Techreport

VR may be the most-hyped tech trend of 2016, and there are already a range of ways to jack into the Matrix with head-mounted devices. Whether you've folded up Google's Cardboard, strapped on Samsung's Gear VR, pre-ordered Oculus' Rift, taken over a room in preparation for HTC's Vive, or you're waiting for Sony's PlayStation VR, we want to hear about it, or why you're holding off for now. Make your voice heard in our poll and tell us what you're thinking in the comments.Read more...

MSI is apparently betting heavily on prebuilt systems these days, and today the company unveiled a new addition to its family of gaming-oriented all-in-one desktops. Meet the new version of the sleek but powerful MSI Gaming 24. ...Read more...

AMD has turned in its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2015. The company posted an operating loss of $49 million and a net loss of $102 million on $958 million in revenue. Those losses are smaller than those in both the last quarter and the year-ago quarter, even as revenue shrank.$470 million of that revenue came from the company's Computing and Graphics segment, down 29% from Q4 2014. The company says that decrease is mostly because of lower client processor sales. ...Read more...

Looking for a high-frequency DDR4 memory kit? Corsair announced three new additions to its Vengeance LPX line, and all three boast transfer speeds over 3000 MT/s. In fact, Corsair claims that these are some of the fastest kits they've ever made. All three kits come with removable 40mm fans to help keep temperatures down. ...Read more...

TSMC is already thinking a few moves ahead of its present processes. According to DigiTimes, the company expects to start production of 7-nm chips in 2018, and it thinks its rollout of 5-nm process tech will begin in the first half of 2020.TSMC has reportedly been researching production at the 5-nm node for over a year. The company says it's made "significant progress" ...Read more...

In a recent interview with VentureBeat, AMD's Raja Koduri spilled a handful of beans on the company's upcoming Polaris GPUs. Most notably, Koduri told the site that AMD is cooking up not one, but two Polaris chip designs for this year. Those parts will be called Polaris 10 and Polaris 11. Koduri says Polaris 10 is the "console-class" GPU for thin-and-light notebooks, while Polaris 11's position in the market wasn't specified. Cards based on the new architecture will be named according to "galaxies, star systems, and stars," but they'll still be sold under the Radeon umbrella.Koduri also seemed to be confident that AMD is several months ahead of the industry on its transition to FinFET GPU production, "especially for the notebook and mainstream market." He ...Read more...

Just under a week ago, JEDEC updated the High-Bandwidth Memory standard with provisions for bigger, faster memory packages. Hot on JEDEC's heels, Samsung has taken the wraps off its mass-production 4GB HBM2 chips this evening.The company says it's fabricating these 4GB dies on its 20-nm process. Each of these packages comprises four 8Gb core dies atop a buffer die at the base of the stack. Consistent with JEDEC's specifications, each of these HBM2 dies will offer 256 GB/s of bandwidth. For comparison, Samsung says that ...Read more...

Fractal Design's Define S case offers an appealing combination of silencing features, a roomy interior, and a wallet-friendly price tag. Fractal is bringing that same feature set to the Mini-ITX arena today with its Define Nano S mini-tower. ...Read more...

Microsoft announced Friday that Windows 10 will be the only version of Windows supported on future CPUs and chipsets. The company will continue to support Windows 7 and 8.1 on older hardware for the next several years, as promised by its support policy.This announcement will affect those who were planning to run older versions of Windows on Intel's forthcoming Kaby Lake CPUs and AMD's Bristol Ridge APUs, as ...Read more...

Last year, I discovered the wonder that is Spotify. Before I tried it, I thought the service was just a Pandora clone, but I quickly got hooked on Spotify's free access to almost unlimited music. I found myself listening to a wider variety of genres than ever, as I no longer had to commit to buying an album or two at a time. After trying the three-month trial for Spotify Premium, I gave in and subscribed so I could download music and avoid ads.Google and Apple both introduced their own Spotify competitors last year. Apple Music and its exclusive Beats One radio station are gaining subscribers at a healthy pace , while Google's Play Music service brings a few YouTube-related benefits to the table if you subscribe to YouTube Red . Services like these ...Read more...

Huawei is growing at a steady clip, and the company now seems to be thinking that a piece of the PC market pie would hit the spot. Chinese newspaper Yicai reports that there's some substance to the rumors floating around about Huawei's upcoming foray into that market.According to Yicai, Huawei will make its splashing entrance during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The company has filed for the "MateBook" trademark recently, and a Huawei spokesperson expressed displeasure with the fact that a lot of people are using Apple computers ...Read more...

Happy Friday, gerbils. After a busy couple weeks of holidays and trade shows, we're back with a hot, fresh serving of deals for your perusal. ...Read more...

When I first saw the trailer for The Mean Greens: Plastic Warfare, I knew I had to try it out. Running around as a plastic army man in a third-person shooter seemed like a brilliant idea. A good concept isn't all it takes to make an enjoyable game, though, and The Mean Greens demonstrates that point. Check out the video for the specifics....Read more...

Remember that Skylake freezing bug we talked about a few days ago? Intel said that system manufacturers would be able to correct the issue with BIOS updates, and it also said it was working with motherboard vendors to make that happen. The first of those updates just came out for owners of MSI hardware. ...Read more...

ASRock and MSI already allow owners of their motherboards to overclock Intel's locked Skylake CPUs by adjusting those chips' base clock, or BCLK. EVGA is getting in on that game, too. Owners of the company's Z170 Classified, Z170 FTW, and Z170 Stinger mobos will be able to turn the screws on locked Skylake chips after a BIOS update. ...Read more...

Intel's fourth-quarter 2015 financial results are in. The company reported revenue of $14.9 billion for the quarter, up 1% compared to Q4 2014, and operating income of $4.3 billion, down 3% from the same time last year. Gross margin shrank 1.1% to 64.3%.The company's Client Computing Group took in $8.8 billion, a 1% decline compared to this time last year. According to the company's CFO commentary , desktop platform volumes (which account for both processors and chipsets) fell 9% year-on-year, but ...Read more...

Gigabyte recently released a few motherboards based on the Intel C232 and C236 chipsets, and today the company added a new ingredient to that formula: ECC DDR4 support. This new recipe comes baked into the X170-Extreme ECC, X150-PRO ECC, and X150M-PRO ECC motherboards. ...Read more...

Yesterday, we covered Seagate's 8TB and 10TB hard drives. Fixstars probably saw that news and thought "psh, we can go bigger without moving parts." Enter the 13TB SSD-13000M and its "smaller" cousin, the 10TB SSD-10000M. The company isn't new to the large SSD game, either. It released a 6TB model last year. ...Read more...

AMD introduced the first official product born from its Seattle project this morning. The Opteron A1100 system-on-a-chip will have up to eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores sharing 4MB of L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache. It can talk to DDR3 or DDR4 ECC RAM over two 64-bit channels. The chip also has two onboard 10Gbps Ethernet NICs, eight lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity, and 14 SATA 6Gbps ports.This Opteron platform is already powering Softiron's Overdrive 3000 developer platform , and it'll also serve as the foundation for an upcoming series of Softiron software-defined storage products. AMD ...Read more...

AMD introduced the first official product born from its Seattle project this morning. The Opteron A1100 system-on-a-chip will have up to eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores sharing 4MB of L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache. It can talk to DDR3 or DDR4 ECC RAM over two 64-bit channels. The chip also has two onboard 10Gbps Ethernet NICs, eight lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity, and 14 SATA 6Gbps ports.This Opteron platform is already powering Softiron's Overdrive 3000 developer platform , and it'll also serve as the foundation for an upcoming series of Softiron software-defined storage products. AMD ...Read more...

Samsung announced that it's begun mass production of chips using its 14-nm Low Power Plus (LPP) process, the latest generation of its FinFET fabrication tech. The company will make its own Exynos 8 Octa SoC on this process, but that's not the only high-end chip it'll be building. Samsung says it'll also be making Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 using 14-nm LPP FinFETs. This news confirms long-standing rumors about Qualcomm's foundry of choice for its next-generation flagship SoC.Samsung says 14-nm LPP silicon can deliver up to 15% higher speeds and 15% lower power consumption than its first-generation FinFET process, called Low Power Early, or LPE. Those improvements apparently come through "improvements in transistor ...Read more...

Now this is something nobody was expecting—certainly on par with the Spanish Inquisition. Electronic Arts has pulled back the curtain on a surprisingly sensible game catalog offer. The publisher's Origin Access service lets gamers play a number of titles with very few strings attached for $5 a month, and it comes with some nice extra perks, too. Did I just spot Beelzebub on a toboggan? ...Read more...

Seagate's 8TB NAS hard drive isn't the biggest thing going in mechanical storage today. The company has also announced a 10TB version of its Enterprise Capacity 3.5" drive. This data-center-oriented drive puts seven platters and 14 heads under helium to reduce friction and turbulence. ...Read more...

Google's Cardboard headset is probably the most accessible route into VR right now. The company is making that experience more immersive today with an SDK update that lets Cardboard developers add spatial audio features to their apps.This update gives developers some tricks to make sound more positional. For example, sound from a virtual source to the user's right will ...Read more...

Seagate has updated its lineup of NAS-oriented hard drives. The NAS family now welcomes its newest and biggest member, a drive with an impressive data capacity of 8TB. ...Read more...

A recent version of TrendMicro Antivirus contained a serious security vulnerability that would let a remote attacker run arbitrary commands on the target system and steal users' passwords. The now-patched flaw was present in the software's password management component and was discovered by security researcher Tavis Ormandy of Google Project Zero.After installing TrendMicro Antivirus, Ormandy noticed that the software was listening on a few network ports for no apparent reason. After some investigation, he discovered that the password management component ...Read more...

IDC has released its PC shipment figures for the fourth quarter of 2015, and the numbers continue to shrink. The research firm says worldwide PC shipments totalled 71.9 million units in the final quarter of last year, a decline of 10.9% compared to the same time in 2014. IDC says that's the largest year-on-year decline it's ever recorded, and it also says 2015 is the first year the industry shipped fewer than 300 million units since 2008.The research firm thinks the continuing decline in the marketplace can be blamed on longer PC lifecycles and the rise of smartphones and tablets, even as sales growth in mobile devices has also slowed. IDC also believes the end of Windows XP support in 2014 may have prompted many to upgrade their ...Read more...

IDC has released its PC shipment figures for the fourth quarter of 2015, and the numbers continue to shrink. The research firm says worldwide PC shipments totalled 71.9 million units in the final quarter of last year, a decline of 10.9% compared to the same time in 2014. IDC says that's the largest year-on-year decline it's ever recorded, and it also says 2015 is the first year the industry shipped fewer than 300 million units since 2008.The research firm thinks the continuing decline in the marketplace can be blamed on longer PC lifecycles and the rise of smartphones and tablets, even as sales growth in mobile devices has also slowed. IDC also believes the end of Windows XP support in 2014 may have prompted many to upgrade their ...Read more...

For most gerbils, Gigabyte is a name associated with consumer-grade motherboards and graphics cards. However, the company has always operated in the server arena, too, and it's showing what it can do with four motherboards built around Intel's Xeon D products. ...Read more...

Electronics industry standards body JEDEC released an update to the High-Bandwidth Memory (or HBM) standard today. The updated standard, JESD235A, allows for two-high, four-high, or eight-high HBM stacks with capacities ranging from one to eight gigabytes per stack. While this updated HBM standard uses the same 1024-bit-wide, eight-channel interface per stack as the first generation of HBM, each stack can now support transfer speeds up to 256 GB/s. If you're not sure what any of that means, check out our HBM overview.

G.Skill thinks that 64GB still isn't enough for a single memory kit, and it's now releasing a 128GB DDR4 kit targeted at Intel's X99 platform. Yes, one hundred and twenty-eight gigabytes, a figure larger than many SSDs. 16GB DIMM support for Haswell-E CPUs and X99 mobos isn't official, but at least one board maker has enabled it with a BIOS update, and it seems likely others will follow suit. ...Read more...

Apple has released details of the beta version of iOS 9.3, and it certainly sounds like the company is going after Chromebooks' success in schools. iOS 9.3 includes a ton of functionality aimed at classrooms,device management, and device sharing. Let's start with the features aimed at us grown-ups, though.First, iOS now has f.lux built in. Er, I mean, "Night Shift." For those unfamiliar with the concept, this feature tweaks the displays's color temperature according to the time of day and ambient light conditions. The most common scenario involves making ...Read more...

For those who were waiting for details of how to buy HTC's Vive in the wake of Oculus' own pre-order announcement, the wait is over. In an interview with The Telegraph, HTC CEO Cher Wang confirmed that the company's VR headset will be available for pre-order starting February 29. The Vive is expected to begin shipping sometime in April. HTC didn't reveal how much the Vive will sell for, but we think it's a fair bet that the entire system will cost more than the $599 Oculus is asking for its Rift headset. ...Read more...

AMD has released version 16.1 of its Radeon Software Crimson Edition drivers, and it's easy to see that its software engineers have been on a bug-hunting spree. The new release has fixes for a number of game titles and FreeSync-related problems.The new drivers fix a number of stutter and crash-related bugs in Fallout 4 , Just Cause 3 , Dirt Rally , and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 . The Frame Rate ...Read more...

'Tis a peaceful night after Christmas, and the ghosts of FDIV and TSX have come once again to haunt Intel. The folks at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (who make Prime95) have come across a bug in Intel Skylake CPUs that causes affected systems to freeze.The bug manifests when a certain calculation is performed. Prime95 uses the fast Fourier transform to multiply very large numbers, and at least one ...Read more...

AMD's Radeon R9 Nano may be the graphics card with the highest performance-per-inch ratio on the market today, but its compact size came at a premium price when it was released. The smallest Fiji card launched with a suggested price of $649, about as much as the bigger-and-faster R9 Fury X or Nvidia's market-leading GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Now, AMD tells us that it's lopping $150 off the Nano's price tag, bringing it down to $499. ...Read more...

AMD's Radeon R9 Nano may be the graphics card with the highest performance-per-inch ratio on the market today, but its compact size came at a premium price when it was released. The smallest Fiji card launched with a suggested price of $649, about as much as the bigger-and-faster R9 Fury X or the market-leading GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Now, Anandtech reports that AMD will lop $150 off the Nano's price tag, bringing it down to $499. ...Read more...

CES - More than a handful of SSD manufacturers have released drives built around Silicon Motion's SM2246EN controller, including Mushkin and its Reactor 1TB SSD. An updated SM2246EN now supports 3D NAND and drive capacities up to 2TB, and Mushkin is using that updated controller to expand the Reactor to 2TB. ...Read more...

Dell and Lenovo have already deemed OLED screens good enough for prime time as monitors. Now, according to PC World, Alienware is adding one to its Alienware 13 gaming notebook. Given that the premium gaming PC maker is a Dell subsidiary, that move isn't a huge surprise.The OLED panel Alienware demonstrated is apparently a 2560x1440 unit, with a response time of less than a millisecond. Of course, with no backlighting to speak of, the ...Read more...

We first saw In Win's gloriously ostentatious H-Tower transforming E-ATX case at this summer's Computex. This week at CES, In Win revealed when potential buyers will be able to get an H-Tower of their own and the price they'll pay for the privilege. You may want to sit down before continuing. ...Read more...

Quite a few players are producing candy-bar PCs these days, and we're finally starting to see some deviation from Intel's original Compute Stick formula. Zotac has announced its PC Stick, which is a little larger than usual but also has a couple interesting features. ...Read more...

Since July, Microsoft has offered Windows 10 as an optional free upgrade for many users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. As we let you know last October, the Windows 10 upgrade will soon become a "recommended update," meaning that the install files for the new OS will automatically download for anyone using the default Windows Update settings. However, users who've decided to stick it out with their older Windows versions do have some options for blocking the upgrade and suppressing the offer notifications.According to Microsoft, the Windows 10 upgrade can be blocked in several ways. First, Microsoft has released updates that install a new Group Policy Object. Computers with this update "will never detect, download, or install and upgrade to the latest ...Read more...

TP-Link and Linksys each took advantage of CES to show off impressive new Wi-Fi routers. The routers differ in a few key areas, but both are unapologetically high-end. ...Read more...

CES - We met with AMD at CES this week to discuss the present situation of its desktop CPU lineup and its future plans for its desktop platforms. The company acknowledges that today's platform situation for its desktop CPUs is a somewhat confusing one. The company's Vishera CPUs require Socket AM3+ motherboards, while Kaveri and Godavari APUs need Socket FM2+ boards. Furthermore, Kabini Athlons and Semprons need the AM1 platform. ...Read more...

All the cool kids are releasing motherboards with Intel's C232 and C236 chipsets that blur the lines between work and play. It only makes sense that Gigabyte would join the party, too. These boards support Xeon E3-1200 v5 processors and sport a slick digital camo appearance. ...Read more...

We've had a couple models of Gigabyte's Brix mini-PCs in the lab here at TR, and we've been impressed with how much PC Gigabyte crams into such small boxes. For the upcoming lineup of six new Brix models, Gigabyte upgraded these systems with Skylake processors and M.2 SSD storage while maintaining the units' diminutive size. ...Read more...

The fine people at Monoprice have revealed a take on the increasingly popular 21:9 monitor. This screen's combination of specs and price sure looks like a winner to me. ...Read more...

Mushkin's ECO family of solid-state drives has been known primarily for being budget-friendly. With its new ECO3 drives, it looks like Mushkin is sticking with that formula. This time around, the company is dropping the smaller 60GB and 120GB offerings. ECO3 drives will only ship in 240GB and 480GB capacities, at least initially. ...Read more...

Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, and 10 have their days numbered. Come January 12, only Internet Explorer 11 will be supported on modern Windows desktop operating systems, along with Edge on Windows 10. IE 9 in Vista SP2 does gets a stay of execution, but not for long—that operating system will be taken behind the barn in April 2017.The situation is slightly different for server versions of Windows. Microsoft will only offer support for IE 11 on Windows Server 2012 ...Read more...

CES - EVGA gave us a look at its upcoming SC 17G gaming laptop today. This 17" machine is hewn entirely from aluminum, and both the case and keyboard feel rock-solid. EVGA puts a 4K IPS panel under the lid. G-Sync will be available as an option. ...Read more...