When we first looked at the Opteron 6276, our time was limited and we were only able to run our virtualization, compression, encryption, and rendering benchmarks. Most servers capable of running 20 or more cores/threads target the virtualization market, so that's a logical area to benchmark. The other benchmarks either test a small part of the server workload (compression and encryption) or represent a niche (e.g. rendering), but we included those benchmarks for a simple reason: they gave us additional insight into the performance profile of the Interlagos Opteron, they were easy to run, and last but not least those users/readers that use such applications still benefit.

Back in 2008, however, we discussed the elements of a thorough server review. Our list of important areas to test included ERP, OLTP, OLAP, Web, and Collaborative/E-mail applications. Looking at our initial Interlagos review, several of these are missing in action, but much has changed since 2008. The exploding core counts have made other bottlenecks (memory, I/O) much harder to overcome, the web application that we used back in 2009 stopped scaling beyond 12 cores due to lock contention problems, the Exchange benchmark turned out to be an absolute nightmare to scale beyond 8 threads, and the only manageable OLTP test—Swingbench Calling Circle—needed an increasing number of SSDs to scale.

The ballooning core counts have steadily made it harder and even next to impossible to benchmark applications on native Linux or Windows. Thus, we reacted the same way most companies have reacted: we virtualized our benchmark applications. It's only with a hypervisor that these multi-core monsters make sense in most enterprises, but there are always exceptions. Since quite a few of our readers still like seeing "native" Linux and Windows benchmarks, not to mention quite a few ERP, OLTP, and OLAP servers are still running without any form of virtualization, we took the time to complete our previous review and give the Opteron Interlagos another chance.

For the majority of the history of AnandTech we've hosted our own server infrastructure. A benefit of running our own infrastructure is that we're able to gain a lot of hands on experience with enterprise environments that we'd otherwise have to report on from a distance.

When I first started covering SSDs four years ago I became obsessed with the idea of migrating nearly every system over to something SSD based. The first to make the switch were our CPU testbeds. Moving away from mechanical drives ensured better benchmark consistency between runs as any variation in IO load was easily absorbed by the tremendous amount of headroom that an SSD offered. The holy grail of course was migrating all of the AnandTech servers over to SSDs. Over the years our servers seem to die in the following order: hard drives, power supplies, motherboards. We tend to stay on a hardware platform until the systems start showing the signs of their age (e.g. motherboards start dying), but that's usually long enough that we encounter an annoying number of hard drive failures. A well validated SSD should have a predictable failure rate, making it an ideal candidate for an enterprise environment where downtime is quite costly and in the case of a small business, very annoying.

Our most recent server move is a long story for a separate article but to summarize the move, we recently switched hosting providers and data centers. Our hardware was formerly on the east coast and the new datacenter is in the middle of the country. At our old host we were trying out a new cloud platform while our new home would be a mixture of a traditional back-end with a virtualized front-end. With a tight timetable for the move and no desire to deploy an easily portable solution at our old home before making the move we were faced with a difficult task: how do we physically move our servers half way across the country with minimal downtime?

Thankfully our new host had temporary hardware very similar in capabilities to our new infrastructure that they were willing to put the site on as we moved our hardware. The only exception was, as you might guess, a relative lack of SSDs. Our new hardware uses a combination of consumer and enterprise SSDs but our new host only had mechanical drives or consumer grade SSDs on tap (Intel SSD 320s).

In preparing for this move I realized we hadn't publicly discussed the performance and endurance issues associated with using consumer SSDs in an enterprise environment. What follows is a discussion of just that. Read on...

Intel was rumored to be working on a SandForce based drive for several months now, but even the rumors couldn't encapsulate just how long Intel and SF has worked on this drive. According to Intel, the relationship began 1.5 years ago. Still lacking a 6Gbps controller of their own and wanting to remain competitive with the rest of the market, Intel approached SandForce about building a drive based on the (at the time) unreleased SF-2281 controller. Roughly six months later, initial testing and validation began on the drive. That's right, around the time that OCZ was previewing the first Vertex 3 Pro, Intel was just beginning its extensive validation process.

Codenamed Cherryville, Intel's SSD 520 would go through a full year of validation before Intel would sign off on the drive for release. In fact, it was some unresolved issues that cropped up during Intel's validation that pushed Cherryville back from the late 2011 release to today.

Intel's strenuous validation will eventually make SandForce's drives better for everyone, but for now the Cherryville firmware remains exclusive. Intel wouldn't go on record with details of its arrangement with SandForce, but from what I've managed to piece together the Intel Cherryville firmware is exclusive for a limited period of time. That exclusivity agreement likely expires sometime after the SF-2281 is replaced by a 3rd generation controller. There are some loopholes that allow SandForce to port bug fixes to general partner firmware but the specific terms aren't public information. The important takeaway is anything fixed in Intel's firmware isn't necessarily going to be fixed in other SF-2281 based drives in the near term. This is an important distinction because although Cherryville performs very similarly to other SF-2281 drives, it should be more reliable.

Read on for our full review of Intel's SSD 520.

We've been providing live coverage of AMD's 2012 Financial Analyst Day from Santa Clara today, but if you want a summary of the company's strategy under new CEO Rory Read you've come to the right place. Below you'll find links to everything we've published from AMD's FAD 2012:

AMD's Rory Read Outlines AMD's Future Strategy
AMD Outlines HSA Roadmap: Unified Memory for CPU/GPU in 2013, HSA GPUs in 2014 
AMD is Open to Integrating 3rd Party IP in Future SoCs
AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2012 - Mark Papermaster, SVP & CTO Presentation 
AMD: Flexible Around ISA
AMD Nods at Shorter Design Cycles, More Synthesized Designs
What AMD Views as Important: Tablets, Servers, Notebooks & GPUs
AMD & Compal Show Off 18mm Trinity Notebook 
AMD's 2012 - 2013 Client CPU/GPU/APU Roadmap Revealed 
AMD's 2012 - 2013 Server Roadmap: Abu Dhabi, Seoul & Delhi CPUs
AMD is Ambidextrous, Not Married to Any One Architecture, ARM in the Datacenter? 
AMD's Tablet Architectures: Hondo at 4.5W, Future Sub-2W SoC

Read on for our summary and analysis of AMD's new strategy.

NZXT recently released the Switch 810, a new high-end full tower model they proudly had on display at CES at the same time they were seeding samples to reviewers. It's a looker to be sure, but NZXT's engineers also played a lot with the insides of the enclosure, and what they've put together is a chassis with a remarkable number of uncommon features designed to appeal to enthusiasts who want to maximize both the utility of their machines along with the control they have over that utility. It looks great on paper and great on display, but how does it work in practice?

Announced late last month and shipping 3 weeks ago, AMD kicked off the 28nm generation with a bang with their Radeon HD 7970. Combining TSMC’s new 28nm HKMG process with AMD’s equally new Graphics Core Next Architecture, AMD finally took back the single-GPU performance crown for the first time since 2010 with an all-around impressive flagship video card.

Of course AMD has always produced multiple video cards from their high-end GPUs, and with Tahiti this was no different. The second Tahiti card has been waiting in the wings for its own launch, and that launch has finally come. Today AMD is launching the Radeon HD 7950, the cooler, quieter, and cheaper sibling of the Radeon HD 7970. Aimed right at NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580, AMD is looking to sew up the high-end market, and as we’ll see the Radeon HD 7950 is exactly the card to accomplish that.

Software Blu-ray / DVD players are bundled with almost all OEM PCs and a necessity for consumers who want to enjoy their commercial optical media in the most legal manner possible. At AnandTech, we regularly use the offerings from ArcSoft (Total Media Theatre), Corel (WinDVD Pro) and Cyberlink (PowerDVD) in our reviews. Each of them has its own pros and cons. While WinDVD Pro is the leanest and most responsive of the lot, it is also pretty barebones. Total Media Theatre, on the other hand, has a very good user interface and integrates services like YouTube in a seamless and enjoyable manner. PowerDVD has historically been a leader in the features department, but the user interface and bloat used to be a turn off for most users.

Today, CyberLink is introducing PowerDVD 12 along with an updated Android / iOS app. With the Blu-ray functionality not needing any updates, most of the attention has been focused on the mobile apps and streamlining the user experience with the PC player. How good are the changes? Are they enough to make us change our opinion of PowerDVD? Read on for our review.

One of the benefits of going with a boutique builder is being able to get custom machines that are a little more specialized than what you might get from HP or even Alienware. While bigger vendors can produce their own cases, those designs have to suit a wide variety of customers. Boutiques can cherry pick existing hardware and modify it for specific purposes, gearing each build to suit the end user's exact needs. It's the same benefit many of us enjoy from building our own machines, but for those who can't or won't, builders like AVADirect are here to pick up the slack.

Which leads us to today's build, which AVADirect dubs their Silent Gaming PC. Their builders have tried to take a standard powerhouse boutique machine and kill the noise. Did they succeed, or is the Silent Gaming PC merely the sum of its parts?

For most people seeking accurate color reproduction and wide viewing angles, IPS has been the screen technology of choice for years now. The main issues against IPS have typically been response time for gamers, a higher black level than VA technologies, and more prominently cost. More and more vendors have been introducing e-IPS displays, which is a more transparent version of IPS that allows for the use of lower powered backlights, lowering the cost to consumers. The tradeoff is that this does have a negative effect on contrast shifts in the panel when viewed at an angle, though color shifts still are not present.

There was a bit of chatter this past fall when AOC introduced the i2353 display, which is an LED backlit IPS panel with an MSRP under $200. Had the prices of IPS panels and components finally fallen to the point where they would be able to start forcing companies to transition to them away from TN for their affordable monitor lines? To find out if the AOC monitor was still able to offer a good level of performance at this price point we requested a review sample, which they quickly provided.

With the release of AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 it’s clear that AMD has once again regained the single-GPU performance crown. But while the 7970’s place in the current GPU hierarchy is well established, we’re still trying to better understand the ins and outs of AMD’s new Graphics Core Next Architecture. What does it perform well at and what is it weak at? How might GCN scale with future GPUs? Etc.

Next week we’ll be taking a look at CrossFire performance and the performance of AMD’s first driver update. But in the meantime we wanted to examine a few other facets of the 7970: the impact of PCIe bandwidth on performance, overclocking our reference 7970 (and the performance impact thereof), and what AMD is doing for anti-aliasing with the surprise addition of SSAA for DX10+ along with an interesting technical demo implementing MSAA and complex lighting side-by-side. So let’s get started.

The basic building block of Bulldozer is the dual-core module, pictured below. AMD wanted better performance than simple SMT (ala Hyper Threading) would allow but without resorting to full duplication of resources we get in a traditional dual core CPU. The result is a duplication of integer execution resources and L1 caches, but a sharing of the front end and FPU. AMD still refers to this module as being dual-core, although it's a departure from the more traditional definition of the word. In the early days of multi-core x86 processors, dual-core designs were simply two single core processors stuck on the same package. Today we still see simple duplication of identical cores in a single processor, but moving forward it's likely that we'll see more heterogenous multi-core systems. AMD's Bulldozer architecture may be unusual, but it challenges the conventional definition of a core in a way that we're probably going to face one way or another in the not too distant future.

A four-module, eight-core Bulldozer

The bigger issue with Bulldozer isn't one of core semantics, but rather how threads get scheduled on those cores. Ideally, threads with shared data sets would get scheduled on the same module, while threads that share no data would be scheduled on separate modules. The former allows more efficient use of a module's L2 cache, while the latter guarantees each thread has access to all of a module's resources when there's no tangible benefit to sharing.

This ideal scenario isn't how threads are scheduled on Bulldozer today. Instead of intelligent core/module scheduling based on the memory addresses touched by a thread, Windows 7 currently just schedules threads on Bulldozer in order. Starting from core 0 and going up to core 7 in an eight-core FX-8150, Windows 7 will schedule two threads on the first module, then move to the next module, etc... If the threads happen to be working on the same data, then Windows 7's scheduling approach makes sense. If the threads scheduled are working on different data sets however, Windows 7's current treatment of Bulldozer is suboptimal.

AMD and Microsoft have been working on a patch to Windows 7 that improves scheduling behavior on Bulldozer. The result are two hotfixes that should both be installed on Bulldozer systems. Read on for our take on what these hotfixes do to Bulldozer's Windows 7 performance.

NZXT is a well known provider of "eye-catching" cases and peripherals, but like many other brands they offer power supplies as well. These include the HALE90 series, their first 80 Plus Gold product to hit the market. While the HALE90 targets the high-end audience, NZXT also wants to cater to midrange users, and for that market they have their new HALE82 series that covers wattages from 650W to 850W. The rated output makes these models good for high-end single GPUs as well as moderate SLI and CrossFire systems. Features such as 80 Plus Bronze certification and modular cables are common these days, but such features say little about how good a PSU really is. Today, we're testing the 650W and 750W models, with our usual results on the following pages.

As enthusiasts and professionals we spend a lot of time checking out what's under the hood of the computers and devices we use, but thankfully more and more we're paying attention to how we actually interact with hardware, what the user experience is like. User experience has been a major selling point of Apple's products, but there's one place where even Apple has been a bit neglectful: the keyboard. On notebooks your options are limited, but on the desktop you have access to mechanical keyboards. Today we'll take a quick look at Rosewill's RK-9000 mechanical keyboard and see if it's worth the price premium.

Pulse-Eight is one of the commercial vendors tracing their roots to XBMC. Boxee is another company with XBMC roots, but, unlike Boxee, Pulse-Eight concentrates more on the hardware aspects.  The PulseBox, a Brazos based HTPC, is one of their products, but they also have a number of other HTPC accessories like Bluetooth mini-keyboards and RF remotes in their catalog. However, their most interesting product is the USB CEC Adapter. Almost none of the GPUs in the market have CEC functionality embedded, and this makes them quite unfriendly for integration in a home theater with a single remote control.

The USB CEC adapter from Pulse-Eight aims at solving this issue. As long as you have a TV or receiver compatible with HDMI CEC, you can use that remote to control XBMC on your HTPC, or, with software support, also be able to control other applications. What exactly is CEC and how does it work? What is inside the Pulse-Eight's USB CEC adapter, and how does one get it up and running with XBMC Eden? Can the USB CEC adapter be built into future HTPCs? Read on to find out the answers.

While flagship enclosures are certainly interesting and there are some great deals to be had even just north of $100, competition south of that border is mighty fierce and only becomes more so as manufacturers refresh their lineups with the latest trends and advances in chassis design. We've seen a lot of great options for end users looking to save some scratch, but we haven't had a chance to see what Antec can do in this market...until now. Antec is launching their new Three Hundred Two chassis, and if you're an enthusiast on a budget looking for the best cooling you can get without spending up for it, this may be the case for you.

When you pay more for a product, you expect a better level of everything - performance, features, support.  In a motherboard, I'd want all the upgrades - top line audio, overclockability, superior software, better USB 3.0 / SATA 6 Gbps controllers, and so on.  The ASRock X79 Extreme9's party piece is the bundled 'Game Blaster' - a PCIe x1 card with Creative Sound Core3D Audio powered by a quad core audio processor and an additional Broadcom Gigabit LAN port.  All in at $360 MSRP, today we review the Extreme9 to see if it fits into the enthusiast of enthusiast price segments.  Read on for the full review.

The Cooler Master Cosmos is more or less legendary among top-of-the-line enclosures. It's not hard to see why, either: it's big, it has loads of expansion, and it looks like a giant refrigerator...for your computer. That said, some time has passed since the Cosmos originally landed with very little in the way of updates. Today, Cooler Master brings us the long-awaited update, the Cosmos II. With a $349 MSRP and a shipping weight of nearly fifty pounds, this enclosure is oversized in every way. Will it retain the cachet of its predecessors, though, or have advances in the computing market since the era of the original Cosmos left the Cosmos II a shiny relic of a bygone era?

Llano is still selling strong for AMD, as shown by the relatively recent reports of representing a major aspect of their CPU profit margins. Building on our Llano and A75 review base, ASUS gave us the opportunity to look at their F1A75-M Pro motherboard - e-tailing at the time of writing for around $110.  Here at AnandTech we have reviewed other offerings from ASUS in A75, in full ATX from the F1A75-V Pro, and the mini-ITX F1A75-I Deluxe.  This time, it's the turn of micro-ATX.  Read on for the full review!

Recently Taiwanese vendor GeChic got in touch with us about a new product set to appear on American shores, the On-Lap 1301 laptop monitor. The concept? A portable 13" screen that affixes to the back of your notebook lid and swings out, extending your desktop space and powered by a USB 2.0 cable. The first inclination is to expect another DisplayLink peripheral, but the On-Lap 1301 actually uses the HDMI or VGA out of your notebook and thus dodges all of the pitfalls of using a USB-driven screen. So how effective is the On-Lap 1301? We took it for a test drive to find out if GeChic's screen is the productivity enhancer you were looking for.

The evolution of Google’s Nexus line is an interesting one. Each year, Google chooses both a silicon partner and an OEM to make a unique hardware archetype which it caters a specific build of Android to. We've been playing with the latest Nexus - Android 4.0 on both the GSM/UMTS and CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus - for a while now and have put together a comprehensive review of all three. First, our thoughts on Ice Cream Sandwich and Android 4.0, and after that, a review of both devices. 

Read on for the full review.