The Tech Report

Howdy, folks. We're short on time for pleasantries today, but you'll be fine. After all, you have a review to read—that of the Intel Core i9-9980XE. That's one big, seriously fast chip. Before you head out, though, grab your credit card and take a look at the selection of deals we have today. ...Read more...

Intel is shaking up its plans for its rollout of 5G modems today. Just under a year ago, the company took the wraps off its XMM 8060 modem. The XMM 8060 promised support for the 5G New Radio (5G NR) standard in both Standalone (SA) and Non-Standalone (NSA) forms, as well as backward compatibility with 2G, 3G (including CDMA), and 4G networks. Today, the company announced that it plans to pull in the launch of its new XMM 8160 modem to the second half of 2019, or by more than six months, according to its press release. The XMM 8160 claims support for 5G speeds of up to 6 Gbps. ...Read more...

Das Keyboard made its name with no-nonsense mechanical clickers whose quality could be felt with every key stroke, but a wide range of modern high-end keyboards make mechanical switches table stakes. The company has since introduced the Q software platform for lighting control and web-powered intelligent notifications, and the classic Das Keyboard 4 Professional design now boasts compatibility with that utility. ...Read more...

Wireless VR adapters exist for those who want to cut the cord, but not every headset has one of those transceivers available. For those who still want to dump the fixed umbilical, Zotac has upgraded its VR Go backpack PC. Version 2.0 of the concept gets some new guts and an upgraded harness design that claims to hold the system further away from the wearer's body for better cooling performance. ...Read more...

Not to be left behind by the green team, AMD has its own set of fresh drivers for the upcoming release of Battlefield V. With Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.11.1, AMD claims gamers will enjoy up to 8% faster performance in BFV compared to the Radeon Software 18.10.2 release with the RX Vega 64 at 1920x1080, and Radeon RX 580 8 GB users will enjoy up to 9% higher performance under the same conditions. In absolute terms, the company observed 142.6 FPS on average from the RX Vega 64 using BFV's ultra preset, while the RX 580 delivered 91.1 FPS using the latest driver. ...Read more...

Complex computation consumes copious CPU cycles.

Howdy, gerbils. The TR labs are humming with activity behind the scenes, but that's not all that's happening. Black Friday is coming up fast, and deals at every e-tailer are heating up. Right now it's a mild boil, but as always, we picked out the best pieces for you. It's a long one today, so get a cup of tea and your credit card. ...Read more...

The Windows 10 October Update remains a massive missing piece in Nvidia's RTX software stack, but you have to go to war with the army you have, and Battlefield V is set to arrive to the general public on November 20. Origin Access Premier subscribers will be able to take the field starting tomorrow, though, and that means it's time for a fresh GeForce driver. Version 416.81 gets GeForce gamers ready for Battlefield V, although the release makes no notes about when GeForce RTX owners should expect to be able to fire up their cards' RT cores.

Rumors of a Samsung smartphone with a foldable display have been rampant of late, and the company confirmed that it's working on such a device at the Samsung Developer Conference this afternoon. The so-called Infinity Flex display made its debut in a "pocket-sized smartphone" that can fold open to reveal a 7.3" display—just a bit short of the diagonal of other small tablets like the iPad mini 4. The company's prototype device also has a screen on one of its outer faces for use when the full-size internal display isn't needed or practical. ...Read more...

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets often come with enough RAM to rival desktop PCs these days, but capacity isn't the sole measure of performance by any stretch. Mobile data rates are poised to skyrocket with 5G connectivity, and the applications that connectivity could enable may prove more and more demanding on devices' memory subsystems. Even today, imaging subsystems and AI workloads demand high-performance memory hierarchies. ...Read more...

Alongside a preview of its first 7-nm Epyc CPUs built with the Zen 2 microarchitecture, AMD debuted its first 7-nm data-center graphics-processing units today. The Radeon Instinct MI50 and Radeon Instinct MI60 take advantage of a new 7-nm GPU built with the Vega architecture to crunch through tomorrow's high-performance computing, deep learning, cloud computing, and virtualized desktop applications. ...Read more...

I knew there'd be an image of someone playing one under a bridge.

At its Next Horizon event today, AMD gave us our first look at the Zen 2 microarchitecture. As one of AMD's first 7-nm products, Zen 2 will be making its debut on board the company's next-generation Epyc CPUs, code-named Rome.According to AMD CTO Mark Papermaster , TSMC's 7-nm process offers twice the density of GlobalFoundries' 14-nm FinFET process. It can deliver ...Read more...

A fair day to you, gerbils. Long have I enjoyed in jokes about constipation. I am not laughing anymore after having experienced serious bloatedness for the first time. All is slightly better in the world now, though, and I can finally wear a belt without major discomfort. None of that is an excuse for missing out on hardware deals, though. Here are today's top picks. ...Read more...

If you've always wanted a Corsair-powered PC of your very own but don't know where to begin, help is on the way. The company is launching a line of prebuilt PCs under its Vengeance banner, and the first of the line is the Vengeance 5180. ...Read more...

As traditional silicon scaling has stopped paying dividends for flash-storage density, NAND makers have packed more and more bits into their flash packages by layering more and more sheets of flash memory on top of one another. Today, SK Hynix is joining the elite 96-layer club with its "CTF-based 4D NAND flash." While that "4D" descriptor is purely fluff, the company is in fact producing many-layered charge-trap NAND (as opposed to the floating-gate tech favored by Intel and Micron). Those 96-layer stacks allow the company to pack 512 Gb (64 GB) of TLC flash into a single memory chip. ...Read more...

Some builders want high-end motherboards without a layer of gamer bling on top, and for those folks, Gigabyte has its Designare series. While these boards are ostensibly for creative pros, their understated looks and high-quality parts make them a good fit for any high-performance build. The company has just applied this treatment to the Z390 chipset with its Z390 Designare. ...Read more...

After taking a little over a year to think on it, Intel appears to have decided that glue can be pretty Epyc after all. The company teased plans for a new Xeon platform called Cascade Lake Advanced Performance, or Cascade Lake-AP, this morning ahead of the Supercomputing 2018 conference. This next-gen platform doubles the cores per socket from an Intel system by joining a number of Cascade Lake Xeon dies together on a single package with the blue team's Ultra Path Interconnect, or UPI. Intel will allow Cascade Lake-AP servers to employ up to two-socket (2S) topologies, for as many as 96 cores per server. ...Read more...

After taking a little over a year to think on it, Intel appears to have decided that glue can be pretty Epyc after all. The company teased plans for a new Xeon platform called Cascade Lake Advanced Performance, or Cascade Lake-AP, this morning ahead of the Supercomputing 2018 conference. This next-gen platform doubles the cores per socket from an Intel system by joining a number of Cascade Lake Xeon dies together on a single package with the blue team's Ultra Path Interconnect, or UPI. Intel will allow Cascade Lake-AP servers to employ up to two-socket (2S) topologies, for as many as 96 cores per server. ...Read more...

A new AMD event has appeared on the company's investor relations website, as spotted by the eagle eyes at Anandtech. The company will be holding an event it calls "Next Horizon" on November 6. Although no details of this event accompany its page on the investor relations site, the "Horizon" name has some historical portent for past AMD events. The "New Horizon" presentation in December 2016 proved one of the more public demonstrations of the Zen architecture ahead of the chip's launch the following March, and it was the place where AMD revealed the Ryzen nameplate for its enthusiast CPUs with Zen silicon inside.With that historical precedent in mind, AMD could be poised to reveal some details of the next architectural revision on its roadmap, code-named Zen 2. We could also learn more about the company's other 7-nm products, like the next-generation Radeon Instinct GPU the company has been teasing for some time. According to the earnings call transcript ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Howdy, folks. It's the day after the first gig in my life, handling bass duties with my band Wicked. I'm overtired, but happy because I survived it somehow without looking too bad (by most accounts, anyway). At least I can safely say it was my best gig ever. Metal was played, everything was loud, and it's all good in the world. There ain't no rest for Wicked, though, and today it's deals day. Here's today's set of picks. ...Read more...

Corsair's H100i Pro, H115i Pro, and H150i Pro liquid coolers have impressed us in the TR labs with consistently award-winning performance, but their one-color LED pump heads and non-illuminated fans might leave some thinking there's not enough RGB LEDs to go around. Corsair is rectifying that fact this morning with two new closed-loop liquid coolers. The H100i RGB Platinum and H115i RGB Platinum boast rings of 16 addressable RGB LEDs on the pump head plus four multicolored diodes in each of their fan hubs to bring a full range of effects and animations from Corsair's iCUE software to life.

TR's test labs are awash in the latest and greatest CPUs and graphics cards, but our ability to provide a frame of reference past Sandy Bridge CPUs is a little fuzzy. My P965 Express motherboard fell to a botched firmware update years ago, and I had stretched that Core 2 Duo E6400-powered system out for the better part of seven years before I hopped on board the Haswell train. Plenty of stuff happened in the intervening time, of course, and holdout enthusiasts with chips from the Nehalem era might want to see how their hardware is holding up.Problem is, chips from that era are cheap, but contemporary motherboards still demand a pretty penny—often hundreds of dollars. It's hard to justify spending real money on those historical platforms out of curiosity alone. TR BBQ host and ...Read more...

Intel's X299 platform offers a maximum of 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes from its accompanying CPUs, but even that might not be enough for the most demanding builders. Enter Gigabyte's X299-WU8 motherboard. This mobo uses not one, but two eye-wateringly expensive Broadcom PEX 8747 PCIe switches under its chipset heatsink to provide all four of its main PCIe 3.0 slots with 16 lanes of connectivity. If you just need to run a lot of single-slot cards, the WU8 can oblige with 16 lanes on its first slot and eight lanes to each of the remaining six PCIe slots on the board. ...Read more...

Nastiest stuff ever. Someday, I'll get around to trying Alton Brown's version, though.

Jeff took a look at Corsair's updated K70 RGB Rapidfire gaming keyboard earlier this year, but Corsair isn't done building on its K70 platform. The company recently announced that it has partnered with Cherry to bring the world the first keyboard with Cherry's new Low Profile (LP) switches. Corsair was kind enough to send one of these bad boys our way to test out. ...Read more...

Brrrr. The cold front has hit the country like a sledgehammer, bringing with it a sharply-worded reminder of "ohai, autumn." I've started to long for warm beverages instead of cold refreshments, and I'm glad that I invested in some decent Michelin tires for the pouring rain. At least it's nice weather for sitting in the office with a mug and the heat on, hunting down hardware deals. Here's today's catch. ...Read more...

Apple finally updated one of its most-loved and most-neglected notebooks this morning. The latest MacBook Air gives fans of this iconic machine everything they've been asking for over many years: a Retina display, Touch ID, and a body that's 17% less voluminous and a quarter-pound lighter than its predecessor. ...Read more...

Not content with upgrading the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air (more on that shortly), Apple put its iPad Pros under the knife and gave them the upgrade treatment this morning.At least style-wise, the new iPad Pros are a significant departure from the previous-generation models. The chassis has iPhone 5-like straight edges all around, and the company ditched the home button for an iPhone X-like gesture-style interface. As a ...Read more...

Today's Apple event is ongoing as we speak, and the company is releasing a slate of new Mac and iPad products. One of them is a spankin' new Mac Mini with fully revamped internals. The existing model was so long in the tooth as to be considered borderline irrelevant, but the upgraded machine might make up for it by packing quite the punch inside its slim dimensions. ...Read more...

Apple's event in New York City is ongoing as I write this, and a new MacBook Air and a new Mac Mini have both debuted. We'll be covering those as soon as we can, but I wanted to specifically point out an interesting tidbit of news that might have passed by in an instant on stage. In its press release for the new MacBook Air, the company also noted that some form of Radeon Pro Vega graphics processor is coming to its MacBook Pros as an option "next month." ...Read more...

Apple's event in New York City is ongoing as I write this, and a new MacBook Air and a new Mac Mini have both debuted. We'll be covering those as soon as we can, but I wanted to specifically point out an interesting tidbit of news that might have passed by in an instant on stage. In its press release for the new MacBook Air, the company also noted that some form of Radeon Pro Vega graphics processor is coming to its MacBook Pros as an option "next month."

Chances are you think of gaming laptops as outwardly burly but ultimately frail machines. If you're looking to game on the go but you're concerned about durability, perhaps you'd be best served by the newest notebooks in Asus' TUF Gaming family.

It's new phone day, courtesy of the fine folks at OnePlus. The OnePlus 6T handset has now broken cover, and as its name implies, it should prove a capable iteration on the already-impressive OnePlus 6 released last May. Let's dig in and see how much of an evolution the newcomer is. ...Read more...

Nvidia board partner Palit hasn't sold graphics cards in the United States for some time, but that doesn't mean it can't help us make sense of unannounced products from the green team. The company has posted a product page for a "GeForce GTX 1060 GamingPro OC." Like the Gigabyte card we covered yesterday, this card comes bearing 6 GB of GDDR5X memory. ...Read more...

Rumors of a GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB card with GDDR5X memory on board have popped up in the past couple of days, and now Gigabyte has revealed an actual product bearing that high-speed graphics RAM. The GTX 1060 G1 Gaming D5X 6G indeed purports to offer 6 GB of GDDR5X memory on a 192-bit bus. Quite unlike the average GTX 1060 6 GB, this card has a large triple-fan cooler and an eight-pin power plug. The mysteries only begin there, however. ...Read more...

The Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. begins October 30 on the PC, and AMD is ready with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.10.2. Developer Bethesda promises "spectacular issues" and "unforeseen bugs" with its online multiplayer take on Fallout, but hopefully AMD's drivers will keep the problems isolated to those in the game itself. ...Read more...

Intel's third-quarter 2018 earnings are out. The company had a smashing quarter, bringing in $19.2 billion in revenue for a 19% year-on-year increase. On that haul, the company made $7.3 billion in operating income, up 43% on the year. Net income was $6.4 billion, up 42% from this time a year ago. Gross margin was 64.5%, up 2.2 percentage points. Earnings per share were $1.38, up 47% on the year.The blue team reported record quarterly revenue across all of its divisions. The Client Computing Group brought in $10.2 billion in revenue, up 16% on the year, and made $4.5 billion in operating income, ...Read more...

Everybody likes a mechanical keyboard, but not everybody might like the tall keycaps and long travel of Cherry key switches in an age where short-stroke laptop keyboards reign. Enter Corsair's K70 RGB MK. 2 Low Profile keyboard. The company's latest gaming deck uses new Cherry key switches to shave 11 mm off the height of its regular Cherry MX keyboards, from 40 mm to 29 mm. ...Read more...

Howdy, folks. It's pretty quiet around here because Jeff's working on a piece that you gerbils should find quite interesting. Remember the ever-so-mighty Core i7-5775C processor and its 128 MB of on-package eDRAM? That chip displayed some serious gaming chops back when we took a look at it, and it's become one of the gerbil army's favorite conversation pieces since then. We're taking a second look at it three years down the road and wondering if it's still as good a machine as it was made out to be. The answer may well surprise you. In the meantime, take a good look at the deals selection we have picked out. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

AMD reported its earnings for the third quarter of 2018 today. The company took in revenue of $1.65 billion during the quarter, up 4% on the year, and operating income of $150 million, up 26% on the year. Gross margin rose to 40%, up four percentage points from this time last year, and net income grew to $102 million, up 67%.The Computing and Graphics business took in $938 million in revenue, up 12% year-on-year. The company said it enjoyed strong sales of its Ryzen desktop and mobile products, but that graphics revenue weakened from this time last year—almost certainly because of ...Read more...

In a bit of PC hardware media news, PC Perspective head honcho Ryan Shrout has announced that he is leaving his role as owner and Editor-in-Chief of that site to join Intel as its chief performance strategist. Shrout says that "in this capacity, [he] will help influence and drive performance leadership across Intel's product portfolio."Shrout founded PC Perspective as K7M.com in 1999 and proceeded to grow it into one of the leading independent voices in the space, and among his ...Read more...

Qualcomm released its first practical 5G RF module earlier this year in the form of the QTM052, but the company apparently wasn't done shrinking those modules to sizes usable in today's razor-thin smartphone designs. The company has added a smaller version of the QTM052 to its family of RF modules, and the further-shrunken version cuts the size of the original module by 25%. Qualcomm says the size reduction of the latest QTM052 module gives handset OEMs more options for antenna placement, and by extension, more flexibility as they develop the first 5G handsets for release in the next couple of years.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 is here, and a wave of partner cards has broken with it. We sadly didn't get an RTX 2070 to review ahead of the card's launch, but Gigabyte has kindly shipped over one of its GeForce RTX 2070 Gaming OC 8G cards for us to play with. I've just pulled the Gaming OC 8G out of the box, and it looks like a fine take on Nvidia's most accessible Turing card so far. ...Read more...

Hello, folks. There's something cooking in the TR labs. Maybe it's Jeff's coffee or one of the slabs of roasted meat he occasionally posts pictures of to make the staff's mouths water and annoy them even more. Maybe it's new hardware. Who knows. In the meantime, all we can reveal is today's selection of deals. Check out what we have in store. ...Read more...

It's a unit of SI, not this little guy, that's a mole day.

A bombshell report from Charlie Demerjian at SemiAccurate this morning claims that Intel has stopped work on its long-delayed and long-beleaguered 10-nm production process. SemiAccurate is presently down, but the report was apparently troublesome enough that Intel felt the need to weigh in on Demerjian's claims by way of its official Twitter account.For its part, the company says that 10-nm is alive (if not yet well). The company's tweet asserts that "[w]e are making good progress on 10nm. Yields are improving consistent ...Read more...

Samsung's HMD Odyssey Windows Mixed Reality headset was already among the highest-end of its type, and the company is refining that head-mounted device with the Odyssey+. Most notably, this pair of goggles includes a technology that Samsung calls an Anti-Screen Door Effect Display. ...Read more...