Techreport

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...

Rumors are what are they are, but oftentimes there's fire to their smoke. First, there were unconfirmed reports that Gigabyte's launching a version of the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB with a GDDR5X memory upgrade. Now, our eagle-eyed reader SH SOTN spotted a change in Nvidia's spec sheets for the GTX 1060 confirming that such a product does exist. ...Read more...

It seems like Gigabyte may have been saving some of its best gear for last. The company announced its Z390 wares a little while ago, but it's only now pulled the wraps off the Z390 Aorus Extreme. This E-ATX platter appears to be the fanciest Z390 motherboard we've seen from the company. It comes with virtually all the gear that any builder could desire in a gaming motherboard, and perhaps even a few things they didn't know they wanted. ...Read more...

That reminds me, I need to pick up some milk.

Three spoons of flu. A dash of car unavailability due to repairs. A couple buckets of mysterious Windows installation automation issues. Bureaucracy to taste. A couple well-placed pinches of software that works differently across machines for no good reason. Two glasses of bad luck. Add all that together with some gravy, and you have the recipe of what's going on in the TR labs during our time reviewing the Core i9-9900K and its school buddies. But no matter, there ain't no rest for the wicked, and the only thing that's making us happy right now is seeing low price tags on fancy hardware. Here's what we dug up. ...Read more...

Samsung announced yesterday evening that its 7-nm Low Power Plus (LPP) process technology is ready to roll. The company says it has completed development of that next-generation process technology and is now turning out production wafers with it. That milestone is remarkable because 7-nm LPP is the only process technology in the world so far to use extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV, tools to inscribe features on silicon. Samsung's adoption of the technology is especially ambitious because the company is using it for critical layers in the stack of elements that go into a modern chip, not just for low-risk features like contacts and vias (as GlobalFoundries had planned to do before it abandoned 7-nm development entirely).

NVMe drives used to be bits of kit reserved for the elite, but over the last couple years, we've seen the introduction of multiple entrants in the space promising speeds far higher than those attainable by SATA devices, yet priced competitively enough so that even Aunt Ginny can have one for her Facebork-and-Instacat machine. Crucial, Micron's consumer brand, just released its P1 solid-state drives aimed exactly at this market. Let's dig in. ...Read more...

AMD's own in-the-box heatsink bracket for Threadripper CPUs might encourage builders with those chips to go with a liquid cooler, but a growing number of air-cooled options for those chips means that the liquid-cooler mounting ring can stay in the box. be quiet!'s Dark Rock Pro TR4 appears set to give Threadripper builders another massive and classy air-cooling option for their Socket TR4 chips. ...Read more...

Wait, two Portuguese dictionaries in some random stock image... Anything to confess, Bruno?

The price drops on solid-state drives in the past couple months has turned them into hot commodities. Everyone and their dog wants a piece of this market's pie, and Corsair's among the companies ready to pounce. The folks with funny ships are showing off their Force Series MP510 SSDs, fresh off the production line. The drives look like they're speedy enough and competitively priced. ...Read more...

Portugal's not a place that sees much in the way of seriously nasty weather. People around here just aren't used to more than the occasional flood. That's why Hurricane Leslie came in with a bang and got everyone in a tizzy. Thankfully, my area wasn't all that affected save for the occasional fallen tree and a few hours without power. Certain areas in the country weren't so lucky, but even so, the country saw only light damage compared to something like Hurricane Michael. Anyway, my ability to hunt down hardware deals remains unaffected, and so shall I provide. Take a look at today's picks. ...Read more...

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card launches this morning. First, the bad news: we don't have an RTX 2070 in the TR labs for testing. We're working to obtain one of those cards as soon as we can to review in depth, but my test bench (and attention) is presently occupied by Intel's Core i9-9900K and a raft of other CPUs. Stay tuned for more details on those chips soon.

We usually talk up heavy-duty keyboards with metal chassis that are probably heavy and durable enough to use as an impromptu murder weapon. Not every single key clacker needs that much endurance, though, and heirloom quality and durability don't necessarily come cheap. For those who just want a decent, stylish keyboard for not a lot of scratch, HyperX has the Alloy Core RGB. ...Read more...

There's wide, there's ultrawide, and then there's Dell's Ultrasharp 49 display, a 49", 5120x1440 beast that puts the equivalent of two 2560x1440 monitors in one expansive, curved screen. Dell uses an IPS panel with a 60-Hz refresh rate and a 5-ms response time in its "fast" mode, so it's no surprise that the company is targeting this display at productivity tasks where information density is paramount. ...Read more...

Intel's Z390 chipset is here, and while it isn't a revolutionary change for the enthusiast desktop PC, it adds two major new features: provisions for as many as six USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports from the chipset and the brains to control Intel's Integrated Connectivity (or CNVi) Wi-Fi modules. Presuming one has the router to support it and one's motherboard maker chooses Intel's highest-end Wireless-AC 9560 RF module, Z390 motherboards can wirelessly network at speeds upward of a gigabit per second in ideal conditions.Our first Z390 motherboard in the TR labs is Gigabyte's Z390 Aorus Master . This is the second-highest-end board ...Read more...

Nvidia graphics card owners aren't the only gamers getting software updates this morning. Radeon Software 18.10.1 is here, and it offers slight but welcome improvements for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 performance. RX Vega 64 owners will see as much as 5% more performance at 1920x1080 versus Radeon Software 18.9.3 with the new update, and RX 580 gamers will get up to 6% better average frame rates at 1920x1080 versus the last Radeon Software release. 18.10.1 is also the first Radeon Software release that's compatible with the Windows 10 October Update. ...Read more...

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is here, and Nvidia is giving GeForce gamers a supply drop with version 416.34 of its Game Ready drivers. The green team is also delivering refinements for players of the upcoming combat-racer Grip and of Soulcalibur VI, the first title in the long-running franchise to reach the PC.

Razer's Blade family has proven itself a popular choice among buyers of high-end laptops, and the company wants to make some of its highest-performing notebooks more accessible with two new options for the Blade 15. To make that happen, the company is moving to single-zone Chroma backlighting on its duo of new configurations and leaning on mechanical bulk storage alongside small M.2 SSDs for important files.A new $1599 model will offer a 128-GB-SSD-plus-1-TB-hard-drive config that uses a SATA gumstick plus a 5400-RPM mechanical drive, while a ...Read more...

Close enough.

Intel is refreshing its Core X-series CPUs with higher performance potential and solder TIM, and Asus is getting ready for those chips with its Prime X299-Deluxe II motherboard. This mobo drops support for Intel's late Kaby Lake-X CPUs and wisely focuses on making the most of Skylake-X parts. ...Read more...

Greetings, good fellows. 'Tis a calm and relatively quiet day at the TR HQ, but there's brewing going on. Jeff's just ordered some fancy espresso cups to use as props for taking good shots with the Intel Core i9-9900K for our upcoming review. You gotta love a man's devotion to his coffee craft. In the meantime, I've come up with today's selection of hardware deals. Today's selection hits that mid-range spot just fine. ...Read more...

Razer proved it was serious about phones with its first , and the company is keeping the concept sharp with the Razer Phone 2. The updated device keeps the 120-Hz refresh rate and 120-Hz touch sampling that made waves on the first Razer Phone, and that display now gets pixels courtesy of the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC. ...Read more...

In the famous words of Homer Simpson, "doh!" That's probably the expletive most heard at Microsoft this past Saturday, when the company was forced to temporarily pull the Windows 10 October 2018 update due to a serious data-eating bug that would make users' documents vanish in a puff of bytes. The company has now identified the root cause of the problem and has since issued a fixed version of the update for Windows Insiders. The Windows blog also now has a detailed explanation of the issue up. ...Read more...

Google showed off a handful of new hardware today, and the headline act was the long-rumored and much-leaked Pixel 3 duo of phones. Judging by the presentation, you could be forgiven for thinking that all the focus was on the Pixel 3's software. We'll be taking a good look at the handset's hardware first, though. ...Read more...

Yesterday's launch of the Z390 chipset and new ninth-generation Core CPUs was met with a flurry of motherboard announcements. We covered boards from Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI, and now it's time for ASRock. The company has a full twelve boards ready to go for the Z390 platform. Let's take a look at them, starting from the top with the Z390 Taichi Ultimate. ...Read more...

That proves it!

How are you doing, folks? I'm sure that by now you've evaluated Intel's ninth-generation Core lineup and are probably doing the math for an upgrade. Have no fear, TR will be here to let you know whether the new chips are worth it. In the meantime, there's good deals to be had. We hunted high and low for these, check them out. ...Read more...

Along with its refreshed Coffee Lake chips, Intel announced an update to its Skylake-X CPUs for the X299 platform yesterday morning. While the underlying architecture of these parts is the same as the first round of Core i7 and Core i9 CPUs for the platform, quite a bit has changed in the way Intel manufactures and packages those CPUs.As with Intel's unlocked mainstream desktop parts, one of the loudest complaints about Skylake-X CPUs regarded the effectiveness of the paste-type thermal interface material the company began using in lieu of solder on its first run of those chips. Indeed, we've rarely found ourselves limited by the underlying silicon when overclocking our Skylake-X CPUs—the wall has ...Read more...

The are some people that think that bigger is always better, or simply that more is more. G.Skill clearly employs folks who abide by that ethos, as evidenced by its 64-GB Trident Z RGB DC dual-channel kits. The memory maker says it's worked with Asus to develop a "customized PCB solution" that lets it produce high-speed 32-GB DDR4 modules using existing DRAM packages—in this case, 32 chips with 1 GB (8 Gb) of capacity apiece.The sticks are taller than your standard DIMMs, but otherwise look like ye olde Trident Z RGB modules. The idea is to ...Read more...

A new motherboard party wouldn't be complete without Asus, and the company has no less than sixteen new motherboards to show off. From the glorious excess of the Maximus XI Extreme to the workstation-focused WS Z390 Pro down to the mainstream Prime Z390-P, Asus probably has a board that'll suffice for anyone building around an Intel ninth-gen CPU. Without further ado, let's take a peek. ...Read more...

We were a bit let down when we found out that the supposedly range-topping Z370 chipset had missed out on some of the fancy new features in the H370, B360, and H310 chipsets. If you feel the same way, then you'll be delighted to hear that Intel's new Z390 chipset packs in all of those features, including native USB 3.1 Gen 2 and CNVi Wi-Fi support. A new chipset means new motherboards, and MSI is leading the charge with a grand total of ten boards for you to plant eighth- and ninth-gen Intel CPUs on.Dedicated MSI fans are probably the only ones who will recall that MSI segments its gaming boards into "Enthusiast," "Performance," and "Arsenal" families. That's still true, but using full words is apparently way too old-school for MSI. Instead, the company ...Read more...

Gigabyte is cooking up a whole batch of Z390 motherboards in its Aorus, Gaming, UD, and Designare ranges. Right now, we're going to take a good look at the Aorus lineup, from the most-featured models down to the barest. The absolute highest-end models in the Z390 Aorus range are the Xtreme and Xtreme Waterforce, but there's very little information about them just yet. We do have the skinny on the core of the Aorus lineup—namely, the Master, Ultra, Pro, and Elite variants. Let's get started.The company says its goal for the boards in its falcon-themed series was to let ninth-gen CPUs with unlocked multipliers achieve 5-GHz clock speeds "without any VRM concerns." Gigabyte goes on to say that the VRM setups in the lineup run 5-10° C cooler than those of its competitors, both with and without heatsinks. The higher-end Aorus boards have fin-stack heatsinks with heatpipes underneath ...Read more...

At its Performance Unleashed event this morning, Intel announced three new product families. For most PC builders and enthusiasts, the trio of ninth-generation CPUs for Intel's 300-series LGA 1151 platforms will likely be of most interest.The long-rumored and long-leaked Core i9-9900K is Intel's first 5-GHz CPU to ship in volume, and it'll bring eight Skylake cores and 16 threads to Z370 and Z390 motherboards. The ninth generation of Core desktop CPUs also marks the long-requested return of solder ...Read more...

At its Performance Unleashed event this morning, Intel announced three new product families. For most PC builders and enthusiasts, the trio of ninth-generation CPUs for Intel's 300-series LGA 1151 platforms will likely be of the greatest interest.The long-rumored and long-leaked Core i9-9900K is Intel's first 5-GHz CPU to ship in volume, and it'll bring eight Skylake cores and 16 threads to Z370 and Z390 motherboards. The ninth generation of Core desktop CPUs also marks the long-requested return of ...Read more...