Revenant – Page 2 – SFF.Network

NUC is Dead

Credit to Serve The Home for this news but it appears the NUC line of Intel PCs is dead. Intel is moving away from direct PC production, but intends to fulfill remaining orders as well as support OEMs in the transition. NUC, for those that don’t know, stood for Next Unit of Computing. The program resulted in some unique mini-PCs including an oddball Intel CPU with AMD Vega graphics on the same chip package. While hardcore SFF users tend to shy away from lower end barebones and prebuilt machines, NUC systems were very popular with businesses and more casual users. …

News

MSI Developing Slim RTX 4060Ti

All credit to Videocardz and Twitter User Hongxing2020 for this. MSI is planning on releasing a “slim” version of their RTX 4060Ti. While slim in the SFF world usually means single slot, to the rest of the industry it means 2-slots; which is exactly what this card is. Of course even at 2-slots this triple fan card is overkill for a 160 watt GPU. Regardless, it’s nice to see manufacturers scaling back a bit as many SFF cases over the last decade rely on 2-slot designs.

Graphics Reviews

Nvidia RTX 4060 Review – Testing ZOTAC GAMING’s RTX 4060 SOLO 163mm Long GPU for the Small Form Factor Market

Let’s be very clear before we begin: we are looking at the RTX 4060 from a small form factor perspective. I intentionally requested the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4060 SOLO, and not a two or three fan OC card. This is a very small, single fan GPU. This means we’re looking at this from a different angle than a traditional review. We will, of course, have performance numbers for the card. However, our conclusion will be focused more on efficiency and performance per liter then raw performance and value. As I said in the RTX 4060Ti review: Small Form Factor …

Graphics Reviews

RTX 4060Ti Review: A GPU in Search of a Use Case – Part 2 Ray Tracing

This is part 2 of our RTX 4060Ti review where we look at the RTX 4060Ti’s Ray Tracing performance. To see part 1, CLICK HERE. Ray Tracing Ray tracing has become an important performance metric over the last five years as it slowly supplants older reflection and ambient occlusion technology. Unfortunately, it still carries a hefty performance penalty. Using upscaling technology such as DLSS, FSR, and XESS does help mitigate some of the performance loss, but they aren’t magical fixes to the issue. Ray tracing is also done in two methods currently. There is the hybrid approach where ray tracing …

News

Minisforum Announces 3rd “Anniv.” Sale

Minisforum has announced their third “anniv.” sale They were founded in 2018, but whatever. A sale is a sale. The sale includes discounts on current inventory as well as upcoming units such the EM680 and UM790 Pro. Of particular interest is the well reviewed NUCXI7. It’s basically a laptop without a screen and with better cooling, and features an Intel i7-11800H CPU (8 cores / 16 threads) with the mobile version of the RTX 3070. Right now it’s $1,089 US for a model with 64GB of memory and 1TB SSD. ETA Prime tested the unit and found …

Other

Press Release: Noctua Releases Offset Mounting for Improved Cooling Performance on AMD AM5 Processors

NOTE: This is a press release. It presented exactly as the company released it with no editing by SFF.N. In this instance, Noctua’ s wording is unchanged and presented as Noctua wrote it. The photos and videos are in the same place they were in the Noctua Press Release where possible. All photo credit is Noctua’s. While we at SFF.N try avoid using direct press releases for our news coverage, there are instances when doing so is necessary due to time constraints. Noctua releases offset mounting for improved cooling performance on AMD AM5 processors Vienna, June 13th 2023 – Noctua …

News

Retro SFF: RetroGameCouch Builds SFF AMD 5×86 PC With Legos

Retro PC gaming is getting smaller and smaller thanks to industrial system-on-boards. In this instance, RetroGameCouch has built up a kick ass little AMD 5X86 retro machine using a MSC242 ISA board. The board is mounted to a small ISA backplane along with a Sound Blaster Pro CT1600 sound card, and a Trident TVGA9000C video card. Unfortunately, there aren’t exactly a lot of SFF cases for such builds, so RetroGameCouch just built one out of Legos. The AMD 5X86, better known as the X5, is a processor designed for 486 Socket 3 boards. It’s not particularly common in mainstream …

News

Ars Technica Reviews M2 Ultra Powered Mac Studio

Ars Technica has gotten their hands on the newest Mac Studio and this time it’s packing an M2 Ultra chip. What does that mean? Imagine cramming the nearly the power of an Intel i9 – 13900K CPU and desktop class Nvidia RTX 4070Ti class GPU performance in an approximately 3.7L case that only uses 61 watts under CPU load. That’s a lot of power under the a tiny, tiny hood. It does come at a price, though. For those that don’t know, Apple has eschewed Intel, AMD, and Nvidia chips in favor of creating their own ARM based processors. …