But it ran so horribly slow on my phone. Restarting fixed it for a certain degree, but it was slow - much slower than the slowness I talked about at the top of this post. People with iPhone 5's were not feeling the slowness. Sure, the iPhone 5 is twice as fast as mine, but if people didn't feel the slowness, that's either because it is not slow, or because people are numb. I wanted to believe it was the former. So what I did was, I cleared out all the junk from the phone.
・I had all 1000 pics from Photo streams and disconnected it from the phone.
・I removed all the photos there were in the camera roll.
That's all really. I had already removed the unnecessary apps and I only had the apps that I frequently used.

But it didn't get any faster. Not only that, it was crashing few of the apps that I really needed. One of them was the Pocasts app. Commuting without the Podcast app would be a nightmare. So I wanted to go back to iOS 6.

But I made a mistake this time. I could not restore the backup via iTunes, because the last backup was done from iOS 7 and it was incompatible with iOS 6's backup format. Yes, I believe the older backups were still there in the PC and I could have chosen one of them instead. I only remembered that the next day. But I do not regret what happened. I had to start over from the scratch, BUT for some reason, the phone is very snappy now. I think it was the junk that was in the backup that was causing the lag. I had all the SMS history and call history and the settings of apps that I don't use anymore all copied back to the phone. That junk must have been the cause of the slowness. I have been using the phone for 3 days and there isn't the slightest hint of it running slow. Sure, it is not iPhone 5, but I don't feel that it is laggy anymore. I'm pretty sure that it is not my mind playing tricks.

So what I am going to do from here onwards is, I'm going to keep my the call history clean, SMS history clean (only keep the ones that I want to keep, and delete the rest), sync only 50 emails, clean up the camera roll every day when I get back home and not connect to photo streams. Basically, I'm gonna keep the phone as clean as I can. I'm sure it will become an obsession eventually, but at least I will have a fast phone.

Haswell dream shattered even before the release? Haswell is a flop?

Yesterday I came across a very disturbing news. A Chinese site had posted benchmark scores of the flagship Intel Core i7 4770K (@stock as well as at @4.5GHz) and the results were pretty bad. They were comparing it with the flagship model from the 3rd generation, namely the Core i7 3770K. They were not just posting the scores. They were also showing the screenshots of CPU-Z, AIDA and other benchmark programs. 

Let's be honest now. Nobody likes those Chinese sites. They are ugly, plus, nobody can read them. Google translate can do a decent job, but still the quality of content in those sites are BAD. Luckily, Xbitlabs recently extracted those results and posted on their website. Check it out by linking on the following link.
Web-Site Publishes Fully-Fledged Intel Core i7-4770K “Haswell” Review 

The following is an extract of the results posted on that site.

That really sucks! The only thing that might sound interesting is the last test, but that is all due to the better iGPU in Haswell. It has nothing to do with the CPU raw power.

But we knew that the performance improvement from the CPU side was not going to be fantastic. Intel was mostly concerned about two things. Improving the power efficiency (for tablets and ultrabooks) and improving the performance of the integrated graphics potion (for non-enthusiast crowd). They seems to have done that alright.

But we expected a bigger than a single digit percentage boost, did we not? In some tests, Haswell is even slower than its predecessor. That's unacceptable. The instructions per clock (or IPC) hasn't improved much, from even SandyBridge. For example, the 4770K@4.5GHz does 1M Super Pi calculations in 8.018s and my 2600K at same clocks does it in 8.344s. Just a mere 4% improvement at the same clocks. That's almost no architectural change IMO. No idea what those Intel engineers were doing for more than a year.

However, what every geek was waiting to see was how well the Haswell CPU overclocked compared to the previous generations. There were leaked overclocking results showing the CPU running at 6GHz with just 1.2V and 7GHz with a whopping 2.56V. It is possible that CPU-Z wasn't reporting the correct amount of Voltage because the Voltage Regulator Modules (VRMs) are moved from the motherboard on to the CPU itself. Anyways, 6GHz @1.2V seems like it can even do that on air, right? IvyBridge could do OK with 1.2V when it comes to the temperature. There is no need to doubt that would not be the case with Haswell because Intel did not change the process node from 22nm. 

But what that Chinese website reports is very troubling. They are saying that their 4770K CPU @4.5GHz could not complete Cinebench test because the internal temperature of the internals rose up too rapidly that their water cooler couldn't keep up with that rate, and ultimately crashing the PC. We don't really know if this is true or if they applied too much voltage to the CPU that it overheated too fast or if the reason for crash was something completely unrelated to it being a Haswell CPU. 4.5GHz seems to low to require a water cooler and that water cooler too being insufficient. Besides, this was a engineering sample. I don't think there would be significant difference between the retail product and this, but we shall see.

The CPUs are coming out in early June so it's only one month to go before we see the real things in action. But so far, things are not looking great for the enthusiast desktop user. If these results are true, I'll probably stick with my trusty Sandybridge CPU. Heck, I might even consider the IvyBridge-E platform to upgrade to. While I'm not happy that I won't be able to waste some of my hard earned cash this time round if Haswell turns out to be crap, I'm glad that this might actually give AMD a fighting chance when the Steamroller comes out later this year. (AFAIK, it's coming out in September so not so far away from now.)

Crysis 3 patch 1.3 released

Few days ago, Crytek released the patch version 1.3 for Crysis 3 with a lot of bug fixed in single player and multiplayer modes. While the improvements were necessary, they broke an essential part of multiplayer mode.

People were seeing a massive performance drop only in multiplayer mode. For example, I was playing with High settings because I wanted to get all the FPS I could so that it reduces input lag, and prior to this patch I was getting around 80 ~ 120FPS. But after the patch, the frame rate didn’t rise above 50FPS. Funny thing was, I was getting the same 50FPS in all Medum, High and Very High graphics settings. There were many posts on the forums and for some people the game had become completely unplayable. I can see how that would drive people insane, especially because every one who is playing the multiplayer has bought the game legitimately.

But Crytek released a small update the next day and it fixed the issue. Now I’m getting the same 80 ~ 120fps as before. Phew!

In case you are wondering what the improvements in version 1.3 are, click the following image.

The Windows 8 tablet experience - web browsing

Browsing and watching videos are the two most important things that I do with the tablet. If either of these experiences are sour, the entire tablet experience become sour for me.

 

Google Chrome

I was planning to use Google Chrome when I received the tablet, because that way I could get the full browsing experience that a full blown desktop browser offers. I could integrate LastPass, sync my bookmarks and settings with my desktop PC, block ads (the screen is not large enough to allow ads on a tablet, even though I'm not against advertising) and integrate Internet Download Manager to download flash video off the streaming sites.

But those plans got irradiated the second I found out how pathetic the Google Chrome's UI was as a touch UI. The interface is very slow as well. (I have noted on PCs too, if you have a fast PC the UI feels fluid, but if you are using an ancient PC from the Pentium4 days, the UI performance starts to crawl.) You cannot zoom with two fingers without using the f-word. The Metro version is no better. Metro version is pretty much the same thing as the desktop version, only made to run under the Metro environment. Nothing's done to improve the touch experience.

 

What about Firefox? They have a Metro version too right?

Then I checked Firefox Nightly build that comes with a Metro version alongside the desktop version. It wasn't that great either. There definitely were some attempt to improve the touch experience, but the UI wasn't smooth -or responsive- enough. And the UI acted erroneously most of the times. For example, when I set focus to the address bar, the virtual keyboard wouldn't come up. Also it is currently lacking a lot of features. Add-ons are not supported yet. Until they start supporting add-ons there is no way I can recommend Firefox over IE10.

But since Firefox is at least on the right track-on the UI perspective at least, I will continuously monitor how their Metro version of the browser evolves. Who knows, I might end up ditching Chrome on the desktop and completely switch to Firefox, if Mozilla gets their Metro version of the browser right, because I want uniformity between the devices I use.

 

How to improve/restore your Samsung 840 Series SSD’s performance

Remember that I bought a Samsung 840 series 250GB SSD about a month ago? Remember also that I told you I would be closely monitoring the degradation? This is the report after a month of moderate use.

 

On a fresh Windows 8 Pro x64 installation, the Windows Experience Index rated the SSD at a score of 8.1. But over the past month, I installed a lot of applications and huge games and now the SSD is 30% full. (Yeah, just 30%!) Once even I mistakenly copied my entire iTunes music collection to the SSD. Then I downloaded a whole 10GB file to the SSD without knowing that it was being downloaded into the SSD. I also did not do any of the space-saving tricks discussed here either. I'm using the default temporary folders. However, I do not let those temporary folders to fill up. Everyday at 10PM, a scheduled CCleaner cleanup job gets executed and all the temporary files get purged.

 

The Windows Experience Index score for the SSD quickly dropped to 7.9 after a couple of weeks. I wasn't happy about it because that's what I got with my old SSD as well. I waited a week or so hoping that the original performance would be automatically restored, but it didn't happen. I felt as if I was cheated.

 

The SSD comes with a maintenance / management tool called the Samsung SSD Magician.

 

 

You can perform various tasks in it.

• Benchmarking (Sequential read/write speeds + IOPS)
• Performance Optimization (garbage collection?)
• Data migrating (cloning from a old drive)
• Secure erasing (resetting the bits either to start fresh - kinda like a manual trim, if you are going to sell the drive.)
• Changing the amount of default over provisioning (how much space is reserved for wear leveling)
• Optimizing the OS settings to get the best out of the SSD (things like disabling indexing service and hibernation)
• Firmware update

I'm not actually sure what Performance Optimization does, perhaps some sort of garbage collection, but that is what we are interested in. Last night I ran it to see if I can get back the score of 8.1 in Windows Experience Index. It didn't take long. It originally predicted a running time of 6 minutes, but it actually finished within a minute. Thus I wasn't expecting any miracles. But that's what I got. A miracle.

Is Google Chrome having memory leaks? It becomes really sluggish at times.

I’ve an avid Google Chrome user. I love its simple and sleek UI. I like how it syncs all the bookmarks, extensions and everything with my Google Account. Even though Chrome still sucks on my iPhone (it’s slower than Safari even with the Nitro JavaScript engine is enabled for it), I still like how it syncs everything from my PC to the phone…and to my laptop as well.

Quite recently, I have come to notice that the browser become very sluggish after browsing for few minutes. When I quite Chrome, I see Task Manager dropping the RAM usage by about 2GB. That’s insane – a browser using up 2GB RAM?? Looks like there is a memory leak somewhere. I’m currently using the latest release version – 24.0.1312.57m as of 2013/02/07. It’s not easy to reproduce though.

I don’t use a lot of extensions. Only a handful of them. Namely, Lastpass, Rikaikun and AdBlock Plus. Internet Download Manager extension is automatically installed as well. There were few more extensions, but I removed the ones that I don’t use much the last time this happened. Today it happened again, and obviously it was not caused by those extensions that I removed. I cannot uninstall the extensions that I have installed at the moment.

One thing was in common between last two times this happened. Facebook page was opened and I had checked my feed a bit deep. Could Facebook page be the culprit? I’ll post back if I find the cause. Maybe I should try the latest developer release.

Anyone else having the same problems as I’m having? Let me know if you have a fix or an idea for me to try.

The impact of Antialiasing (AA) mode on Crysis 3 MP Beta’s performance with Geforce GTX670

I had a little spare time today and managed to measure how antialiasing affects Crysis 3 Multi Player Beta’s performance on my GTX670.

Please note that this is not very accurate because the game play is not identical between each. That’s impossible right now. Hopefully there will be a benchmarking mode in the full game. Then it would be easier to compare the performance with others.

Test Configuration

• CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k @ 4.5GHz
• RAM: 16GB DDR3 9/9/9/24/1T
• Motherboard: ASRock Z68 Extreme4
• Video Card: Palit Jetstream GTX670 @ 1176MHz (313.96 beta drivers)
• Audio Card: Creative X-Fi Titanium
• Disk Drive: Samsung 840 250GB (rest is not important)

Frame rate was measured by FRAPS for more than 2500 frames. Some even more than 5000 frames, but as the performance got worse with stronger AA, I didn’t want to play long enough.

Results

There isn’t really a point in comparing the min and max frame rates because it is not the same gameplay. But you should be comparing the average frame rate.

Obviously, running with no AA is the fastest, but it seems SMAA 2TX gives you the best experience overall. I hope the performance would only go up from here. The game will be hopefully optimized a bit and the drivers improved a bit. If we can hit 60fps on average with SMAA 2TX, then it would be a awesome.

Crysis 3 multiplayer beta impressions

Day before yesterday (29th of January), Crytek released the multiplayer beta of their upcoming flagship game, Crysis 3, to the public. Wasn't I glad to see that by the time I got home, the game was already online. (Except that my mouse was broken! Gah!) i didn't expect to find out that my PC (a 2600K @4.5GHz and GTX670 @1176MHz/6800MHz) wasn't adequate to play the game with graphics maxed out. But sadly, that was the case. Well, I could use very high settings for everything, but any mode of AA along with those settings would make it slow enough. TBH, even without AA, the game looked amazing. Crytek knows how to do eye candy right.

I was getting around 60fps without AA and if I used MSAA 8X, which comes with the biggest performance hit, I would get like 25FPS. There are so many AA options for you to choose from though. Most people are recommending that you use SMAA which not only gives much better performance than MSAA, but produces better quality AA’ed renderings overall. (Well, it is not better across the board, otherwise there is no point in including MSAA, but on average it is on par with MSAA.) I didn't play around with the different AA modes and how they affect performance, especially because there wasn't repetitive gameplay to come to a solid conclusion, but I shall give it a try when I have some free time - which is hard to come by these days though. The only way to improve it beyond what I get is by going multi-GPU. Didn't I say that I'm never going to go the multi-GPU route after biting the dust with the HD6950 CFX? *sigh*.

AMD HD7000 series graphics cards: from top dog to under dog then to top dog once again!

There is no official announcement of when the next generation graphics cards from AMD are coming out, but it's been almost a year since they released the HD7000 series. One would expect that the new cards to hit the market in early next year. When AMD released HD7000 series cards, the top of the line cards managed to excel the nVidia's top of the line cards by a fa. For that reason, AMD enjoyed high profits because they could sell the high-end cards at a price never seen before. The HD7970 was originally sold at $549 and HD7950 at $449. But such high price didn't stop people from buying those cards. Those cards were intended for enthusiasts and they would pay anything to own the cutting edge stuff.

There was one problem with the HD7900 series cards though. They did not widen the gap as much as people originally expected. The GTX580 was still competitive in the high-end segment. Only the HD7970 was faster. HD7950 was only slightly faster. Sometimes performing on par.

Windows 8 RTM thoughts

Finally Windows 8 RTM came out on 15th of August on the dev channels, and ,to everyone’s surprise, along with a downloadable public trial of Enterprise version. Too bad you cannot simply upgrade it when the retail versions hit the market. Doesn’t really matter to me because I managed to grab the Pro version and got myself activated. :)

TBH, I was expecting a much larger change from Release Preview, other than disabling of Aero transparency and smaller text/larger icon of Metro apps. I’m sure there are a lot of under the hood changes, but in the end of the day, we only can see what we only can see.

Just to try out my new USB drive, I went around installing it via the USB drive. I used the tool that was meant for Windows 7. It went in pretty well. Installed pretty quickly too. Activated fine. But, just like OSX Mountain Lion, it didn’t have the oomph factor which was there from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Instead, I felt as if it came with a lot of bloat-ware that I would not use, but could not get rid of either.