Step up your game with a Dell Alienware desktop. Today you get one of these systems with an RTX 2060 graphics card and a Core i5 processor on sale with over $380 knocked off the retail price.
Dell’s new Alienware Aurora gaming desktops utilize a new case design with RGB LED lighting and it comes equipped with a powerful Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card, which is capable of running the latest games with next-gen effects including ray tracing. You can get it now from Dell marked down from $1,229.99 to $849.99.
Apple’s Watch SE is a more affordable alternative to the new Watch Series 6. It’s more than twice as fast as the old Apple Watch Series 3 and comes loaded with useful features to track your fitness activity. By default this watch is priced over $100 lower than Apple’s Watch Series 6, but now you can get one from Amazon marked down from $279.99 to just $259.00.
Insignia’s 43-inch 4K TV features HDR support and Amazon’s Fire TV software. This allows the TV to stream content from various sources, and it enables you to control your TV with voice commands using an included voice remote with Alexa support. Normally this model would cost $299.99, but right now you can get it for $199.99 from Amazon.
With powerful noise-cancelling technology, these headphones provide a superior music-listening experience by eliminating ambient noise. They can last for up to 30 hours on a single charge, and for a limited time you can get a set of these headphones from Amazon marked down from $349.99 to just $278.00.
Featured Deals
Alienware Aurora R9 Intel Core i5-9400 6-core Gaming Desktop with RTX 2060, 512GB SSD for $849.99 at Dell (List price $1,229.99)
No one could have predicted the importance of a home office in 2020! With most of us working from home or helping kids attend virtual school, we’re relying on a home workspace now more than ever. And as we all invest in improving our work areas, it’s important to think about upgrading our computers as well.
Laptops are great for convenience’s sake, but while we continue to stay safe sheltering in place, it’s vital to establish a separation between work and play within our homes. That’s where a great desktop comes in. We no longer have commutes, so it’s easy to get used to working in bed, on the couch, or at the dinner table. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to close the door on work at 5 pm, both literally and figuratively?
Desktops aren’t portable, but in 2020 this might be their best attribute. By ensuring that your desktop stays at your desk, there are immediately work boundaries set. And aside from helping you disconnect, there are plenty of other reasons desktops can be preferable to laptops.
Why choose a desktop?
Though laptops are convenient, desktops with similar parts as their portable counterparts are still proven to work faster and smoother. That’s likely due to the fact that desktops are able to utilize full-size parts, which pack more punch than the smaller parts used for laptops. If you’re looking for a quick and reliable computer, desktops are the way to go.
Aside from better performance, there’s also the important factor of price. Thanks to their convenience, laptops can usually cost a pretty penny. And despite being bigger in size, desktops don’t necessarily come with a heftier price tag.
When it comes to value, desktops definitely win out over their laptop counterparts. And when you need to make an upgrade, it’s much easier — and less expensive! — to make changes to desktops than it is to upgrade a laptop. The same goes for potential repairs as well.
There’s also the issue of comfort, where desktops also have an edge thanks to their full size keyboards and mouse options. Though these things are also possible to use with a laptop, they tend to take away the ease of portability.
If you’re in the market to get a desktop for your home, we’ve rounded up some desktop computers that are currently on sale from top tier brands. Whether you’re in the market for a renewed or refurbished, or maybe a brand new gaming desktop, check out these killer sales:
Dell Desktops
Dell has always been a reliable electronic brand, with that unforgettable “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” ad campaign to boot! But catchy phrases aside, Dell desktops are reliable and powerful computers available in a wide range of prices. And when you select a refurbished or renewed version, you’re getting an even sweeter deal.
HP is a trusted name in the world of computers, and for good reason. They build dependable desktop computers, and if you look into their renewed or refurbished models you can get an incredible deal. Here are two great options that are both available now for under $500.
If you’re looking for an affordable desktop option, Lenovo desktops are packed with impressive technology while remaining easy on the pocketbook. And if you choose a renewed or refurbished computer you can get them for a steal.
Maybe you’re looking for a desktop that can help you escape all that is 2020. If that’s the case, Periphio Gaming desktops are an amazing option for PC gaming. And there are many options at a wide range of prices, currently on sale for as much as 40 percent off.
SpaceX has been launching batches of Starlink internet satellites on a regular basis since May 2019, and there are now hundreds of nodes in its megaconstellation. That provides sufficient coverage that SpaceX has started rolling out a beta test of its new satellite internet service. According to data from Ookla Speedtest (and analyzed by our colleagues at PCMag), Starlink is living up to its lofty speed claims.
Starlink joins a market that has long been dominated by a handful of companies like HughesNet and Viasat that offer sluggish satellite internet as a last resort for consumers who don’t have any other options. The current network features almost 900 satellites, some of which orbit much lower than traditional internet satellites. That helps Starlink deliver higher speeds and lower latency.
While Starlink isn’t cheap with its $500 equipment fee and $100 monthly bill, it’s vastly outperforming the other satellite internet providers. In its invitation emails, SpaceX promises between 50 and 150Mbps, and it’s running well inside that range. With the launch of the beta, Ookla has seen the average Starlink speed jump from 30-40Mbps all the way to 79.5Mbps down.
The speed comparison is not kind to the old guard of satellite internet. HughesNet ekes out a mere 19.84Mbps down, and Viasat isn’t much better with 24.75Mbps. The difference in upload speeds is even more stark. While Starlink is currently managing a 13.8Mbps average upload, HughesNet and Viasat are at 2.64and 3.25Mbps, respectively.
Everyone focuses on download speeds, but you need a decent upload for the video chats that have become such an important part of our lives during the pandemic. Latency is also an important part of real-time services like video chats. Again, Starlink is blowing other satellite internet services out of the water. The Ookla data shows Starlink with 42ms of latency on average. That’s enough to make video chats bearable. HughesNet, by comparison, has 728ms of latency. SpaceX even claims its network will be able to get under 20ms by next summer. I get 8-10ms on my home cable connection.
Currently, Starlink’s beta is only available to select customers in the northern US. CEO Elon Musk has said he hopes to expand the beta into Canada. Eventually, the Starlink megaconstellation will feature at least 12,000 satellites with coverage for most of the world.
We’ve discussed Zhaoxin several times over the past few years and covered the company’s efforts to build a true x86 competitor. This is a difficult task for VIA, one of Zhaoxin’s shareholders and IP contributors, which hasn’t ever been competitive with AMD or Intel when it comes to building high-performance CPUs. The company originally eked out a market in the ultra-low-power segment (mini-ITX, for example, is originally a VIA standard). A few years ago, it formed an agreement with Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor to allow that company to build its own x86 designs. Now, it’s expanding that agreement with some additional IP transfers.
To date, the Zhaoxin CPUs have underwhelmed when compared with a modern x86 chip, but the overall level of performance they offer has still been improving, bit by bit. Its last chip, the KX-U6780A, managed to offer gaming performance on par with a weak, Excavator-class APU with half the cores. While this isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, it’s better competition than the company has offered in the past. With the KX-7000 family under development and supposedly targeting a 7nm process, there’s hope for future improvement.
Currently, Zhaoxin’s processors are all believed to be evolutions of VIA’s “Isaiah” core. Isaiah is a 12-year-old design built by Glen Henry at Centaur and originally marketed as the VIA Nano. The Nano actually had some mainstream success and could have been a contender against Atom in its early market. But VIA either couldn’t drive OEM interest in the part, or it ran into other, unspecified troubles. Isaiah was a major advance over the VIA C7, which was an in-order chip, but not enough details are available about Zhaoxin’s exact capabilities to really compare how the more modern architecture diverged from its roots.
VIA is selling some IP to Zhaoxin, and its 100 percent-owned subsidiary Viabase is doing the same. The total value of the deal is expected at $257M, with VIA expecting to recognize ~$197M in profit after associated costs. China is undoubtedly interested in the deal, given that the fighting between itself and the US government has deepened the urgency of developing its own local silicon manufacturing.
It’ll be particularly interesting to see if Zhaoxin’s KX-7000 family incorporates any of the improvements Centaur Technology (another VIA subsidiary, acquired alongside Cyrix in the late 1990s) announced when they debuted the CHA CPU core in 2019. CHA is expected to be the first server CPU to include an onboard AI accelerator core and it’ll offer up to eight cores with support for features like AVX2 and AVX-512.
Historically, Centaur’s designs have focused on stripping out what the company feels is extraneous cruft that leads to bad tradeoffs on performance versus power efficiency. Its CPU cores have often been designed to be “good enough” while offering exceptional battery longevity or cool-running temperatures. The fact that VIA and Zhaoxin are strengthening their ties could be interpreted as a sign that we’ll see more of VIA’s fab work showing up in China. While the US has put certain moratoriums on what Chinese companies can buy what kind of goods, we haven’t seen any information yet suggesting VIA, which holds the barest fraction of the PC market, has gotten any real attention.
The CHA was originally expected to ship this year, so KX-7000 CPUs based on it sometime in 2021 makes sense. Alternately, this could be Zhaoxin’s first independent core design, with a little help from VIA’s patent library and engineers. If they keep improving, hopefully some of these CPU cores will make their way across the ocean in larger numbers. We certainly wouldn’t mind a three-way slug-out for best CPU, if Zhaoxin can rise to the challenge in a few more years.
One architecture I’ve been keeping an eye on for the past few years is the revolutionary, open-source RISC-V ISA. A number of companies have announced low-level RISC-V CPUs, though these are often used as embedded controllers. Companies like Alibaba Group, Western Digital, and SiFive have all been working to design new RISC-V chips that can hit higher levels of performance.
SiFive has announced its new Hive Unmatched platform, built around the SiFive FU740 SoC. This is a five-core, heterogeneous processor with four SiFive U74 cores and one SiFive S7 core. This low-level core is a bit like Nvidia’s old Companion Core in Tegra 4 — it’s an embedded core for running a real-time operating system (RTOS) or something similar. According to WikiChip, the U74 has an eight-stage pipeline (up from 5-7), 10 percent additional frequency headroom, and a 2-cycle SRAM latency (down from 5 cycles).
The U74 is a high-performance core only within the confines of the RISC-V ecosystem and addressable market — it’s not going to be competing against Ryzen or Core any time soon — but the CPU design has still advanced in several ways. The dual-issue, in-order CPU design can handle up to two instructions being issued at once, compared with just a single instruction for previous designs.
The SiFive U74 block plan diagram.
Architecturally, the U74 sounds a bit like the old Cortex-A8 in terms of certain capabilities, though I want to make it clear I’m basing that on features like the dual-issue support and a longer pipeline compared with past designs. We don’t actually have enough information about the SiFive U74 to make a proper comparison on that point.
SiFive’s Hive Unmatched platform is a mini-ITX motherboard with features like ATX power supply connectors, a PCIe slot, gigabit ethernet, and onboard USB ports. It includes 8GB of RAM, 32MB of QSPI flash, and a microSD card for storage. If you want debugging and monitoring capabilities, you can plug into the micro USB type-B connector.
There are two M.2 slots on the board, one for Wi-Fi and one for storage, and four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A ports on the back. The system ships with a bootable SD card that includes Linux, and the board will sell for $655. It’s a significant improvement over the company’s last dev board, the Hive Unleashed, which had much weaker cores, no PCIe support, and no USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports.
This is, rather obviously, a board meant for developers to build software with as opposed to a consumer product, but the fact that we’re seeing more and more interest in RISC-V is a healthy sign of long-term interest in the architecture. Nvidia’s next moves re: ARM will impact just how quickly RISC-V takes off. While the architecture is expected to grow and win market share in certain segments no matter what, if Nvidia begins making changes to the classic ARM licensing model that its customers feel benefit Nvidia more than themselves, RISC-V could quickly become a must-ramp solution. It’s historically pretty rare for a company to lose its market in this way, and Nvidia is surely aware of the RISCs risks, but the rising interest in RISC-V is one of the reasons the CPU industry is more exciting now than at any time in decades.
Astronomers have identified more than 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars but just a few “rogue planets” wandering the galaxy without a star to call home. A new study claims to have spotted one of these worlds, and it may be a small, rocky world like Earth. If confirmed, the planet known as OGLE-2016-BLG-1928 would be a major milestone in our efforts to spot these unattached worlds.
While scientists believe rogue planets are common throughout the universe, they’re very difficult to find. We currently lack the technology to directly image exoplanets in most instances, so we can only locate them by observing the stars they orbit. The dearly departed Kepler Space Telescope single-handedly detected more than 2,500 exoplanets, and that number continues to rise as scientists analyze its data. Kepler used the transit method, which involves watching stars for dips in brightness as a planet passes in front of them. Scientists have also used radial velocity measurements of stars to look for small wobbles caused by the mass of planets.
Without a host star, spotting planets gets a lot harder. The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) project found the potential rogue planet using gravitational microlensing, which superficially similar to the transit method. This approach monitors the light from a distant star in hopes a massive object like a planet will pass in front of it. While the star and planet may be many light-years away, the planet bends or “lenses” the star’s light from our perspective on Earth. This can reveal the foreground object’s mass and size, but only if you happen to be looking in the right place at the right time.
This light curve indicates a massive object passed in front of the star.
Andrzej Udalski of the OGLE project notes that you could watch a single star for a million years and only see a single lensing event. Luckily, Udalski and his team didn’t have to go one star at a time. They used the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, which scans millions of stars in the direction of the galactic center on a daily basis. In analyzing this data, the OGLE team spotted a lensing event dubbed OGLE-2016-BLG-1928. At just 42 minutes long, it’s the shortest such detection ever recorded. That suggests the planet, if indeed that’s what it is, would be somewhere between the size of Earth and Mars.
The team believes this object is a rogue planet because there are no known stars to which it could be connected. The data also showed no light sources within eight astronomical units of the lensing event. Other researchers will need to confirm this object is a planet before it goes in the history books, but if current theories are right, there are uncountable millions of similar objects out there just waiting to be discovered.
Rocket Lake has been a bit of a mystery ever since we first heard about the chip. There have been questions about whether it was a true 14nm backport of a 10nm design, whether it would keep the full measure of clock speed Intel squeezed out of 14nm, and whether it will compete effectively against AMD’s Zen 3 architecture. We can’t answer that last question until the chips launch, but luckily we can take a crack at the first two.
First of all, Rocket Lake isn’t based on Willow Cove, the higher-frequency CPU that Intel debuted earlier this year. Rocket Lake’s CPU core, codenamed Cypress Cove, is based on Sunny Cove, the CPU that powers its Ice Lake line of processors. This isn’t necessarily a problem; Intel was attempting to fix problems with scaling to high frequencies when it built Willow Cove. Because it’s based on an older 14nm process, Sunny Cove shouldn’t suffer the same declines.
Meet Cypress Cove
Cypress Cove is a backport of Sunny Cove, aka Ice Lake. Intel claims it is looking for double-digit IPC scaling, which we assume refers to IPC scaling without counting clock speed improvements over previous chips. Advantages of Cypress Cove include:
New support for AVX-512 baked into Intel desktop CPUs.
Integration of Intel’s new Xe graphics core
Support for up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes
DDR4-3200 support
Xe-LP graphics
The Xe-LP graphics are only listed as being 1.5x faster than Gen9 integrated performance. This says nothing good about the actual onboard GPU built into the desktop versions of these chips.
To put this in perspective, Tiger Lake’s Xe solution is ~2x faster than Ice Lake’s GPU. As this graph from Anandtech shows, Ice Lake’s Gen11 GPU was substantially faster than any Gen9 solution Intel ever shipped. There are limited numbers, but they range from a 2x advantage to a 1.27x advantage.
If Intel was putting a full Xe configuration on its die, we should be able to expect something like a 2.54 increase in raw GPU horsepower. TGL laptops can carry up to 96 EUs (execution units). We know that Xe is going to be much faster than Gen 9 thanks to efficiency improvements, but it sounds like Intel is going to use between 24 EUs and 32 EUs in its desktop chips. If it used 32 EUs instead of the 24 it had fielded previously, this would represent a 1.33x performance improvement on width alone. We know, however, that Xe makes some significant changes to Intel’s overall GPU design, which is probably where the rest of the improved performance is coming from. If Intel was using a 96 EU configuration in Rocket Lake, we’d expect performance to be 2-2.5x faster than Gen 9, not just 50 percent.
I had floated the idea earlier this year that Intel might compete against AMD by positioning its own CPUs at price points where the built-in Xe graphics could carve into markets where people want better graphics on a budget. As an added bonus, setting up a comparison against an AMD APU with a 64-96 EU Rocket Lake would probably have gone well for Intel, given how Tiger Lake compares against the Ryzen 4000 series.
But if Intel is sticking to 32 EUs on desktop, that’s not going to happen. Gen9 simply wasn’t fast enough for a 1.5x performance increase to get you much in the way of useful gaming performance. If you start at 30fps, a 1.5x increase gets you to 45fps — a visible gain while playing. If you start at 15fps and pick up the same +50 percent, you’ve hit 22.5 frames per second — well below the playable threshold for the majority of titles.
Intel, apparently, still views its integrated graphics as worthless to its desktop line, which is deeply unfortunate. Companies like Topaz Video Enhance AI are actively working to improve Intel GPU support, and a more robust iGPU in desktop would have helped this a great deal.
Also, unlike Comet Lake, Rocket Lake will drop back to just eight cores. How much of an impact this will have on the product remains to be seen. Imagine, for example, that Intel hits the ~1.16 IPC uplift for Ice Lake and keeps every bit of its frequency at 14nm — or maybe even hits slightly higher clocks, since it doesn’t have to power 10 chips in the same die. That would be a 1.16xc IPC jump combined with, say, a 5 percent gain in real clock speeds, or about 1.22x uplift overall. An eight-core chip with a 1.22x performance uplift would be just slightly slower (theoretically) than a 10-core chip that lacked these advantages.
A few other notes: Intel doesn’t rule out releasing chips without integrated graphics, similar to its current “KF” CPUs, and it says that the x4 PCIe lane off the CPU is “only validated for discrete graphics, storage, or Intel Optane.” Not sure if anyone is likely to build a PCIe 4.0 sound card any time soon, so this is unlikely to be an issue. There’s also backward compatibility with the existing 400-series chipsets, with a new 500 series chipset coming as well, with unspecified features.
Intel’s single-thread performance jump would put it closer to par with AMD, but its multi-threaded performance might not get much better. Matching the performance of a 10-core with an eight-core is intrinsically impressive, but cleanly exceeding the performance of your 10-core with an eight-core in well-threaded code will require more than just a 1.16x IPC boost combined with a 5 percent frequency gain. A 10 percent improvement in sustained clocks combined with 1.16x IPC would do it, but it’s not clear if Intel’s 14nm process has any headroom left.
Getting AVX-512 into desktops is critical to encouraging developers to use it, but I think the most important narrative around Rocket Lake for Intel is that it’s no longer recycling an endless succession “14nm++++.” While these new chips are still built on 14nm, they will introduce real, distinct improvements to the Intel ecosystem, with everything from PCIe 4.0 to Xe support in an iGPU.
I’m not sure that’ll be enough — but it’s absolutely wonderful to see real competition in the CPU market again.
Amazon is once again running sales on many of its own products with prices that match what we saw during Prime Day. In addition to Amazon’s Echo Show and Fire TV devices, you can also save on Amazon’s Kindle and some Ring Video Doorbell home security cameras.
Amazon’s Echo Show 8 features an 8-inch HD display and is compatible with a wide range of Amazon- and Alexa-enabled services. It can work as a display for home security devices like Ring’s video doorbell, and it can be used for calling people and numerous other functions. I personally like to use mine for watching YouTube videos before bed and for listening to music. The Echo Show 8 typically costs $164.98, but you buy it now from Amazon marked down to $69.99.
Ring’s new Video Doorbell 3 features a 1080p HD video camera and it has built-in speakers and a microphone. Compared with the older Video Doorbell 2, this device has upgraded motion detection, and it also comes with an Amazon Echo Show 5. The Echo Show 5 is a useful addition to have with the Doorbell 3 as it can be used to display footage from the Doorbell 3’s camera and it can also be used to talk to whoever is at the door. You can get it now from Amazon marked down from $289.98 to $149.99.
Amazon’s new Fire TV Stick Lite is essentially the same as the company’s regular Fire TV Stick. The key difference is that this model comes with a less advanced remote and can’t control your TV. This is a minor inconvenience, but if you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to the Fire TV Stick then you just found it. Amazon set this device with an MSRP of $29.99, but you can get it now for a limited time for just $17.99.
Amazon’s newest Kindle comes with a built-in front light, a high-quality 167ppi display, and a battery that can last for weeks without needing to be recharged. For a limited time, you can get this Kindle along with a three-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited marked down from $89.99 to just $59.99. It should be noted, however, that this version is ad supported and it will have a few ads.
Featured Deals
Echo Show 8 8-Inch Smart Display + Blink Mini for $69.99 from Amazon (List price $164.98)
Ring Video Doorbell 3 1080p Video Doorbell + Echo Show 5 for $149.99 from Amazon (List price $289.98)
Fire TV Stick Lite 1080p Streaming Media Player for $17.99 from Amazon (List price $29.99)
As the pandemic rages on, many industries continue to be affected. If you’re in search of a field that continues to grow amidst the uncertainty, it might be time to think about the world of data and tech. And since we’re all continuing to stay safe at home, you can even start your training and expand your knowledge in the in-demand data analysis field from the comfort of your couch.
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Then you’ll move on to Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence tool. For those intimidated by the tech world, rest assured that Power BI is ideal for those with a limited technical background. You’ll master how to use this tool to organize and clean out data, and from there move on to Power Pivot, Power Query & DAX in Excel, a more advanced look at these three Excel features. There are also Advanced PivotTables and Advanced Excel 2019 courses to round out your education, making you a skilled pro by the time you complete the entire bundle.
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Titan might be just one of dozens of Saturnian moons, but it’s one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system regardless. Astronomers often refer to Titan as a planet-like moon — it’s larger than Mercury and has a thick atmosphere like Earth and Venus. The environment is not hospitable to human life, but scientists have still found numerous intriguing organic compounds. In the latest analysis, researchers from NASA have identified an important, highly reactive organic molecule in Titan’s atmosphere. Its presence suggests the moon could support chemical processes that we usually associate with life.
A thick organonitrogen haze obscures the surface of Titan, but scientists were shocked to see how varied and planet-like it was under all the clouds. Titan is the only object in the solar system aside from Earth that has permanent bodies of liquid on the surface. On Earth, the liquid is water, but the seas on Titan are composed of liquid hydrocarbons. However, just because humans wouldn’t be at home on Titan doesn’t mean the moon is completely uninhabitable.
The NASA team used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to probe Titan’s murky atmosphere to better understand its complex chemical composition, and the researchers spotted a molecule known as cyclopropenylidene (C3H2). The team says this discovery has the potential to open up new arms of chemistry on Titan, many of them associated with life. Cyclopropenylidene is what’s known as a cyclic or “closed-loop” molecule similar to benzene, and for the record, scientists have known benzene exists on Titan since 2003. Cyclic molecules are a vital piece of organic chemistry and might even be precursors to life.
Titan isn’t the only place we’ve found cyclopropenylidene — it’s also a common constituent of molecular clouds drifting through space. However, this is the first time it’s been detected in an atmosphere. The molecules floating in space are too cold and far apart to facilitate chemical reactions, but on Titan, cyclopropenylidene could form molecules very much like the nucleobases of DNA.
The more we learn about Titan, the more fascinating its chemistry becomes. We may be looking at a mixture of molecules not unlike those that gave rise to life on Earth. Unfortunately, it’s hard to study Titan from so far away. NASA hopes to launch a mission to Titan in the late 2020s that can explore these questions in detail. The Dragonfly lander should arrive on Titan in 2034, based on current projections. This drone will fly between multiple sites on the surface, using its instruments to probe the moon for compounds of scientific interest.
There are two things you should know about the RTX 3070. First, this is a fabulous GPU by any measure. Nvidia has been claiming that this $500 GPU could match its $1200 RTX 2080 Ti Founder’s Edition. That claim has been demonstrated as broadly true with the release of the Founder’s Edition earlier this week — the RTX 2080 Ti can still pull ahead by a whisker in some 4K games, but in the vast majority of titles, the two are neck-and-neck.
Second: As great a GPU as the RTX 3070 is, you may still want to hold off a bit before purchasing a new card. It may not be able to buy one in any case — Nvidia has warned would-be customers to expect limited supply through the end of this year and into 2021. Separately from this, AMD will launch its own Big Navi cards in a matter of weeks. It may be prudent to see how the two compare before pulling the trigger.
GA102 and the MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio
The MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio is built around Nvidia’s GA104 GPU, while the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 use the larger GA102 processor. Nvidia has been building multiple die at the high end for its recent launches as opposed to fusing off parts of the same design to create lower-end parts. When Turing launched, the RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 each used a different GPU design (TU104 and TU106, respectively). This time around, the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 share a common GPU core (GA102), while RTX 3070 is built around its own unique chip (GA104).
Like its Turing and Pascal predecessors, the RTX 3070 retains the same 8GB RAM capacity Nvidia has used in this price segment since 2016. The company had plans to launch high VRAM variants of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, but those plans have been canceled or at least put on hold until overall availability improves.
The RTX 3070 packs 5888 cores, 96 ROPs, 14Gbps GDDR6, and a 1.725GHz boost clock. The GPU’s massive number of cores — more than 2.5x as many as the RTX 2070 — is why Nvidia is so confident in its ability to match the RTX 2080 Ti with a much cheaper card. The chip is a 17.4B transistor-design and its built on Samsung’s 8nm process. Computationally, the RTX 3070 has ~30 percent less compute power than the RTX 3080, and 41 percent less memory bandwidth. In addition to using slower RAM (16Gbps, down from 19Gbps on the RTX 3080), the RTX 3070 also has a smaller, 256-bit memory bus.
That’s the GA104 GPU itself. What has MSI brought to the table with the Gaming X Trio?
The Gaming X Trio uses a tri-axial cooler design, with additional bracing included to strengthen the GPU and prevent bending during transport.
I’ve seen more than one GPU shipped with inadequate packaging around it in the last few years, and I suspect the underlying problem is that people don’t appreciate just how heavy these cards have gotten. MSI’s strengthening bracket is a nice touch.
RGB support is provided via MSI’s “Mystic Light” system, and the default RGB is quite pretty if you like that sort of thing. The RGB lighting is designed to be controlled from MSI’s Dragon Center application, which functions as an all-in-one stop for controlling RGB, overclocking, and managing various system functions.
For those of you concerned about the power cabling situation, the MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio uses twin 8-pin connectors, not the specialized Nvidia cable.
The Competition
Our competitive selection against the RTX 3070 is a bit more limited than I’d like — I don’t have an RTX 2080 Ti to compare against. We’ll be comparing the RTX 3070 against the just-launched RTX 3080, the older RTX 2080 (non-Super), and the Radeon VII from AMD. The RTX 2070 Super and the RTX 2080 perform quite similarly, so the RTX 2080 does double-duty representing both SKUs.
I chose the Radeon VII over the 5700 XT because AMD’s highest-end consumer GCN product often outperformed the newer RDNA chip last year, even if it was only by a few percent. The fact is, AMD doesn’t have a great GPU to compare in this bracket at the moment. The 5700 XT is currently selling for ~$390, which is quite a bit less than the RTX 3070’s $500 baseline MSRP, and the Radeon VII isn’t on the market at the moment.
For this review, I’ve decided to put AMD’s overall best foot forward. In a matter of weeks, we’ll have competitive figures from the Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT, and will be able to give you a much better estimation of what Big Navi does and doesn’t bring to the table. Regardless, the AMD figures are here for reference. Until Big Navi debuts, Nvidia is competing against itself. If you want to estimate RX 5700 XT performance, assume it’s close enough to the 5700 XT that you’d never actually notice in reality, but factually a bit slower if you ran the numbers.
All testing performed on an Asus Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi with 32GB of DDR4-3600 installed. Intel’s Core i9-10900K was used for all testing, with Windows 10 2004 and the latest set of updates and patches installed.
Benchmark Results:
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation shows the RTX 3070 pulling ahead of the RTX 2080 by 1.2x at 1080p, though the gap actually shrinks a bit as we go up. Ashes doesn’t bring GPUs to their knees quite the way it used to.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has the dubious distinction of having the worst MSAA mode I’ve ever seen, as far as its impact on performance. I’ve kept it around as a benchmark mostly for this reason. The RTX 3070 holds its 1.2x improvement over the RTX 2080 at 1080p but extends the lead to 1.26x at 4K.
At 4K, the RTX 3080 is 1.31x faster than the RTX 3070 and 1.4x more expensive. We expect price-performance curves to begin to bend out of a 1:1 curve at these price points, and the ratio isn’t bad — provided either of these GPUs are available for MSRP. The Radeon VII fully matches the RTX 2080 here, but it’s clearly a last-gen card.
The gaps between the GPUs are a little smaller here, but we’re using somewhat lower detail levels, which means the CPU is in play a little more than typical. The RTX 3070 continues to impress. While $500 is a great deal to spend on a GPU, the high performance of the RTX 3070 at $500 implies good things about the GPUs that will follow farther down the stack.
AMD’s Radeon VII would have benefited somewhat from DX12 here, but it wouldn’t be enough to change the big picture. Nvidia is nothing if not consistent here, with regular bands between each GPU.
I threw Strange Brigade into the mixture to see what a Vulkan title might look like. Nothing much to see here, except an interesting performance by the Radeon VII, which lags the RTX 2080 by about 17 percent in 1080p, roughly the same amount at 1440p, and just 3.4 percent in 4K. Every Nvidia GPU loses much more performance from 1440p – 4K than 1080p – 1440p, implying this may be a quirk of the engine.
At the risk of sounding boring, you’ve seen this graph already. Remember that the RTX 2080 is also standing in for the RTX 2070 Super — the gap with the standard RTX 2070 would be larger, and the performance per dollar gains are considerable.
No surprises here.
Final Fantasy XV doesn’t run well on the Radeon VII — this is a test where we suspect RDNA would turn in better results. With Big Navi launching soon, it’s not a big deal either way.
Three different Metro Exodus graphs here, to highlight three different takeaways. First, we have Ultra ray tracing enabled at Extreme Detail on the RTX 3070 versus the RTX 2080. This is a worst-case scenario, with 200 percent supersampling active — and the RTX 3070 still manages to turn in a 1.31x higher framerate at 1080p. Interestingly, the gap is smallest without ray tracing enabled — and here, the RTX 3070 isn’t all that much faster than the RTX 2080.
Big Picture Takeaways
At $500, the RTX 3070 is an objectively great GPU. As I expected, it solves all of the problems I initially had with Turing. Ray-tracing support is beginning to show up in games, and the higher-end cards in the family are now powerful enough to enable it at ultra-quality without needing to bother with tricks like DLSS 1.0. (DLSS 2.0 is much nicer). With Turing, I wasn’t comfortable recommending the family as a long-term investment into ray tracing given that the performance hit for enabling it could be 60-80 percent.
But most of all, with Ampere, Nvidia has returned to a Pascal-ish GPU pricing model. When it launched Turing, the RTX 2080 was 1.28x faster than the GTX 1080 on average, and cost about 1.28x more. The RTX 3070, meanwhile, is about 1.25x faster than the RTX 2080, while costing about $200 less than that GPU did at launch.
If you know you’re Team Green forever, and you’ve got $500 to throw at a GPU upgrade, this is a great card to choose. Nvidia powers the majority of gaming PCs, which means game developers will build their titles to target whatever amount of VRAM Nvidia GPUs offer. It’s going to be interesting to see if AMD’s 16GB cards can offer performance advantages, but 8GB cards aren’t going to be outdated in a year or two. MSI’s version of the GPU doesn’t put a lot of english on the ball, but there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken, and this GPU most emphatically isn’t.
The RTX 3070 is the true successor to the value proposition Nvidia debuted with the GTX 1080, assuming one can snag a GPU at MSRP. Whether that’s going to be possible is anyone’s guess, and the impact of bots has been ugly enough this year that I feel obligated to leave a bit of a question mark on this claim.
If you are willing to wait and see what AMD will bring to the fight, I recommend doing so — it’s always a good idea to see what the competition has in store — but only if $579 is still within your price range. Either way, the RTX 3070 is a huge leap forward for gaming, and a great value for gamers that can afford it.
