Month: December 2020

Microsoft has added a new built-in command line tool called DiskUsage to Insider builds of Windows 10 that reports how much disk space folders use.

As first reported by BleepingComputer, the news outlet discovered the new utility when testing Windows Insider builds 20277 and 21277. DiskUsage is capable of scanning entire drives or specified folders and reporting how much drive space each folder is using.

The utility is located in System 32 and is still in the early stages of development. Currently some features are now working as expected and there are even some spelling errors in the the DiskUsage’s instructions.

Still though, admins may find it useful to analyze disk space from terminal windows though most Windows users will likely continue using popular tools such as WizTree or TreeSize.

DiskUsage

As DiskUsage is still in development by Microsoft, the tool currently reports file and folder sizes in bytes as opposed to doing so in megabytes or gigabytes. However, the software giant has included a /h argument to display file and folder sizes in a more conventional way.

It’s also worth noting that DiskUsage requires administrative privileges so Windows Insiders that want to test it out for themselves will need to open an elevated command prompt in Windows 10 before running the tool or else it will display an error.

The tool can be used for general disk space scans but users can also configure it to say, display all of the folders on a drive that are larger that 1GB in size. DiskUsage also includes other features such as creating configuration files with the options you want to use automatically, output customization and the ability to skip over certain folders depending on their type.

We’ll likely hear more about DiskUsage from Microsoft itself once the company is ready to ship the tool in an upcoming Windows 10 release. For now though, Windows Insiders running builds 20277 and 21277 can begin experimenting with it.

Since the debut of ASRock’s Taichi brand, we’ve been fans of its quality blend of price, performance, and features. It’s also one of few sub brands that doesn’t go all in on a ‘gaming’ theme, which is something many people appreciate. I know I do. With the Razer influence, however, that’s changed somewhat here. The traditional yin/yang and cog machinery aesthetic has been left off with the release of the B550 Taichi Razer Edition. 

This reinvented ASRock Taichi board features a minimalist, yet unmistakably premium appearance that integrates Razer Chroma RGB support. It sure is a lovely looking board, and if you’re invested into the Razer ecosystem, it’s a board you’ll definitely want to consider for a Ryzen 5000 series build.

Depending on which country you live in, at $299 USD the B550 Taichi Razer Edition may be the most expensive B550 board of all, it’s certainly one of the best B550 motherboards. This isn’t some bargain basement cheapie that belongs in the budget bin. It’s a fully featured premium tier board with almost all the bells and whistles you’d expect from an enthusiast motherboard. Do you want a to run an overclocked 5950X with 64GB of RAM? Pair it with an Nvidia RTX 3090 or AMD 6900XT? Go right ahead.

As the name suggests, the biggest marketing talking point of the board is its support for the Razer Chroma RGB ecosystem. On the surface it’s just another flavour of RGB, but Razer does go beyond a typical implementation to include a greater range of effects while offering extensive customization with the Chroma Studio app. There’s also game integration, support for many external apps and Amazon Alexa integration. So, if you want to RGB your RGB, the chances are Chroma can do it. 

It really does look lovely, though as is often the case, a graphics card will cover a big chunk of the PCH heatsink. But, with all the other RGB devices you’re likely to add to such a system, that’s not really a problem.

The other notable differentiator is the inclusion of Killer E3100 2.5G and AX1650 WiFi with DoubleShot support. The gaming community tends to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Killer. A lot of it goes back to the clunky Manager app. The days of LAN gaming are behind us, but that would have been a great environment to test. Throw in all the leeching and you’d really stress your networking! The network outside of your PC and home is the true bottleneck these days. In the course of our testing the Killer networking operated exactly as it should. 

The board is dominated by the subtle large black heatsinks featuring that stylish RGB lighting. RGB and ARGB fan headers can be seen just above the RAM slots, which themselves support up to 128GB at DDR4-4733. While that speed sounds good, actually you’re better off at 1:1 with the Infinity Fabric up to around DDR4-4000.

The primary M.2 slot is covered by its own heatsink. Thankfully this means you’re not required to remove the entire heatsink to connect a drive. First world reviewer problem perhaps? You also get eight SATA ports, something that’s becoming rarer these days even on high end boards as the switch the NVMe and M.2 accelerates. File hoarders take note. 

Also noteworthy is the inclusion of a USB Type-C case header. At the bottom of the board you’ll find another set or RGB headers and power and reset buttons. This is becoming more and more common to many cases.

The VRM used on the ASRock Taichi Razer Edition is among the best you’ll find on a B550 board. A 16-phase setup with 50a mosfets will easily power an overclocked 5950X. Twin 8pin EPS connectors provide the juice.

The I/O is fairly typical of a premium board. We like that there are eight USB ports on the back panel, though curiously they aren’t color coded. There are two labelled USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, four Gen 1 ports and a pair of 2.0 ports. (Side note: We really hope the USB naming mess is fixed with USB 4. It really is BS.) We’re not displeased to see HDMI 2.1 and DP 1.4a ports. If you’re a gamer with a discrete card it won’t matter, but a Zen 3 based APU with a monolithic die might surprise with its performance, so it’s better to have them than not. 

As we often say when testing motherboards, the performance between them is usually within a margin of error or a couple of percent, and that’s the case again here. The B550 Taichi Razer Edition proved to be quite strong under most of the multi-threaded tests with our AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, often leading the other X570 and B550 boards we’ve tested to date. The board was more mid pack in the gaming tests, however.

Now that we’re familiar with the characteristics of our 5950X sample, it’s a lot easier to know what to expect from a board. We were again able to hit 4.5GHz with a 1.26v load but its gets very hot running 32 threads at 100%! Well into the 80’s in fact, so we call it quits there. The board has more headroom but the CPU just gets too hot even with a 360mm AIO. The VRM didn’t break a sweat with a 55°C maximum temperature recorded. That’s a long way from any danger or concern.

As far as memory overclocking goes, DDR4-4000 or 2,000 MHz with a 1:1 Infinity Fabric clock was easy. We have achieved higher on the Asus Crosshair VIII Dark Hero but that’s a top tier board. A good set of DDR4-3600 with your choice of capacity at a 1:1 Infinity Fabric ratio will sit right in the sweet spot.

The ASRock B550 Taichi Razer Edition is arguably right at the top of the B550 tree. Whether a B550 board costing as much as the Taichi Razer Edition is right for you may come down to how important RGB is to you and how many M.2 drives you plan to run. Many X570 boards are available at this price with three M.2 slots and feature more PCIe 4.0 general purpose lanes. There is an ASRock X570 Taichi Razer Edition, and that is some $100 more. Is it worth the extra? We’d say probably not unless your needs are specific. 

The ASRock B550 Taichi Razer Edition can overclock as far as your cooling will allow, it can run fast memory, and it’s got Killer 2.5G LAN and WiFi 6 along with decent audio. It really does look great and will strongly appeal to RGB lovers. Ask yourself if you need extra M.2 slots or things like 10G LAN. If not, then this is a board that’s definitely worth considering. Even if for the aesthetic alone…

A benchmark of AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800H has allegedly leaked on Geekbench, with some positive results. The benchmark was posted to Twitter by well-known leaker ASPIK (@TUM_APISAK) and can be compared against its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 4800H, and also the existing Comet Lake-H CPUs from Intel.

As ever, treat any leak with caution, but if this benchmark score is a genuine reflection of performance then the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H would be giving some serious competition to Intel’s Tiger Lake-H family of high-end processors that will be launching in early 2021.

Trouble for Tiger Lake?

AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800H CPU was featured in the upcoming Acer Nitro AN515-45 notebook which comes configured with 16GB of DDR4 memory. In regards to performance, the 5800H features eight cores and 16 threads and was running at a base clock of 3.20 GHz and a boost speed of 4.45 GHz, with the average across all cores being a stable 4.40 GHz.

The 5800H hit a score of 1,475 in Geekbench 5 single-core, and managed 7,630 for multi-core. That’s a staggering 35% faster than the Ryzen 7 4800H in single-core, something that should greatly concern Intel with the impending release of its Tiger Lake CPUs. Not only that, but the ability to boost at 4.45 GHz would mean the Ryzen 7 5800H could defeat the Intel Core i9-10900K by 5% in single-core performance.

On paper, the difference in performance seems insignificant, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the Ryzen 7 5800H is a mobile chip iwithin a notebook, whilst the Intel Core i9-10900K is a full desktop CPU with a much higher power limit (35W vs 250W).

Things have certainly been heating up in the competitive world of CPUs this year, and with the Ryzen 5000 Mobility CPUs expected to be announced at CES 2021, competition is only going to get fiercer. Whether your preference lays with AMD or Intel, there are exciting things to come in the next few months.

Intel is taking Optane to the next level with its SSD P5800X, which it bills as the fastest SSD in the world. The next-gen Optane SSD leverages the PCIe 4.0 interface, second-gen Optane media, and a new SSD controller to deliver truly astounding performance and endurance specifications.

Compared to the first-gen Optane DC P4800X, Intel says the 5800X offers an impressive 3X performance improvement in random read/write workloads, peaking at 1.5 million 4K random IOPS, and 3X more sequential performance at a peak of 7.2 GB/s. 

The drive also delivers up to 4.6 million IOPS in random 512B workloads (useful for certain types of caching workloads) and up to 1.8 million IOPS in mixed workloads. 

Additionally, the drive offers up to 67% more write endurance than the first-gen P4800X, and now peaks at a staggering 100 drive writes per day (DWPD). That also makes it the most endurant SSD on the market. For perspective, there are very few ‘regular’ NAND-based SSDs that offer even 10DWPD of endurance, meaning the P5800X is truly in a class of its own. 

The drive leverages Intel’s second-gen Optane media, which comes with two decks/layers instead of one, and a new PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD controller that allows the company to finally break the shackles of the PCIe 3.0 interface. 

Intel isn’t sharing the finer-grained technical specifications behind the P5800X’s new PCIe 4.0 SSD controller. Still, we know that the drives will come in the tried-and-true U.2 form factor in capacities of 400GB, 800GB, 1.6TB, and 3.2TB, marking a healthy capacity increase that is more than twice the storage of the previous-gen DC P4800X. 

Just like any other Optane-powered drive, the exotic underlying 3D XPoint technology provides far more speed and endurance than any NAND-based SSD, delivering a level of performance that lands between flash SSDs and system memory. The drives are also designed to offer a superior quality of service (QoS) over competing NAND-based SSDs, meaning performance consistency is a key focus area. Intel’s first-gen P4800X had already established itself as the most consistent SSD on the market, but Intel says the P5800X extends that with up to a 40% better QoS in 4K random read workloads. 

Perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of an Optane SSD is its ability to deliver tremendously consistent performance even while it is under heavy load. As outlined in the slide above, the P5800X reaches new heights with more than 8 GB/s of throughput while under heavy load, easily outclassing all NAND-based SSDs on this logarithmic scale and also notching a substantial lead over its previous-gen counterpart. Intel claims the drive can deliver less than 66us of 99.999th percentile latency, which is a massive step forward over the first-gen DC P4800X, not to mention standard SSDs. 

The Optane Memory P5800X can even outstrip what we typically classify as the throughput limit of the PCIe 4.0 bus. That comes as a byproduct of the drive’s ability to leverage PCIe’s bi-directional interface. By saturating both sides of the interface at full line-rate read and write performance, the drive delivers even higher performance during mixed workloads. We can see that ability in the 70/30 read/write workload outlined above where the SSD peaked at 2 million IOPS. This allows the drive to deliver 3.7x more performance than the previous-gen model in mixed random workloads. 

Intel hasn’t released pricing information yet, but the company says the drives are already shipping to OEM companies. Naturally, as a standards-based NVMe block-addressable device, these SSDs will also be compatible with AMD’s EPYC processors. 

The Surface Pro 8 has already leaked plenty of times, but now Roland Quandt has revealed the memory configurations of Microsoft’s upcoming 2-in-1. So far, we know that the design of the Surface Pro 8 will remain unchanged from its predecessor, which featured an outdated design itself. The Redmond-based company will switch the Surface Pro to Intel’s Tiger Lake-U platform though, which should bring a healthy graphics boost for the Surface Pro 8 compared to the Surface Pro 7.

According to Quandt, LTE connectivity will return as of the Surface Pro 8, which is unsurprising. We suspect that Microsoft will restrict LTE connectivity to the Business version of the Surface Pro 8 though, as it does with many of its Surface products. Hence, there will be no 5G connectivity for the Surface Pro in 2021. The Core i5-1135G7 and Core i7-1165G7 should be available for business and regular customers, though.

Additionally, Quandt claims that the Surface Pro 8 will be configurable with up to 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. We imagine that the Surface Pro 8 will be just as improbable to upgrade as the Surface Pro 7 though, if it follows the same design. It would be good if the Surface Pro 8 features a replaceable SSD like the Surface Laptop 3 and Surface Pro X do, but we doubt that will be the case.

The Surface Pro 8 should debut in early 2021 alongside the Surface Laptop 4. Microsoft will offer the Surface Pro 8 in the following configurations, according to Quandt:

Surface Pro 8 LTE i5 8 GB/128 GB

Surface Pro 8 LTE i5 8 GB/256 GB

Surface Pro 8 LTE i5 16 GB/256 GB

Surface Pro 8 i5 8 GB/128 GB

Surface Pro 8 i5 8 GB/256 GB

Surface Pro 8 i5 16 GB/256 GB

Surface Pro 8 i7 16 GB/256 GB

Surface Pro 8 i7 16 GB/512 GB

Surface Pro 8 i7 16 GB/1 TB

Surface Pro 8 i7 32 GB/1 TB