Techreport

Google's web-first Chrome OS delivers a streamlined browsing experience, but the lack of native applications has been criticized since the operating system's earliest days. Over the last couple years, Chrome OS devices eventually gained the ability to run Android apps, but even with that feature, there are significant functionality gaps compared to traditional desktop operating systems. The company is now adding support for containerized Linux apps to Chrome OS machines, starting with its own high-end Pixelbook. ...Read more...

Moving right along from the troublesome release of the previous GeForce driver, Nvidia's already got the next version ready. GeForce driver version 397.64 is WHQL-certified and Game Ready for Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, the full release of Conan: Exiles, and Destiny 2's Warmind expansion. It also adds SLI profiles for Kingdom Come: Deliverance and GRIP.

Back at CES this year, we met up with Mushkin and saw four new SSDs that the company was working on. The first of those SSDs has shown up on the company's website, which we take to mean that it's about to hit the market. The Pilot will be Mushkin's first PCIe SSD in M.2 format, and it will also be the manufacturer's fastest consumer SSD for the time being. ...Read more...

Corsair's Carbide Series Spec-Omega RGB ATX mid-tower case is the company's second Spec-series launch in two days. However, the component manufacturer is aiming the Omega at a different part of the market than the entry-level gaming aspirations of yesterday's $50 Carbide Spec-05. The Spec Omega wants to be the last word in colorful lighting with its 30 programmable digital RGB LEDs fitted to an asymmetric-design front panel, plus the two included HD120 RGB LED-lit fans. ...Read more...

Today at Google I/O 2018, the company revealed the latest version of Android. There's no fancy dessert-based name for it yet, so Google is simply calling it Android P. Like the rest of Google's announcements today, the new version of Android has a heavy emphasis on making use of deep learning—both in Google's datacenters and in your phone. ...Read more...

An apple day keeps the teacher at bay.

Microsoft has struggled for a long time to duplicate its PC success on other platforms. Previous Microsoft administrations might have pressed forward with trying to force Windows Phone and specialized Cortana devices onto users, but the newest version of the company is more willing to bring its most compelling features to competing platforms. The latest evidence of this new spirit is on display at this week's Build conference, where Microsoft has shown off Android and iOS integration on PC and improved teamwork between its Cortana assistant and Amazon's Alexa platform. ...Read more...

Hello, folks! We figure at least some of you might be waiting with bated breath for the Google I/O keynote and whatever software and hardware reveals that may stem from it. It's hard to tell at this point what the search giant might be cooking up, though. How about some bets on which apps or services it'll redesign this time? Place your wagers in the comments section below, but first take a good look at the awesome hardware deals we found for you. ...Read more...

Not every gerbil is a gamer, but there's enough of you out there that I don't feel weird asking: how's your gaming display? It could always be better, unless you've somehow snagged a pre-release G-Sync HDR display. We first heard about the tech all the way back in January of last year, and we're still waiting for the monitors to release. The wait might soon be over, though. PC World just put up a video on its YouTube channel where the mag's executive editor Gordon Mah Ung gushes about the Acer Predator X27. During the demo, he remarks that this display will be available in about two weeks....Read more...

Despite my gauche and unstylish taste, I don't like to spend a lot of money on a case. In fact, I usually end up building PCs in boring black boxes. It's a habit from my younger years when I needed to pour every penny into performance-enhancing parts. These days, though, you don't have to pay out the nose to get a nice-looking chassis. Check out Corsair's latest, the Carbide Series Spec-05. This is an ATX mid-tower case with a stylish front fascia, a full-size acrylic side window, and a reasonable price. ...Read more...

The chatter among PC builders the last few months has centered around the high prices of discrete graphics cards and system memory. SSD prices, thankfully, have been slowly but surely falling for a while now, and Samsung seems to have taken this into account by making a last-second adjustment to the launch prices of its 970 Evo and 970 Pro SSDs.The specific prices are listed in the table above, but the general trend is that the Pro models get a bigger discount than the Evo units, thereby reducing the price ...Read more...

The subgenre of VR headsets that don't require an attached PC or console seems to get a big release or announcement just about every week. The appeal of a VR experience without the expense of a discrete graphics card and a tangle of wiring is easy enough to understand, after all. Oculus and HTC recently joined Samsung and Google in offering standalone VR headsets. Lenovo has been talking about joining in on the fun since last May, and its Mirage Solo headset is the first standalone HMD that runs Google's Daydream platform. The manufacturer is also offering the Mirage Camera for recording video for playback in Google Daydream devices. ...Read more...

What's this, a deal on Monday? That's right, gerbils and gerbilettes. We found something so sweet, so fluffy and warm, that we can't help but invite all of you to see. We're talking about a fantastic deal on the 25" Alienware AW2518H monitor. ...Read more...

You might recall that back in March we took a quick look at Cougar's Panzer-G mid-tower case with four sides covered in glass. The Panzer-G itself is a fine case, but folks who find it just isn't big enough could step up to the Panzer Evo. As it happens, Cougar just launched its first ever case that comes with RGB LED lighting: the aptly-named Panzer Evo RGB. ...Read more...

Game development requires a careful balance between keeping system requirements low enough to make the product accessible to a wide range of players while incorporating attention-getting features and a helping of eye candy. Steam's Hardware Survey is one of the tools that coders can use to make sure their software targets the the right hardware specs. The latest round of stats has some pretty big changes, but the wildest swings probably come from a correction in the way Steam counts internet café machines operated by many users. As it turns out, the last few months of stats may not have been entirely reliable.The latest results come with a note explaining that the figures started changing in unexpected ways back in August of last year. Valve's engineers thought it had taken measures that would prevent PCs from net cafés from being counted multiple times, but the way administrators tend to those systems inadvertently circumvented Valve's workarounds. The company says it has taken these details into account and that the latest results are ...Read more...

What have you heard about the GeForce Partner Program, gerbils? Well, it doesn't really matter, since it's over now. Nvidia put up a blog post today that says the company has decided to cancel the program amid "rumors, conjecture, and mistruths" regarding its nature and function.In the blog post, Nvidia emphasizes that the GeForce Partner Program (GPP) was about clarity and transparency. Nvidia says it simply wanted to make sure that "gamers who want Nvidia tech get Nvidia tech." It is a ...Read more...

It's easy to make an interesting case design when you're not all that concerned about how much space it takes up. We've seen a number of outsized cases with curious styling, but Mini-ITX designs are less common. Most (but not all) Mini-ITX cases tend to be small, featureless boxes, too. Happily, that's not the case with In Win's new A1 Mini-ITX enclosures. These little cases have RGB LED lighting, a glass side window, and a top-mounted power-supply—just like larger contemporary chassis. ...Read more...

Just as Intel has started to get a handle on managing the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security flaws in its contemporary processors, there's a warning about a second wave of related vulnerabilities. German computer magazine c't (a part of Heise) reports that multiple groups of security researchers have clued Intel in on eight unique speculative execution vulnerabilities in its chips. The magazine calls the set Spectre-NG and goes on to say that some or all of these flaws may also be present in ARM processors. The applicability of the flaws to AMD CPUs was said to be less clear. c't did not publish any specific technical details about the problems beyond mentioning that they were all similar to Spectre. ...Read more...

Some folks who installed the GeForce 397.31 driver had some very strange problems over the last week. While leaving the machine "without user input," even if it was active otherwise, the driver could be unloaded by Windows 10. That driver version also had specific problems on some GeForce GTX 1060 cards where it would fail to install or crash and then report a Code 43 error in Device Manager. In any case, never fear: Nvidia has released GeForce 397.55 hotfix driver that resolves both of these issues.Folks who suffered stuttering playback in Netflix will also apparently find relief in this driver. Additionally, this release supports Microsoft's Surface Books and their built-in GeForce cards. That's about it for this minor release, but that auto-unload bug was a doozy. If you grabbed GeForce driver 397.31 and ...Read more...

There are few other industries where people are looking forward as often as in computing. Even if the latest-gen stuff is amazing, it always seems like the next big thing is just around the corner. Neither Intel nor AMD have made any specific announcements about their next moves, but thanks to a presentation that was apparently leaked to the web by accident, we have an inkling of both companies' futures. Thanks to Videocardz who captured snaps of the video before it was removed.The presentation was created by German IT distributors Bluechip and was apparently a webinar intended to market the company's services and wholesale offerings to its partners. However, Bluechip also included its own roadmaps that reference numerous unreleased and even un-announced ...Read more...

Flagship Android phones are great for a lot of people, but some folks don't like the recent trends towards rising prices, disappearing headphone jacks, overstuffed software packages, and iffy update policies. Nokia hopes its freshened mid-range 6.1 handset can find some buyers in the United States with its middle-ground asking price, stock Android experience, and two years of software upgrades. ...Read more...

Mr. SAN man, backs up with Veeam. Makes bits the safest that they've ever been.

Fair afternoon to you, gerbils. I'm still reeling from the excitement of the SWR Barroselas Metalfest. My ears have only been listening to softer types of music lately to make up for that weekend. I'm quite happy to sit here quietly and hunt for the latest hardware deals, thank you very much. Here's what we came up with today. ...Read more...

Turning the calendar from April's picture of a tabby kitten with a yarn ball to May's photo of two calico kittens curled up inside coffee mugs means we are one-third of the way through 2018. It also means that Backblaze is back with its latest hard drive reliability report. The cloud backup outfit provides data about the reliability of drives in its enormous storage pool every three months, and the results this quarter are the best so far. ...Read more...

Remember back in March when security firm CTS Labs appeared out of nowhere with news of a series of security vulnerabilities on AMD hardware? Regardless of questions about responsible disclosure or the origins of the company, the vulnerabilities are real. AMD responded a week later promising patches to mitigate the new attacks, but we haven't heard a peep since. As it turns out, we may just not have been listening in the right places. Tom's Hardware poked AMD about the firmware fixes, and this is what the company had to say:Within approximately 30 days of being notified by CTS Labs, AMD released patches to our ecosystem partners mitigating all of the CTS identified vulnerabilities on our EPYCâ„¢ platform as well as patches mitigating Chimera across all AMD platforms. These patches are in final testing with ...Read more...

We wrote just a couple days ago about the surprise appearance of Intel Optane 905P 3D XPoint SSDs at Newegg and other online retailers. Newegg's listings were pretty short on technical details, but the blue silicon goliath came forward today with more data about these enthusiast-targeted storage devices. The manufacturer is making versions of the drives with PCIe slot and U.2 connectors. Units in the larger PCIe card format come in capacities up to 960 GB, while the smaller 2.5" U.2 versions top out at 480 GB. ...Read more...

How many products have you bought that come with stickers proclaiming "warranty void if removed?" Those stickers are remarkably common despite being illegal here in the good ol' US of A since 1975. Last month, the FTC announced that it had alerted six companies that their warranty terms and conditions could be in violation of the law. More recently, the folks at Vice's Motherboard publication discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request that the six companies were Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Hyundai, HTC, and Asus.The FTC says that the above-named companies' warranty terms could be in violation of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act . That's because the companies imply or outright state that users will lose their warranty coverage under various circumstances, like using third-party parts. That's not legal unless the ...Read more...

An audience of gerbils probably doesn't need to be told this, but few companies take fans more seriously than Noctua. As proof, I present the fact that the company spent the last five years developing its latest fan design: the NF-A12x25. In the process, the company used computational fluid dynamics, laser vibrometers, and acoustic imaging to figure out that existing fan materials just weren't going to cut it. Ultimately Noctua invented its own material and created what it says is its best fan ever. ...Read more...

Flagship Android smartphones tend to follow a pattern, and LG's G7 ThinQ is no exception. The phone sticks closely to the 2018 template of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC, dual rear cameras, and a stretched-out screen with small bezels. The company hopes that the AI-assisted camera, bright screen, audio features, and tight integration with Google's Assistant and Lens software will help make the ThinQ stand out from certain competitors. ...Read more...

Flagship Android smartphones tend to follow a pattern, and LG's G7 ThinQ is no exception. The phone sticks closely to the 2018 template of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC, dual rear cameras, and a stretched-out screen with small bezels. The company hopes that the AI-assisted camera, bright screen, audio features, and tight integration with Google's Assistant and Lens software will help make the ThinQ stand out from certain competitors. ...Read more...

VR vendor and Facebook subsidiary Oculus has been teasing its Go standalone VR headset since October of last year. In the meantime, HTC, the company's biggest competitor in the high-end VR market, has launched a premium headset worldwide and its own Vive Focus standalone VR platform in China. Oculus' Go has now been officially released and will beat the Vive Focus to the US market. ...Read more...

Apple announced its first-quarter 2018 financial results today. The company took in $61.1 billion in revenue, up 16% from a year ago, and it earned $15.9 billion in operating income on that revenue, up 13% from a year ago. Net income totaled $13.8 billion, up 25% from a year ago. Gross margin was 38.3%, down 0.6 percentage points from this time a year ago.iPhone sales continue to make up the bulk of Apple hardware earnings. The company moved 52.2 million handsets last quarter, up 3% from this time a year ago. CEO Tim ...Read more...

Cooler Master knows that not all PC builders want the same thing. Some folks want a showpiece with clear windows and lights to display on top of their desk, while others want a tidy black box with no illumination beside a couple of indicator LEDs to sit quietly out of sight and out of mind. The company's latest MasterBox K500L addresses the crowd looking to make a statement, and the MasterBox E500L is tailored for those that want simple styling at a low price. As different as they are from a style perspective, both chassis are designed for ATX motherboards.

Batman is our friendly neighborhood stray cat. He's so cool that Bruno crossed the Atlantic just to meet him.

There's no getting around it: RAM prices are extremely high, and they've been that way for a while now. The high cost of memory has caused more than a few grumblings of price fixing, but nobody had taken action until this past Friday. Law firm Hagens Berman, representing a collection of consumers, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, accusing the companies of colluding to increase the cost of DRAM.According to Hagens Berman, the three named companies controlled 96% of the worldwide DRAM market from July 2016 to February 2018. During that period, DRAM prices jumped 130%. The firm says that collectively, the DRAM vendors' revenues increased by more than ...Read more...

Hullo, gerbils and gerbilettes! It's been a busy couple weeks for TR, but there's no stopping the hardware train. We have a particularly good bounty of deals today, so lets get right down to business. ...Read more...

The Windows update with the technically-correct name is out. Since it doesn't bring huge changes from the previous version of Windows, it's likely your old Radeon driver is probably still working fine. Still, OEMs and business users will be happy that Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition version 18.4.1 boasts official support for the Windows April 2018 update.

The positioning of Intel's Kaby Lake-X chips has been a bit cloudy since their introduction back at Computex last year. The four-core, four-thread Core i5-7640X and four-core, eight-thread Core i7-7740X offered minor clock speed bumps compared to their then-contemporary Kaby Lake mainstream desktop brethren, but required buyers to give up IGPs and pony up for pricier X299 boards those chips couldn't fully light up. That formula evidently didn't find enough takers, especially after the October 2017 introduction of the blue silicon giant's Coffee Lake processors. A new item in Intel's document management system specifies the discontinuation of the Intel Core i5-7640X and Core i7-7740X in their tray and retail boxed forms. ...Read more...

We saw first laid eyes on HyperX's Predator DDR4 RGB memory sticks back at CES in January. The modules use integrated infrared transceivers to synchronize the light show coming from each stick's color-changing diodes. The company said at the time that kits would start hitting shelves in the second quarter of this year, and the modules' appearance at Amazon puts the proof in the 16-million-color pudding. ...Read more...

Update 2: Best Buy has this card back in stock as of 4:55 PM CT on April 30. Go get 'em.After months and months of sad glances at graphics-card prices at retail and e-tail, we may be receiving a brief reprieve. While many graphics cards are creeping back toward their suggested ...Read more...

It wasn't long ago at all that a 16-core workstation was unthinkable, much less affordable. Now, thanks to AMD's Threadripper CPUs, you can build such a machine relatively cheaply. What if 16 cores and 64 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 aren't enough, though? In that case, you need to go Epyc. While normally intended for server deployments, Epyc makes for a beastly workstation CPU. Velocity Micro is offering just such a machine with its ProMagix HD150 desktop workstation. ...Read more...

Desktop PC builders excited about the extended endurance and crazy-low latencies of Intel's 3D XPoint storage technology have been limited to drives with a maximum capacity of 480 GB since the release of the Optane 900P SSDs late last year. Good news storage freaks—a couple of models wearing an Optane 905P badge have appeared among the product pages of Newegg and other online retailers. The 905P drives have a flashier design with blue LED illumination and come in a new 960-GB capacity. The listings for these new models show substantially higher prices than their comparable 900P siblings.

Asus may not be your first thought when you start looking for a mini-PC, but the company has a fair few on offer. Its most recent releases, the PN40 and PB40, are fanless designs that differ only in size and external connectivity. Let's check 'em out.

As we reported on Wednesday, folks with Haswell and Broadwell CPUs may be able to get a Spectre-mitigating patch from Windows Update. It's really preferable to have that sort of patch in firmware, though. That way, you'll be protected even if you use a different OS. As it happens, folks using Asus and ASRock motherboards might be in luck. Those two companies have issued firmware updates for many of their Z97 boards that include the latest mitigations in microcode from Intel.ASRock actually began patching its Z97 boards way back in the middle of March, but we didn't notice until today. TR honcho Jeff noticed that his own Asus Z97-A motherboard had a new beta firmware update available and sent me on a quest. Despite my searching, it seems like only Asus and ASRock ...Read more...

Razer has updated its entry-level Abyssus mouse, and the new capabilities are enough to bring on a new suffix: the new version of the pointing device is now called the Abyssus Essential. The old "V2" model had a 5000-DPI sensor, which was probably plenty for just about anyone. Even so, the new version has a higher-resolution 7200-DPI sensor and expands its range of selectable lighting colors from just three to more than 16 million. ...Read more...

I've heard one remark from novice typists over and over: "I love the way my laptop's keyboard feels. Why aren't there desktop keyboards that feel like laptop keyboards?" Well, there are—you just have to go looking for them. One such model is Cherry's upcoming KC 6000 Slim. This vanishingly thin board uses the company's SX scissor-style keyswitches. ...Read more...

After early 2017's Creators Update and the Fall Creators Update later last year, Microsoft has been mysteriously quiet about the name of the next big Windows update. The company let the cat out of the bag in a recent blog post. The next biannual release will be called the April 2018 Update, and its release on Monday will get it out the door on the last day of the month....Read more...

Hot on the heels of AMD's healthy earnings report yesterday, Intel posted strong Q1 2018 results of its own this afternoon. The blue team took in $16.1 billion in revenue, up 9% year-on-year. The company turned a $4.5 billion operating profit on that revenue, up 23% on the year. Net income was $4.5 billion, up 50% on the year, and earnings per share of 93 cents was up 53% on the year. Gross margin fell 1.3 percentage points on the year, to 60.6%.Intel's PC-focused Client Computing Group brought in $8.2 billion in revenue, up 3% from this time last year. Operating income fell 8% to $2.8 billion. PC platform volumes (a measurement of processor and ...Read more...

Well, that was a freebie.

Jim Keller has worked for some of the biggest heavyweights in the silicon industry, including DEC, AMD, Broadcom, and Apple. The lead designer of AMD's K8 microarchitecture is now a senior VP at Intel after spending two years working on Autopilot and low-voltage hardware at Tesla. Intel's announcement says Keller will lead the company's silicon engineering efforts, which include SoC design and integration. ...Read more...