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The Z490 chipset is built to accommodate the best of Comet Lake, however some prefer to use small mini-ITX configurations rather than ATX format monsters. In this game, manufacturers have not turned a deaf ear and have released a few models in small format, allowing you to take advantage of the best of the latest generation of processors from Intel, at least on paper.
Read more @ Le Comptoir Du Hardware (French)
Performance on the Apex was right around most other boards, particularly those with a bit more freedom from the Intel specification. Gaming performance was on par or better than most boards, and the other data sets showed similar results. As far as overclocking, we had zero issues pushing our Intel Core i9-10900K CPU to 5.2 GHz. RAM overclocking was painless, easily handling our DDR4 4000 kit. However, the board set the System Agent (VccSA) and IO (VccIO) voltage higher than most.
Read more @ Tom’s Hardware
AMD’s requirements for Smart Access Memory are pretty simple. You need to own a Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) processor, a Radeon RX 6000 (Big Navi) graphics card and a 500-series motherboard. However, ASRock’s latest firmware appears to defy the chipmaker’s conditions as the ASRock B450 Steel Legend motherboard is proof that the setting is available outside of 500-series motherboards.
Smart Access Memory isn’t a proprietary technology. In fact, Smart Access Memory is built upon the foundations of Resizable BAR (Base Address Register), a feature that’s part of the PCIe specification. Smart Access Memory is AMD’s unique fancy way of referring to the technology.
Read more @ Tom’s Hardware
MSI’s new custom GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X graphics card is one of the biggest, most bad-ass RTX 3080s on the market. It sports a tweaked look that looks just… I don’t even have words, it’s just so nice in person and in your hand (and more importantly, in your gaming PC).
The company has used some gorgeous brushed aluminum on the shroud and backplate, which looks absolutely stunning in person with RGB lighting flashing off of it — in my case, 32GB of G.SKILL Trident Z RGB memory. It seriously looks so nice installed into the PC.
Read more @ TweakTown
MSI released a beast of a graphics card with their GeForce RTX 3080 Suprim X. The GPU is the largest GPU that I’ve ever put my hands on. MSI was very quiet on the specifications and even the looks of the graphics card before it showed up at my house. When the shipping box arrived, it was large enough that I was wondering if MSI had shipped two GPUs. The GPU even comes with its own GPU Support bracket.
Read more @ Modders Inc
Overall there is some great performance gains to be had from overclocking both the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 gaphics cards. I’m interested to see how custom solutions from the likes of MSI, SAPPHIRE, XFX, PowerColor, and others do — many of these have custom Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 cards on their way to me now.
Read more @ TweakTown
Out of the three GeForce 30 series cards that NVIDIA announced back in September the one I was most excited about was the RTX 3070. The main reason was mainly price, the RTX 3070 is only $499. Lower-priced cards end up getting in the hands of more gamers and with the RTX 3070 NVIDIA is claiming better performance than a $1200 RTX 2080 Ti!
Read more @ ThinkComputers
AMD has officially stated that Ryzen 5000 support for the 400 series chipset will be coming in 2021, but that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore. Three companies have shared (so far) that they will support AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs before 2021, BIOSTAR, ASRock, and ASUS. With Asrock already having beta BIOS’s ready for the shiny new CPUs.
To ensure compatibility, you’ll need a BIOS for your specific B450 motherboard that supports AGESA 1.0.8.1 at the very minimum. This AGESA code enables Ryzen 5000 Renoir compatibility. In order to get the full performance out of your Ryzen 5000 CPU you’ll need to make sure your B450 motherboard has a BIOS supporting AGESA 1.1.0.0 or greater.
Read more @ Tom’s Hardware
The Ryzen 5 5600X takes the mid-range by storm with six cores and twelve threads powered by the Zen 3 architecture fabbed on the 7nm process. That potent combination equates to a ~19% improvement in instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput, making the 5600X an easy choice for our list of Best CPUs. Other fine-grained improvements, like a vastly optimized boosting algorithm, improved memory overclocking, and reworked cache topology erases the last traces of Intel’s performance advantages while delivering a new level of power efficiency. In fact, as we’ll detail below, the Ryzen 5 5600X is the most power-efficient desktop PC chip we’ve ever tested.
Read more @ Tom’s Hardware
If you’ve already bought, or plan on buying, a Ryzen 5000 processor, AMD just made the deal a whole lot sweeter. AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) introduced one-click hassle-free overclocking to the masses for the Ryzen lineup of processors. Still, while the tech boosts performance in multi-threaded workloads, it has long failed to benefit single-threaded workloads. That changes in December when AMD’s new Precision Boost Overdrive 2 (PBO2) lands in BIOS patches. The new PBO2 boosts single-threaded performance while retaining the benefits of the existing multi-core boosts, and even adds a little extra oomph there, too.
Read more @ Tom’s Hardware