What do you get when you need a multipurpose tool that you can have fun with, be productive with, be creative with, and does not break the bank? In 2021, that means you get an NVIDIA® GeForce RTXTM 3050 gaming laptop. While most will tell you that building a gaming desktop PC is usually the way to go when you want a powerful tool that could fit the bill for entertainment, creativity, and productivity, a gaming laptop could make a little more sense in these times.
The question now is not whether or not you should get a gaming laptop. You still have a tough decision ahead though. In the sea of gaming notebook PCs in the market, which one would be the right one for you?
For all the consideration above, the NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 30 Series powered HP Pavilion Gaming 15 might be the one for you.
Source: HP
Experience Modern Gaming with NVIDIA
Despite its “entry-level” moniker, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 still packs plenty of punch, equipped with a rather powerful NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3050. The new award-winning NVIDIA Ampere architecture on NVIDIA’s 2nd Generation RTX Architecture is also a large step up from the previous generation’s platform. That means you are getting a lot more performance for your money in this department.
Being a part of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX family also means you have access to NVIDIA’s game changing technologies. You can experience Ray Tracing for the most realistic gaming experience with ultra-realistic lighting and reflection models. You get NVIDIA DLSS technology too to optimise your gaming performance. The OMEN Command Center ensures that gaming is an uninterrupted and immersive experience by prioritising what is important to you.
The GPU powers a modest Full HD 144Hz display measuring at 15.6-inch. The IPS panel also means that the display projects bright, vivid colours that could benefit in both gaming and working situations. While the display may not be the highest resolution or fastest available, it also means that the internal hardware can take full advantage of the display’s 144Hz refresh rate.
Of course, the GPU alone cannot be handling everything required for a game to run at high frame rates. To really optimise the gaming experience, you need a powerful CPU to pair with. You get to choose between up to an 11th Generation Intel Core i7 or an AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU.
Source: HP
Of course, with powerful hardware, gaming is just half the story. The stealthy, Shadow Black colour scheme and design language of the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 allows it to blend in at your workplace. It is thin and light to as well, meaning moving it from home and to work is not a chore.
The Powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 paired with a powerful CPU from either Intel or AMD allows you to easily work across any creative software with ease. Need to edit a video using Adobe’s Premiere Pro, no sweat. Need to get a photo edited quickly with a combination of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, done. With up to 16GB in RAM (8GB x 2), no creative task is too great for the HP Pavilion Gaming 15.
At the end of the day, when it is time to take a break from the hustle and bustle, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 comes equipped with powerful speakers tuned and designed by Bang & Olufsen. The powerful audio drivers come with a built-in discrete amplifier to make the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 a true entertainment powerhouse. With the B&O sound system, you can cast your worries away with soothing music. Or, when the mood takes you, you can get immersive audio and graphics while battling with your friends in Doom Eternal and Rainbow Six: Siege. When the hustle and bustle of competition gets a little tiring, you can go into titles like Minecraft, and even Red Dead Redemption 2 to get some peace and quiet.
The HP Pavilion Gaming 15 is now available in Shadow Black accented with an Acid Green LED backlit keyboard. You can get the new HP Pavilion Gaming 15 with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 and AMD Ryzen 5 5000 series for MYR 3,899 onward via their website.
NVIDIA’s GTC 2021 just happened last night. If you remembered 2020, you would remember that GTC 2020 was also the time where NVIDIA introduced their new A100 GPU chips for super computers. 2020 was also the yea NVIDIA launched their highly anticipated, and highly capable RTX 3000 series consumer grade GPUs.
GTC’s keynote is always a highly anticipated event. Not because the conference always brings a new GPU. Recent years of GTC has always been exciting because somehow GPU is able to push the limits of what is possible with computing and cloud. NVIDIA has made itself relevant not just in the graphics world, but also in the super computing world, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and even cybersecurity. NVIDIA’s own AI even composed its own song, and it is a good song mind you.
With GTC 2021, NVIDIA shows that they are not done innovating just yet. Now, they also want to give the likes of Intel a new sort of headache. NVIDIA has introduced Project Grace.
Source: NVIDIA
NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang mentions that the name Grace refers to a particular pioneer in the computer science field, Grace Hopper. The project is NVIDIA’s first dip into the datacentre CPU industry. Fitting to the Grace Hopper namesake, project Grace is supposed to be 10x more powerful than the current NVIDIA GDX x86 supercomputer platform.
Why is this a problem for Intel? The world’s fastest supercomputer today is all powered by Intel’s x86 CPU platform. The x86 platform has also existed for about a decade now and the platform has approached its technological limits in 2021. Of course, NVIDIA took matters into their own hands and the Grace CPU is an ARM based chip for the fastest ever datacentre and servers in the world.
Just saying that the CPU will be the fastest ever server-based CPU though means nothing. What you want to know is numbers, and these are big numbers. The new Grace architecture allows the CPU and GPU to communicate at up to 900GB/s speed thanks to NVLink technology. According to NVIDIA, that is 30x faster than most servers today. Of course, paired to LPDDR5x memory modules, you get up to 10x the speed of today’s machines.
Before anyone can say that NVIDIA’s Grace dreams is just that; dreams, NVIDIA also announced that they will be installing their Grace based datacentre in the United States Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Labrotory and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). The two clients will feature their very own NVIDIA powered supercomputer soon.
Source: NVIDIA
In those two places though, the servers and supercomputers are not built just to push cloud storage to corporations. They are purpose built for AI training and implementations. They are built for neural and language programming and training. They are built to progress humanity and probably cure cancer one day.
Of course, because Grace is a giant processor made for datacentres and supercomputers, we will not be expecting to see NVIDIA dive into consumer level ARM-based processors for PCs anytime soon. NVIDIA is working with MediaTek to bring their GPU technology into the mobile space and even ARM based PCs though. In that case, us regular consumers can expect a Qualcomm Snapdragon notebook PC with NVIDIA GeForce graphics power soon, probably. Catch NVIDIA’s GTC 2021 keynote on their website.
Hot off the heels of AMD’s announcement of their new EPYC processors, Dell Technologies has revealed a series of new offerings that put the AMD EPYC front and centre. The new Dell EMC servers come optimised for multiple workloads to help businesses better cater to their needs. They up the ante with up to 64 cores with EPYC’s new Zen 3 architecture.
The new additions add to Dell Technologies’ already robust portfolio of Dell EMC PowerEdge offerings. They bring updated technologies with improved compute capabilities. The expanded portfolio allows for better handling of critical workloads and applications augmented by fast data performance thanks to the integration of PCIe Gen 4 technology. In addition, the new offerings in the Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio come with up to six accelerators to help with large, challenging, data-intensive workloads. They continue to put data security and redundancy at the core with a well-established Root of Trust and what Dell Technologies refers to as a Cyber resilient architecture.
Of course, running on the Zen 3 augmented EPYC processors, the new PowerEdge servers are more power-efficient than before. Dell Technologies claims that the new racks offer up to 60% power efficiency compared to the previous generation. Adding to its power efficiency, Dell has equipped the new generation PowerEdge with multi-vector cooling. This technology helps direct airflow to the hottest portions of the server; helping maintain lower temperatures and better performance.
The new line up consists of six offerings catered for different workloads and computing environments. From powerful, performance-oriented racks to AI optimised racks to deceivingly powerful, slim racks, Dell’s new offerings have you covered. Their Dell EMC PowerEdge XE8545 marries the performance of AMD’s new EPYC cores with NVIDIA’s A100 GPUs for powerful, AI and machine learning optimised workloads. The PowerEdge R6515 packs a configurable, dual-socket setup in a 1U rack server for compact performance while the R7515 brings a scalable single-socket 2U rack with performance and affordability in mind. They’ve got the C6525 for high performance, dense computing environments while the R7525 and R6525 bring extended flexibility.
Last night, NVIDIA launched their new GPU platform they nickname the Ampere. They also tout that this is their greatest generational leap in performance ever. Welcome to the NVIDIA’s second-generation Ray Tracing GPUs.
For now, they have announced the availability and launch of three new GPUs that is meant to blow even the fastest GeForce RTX 20 series GPU, the GeForce RTX 2080Ti away. We are only talking about the GeForce RTX 3070 mind you. There is still the high-end GeForce 3080 and mind-bending GeForce RTX 3090.
Supposedly the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series are supposed to be about twice as good in performance than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 series while offering nearly twice the power efficiency. That puts the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 about on par with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 that was launched two years ago. Which also means that the GeForce RTX 3080 is miles away from the GeForce RTX 2080Ti.
What’s New with Ampere?
Source: NVIDIA
Just saying that it is faster though, may not mean that much to you. In this case, bear with us a little bit as we go a little more technical than usual in identifying what is new with the new GeForce RTX 30 series cards. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang also did say in the launch that it might be time for you to upgrade your GPUs if you are still on the GTX platform with this second generation Ray Tracing GPU.
New Multiprocessors
If you think of a GPU, it is actually a mini computer on its own that you dedicate on graphics processing. It sort of works on a piggybacking system on top of your main logic board for your PC. By principle, it is just its own processing unit separate to what the CPU and regular RAM does. In layman terms, the GPU is an additional calculator lodged in your PC.
The multiprocessor that is on the GPU is technically its heart, its cores. The new processor on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series is technically the same size as the older NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series cores. That is to say that Ampere did not gain in size for more performance over Turing.
They simply unlocked more power from the chip itself with new technologies and architecture. We will talk about that a little bit more later though. For now, you just have to know that it is now twice as powerful as before, it is twice faster in calculations.
New Generation Ray Tracing Cores
NVIDIA says that new generation consumer graphics standards is their new Ray Tracing technology that is introduced two years ago. The technology, technically, is not new. It has been a technology used in plenty of 3D rendering applications and even machine learning applications.
With the first-generation Ray Tracing cards, that is the GeForce RTX 20 Series GPUs, ray tracing is used to make graphics even more stunning and realistic by correctly predicting reflection and shading models based on virtual lighting positions. That means that graphic artists do not need to predict where the light is coming from or how it interacts with an object, it just simply does. That is why you do not get great mirror reflections, glass reflections, or water textures in older video games up until the late 2018s.
The said technology requires a separate core to the regular GPU cores that we are used to on older GeForce GTX cards though.
The second-generation Ray Tracing core is technically not that much different from the first-generation. In terms of size and build at least, it is about the same. They managed to extract even more performance out of it, they claim twice more performance out of it too. That allows the GPU to render reflections and shades correctly even faster.
In the previous generation Ray Tracing core, they could render shades, reflections, and even physics correctly at about 720p at 60fps. The new generation that was just introduced is supposed to be able to render smoothly at 1440p at 60fps. That is a large leap, about twice according to NVIDIA.
Even Newer Tensor Cores
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning has been a part of NVIDIA’s repertoire for a long time now. They started looking into implementing A.I. cores in their GeForce GTX 10 Series GPUs. They were successful and the cores worked to a certain degree in GTX GPUs.
In the new GeForce RTX architecture though, A.I. took a bigger stage and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) was born. The first generation DLSS allowed calculations and processing to be offloaded from the GPU and pushed to a different server. That allows graphics to look even better than what the GPU is actually capable of physically. Of course, that takes a lot of processing power.
At the same time the DLSS technology is used as a prediction model as well, to anticipate calculations and render them beforehand. In terms of gaming, the cores allow your games to render at 720p on your own GPU but deliver 1080p or 1440p graphics to your eyes via the display. This is all part of the NVIDIA RTX IO experience as well though.
NVIDIA RTX IO
So, you have watched the demo of the upcoming Sony PlayStation 5. You saw the next generation console load open world maps and transition between places in no time, with no load screens. That technology is achievable through the clever use of SSD and processing power.
That is what NVIDIA RTX IO is going to replicate though. It allows plenty of the processing loads on the CPU and on board RAM from modern SSDs to be offloaded to the GPU itself. Since the GPU, in some cases, have spare processing capacity anyway, you get an improved processing performance for your games anyway and even improved data transfer and read speeds.
That means that game designers can try to build games with huge amount of detail in their maps while not thinking too much about load times. Of course, for lesser CPs, load screens are always going to be an issue in games. NVIDIA’s RTX IO is built to solve that.
There is another benefit to this though. Every other PC builder will tell you that if you want a great performing gaming machine, it has to be a combination of great GPU and CPU. The GPU will handle the 3D stuff, while the CPU will handle the frame generation. That is because most of the frame generation is done by the CPU, and therefore your framerate greatly depends on how much your CPU can handle itself. With RTX IO offloading that load to the GPU, you technically can have a slightly cheaper CPU and still achieve high frame rate in games.
New Faster, Nay, Fastest Memory Module in the World
As we mentioned earlier, a GPU is a little bit like a mini computer that piggybacks on top of the main board. It is a calculator that hops on another calculator to make that calculator faster and more powerful. In that sense, the GPU also needs its own memory module, its own RAM unit.
In that, they have worked with Micron to build the world’s fastest discrete graphics memory unit, the GDDR6X. You get up to 1TB/s in bandwidth for any graphics applications. This is where that minimised load times come into play too.
Samsung 8nm Transistors and NVIDIA
Every other tech familiar person knows that there are only a few manufacturers that really know what their doing when it comes to semiconductors and chip making. Samsung is one of those manufacturers in the circle of ‘the best of the best’. The new GeForce RTX 30 Series GPU benefits from Samsung’s know how in chip making.
The new GPU multiprocessing chips are built with 8nm standards and technology by Samsung. Smaller transistors also mean that you can fit more in a certain surface area. More transistors mean more power naturally.
This is technically how NVIDIA managed to achieve double the power from the previous generation GeForce RTX 20 GPUs while still retaining the sizes, just about. Less space and size also means that there is less power requirements from the transistors themselves, which leads to a much higher power efficiency. Hence, double the power, double the efficiency.
Better Technology, Better Experience
With more power, comes more enhancements from NVIDIA. They have done audio before already with RTX noise cancelling, which never cease to amaze us. This time though, they are turning their focus toward competitive gaming and other parts of content creation.
Source: NVIDIA
NVIDIA Reflex
It is exactly what it sounds like. It measures reflex. It does not measure your reflexes though.
Instead, NVIDIA Reflex measures latency between your input and the display’s output. From that measurement, NVIDIA’s Reflex algorithm will then optimise the game’s latency. In some sense, it is meant to reduce the latency between your input and the PC’s output.
This impacts eSports titles mostly. In video games with built in NVIDIA Low-Latency Mode, the technology reduces latency by about 50 percent. Every millisecond counts in eSports environment. That is also why NVIDIA’s Reflex Analyser also can calculate and tabulate the time it takes for you input to be translated into output. The Reflex Analyser is coming to most of the new 360Hz NVIDIA G-Sync eSports displays from its partners later this year.
NVIDIA Broadcast
Streaming is a huge business. It is gaining in popularity as well. As such, it would not be right for NVIDIA to ignore the market completely. In the sense of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series, the extra power can also help with a single PC stream set up with NVIDIA Broadcast. The A.I. noise cancelling is already clever enough. NVIDIA Broadcast though is much cleverer than that with webcam auto framing and even virtual background effects for your stream.
NVIDIA Omniverse Machinima
Forget trying to create new stories with game engines. Forget spending hours on character creations and animations codes. Now, you could do all that for storytelling via NVIDIA Omniverse Machinima. You can use existing models or assets and even create your own via a webcam, amazingly. This is the power of NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 30 Series, and NVIDIA’s new storytelling tool.
Well, then again, this is still an early access tool. You might want to check back on this. If not, you can be a part of it by signing up for early access.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, GeForce RTX 3080, and GeForce RTX 3090 is Here!
Source: NVIDIA
The first GPUs that comes out from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, a technical replacement of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070. Thanks to the technological advancements, the GeForce RTX 3070 is way more powerful than the GPU it replaces. In certain benchmarks it is more powerful than the GeForce RTX 2080. With up to 8GB of GDDR6X RAM, 4K and 1440p resolution should be comfortable enough.
Then there is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 which is way more powerful than the current generation GeForce RTX 2080Ti. It just blows the older GPU away. All that, while costing less than the GeForce RTX 2080Ti. It has up to 10GB of GDDR6X RAM to deliver 4K resolution at 60fps.
The daddy of the lot is what NVIDIA refers to as the “BFGPU” – Big Ferocious GPU. We would expand it to a different thing, but that is just us. This is the spiritual successor to the NVIDIA GeForce TITAN RTX, technically. This is supposed to be 10x quieter, and up to 30°C cooler. Of course, it is a big one, occupying three PCIe slots. Within the large body is an enormous 24GB of GDDR6X RAM and performs up to 50% faster than the TITAN RTX. It can easily support 8K resolution up to 60 fps in Control.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 is priced at US$ 499 (MYR 2,399*) and will be available in October 2020 onward. The GeForce RTX 3080 is priced at US$ 699 (MYR 3,360*) and will be available 17th September 2020 onward. The GeForce RTX 3090 is priced at US$ 1,499 (MYR 7,208*) and is available 24th September 2020 onward. Keep in mind that these are release dates for the Founders Edition cards. Of course, partner manufacturers will have their custom boards and own clocks later on or the same date.
