Thursday 23 October 2014

AMD FX-8370E

AMD FX-8370E

AMD rejigs old hardware in an attempt to compete with Intel.

AMD has ceded the CPU high ground to Intel’s all-conquering i7 chips, but the firm still reckons it can fight in the mid-range – and that’s exactly where the new FX-8370E hunkers down.

This chip is different from the rest of AMD’s FX parts thanks to its ‘E’ suffix. It stands for ‘energy efficient’, and means it has a TDP of 95W. That’s a reduction from the 125W and 220W TDPs used by other AMD FX chips, but it’s still 11W more than Intel’s Core i5 parts require. That’s because the FX-8370E still relies on the toasty 32nm Piledriver architecture, rather than the 28nm Steamroller cores found in the firm’s APUs.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

The game is at hand.

Call me the king of wrongful imprisonment. The big ‘hook’ with the latest Sherlock Holmes title from Frogwares is that you get to both accuse and suggest the punishment for the perpetrators of the Crimes being investigated. At this I failed.

Despite my careless dooming of innocents to their fate, the investigative side of the game is surprisingly robust affair, especially when compared to the usual fare that claims to include detection as a feature. While the actual means to an end sometimes feels like a bizarre attempt to shoehorn in mini games, the actual process of evidence collection and deduction is quite slickly done, and requires both a thorough approach and some decent thought processes.