Those titles include Quake, Rose Riddle 2: Werewolf Shadow, The Amazing American Circus, Banners of Ruin, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Spinch, Desert Child and Doors: Paradox. New in-game content for titles like Apex Legends, Madden 23, Fall Guys and Valorant are also on offer. From December 27 through January 3, Prime subscribers can additionally add the following games to their collection free of charge: Dishonored 2 Metal Slug Metal Slug X Metal Slug 3 Real Bout Fatal Fury The King of Fighters 2003 The Last Blade The Last Blade 2 Twinkle Star Sprites SNK 40th Anniversary Collection...

Shortly after Zacate’s release, we had an opportunity to test AMD’s A8-3850 desktop APU, codenamed Llano, which featured “Husky” CPU cores that were essentially the mobile Phenom II architecture along with Redwood-class integrated graphics (WinterPark for the dual-core variants and BeaverCreek for the quad-core versions). Like Zacate, we felt Llano was going to be a success for AMD, and for the most part, it has been a hit among certain users....

The AMD A10-6800K took 14.75 seconds to complete our Excel 2013 workload test, making it 4% faster than the A10-5800K and 26% faster than the Pentium G2020. It was far from matching the FX-4350 and Core i5-3450, however, delivering 40% and 50% lower performance respectively. The A4-4000 was considerably slower at 33.80 seconds. This made it 20% slower than the A4-5300 and 40% slower than the Celeron G1610. Using the in-built WinRAR 5....

“Why didn’t we see Radeon 7000 up against Nvidia, what’s up with that?” PCWorld asked. “Are you afraid? What’s going on?” The logical answer that most commenters were suggesting turned out to be the right one: AMD doesn’t have an RTX 4080 on hand to benchmark yet, and nor does it want to use Nvidia’s propped-up numbers in its presentation. “Nvidia hasn’t sent me a 4080 yet, so I’m kinda waiting for that to come in before I can have the comparisons,” Azor laughed....

The memory bandwidth performance of the Athlon II X4 620 was excellent when compared to the Intel Core 2 range. MaxxMem² reported a read bandwidth of 8.8GB/s, while the write throughput reached 6.8GB/s. The latency performance was also quite good, as the Athlon II X4 620 roughly matched the Phenom II processors and outclassed Intel’s chips except for the newer Core i5 750. EVEREST Ultimate Edition confirms the strong memory bandwidth performance of the Athlon II X4 620 processor, as again we found it to be significantly faster than the Core 2 processors....

Although we ran Metro 2033 with Tessellation disabled, we still saw big gains with the Radeon HD 6970 compared to the previous generation HD 5870. The card reached an impressive 52fps at 1920x1200. This was 11% faster than the GeForce GTX 570 and just 9% slower than the GTX 580. The new Radeon also looked past the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 with a 8% advantage, which ultimately meant that it was an incredible 73% faster than the HD 5870....

Finally when testing with Splinter Cell Conviction, the Radeon HD 6990 was 4% slower than the Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire boards and just 8% faster than the HD 5970. Compared to a single Radeon HD 6970, the HD 6990 was 65% faster and 48% faster than the GeForce GTX 580.

Bioshock was another rare case where the Radeon R9 270X was considerably faster than the Radeon HD 7870 though that could be down to the new drivers. With a 16% performance boost over the Radeon HD 7870 the R9 270X was 3% faster than the GeForce GTX 660. The Radeon R7 260X was also 16% faster than the Radeon HD 7790 but 5% slower than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti....

The R9 290X averaged 71.3fps at 2560x1600 in Max Payne 3, which was only 1% faster than the GTX Titan but 20% faster than the GTX 780 and only 1% slower than a pair of GTX 660 Tis. Furthermore, AMD’s newcomer offered a 30% performance boost over the old HD 7970 GHz Edition. The frame time performance of the R9 290X was solid, taking 16.4ms between frames at 2560x1600 and faring 13% better than the HD 7970 GHz Edition, 3% better than the GTX 780 and 8% worse than the GTX Titan....

The idle results aren’t particularly interesting, as you can see the R9 290X’s system idle consumption is within a few watts of the HD 7970 GHz Edition and GTX Titan. When playing Crysis 3, the R9 290X system consumed 304 watts – 2% more than the GTX Titan, which isn’t bad considering the former was 15% faster in this title. Similarly, the R9 290X consumed just 4% more power than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition despite being 41% faster....

Despite the potentially enormous power consumption of the R9 295X2, it’s a sleeper at idle, consuming just 10 watts more than the R9 290X. It was also slightly more fuel efficient at idle than a pair of GTX 780 SLI cards. When playing Crysis 3, the R9 295X2 takes the system power consumption to 566 watts, 13% more than the older HD 7990. This was also 16% more power than consumed by the GTX 780 SLI system and 86% more than a single R9 290X....

What’s great about using these cards for a 4GB vs. 8GB test, is that with the exception of memory capacity, they’re identical, so there are no other factors to account for such as cooler quality or operating clock speeds that can influence the results. The Sapphire Pulse 5500 XT’s are also top notch cards that retail for about $10 over the MSRP, a reasonable markup given they feature a factory overclock, a well designed cooler with an excellent aluminium backplate, and they even come with a dual BIOS....

As before, the Ryzen 3 1300X will operate at a base frequency of 3.5GHz with a boost frequency of 3.7GHz, while the slightly lower-end 1200 drops that to 3.1GHz with a 3.4GHz boost. Both parts are unlocked, so the pricier 1300X seems less attractive to us at $130, which is only $40 away from the SMT-enabled R5 1400. At $110, the R3 1200 offers $60 in savings over the R5 1400 and seems like a better buy for budget builders....

Our custom WinRAR test was also used to measure the performance of these budget AM3 motherboards. As you can see the shorter 400MB program compression test saw all three AM3 boards complete the test in 41 seconds making them just a few seconds slower than the more expensive Phenom II X6 1090T and Core i5 750 processors. The longer single file audio/video compression test did see the unlocked Phenom II X2 555 lag behind....

AMD, which this week posted record quarterly revenue, is pushing Dragon Range’s gaming laptop credentials in the slide. In addition to the Zen 4 architecture, it will also have the highest ever core/thread count and cache for a mobile gaming CPU. No specifics on exactly how many Zen 4 cores it will boast, but there have been rumors that it could reach as high as 16. Additionally, Dragon Range will support full DDR5 memory as opposed to being limited to LPDDR5, as is the case with the Phoenix APUs....

According to Gordon Moore, the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years (Moore’s Law). However, maintaining this while using a monolithic design has gradually become more challenging, leading companies like AMD and Intel to use chiplet systems within their products. Moore predicted this in 1965, calling it the “Day of Reckoning.” “It may prove to be more economical to build large systems out of smaller functions, which are separately packaged and interconnected,” Moore said....

When it comes to idle consumption, the 7200U is on par with the 6200U as both complete systems consumed just 7 watts here. Despite the slight clock speed advantage, the Core i5-7200U does consume slightly less power than the 6200U under full load, we saw a 2-watt reduction here. Certainly nothing worth getting excited over but it’s nice to see efficiency improvements, even if they are minor. Placing both the CPU and GPU under full load we see that the 7200U consumed 3 watts less than the 6200U, so again nothing earth shattering but it’s still positive to see a reduction in consumption for a slight performance improvement....

The CoreHT fared pretty well in Far Cry 2 with 50.7fps, which was quite a bit better Vision3D’s 37.9fps and highly playable if you’re willing to do without the eye candy. Using low quality settings at 1024x768, we saw an average of 171.2fps in Company of Heroes with the CoreHT, clearly more than enough for a smooth, albeit ugly experience. The CoreHT also fared well in StarCraft II, averaging 49....

On the other hand, the CoreHT with its Core i5 2520M/HD Graphics 3000 is only a fraction faster than what we saw from the Vision 3D, providing rather poor performance. The CoreHT does much better when testing with Povray and this time it is just a hair slower than the AMD A8-3850. Furthermore, it provided a noticeable performance improvement over the Vision 3D. The CoreHT provided strong CPU performance in CINEBENCH R11....

The Asrock Ion 330HT-BD on the other hand, may still be far from a gaming solution, however at 1024x768 with maximum quality settings enabled, we saw average frame rates above 15fps. This means playing games such as UT3 using low quality settings is possible and older games will be playable. Again the Ion 330HT-BD is certainly not a gaming system, but it would be possible to enjoy some older 3D games with it....