Techreport

Nvidia's Shield set-top box comes with a modest 16GB of flash storage. That amount makes sense for those who'll mostly be streaming Grid games and Netflix movies alongside a few locally installed games, but Nvidia thinks some buyers will want more storage–a lot more. A new version of the console, called the Shield Pro, offers a 500GB hard drive instead. ...Read more...

Looking for some discounted PC hardware to tide you over until the next batch of daily deals from the Steam Summer Sale? I thought you'd never ask...Those are the deals that popped up on ...Read more...

We still don't have official word from Intel on when to expect its next-gen Skylake processors. However, Biostar sent out a press release today that provides the clearest indication yet. The company's Gaming Z170X motherboard is designed for the chips, and it's slated to be available in August. Compatible CPUs will presumably be available around the same timeframe. ...Read more...

When we think of PCs for creative types, most of us would probably name some tricked-out Windows workstation or a high-end Mac—traditional PCs turned up to 11, in a sense. That's why HP's Sprout is so striking. Though this PC was apparently announced with little fanfare last year, it's back in the news thanks to a new twist on its 3D scanning capabilities. More on that in a moment. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

When we last heard about Saitek's custom controller for Farming Simulator, it was nothing more than a wireframe drawing and a promise. For those that have been waiting with bated breath for this thing to become reality, today is your day. The finished product includes a wheel, side control panel, and pedals. Aspiring MacDonalds can pre-order this baby today for $300 and expect shipment in the fall. ...Read more...

Oculus held a brief event today to share some details about the final Rift VR headset, as well a pair of prototype handheld controllers called Oculus Touch. ...Read more...

Run for the hills! The Steam Monster Summer Sale has begun, much to gamers' glee and dismay. GabeN plans to conquer the shores of VISA and the plains of Mastercard with discounts spanning a great number of titles. Here's today's selection of daily specials. ...Read more...

Need a racing wheel to go with Project Cars? Logitech's just-announced G920 could be just the ticket. This wheel has a spec list that wouldn't look out of place in a Ferrari showroom, and it boasts compatibility with both the PC and Xbox One. ...Read more...

Cooler Master introduced its MasterCase chassis at Computex last week, but there's more to this story than just a case. The modular mid-tower is part of a new focus that will eventually spread across the company's products. We spoke to regional marketing chief Rajiv Kothari to get a better sense of what's in store.One of the central themes is a reduction in the deluge of products in Cooler Master's catalog. The plan is to offer fewer products with greater variation through modular design. Cooler Master wants to help PC users achieve ...Read more...

Heads up to anyone using iOS's Mail app: security researcher Jan Souček has found a serious vulnerability in the way the app handles inline HTML, allowing an attacker to load arbitrary web pages—including a simulated iCloud login prompt for phishing purposes. You can watch the proof-of-concept here:...Read more...

As a child, I often staged epic battles between toy brands. There were no rules forbidding separate universes from crossing paths. Lego armies waged war against bands of G.I. Joes, while Transformers took on He-Man and his pals. My sister's Barbie dolls were occasionally used as hostages—and cannon fodder.Now, Ubisoft is promising to bring a similar experience to PC gamers with the "Hall of Fame Edition" of Toy Soldiers: War Chest . The game drafts combatants from the G.I. Joe ...Read more...

Futuremark has announced that it's developing VRMark, a new benchmarking tool for virtual-reality hardware. Unlike 3DMark, this new product will use a combination of hardware and software to test the performance and accuracy of VR systems. It's targeted at hardware makers, analysts, and members of the press.VRMark will measure a system's ability to deliver high frame rates with low variance. It'll also measure frame latency in the headset itself, and it'll check the responsiveness and accuracy for ...Read more...

Microsoft has added a new member to its Surface family of devices. The Surface Hub is a behemoth, wall-mounted all-in-one that's described as a powerful business collaboration tool. ...Read more...

Intel's latest integrated graphics processors might not max out recent games at 4K, but they're plenty serviceable. To help owners best take advantage of the graphics integrated into their CPUs, the company has set up a new gaming portal that recommends playable games and provides optimal graphics settings for different chips. Here are the recommended settings for Borderlands 2 on my Core i5-4690K's HD Graphics 4600 IGP—at a resolution of 1366x768: ...Read more...

Samsung claims it has developed the world's first OLED displays with mirrored and transparent surfaces. Designed for digital signage and retail applications, the unique screens are being showcased at an event in Hong Kong this week. They look straight out of science fiction: ...Read more...

Nvidia apparently had a private venue away from the Computex 2015 show floor last week, and it was showing off a new DirectX 12 demo titled Mech Ti. Japanese site 4Gamer captured the six-minute reel and shared the clip with the world:...Read more...

ASRock's lineup of compact Braswell motherboards isn't just limited to the embedded-oriented offering we spotted last month. The company's website now details seven more conventional models based on the 14-nm Bay Trail sucessor. All of them cool the low-power chip with a passive heatsink, and there's a fair bit of variety within the family. ...Read more...

As we wait for next-generation chips from AMD and Intel to hit the market, it's worth looking back down the steep mountain we've climbed in terms of performance per watt and transistor count. The folks at Phoronix dug deep into their hardware closets in celebration of the site's 11th birthday, and they cobbled together some systems based on Intel's Northwood and Prescott silicon: a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 "C" (SL6WT) and a 2.4GHz Celeron D 320, respectively. (We reviewed similar chips back in 2004—how time flies.) Phoronix then ran an extensive suite of benchmarks to see how the chips stack up to modern hardware. ...Read more...

Earlier this year, Microsoft promised a wireless adapter for those using Xbox One controllers on the PC. We now know a couple more things about it thanks to the company's latest Xbox news flash. The dongle will cost $25, and it's expected to arrive in the fall. Here's the finished product: ...Read more...

As users of 8GB and 16GB iDevices can surely tell you, installed app sizes have been ballooning over the years. That's because an app's installer has to include all of the possible variations of executables and assets for different models of iPhones and iPads, like Retina and non-Retina graphics. Despite going unused, those extra assets take up precious space.That's all changing in iOS 9. With App Thinning , developers will ...Read more...

LG's 27MU67 monitor quietly appeared on the firm's Australian site last month, promising FreeSync goodness from a 4K IPS panel. Today, the display was formally introduced in the U.S. The 27-incher is headed to Amazon, Fry's, Micro Center, and B&H later this month for $599. ...Read more...

Here's some news that should make gamers 30 and older very happy—and leave younger ones wondering what all the fuss is about. Wargaming, the company behind the World of Tanks MMO, has announced a remake of Master of Orion, the game that almost single-handedly wrote the book on the 4X sci-fi strategy genre....Read more...

HGST first revealed its 10TB cold storage drive back in September. The 3.5" mechanical unit combines helium-filled internals with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to hit a new capacity milestone, and it's finally ready for prime time. Customers will start getting production drives in a couple of weeks. The Ultrastar Archive Ha won't be available through conventional channels, so don't expect it to hit online retailers. HGST's host-managed SMR implementation requires substantial customization on the software side.SMR crams more data onto the platters by overlapping the individual tracks like rows of shingles on a roof. This layering is typically managed by the drive, without host-level intervention. That approach ...Read more...

A major selling point of the iPad over smartphones is its more expansive screen, but iOS has only allowed one app to run at a time on the bigger display—at least, until now. With iOS 9, iPad owners will be able to run multiple apps at once using several new multitasking views unveiled by Apple today at WWDC. ...Read more...

iOS 9 is coming, and major changes are coming with it. In an apparent answer to Google Now, iOS 9 will include some contextual awareness features in Siri and a new Search view on the home screen.Broadly, iOS 9 will be able to use information about how, where, and when you use your device in order to respond in the right way at the right time. For example, if you're a regular runner and ...Read more...

At its WWDC keynote today, Apple introduced the next version of OS X, bringing another slice of California to Mac users everywhere. It's called El Capitan, and though it doesn't bring any earth-shattering changes to the user interface, there is one major new feature that Mac gamers and professional users may appreciate: the Metal low-overhead graphics API from iOS is now available on Macs. ...Read more...

AT&T has announced that the ruggedized Active version of Samsung's Galaxy S6 flagship will be available exclusively on its network. The specs suggest this new Active variant isn't a big departure from the base model, which isn't at all a bad thing.

During last week's deluge of Computex news, I somehow missed that Lego is developing a PC game that looks very similar to Minecraft. Lego Worlds is billed as a "fully open-world, creativity-driven game." It offers procedurally generated worlds filled with virtual bricks, beasts, and building options galore. Check out the trailer:...Read more...

Amazon sells an awful lot of PC games, and now it's making one of its own. The e-tail giant's Amazon Game Studios division is recruiting for an "ambitious new PC game project using the latest technology." There's no information on the game itself, but the job postings list openings for engineers, designers, and artists. They also include specific positions for combat and economy design. Hmmm.The Seattle-based team tasked with the PC project is already populated with folks who have worked on Half-Life 2 , Left for Dead , Halo , Thief , Gears of War ...Read more...

Batman: Arkham Knight is the latest game to hop aboard Nvidia's GameWorks bandwagon. Whatever your feelings about the program, it's hard not to be impressed by some of the goodies in this new teaser trailer, which debuted on the GeForce blog today:...Read more...

Information about AMD's upcoming 300-series Radeons has dribbled out over the past few weeks, including some official details. Now, we know a little more about an apparent R9 390X, thanks to what looks like an errant image on one of XFX's R9 290X product pages: ...Read more...

Adorama has a sweet storage deal just for TR readers. The e-tailer is offering Samsung's 850 EVO 250GB SSD along with Far Cry 4 for only $97.99 with coupon code TECHRDEALS. That's less than what Amazon, Newegg, and TigerDirect are charging for the drive on its own. Shipping is free, and there are no mail-in rebates to worry about. ...Read more...

The video of our latest TR Podcast live stream is now available on YouTube. This week, we talked about a ton of Computex news, including the release of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, G-Sync updates, Intel's desktop Broadwell, our new headline format, and AMD's Carrizo....Read more...

We've been paying close attention to Logitech's latest high-end productivity mice—the MX Master and MX Anywhere 2—since their release, and I now have these squeaky siblings in my labs for review: ...Read more...

Great news for Elite: Dangerous players: the much-awaited 1.3 update, dubbed "Powerplay," is available today. As its name implies, this update lets players influence the balance of power between the game's three main factions by undertaking missions for or against them. Previously, one could perform missions for these factions, but the outcomes didn't influence the game's larger persistent universe.All that dovetails nicely with some new mission types and better risk-reward payouts that ...Read more...

Rumors have been swirling around this one for a while, but it just became official: Intel is buying FPGA maker Altera for $16.7 billion. The official news is available via this funky joint Intel-Altera website, which says:Intel and Altera announced on June 1, 2015 that they have entered into a definitive ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Yep, Gigabyte has announced its own G1 Gaming version of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, complete with one of its signature low-profile, triple-fan coolers. ...Read more...

SanDisk seems to be making a point of cramming enormous amounts of storage into impressively tiny form factors. We saw a 200GB microSD card from the flash storage maker a couple months ago, and the trend continues with the 128GB Ultra Fit USB 3.0 flash drive released today at Computex. The Ultra Fit packs all of those bits into a device barely larger than a Type-A USB plug. Behold the 64GB version: ...Read more...

Everyone's getting in on the mini-PC game, including Asus, which unveiled a stack of new systems at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan. One of the most intriguing is the VivoPC VC65, which is based on Intel's next-gen Skylake processor. ...Read more...

Computex will be filled with products that most of us expected, but PowerColor's latest came outta nowhere. The graphics card maker is dipping into the audio business with the Devil HDX sound card. Insert your own Van Halen reference here. ...Read more...

Nvidia has released fresh WHQL-certified drivers just in time for Heroes the Storm. The 353.06 update is optimized for Blizzard's new MOBA, and it also supports the recently-unveiled Geforce GTX 980 Ti and the latest G-Sync upgrades. Support for Dynamic Super Resolution has been added for notebooks with discrete Fermi or newer GPUs, as well.In a blog post describing the new drivers, Nvidia says it fixed bugs that limited performance in The Witcher 3 , ...Read more...

Not content with the standard-issue version of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, Zotac has created not one, not two, not three, nay, not even four versions of the GTX 980 Ti, but five!Like blades on a fancy razor, Zotac has taken things ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

It's that time again. Here are the deals that popped up on my radar this morning:I've undoubtedly missed something, so feel free to add ...Read more...

We love our Star Wars here at TR, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a bit of a Trekkie, too. So, you can imagine my delight when GOG announced that three classic Star Trek games—25th Anniversary, Judgment Rites, and Starfleet Academy—are now available in its library.

Samsung is reportedly making a huge investment in its next semiconductor production facility. According to ET News, the firm plans to sink $14.3 billion into new operations in Pyeongtaek City, South Korea. This will be the biggest investment in a single semiconductor production line, the site says, adding that Samsung plans to use the plant to produce DRAM along with chips for the Internet of Things.The new installation is set to be the country's largest semiconductor production facility. It will reportedly cover over 30 million ...Read more...

Nvidia's first-quarter financial results are in. Revenue was $1.15 billlion, up four percent from the same time last year. Net income fell two percent year-over-year to $134 million, while gross margin rose 1.9 points to 56.7%. Here are the full details:In the upcoming quarter, the company will be winding down or selling off its Icera cellular modem business . If nobody steps in to buy Icera, Nvidia will incur a restructuring charge of $100-125 million at ...Read more...

Just a quick reminder: we'll be talking about the news from AMD's Analyst Day on The TR Podcast live stream tonight with special guest David Kanter of Real World Tech. The stream will start at 9:30 PM ET/6:30 PM PT. Prep is already underway... ...Read more...