TechFan@ic

I'm going to make a big bold prediction and say G-Sync's going to win this one. Simply because most of the current 4K and IPS FreeSync monitors have very narrow variable ranges. 48-75, 40-60. The only exception is Asus's MG279Q.

That's exactly right.

They asked for these "fake" slides to be taken down. Even though they traditionally never address rumors. This only makes them appear more valid in my estimation.

Notice how the floating point unit is twice as wide as the one on Excavator, obviously to suppoer AVX-512. The core also gains 50% more integer resources. The larger single integer cluster should both clock higher and have a significantly higher IPC. The simplified front-end also means less power and smaller area. This will be a high IPC, high frequency, efficient CPU core.

I remain very skeptical of this. Only a few years back scientists claimed to have measured a neutrino traveling at speed that surpasses that of light. It eventually turned out to be just an error. Similarly in this instance measurements for the speed of some of the beams could simply be erroneous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly.

It isn't artifacting per se. I know the issue, I've seen it before with Skyrim ENBs when you enable edge AA along with transparency AA. For some reason the note box on the bottom right corner of the screen is recognized as game geometry so it gets caught in the MSAA filter. As far as I can tell this is only present on the Tahiti based GPUs so the R9 280X, 280 and equivalent 7900 series GPUs.

An i5 4690K would be more than enough for what you need. I wouldn't recommend spending an extra $100 on the i7 4790K just for hyperthreading and a small clock speed advantage. Especially when the i5 4690K is unlocked and overclocks just as well.

My only concern is that the board is actually quite poor. I made the mistake once of pairing an i7 2600 to an Asus H61 board and I quickly regretted it. Get a decent board. Although for $140 that's even cheaper than the i5 alone, so it's a heck of a deal. So I'd probably sell the H81 board and buy a proper one.

No need for that, I know what I'm talking about

Even the mods which are purported to demand a faster CPU run excellent on the FX 8320. The lighting mods for example, the grass mods, water mods and the snow mods just to name a few aren't as CPU heavy as you would imagine because they're sufficiently multi-threaded. They also require a lot of GPU horsepower tipping the equation back in favor of the GPU, so the game becomes more GPU bound. Which does end up meaning that a $130 FX 8320 with a modest overclock is really all you need to mod Skyrim to the moon. Simply put once you mod Skyrim for better graphics it will always end up being GPU bound so long as you're running a decent multicore CPU like an i5 or an eight core FX. The older dual cores will struggle.

These are the graphics mods that I used to capture the above screenshots. I use a lot more mods, but those are the ones specific for graphics.

Hey buddy, the CPU doesn't matter nearly as much with modded Skyrim vs vanilla Skyrim. In fact in my own personal testing a $130 FX 8320 at 4.6Ghz was a tiny bit faster than a $330 i7 2600K at 4.4Ghz in modded Skyrim. Even though in Vanilla Skyrim the i7 was measurably faster. My own Skyrim goodness. Mod list : High-Res texture pack. Skyrim Flora Overhaul Enhanced Lights and Effects Revamped Exterior Fog Grass and Grass Better Dynamic Snow Realistic Water 2 Unfortunately the Kountervibe ENB used to take these screenshots is no longer available, a good alternative is Sharpshooter's ENB. System : CPU : FX 8320 @4.6Ghz GPU : Gigabyte Windforce R9 290 @1040mhz Memory : 16GB 1600mhz CL9

Actually she's not. All the Carrizo and Godaveri stuff was conceived under Rory Read not her. A CEO can't just suddenly make a product and release it, that's not how the semiconductor industry works. Any product plans that are put in motion now will only bare fruit multiple years from now. What Su can and has done is finance the 8 core Zen CPU die design.

The last thing AMD needs right now is another change in management. Lisa Su is impeccably qualified to lead AMD to long term success.

The answer to that deserves its own editorial. Maybe I'll write one some day. But here's what happened in a nutshell. 2002 Jerry Sanders founder of AMD decided to retire after achieving the goal that everyone else believed impossible for decades. Beating Intel at their own game. At the time AMD was making record profit and revenue, thier CPUs were both faster and more efficient than their Intel counterparts and in two short years AMD controlled up to 50% market share in the x86 CPU business. Hector Ruiz succeed Jerry as President and CEO. Ruiz decided that AMD should now involve itself in the graphics business. AMD began negotiating an acquisition between Nvidia and ATi. It was later decided that ATi should be acquired. AMD vastly overpayed for the acquisition. ATi was finally acquired for 6 Billion dollars in 2006, nearly what AMD is worth today. Overbidding on ATi quickly began to show its financial effect on AMD, the company began to lose the momentum it once had. 1 billion dollar profits every year turned into 1 billion dollar losses. Ruiz then decided to sell AMD's manufacturing to save the day, in 2008 AMD's manufacturing was spun off as Globalfoundries. Hector Ruiz was then quickly dispensed with after allegations of insider trading and after destroying what Jerry worked so hard to achieve in over three decades. Dirk Meyer was hired to replace Ruiz. Meyer was a brilliant engineer and one of the two AMD engineering legends, the other being Jim Keller. Together with Keller, Myer contrived AMD's most successful CPU architectures in recent history, the original Athlon and the Athlon64. Under Meyer as CEO two CPU architectures were designed and introduced. A low power core code named Bobcat which was a resounding success and a high performance core code named Bulldozer which turned out to be a major flop. Unfortunately the board of directors saw that Bulldozer flop as Meyer's fault. They pressured him to invade the mobile space with haste to redeem what they saw as his mistake. He however disagreed. He believed that AMD should first regain the strong foothold it once held against Intel in the market that AMD knows best, before attempting to break through an even tougher market that AMD had no previous experience in and a market that's controlled by multiple competitors just as strong as Intel. This disagreement spilled over to a disaster and Myer left in January of 2011. 8 months passed with no CEO leading AMD. Finally Rory Read was brought in by the board. He was seen as the hero that will resurrect AMD just as he helped Lenovo climb to the top. While Read was a brilliant manager he unfortunately had no prior experience in semiconductors. He was responsible for cancelling AMD's high performance CPU only designs. But he did bring Mark Papermaster on board as the Chief Technology Officer. Who by some miracle convinced Jim Keller to rejoin AMD and he's been designing AMD's future CPU architecture ever since. The new CPU core will allegedly debut next year. AMD's long term x86 success relies entirely on this new core, code named Zen. So here's hoping for the best.