Sapphire Nitro R9 390 1440p gaming ? No problem !

So let’s get right to it. Is the R9 390 a rehashed core? Yes, kind of. It’s the same Hawaii core found in the R9 290 nearly two years ago. It has the same number of streaming cores at 2,560, the same GDDR5 memory and the same number of transistors littering the GCN GPU. Understandably then, you’re probably wondering why you should bother purchasing one of these cards. Good question. For a card that uses more power with just a slight overclock over the reference card, it certainly doesn’t make much sense to upgrade if you already have an R9 290. Unless, of course, you’re after that 8GB memory fi gure, in which case it might be worth your time. Laughably though, there are people out there who have managed to fl ash their R9 290s to 390s, using the latest R9 300 series BIOS, most likely to AMD’s disapproving frowns. So, who should be looking at this card then? Well, if you’re still on a Tahiti core, or a 600 series card from Nvidia, this is defi nitely a suitable solution to your graphical woes. It’s fantastic for gaming at 1440p, and thanks to Sapphire’s Nitro implementation (because apparently nitrous oxide cards are a thing), this card overclocks above and beyond anything we really expected. In our testing, we found that with games such as Witcher 3, Shadow of Mordor and Project Cars, our R9 390 was regularly only around 10-15fps behind AMD’s fl agship Fury X, purely thanks to the Nitro’s ability to aggressively overclock, no doubt. That may still seem like a big disparity between the two, but there’s something you might want to take into consideration — the Nitro is currently half the price of the Fury X. How interesting are those fi gures sounding now? So, the obvious solution here would be to run two of these bad boys in CrossFire – the same performance as a single Fury X with twice as much memory, for the same cost. Say what you like about HBM (highbandwidth memory) — yes, it’s revolutionary — but it’s just not there yet. And with DirectX 12 merging dedicated graphics card memory together, you’d be looking at a setup containing four times the memory of a single Fury X card for the same price — 16GB to be exact. An insane solution, to say the least. Sapphire’s Nitro Tri-X fan design is a fantastic cooling solution, providing dissipation for that massive heatsink with one 10mm heatpipe, two 8mm heatpipes and two 6mm heatpipes. It’s well cared for. The card also has a (rather terrifying in our opinion) 0db fan feature, so if you’re not gaming, those fans aren’t spinning — ideal if you’re often working from home. Even so, it’s not exactly a noisy cooler when it does spin up. Even in Furmark’s GPU stress tests we only hit 69°C, with the fans spinning at around 65% capacity. What would’ve been nice to see on the Nitro is a backplate, but then Sapphire presumably reserves those specifi cally for its 390X iteration and beyond. Understandable, but it would have helped to transform this GPU into the lustrous black beauty it so righteously deserves to be. Otherwise, we have no bones to pick with Sapphire’s offering. Yes, it’s a rebrand, but it still performs admirably. When it comes to bang-for-yourbuck performance, it’s on a par with AMD’s Fury X, if not better.

Making motherboards

As part of a guided tour to coincide with Computex in June, Gigabyte took me to its Taipei motherboard factory on the outskirts of the city. Situated in a small industrial town about an hour out of central Taipei, Nanping is the biggest of the company’s three motherboard plants, with the other two – Dongguan and Ningbo – based in China. Opened in 2000, Nan Ping employs 1,500 people and produces 575,000 motherboards per month. Each of these are tested before shipping, and each are created with a mixture of automation and manual labour. The only aspect of motherboard creation not accounted for at Nanping is the printed circuit board (PCB), which is made in China. Otherwise, each motherboard is crafted ‘from 0 to 100%’ at the plant. On the seventh fl oor, large (and loud) surfacemount technology (SMT) machines slot tiny resistors and other chips onto the PCBs, with several workers responsible for testing the results at the end of the line. These SMT machines are capable of slotting in components at a speed of half a second, with long reams of tiny components fed into the SMT automatically. While the seventh fl oor is mostly automated, the manual assembly line two fl oors down is where the more delicate work happens. That said, it doesn’t look delicate — dozens of Taiwanese women sit elbow to elbow placing components at blinding speeds — but a lot of care and attention is afforded to the process and again, every motherboard is also function functiontested before leaving the premises. Each worker wears an antistatic wristband, and each has trays full of ports, chips and transistors, which they apply as a conveyor transports an endless stream of PCBs throughout the fl oor. On the day I visited, the target was 1,500 motherboards. That’s a lot of USB ports manually slotted in. Down on the second fl oor is where packing happens. This is a thorough process and, despite being the least technical part, easily the most fascinating: machines beat cardboard boxes into shape while men and women carefully place the motherboard, cables, driver disc and all manuals into the package you purchase at retail. While the process of building the actual motherboard may seem remote and foreign to anyone with subprofessional technical knowledge, watching the actual product materialise before your eyes is… well, eyeopening. The next time you throw your motherboard’s manual away, keep in mind the guy tasked with putting 1,500 of these into 1,500 boxes, every day. Each motherboard package is then stacked into a bigger box and sent directly from Nanping to Gigabyte’s wholesalers. That’s a lot of motherboards built per day, and for what is arguably the least sexy component of a PC, quite a lot of work. For me, the tour was a welcome reminder that PC components don’t just materialise from out of nowhere in boardrooms or retail outlets: they’re painstakingly constructed by dozens of human hands.

Galaxy S6 Edge

It looks great, is powerful, and has a good camera, but in some ways, the S6 Edge has gone backward.

BACKGROUND
With its glass and aluminum construction and curved-edge screen, Samsung looks to have leaped lightyears ahead with its newest fl agship smartphone, the Galaxy S6 Edge. But is it as future-proof as it is futuristic? Only a teardown will tell…

MAJOR TECH SPECS €
5.1-inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen (1,440 x 2,560, 16 million colours) € Samsung Exynos 7 Octa 7420 processor, integrated ARM Mali-T760 GPU and 3GB memory € 16MP rear camera with HDR, LED fl ash, and 4K video recording € Built-in support for Qi and Powermat wireless charging € 32/64/128GB storage options, but no microSD slot

KEY FINDINGS €
The rear panel is glued on rock-solid. We had to break out a suction cup to slip in an opening pick. Defi nitely not fun. With the panel fi nally off, the adhesive peels off the glass nicely, but leaves a sticky residue on the metal midframe. € Using a screwdriver and plastic opening tool, the midframe comes off easily, revealing all the goodies. However, the battery is still held captive under the motherboard. We’d normally remove the microSD card now, but Samsung eliminated it. If you need extra storage, you’ll need to pay for it up-front. € We pluck out the main camera to get a better look at the hardware. The 16MP OIS rear-facing camera dwarfs the 5MP selfi e cam. On the front we fi nd: Samsung Exynos 7420 octa-core processor (64-bit), 2.1GHz Quad and 1.5GHz Quad, along with Samsung K3RG3G30MM-DGCH 3GB LPDDR4 RAM and Samsung KLUBG4G1BD 32GB NAND fl ash. € A glass back and a stubbornly glued battery? Samsung, have you been hanging out with Apple? Finally free, we get a better look at the 3.85V, 10.01Wh battery. It’s a 2,600mAh battery, like the S4. € In what seems another step backward, the S6 dumps the S5’s lightning-fast Micro-B USB 3.0 port for a microUSB (2.0) port. Apart from saving some space, we fail to see the point of this. € The Super AMOLED display is what allows for the smooth curves. Riding on the back of the display is the customary touchscreen controller, this time an STMicro FT6BH. € Repairability score: 3 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair). Many components are modular. In an improvement over the S5, you no longer have to remove the display to get into the phone and replace the motherboard. Front and back glass makes for double the crackability, and strong adhesive makes it hard to gain entry. The battery is very tightly adhered, and buried beneath the midframe and motherboard. Replacing the glass without destroying the display is going to be very diffi cult.

Block unwanted Windows 10 updates

After years of Windows users being able to pick and choose which security updates and new features would get installed, a controversial decision from Microsoft has made updates in Windows 10 mandatory, causing many early testers to get understandably peeved. Reports of an updated Nvidia driver causing performance issues on certain systems is just one example of how mandatory updates have so far bothered users. Thankfully, there’s also a way to avoid those unwanted updates — a troubleshooter package has been released that allows users to temporarily prevent a Windows or driver update from reinstalling in Windows 10. The package, which can be found by simply Googling ‘KB3073930’, was made for the Windows 10 Insider Preview, although it should also work on the fi nal release version. The troubleshooter will allow you to hide any updates that are causing you strife, and it will also let you manually select drivers for automatic installation. While this is a temporary solution, let’s hope that a proper fi x for this issue is on the way

Intel’s Skylake finally lifts off

For PC makers, Intel’s new Skylake platform has been a long time coming. Consisting of sixth-generation Core i CPUs and accompanying 100-series chipsets, the hype has slowly been growing for the platform, with leaked benchmarks pointing to great base performance and fantastic overclockability. The good news is that wait is nally over. Launching at the start of August are the enthusiast-oriented Core i5-6500K and Core i7-6700K CPUs and accompanying motherboards, based on the high-end Z170 chipset. Lower-end CPUs and boards are expected to start ltering through from September onwards. The Skylake platform has seen multiple delays. At Computex in Taiwan in June, most major motherboard vendors were already showing o Z170 products, but CPUs were nowhere to be seen. Australian PC vendors have told APC that even leading right up to the launch, test CPUs were hard to come by, indicating that retail chips may initially be hard to nd. Skylake should also launch on laptops before the end of the year, with some multinational vendors anticipated to release products as soon as October. Taiwanese publication Digitimes is also reporting that Intel’s NUC and Compute Stick product lines will see Skylake updates in Q4 2015. We’ll have a full report on the rst sixth-generation Core i CPUs and Z170 motherboards next month.

The Windows 10 upgrade experience

as we go to print with this issue of APC, Microsoft has just started rolling out the free Windows 10 upgrade. Judging just from the numbers — Microsoft claims 14 million devices were upgraded just on the fi rst day — it’d seem to be off to a good start. Unfortunately, my own upgrade experience didn’t quite go as smoothly as I’d hoped — although, admittedly, part of that could defi nitely be my own fault. When upgrade day rolled around, I decided I’d leave my home PC (which runs an almost 2-year-old Windows 8.1 installation) switched on to see if the required 3GB of downloads would come down automatically via Windows Update — which apparently, they did… and then some, as I discovered when I got home. Windows 10’s temporary upgrade folder housed not just 3GB of fi les, but a whopping 15GB! It seems that some of the downloaded fi les had been corrupted — apparently repeatedly — and Windows Update had been trying to replace them with good ones… and, failing time and again. (Thank goodness for unlimited broadband plans.) Deducing that this problem probably wasn’t going to resolve itself cleanly, I then went about deleting all the corrupted fi les and then trying to force Windows Update to start the process again… which, after a couple of hours of downloading more fi les, once again failed. The installer was still ending up corrupted. “Screw Windows Update,” was my general feeling at this point, so I went about looking for alternatives, fi nding that Microsoft’s smartly put together a standalone tool for creating a Windows installer on a USB drive — the so-called ‘media creation tool’, which you can fi nd here: tinyurl.com/apc419-w10mct. Using this to create a USB 3.0 fl ash drive with the Windows 10 installer, the upgrade process was fast — taking around 30 minutes — and completely fl awless. (APC’s creative director, Troy Coleman, went through a similar ‘corrupted downloads’ experience, but also had a great experience with the media creation tool.) And now that it’s running, I’m pretty fond of the new OS. It’s very quick, not just for Microsoft’s own apps (like the excellent but a little under-featured Edge browser) but for using and launching third-party ones too. Not everything is working great, however. I run a dual-monitor setup, and trying to game on one screen and watch fl icks on the other results in choppy video — and this is something that worked perfectly on Windows 8.1. Hopefully, these are just driverrelated teething problems that will improve over the next few months — it still is very much early days for Windows 10. If you’ve upgraded to Windows 10 already, what was your experience? And is there anything you particularly love or hate about it?