Month: September 2020

Sony is continuing its refresh of its smartphone line to focus on photography and video with the new Xperia 5 II. It’s the smaller sibling of the very tall and weirdly expensive Xperia 1 II, and this newer phone betters it in several regards. It’s cheaper, for one thing, going on sale on September 29th for $949. The other major improvement is that Sony has put in a high-refresh-rate 120Hz panel.

Oddly, though, Sony says it’s not shipping until December 4th and even more oddly, it will have 5G but won’t work with the 5G networks in the US — just like the Xperia 1 II.

The basic idea of the Xperia 5 II is that it’s a phone with a tall 21:9 screen, but it’s relatively small at 6.1-inches. That sounds big, but since it’s so tall it works out to only about 2.68 inches wide. It’s a much more pocketable phone than the Xperia 1 II.

It features fairly standard flagship specs for 2020: a Snapdragon 865 processor, 4,000 mAh battery, and the aforementioned 120Hz refresh rate display. Sony is also sticking with dual front-facing stereo speakers and a traditional headphone jack, both of which are formally classified as endangered species now. Unfortunately, there’s no wireless charging.

As for cameras, the Xperia 5 II has the now-standard three-camera array on the back. Sony’s focus on photography means that it prefers to label them with their 35mm focal length equivalents: 16mm, 24mm, and 70mm.

Sony is claiming to be the first smartphone to be able to record slow motion at 120FPS in 4K HDR. I’ll be curious to see how that works and also to see if the Xperia 5 II improves on the video quality in the previous one. Sony’s pro video app lets you have a lot of control over video settings and to package clips into projects for easier editing.

Really, though, the Xperia line’s claim to fame with the camera is with auto focus and capture speed. Like the Xperia 1 II, the Xperia 5 II features Sony’s best-in-class autofocus, which can lock on to a human or pet’s eye and keep that focus tack sharp with surprising speed — up to 60 times per second. It can also do burst mode shooting at 20fps.

Maybe the most interesting photography feature is that you can set the Xperia 5 II to be a direct tethered upload machine for one of Sony’s newer mirrorless cameras. It’s not the equivalent of full USB tethering on a desktop, but it is much faster and more efficient than the usual Wi-Fi solutions offered on cameras these days.

Sony is also talking up the Xperia 5 II’s gaming features — and for the first time in forever I think an Android gaming phone might have features that are more than just gimmicks. Sony’s angle is that the 120Hz refresh rate includes a 240Hz touch scanning rate, but that’s not the big deal to me.

Sony has a game enhancer mode, like many phones, but its mode has some genuinely useful features. That’s not something I ever expected to write about game enhancer software on an Android phone.

You can directly set and lock the screen’s refresh rate, motion blur, and touch response speed. More interestingly there is a power bypass feature — it lets you set the phone to draw power directly from a USB-C cable without charging the battery. That significantly reduces heat, which means all the silicon can run better. Sony also has added a graphene heat sink to draw heat away from the main board.

In all, the Xperia 5 II sounds like a fascinating phone with unique features and infuriating drawbacks. But if you’re deep into Sony’s camera ecosystem, it could be a good choice. A better choice might be to wait for the Xperia Pro, which has been announced but still not detailed beyond one key photography feature — using your phone as an external HDMI monitor for a video camera. Presumably by the time the Xperia 5 II launches in December, we’ll have heard more.

New photos of alleged AMD Radeon RX 6900XT leak

A YouTuber RedGamingTech has leaked more photographs of the alleged Radeon RX 6900XT graphics card. It seems that the source of the photographs is the same as JayzTwoCents’s who also shared some of these photos yesterday.

It is worth noting that the graphics card name has not been confirmed. It is only alleged that the highest-end model will be called RX 6900XT. AMD is likely to unveil multiple graphics card SKUs based on RDNA2 architecture. The flagship model should feature Navi 21 GPU (known as Big Navi), while the rest of the stack could adopt Navi 22 or Navi 23.

The photos are likely showing a prototype as even the I/O vents are blocked, which is very unusual for a graphics card. Although the render of the graphics card in Fortnite game also lacked the venting holes.

The model is equipped with dual 8-pin power connectors. This configuration is also seen on a dual-fan model, which was revealed by JayzTwoCents yesterday.

Tech YouTuber JayzTwoCents recently shared an image of what appears to be another Radeon RX 6000 (a.k.a. Big Navi) graphics card that may eventually contend for a spot on our best graphics cards page.

Unlike the beefy Radeon RX 6000 that AMD teased in Fortnite, this newly leaked variant features a less substantial cooling solution, insinuating that it could be a SKU that’s on the lower end of the Big Navi spectrum. It’s plausible that AMD might use the triple-fan configuration for the flagship model, such as the Radeon RX 6900, while saving the dual-fan setup for something like a Radeon RX 6800 or RX 6700. This is all just speculation, of course.

The concept behind the dual-fan Radeon RX 6000 seems to be the same as its bigger brother. The shroud exhibits a contoured design with a black and silver theme. In this render, however, the silver color looks white, which may just be a reflection. The Radeon logo and red highlights are still present to complement the graphics card’s body. Now that we are seeing a dual-fan design, it’s even harder to shake off the perception that it looks similar to Nvidia’s last-generation Founders Edition shroud.

There are high hopes that AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture will deliver improved power efficiency over RDNA. The triple-fan Radeon RX 6000 surfaced with two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which isn’t shocking for a high-end graphics card. Nvidia’s own GeForce RTX 3080 is rated for 320W, but the chipmaker craftily disguises it with a single 12-pin PCIe power connector. But the presence of the pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors on the dual-fan Radeon RX 6000 may raise the alarm for some users.

The combination of the PCIe slot and two 8-pin PCIe power connectors is good for a power delivery up to 375W. Once again, having two 8-pin PCIe power connectors is one thing, but actually drawing the maximum power from each is another. We see manufacturers overprovision the power connectors on graphics cards all the time.

Regardless, we have a little over a month to wait until we know more officially. AMD will be livestreaming its Radeon RX 6000 announcement on October 28 at 10 a.m. PT. Nvidia has landed the first stike with Ampere, and now the ball is in AMD’s court.

If you haven’t already read our full RTX 3080 review, I would recommend doing so first. That will give you an idea of how this new GPU compares to the likes of the RTX 2080 Ti, GTX 1080 Ti and more. In this article, we are only looking at performance of the RTX 3080, but tested on different CPU platforms.

Here, we are comparing three sets of data. First of all, the data we used for our review – the RTX 3080 Founders Edition tested with an Intel i9-10900K overclocked to 5.1GHz, restricting us to PCIe 3.0 due to the Z490 platform. To give us an idea of PCIe Gen4 performance with this GPU, we turn to AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900XT and the X570 platform. As a final data set, we also force PCIe 3.0 while testing with the Ryzen 9 3900XT.

Lenovo no longer lists the AMD Ryzen-powered IdeaPad 5 on its own site, and we don’t know why. Fortunately, the laptop is still available at Walmart – and at a seriously affordable price too.

On paper, the IdeaPad 5 (model numbers 81YM0060US, 81YM005YUS or 81YM0061US) has a lot going for it. With a rock-bottom price, the machine significantly undercuts the previous cheapest AMD Ryzen 8-core laptop.

What do you get for your money? A choice of three colours, a 14-inch full HD IPS display, an AMD Ryzen 7 4700U CPU, 8GB of DDR4 memory (soldered), a 256GB PCIe SSD and a 57WHr battery that should last up to 14 hours.

The processor has eight threads and seven GPU cores with a base clock speed of 2GHz, 12MB cache and a default TDP of only 15W. The graphics subsystem is not too shabby either, thanks to the integrated Vega GPU – great for anyone looking for a business laptop or mobile workstation.

A fingerprint reader is integrated with the power button and there’s a privacy shutter to block the webcam when it’s not in use. Small features like this could be a boon for small businesses and professionals looking for a powerful laptop that takes security seriously.

It is a shame, however, that it doesn’t include Windows 10 Pro, but you can always upgrade from Windows 10 Home (albeit at a cost).

Connectivity and expansion capabilities include an SD card reader, audio connector, HDMI port, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, two USB ports and a USB Type-C that provides power as well.