You can attach the Pixma MG4120 directly to your PC via USB, or network it using the integrated Wi-Fi. The unit's flip-up 2.4-inch LCD screen is easy to read, and makes using the printer a breeze for the most part. Canon needs to ditch the three "function" buttons for making selections, though. Having to move your fingers to those buttons is a waste of time and effort; the OK button and four-way cursor control would suffice. The Pixma MG4120 also features SD Card and Memory Stick slots for printing photos or offloading scans.
Paper-handling features on the Pixma MG4120 are modest, though adequate for home use. You get a single 100-sheet letter/legal input tray at the front of the unit, and a 50-sheet output tray directly above it. The unit doesn't have an automatic document feeder for the A4/letter-size scanner, but it does offer an automatic duplexer for hassle-free two-sided printing. The lid for the scanner telescopes to accommodate thicker material.
The Pixma MG4120's output is about the same quality as what you see from other Canon Pixma MG-series printers--that is, quite good. Text is sharp, if not laserlike. Color graphics have an orange skew that can make faces look spray-tanned, but the tint also makes for warm-feeling landscapes and still-lifes. Photo details are nicely rendered.
Speed is good for everyday tasks and the odd photo. In our tests the Pixma MG4120 printed text pages at 6.5 pages per minute on the PC and 7.1 ppm on the Mac. Snapshot-size photos printed at 2.6 ppm on plain paper, and at 1.2 ppm on photo paper. Color PDF pages and full-page photos printed on the Mac took twice as long as the average. Scans and copies at normal and higher resolutions were decently fast. And, in case you were wondering, the Pixma MG4120's performance falls right in line with the numbering convention of the MG series--it's faster than the MG2120 and MG3120, and slower than the MG6120 and the newer MG5220.
Similar to its brethren, the Pixma MG4120 has higher-than-average black-ink costs. The PG-240XL Extra Large black cartridge costs $21 and lasts for 300 pages, or 7 cents per page. The $38, 600-page PG-240XXL black cartridge reduces costs only slightly to 6.3 cents per page. Color, on the other hand, is relatively cheap. The unified-color CL-241XL costs $30 and lasts for 400 pages, or 7.5 cents per page. A four-color page using the PG-240XXL and the CL-241XL would be 13.8 cents, about average in cost for an inkjet MFP. Note that with a tricolor cartridge (containing cyan, magenta, and yellow), when one color runs out, you have to replace the entire cartridge even if ink remains for the other colors.
If you're looking for alternatives with lower black-ink costs, both the HP Photosmart 6510 e-All-in-One ($150) and the Brother MFC-J625DW ($130) are worth considering. However, the Pixma MG4120 is otherwise every bit as competent, and it's decently inexpensive for mixed-color pages and photos.
View the original article here
In January, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) shipped the world's first 28 nm graphics processing unit, Tahiti. Leveraging AMD's long-awaited new architecture, Graphics Core Next, the ensuing Radeon HD 7950/70 card snatched the performance crown away from rival NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA).
In the months that follow AMD fleshed out its lineup with four more cards, the Radeon HD 7750/70 and the Radeon HD 7850/70 While pricing was a bit high, in all but the Radeon HD 7700 series the AMD card was the best buy because NVIDIA's 28 nm counterpunch Kepler was missing in action.
I. The New Gaming King
Missing in action, that is, until now. A week after a Kepler-powered ultrabook popped up, NVIDIA has pulled the wraps off of its flagship desktop Kepler graphics card, the GeForce GTX 680.
Almost everything in the GK104 architecture chip has been improved. The die is a petite 294 mm2, with 3.5b transistors onboard, versus AMD's 365 mm2 4.3b transistor Tahiti. Likewise, NVIDIA not only one-ups AMD in core clock speed (1008 MHz on the GTX 680 vs. 925 MHz on the Radeon HD 7970), but it also installs a promising new dynamic clocking system, which allows smartphone-esque throttling up or down, based on performance demands.
In "unlocked" card models, NVIDIA expects the card to dip as a low as 325 MHz at idle allowing massive power savings. On the opposite end of the spectrum, in times of extremely demanding performance, unlocked cards can dynamically clock up over the 1.1 GHz barrier, all automatically.
NVIDIA's frame buffer (memory) is a bit smaller -- 2 GB of GDDR5 vs. 3 GB of GDDR5 in the Radeon HD 7970, and the bus is narrower -- 256-bit vs. 384-bit. Despite NVIDIA holding a slight edge in memory clock (6.008 GHz v. 5.5 GHz), memory throughput will like favor AMD.
Gaming-wise AnandTech's testing shows it to be faster in almost all games, though the AMD flagship manages to eke out a win in some tests. In power and heat NVIDIA has dramatically improved over the 500 series, but it only earns a tie with AMD. However, it is much quieter than AMD's cards.
II. GPU Computing -- Some Steps Forward, Some Spinning of the Wheels
The new card mostly impresses when it comes to GPU computing.
The card streamlines the Fermi architecture, eliminating the high performance, but divergent higher shader clock. In its place it uses the core clock ubiquitously in all its computing functional units. As a result, most of the components of its functional units doubled -- such as the number of CUDA cores, load/store units, and special function units. For example, the CUDA core count in a block within a functional unit doubles from
To move things forward, NVIDIA then doubles the number of "blocks" of cores from 3 to 6 per functional unit, effectively doubling performance. In total 192 CUDA cores (6 blocks of 32) now lurk inside a GK104 streaming multiprocessor (SM), vs
SMs are grouped in blocks called GPCs. There's twice as many GPCs (4) as Fermi (2), but they each half half the number of SMs (2 vs 4 in Fermi), so the SM count stays the same.
A couple remaining oddities are that it declines to boost the shared memory space from 64 kB (a disappointment considering 192 cores are now sharing the resources previously shared by 96 cores). Also it offers 8 special CUDA cores per function unit that offer full 1/1 64-bit floating point (FP64) performance, versus 32-bit floating point. This is the first GPU computing chip to ever offer 1/1 FP64 vs. FP32, however that achievement is dulled by the fact that there are only 8 of these cores per functional unit, meaning an effective speed of 1/4 FP64 per functional unit or 1/24 FP64 per SM.
Still for all its gains in GPU computing, Anandtech's benchmarking shows it to only be roughly on par with AMD's flagship card, winning in some GPUCompute benchmarks, losing in others. Of course a tie still works in NVIDIA's favor as it has arguably the best supported GPU programming API -- CUDA -- which is slightly easier to learn and master than OpenGL, thanks in part to the large amount of resources and support NVIDIA throws at developers.
III. Buy One if You Can
NVIDIA's card is available today for $500 USD. NVIDIA is going to tell you that it's the fast card on the market and toss out terms like "revolutionary". The good news, is that when it comes to gaming it is a solid card, though its less of a revolution and more of a nice iterative bump.
Still, that bump is enough to make it the new king of the graphics market on the high end.
The choice is now easy for customers -- buy a GTX 680. That's the good news.
The bad news is that the choice may not be that easy. Anandtech writes that NVIDIA indicated that launch supplies may be slightly scarce. Thus it's very possible that GTX 680s could be sold out, taking this option off the plate temporarily.
This all gets back to the yield difficulties reportedly experienced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Comp., Ltd. (TPE:2330) on their new 28 nm node. Like AMD, NVIDIA is likely aggressively binning the good chips coming off the line for use in its flagship cards, but the problem is that higher quality 28 nm silicon appears to be having very low yields. As a result, expect supply of NVIDIA's unannounced lower-end Kepler derivatives to be a bit more liberal, but that they'll have lower clock speeds similar to AMD's chips.
So get your hands on the GTX 680 if you can find one -- it's the best thing you can find -- for now -- until the rumored "Big Kepler" comes along.
View the original article here
The computer geeks over at PC World run a few benchmarks on the consumer preview for Windows 8, comparing it to Windows 7. The findings indicate that Windows 8 offers improved performance on almost every test. PC World reports that the consumer preview of Windows 8 was generally faster, and often much faster, than Windows 7.
PC World used a test machine running an Intel Core i5-2500K at 3.3 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, 1 TB hard drive, and an NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti video card. The same machine had previously been subjected to an identical battery of tests running Windows 7. The machine was benchmark using WorldBench 7 tests. WorldBench results showed that Windows 8 was 14% faster than Windows 7. The publication reports that a difference of 5% or more on WorldBench is noticeable performance wise, so 14% is significantly faster.
Using the same computer benchmark and PC, Windows 7 scored 100 while the system running Windows 8 scored 114. Start up time for the Windows 8 machine was 36.8 seconds compared to 56.2 seconds for the same system running Windows 7.
Web performance for the Windows 8 machine using WebVizBench gives a score of 28.6 frames per second compared to 18.9 frames per second for a Windows 7 machine. Interestingly, when running Windows 7 the test machine was faster for content creation compared to running Windows 8. The difference was slight though and new drivers for Windows 8 machines can significantly improve performance.
It's also worth noting that Futuremark is working on updating the PCMark benchmark suite for Windows 8. The office productivity tests were performed using PC Mark from Futuremark and an upgrade to the software for Windows 8 could mean significantly improved performance. As it stands now Windows 7 was quicker in both content creation and office productivity on PCMark. In Office productivity the Windows 7 system scored 2280 compared to the 2099 of the Windows 8 system.
Windows 8 could be significantly faster than Windows 7 on the same computer once drivers and benchmarks are optimized. That, however, isn't likely to happen until Windows 8 launches or is close to launch.
View the original article here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
