Techreport

Panasonic's Toughbook laptops are famous for their knock-around durability. Recently, the Toughbook lineup has expanded to include rugged tablets as well as notebooks, and now Panasonic has launched what it claims is the world's first ruggedized convertible, the Toughbook 20. ...Read more...

If the manifold Apple Watches aren't luxurious enough for well-heeled wearable buyers, TAG Heuer, Google, and Intel may have just the thing. The three companies unveiled the Connected Android Wear watch today at a grandiose event that also starred the Swiss ambassador to the United States, a large wheel of cheese, and glocken, because Switzerland. Yes, it was as crazy as it sounds. ...Read more...

Nvidia is making good on its promise to have Game Ready drivers prepped and posted for the traditional holiday gaming onslaught. Version 358.91 has optimizations and fixes for this week's big releases, as well as updated SLI and 3D Vision profiles for several other titles.Most importantly, this fresh batch of drivers has Game Ready optimizations for Fallout 4 , StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void , and Star Wars Battlefront . Act of Aggression , NBA 2K16 , and the 64-bit ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

You may be aware that Epic has kicked off a community-participation project intended to resurrect the classic Unreal Tournament using the latest version of the Unreal Engine. The new game, Unreal Tournament 4, will be free to download and use, and the current builds are already in very good shape.You can grab UT4 from the website and try it for yourself, which is just what I did this past weekend. Despite the "pre-alpha" label, the game already seems to be quite stable. It runs ...Read more...

Asus continues to expand the ranks of its Republic of Gamers legions. The latest recruits for the cause are the ROG Maximus VIII Extreme/Assembly motherboard and the ROG Matrix GeForce GTX 980 graphics card. ...Read more...

It's been two months to the day since Apple announced the iPad Pro, a big-screened, beefed-up tablet that's meant to take the iPad into new frontiers. True to the company's November release date, the iPad Pro will go on sale this Wednesday through Apple's online store. Brick-and-mortar Apple Stores will begin selling the tablet "later this week." ...Read more...

Thin is in these days, and Origin PC has embraced that saying in the form of its EVO15-S gaming notebooks. The company has updated this line of sleek PCs with a Skylake quad-core CPU and DDR4 memory. ...Read more...

A couple weeks ago, PC Perspective came across an intriguing behavior when testing Asus' PG279Q monitor. While driving that monitor with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti, the site found that after selecting refresh rates higher than 120 Hz, the system power draw at the Windows desktop would climb dramatically for no apparent reason.According to PCPer's analysis, the site's test system normally idles at about 75W. With the PG279Q attached, however, idle power draw climbed in tandem with refresh rates at the Windows desktop, hitting a ...Read more...

A couple weeks ago, PC Perspective came across an intriguing behavior when testing Asus' PG279Q monitor. While driving that monitor with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti, the site found that after selecting refresh rates higher than 120 Hz, the system power draw at the Windows desktop would climb dramatically for no apparent reason.According to PCPer's analysis, the site's test system normally idles at about 75W. With the PG279Q attached, however, idle power draw climbed in tandem with refresh rates at the Windows desktop, hitting a ...Read more...

Assassin's Creed Syndicate hits the PC on November 19. While you're waiting for the game to arrive, it might be a good idea to check your system's specs against Ubisoft's suggested requirements. We've condensed them here for easy reference:Most of those specs should be easy to meet for most recent PCs, though Ubi says that "for a recommended experience, the game requires a video card with at least 3GB of VRAM when playing at a full HD resolution." As a result, some GTX 760 owners might find that ...Read more...

The camera of Asus' Zenfone 2 Laser may be able to focus on its subjects faster than average, but that phone trades Intel's Atom SoCs for a Snapdragon 615. It's not particularly eye-catching, either. Asus is bringing Intel-branded sexy back in the form of the Zenfone 2 Deluxe Special Edition, and this phone's got more than just good looks going for it. ...Read more...

As you may know, we're giving away an exceptionally well-appointed gaming rig known as the Skylake Damagebox. The way we're doing it is by asking folks to create the best tech-related comic they can. We have a handful of entries already, but I've heard from a number of folks that they don't plan to participate because they can't draw.Here's the thing about ...Read more...

Happy Friday, gerbils. Welcome back to our regularly scheduled deals of the week. We've hit a particularly rich vein of bargains this time around, especially for SSDs. Let's get to it.Whew. That's it for this week. If you find a bargain we overlooked, ...Read more...

AMD's Bulldozer CPU architecture has had a troubled history. Thanks to its unusual design, the company's top-end CPUs had difficulty competing with Intel's latest and greatest—and its troubles may not be over yet. Legal News Wire reports that a class-action lawsuit has been filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California's San Jose division, alleging that AMD falsely advertised those CPUs as having more cores than they actually do.The heart of the matter is the Bulldozer architecture itself. Bulldozer modules combine two integer cores with a single floating-point unit and a shared L2 cache. Multiple modules are then combined to form the CPU. According to Tony Dickey, who filed the ...Read more...

GlobalFoundries has announced successful production of the first AMD products using its 14-nm FinFET Low Power Plus (14-nm LPP) process tech. As a result, AMD plans to begin integrating 14-nm LPP silicon into several of its products. Chips based on this process will purportedly deliver more processing power in a smaller footprint while sipping less power at the same time.AMD VP and CTO Mark Papermaster says that the company is looking forward to production readiness for GloFo's 14-nm LPP process. He also ...Read more...

Nvidia's financial results are in for the third quarter of its fiscal 2016, and the numbers are solid. The company made $245 million on revenue of $1.305 billion, up 15% and 7% over this time last year. Nvidia says the growth came primarily from GeForce GPU sales for gaming and automotive applications.Here's a tabular summary ...Read more...

Fallout 4 is coming on November 10, and it looks totally sweet. To ratchet our anticipation levels even higher, Bethesda has released the game's launch trailer. Behold:...Read more...

Just the other day I was looking for a mini-PC. After looking long and hard at the Intel NUC and the Zbox Magnus, I felt I needed something sturdier. Enter Perfectron's SR100, SR200, and SR700 ruggedized mini-computers.According to Perfectron, the SR series machines are all designed to meet the MIL-STD-810G shock, vibration, and temperature standards. That means these boxes can withstand ambient ...Read more...

Arctic Cooling is already known for its CPU and graphics card air coolers, and now the company is putting its stamp on all-in-one liquid coolers, as well. The Liquid Freezer 120 and Liquid Freezer 240 pair fairly standard-looking water blocks and radiators with Arctic's own fans—a combo that the company says makes these coolers "the quietest and most powerful in their class." That's a bold claim. Let's see how Arctic justifies it. ...Read more...

Android has taken quite a beating lately on the security front. In part, that's due to a perfect storm consisting of a large user base, slow software and security updates, and the ability to sideload untrusted apps that could potentially steal data or crash the phone. Against that backdrop, antivirus maker Lookout has posted a warning about a wave of novel malware with a nasty side effect: giving itself root privileges.The attack vector is pretty straightforward. An attacker downloads a popular app like Facebook or WhatsApp from the Google Play store and then injects it with one or more root exploits. The trojan ...Read more...

Think Samsung, and you might think "phones," "tablets," or "SSDs." The company makes notebook PCs, too, and its Ativ Book 9 Pro and Spin seem like sleek, stylish takes on Skylake laptops. ...Read more...

Fallout 4 will arrive on November 10, but Bethesda is giving us a sneak peek at the eye candy afforded by the game's improved Creation Engine and its physically-based deferred renderer. If your PC is up to the challenge, a romp in the Wasteland looks like it has the potential to be gorgeous. ...Read more...

Yesterday was different around here. Kansas City pretty much shut down in order to celebrate the Royals' victory in the World Series. Schools were out, folks took off work, and everybody wore blue. Ahead of the parade, I heard that around 200K people were expected to show up. By the end of the day, the mayor estimated 800K had turned out. Not bad for a city of ~467,000—although the metro area is more like 2.2 million. Here's a scene from the end of the parade route at Union Station.

GeForce owners, get ready for a deluge of holiday driver updates. Nvidia is kicking things off today with the release of the 358.87 WHQL driver for Call of Duty: Black Ops III. The company is also promising a series of "Game Ready" drivers ahead of or on launch day for a bunch of major titles. Expect driver updates for each of these games and more:Each of these "Game Ready" drivers is tuned and refined "until the 11th hour," according to Nvidia, and they'll all be WHQL-certified, as well. If smooth gameplay wasn't incentive enough, the ...Read more...

German gaming peripheral manufacturer Roccat has a new mouse out. Its name is Kiro, and it'll serve both right-handed and southpaw users equally well. ...Read more...

Closed-loop liquid coolers are all the rage these days, and even cheap PC cases make room for them. One thing most all-in-one cooling solutions don't do is move any air around the CPU socket, starving VRMs of airflow. Cryorig's A Series of AIO coolers could rectify that potential shortcoming by adding a fan to the CPU water block. ...Read more...

We first learned about Zotac's "console-killing" Steam Machine, now called the NEN SN970, earlier this year. At the time, Zotac was rather tight-lipped about the components inside the SN970, but the wraps are finally off this mini-PC, and we can say with full certainty what powers this SteamOS mighty mite. ...Read more...

Asus' Zenfone 2 and Zenfone 2E are affordable phones based on Moorefield Atom processors. For its latest Zenfone 2 Laser, Asus has ditched Intel's SoCs in favor of Qualcomm's ARM-flavored chips, and it's also given the camera on this phone a laser-based autofocus system. Asus says the rear snapper can focus in on a picture's subject in as little as 30 milliseconds. ...Read more...

Crucial's BX100 SSD is a budget favorite at TR, and for goood reason—it pairs decent performance for a SATA SSD with relatively low prices for its segment. Crucial is pushing even further into the budget SSD arena today with the BX200, a TLC NAND SSD that will run just $85 for the 240GB model, $150 for 480GB, and $300 for 960GB. That's only $0.31 to $0.35 per gigabyte, depending on capacity. ...Read more...

Microsoft has removed the unlimited storage tier from its OneDrive subscription plans, and cut down the free storage tier from 15GB to 5GB. The company says a percentage of its users were abusing the unlimited storage tier, backing up multiple computers and storing their entire movie collections and DVR archives. At least one user managed to upload 75TB of files to the service. Microsoft says that it wants OneDrive to be a tool for productivity and collaboration, not a backup service.As a result, all Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscriptions will have a 1TB cap. The 100GB and 200GB plans will be nixed in "early 2016," and they'll be replaced by ...Read more...

Lots of recent motherboards have decked-out color schemes with plenty of bling to catch the eye. MSI is taking the opposite approach with its Z170A SLI Plus, an all-black, buttoned-down Skylake motherboard that won't draw a lot of attention. Don't let the subdued color scheme fool you, though: this board has plenty to offer. ...Read more...

Microsoft has updated its Windows lifecycle page with a deadline for the sale of OEM copies of Windows . All good things must come to an end, and Windows 7's last day of availability as an preinstalled operating system is October 31, 2016, a date that now matches Windows 8.1's cutoff. After that deadline, the only Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 PCs you'll find in stores will be leftover stock.Amusingly enough, the cutoff date for Windows 8 will come sooner than for 7 or 8.1—the first "modern" version of Windows will see its last sale on June 30 of ...Read more...

If you've already read Scott's write-up about his Skylake-based Damagebox, you've probably had to wipe some drool off your chin or desk already. (If you haven't read about it yet, you should definitely go check out that article now.) Here's the crazy part: Scott already built a fancy new Damagebox for himself earlier in the year, so we're giving this system away to one deserving TR reader. ...Read more...

Last week's report that Google would merge Chrome OS into Android drew plenty of attention. The report seemed plausible, since Chrome OS can already run some Android apps and the Pixel C convertible runs Android. That merge won't be taking place, however. Hiroshi Lockheimer, senior VP of Android, Chrome OS, and Chromecast took to Twitter and the Chrome blog to say that Chrome OS isn't going anywhere.There’s a ton of momentum for Chromebooks and we are very committed to ...Read more...

I feel obliged to note that CBS has announced plans for a new Star Trek TV series that will be brought to you by executive producer Alex Kurtmzan, who is also responsible for this sequence from the dreadful show Scorpion....Read more...

Owners of Radeon graphics cards can look forward to a fresh, modernized user interface in the coming months. AMD will soon be replacing its venerable Catalyst driver stack with a revamped software suite known as Radeon Crimson. Gone is the Catalyst Control Center, supplanted by "Radeon Settings."The updated driver suite will bring with it a user interface overhaul and a fresh ...Read more...

The higher-end members of Gigabyte's Z170 motherboard lineup tend to be decked out with sporty white plastic shrouds and RGB LED accents, but bright white isn't to everybody's taste. For those whose preferences run toward the dark side, Gigabyte's GA-Z170-Gaming 6 might be just the ticket. This board trades its stablemates' white cladding for a more sinister black-and-red paint job, and the result sure looks nice. ...Read more...

The weird, sad story of the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight may be near its conclusion. The game returned to Steam last week, but players found that the intervening four months didn't really help its performance. Because of those ongoing inssues, Warner Bros. Interactive has announced that players who have purchased the game can return it for a refund at any time during the remainder of 2015.The refund program covers both the main game and the "season pass" for downloadable content, so long as both pieces of software are returned at the same time. WB Interactive threw out all ...Read more...

I just finished reading Walter Kirn's article in The Atlantic about mass surveillance and privacy issues, entitled If you're not paranoid, you're crazy. Kirn explores the extent to which advertisers and governments have been collecting and using data on our habits—the things we already know—and asks whether freedom is compatible with today's tools of surveillance and the ways they're wielded.The issue isn't just about government. He also considers how constant surveillance alters our everyday ...Read more...

G.Skill is probably best known for its RAM, which we regularly recommend in our system guides. The company has now announced something a little different: 64GB memory kits for your laptop (or mini-PC), spread across four SO-DIMMs. Overkill much? ...Read more...

When Google unveiled the Pixel C running regular Android, it seemed like a shot across the bow of the browser-centric Chrome OS. The Pixel C may be just the beginning of an Android-powered notebook era, if a report from the Wall Street Journal proves true. According to the WSJ's sources, Google plans to combine Chrome OS and Android into a single operating system.The end of Chrome OS won't come overnight, the paper's sources say. Google is expected to show off an early version of the combined OS sometime in 2016, but a formal unveiling wouldn't ...Read more...

I've written about how Google Fiber has slowly been rolling out here across the Kansas City metro area, including here at my place. The service has largely been excellent so far, and it seems to have built a solid reputation among its customers. But then the other night happened.The Royals were playing in Game 1 of the World Series, and early in the game, Google Fiber was hit with a major outage across the metro. It didn't affect me since ...Read more...

Some early reviews of the new Apple TV are out, and the general response to Apple's latest spin on the set-top box appears positive. We took a gander at some of the reviews and summarized them for your pleasure. The zeitgeist seems to be that the Apple TV isn't perfect right now, but it appears to have a ton of future potential.At first blush, the Apple TV impresses. The reviewers we surveyed found the initial setup process quick and painless, and the touchpad-enabled remote received universal praise. ...Read more...

Microsoft really wants users to upgrade their PCs to Windows 10. Really. In a post on the Windows Blog, Windows and Devices head Terry Myerson said that the reservation-system update process for Windows 10 has worked well so far. To get Windows 10 on more PCs, though, Microsoft has streamlined the manual upgrade process, and it'll soon begin pushing out the final version of Win10 to Windows Update.To start, the reservation method of requesting a Windows 10 upgrade is dead. Myerson says that interested PC owners can instead begin the upgrade straight from the notification app that shows up on Windows 7 and ...Read more...

Just as Warner Bros. Interactive and Rocksteady promised, Batman: Arkham Knight made its triumphant return to the PC yesterday in its long-promised patched form. Some recent user reviews of the re-released game are in, and they're not pretty.The release notes for yesterday's patch don't get into too much detail, but they contain some interesting tidbits nonetheless. On Windows 7 systems, Warner says Batman: Arkham Knight may constantly page data back to the disk, and ...Read more...

Happy Friday Thursday, gerbils. Yes, we're bringing you this week's best deals a day early, because some of them are on a clock and too good to ignore. Let's get right to it. ...Read more...