Techreport

Acer's Predator X27 gives games the full G-Sync HDR treatment, but its $2000 price tag puts it out of reach of all but the most dedicated videophile gamers. The company is making high refresh rates and 4K gaming a little more accessible today at the IFA trade show with its XB273K display. This 27" screen boasts a 3840x2160 resolution and a maximum refresh rate of 144 Hz, but its HDR star dims to DisplayHDR 400 standards. It's still compatible with Nvidia's G-Sync variable-refresh-rate tech for a tear-free gaming experience. ...Read more...

Alas, no good images of Tae Bo could be found.

Phanteks' Enthoo Evolv chassis has become an iconic tower for Mini-ITX, microATX, and ATX builders alike, and the company is letting this design breathe easier with its Evolv X. This case's front panel has deeper cutouts and sits further away from the fans behind it compared to earlier Evolvs. The Evolv X also has full-length mesh vents on its top panel to allow waste heat to escape, compared to the rather tiny slots on earlier iterations of the design. ...Read more...

There's a small cloud of dust in the distance, just above the desert sun and the slowly-rolling balls of tumbleweed. A dark shape in the cloud resolves to a figure with a sombrero and a poncho, astride a racing burro and armed to the teeth. El Dealino is back in town, and with a flourish he opens his poncho and reveals a collection of cut price tags. Ladies swoon and keel over. Dogs bark and end up at his feet. The deals fly all over town. ...Read more...

AMD has released the latest version of its Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition drivers. Version 18.8.2 is optimized for Strange Brigade—one of the titles Radeon buyers will currently get for free when they pick up a new RX 570, RX 580, RX Vega 56, or RX Vega 64 card (along with Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Star Control Origins). The 18.8.2 driver also includes optimizations for F1 2018.

The frighteningly expensive race for the last shrinks of silicon processes has claimed another contestant. GlobalFoundries announced today that it is suspending development of its 7-nm LP process indefinitely in order to shift its resources to specialized, continued development of its 14-nm and 12-nm FinFET nodes. This abrupt strategy change comes just months after the company touted its confidence and the scale of its investments in leading-edge fabrication technology at its Fab 8 facility in Malta, New York. ...Read more...

Jim Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Computing and Graphics group, is leaving the company. Anderson is perhaps best known for his work shepherding the well-received Ryzen Threadripper family of high-end desktop CPUs to the market, but he was also responsible for overseeing execution of the company's Ryzen CPU product stack and beyond.Anderson will be taking over the CEO chair at Lattice Semiconductor starting September 4. In its own words, Lattice Semiconductor "is a leader in smart connectivity solutions at the network edge, ...Read more...

Nvidia released a hot, fresh Game Ready driver for its graphics cards today. Version 399.07 offers a refined gaming experience with the Battlefield V open beta, F1 2018, Immortal: Unchained, Pro Evolution Soccer 2019, Strange Brigade, and Switchblade. The driver adds SLI profiles for F1 2018 and Immortal: Unchained, as well.

AMD has long touted the benefits of its server graphics cards for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) purposes, and it's updating Radeon Pro cards' ability to deliver the desktop over the network with its Radeon Pro V340 graphics card. The V340 takes a pair of Vega 10 GPUs with 56 compute units enabled, yokes 16 GB of HBM2 RAM to each one, and slaps them on a single card capable of handling up to 32 VMs with 1 GB of graphics memory each. ...Read more...

Nikon has been teasing its first pro-grade mirrorless system for weeks, and it's finally shed a light on what to expect from its next generation of cameras. The Nikon Z family comprises two bodies: the Z 7, with a 45.7-MP sensor, and the Z 6, with a 24.5-MP photon collector. ...Read more...

This is the first thing you thought of too, right?

Greetings, folks. I re-joined a band a while back and am furiously both learning and practicing my bass skills (I was doing guitar before). This left me wondering exactly how many musicians, bedroom or professional, there are among the TR crowd. I'm guessing that there are quite a few among the gerbils, but we don't often hear from you. So speak up, let us know what you play. Meanwhile, here are the deals we dug up today, singing and dancing all the way. ...Read more...

Thermoelectric coolers (or TECs) have long been used to keep CPUs chilly, but HP wants to use that technology to combat an entirely different problem: overly sweaty ears during long gaming sessions. The company's Omen Mindframe headset uses a pair of thermoelectric modules—one in each ear cup—to help conduct heat away from one's ears and into the surrounding environment. The mesh-covered ear cups might help prevent hot-headedness, as well. ...Read more...

Nvidia touted some impressive theoretical performance numbers for its GeForce RTX cards during CEO Jensen Huang's keynote this Monday, but the company didn't generally talk in the universal language of gamers, flawed as it may be: average FPS. We've already tried to estimate how the Turing-powered RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti would perform using a number of peak performance measures for rasterization, but even those estimates are a bit abstract.To help the average person understand how the RTX 2080 performs, Nvidia is releasing some average-FPS metrics and performance indices of its own for the games of today and tomorrow. First, here are ...Read more...

Corsair's brand has become synonymous with closed-loop liquid coolers of all shapes and sizes, but the company could be getting ready to embrace builders of custom loops, too. On its Twitter account yesterday, the company teased the existence of a Hydro X series of products, marked by what appear to be two liquid-cooling hard lines filled with coolant.CORSAIR Hydro X Series.

Even among eye-wateringly high-end graphics cards, builders want their pixel-pusher of choice to stand out. Galax appears to be preparing to serve those who want to leave no doubt about the power of their PCs with Nvidia's GeForce RTX products. In a teaser image obtained by VideoCardz, the company showed off the next Hall of Fame (HOF) cooler that could adorn GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti cards.

The ice cream is fine and all, but I'm a bigger fan of Dino Spumoni.

Nvidia's just-announced GeForce RTX family of graphics cards opens up two new horizons of possibility for game developers: the use of ray tracing to improve the quality of reflections, ambient occlusion, shadows, and global illumination with acceleration from Nvidia's RT cores, and the use of deep learning models on consumer graphics cards with Nvidia's tensor cores. The first major uses of those tensor cores appear to be denoising algorithms for use in tandem with the RT cores, as well as a new form of high-quality anti-aliasing Nvidia calls "Deep Learning Super-Sampling."

If you're an elite esports player and your mouse isn't serving you well, Logitech might have an upgrade just for you. The company says its G Pro Wireless gaming mouse is the product of consultations with "more than 50" esports pros worldwide, and its wireless chops have been proven in battle. The company says players have been using the G Pro Wireless in competitions for months. ...Read more...

Greetings, folks! All the buzz of the moment is about the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards, and as well it should be. Those cards promise to meld rasterization and ray tracing in an efficient way, something that may turn out to be a permanent improvement in computer graphics. We'll reserve final judgment until we've had a close look at them, of course. Meanwhile, here's today's selection of deals. Enjoy! ...Read more...

MSI was at the front of the pack today when everyone scrambled to announce Turing-based graphics cards. The company put out an early press release and microsite promising GeForce RTX 20-series cards from its Aero, Ventus, Sea Hawk, Duke, and Gaming X lines. However, only the Duke and Gaming X Trio cards have broken cover so far. Let's have a look at them.

We've covered RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti-based cards from the major players so far, but those companies aren't the only ones in town with pixel-pushers bearing Nvidia's latest tech. Zotac too has four graphics cards on display: the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP and Triple Fan, along with the GeForce RTX 2080 Blower and AMP.

Nvidia's board partners are releasing an onslaught of GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 cards, and Gigabyte has its own quartet of ray-tracing-ready hardware in the wings. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and GeForce RTX 2080 are both getting a triple-fan treatment from Gigabyte's engineers.

Given what transpired at Gamescom today, we figure that "2080" will be the most oft-repeated number and word for at least a good while. EVGA is on board with Nvidia's recently released Turing GPUs and is readying up a whopping 16 cards. The manufacturer's offerings are split down the middle between GeForce RTX 2080 Ti-based units and cards based on the RTX 2080. ...Read more...

Did you watch Nvidia's presentation at Gamescom today? Even if you didn't, if you're reading this site, you're doubtless aware that Nvidia announced its next-generation GeForce graphics cards. Naturally, all of the board vendors are following on with their own announcements for new cards based on the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti GPUs. Asus has cards coming for both GPUs from its ROG Strix, Dual, and Turbo families.

Alongside CEO Jensen Huang's pre-Gamescom keynote, Nvidia unveiled three new GeForce graphics cards using the Turing architecture. The GTX 2080 Ti uses a Turing GPU capable of up to 14 TFLOPS of single-precision floating-point performance for traditional rasterization, while the RTX 2080 measures in at about 10.5 TFLOPS, and the RTX 2070 is capable of about 8 TFLOPS. ...Read more...

Today's biggest news will almost certainly be whatever Nvidia plans to show at its #BeForTheGame event ahead of Gamescom. The company will be streaming the event live on Twitch, and it's told us to expect "exclusive, hands-on demos running on the hottest upcoming games, presentations from some of the world's biggest game developers and some spectacular surprises."...Read more...

Vertical mice keep the hand and forearm in a more neutral position than the average mouse today, and that neutral position is reputed to be easier on the hands, wrists, and arms. Logitech is hopping on board the vertical-mouse train with the MX Vertical. This productivity mouse tilts the gripping surface at a 57-degree angle for a "handshake" position that Logitech says was developed with criteria from "leading ergonomists" in mind. That design purports to reduce muscle strain by 10% relative to the average rodent. ...Read more...

We just tried to predict the performance of Nvidia's rumored RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti using a mix of public information and best guesses, and now we have the first official spec sheet for an RTX 2080 Ti thanks to a misfire from board partner PNY and a good catch from a TR staffer. The company posted a product page for its RTX 2080 Ti Overclocked XLR8 Edition early, revealing several critical specifications for the as-yet-unannounced and unreleased card. ...Read more...

This week at SIGGRAPH, Nvidia introduced its Turing microarchitecture, the next major advance for the green team since Pascal made its debut over two years ago. If you're not already familiar, Turing includes RT cores that accelerate certain operations related to ray-tracing and tensor cores for accelerating certain AI operations to render the results of those ray-tracing calculations usable for real-time rendering, among other benefits that we're likely unaware of.

ARM produces the basic CPU designs that power practically every smartphone and non-x86 tablet in the world. Now that the CPU IP licensing firm has tasted higher-power-envelope blood thanks to always-connected PCs from partnerships between Qualcomm, Microsoft, Asus, and HP, it wants to expand its ambitions in mobile computing to the 15-W performance class occupied by Intel and AMD U-series processors. ...Read more...

Nvidia reported its results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2019 today. The company pulled in $3.12 billion in revenue, up 40% year-on-year, and operating income of $1.16 billion, up 68% year-on-year. Gross margin was 63.3%, up 4.9 percentage points on the year. The company reported record revenue across all of its divisions.The GPU business made up the vast majority of Nvidia's revenue at $2.66 billion. The company said strong performance in its gaming, professional visualization, and data-center products made up for a "substantial decline" in cryptocurrency sales. Gaming revenue was up 52% from this time last year at $1.8 billion thanks to strong sales ...Read more...

MSI's workstation notebooks are getting dressed up with a toned-down new design, and the WS65 launching at SIGGRAPH this week is the first of the breed. This system is a thin 15.6" design that still squeezes plenty of power inside. MSI will let professionals get WS65s with CPUs as powerful as Intel's Core i9-8950HK and graphics processors ranging up to Nvidia's Quadro P4200. ...Read more...

Lian Li made its name with massive, featureless aluminum monoliths, but nobody can ignore the RGB LED craze. Enter the Lancool One. This case's front panel takes Lian Li's signature brushed-aluminum stylings and blends them with an RGB LED-accent that cleverly doubles as an ambient light source for the interior of the chassis. ...Read more...

13", 14", and 15.6" notebooks rule the mobile roost these days, but 17" notebooks endure for folks who care about performance above all. Asus is trying to make life easier for folks who want to lug around such large machines with its ROG Strix Scar II. This machine is built around a 17.3" display, but Asus has slimmed down three of the four screen bezels to the point that it claims the Scar II is no larger than a notebook with a 15.7" chassis. ...Read more...

Cooler Master has put its stamp on several liquid coolers over the years, but it's never made one with a 360-mm radiator until now. The MasterLiquid ML360R RGB stretches out with an extra-long radiator that gets its airflow from three PWM fans with speed ranges from 650 RPM–2000 RPM. An array of 12 RGB LEDs encircles the top of the pump head, and each of the ML360R RGB's fans has a further eight addressable lights in their fan hubs. ...Read more...

Asus' ROG Zephyrus notebook turned heads last year by putting gamer-grade hardware in an ultrabook-like chassis. The concept apparently wowed enough people that Asus' designers went back and did it again. The ROG Zephyrus S keeps the keyboard-forward design and fold-out cooling system of the original Zephyrus, but it slims down the chassis even more. The Zephyrus S is just 0.62" (15.75 mm) thick at its thickest point, making it 12% thinner than even the original. It also slims down its display bezels for a clean appearance. ...Read more...

Intel's plans to release a discrete graphics product in 2020 are well-known, but just what that product will look like is not at all known. We may have a very slightly better idea today thanks to the newly-inaugurated Intel Graphics Twitter account. The company tweeted a teaser video reminding PC users that its graphics products power a huge swath of screens on the planet, and it closes with the reminder that "in 2020, we will set our graphics free." ...Read more...

Samsung is getting ready for 5G handsets with an all-in-one modem that can handle cellular standards of the past and future alike. The Exynos Modem 5100 claims full compliance with the 3GPP 5G NR Release 15 standards, and Samsung claims it's the first 5G modem in the industry to achieve that compliance. To prove its mettle, Samsung used the Exynos Modem 5100 to successfully place a 5G NR data call with its own base station and handset prototype. ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of CEO Jensen Huang's Quadro RTX announcement last night, Nvidia released a teaser video for its upcoming festivities at the Gamescom convention in Cologne, Germany. That video contains a number of winks and nods to the fact that next-generation GeForce cards are coming, as spotted by PCWorld's Brad Chacos on Twitter. ...Read more...

As part of the proceedings at Nvidia's SIGGRAPH keynote this evening, the company took the wraps off the first graphics cards powered by its Turing architecture for hybrid rendering with real-time ray tracing—certainly the biggest change in the production of computer graphics since the introduction of unified shaders with the GeForce 8800 GTX in 2006. ...Read more...

At Nvidia's SIGGRAPH event this evening, CEO Jensen Huang introduced "the world's first ray-tracing GPU," the Quadro RTX. This family of graphics processors offers up to "10 gigarays per second," 16 TFLOPS of single-precision performance, and "500 trillion tensor ops per second," all courtesy of the Turing microarchitecture. ...Read more...

Enermax's Liqtech TR4 closed-loop liquid cooler is one of a handful of Threadripper-specific heatsink options on the market. Thanks to its full-coverage cold plate, the Liqtech TR4 has the potential to cool AMD's high-end desktop parts better than the average liquid cooler. Now, Enermax is spiffing up the Liqtech TR4 with addressable RGB LED lighting encircling its pump head. That update means a new name for the series: Liqtech TR4 II. ...Read more...

The SIGGRAPH conference kicks off today in Vancouver, and AMD is marking the occasion by launching a fresh pro graphics card. The Radeon Pro WX 8200 houses a Vega 10 GPU with 56 compute units enabled, fed by 8 GB of second-generation SK Hynix HBM2 RAM, and it'll feed displays using four Mini DisplayPort outputs. ...Read more...

Cryorig has a full line of CPU coolers ready to transport heat away from the chips beneath, and its H7 Plus and M9 Plus promise to be even more capable at that job than the existing H7 and M9 heatsinks. Cryorig is powering up these towers by offering them in dual-fan, push-pull configurations for higher cooling performance out of the box.

Intel's Core i3-8121U is the one and only Cannon Lake CPU to exit the company's foundries so far, and its implementation in actual products has been confined to a single Chinese-market Lenovo laptop. That could change soon with the NUC8i3CYSM and NUC8i3CYSN, two NUCs widely referred to as "Crimson Canyon" in rumors and leaks. ...Read more...

I'm on my 3rd Kindle, a used 6" Oasis that I snagged for cheap. It's so much better than a "real" book.

Samsung's Galaxy Note phones have long held a reputation as the power user's Android device, and the company is adding to that legacy today with the Galaxy Note 9. The company's next-generation flagship handset gives demanding users access to its DeX desktop interface on external monitors over a single cable, and it teaches the S Pen new tricks like remote shutter control for the phone's cameras, presentation control, video playback control, and more using Bluetooth Low Energy. ...Read more...

Hi there, folks. We're fairly quiet around here at the TR HQ, as Jeff is frantically testing AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 2 to his heart's content, while I'm trying to make his job easier by improving our Mechanical TuRk (aka Benchy McBenchFace). In the meantime, you totally should check out our collection of deals. We had to sift through a lot of good ones today. Here are the best. ...Read more...

Zotac demoed its sharp-looking CI660 nano, CI640 nano, and CI620 nano fanless PCs back at Computex, and those systems are getting an official release now. The CI nano family has a fanless chassis that Zotac claims is capable of keeping Intel CPUs with TDPs as high as 25 W in check. ...Read more...