Auria EQ276W 27" IPS Monitor Review: QHD For $400

Although QHD screens are nothing new, they remain atop the desktop monitor price ladder. Auria broke the $400 barrier with its new EQ276W 27” IPS panel. Today, we run it through our display benchmarks to see how it compares to far pricier competition.
While we’re all used to the prices on our favorite technology dropping as new and better products hit the market, what you pay for an LCD panel falls a little more slowly than most other components. QHD (2560x1440) is one of the highest resolutions available on the desktop. And even though QHD monitors have been available for several years, their prices remain grossly higher than equally-sized FHD (1920x1080) screens.

With most QHD screens priced around the $800 mark, Auria offers its EQ276W at a paltry-by-comparison $399. Recalling the old adage, “you get what you pay for,” we wanted to track one down, run a full battery of tests, and determine whether the company compromises anything in its quest to enable 2560x1440 for less than $400.
IPS (in-plane switching) panels are currently manufactured by LG and Samsung. The latter calls its technology PLS (plane-line switching), but the principle is the same; individual sub-pixels are aligned parallel to the screen instead of perpendicular. The benefit is increased color accuracy, more efficient light transmission, and lower power consumption. The problem of reduced contrast seen in early IPS panels has been mostly eliminated. In fact, many IPS monitors available now boast significantly higher contrast than their TN-based counterparts.
Auria uses LG’s IPS panel as the basis for its EQ276W. At the time of writing, the only place to buy this display is Micro Center, where it can be purchased online or in-store. While there are occasional group buys for the EQ276W on various forums, purchasing this way means that you risk accepting the product as-is, with no support. Fortunately, Micro Center honors the one-year manufacturer’s warranty and replaces monitors with dead pixels.

Our sample arrived in a sturdy box, with medium-density flex foam protecting the panel and base. The power supply is a large brick with a detachable power cord. For connectivity, dual-link DVI and DisplayPort cables are included. In addition to those inputs, you also get an HDMI port and a headphone output jack. There is no separate audio input (apart from the signal carried through an HDMI connection) or USB ports. All of the connectors face downward, and are clustered near the center of the panel. The vertical support makes it a bit difficult to plug cables in; you'll have an easier time if you remove the stand hardware first.
The base snaps to the panel’s back support and adjusts for tilt and swivel. The screen sits very low on the desktop (less than two inches off the surface). So, unless your desk is unusually tall, you’ll have to tilt the screen upward to achieve the proper angle. It’s unfortunate that the stand has no height adjustment. On the plus side, all the hardware is removable so you can use a standard 75 mm VESA mount if you want to attach the EQ276W to a swing arm or wall bracket.
The bezel is fairly wide, at 28 mm across the top and sides and 41 mm on the bottom. Instead of the now-typical touch-sensitive controls, Auria includes buttons along the bottom-right of the panel. From here, you can control menu navigation, input selection, and speaker/headphone volume. The buttons feel cheap, and require a firm push to activate. In fact, they’re so firm that the entire panel moves upward when you press them. A softer touch would have been an improvement. The screen itself has no anti-glare properties whatsoever, so you’ll need to place this monitor carefully in order to avoid reflections.

GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: A Budget-Oriented GK106-Based Boss

GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: A Budget-Oriented GK106-Based Boss

Less than one week after AMD's Radeon HD 7790 launch, Nvidia is ready with a GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. Can the company parlay another GK106-based card into something more balanced than GeForce GTX 650 Ti, ousting the Radeon HD 7850 for less money?

Rare is it that one graphics processor vendor holds onto an important price segment uncontested. However, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti was the only compelling $150 card for darned near six months. Similarly, AMD's Radeon HD 7850 locked down the segment right above that, ranging between $175 and $200, depending on how much memory you wanted.

Less than a week ago, though, AMD introduced its Radeon HD 7790 for $150, encroaching on previously uncontested space. Based on a new Bonaire GPU, the first member of AMD's Sea Islands family, it fired a shot across Nvidia's bow. And now Nvidia fires back with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, jockeying for attention in the same market as the Radeon HD 7850.

While AMD manufactured a new ASIC for its Radeon HD 7790, Nvidia is recycling the GK106 graphics processor already featured on the GeForce GTX 650 Ti and GeForce GTX 660, both of which surround the Radeon HD 7850's $175 to $200 price range. It makes sense to employ that same, successful graphics processor to address the hole in Nvidia's line-up, and that's what the company is doing with its latest offering.

Put simply, GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost combines the setup and shader configuration of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti with the 660's back-end and 192-bit memory interface. This is a good thing, we think. On several occasions, we've seen the GeForce GTX 650 Ti limited by relatively low memory bandwidth. Although GK106's third asymmetrical GPC is disabled, all of the chip's ROP partitions and 64-bit memory controllers are left intact. The result is four streaming multiprocessors totaling 768 CUDA cores and 64 texture units. Three ROP clusters output up to 24 full-color raster operations per clock, and the aggregate memory interface is 192-bits wide thanks to a trio of 64-bit controllers.

In addition, the new card's core clock is up to 980 MHz, which is 55 MHz more than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti and identical to the 660. As its name indicates, Nvidia enables GPU Boost on this model, claiming that the core typically sees at least 1,033 MHz. Combine that with the same 1,502 MHz GDDR5 memory (yielding 144.2 GB/s of bandwidth) found on GeForce GTX 660, and there's good reason to be optimistic about the balance struck by GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. In fact, based on its specifications, we're expecting this card to perform more like the GeForce GTX 660 than the 650 Ti. The benchmarks will show whether that's the case, though.This is GK106's third outing, so there aren't any new features to discuss, really. If you want to know more about this GPU, check out Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 and 660 Review: Kepler at $110 and $230.

				The differences between Nvidia's cards are important, but we're far more interested to know how GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost fares against the Radeon HD 7850. GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost: The Reference Card Considering that the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost employs the same GPU and memory interface, we're not surprised that it looks a lot like Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 reference card. There's not a single feature distinguishing one from the other. The PCB even appears to sport the same traces. The circuit board plus Nvidia's cooling hardware measures 9.5" x 4.5" x 1.5". As we saw on the GeForce GTX 660, this card's PCB is only 7" long, with almost 3" of overhang attributable to the fan and shroud. There are GeForce GTX 660 models available with smaller coolers, so it's likely that shortened GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost cards will surface, too. Four of this model's memory modules are easy to spot, uncovered, on the back of the board. Nvidia's reference GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost comes equipped with two dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI port, and DisplayPort output, matching the GeForce GTX 660. Both models support up to four monitors at a time. This card bears the same 134 W as GeForce GTX 660. It likewise requires one six-pin auxiliary power cable. A single 65 mm fan keeps the card cool, while exhausting heated air out through its I/O bracket. A single SLI header indicates support for dual-card configurations, and simultaneously tells us that three- and four-GPU arrays are not possible.

AMD Radeon HD 8790M: Next-Gen Mobile Mainstream Graphics Preview

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AMD sent over some of its lab gear: an interposer card and two PCI Express-based boards with MXM modules...one of which hosted its upcoming Radeon HD 8790M GPU. At long last, the GCN architecture is hitting mainstream notebooks in its 28 nm glory.
Here we were just saying not to expect AMD Radeon HD 8000-series graphics cards until later in 2013 in Best Graphics Cards For The Money: December 2012, and the company sends over its Radeon HD 8790M. Cool, right? We haven't even reviewed a desktop-based 8000-series card yet.
Well, not so fast. AMD does currently offer mobile graphics processors based on its Graphics Core Next architecture. However, those are limited to the high-end of its Radeon HD 7700, 7800, and 7900 families. Everything in the 7600-series and lower centers on the company's VLIW5 shader configuration, which you last saw make news on the desktop when it launched the Radeon HD 6800 series in October of 2010. So, yeah. It's high time that AMD starts nudging the far superior GCN architecture and 28 nm manufacturing into mainstream and entry-level mobile designs.
Enter the Radeon HD 8000M-series chips.

What's up with the name, then? Call it carry-over inflation from the Radeon HD 7000M line-up, which also mixed multiple architectures. The take-away, right up front, is that even though we're previewing a Radeon HD 8790M, this isn't the 8000-series you're expecting on the desktop. Rather, it's AMD's effort to get GCN into the mobile space, an exciting-enough prospect in its own right, given that small, lightweight notebooks stand to gain quite a bit from an energy-efficient design able to bolster performance significantly.
We're not particularly happy about the model confusion, as we've pointed out many times in the past. But AMD didn't leave itself much room to roll out GCN-enabled Radeon HD 7000M-series parts. And besides, Windows 8 is here. OEMs want to see shiny new names to go along with their latest models.
Those marketing shenanigans don't diminish AMD's claim that the Radeon HD 8000Ms are going to be quite a bit faster than the VLIW5-based GPUs they replace. On the desktop, we saw the Radeon HD 7000-series add-in cards not only improve performance appreciably, but the GCN architecture also helped ratchet up efficiency and improve the company's standing in more general-purpose compute workloads. Equally impressive were the speed-ups AMD's driver team managed to coax from GCN after the architecture's introduction. We expect that GCN-enabled mobile parts to wield the same benefits, plus enjoy a more mature driver (including a fixed implementation of its switchable Enduro technology, which was recently patched to address a frame rate-limiting bug).

AMD's Mainstream Radeon HD 8000M-Series

AMD Notebook Graphics Line-Up In Q1'13
	Radeon HD 8500M	Radeon HD 8600M	Radeon HD 8700M	Radeon HD 8800M	Radeon HD 7800M	Radeon HD 7900M
Stream Processors	384	384	384	640	640	1280
Engine Clock	Up to 650 MHz	Up to 775 MHz	Up to 850 MHz	Up to 700 MHz	Up to 800 MHz	850 MHz
Memory Clock	Up to 1125 MHz (GDDR) Up to 1000 MHz (DDR3)	Up to 1125 MHz (GDDR) Up to 1000 MHz (DDR3)	Up to 1125 MHz (GDDR) Up to 1000 MHz (DDR3)	Up to 1125 MHz (GDDR)	Up to 1000 MHz (GDDR5)	1000 MHz (GDDR5)
Single-Precision Compute	537 GFLOPS	633 GFLOPS	Up to 691 GFLOPS	Up to 992 GFLOPS	Up to 1024 GFLOPS	2176 GFLOPS
Double-Precision Compute	33 GFLOPS	39 GFLOPS	Up to 42 GFLOPS	62 GFLOPS
Code Name	Mars	Mars	Mars	Venus	Heathrow	Wimbledon

As you can see, the Radeon HD 8000Ms actually slot in underneath AMD's Radeon HD 7800M-series in the Q1 product line-up. AMD plans to fix this in Q2, when 7800M- and 7900M-series replacements get the entire portfolio into the Radeon HD 8000M family.
If you've heard rumors about the Venus and Mars parts, and thought they had something to do with the desktop, then you'll be surprised to learn that those are the code names for two mobile GPUs. Venus is one component, while Mars is divided into three families, all equipped with 384 Stream processors, but operating at different clock rates.
AMD does plan to turn features on and off to differentiate its new GPUs, too. For example, the Mars-based Radeon HD 8790M we're previewing does not include support for the company's Video Codec Engine (VCE). Conversely, the Radeon HD 8800Ms, armed with Venus, are expected to include VCE functionality to speed up video encoding and decoding in hardware.

Previewing GCN For The Mainstream: Radeon HD 8790M, Benchmarked

While we would have loved to start by taking a look at one of AMD's Radeon HD 8800M GPUs, the Radeon HD 8790M is its first mainstream GCN-based graphics processor ready for testing. In fact, the company hasn't even started announcing OEM design wins yet.
You'd think that would make it hard to benchmark the Radeon HD 8790M. However, we have a bit of hardware in the lab that should allow us to draw a comparison between AMD's next-generation mobile line-up and the one it replaces. The interposer card in the image below drops into a PCI Express x16 slot, and accommodates an MXM module. AMD and Nvidia use these things in their own labs during the bring-up process. They make it possible to do all of the testing needed before an OEM integrates a GPU into its own notebook design. 

The interposer solves some problems, even as it introduces others. Let's start with its advantages.
First, and perhaps most important for the scientifically-minded out there, it allows us to maintain a common test platform. Were we to instead benchmark notebooks from competing vendors against each other, we'd have to take different processors, thermal limits, clock rates, memory capacities, and motherboards into consideration. This way, the only things changing are the MXM modules. Moreover, getting our hands on these components allows us to test weeks or months before OEM notebooks start shipping.
Conversely, we're painfully aware that dropping mobile hardware into a desktop environment ignores many of the constraints OEMs face when it comes to integration. We don't get a sense for thermal output or battery consumption during a 3D workload. That makes it easy to create an unrepresentative comparison. See the heat sink on the 8790M? It's quite a bit larger than the 7670M's cooling solution. Could we be facing a match up that never pans out in the real-world? Perhaps, though a 28 nm processor and proven-better efficiency give the GCN-based part headroom that the prior-gen part doesn't enjoy. When we first started this evaluation, AMD told us we were working with a Radeon HD 8770M, and that it was as close to a drop-in replacement for the 7670M as you'd find, matching its TDP. But after GPU-Z indicated that we were dealing with a Radeon HD 8790M, the company corrected itself and confirmed the higher-end part, operating at 850 MHz with a 900 MHz boost state available.
There's no way for us to be certain that the previous-gen part, the part we originally thought we'd be testing, and the 8790M we actually have in the lab would all work in the same notebook, or if their respective thermal and power attributes would preclude one or more from sharing compatibility. So, we're hedging our bets by not involving Nvidia in this discussion, and recommending that you consider the performance we're presenting as a comparison between two distinct models in AMD's line-up, which you wouldn't necessarily find in the same chassis.

The specs on the Radeon HD 7670M match what we are expecting. GPU-Z doesn't fully recognize the 8790M, but it does pick up its maximum 900 MHz boost clock.

Test Setup And Benchmarks

12:00 AM - December 21, 2012 by Andrew Ku

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Again, because the new Radeon HD 8000M-series GPUs aren't yet shipping in notebooks, we're using a desktop-oriented setup with a PCI Express interposer to preview the performance of AMD's GCN-enabled mainstream mobile graphics processors. Although we could have used an overclocked Core i7-3770K to crush the potential of a platform-oriented bottleneck, we stepped down to a Core i5-2500K instead. Though still fast, this part running at its stock settings is perhaps a better match to the performance of what you might find in a notebook (even if its 95 W TDP is way out of bounds).

Test Hardware
Processor	Intel Core i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.3 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled
Motherboard	MSI Z77A-GD80
Memory	Kingston Hyper-X 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1333 @ DDR3-1333, 1.5 V
System Drive	OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s
Graphics	AMD Radeon HD 7670M 1 GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon HD 8790M 2 GB GDDR5
Power Supply	Seasonic 760 W, 80 PLUS Gold
System Software and Drivers
Operating System	Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
DirectX	DirectX 11
Driver	Graphics: Catalyst 9.011 beta RST: 11.5.0.1207 Virtu: 1.1.101

Benchmarks
Hitman Absolution	1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080, Low and Ultra Quality Presets
Far Cry 3	1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080, Low and High Quality Presets
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim	1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080, High and Ultra Quality Presets
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria	DX11; 1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080, High and Ultra Quality Presets
Battlefield 3	1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080, Low and Extra Quality Presets
Call of Duty: Black Ops II	1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080, Normal and Extra Quality Presets
LuxMark	v2.0, Sala Scene
CLBenchmark

		Hitman: Absolution Hitman Absolution Benchmark The recent introduction of Hitman: Absolution gives us a new title for our suite with built-in benchmarking capabilities. Not only does it support DirectX 11, but the characters are really well-done. Although this title is available on consoles as well, there are a number of PC-only features (like higher texture resolution, higher shadow map resolution, and increased gesture resolution). DirectX 11-specific additions include global illumination, bokeh, tessellation, Eyefinity support, and HD3D support. Even at Low quality, the Radeon HD 8790M demonstrates its advantage over the 7670M. With anti-aliasing disabled, it delivers 35% more performance than the 7670M at 1280x720. The delta increases as resolution goes up, too. At 1920x1080, the Radeon HD 8790M outperforms the 7670M by 45%, delivering fairly playable performance where last generation's part doesn't. Enabling 2x anti-aliasing translates to a roughly 35% advantage favoring the Radeon HD 8790M across the board. At 1280x720, frame rates remain playable, but above that they aren't as viable. We're definitely still looking at mainstream hardware here. The Ultra quality preset hammers that point home for us. No longer is the story about performance; it's now a matter of basic playability. Even at 1280x720 with no anti-aliasing applied, both mainstream GPUs struggle to serve up a smooth experience. Sure, the Radeon HD 8790M decimates its predecessor. But you're going to need to make some compromises when it comes to gaming on a less expensive low-power platform. Far Cry 3 Don Woligroski recently published Far Cry 3 Performance, Benchmarked, and determined that even the Low quality preset looks pretty darned good. In his performance evaluation, he ran around a specific outpost during daytime. Because there is no built-in benchmark for Far Cry 3, we end up with some variation in our results due to user input. At least we end up with numbers representative of actual game play, though. We're replicating Don's methodology for benchmarking AMD's mobile graphics processors. At the Low quality preset, the 7670M is fairly playable at 1600x900, and definitely workable at 1280x720. Dips as low as 17 FPS at 1920x1080 render that setting untenable. The Radeon HD 8790M alleviates all of that, serving up anywhere between 50-60% more performance. Even at 1920x1080, the game is fairly fluid. Stepping up to the High quality preset renders the Radeon HD 7670M completely unplayable. The 8790M gets by at 1280x720, but is hampered by demanding graphics at 1600x900 and 1920x1080. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim More so than Hitman or Far Cry 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim tends to be platform-bound. That's good news for mid-range mobile graphics processors. Using the High preset, we still see that increasing resolution has an impact on each GPU, though. The Radeon HD 7670M is fairly playable at 1280x720, though it drops as low as 20 FPS in heavily-wooded areas. The last-gen VLIW5-based chip gets increasingly choppy as you step up to 1600x900 and beyond. Meanwhile, the Radeon HD 8790M does better at 1920x1080 than the 7670M did at 1280x720. We're comfortable calling all three resolutions playable at this detail level. The Ultra preset is notably more taxing on graphics hardware. We wouldn't bother trying to enjoy Skyrim on a Radeon HD 7670M-equipped notebook at even 1280x720 using that setting. AMD's Radeon HD 8790M fares better, but still suffers occasional performance dips.