Articles – SFF.Network

RTX 4060Ti Review: Part 1- Pricing and Rasterization Performance

I’m not going to waste time with a long and fluffy opening. Nvidia has launched the RTX 4060Ti and it has not gone well. By now, must people know the RTX 4060Ti has been a let down in terms of performance for the price. Let’s start off by looking at why. Why are Gamers Upset? “The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness…shadow and flame” – Lord of the Rings. The raw performance has been disappointing. The bus bandwidth and memory size has been disheartening. The price to performance has been …

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Nvidia Announces RTX 4060 and 4060Ti

Nvidia has revealed the RTX 4060Ti and 4060 to the world today. Pricing starts at $299 for the non-Ti model, and rises to $499 for the 16GB Ti variant. Nvidia is stating that these cards are targeting the high frame rate 1080P gaming community, and will be available on Mat 24th for the 4060Ti 8GB, and in July for the other two cards. Let’s dive into this announcement by starting with the specs. The RTX 4060Ti is clearly going to be the more performant of the two GPUs as it has an additional 1,280 CUDA cores, slightly …

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Retro SFF: The X68000 Z Mini Arrives

In 1987 Sharp released one of the best home computers to never make it beyond the shores of Japan; the X68000. The initial models were powered by a Motorola 10MHz 68000 processor and had 1MB of RAM. Later models included the far more powerful 25MHz Motorola 68030, up to 12MB of RAM, and an 80MB SCSI HD. All of the X68000 models were equipped with powerful hardware based 2D graphics processors that supported scrolling, multiple bitmap layers, tiled backgrounds, sprites, and parallax. The system had a very large for the time 1MB of VRAM that allowed it to have up …

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Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing Overdrive on RTX 3080 Benchmarks

Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray Tracing Overdrive mode has gone live today. Virtually everyone is testing it on the latest and greatest RTX 4090, so I decided to test it on an RTX 3080. For those that don’t know, put simply, this version of Cyberpunk 2077 uses only path tracing to create far more realistic shadows, reflections, and lighting. The previous version used a hybrid lighting system even on psycho ray tracing mode. Basically put, this is as close you can get to realistic lighting in the decidedly dystopian Cyberpunk society. Can the RTX 3080 run what is likely the …

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AMD Radeon Resizable Bar Benchmarks

With the recent issues discovered by Hardware Unboxed regarding resizable bar, I decided to take a look at our own test bench. Currently, we test with resizable bar on. This will be an ongoing test series but for today, we’ll be looking exclusively at the Radeon 6900XT. …but before that I’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor….our own credit cards. Yes, we push ourselves deeper into unrecoverable debt every day to help you try to cram way to powerful components into tiny tiny cases. If you would like to help us (financially as we are way …

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AMD Radeon 6900XT in 2023 Benchmarks

Small Form Factor Network is continuing to update its internal benchmarks charts and I thought I would take a moment to share our AMD Radeon 6900XT reference design results. I purchased this card directly from AMD when they were liquidating them some months ago. I tested it on our 12900K open bench test rig. Let’s get right to the benchmarks. Test system: Intel i9-12900K at Stock Settings with 360mm MSI AIO 32GB G.Skill DDR5-6400 CAS 32 MSI Z690I Unify ITX Motherboard Corsair P3 Plus NVME SSD for game storage Open air test bench via Xtia Xproto 1000 Watt …

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Ryzen R9 7950X3D Review Round Up – It’s good for SFF but…

Reviews are out for the Ryzen 7950X3D, and it’s actually quite interesting. For those that don’t know, the X3D version of Ryzens include a very large amount of 3D V-Cache. In this instance, it’s 128MB of level 3 cache. However, there is an important catch that anyone looking at the 7950X3D as a gaming CPU should be aware off. Only One CCD Has 3D Cache. The 7950X3D is a 16-core CPU. However, those cores are divided between two CPU clusters or dies. These are physically separate from each other, but can talk through a dedicated bus call Infinity Fabric. …

Cases Feature Reviews

Introducing the Fractal Design Ridge, a better, more refined, Node 202.

We would like to thank Fractal Design for providing us with a review sample of their Ridge chassis. Without their generosity, this case review would not be possible. Way back at CES 2019, representatives at Fractal were quick to quell our disappointment in their LFF case lineup by asking that we to stay tuned, and to rest assured that the ITX audience had not been forgotten. Immediately, I expected Fractal to simply take the easy route and refresh their wildly popular Node 202 chassis with some brushed aluminum variant but instead they released the wildly stylish Fractal ERA chassis that …