Author: batteryforpc

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 is here – as the follow-up to Samsung’s first ever foldable phone, the original Galaxy Fold, it brings some tweaks and improvements to the established formula with some extra features thrown in.

We first heard about the Galaxy Z Fold 2 at the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 launch event, where it was teased by the company, but we didn’t get all the information until a separate event a few weeks later.

So what’s new in this improved Galaxy Fold phone? The form factor is largely the same, but beyond the expected iterative updates, there are some other new features that prospective Fold buyers might be interested in.

We’ll take you through both phones, putting them head-to-head, to show you what’s new.

Price

The original Samsung Galaxy Fold cost $1,980 / £1,900 / AU$2,900 when it launched, and in the first year of its life that price didn’t drop by very much.

The Galaxy Z Fold 2 costs roughly the same at $1,999 / £1,799 / AU$2,999, so depending on your region it might cost a touch more or less than the Galaxy Fold’s launch price, but only a bit.

That’s a high price for a smartphone, about twice as much as you’d normally pay for a premium handset, and more than Samsung’s other foldable, the Galaxy Z Flip, which costs $1,380 / £1,300 / AU$1,999.

Design and display

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 has a similar form factor to the original Galaxy Fold, but that doesn’t make the two phones identical.

Without even opening either Galaxy Fold phone, there’s one noticeable difference on the outsides – the original Fold had a small 4.6-inch screen on the outside that took up some space on the front, but the Z Fold 2 has a bigger 6.23-inch display that takes up the whole of the front.

The camera array on the back of the newer phone has been redesigned in keeping with the Note 20, and the hinge has seen a huge overhaul too – hopefully this one won’t break easily.

Opening the phones, the newer one is slightly bigger with a 7.6-inch screen over 7.3 inches on its predecessor. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 has also got a 120Hz refresh rate, compared to just 60Hz on the original.

The screens on both phones use Dynamic AMOLED tech. The resolutions are 1536 x 2152 pixels for the original Galaxy Fold and 1768 x 2208 pixels for the Z Fold 2 – thanks to the differing display sizes this means the pixel-per-inch counts are almost identical.

Both phones have side-mounted fingerprint sensors for unlocking them.

Camera and battery

On paper, it seems the original Samsung Galaxy Fold has a better camera array than its successor, but we’ll have to take both out for tests to see if that’s definitely the case.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold has three rear cameras, consisting of a 12MP main, 16MP ultra-wide, and 12MP telephoto 2x zoom snapper, but there’s also a 10MP and 8MP snapper on the front of the device when unfolded, for selfies, and a sixth camera on the front when it’s folded, with a 10MP resolution. 

In comparison, the Galaxy Z fold 2 has the same rear cameras, but with a 12MP resolution on the ultra-wide. There’s only one selfie camera on the front (when unfolded) which has a 10MP resolution, and there’s a similar 10MP snapper on the front when you fold the phone.

Megapixel counts don’t tell the whole story of photography potential, and nor do camera numbers, so we’ll have to test both phones before declaring one better than the other.

In terms of battery sizes, the Samsung Galaxy Fold has a 4,380mAh power back and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 has a slightly bigger one at 4,500mAh, but thanks to the screen size increase we wouldn’t expect the phone to last much longer.

The original Samsung Galaxy Fold has 15W wired and wireless charging, and while the Galaxy Z Fold 2 bumps its wired powering up to 25W, wireless charging is actually slower at 11W. Both support reverse wireless charging too, letting you use the device to power up others.

Specs and features

The newer foldable phone has a better chipset, as while the original Galaxy Fold has a Snapdragon 855 processor, Samsung stuck the improved Snapdragon 865 Plus in the Galaxy Z Fold 2. Both phones have 12GB of RAM though.

Strangely, the newer Galaxy Fold model has less internal storage – while the original comes in only a 512GB model, the newer one only comes in 256GB.

While the main selling point of both phones is the foldable display, the Galaxy Z Fold 2 borrows a few tricks from the Galaxy Z Flip which help it make the most of the form factor. The main one of these is Flex Mode, so you can use special functions when the handset is only partly unfolded. An example of this is so you can use the phone as its own camera stand, for if you want to take a selfie without holding the device.

Both phones run One UI, Samsung’s fork of Android. The Fold 2 comes with Android 10, the original comes with Android 9 out of the box but it can be upgraded to 10 easily.

Takeaway

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 fixes many of the issues people had with the original – except for the price, which is still astronomically high.

The front screen is bigger, the chipset is improved, and the 120Hz refresh rate screen will impress many. 

There are some areas where the phone is less of a step up, but seeing as the original Samsung Galaxy Fold hasn’t lost its value much, if you’re in the market for a foldable phone, you’d be better off going for the newer device.

If Samsung soon decides to give a big price cut to the original Galaxy Fold, and turn it into a ‘budget’ foldable, maybe our takeaway will change, but for now there are few reasons not to consider the newer Galaxy Z Fold 2.

7,000MB/s read and 6,850MB/s write sequential performance

Although we might have seen a glimpse of Samsung’s 980 Pro, Sabrent is not giving it any room to breathe as it has unveiled its answer, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Being a faster version of the Rocket 4, the Rocket 4 Plus uses Phison’s PS5018-E18 SSD PCIe 4.0 controller paired up with TLC NAND flash, hitting impressive sequential read and write performance of up to 7000MB/s for read and up to 6850MB/s for write.

The Rocket 4 Plus will be available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities.

In order to deal with all the heat from such performance, Sabrent has come up with a custom heatsink, which combines an aluminum heatsink with copper heat coils. The complete heatsink also includes thermal tape, an aluminum tray, and a top heatspreader. According to Sabrent, this should prevent all thermal throttling, pushing it to maximum performance.

Unfortunately, the product page did not include 4K random read and write performance and we still do not have a price nor the availability date, but it will be interesting to see how well it does in detailed benchmarks.

According to leaked product pages from Gainward, Nvidia’s new high-end card is wild, at least when it comes to memory.

Here it is: The Nvidia RTX 3090. Or at least, one variant of the new GPU from hardware company Gainward, which appears to have accidentally posted product pages for the RTX 3090 and 3080 a little bit early. 

A day before Nvidia’s Ampere reveal event, where we expect Nvidia to officially show off the RTX 3090 and 3080 graphics cards, Gainward posted (and then removed) images and specs for its versions of each card, with specs that match up with previous leaks. The 3090 is a 24GB monster, while the 3080 comes equipped with 10GB of GDDR6X.

As spotted by Videocardz and our colleagues at Tom’s Hardware, the Gainward product pages list four configurations for the 3090 and 3080, two of which are “Golden Sample” (aka factory overclocked) variants. You can see the full specifications at the Videocardz link.

Here are the key specs for the base models:

RTX 3090 Phoenix

CUDA cores: 5248

Clock speed: 1695 MHz (Boost)

Memory: 24GB GDDR6X

Memory clock: 9750 MHz

Bandwidth: 936 GB/s

PCIe: Gen 4

Max power consumption: 350W

Output: HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a

RTX 3080 Phoenix

CUDA cores: 4352

Clock speed: 1710 MHz (boost)

Memory: 10GB GDDR6X

Memory clock: 9500 MHz

Bandwidth: 760 GB/s

PCIe: Gen 4

Max power consumption: 320W

Output: HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a

The biggest difference between the two is that huge jump in memory. For comparison, the RTX 2080 launched with 8GB of GDDR6 in 2018; the RTX 2080 Ti, released at the same time, had 11GB of GDDR6.

The amount of VRAM a graphics card has is especially important for gaming at 4K, where the larger frame buffer is especially memory hungry. Demanding games today can and will use more than 8GB. The RTX 3080 may not have much headroom at native 4K, then, while the RTX 3090 has tons; it looks like the card you’ll want for Microsoft Flight Simulator, as long as you can pair it with a high-end CPU.

This time around there’s no mention of a 3080 Ti at launch, which likely leaves the door open for a card in between the 3080 and 3090 in the future; perhaps a 3080 Ti or Super model with 16GB of memory. While we do expect Nvidia to announce a 3070, that model wasn’t leaked on Gainward’s site. Neither product page listed a price, but considering the specs, expect some big dollar signs tomorrow.

One other interesting tidbit: Gainward’s spec sheets state that both the 3090 and 3080 models require two 8-pin power connectors, meaning they seemingly won’t be using Nvidia’s new 12-pin connector.

Reached for comment on the GPU pages, Nvidia responded “We do not comment on rumors or unannounced products.”