Acer showed an interesting development earlier this year: a GeForce RTX 4090 video card with liquid cooling, but without an external radiator and pump. It turned out that Acer failed to make such a design effective.

The video card is not available at retail, but is available as part of the finished Predator Orion-X PC. Judging by KitGuru’s tests, such a PC with such a video card is hardly worth buying.

The Acer cooler turned out to be the most unsuccessful of all that the authors tested on the RTX 4090. Firstly, the card turned out to be the noisiest, and secondly, the hottest. Moreover, if the GPU temperature, although the highest, is not much higher than that of the same Asus RTX TUF, then the memory temperature is immediately much higher than that of any other RTX 4090, and in absolute terms is too high (96 degrees).

As a result, the card operates at relatively low frequencies, is very noisy and suffers from throttling.

The new version of the GeForce RTX 3050 with 6 GB of memory can cost only $180-190.

Benchlife resource says that the new product could cost less than $190, that is, up to $189. It obviously won’t be much cheaper, but a guideline close to the maximum price is quite normal.

It is expected that the new product will be released in January, and production of the current RTX 3050 8GB will be discontinued. Perhaps Nvidia wants to make room for the RTX 4050. As we have already seen with the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti, these new products were not particularly faster than their predecessors, and sometimes even inferior to them. Apparently, to prevent the same incident from happening, Nvidia wants to remove the competitor for the RTX 4050 from its own range. In addition, even without this, the RTX 3050 in its current form is not particularly competitive with a price of $200-220 compared to the prices of the Radeon RX 6600 and Arc A750.

Presumably, the RTX 3050 6GB will be as similar as possible to the RTX 3050 Laptop. That is, it will receive 2048 CUDA cores and a 96-bit bus.

Intel is preparing not only 64-core Emerald Rapids processors, but also 144-core and even 288-core Sierra Forest. And such a processor appeared in the test for the first time.

A result of a 144-core CPU has appeared on Geekbench, the name of which is not specified. More precisely, the test was passed by a system based on the Beechnut City platform with two such processors, that is, it had a total of 288 cores. Let us remind you that Sierra Forest will only have small cores based on the Crestmont architecture – the same ones will appear in consumer Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake.

The test CPU had 144 cores with a frequency of 2.2 GHz, 108 MB of L3 cache and 64 MB of L2 cache.

The benchmark result is 855 and 7770 points in single-threaded and multi-threaded modes, respectively. These are low results, but the test CPUs were early engineering samples, so the results as a whole can be omitted.

The Xeon Sierra Forest processors will be aimed at cloud data centers and will be direct competitors to AMD’s Bergamo generation Epyc, which offers a maximum of 128 cores. True, although these are Zen 4C cores and not Zen 4, they are technically identical, so the performance of one such core is likely higher than the Crestmon core. Additionally, the Zen 4C cores support multi-threading, something Intel’s smaller cores don’t have.