What you’ll need
A valid Windows Server 2022 ISO file (available from Microsoft’s Evaluation Center or Volume Licensing)
A bootable USB drive (8GB or more) or a virtual machine platform (e.g., Hyper-V, VMware, VirtualBox)
A PC or server that meets the minimum system requirements:
1.4 GHz 64-bit processor
512 MB RAM (2 GB recommended for GUI)
32 GB disk space
UEFI firmware with Secure Boot
Network adapter
The only thing better than a super-fast SSD is a super-fast SSD that doesn’t need a heatsink to maintain its speed. The PNY CS2150 promises just that, using newer controller tech in a svelte package that makes it hard to believe that this level of performance is just a cart-click away.
PNY has been in the memory business for quite a long time, and with SSDs it’s probably best known for offering affordable second-look drives. This means drives that compete with big brand names using the same hardware at usually lower prices. Part of this strategy means having a smaller capacity range, especially with newer SSD hardware, to net sales with the most popular capacities.
Many other companies do this and often with larger ranges — Teamgroup comes to mind — but PNY has enough of a market presence that it doesn’t have to work too hard to compete. Right now, the CS2150 is one of the few options with efficient PCIe 5.0 hardware, and that lets the drive stand out even if it’s otherwise unremarkable and not priced aggressively.
This is a drive not only for those who want the PCIe 5.0 checkbox ticked — though that’s possibly an OEM PC builder’s dream — but by a wider audience who can appreciate the new technology. The drive is incredibly efficient and cool-running with excellent performance almost across the board. It can still hit the right notes in a 4.0 slot and is not limited to desktops as its power consumption and thermal output are both pretty low. Its main weaknesses are pricing and the lack of a 4TB SKU, but it’s positioned perfectly to be an excellent primary drive where you might not need that much space but still want top-tier
No matter what the socket or chipset or processor, PCIe slots meant for graphics cards are always given their own PCI Express lanes. In the older northbridge/southbridge chipset setup, PCI Express lanes meant for the graphics card always went through northbridge, which is the faster chipset. Normally northbridge gave 16 lanes in a x16, x8/x8, x8/x4/x4, or x4/x4/x4/x4 configuration. Higher end chipsets and processors will have more lanes. To summarize in a list:
The chipset provides additional PCI Express lanes for other use
The CSTM80 is — as you might expect from the name — a mechanical keyboard that’s designed to be customized. Just about everything, from the top plate to the case weight, can be swapped out, and Drop sells additional case plates, switch plates, keycaps, and case weights on its site. The keyboard comes with Gateron Brown Pro 3.0 or Milky Yellow KS3 switches and a polycarbonate top plate, as well as ABS keycaps with shine-through side legends. It’s not designed to be a gaming keyboard, necessarily, but it does boast a 1,000 Hz polling rate and N-key rollover. And its TKL layout is the perfect size for most gamers.
The CSTM80 is a wired mechanical gasket-mount keyboard with a tenkeyless (TKL) layout, which means it has a full function row, arrow keys, and a 3 by 2 navigation cluster. It also has an extra F13 function key, but no rotary knob.
The CSTM80 has a polycarbonate case with a decorative magnetic top case. The base keyboard comes with a black ABS top case and matching black ABS keycaps with shine-through side legends. Drop sells additional top cases in various colors, patterns, and materials, which you can find on their CSTM80 collection page.
The black case that the keyboard comes with is nicely made, if a bit boring, with a half-inch bezel that surrounds the keyboard and a chamfered edge. The keyboard measures 14.7 inches (374mm) wide by 5.8 inches (148mm) deep, and is 1.3 inches (34mm) thick at its thickest point. It weighs about 2.8 pounds (1,272g) with the included ABS top case and keycaps installed, but you can change the weight by adding a heavier top case or replacing the keyboard’s standard aluminum case weight with one of Drop’s custom options (replacing the case weight is slightly trickier than replacing the top case, as you’ll need to unscrew it from inside).
The keyboard measures about 0.74 inches (18.7mm) at the front, so it’s high enough that some people might want a wrist rest, though I didn’t feel the need to use one. The board has a typing angle of 6 degrees.
The back of the keyboard has four anti-slip rubber feet and a standard silver brushed aluminum keyboard weight, which is replaceable. In the box, the CSTM80 comes with a braided USB-C to USB-A cable, a keycap puller, a switch puller, optional Mac keycaps, and extra gaskets.
[mai mult...]The Aerox 9 is a medium-large mouse measuring 5 inches (128mm) long, 2.6 (68mm) inches wide, and 1.6 inches (42mm) high. It weighs just 3.13 ounces (89g), which is fairly light for a mouse with so many buttons. It’s a good mouse for gamers with larger hands, but if your hands are on the smaller size it could be uncomfortable. The mouse wheel is sunk into the chassis and has a low profile, which improves access for scrolling but makes using the tilt function difficult.
Now for the most important part: the Aerox 9 has 18 programmable buttons, most of which are on the elongated 12-button side panel. The other buttons are the left/right primary buttons, the tilt wheel (left, right, middle click), and the DPI switch button behind the mouse wheel.
On the bottom of the mouse, you’ll find two large 100% PTFE mouse feet, plus a small PTFE circle around the sensor. This allows the mouse to freely glide around your mouse mat with minimal drag. The mouse is also touted as having an “Aqua Barrier” with an IP54 rating to protect its inner workings from dust, debris, and accidental drink spills (which we know all too well have dispatched a few peripherals to the bin).
In the box, you get the Aerox 9 mouse, a 6.5-foot (2m) braided USB-C to USB-A cable, a USB-C to USB-C wireless extension adapter, and the 2.4GHz wireless USB-C dongle.
On the surface, a bottleneck is an imbalance or limitation of hardware. For example if you have a really strong graphics card but not a strong processor, then the processor could be spending too much time working on game logic to get around sending render commands to the GPU. A tale tale sign is you’re running an application and it’s not performing as fast as it could be.
Though “as fast as it could be” is kind of hard to objectively say so. If you’re playing a game, for instance, and you want to make sure the video card is working as fast as it can, you can check benchmarks of that video card against the game you’re playing from review sites. Usually they run on the top-end hardware, lowering the potential of a bottleneck.
Bottleneck issues usually show themselves in mainly two ways
GPU-z (https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/): This is useful for obtaining information about what’s going on in the GPU including clock speed, GPU load, and for some GPUs a performance cap reason. GPU-z also allows you to log data.
Task Manager: You can check out CPU load, system RAM usage, and tweak how many threads the application can use to further test. As of Windows 10 Fall Creator’s Update (1709), Task Manager includes a GPU usage section that can work as a substitute for GPU-z, although it’s less informative.
Performance Monitor (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749249(v=ws.11).aspx): This is a tool built-in Windows that you can use to log data. I usually use this to log CPU usage since you can’t do this in Task Manager
FRAPS (http://www.fraps.com/): While it’s primary use is to monitor frame rate performance, it can also log frame times which can be useful for determining where performance drops.
Since bottlenecks are usually the result of some issue with hardware, let’s go over the various root causes. If you suspect you’re having a bottleneck issue, consider the application you’re running or the hardware setup you have to determine the root cause.
Symptom: All of the processor’s logical cores (or “threads”) are maxed out at 100%.
How to verify: Reducing the application’s processor affinity causes performance to tank linearly. i.e., If the application is maxing out 4 cores, disabling 1 reduces performance by about 25%.
How to fix: Upgrade the processor to something with more cores. While overclocking can help, it will not offer a lot of wiggle room.
Description: This is caused by the application needing so much of the processor’s time that it cannot send render commands to the GPU fast enough. For the most part, games will typically only process logic every so often on a fixed timer and logic often goes before graphics. So if the processor spends too much time processing the game logic, it doesn’t have enough time generating render commands. An example of this can be seen back in the days of 8-bit consoles. When too much action is going on the screen, the game slows down as the CPU needs more cycles to process logic before it can get to sending rendering commands.
Reliance on single core performance
Symptom: Either a few logical cores have high usage or the entire processor appears busy, but appears to flat line at a certain percentage.
How to verify: Reducing the application’s processor affinity does not cause performance to tank unless you really reduce the affinity. e.g., if the total processor load on say an 8 thread processor is only 60%, disabling one core does not affect performance at all.
How to fix: Increase the single core performance by either changing the processor with a higher IPC or increase the clock speed of the current processor
Description: This is caused by applications that cannot issue enough threads of work on average to saturate the processor. As a result, the processor can easily finish up the work but has to wait for the application to issue more threads. This can be caused by many things, usually due to over-reliance on synchronous software design.
Accessing storage
Symptom: Performance hiccups or outright drops for a few moments when moving around in the game’s environment. This is normally a problem in open-world games
How to verify: Go to different areas of the game, but do not backtrack (those areas are often left in RAM, so they load “instantly”). If you have a hard drive, you can hear it working while you play the game.
How to fix: This is most likely going to be an issue with the game being on slower storage media like hard drives. The easiest solution is to upgrade the storage to an SSD. If that’s not feasible, then defragging and having the defragger consolidate data should help. Windows’ built-in defragmenter should consolidate data.
Description: This is caused by the application needing something, but it hasn’t loaded it yet so it has to go to storage to retrieve it.
VRAM/RAM loading
Symptom: Performance starts off fine, but at some point it starts to stutter.
How to verify: Check if the VRAM/RAM usage is close to 100%
How to fix: For VRAM, lower resolution based settings (texture, shadow, screen) or turn off MSAA. For system RAM, get more RAM or close applications that you’re not using.
Description: Applications aren’t aware of how much actual RAM there is in the system, only the OS. As a result, when the application starts requesting more RAM and no more physical RAM is available, the OS starts evicting data from RAM onto storage. This takes a very long time in computer time and normally the application can’t do anything else while this is happening, causing hiccups.
[mai mult...]Peripheral Component Interface – express (PCIe) is a bus that allows expansion cards inside your computer to communicate with other components. You use the PCIe system by putting cards into slots on the motherboard. These cards can be things like graphics cards, RAID cards, network cards, even co-processors.
Expansion cards can communicate with other system resources by using lanes Lanes are represented by an “x” followed by the number of lanes being used. Multiple lanes can be used by one card, and we call these configurations “modes”. The PCIe 3.0 specification allows for these modes and slots, in ascending order by bandwidth/length:
x1
x2
x4
x8
x16
x32 (for all intents and purposes this doesn’t actually exist).
When a card is placed into a slot and the computer booted up, the system negotiates with the card to determine which mode to operate in. If there is only one card in the system, and it is in a slot that supports it’s maximum mode, then the system will give it that mode, otherwise it will give it the maximum mode supported by the slot. For example: If a x16 card is in a x16 slot, then it will run in x16 mode. If, however, you place a x8 card in a x16 slot, then it will still run in x8 mode.
When multiple cards are used, things get a little more complicated, but it is eased by the fact that all cards can operate in any mode below their listed mode. Processors and motherboards each have a maximum number of lanes that they will support.
A PCIe lane is simply one channel of serial communication. The supported lane configurations are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 (for all intents and purposes this doesn’t exist). Each configuration has it’s own slot. You can differentiate them by length, a 1 lane slot is the shortest while a 32 lane slot is the longest. There are also PCIe modes. A mode is simply how many lanes a card is actually using. It is independent from how many lanes are available to the card. Any card or slot may operate in any mode below it’s maximum mode, but must be in a slot that is the same physical size. Lanes and modes are denoted by an “x” preceding the number of lanes. For example: x1, x2, x4, x8, x16, or x32.
You can think of each lane like a two lane road (one lane in each direction). If we only have x1 lanes then we have a two lane road. If we have x2 lanes then we have a 4 lane highway. With x4 we have an 8 lane freeway. With x8 we have a 16 lane superhighway.
[mai mult...]So much power, and now with the RAM to back it up, but the price makes this a considered purchase for all but the most die-hard fans.
You may have just glanced over the price, so let’s make this clear. Yes, this is a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM for $120 (£115). That is $40 more than the 8GB model. There is no other difference between the models. We get the same CPU and we can use the same peripherals and accessories.
The Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is exactly the same as previous models of Pi 5. The same accessories and cases will work, and you can still overclock the CPU to get a free boost of speed. The only difference, from a user perspective, between the Raspberry Pi 5’s is the amount of RAM. In fact, you can spot the difference between lower specced Raspberry Pi 5s quite easily. Raspberry Pi has chosen to highlight the fact in the silkscreen. The “table” previously used to identify the RAM is gone, but the resistor used to identify is still present.
Under the hood though, the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB uses the same, lower-cost, D0 stepping as the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB, and this means that the 2 and 16GB models have more in common than the earlier models. The D0 stepping (BCM2712D0) removed “all the non-Raspberry Pi specific logic from the chip” according to Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton, while leaving it functionally identical to the previous.
To really see what the difference is, you would need to de-lid the chip.The “dark silicon” is essentially the unused part of the chip, and the removal of non-Raspberry Pi specific logic means that there is a 33% reduction in die space. What was taken out? On the Raspberry Pi 2GB it was the Ethernet and USB logic, with both features being moved to the RP1 “Southbridge” chip.
If you have already invested in Raspberry Pi 5 AI HATs, NVMe storage, cases and cooling, then you can easily use them with the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB. The GPIO pinout, port locations and chip locations are all the same, and compatible with your add-ons.
More RAM is always better. Your machine has more space to swap data with the CPU, and you can run more applications, or heavier applications without bottlenecks. A 16GB Raspberry Pi 5, with its quad-core 2.4GHz CPU means that we have a true Raspberry Pi desktop. Throw in an NVMe drive and perhaps a little overclock, and your Raspberry Pi 5 16GB would be a viable desktop alternative.
When it comes to the best portable monitors, multiple manufacturers seem to be testing the lower limits of what’s possible regarding pricing. Arzopa has added some nice touches to this portable monitor, making it an excellent bargain for anyone seeking a secondary monitor for travel use.
The A1 sets itself apart from similar entries in this price segment due to its choice of materials for the chassis. While most value-priced portable monitors use a plastic chassis to keep costs down, the A1 uses an aluminum frame instead. This imparts a sense of quality you can’t get from cheap, thin plastic that flexes easily. The chassis is rigid and finished in matte black.
Thin bezels run along the sides and top, while a more significant “chin” resides below the 15.6-inch panel, which features Arzopa branding. We love to see integrated kickstands on portable monitors, and Arzopa includes one on the A1. It’s a long, rectangular kickstand that is top-hinged. The stiff hinge lets you configure the monitor to your ideal angle for the best viewing experience.
The A1 features three ports on its left side: two USB-C (DisplayPort Alt-Mode supported) and an HDMI port. Arzopa also includes USB-C to USB-C, USB-C to USB-A (for auxiliary power), and HDMI to Mini-HDMI cables in the box. There are three buttons located at the top left of the S1. There’s a multi-function power/input switch/return button, a rocker switch (which navigates the OSD or controls brightness/volume), and an OSD button.
The most popular size and resolution in the portable monitor space is 15.6 inches and Full HD (1920 x 1080). Not surprisingly, this is how Arzopa specs the A1, including a 60Hz panel refresh rate.
