Techreport

Hey, folks. As it's turkey day in the United States, we won't be publishing today. The Tech Report staff would like to wish you and yours a happy Thanksgiving, and if you're not in the US of A, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming come tomorrow. ...Read more...

Topre's Realforce and PFU's Happy Hacking keyboards enjoy near-mythical status among keyboard enthusiasts thanks to their unique capacitative key switches, but those products apparently haven't had an official importer in the United States—at least, until now. Fujitsu Computer Products of America, the venerable Japanese firm's stars-and-stripes arm, is bringing these boards to our shores under its own banner soon. ...Read more...

Battlefield V's performance with Nvidia's RTX effects enabled has sparked plenty of heated discussion about the merits of the technology over the past few days. If you're still on the fence about the potential of Turing cards' hybrid approach for ray-tracing and rasterization, the green team is making it easier to see for yourself just how well the tech works. ...Read more...

Mornin'. Black Friday is almost here, and we're going to dispense with the usual pleasantries. After all, you know what the deal is around here—just the finest hardware discounts for you. Here are today's picks. ...Read more...

We often call RGB LED-bedecked hardware "blingy," but few PC hardware companies have pursued that style as literally as G.Skill has for its Trident Z Royal RGB LED memory. ...Read more...

Can you feel it? There's tension in the air, like a massive coiled spring ready to pop in a flash. Black Friday is coming up, and everyone's credits card are preemptively attending PTSD support groups. There's a ton of computer hardware deals already on the air, and we've picked out the best for you. Three days out to Black Friday, and stuff is already looking this good. Check'em out. ...Read more...

Obviously, this needs no explanation.

Radeon cards may not be tracing rays in Battlefield V, but they can still benefit from even more software refinement for the game ahead of its release to the general public tomorrow. Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.11.2 is reporting for that duty, and it apparently builds on the Battlefield V support that rolled out in version 18.11.1. ...Read more...

Razer needs no introduction for its gamer gear, but RGB LED-bedecked hardware isn't going to fly in every setting. For folks who want the feel of Razer keys under their fingers without advertising that fact to the world, the company has just the thing. The Blackwidow Lite keyboard uses Razer Orange keyswitches for tactile but quiet operation, and it wraps those switches up in a discreet-looking tenkeyless board with an aluminum top plate and single-color white backlighting. ...Read more...

Nvidia reported its financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2019 today. The company brought in revenue of $3.18 billion, up 21% from this time last year, and operating income of $1.06 billion, up 18% from a year ago. The company also posted net income of $1.23 billion, up 47% from a year ago, and diluted earnings per share of $1.97, up 48% from this time in 2017. Gross margin rang in at 60.4%, up 0.9 percentage points from this time last year. The company's stock fell about 16% in after-hours trading on those numbers, thanks to a miss on Wall Street analyst estimates.Nvidia unsurprisingly continues to make the lion's share of its revenue from its GPUs. Across all of its GPU-related businesses, the company brought in $2.77 billion in revenue, up 25% from a year ...Read more...

Technically, they're in a freezer, but I do need to talk to my sister about getting her corpses out of my garage.

Mmmm, I love the smell of fresh graphics cards in the morning. Unless your accommodations reside underneath a boulder, you're probably aware that the Radeon RX 590 has been released. We took a long, hard look at the card, and it got a TR Recommended award. Its price could be just a hair more inviting, but there's always the chance that the winds of discounts will soothe that particular itch. In the meantime, Black Friday is coming up, and the deals are ever-flowing. Check out today's selection. ...Read more...

Along with the arrival of Intel's refreshed Core X CPUs, a number of motherboard makers are releasing refreshed motherboards to help take those chips to their limits. Asus' Prime X299-Deluxe II is one such example of the fresh class of X299 boards hitting the market, and the company has sent over an example of that mobo to let us play with. Behold: ...Read more...

Vega Mobile lives, and we now know just how much it'll cost for the privilege of adding Radeon Pro Vega 16 or Radeon Pro Vega 20 power to Apple's MacBook Pros. The company has updated the listing for its highest-end portable system to include those graphics options, as spotted by The Verge. ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of the 416.81 release, Nvidia just pushed a new graphics driver out, with good reason. The 416.94 release is WHQL-certified and ready for Battlefield V, Fallout 76, and Hitman 2. There's a related bit of news regarding Battlefield V that's actually of bigger import, though: the game now has Nvidia RTX effects enabled for those lucky enough to own one of the green team's GeForce RTX cards. This also pins Battlefield V as the first-ever widely-available game with those ray-tracing effects, so write that one down in the history books....Read more...

As the debut of Turing on board Quadro RTX 8000, RTX 6000, and RTX 5000 cards proved, gaming isn't the only area where a blend of real-time ray tracing and rasterization could prove handy. Nvidia is expanding the range of Turing products for rendering and visualization pros with the more attainable Quadro RTX 4000. This card sports a fully enabled TU106 GPU with 2304 shader ALUs, 288 Turing tensor cores, and 36 RT cores. Pro-viz users can harness those real-time ray-tracing resources using Nvidia's OptiX API, as well as the DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) and Vulkan APIs. ...Read more...

Be kind, feline.

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."