Techreport

Video game merch site Fangamer has a new Kickstarter going. Yeah, we know, yet another video gaming Kickstarter. Fangamer has a good track record, though, and this new idea is too cool to ignore. The crowdfunding campaign is for a Nintendo Switch accessory called the Flip Grip. The idea is that you can turn your Switch sideways and connect the Joy-Cons to what would normally be the top and bottom of the tablet. This lets you play games meant for vertical orientation on the go. ...Read more...

Open-loop liquid-cooling setups can be pretty intimidating. Having built such a rig myself in the past, I can tell you that you have to be mindful of many factors, and there's a lot at stake if you screw it up. Fortunately, you don't need to build everything from scratch any more. These days, there are vendors who will sell you all kinds of PC open-loop liquid-cooling sets. One such vendor, Alphacool, just launched new kits in the Eissturm series called Blizzard and Tornado. The Eissturm kits solve the hassle of picking parts and get you everything you need to start cooling your CPU in one box. ...Read more...

Open up those wallets once again, PC gamers, because it is time for the Steam Summer Sale. Traditionally the largest and most comprehensive of Steam's seasonal sales, this year's Summer Sale brings with it a mini-game where users can unpack the mystery boxes that they received during the Spring Cleaning event. At least, so I'm told—I can't get the mini-game page to load. Store pages are working just fine, though, and I've scoured the sale for some really nice deals.

Samsung just announced an apparently-unnamed 8-TB NF1 SSD. In case you're confused, NF1 isn't the name of the SSD, but instead the name of the form factor. NF1 is a derivative of M.2 designed for enterprise environments and to better suit the shape of Samsung's NAND packages. The idea is that the wider drives can fit flash chips in two-wide rows. ...Read more...

Nobody appreciates daylight quite like Baxter.

Oh boy. I'm sure you've heard the news about Intel CEO Brian Krzanich's departure. The consequences of this corporate move are up in the air, and it boggles the mind just to consider them all. Fortunately, you can find solace in a much simpler activity: the acquisition of personal computer parts and accessories for lower-than-expected dollar amounts. Take a look at the selection below. ...Read more...

Google's Chrome OS started out as nothing more than a browser running on top of a stripped-down Linux installation. Over time, the search giant has responded to tech snobs' criticisms that Chrome OS needs more applications by porting over its Play Store and later adding in smoothed-out support for containerized Linux applications on some models. These additions, coupled with the general bloating of website code (The Tech Report excluded) have increased the need for more capable Chrome OS systems.Asus has responded with its Chromebox 3 , a range of machines packing Kaby Lake mobile processors, up to 16 GB of memory, ...Read more...

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has resigned. In a press release posted to its newsroom this morning, the company confirmed that Krzanich had stepped down and said it had appointed executive vice president and CFO Bob Swan as its interim CEO.Intel provided the following rationale for Krzanich's ...Read more...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang loves to take the world by surprise with new Titan cards in unexpected places, and yesterday was no different. At the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference running in Salt Lake City, Utah, Huang unveiled the Titan V CEO Edition. This beefed-up Volta card boasts 32 GB of HBM2 memory, a substantial boost from the Titan V's 12 GB of stacked RAM. ...Read more...

I've never really understood why gaming hardware needs to look like military or industrial equipment, but I love those looks, so bring it on. Plantronics is the latest company to release a piece of gear for gamers that looks like it came straight out of the pages of Soldier of Fortune. That's right—the headset company best known for its stodgy, business-friendly offerings also sells gaming headsets. The newest series is called the RIG 500 Pro, and like the rest of the RIG series it comes with downright aggressive styling.

The most common metrics for graphics card performance tend to be games, but modern GPUs are tasked with doing a lot more than creating pixelated representations of explosions and car crashes on Windows PCs and smartphones. The fine Finns at Basemark have taken the covers off Basemark GPU, a utility intended to test the mettle of graphics chips using a variety of 3D APIs on multiple desktop and mobile platforms.

To many users, Google's Android mobile OS represents increased choice in devices when compared to its most popular alternative. Just a few days ago, the flagship Android handset market looked like it would embrace the big-screen-and-a-notch design trend with all eight of a Snapdragon SoC's big.LITTLE arms. Vivo's Nex first bucked this trend, and now the Find-X handset from BBK Electronics' brand-mate Oppo joins the party with user-facing cameras that pop up from behind a full-coverage display. Better yet, the Find-X will reportedly be the first Oppo phone to officially hit American shores. ...Read more...

Hong Kong hardware site HKEPC might have some fresh details on that 32-core Threadripper chip that you've all been salivating over. The site claims that the chip will be called the Ryzen Threadripper 2990X in an expansion of the current Socket TR4 CPU naming scheme.

Noctua is known for quiet and effective cooling solutions typically topped off by uniquely-hued fans. The company's offerings carry premium price tags, but so do the Xeon Scalable and Xeon Phi processors that Noctua's LGA 3647 coolers are designed for. The DX-3647 family of coolers is designed for use exclusively with Intel's jumbo socket and has members with pairs of 92-mm or 120-mm fans, or a single 140-mm rotating air mover. All three new models have copper bases and heat pipes along with aluminum fin stacks.

'Live every day like it's Sauntering Day!'

As time ticks by and the market for mechanical keyboards gets more and more entrants, manufacturers have to work harder to make their offerings stand out. Cooler Master hopes its new CK550 mechanical keyboard's combination of a standard layout, per-key RGB LED illumination, and choice of three different Gateron switch types will make it attractive to the part of the market that demands customizability above all else.

Intel has been adding big-name semiconductor talent to its bench at a rapid clip over the past few months, and it's added another such name to its roster with the return of Larrabee architect Tom Forsyth. In a tweet, Forsyth confirmed that he will be returning to the blue team as a chip architect under Raja Koduri in the Core and Visual Computing Group. Forsyth says he's "not entirely sure what [he'll] be working on just yet."Personal job news - I start at Intel shortly as a chip architect in Raja Koduri's group. Not entirely sure what I'll be working on just ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils! At last the good weather's arrived around here (for the most part), except I'm stuck at home working instead of out there enjoying the sun. You gerbils' thirst for hardware deals cannot be easily quenched, and I'm sure that most of you are looking forward to buy an NVMe solid-state drive, some fast RAM, or maybe a gaming laptop. As it happens, we have those items today in our picks. Check them out. ...Read more...

I'm sure that, like me, you probably smirk or roll your eyes when you see a TV investigator confidently command a subordinate to "enhance" a low-resolution image. Well, we live in the future, folks. Nvidia's just demonstrated a similar sort of technology for slowing down standard-speed video. Check out this video of what the company calls Super SloMo....Read more...

The fever in the video card market hasn't entirely broken, but there are many encouraging signs that we're getting there. Today's signal comes courtesy of EVGA's GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB Gaming. Amazon will sell you this compact yet powerful card for $250, or right at its suggested price. Yes, this is a bit underwhelming, but we haven't seen cards like this one selling without a markup in ages. As far as we can tell, this is the lowest price on a GTX 1060 6 GB you'll find anywhere right now. ...Read more...

In case you needed further evidence that an eight-core Coffee Lake CPU would be hitting Intel's desktop platform eventually, there's a new piece of data supporting that supposition. Over at Intel's site, you can find a Dear Customer Letter (DCL) that advises the company's partners regarding sample identification and usage guidelines for a "Xeon E Coffee Lake-S 8C Processor ES." That'd be an engineering sample for an eight-core LGA 1151 Xeon. ...Read more...

If you signed up for Intel's Core i7-8086K giveaway, won one, and have no intent of actually using it, you've got another option open to you now. AMD will be offering US residents a trade-in deal: give us the i7-8086K that you won, and we'll give you a 16-core Threadripper 1950X in return. ...Read more...

Bloomberg reports that Samsung Electronics has been ordered to pay $400 million to KAIST IP, the patent-licensing sister company to Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), by a federal jury in Marshall, Texas. The patent in question involves FinFET fabrication technology, a transistor type Samsung started using in products like the 14-nm Exynos 7 Octa 7870 SoC released in early 2016.The jury said Samsung's infringement was "willful," a remark that means the judge could increase the amount Samsung has to pay KAIST IP to as much as $1.2 billion. Qualcomm and GlobalFoundries were also found ...Read more...

Samsung has been on board with Google's Chromebook platform since the first round of retail PCs running the browser-based OS began to ship. The Korean manufacturer has shown no CPU architecture allegiance in that time, being the first major manufacturer to offer an ARM-based Chrome OS portable but also offering plenty of Intel-powered Chromebooks over the years. The company just announced its Chromebook Plus V2, a thin-and-light convertible that tosses out the Rockchip OP1 from the previous-generation machine in favor of an Intel Kaby Lake Celeron 3965Y. ...Read more...

I was actually working at Dell way back in 2001 when the very first Precision mobile workstation came out. At that time, I sneered at the idea of a "mobile workstation." To me, workstations were massive machines with dual CPUs, SCSI HBAs, and one of these ridiculous things. These days, the mobile workstation is a thriving market segment, and I've seen few laptops that exemplify it better than Lenovo's new ThinkPad P52. ...Read more...

I'm a big fan of the looks of Cooler Master's MasterCase H500P. However, I'm not a huge fan of its cooling performance. The H500P's updated version eventually solved that problem with a mesh front panel. Now, Cooler Master is making sure it's not repeating the same mistake with its new case. The MasterBox MB511 is an entry-level ATX mid-tower that wraps the front of the case in a fine mesh grille tuned for high airflow. ...Read more...

Security researchers have uncovered a new microarchitectural vulnerability in some Intel processors. Called "Lazy FP State Restore," this vulnerability relies on a side channel to leak potentially privileged data after the processor performs a context switch from an unprivileged process to a privileged kernel function, according to security analysis from Red Hat. Both Intel and Red Hat classify the potential impact of this vulnerability as "moderate." AMD CPUs are not affected.As with Spectre and Meltdown, the vulnerability stems from efforts to improve performance. Context switches are microarchitecturally expensive, and the less data that needs to be moved around during such a switch, the better. The leak relies on the fact that the processor can defer saving and restoring of FPU state until a new process actually uses the CPU's floating-point ...Read more...

Not shown: one scotch and one beer

Hi there, gerbils. We know that news is slow as heck today, and that's why we have more than a few reviews for you to read through. We recently took a look at the Corsair Strafe RGB MK.2 keyboard, HyperX's Pulsefire Surge RGB gaming mouse, and wrote more than a few words about Microsoft's Windows 10 April Update. Meanwhile, you can ease your Gear Acquisition Syndrome issues by checking out the deals below. ...Read more...

Gerbils with deep pockets will surely recall Asus' WS X299 Sage motherboard from late last year. High-end workstations these days are all but required to have 10-Gigabit Ethernet, though, and the pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports on the WS X299 Sage may have disappointed some buyers. For those folks, Asus has a new version of that board called the WS X299 Sage/10G that upgrades both RJ-45 jacks to 10-GbE sockets. The newer revision also packs an upgraded VRM heatsink. ...Read more...

AMD showed off a Radeon Instinct card using a version of its Vega graphics chip built on a 7-m fabrication process at Computex last week, but it didn't say much about when that tech might trickle down to gamers. In lieu of new hardware, the company is pumping up performance for some Radeon owners by improving its drivers. Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.6.1 claims to increase frame rates by up to 10% in Warhammer: Vermintide 2 on systems with Radeon RX 580 8 GB graphics and up to 9% on PCs with Radeon RX Vega 56 cards compared to the same systems running the 18.5.2 drivers.

A few folks like to have meat around their phone screen for gripping, but the the majority of the market for high-end phones has pronounced that display bezels are terrible and must be eliminated at all costs. So far, that has mostly meant re-positioning things like fingerprint sensors and sticking front-facing sensors into notches carved into the display. Chinese phone maker Vivo has gone a different route for its flagship Nex phone, relegating the self-portrait camera to a flip-out pod and equipping the device with a novel "Screen SoundCasting" ear speaker and a stuff-of-legends in-display fingerprint reader. ...Read more...

Getting into the game has been most every PC enthusiast's goal since all the way back in the 8-bit days. The rise of powerful 3D accelerators and large displays has certainly made it easier to feel like you're immersed compared to when blocky sprites ruled the day. AOC's latest G1-series gaming displays are designed for immersion with their curved VA panels, slim bezels on three sides, claimed 1-ms response times, and rapid, 144-Hz refresh rate capability. FreeSync support is the cherry on top for users with compatible graphics cards or game consoles. The series' first members are the 24" C24G1, the 27" C27G1, and the 32" C32G1.

Naturally, Noctua also attended Computex and showed off an array of new products. After launching the NF-A12 fan last month, the company produced a pair of coolers based on the new fan. The company also also showed off revisions of most of its classic heatsink series, color-customizable versions of the Chromax series coolers, and the a helping of A-series fans.

Cryptocurrency prices are crashing, and graphics-card prices seem to be coming down with them—at least for the moment. A good example is Asus' Dual Radeon RX 580 O4G, on sale today at Newegg for just $210 after promo code EMCSPVER3. That's just $10 above the Radeon RX 580 4 GB's $199 suggested price. We haven't seen prices like this on a Radeon RX 580 for ages, and it's cheaper than most RX 570s on the 'egg at the moment. ...Read more...

Ever since Intel added former Radeon honcho Raja Koduri to its bench of semiconductor talent, the company has been clear that it intends to make a renewed attempt to compete in the discrete graphics card market for both gamers and data centers alike.New product development cycles in the industry begin years before shipping products appear, so it wasn't clear when the first fruits of Intel's newfound interest would arrive. Thanks to a report by analyst Ryan Shrout ...Read more...

Morbotron has this to add.

The meaning of "workstation" changes a lot depending on who you're talking to. When I think of a workstation, I think of a desktop PC on super-steroids kitted out for CAD work, physical simulations, and other crunchy math tasks. As it happens, that's exactly what the Boxx Apexx D5 series is. These beefy tower machines can be equipped with a pair of Xeon Scalable CPUs ranging up to a pair of Xeon Platinum 8176es, offering a total of 56 Intel AVX-512-capable cores. ...Read more...

Hi there, folks. The post-Computex lull is a real thing, and there isn't that much hardware news to go around. Still, you can read our review of the Corsair Strafe RGB MK.2 keyboard and Intel's Core i7-8086K in the meantime. Before you go, though, check out our deal selection below. This day is a good one for components, as you'll see. ...Read more...

Manufacturers from Acer to Zotac launched a bevy of new hardware at Computex just last week. We were just a little surprised to see that Lenovo chose to hold its secrets close to the vest and wait until E3 to launch its revamped Legion gaming PC lineup. We wrote yesterday about the new Legion laptops that with Intel eighth-generation Core processors and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 (and Ti) graphics cards. Today, we're going to focus on Lenovo's four new grab-and-go gaming desktops with transparent windows. The Legion T530 and T730 machines assume the familiar microATX tower form factor, while the Legion C530 and C730 take on a Mini-ITX cube size and shape.

Corsair's Strafe RGB MK.2 isn't the only keyboard the company is launching today. The Vengeance K70 keyboard first appeared on the scene back in mid-2014, and the company has steadily added new K70-badged models over time, including units with RGB LED illumination and a wider assortment of switch varieties. The latest K70 variation is called the K70 RGB MK.2. In addition to some features derived from the company's flagship K95 Platinum, it comes with programmable per-key RGB LED backlighting and a whopping five different Cherry MX switch choices beneath its black anodized "aircraft-grade" aluminum deck. ...Read more...

NVMe storage devices represent the future of high-performance non-volatile storage, but the price tags on those devices have limited their appeal primarily to the enthusiast PC builder. Toshiba wants to help change that this morning with its OCZ RC100 SSD. By taking advantage of the Host Memory Buffer technology in recent versions of the NVMe protocol, the RC100 can go without a costly DRAM cache while potentially maintaining most of the performance of a drive with a DRAM package on board. ...Read more...

One would have thought that Computex would have had a monopoly on PC hardware releases for the first couple weeks of June, but Lenovo chose to launch its refreshed line of Legion laptops at E3 instead. The manufacturer took the wraps off the Legion Y530 15", Legion Y730 15", and Legion Y730 17" gaming laptops. The machines boast available 144-Hz displays, GeForce GTX 1050 or GTX 1050 Ti graphics, and powerful eighth-generation Intel Core processors.

Besides the Bethesda show, there were also E3 conferences from Microsoft and Devolver Digital yesterday—not to mention EA's expo-starting conference the day before. There were a ton of killer games announced and we don't really have room to talk about all of them, but I'm going to hit some of what I thought were the highlights....Read more...

Oak Ridge National Laboratories has a new supercomputer built with bleeding-edge silicon from IBM and Nvidia. The lab and the system's maker claim the machine is the fastest HPC installation in the world. Summit is made of 4608 compute nodes, each built around two IBM Power9 CPUs and six Nvidia Tesla V100 accelerators. ORNL says this combination of gear can deliver a theoretical 200 petaflops (PF) of double-precision floating point arithmetic and over 3 exaflops (EF) of mixed-precision work for AI and deep-learning applications. IBM says the Summit gestalt is over five times more powerful than its predecessor, Titan, and more than a million times faster than the average laptop PC. ...Read more...

A great event of worldwide importance is about to come up. I'm not talking about global warming, Nvidia supporting FreeSync 2, or Intel supporting all CPU features across its entire range of processors. The event that's coming up is none other than the fantastic TR BBQ XV, hosted as always by our Shortbread artiste Colton "drfish" Westrate.The event is coming up quick and it's happening nary two weeks from now, on the 23rd of June, in Holland, Michigan. If you haven't signed up yet, visit this forum thread and let Colton know you're coming. The main course, as ever, is the BBQ proper. Our Mother of Ribs and Queen of the ...Read more...

Yes, The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced. There you go, you can close this post now. Kidding aside, that was just one of several pretty-interesting announcements that Bethesda made at its Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) show last night. The TES6 announcement came in the form of a very brief trailer with a shot of a landscape, a title card, and absolutely nothing else. Still, fans cheered after master showman Todd Howard did what he does best....Read more...

My Core i7-8086K arrives today, and I'm going to waste no time getting it out of its commemorative packaging and into a motherboard so we can see how it performs. It'd be a crime not to share that experience with the rest of the TR community, so I'm going to be benchmarking the chip live on YouTube starting at noon ET. ...Read more...

My Core i7-8086K arrives today, and I'm going to waste no time getting it out of its commemorative packaging and into a motherboard so we can see how it performs. It'd be a crime not to share that experience with the rest of the TR community, so I'm going to be benchmarking the chip live on YouTube starting somewhere between noon ET and 1 PM ET. ...Read more...

The stereotypically hard-working and single-minded engineers at German PC component maker be quiet! have new products in just about every one of the company's product categories. The company showed off new or updated cases in its Silent Base and Dark Base families, plus a new cooler for AMD's Threadripper CPU, new fans, and a line of power supply cabling.