Month: November 2017

Enlarge / These are becoming a more common sight on our roads. (credit: Chevrolet)

Electric vehicle sales continue to increase this year, according to Inside EVs. Although some results have yet to be reported, the site estimates that 50 percent more battery and plug-in hybrid EVs found homes in October 2017 than the year before. And head and shoulders above them all was the Chevrolet Bolt EV.

Chevy sold 2,871 of them in October, making it the best-selling EV of the month by quite some margin. The next closest was the Toyota Prius Prime, which notched up 1,626 sales. That means that the Bolt EV is now the second-best selling EV for the year thus far at just over 17,000 sold—not bad for a car that only went on sale in all 50 states in the second half of the year.

Anecdotally, I've started seeing a lot more of them in the DC area during the last few weeks, but that's probably worthless other than as a casual observation. The Bolt EV's sales are probably coming at the expense of the Volt, which recorded its worst month of 2017, with only 1,362 sold.

A new trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi was released during Game 7 of the World Series last night. It starts with a nostalgia-inducing shot of a grey-bearded Luke Skywalker walking into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. Then there's a voiceover from Kylo Ren, the villain of the third trilogy, saying "let the past die."

Of course, the eighth installment of the Star Wars saga has no intention of letting the past die. The previous film in the series, The Force Awakens, was practically a remake of the original Star Wars, culminating with the heroes destroying the Death Star—sorry, I mean the Starkiller Base.

Trailers for the new film suggest that it will continue this tradition by closely mirroring the story arc of The Empire Strikes Back. Rey travels to a distant planet to receive Jedi training from Master Luke Skywalker, just as Luke once traveled to Dagobah to train with Master Yoda. Last month's trailer had a hint that Kylo Ren may try to recruit Rey to the dark side, just as Darth Vader once tried to turn Luke.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

The GTX 1070 Ti is a great graphics card but a frustrating product. In the year and a half since the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1070 launched, Nvidia has faced little competition from rival AMD, which has been stretched thin across the launch of mainstream graphics cards like the RX 480 and high-end processors like Ryzen Threadripper. As brilliant as those products are, particularly Threadripper, it took until August of this year for AMD to launch a competitor to Nvidia's year-old graphics cards. The resulting RX Vega 64 wasn't the graphical powerhouse many were hoping for, with high power consumption and performance that couldn't quite top a GTX 1080.

The one bright spot was Vega 56, which handily beat the GTX 1070's performance across a wide range of games for around the same price (Ethereum mining price inflation notwithstanding). Given the age of Nvidia's products, a price drop seemed like a natural solution. But this is Nvidia—and Nvidia won't let AMD have nice things. And so we have the GTX 1070 Ti, a "kick a man when he's down" kind of product that shatters the sole success story of the Vega lineup. For around a £20/$20 premium over Vega 56, the GTX 1070 Ti offers tangible boost in performance over a GTX 1070 and, when overclocked, performance as good as (if not better) than a GTX 1080.

Specs

The GTX 1070 Ti is based on the same GP104 GPU used in GTX 1070, but with a CUDA core count much closer to the GTX 1080—2,432 instead of 2,560. The GTX 1070 Ti isn't a pumped-up GTX 1070; instead, it's a cut-down GTX 1080, the key difference being the use of 8GB of standard GDRR5 memory instead of faster GDDR5X memory. Stock clocks are rated at 1,607MHz base and 1,683MHz boost, but as with all Nvidia graphics cards, the boost clock is typically much higher in real-world use with reasonable cooling. The Founders Edition card reviewed, which recycles Nvidia's unremarkable if visually appealing blower-style vapor chamber cooler from the GTX 1080, consistently runs at 1,847MHz under load.