The Tech Report

ECC memory support is only one of many reasons that someone building a workstation might base it on a Xeon processor. The specialized motherboards that they require include other features, such as formal support for hardware virtualization and advanced remote management features. If you've been looking for all of that in cherry flavor instead of blueberry, you might have been struggling. However, ASRock would like you to know that it has just the motherboard for you in the ASRock Rack X470D4U. ...Read more...

Do you like fans, gerbils? Do you like Fractal Design? Do you like RGB LEDs? Scratch that last question; I know you love RGB LEDs. Fortunately for you, Fractal Design just launched its Prisma series of lighted case fans. There are red, green, blue, white, and addressable-RGB versions in 120-mm and 140-mm sizes. ...Read more...

Good afternoon, gerbils. It seems that all the talk lately in tech is about bendy phones that fold over. The screen technology therein is quite fresh, and there are likely to be some growing pains, but it's not hard to envision a future where your phone, tablet, or even perhaps laptop are all the same device. For now, though, there are multiple competing designs, and we'll have to see what the market at large thinks is the best one. While you're mulling over that important question, here are sweet hardware deals for you. ...Read more...

If you go by sales data, most folks on using PCs are on laptops, yet there's really no standardized laptop battery testing methodology. Sure, we have our own testing style, but it differs from, say, Anandtech's, and their differs from Tom's Hardware's...and so on. Underwriter's Laboratories (UL), the group that purchased Futuremark back in 2014, just announced that PCMark 10 is getting two new benchmarks—one of which is a battery life test.UL says that the PCMark 10 battery life benchmark will be a realistic simulation of practical, day-to-day usage ...Read more...

Howdy, enthusiasts everywhere. Around here (Portugal, for those unaware), it's that time of the year again. Samba rhythms occasionally echo through the air from rehearsal warehouses. Orders of plumes from faraway places make their way over here for the construction of ever-elaborate costumes. It's Carnaval season, and soon enough the town will fill up with silliness, dancing ladies, and drumming men. Before the festivities start, I've collected juicy PC hardware deals for you. ...Read more...

If you've shopped for SSDs recently, you're probably aware of the Adata Ultimate SU800. It's a capable SATA SSD that's been available lately for killer prices. Adata must reckon folks will be happy to find even lower SSD prices, though, because now the company is releasing an SSD to slot directly underneath the SU800. Appropriately, it's called the Ultimate SU750. ...Read more...

No pane, no grain.

Like many in the PC hardware enthusiast community, I dig Noctua coolers. I liked my NH-C14 so much that I used it in four separate builds, and I only replaced it because I simply didn't need that much cooling anymore. However, if you were buying an AMD Ryzen system and wanted to use a Noctua cooler, you'd have to either buy one of the models specifically marked for socket AM4 (eg, the NH-D15 SE-AM4) or contact Noctua for a free upgrade kit. The company announced today that this is no longer the case: AM4 mounting kits are now included with all Noctua CPU coolers.

A fair day to thee, good gerbils. If you're looking for an interesting article to read, may I suggest Colton Westrate's "The death of Windows Phone and the five stages of mobile grief"? It's a rather amusing read about one idiot man's quixotic quest to hold onto a dead phone operating system or a silly reasonable facsimile thereof. Go ahead and give it a scan. In the meantime, check out our selection of contemporary hardware deals. ...Read more...

I'm not a betting man, but even so, I'd probably wager that a healthy portion of gerbils have had their hands on a Logitech MX518 mouse at some point. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a few of you are clutching a long-serving MX518 as you read this. If you have fond memories of your MX518, or if you ran your rodent ragged and need a capable replacement, rejoice: Logitech is reviving it. ...Read more...

I took the liberty of adding the critical words "chip," "ice," and "cream" to today's theme. You're welcome.

Greetings, good gerbils. I'm in the process of speccing out a home theater PC so that I can make more frequent use of the big-ass TV I have in the living room. I occasionally plug my laptop into it, but it's often a pain in the neck to connect the cables and deal with oddities like automatic video brightness compensation and whatnot. It's high time to fix this issue, and I'm always happy to order new hardware for a good cause. Speaking of exactly that task, here's today's selection of deals. ...Read more...

Have you ever seen a case and thought, "I like that layout, but I hate that front panel." Sure you have. We all have. Thermaltake is looking to step around those complaints with its new Commander C series of mid-tower ATX cases that come in six different variations. The Thermaltake Commander C31, C32, C33, C34, C35, and C36 are all exactly the same case, aside from the front panels. ...Read more...

Another day, another driver release. This one's a big one, though: Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.2.2 is the first driver to officially support the Radeon VII graphics card. It also adds support for some new games, including some we talked about yesterday: Far Cry New Dawn, Metro Exodus, Civilization VI's Gathering Storm add-on, and Crackdown 3. Did you know Crackdown 3 actually existed? Me neither, but it comes out tomorrow along with Far Cry New Dawn and Metro Exodus. ...Read more...

I don't have to tell this to an audience of gerbils, but rumors of PC gaming's death have been greatly exaggerated for a long time now. Sure, there's awesome console-exclusive titles that we don't get to play, but a lot of those will find their way to the PC eventually. Even disregarding those, though, we've got plenty to keep us occupied in the coming months.

Barely more than a week after the last Geforce driver release, we're back with another one. GeForce driver version 418.91 is "Game Ready" for Metro Exodus, and it also includes game-specific support for Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) on Battlefield V. It's timely, given that just yesterday I was bemoaning the lack of games that make use of the GeForce RTX cards' special sauce in this very space.

Epic Games, which makes Fortnite, also makes the Unreal Engine that powers it. (Remember when Unreal was more than an engine?) Epic just released the the first preview build of Unreal Engine 4.22, and among a great number of other changes and updates, the new build includes preliminary support for Microsoft's DirectX Ray-tracing (DXR) extensions to the DirectX 12 API.

Howdy, folks. The internet at large is probably running out of ink discussing the merits of the Radeon VII to death. We've recently taken a good, hard look at it, and one outstanding question is how it fares when gaming at 2560x1440, a notch down from the 4K resolution with HDR that we originally tested it with. We've just answered that question, and you can take a good look at the results. When you're done, be sure to take a look at today's selection of deals. We've got a few smokin' hot ones. ...Read more...

AMD releases Radeon Pro drivers on a quarterly schedule, and being that we're a month into 2019, the time for the next release was nigh. Indeed, the company just dropped Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q1. This driver brings the usual batch of performance upgrades and additional certifications, as well as a few new features for the red team's blue cards. ...Read more...

This works for me on a couple levels.

Update, 2/7/19, 3:37pm CT: Added AMD's statement about graphics card availability below.Have you read our review of AMD's latest and greatest ? While we may not have showered the card with lavish praise, the Radeon VII is still the fastest single-GPU Radeon card that has ever existed. It's also the fastest 7-nm GPU to date. (Hah.) AMD said the card would be available at ...Read more...

Greetings, folks. I'm going to keep it short and sweet today. AMD's finally released a high-end graphics card since the Vega 64, and we've taken a good, hard look at it. Is it good enough to rock Nvidia's high-end dominance? Our data tells all. After you've read the review, be sure to check out the selection of spicy deals below. ...Read more...

I am way too proud of this.

Greetings, folks! I've started doing a little home improvement—well, paying for it, anyway. The first project was getting a new kitchen exhaust fan and under-cupboard lighting shining on the countertop. Both implementations are a swimming success, but there's a major catch: the better lights now quite handily illustrate how some of the appliances and assorted bits of kit need a good scrub. Alas, house work is never really done, is it? Never mind that anyhow, here are some sweet, juicy PC hardware deals. ...Read more...

Greetings, folks! I've started doing a little home improvement—well, paying for it, anyway. The first project was getting a new kitchen exhaust fan and under-cupboard lighting shining on the countertop. Both implementations are a swimming success, but there's a major catch: the better lights now quite handily illustrate how some of the appliances and assorted bits of kit need a good scrub. Alas, house work is never really done, is it? Never mind that anyhow, here are some sweet, juicy PC hardware deals. ...Read more...

Not technically a shower, but definitely a friend.

Have you gotten yourself a laptop with a GeForce RTX graphics card inside? If so, you'll probably want to make sure you update the graphics driver to the one Nvidia just released. GeForce driver version 418.81 is WHQL-certified and fully supports laptop RTX cards. It's also "Game Ready" for 3DMark Port Royal, which isn't really a game, but just roll with it, alright? ...Read more...

I love Zotac's Zboxes. They're so tiny and cute, and you can stick 'em anywhere—at least, as long as "anywhere" is "a well-ventilated area free of hazards." Some jobs need certain hardware with a very particular set of skills, and Zotac wants to make sure it can serve those markets with the Zbox Pro line of embedded mini-PCs. There are five models in total; three are fanless machines, and two have discrete graphics grunt.

AMD pulled some surprises out of its hat at CES this year not just by showing off one of its impressively efficient Zen 2 CPUs, but also by unveiling the first graphics card for consumers made on a 7-nm process. The aptly named Radeon VII has the GeForce RTX 2080 in its sights, according to AMD's own benchmarks, and it's got plenty of big numbers to go with its big britches. ...Read more...

A few gerbils expressed disappointed at the absence of 5.25" drive bays in the last few cases we peeked at. Yes, contrary to popular belief, there are still some use cases for optical storage media. If you liked one of those cases but need the extra-wide drive slot, Sharkoon can set you up. The company's VG6-W cases are full ATX mini-towers that sit a hair under 40 L, and they include a 5.25" drive bay among other features. ...Read more...

Howdy, folks. I've been keeping an eye on the news about the hellish climate in a good portion of the U.S., and I have only one thing to say: "brrrrrr." Besides the interweb reports, Colton has been posting pictures of the post-apocalyptic scenario in Michigan. To me, sitting here warm, across the ocean, it all just looks like a movie, or how I would picture Siberia. I'm not whining about the my mild cold and rain for a good long while, that's for sure. We all need to warm our hearts, and for that endeavor, there's nothing better than hot PC hardware deals. Here they are. ...Read more...

It sounds like everyone will be calling him “Bob,” but whether he goes by Bob, Robert, or Mr. Swan, Intel’s new CEO starts today. The company tapped Robert Swan to be interim CEO seven months ago, and he’s apparently done enough to make the board feel confident in his appointment as the permanent chief. Swan has been in the business for a long time, serving primarily in finance roles and as a C-level executive. He climbed fast at Intel, joining just in 2016 as the Chief Financial Officer. By mid-2018, he was interim CEO.Everyone at Intel seems to be feeling outstanding about the whole situation. The word appears a lot in Intel’s press release, in which the company offered praise for the “outstanding job Bob did as interim CEO [...] as reflected in Intel’s outstanding results in ...Read more...

One of the nifty things about the Intel Xeon W-3175X is that you could feasibly stuff 768GB of RAM into a system built around it. Such extravagant RAM is mostly wasted on the kind of users that chip is meant for, though. Registered memory likely leaves a lot of performance on the table, too. Instead, we think most users would be better served by something like one of G.Skill's new hexa-channel memory kits. ...Read more...

If you had asked me this time last year whether Intel would take one of its 28-core Skylake Xeon chips with six-channel memory and release it as a consumer CPU on a new platform, I would have smirked and laughed as if you had asked me if game streaming will ever replace local processing. While this is fundamentally the same CPU that Intel showed in chilled form as part of its controversial Computex 2018 demo, we first heard concrete news about these plans back at Intel's "Performance Unleashed" event in October. That's right gerbils: Today is launch day for the Intel Xeon W-3175X 28-core workstation CPU.First, the facts. The Xeon W-3175X is essentially the same silicon as the Xeon Platinum 8180 , but with the clock rates of a Core i9-9960X . Specifically, the W-3175X takes 28 Skylake-X cores to 4.5 GHz max turbo, up from 3.1 GHz base. Thanks to the ...Read more...

FSP Group is famous for its quality (and sometimes quirky) power supplies. Did you know the company also sells a whole line of computer cases? Me neither, but as it turns out, the CMT340 is only the latest in a lineage of computer cases. This new model is similar to a few other cases we've seen in that it has tempered-glass windows on the front and side to allow its four included RGB LED fans to shine through. ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils and gerbilettes. My flu appears to have finally broken, but I'm still taking extra care to stay warm in this chilly season. There's no snow here, for better or for worse, and I'm somewhat envious of Seth, Colton, and Adam's pretty pictures of their locations. (Editor's note: Bruno can have our snow and the single-digit temperatures that go with it, thanks very much.) Then again, I don't need to shovel any snow or slap winter tires on my car. Anyway, enough yakking, here's today's collection of deals. ...Read more...

Another fond memory from kindergarten.

What springs to mind when I say "MIDI," gerbils? Is it perhaps thoughts of an old Gravis Ultrasound or Sound Blaster AWE? Expensive Roland synthesis hardware? Perhaps you're actually a musician who still uses the Musical Instrument Digital Interface to this day. Despite being virtually unchanged since its release in 1983, MIDI remains by far the most popular digital interface for musicians. At the 2019 National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM)show, the MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA) just announced that it is in the preliminary prototyping phase of drafting the MIDI 2.0 standard.

One way to get gobs of memory bandwidth is to ramp up the transfer rate to ridiculous levels. Alternatively, you could adopt a platform with more memory channels. In the words of Old El Paso, ¿por qué no los dos? G.Skill would like to help you along the path toward cresting the 128GB/sec memory bandwidth mark, and to assist in such endeavors, it's offering up 64-GB kits composed of eight 8-GB modules running at 4266 MT/s. ...Read more...