Thread: Anandtech News

Most of our enterprise NAS reviews have focused on Atom-based desktop form factor systems. We ventured into evaluating rackmount units with the QNAP TS-EC1279U-RP, and today we have results from our evaluation of Synology's RS10613xs+. Read on to find out how Synology's 2013 flagship fared in our tests.

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MSI is taking a page out of Razer's design playbook (in turn cribbing liberally from Apple's), but as it turns out, they may have beaten Razer at their own game and produced both a more desirable and more affordable Blade. iBuyPower sent over their version of MSI's GS70, dubbed the Battalion M1771, and it's an almost surprisingly fantastic piece of gaming kit.

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AMD and Electronic Arts send word this afternoon that the Mantle update for Battlefield 4 has been delayed until next month. The update was previously scheduled for late December, however any slippage on that schedule would push the release to January, which it appears is exactly what has happened. AMD and EA have released a short and highly sanitized statement on the matter.

After much consideration, the decision was made to delay the Mantle patch for Battlefield 4. AMD continues to support DICE on the public introduction of Mantle, and we are tremendously excited about the coming release for Battlefield 4! We are now targeting a January release and will have more information to share in the New Year.

With that in mind, for Battlefield 4 players it’s well known that DICE is in the middle of a massive bug hunt due to a number of recurring (and sometimes severe) bugs in the game, which has led to DICE pausing most other development tasks in order to focus on fixing bugs. As such there’s been a lot of speculation over whether Mantle would be delayed as part of the bug hunt, and to minimal surprise this seems to be what has happened.
With that said, while Electronic Arts’ statement is unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) light on details, given the compartmentalized development of modern engines and the bugs facing Battlefield 4 we have good reason to believe that Mantle development itself has only been minimally impeded (if affected at all) since the bulk of BF4’s issues are not in the rendering engine. Instead it’s far more likely that DICE and EA’s QA teams are tied up finding bugs and testing fixes, which would require delaying the Mantle update due to a lack of resources to validate it. The silver lining on all of this being that if our assumption is right, it would at least mean the Frostbite rendering team would have more time to spend on the project while waiting for QA resources to be freed up.

As for the state of the Mantle API itself, we don’t expect that this will change anything. AMD is already working with other developers on Mantle and we’ve already seen Mantle on display at the 2013 AMD Developer Summit, so we know it’s up and running in development form. But as Battlefield 4 is still going to be AMD’s launch vehicle for Mantle, this means that AMD’s consumer Mantle plans are essentially delayed in lockstep with Battlefield 4.

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Until this month Apple's Mac Pro used a chassis derived from the old PowerMac G5, prior to the famous switch to x86 back in 2005/2006. Read on for our review of the first major chassis upgrade to the Mac Pro since its introduction 7 years ago.

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Netgear launched the 6-bay ReadyNAS 716 10-GbE desktop NAS in November. To our knowledge, this is the first off-the-shelf NAS in a desktop tower form factor to come with built-in support for 10GBase-T. With an Intel Xeon CPU under the hood, the unit packs quite a punch within a small form factor. How does the performance stack up? Is the premium for 10-GbE really worth it outside of a server rack? Read on to find out.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or so the saying goes.  Most development in home computers veers towards the ultra large (high impact gaming machines for 4K+) or the ultra-tiny (Intel NUC, Raspberry Pi).  The downside of these two extremes is usually cost, and most regular Joes go for something in the middle trading one side for the other.  One popular build right now is mini-ITX in a Bitfenix Prodigy chassis, as it offers space for a full on GPU or many 2.5” storage drives.  ASRock now come to the market with the M8 barebones based on a BMW design for the Z87 platform, at half the width of the Bitfenix Prodigy and a high build quality.  It mirrors what we are seeing with the latest consoles, and thus offers a prime opportunity as a Steam Box.

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The Intel NUC category (which has been given the official tag of Ultra-Compact Form Factor PC) has been an interesting product line to analyze, as it provides us with insights into where the traditional casual / home use desktop market might end up. Last year, we reviewed Intel's first NUC. Today, we have the Haswell successor in our labs. Read on to find out how the D54250WYK fares in our evaluation.

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All the main motherboard manufacturers now have three distinct classes of motherboard to sell to the common home-build end user: the channel range, the overclocking range and the gaming range.  GIGABYTE color codes their models such that the channel range is blue/black, the overclocking range is orange/black, and the gaming range is green/black.  The gaming range from GIGABYTE has seen an explosion in terms of models available recently – initially for a couple of generations it was one or two models, but in 2013 we had the following:

• Intel 8-series:
  - G1.Sniper 5 ($380)
  - G1.Sniper M5 ($203)
  - G1.Sniper Z87 ($170)
  - G1.Sniper B5 ($100)
• Intel 7-series:
  - G1.Sniper 3 (our review)
  - G1.Sniper M3 (our review)
• AMD:
   - G1.Sniper A88X ($110)

GIGABYTE is a very market focused motherboard manufacturer, often designing product to match specific requests in various regions.  To this end, over the course of the CES weekend we have the two first new 2014 G1.Sniper motherboards being released on the Z87 platform, aimed more at the mid-range gamer: the G1.Sniper Z5S and the G1.Sniper Z5.

Some of the 2013 innovations on the G1.Sniper range include the upgradable OP-AMP feature that lets audio enthusiasts change the operational amplifier to cater their music tastes better, AMP-UP which uses the high end Realtek ALC1150 codec in a tuned and configured environment (EM shield, filter caps, PCB separation of digital and analog signals), USB DAC-UP which provides clean USB power to one USB port to minimize potential fluctuations when using a USB DAC, and Gain Boost to adjust amplification modes depending on the output device.  GIGABYTE wraps this up with a Killer network interface to optimize gaming traffic by bypassing the Windows Network Stack.
The G1.Sniper Z5S will be released first, with the Z5 in a few weeks.  The Z5S will have most of the features listed above, and use the Z87 chipset in an x8/x4/x4 configuration for tri-CFX compatible setups or in x8/x8 for two-way SLI, along with AMP-UP, OP-AMP, USB DAC-UP, a Killer NIC, and GIGABYTE’s updated BIOS/Software package for Z87. 

As these are mid-range motherboards, we have the six SATA 6 Gbps from the PCH and six USB 3.0 ports rather than additional controllers: the main selling point here is a basic motherboard improved through the Sniper series features.  The main difference between the Z5S and the Z5 will be only two-way CrossFire on the Z5, with also fewer VRMs in the power delivery and the SATA ports at the bottom of the board rather than in the right-angled fashion we usually see.  With these specifications they seem straddle the G1.Sniper Z87, which has more VRMs than the Z5 but the same two-way GPU layout than the Z5, as well as more gold plated connectors on the rear IO.

We are waiting for release dates and prices for both models, but we are told the Z5S will be on sale first.  We have the G1.Sniper Z87, the middle one of the three, in for review in due course.  Stay tuned for that!
 
Gallery: G1.Sniper Mid-Range Expansion: GIGABYTE Launch Z5S and Z5

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When Ivy Bridge-E arrived, there was discontent at the lack of a new chipset.  Users who wanted to migrate to the high performance end of the spectrum received a relatively small bump in performance over Sandy Bridge-E and Haswell on the mainstream was offering better IPC.  To compound all this, the X79 chipset looks dated, with no native USB 3.0 and only two SATA 6 Gbps.  ASUS have tried to address this balance somewhat by releasing an upgrade to the bestselling X79 motherboard: the Rampage IV Black Edition is an evolution of the Rampage IV Extreme, incorporating as many aspects of the Maximus Z87 series as possible into an antiquated chipset.

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LaCie was among the first on the scene to support Intel (and Apple's) Thunderbolt specification with the Little Big Disk. The original Little Big Disk combined two 2.5" HDDs or SSDs into a single, externally powered Thunderbolt enclosure. The result was a relatively portable way to add a bit of high-speed storage to your portable Mac. 
With the introduction of Macs equipped with Thunderbolt 2 (2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display, 2013 Mac Pro), LaCie is updating the Little Big Disk to support the updated interface. Thunderbolt 2 doesn't change the connector or even break backwards compatibility with previous designs, but it combines channels to make better use of the 40Gbps of aggregate bandwidth that Thunderbolt always offered. Instead of offering two 10Gbps channels in each direction, Thunderbolt 2 combines them to offer up to 20Gbps in each direction. Once you take overhead into account, Intel claimed we should see a max of 1500MB/s in either direction for a Thunderbolt 2 enabled storage device.
LaCie sent us a pre-production version of the new Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, which I quickly tested with the new Mac Pro before flying out to Las Vegas for this year's CES. The new chassis looks a lot like the previous version, with an obvious difference in color. The new LBD goes black in an attempt to match the new Mac Pro. 

On the back you'll find two Thunderbolt 2 ports and an input for the external power adapter. Inside the chassis you'll find a new thermally regulated fan that only spins up when necessary. Noise definitely wasn't a problem in my limited time with the pre-production sample. 

In order to take advantage of the increased channel bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2, LaCie turned to Samsung's XP941 PCIe x2 SSD. There are two 512GB of these SSDs inside the new LBD. Note that LaCie may switch drive vendors at some point in the future, but my pre-production sample had XP941s inside. 

Once again there's no internal RAID controller, LaCie instead relies on software RAID-0 inside OS X. 

The result is a remarkably simple device that gives you 1TB of external expansion and tons of bandwidth to the device. I measured just under 1400MB/s in sequential read speed to the array and a little over 1100MB/s in writes. Like most external Thunderbolt drives, I expect that large file sequential access is what most users will do with these things. 

Peak power consumption during my testing was around 11.5W. Since the new LBD is a Thunderbolt 2 device it does support DisplayPort 1.2 and 4K displays. You probably won't want to chain a 4K display to the LBD however, as there's only 20Gbps of downstream bandwidth available (with more than half used for display data at 3840x2160) you'll see a significant impact to write speeds:

LaCie expects to begin shipping the new Little Big Disk sometime this quarter. There's no pricing available at this point, but with 1TB of PCIe storage in an aluminum chassis I wouldn't expect it to be cheap.
Gallery: LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2

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