Techreport

How's it going, folks? Motherboards bearing AMD's revamped B450 chipset have begun hitting e-tailers everywhere, ready to take in often-discounted Ryzen 2000-series CPUs. We've already covered Gigabyte's range of offerings, and we'll be shortly taking a look at models from Asus and MSI, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, check out our review of Corsair's great H100i Pro CLC, or, of course, check out our selection of deals below. ...Read more...

Corning's Gorilla Glass probably sits between you and your smartphone's display panel, and it's evolving into its sixth iteration. The company claims Gorilla Glass 6 is made to withstand two potentially catastrophic events for today's increasingly glassy phones: higher drops and multiple drops. The improved endurance comes from "significantly higher levels of compression" than the old stuff. ...Read more...

Many TR readers have no doubt already seen news of the continuing consolidation that's happening in the PC hardware media this morning. That move means the vast majority of the largest and most widely read PC hardware and technology sites in the world, including Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, PC Gamer, and TechRadar, now reside under a single corporate umbrella.In light of this move, you'll recall that The Tech Report secured an independent future earlier this year. We are, as we have been since 1999, 100% free to say ...Read more...

Corsair is updating its Carbide Series Spec-06 chassis with a touch of flair. The case now comes with RGB LED lighting behind its front panel, and its built-in three-button controller offers seven different colors, two different animation speeds, and five animation effects to choose from. ...Read more...

AMD B450 motherboards are coming, and Gigabyte has provided us with our first official information on what that chipset will do for midrange builders on the AM4 platform. ...Read more...

Anybody with a VR headset has known the joy of plugging in a mess of USB, HDMI, and possibly power cables. A new industry group wants to change all that with a new USB Type-C alternate mode called VirtualLink. If the new standard catches on, folks looking to jack in will need only to run a single USB Type-C cable from their future head-mounted device back to the PC. ...Read more...

My most frequently used emojis, according to my Windows Phone.

Intel and Micron work together to develop and produce not only NAND flash (at least, until recently), but also the lower-latency non-volatile 3D Xpoint memory. The companies jointly announced that next-generation non-volatile media three years ago, and they've produced 3D Xpoint chips at the joint IM Flash fab in Lehi, Utah.Despite that long history of working together on the technology, Intel and Micron will be calling it quits on the idea side of 3D Xpoint after the memory's second-generation design is completed in the ...Read more...

NZXT is launching a new range of power supplies this morning to give system builders a window into the operation of their PSUs. The E Series starts with Seasonic's well-reputed Focus Plus Gold PSU platform. NZXT adds a Texas Instruments DSP and USB connectivity to the package in order to allow for monitoring of the 12 V, 3.3 V, and 5 V rails through the company's CAM software. ...Read more...

While we've already posted one round of sweet tech deals from around the web today, Amazon's Prime Day remains in full swing, and retailers have uncorked more discounts of their own to combat Amazon's members-only bonanza. Here's the best of what we've found in our second sweep.Newegg has 46 pages of deals to go through , so feel free to pick through them and find any gems we may have missed. ...Read more...

AMD is keen to talk about a provocative white paper that it commissioned from the testing firm QA Consultants. In its conclusions, the firm says AMD has the most stable graphics driver in the industry.How did QA Consultants come to that conclusion? The firm ran a single test, called CRASH , that's part of Microsoft's Hardware Lab Kit (or HLK) , a suite of ...Read more...

Hey, folks! We're pushing our deals post forwards because Amazon's running its Prime Day sales and pretty much every other retailer under the sun is trying to throw shade across Bezos' mug. That's great news for us PC hardware shoppers. Check out the great deals we found. ...Read more...

Apple's latest MacBook Pros boast, among other things, what Apple calls a third-generation design of the butterfly keyboard that made its debut aboard the MacBook in 2015. The company says this keyboard offers quieter operation than its past short-travel designs, but noise hasn't been the primary complaint owners have had about these notebooks. This short-travel keyboard has developed a reputation as a notoriously unreliable mechanism, and replacing it is an eye-poppingly expensive and difficult process.The folks at iFixit have begun their teardown of the new MacBook Pros, and the updated keyboard was an area of specific interest for the site. Upon popping ...Read more...

My sports analogy game is weak, but I believe what I'm about to do is called going with a pinch hitter. You see, I've had a collection of Asus networking gear undergoing my own brand of torture-testing in my home for a few months now. Before I got around to the Asus Lyra, though, the newer Lyra Trio already hit the market. ...Read more...

Please, I don't even have to try...​​​​​​

After a long period of slow declines in shipments, it looks like the PC might have temporarily arrested its slide. Research firms Gartner and IDC have released their latest reports on the state of the personal-computing market, and both suggest the number of PCs shipped grew slightly for the first time in six years.For its part, Gartner says PC makers shipped 62.1 million units last quarter, up 1.4% from a year ago. That's not much, but it's something. Gartner warns that this ...Read more...

The definition of a "real computer" for many creative professionals has long rested on one question: "can it run Photoshop?" If you've attempted to replace your primary computer with an iPad or iPad Pro, the answer to that question has been "no" until now. If a new report from Bloomberg leak-meister Mark Gurman is correct, though, that situation may be about to change. Gurman says Adobe "is planning to launch the full version of its Photoshop app for Apple Inc.'s iPad." This iPad-friendly app will apparently debut at Adobe's Max conference in October ahead of a 2019 debut.

Heads up, gerbils! We're going to keep this short and sweet. Just a few minutes ago, Newegg let the world know that it's offering a Real Sweet Deal on the Ryzen 5 2600 processor—the slightly slower brother of the Ryzen 5 2600X that got a TR Editor's Choice award just a little while back. ...Read more...

Intel's Coffee Lake CPUs are fine performers for applications where single-threaded performance is paramount. Though workstation integrators like Boxx have built Coffee Lake systems, those chips don't tick every box a workstation user might want. Most notably, they lack support for ECC RAM, and that makes them a no-go for many professional users. Intel has brewed a new round of Coffee Lake CPUs for professionals who need that single-threaded mojo, and it's pouring those folks a cup today with its Xeon E processor family.Intel

Fair day to everyone who, unlike me, hasn't been dealing with a house flood. You see, yesterday after I'd had only a couple hours' sleep, my apartment was almost entirely flooded thanks to a burst pipe underneath the main water heater in the kitchen. Complete chaos ensued. The next-door apartment also got a few rooms with water, the two beneath us had water dripping from the ceiling, and the elevator well had a mini-pool at the bottom. The water even reached the two commercial spaces underneath.It was loads of fun sweeping water and moving furniture for six hours straight with little sleep or food, I tell you. At ...Read more...

The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities are perhaps the biggest security story of the decade. Microcode, operating system, and browser updates have all rolled out in attempts to mitigate the secret-stealing potential that these vulnerabilities have introduced into computing devices everywhere. New variants of the attacks have continued to emerge as researchers test the strength of the security model of modern processor architectures, too.For all the gloom-and-doom predictions of double-digit performance losses from all of those security patches—something that we observed in micro-benchmarks but not necessarily in real-world uses for client PCs—most folks and businesses seem to have gotten on with ...Read more...

Apple delivered some much-needed updates to its highest-end MacBook Pros this morning. The 15" MacBook Pro will now offer six-core Coffee Lake CPUs and up to 32 GB of DDR4 memory, while 13" models with Apple's Touch Bar will use four-core Coffee Lake parts with 128 MB of eDRAM on package. The smaller MacBook Pro will still use LPDDR3 RAM. ...Read more...

If you're building a new midrange PC but are still having trouble finding an affordable graphics card to put inside it, ASRock might have just the combo deal for you. Newegg will sell you a bundle with one of ASRock's Phantom Gaming Radeon RX 580 8 GB graphics cards and AB350 Pro4 motherboards for $299.99 right now. ...Read more...

The latest iteration of Nvidia's GeForce Now game-streaming service has been in beta for the PC and Mac since this January, and the re-imagined service is now coming to the company's own Shield TV set-top box. The company tweeted out an announcement to that effect today.It's official. Say hello to AAA PC gaming glory on #NVIDIASHIELD with the new #GeForceNOW beta. ...Read more...

For camera nerds, bigger is better when it comes to sensor sizes. Sometimes, though, small sensors can be used to great effect, as Nikon's Coolpix P1000 proves. This massive bridge camera boasts an astonishing zoom range of 24 mm to 3000 mm in 35-mm lens equivalent terms. Nikon says that range is enough to fill the frame with the moon, for just one extreme example. ...Read more...

Cougar's Conquer case was certainly one of the most distinctive enclosures released last year, and now the company is making the skeletal aluminum stylings of that case available to builders with smaller motherboards in mind. The Conquer Essence uses what Cougar describes as "CNC-milled aluminum-based panels" and two tempered-glass covers to show off the system inside. ...Read more...

RGB LEDs have become too popular for any peripheral maker to ignore at any price point, and Cooler Master is bringing an entry-level blinkenlights option to its peripheral range today with the CM310 gaming mouse. This dazzling rodent takes an everything-you-need-and-nothing-you-don't approach to gaming. Its ambidextrous design boasts two thumb buttons, two main buttons, a clickable scroll wheel, and dedicated DPI-switching buttons. ...Read more...

A Twitter tempest arose yesterday when Intel alumnus François Piednoël heard through the grapevine that Intel was planning to kill off its Extreme Edition branding. The long-running Extreme Edition label has been Intel's special-sauce brand for ultra-high-end CPUs like the Core i9-7980XE and Core i7-6950X, to name just a couple recent examples. ...Read more...

Elon Musk Flys proven rocket husks He also makes cars And launched his toward Mars

Hullo there, good gerbils and gerbilettes. Summer's in full swing now with high temperatures, trips to beaches, and music festivals everywhere. The time is also ripe for getting gerbil paws on hot hardware deals. Here's today's catch. ...Read more...

Samsung has delivered another salvo in the race to ever-increasing NAND flash density and performance. The company has begun mass production of its fifth-generation V-NAND memory with "over 90" (likely 96) layers per die.Samsung claims this new V-NAND is the industry's first to use the Toggle DDR 4.0 interface standard, allowing for transfer speeds of 1.4 Gbps. Samsung says this rate is ...Read more...

After details leaked earlier this afternoon, Microsoft has revealed the full Monty of its next Surface: the Surface Go. This 10" slate starts at $399. Unlike Redmond's past entry-level slates, it runs Windows 10 in S Mode on top of a two-core, four-thread Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y CPU, according to The Verge. In theory, then, the Surface Go is a settings toggle away from native compatibility with the vast x86 app ecosystem—a stumbling block that has relegated past ARM-powered entry-level Surfaces to obscurity. ...Read more...

Far Cry 5 has offered HDR support for some time now, and I've certainly enjoyed the blinding highlights and pitch-black shadows its HDR mode provides on my TV. If you have a Radeon graphics card and a compatible monitor or TV, however, Ubisoft has made living the high-dynamic-range life easier with FreeSync 2 HDR support baked into the game's latest update. Flip a switch in the game, and your Radeon display chain should begin delivering low-latency, variable-refresh-rate HDR goodness just as Ubisoft intended. ...Read more...

Microsoft seems poised to make an announcement about its next Surface or Surfaces tomorrow morning. The company posted a slightly enigmatic tweet on its Surface account today that asks "Where will Surface go next?" The keen eyes of Sean Hollister at CNET suggest we'll find out tomorrow morning at 6 AM Pacific. Each of the devices in Microsoft's tweet is set to show that time and date, suggesting we should be paying attention at the crack of dawn tomorrow on the West Coast.Where will Surface go next? ...Read more...

While our enthusiasm for process technology tends to be laser-focused on leading-edge nodes like Intel and GlobalFoundries' 14-nm FinFET technologies, not every chip demands the highest-performance digital logic possible. Pure-play fabs like GlobalFoundries offer a range of process tech to best accommodate customer designs, and the firm announced today that its 22FDX technology, or 22-nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator process, has cleared $2 billion of "client design win revenue" across more than 50 products. ...Read more...

thedosbox, you're welcome.

If you're an iOS device owner like me, you probably have a number of Lightning cables floating around. Those cables are great for charging iDevices directly, but they're useless if you also happen to have a small fleet of battery packs to power your stuff through trade shows and the like. The average portable charger needs juiced up with a Micro USB cable, leading to a big tangle of incompatible wires in my bags and a frenzied search for that one Micro USB cable in the house on the eve of big trips. ...Read more...

Lian Li's PC-O11 Dynamic chassis is certainly a looker, but its tempered-glass cladding might not be the best thing for good ventilation. Lian Li fans who liked the design of the PC-O11 Dynamic but needed more airflow now have that option with the PC-O11 Air. This version of the case can breathe through perforated top, bottom, and front panels for maximum heat-evacuation potential. All five of this chassis' air-intake paths are filtered for a clean system, too. ...Read more...

Howdy, folks! I'm sure you're still burping and sleepy from gorging on all that sweet fourth-of-July BBQ. I also hope you haven't spent all your available disposable income on fireworks. After taking a good look at the deals below, you'll have some serious G.A.S. ...Read more...

Seagate made a foray into client SSDs five years ago, but its consumer storage products of late have hewn to good old spinning rust in the BarraCuda, BarraCuda Pro, FireCuda, SkyHawk, and IronWolf families. Folks who have long been pining for a consumer Seagate SSD option now have one again in the BarraCuda SSD. This SATA SSD lineup will range from 250 GB to a whopping 2 TB. ...Read more...

Strangely, my mirror seems to have stopped working.

Howdy, folks. If we had to guess, you're set to leave work early and go on a shopping spree for explosives, if you haven't already. The good ol' Independence Day is coming up, and you should be getting your grills ready for some serious meat charring. That's only happening tomorrow, though. Today, you can take advantage of e-tailers' fourth-of-July PC hardware sales. We've separated Delirium Tremens from Bud Lite to bring you only the best. ...Read more...

As part of its latest microcode update guidance document for the Spectre vulnerability, Intel may have intentionally or inadvertently tipped off the existence of several new Core processors. The microcode update guidance reveals that the Core i5-9400, Core i5-9400T, Core i5-9500, Core i5-9600, and Core i5-9600K are in the pipe.While I initially referred to these parts as "ninth-gen" Core CPUs, the company itself is classifying these chips as an extension of the existing eighth-gen Core family in its documents. If that's true, it'd be the first time in a long time that the first digit of ...Read more...

TVs often serve as the centerpiece of a living space, but perhaps your carefully curated home can't suffer a featureless black void on a bulky plastic stand when you're not appreciating the finest in motion pictures. Samsung's Frame TV just got an update for 2018, and it promises not to sully your walls with an impression of an Ad Reinhardt. Instead, the Frame can show content from Samsung's own Art Store, a collection of over 400 works from museums and agencies from around the world that's exclusive to the Frame. ...Read more...

Acer is growing its ProDesigner family of professional monitors today with the BM270. This display starts with a 27" 4K panel that can reproduce 100% of the Adobe RGB, sRGB, and Rec. 709 color spaces, as well as 97.8% of the DCI-P3 gamut. 10-bit color support and six-axis color adjustment stand ready to serve professional workflows on this display, and Acer calibrates the BM270 at the factory to achieve an average delta-E of less than 1. ...Read more...

One way or another, retail processor sales numbers from German retailer Mindfactory make their way onto the internet courtesy of the charting work of reddit user ingebor. Those figures give us a peek into the shape of processor sales in the enthusiast and DIY market. ingebor has compiled those figures for the month of June, and their work shows fascinating trends over the past year and in the past couple of months.

The lack of system and security updates in the Android handset world has always been a thorn on users' sides, and it's certainly one of the factors contributing to Apple's success with its phone business. Slowly but steadily, though, we're seeing rays of light emerging. Today, OnePlus announced a firm software maintenance schedule for its recent and upcoming smartphones.OnePlus promises to offer system updates to its phones for a full two years after their release. The T-variant handsets are counted separately, too. In addition, the company says ...Read more...

It's a bit of a dreary day out on the big lake, but I've got a smile on my face anyway. The 15th TR BBQ is tomorrow, and I just unboxed a boatload of goodies that our friends at Corsair sent our way to give away to attendees. That boatload includes no less than five HS70 wireless headsets, two Dark Core RGB SE mice, one K63 wireless keyboard, and a massive pile of t-shirts. Whoa. Corsair's own Justin Ocbina will be joining the party tomorrow to help us give away all the goods, too. ...Read more...

Valve is not a company known for getting things out the door quickly, and owners of HTC Vive headsets have been waiting the better part of two years for the company's Knuckles virtual reality input device. Valve's engineers released a development version of the controller called Knuckles EV 1.3 to some of its software partners last summer. Now, the firm is distributing a second revision wearing the Knuckles EV2 moniker to VR software developers. The controller's designers say the ergonomics, strap, sensors, battery life, and support for SteamVR Tracking 2.0 have all improved compared to the last go-round. ...Read more...

Digitimes reports that TSMC CEO CC Wei told onlookers that commercial production of chips built using the company's 7-nm fabrication process has begun at a recent technology symposium. The leader of the Taiwanese foundry says an improved 7-nm node with EUV will come before the end of 2018, and it anticipates a move to a 5-nm fabrication node at the end of 2019 or in early 2020. The CEO said TSMC's newest plant, Fab 18 in Taiwan Science Park, will also be the tip of the spear for 3-nm production at some undetermined point in the future, according to Digitimes.The outlet says that Wei's comments were likely an attempt to counter rumors that the company was experiencing teething trouble with its 7-nm process tech. The leader said the beginning of 7-nm production would increase the company's total output of 12" silicon wafers by 9% to ...Read more...