Techreport

Google's Chrome OS has been reaching its tentacles out to new form factors over the last couple of weeks. As if to prove that the operating system is expanding and not just moving to greener pastures, Acer's just released its latest Chromebox CXI3 desktop PCs.

A new CPU and chipset launch wouldn't be complete without ASRock at the party. The company is known for its unique designs, for better or for worse. For that reason, let's have a look at what ASRock is bringing to the second-generation Ryzen shindig. Over at Newegg, it looks like there are five of the company's boards on the way: the X470 Master SLI/ac, the Fatal1ty X470 Gaming K4, the X470 Taichi, the X470 Taichi Ultimate, and the little-bitty X470 Gaming-ITX/ac.

Y'all whipping your credit cards out to preorder one of AMD's recently-announced second-gen Ryzen CPUs? Hold off just a second, then. There are new boards around with the X470 chipset from every major manufacturer, and that includes MSI. Let's take a look at the Dragon Army's offerings. ...Read more...

Fridays are usually pretty slow for tech news, but today is clearly an exception. AMD has announced its second-generation Ryzen CPU lineup, and motherboards from all the major manufacturers using AMD's X470 chipset are ready for pre-order with them. Asus isn't letting the day go by without its own wave of product announcements. The company is taking the wraps off of five new X470 motherboards. All but one of the new boards adhere to the full-size ATX form-factor, while the last one strips away some slots and ports to squeeze into a Mini-ITX profile.

Yes, sir—AMD's just pulled the wraps from its second-generation Ryzen CPUs. Those chips can go into existing AM4 motherboards, but AMD launched the X470 chipset along with the new CPUs, and every company's got boards bearing it. Gigabyte, for example, has three boards up for pre-order at Newegg: the X470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wifi, the X470 Aorus Gaming 5 Wifi, and the X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming.

Yes, sir—AMD's just pulled the wraps from its second-generation Ryzen CPUs. Those chips can go into existing AM4 motherboards, but AMD launched the X470 chipset along with the new CPUs, and every company's got boards bearing it. Gigabyte, for example, has three boards up for pre-order at Newegg: the Aorus X470 Gaming 7 Wifi, the Aorus X470 Gaming 5 Wifi, and the Aorus X470 Ultra Gaming.

As part of its recent wave of fresh offerings, HP released a couple of new gaming desktops with remarkably-understated styling that should appeal to gerbils who find RGB LEDs grotesque. The HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690 and 790 are both compact machines with a blacked-out color scheme save for a tasteful green LED light bar on the front.

Just as it seems like flagship phone features and performance have pretty much plateaued and spec bumps keep shrinking, AT&T says it will have a really good reason for bandwidth-hungry users to pick up new handsets: next-generation 5G connectivity. The company says its trials of 5G millimeter-wave equipment in Waco, TX, Kalamazoo, MI, and South Bend, IN have shown speeds of up to 1.2 Gbps and latency all the way down in the nine- to 12-ms range.AT&T president of Technology & Operations Melissa Arnoldi says the company started testing 5G equipment two years ago. Field trials started in in Austin, TX and later expanded to the three smaller cities mentioned above late in 2017. The trial in Waco provided 5G mmWave service to a retail store about 500 ft (152 ...Read more...

I know what I'm having for dinner...

A fair day to you, gerbils. At least I hope that yours is fair, as around here it's been gray and rainy for nearly 3 months straight, save for a day of respite here and there. I was told I live in a temperate country, and now I'm seriously doubting that assertion. I don't know if Portugal snapped away from Europe and drifted off next to the UK, the home of all depressing weather. I shall have to be content with the sight of cheap hardware. Look what we found today. ...Read more...

A fair day to you, gerbils. At least I hope that yours is fair, as around here it's been gray and rainy for nearly 3 months straight, save for a day of respite here and there. I was told I live in a temperate country, and now I'm seriously doubting that assertion. I don't know if Portugal snapped away from Europe and drifted off next to the UK, the home of all depressing weather. I shall have to be content with the sight of cheap hardware. Look what we found today. ...Read more...

Buyers thirsting for AMD's Ryzen APUs' attractive blend of multi-core CPU performance and modern Radeon Vega graphics might have something to look forward to. Dell's latest Inspiron 7000 13 2-in-1 isn't the company's first Ryzen-powered portable or the first hybrid notebook with a backward-folding hinge carrying the unique chip, but it is the first 13" 2-in-1 we can recall with a Ryzen APU. ...Read more...

Unless you watch technology news like a hawk, you may not have noticed that AMD has released a new series of Radeons. Don't get excited, though—the sort-of-new Radeon 500X series is an OEM rebadge of the existing RX 500 cards. Intel has the full family of Coffee Lake CPUs out, and AMD is purportedly preparing to launch the second-generation Ryzen processors. OEMs are all putting out new products, but they'd be loathe to launch with last-generation Radeons. Ergo, we have the Radeon 500X series. Here, take a look at the full specifications:At least we won't have to guess at the performance of the new cards. Even if there's little to say about the new hardware, it's not as if nothing has happened on the Radeon front since the RX 500 series came out. Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition brought support for an in-game overlay that can display performance metrics and ...Read more...

We reported earlier on HP's addition to the mainstream gaming laptop market with the Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15 refresh. The company also says that that the more into gaming a person is, the higher the chance that they use a desktop PC as a gaming platform. Desktops need monitors, and HP's Pavilion Gaming 32 HDR monitor could deliver a premium viewing experience at an affordable price. ...Read more...

Lately, HP's efforts at wooing gamers looking for portable power have been mostly limited to the company's high-end Omen lineup. The PC maker is going after the big group of folks that want a slim laptop with gaming capabilities for less than a couple grand with its refreshed Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15. In typical HP fashion, buyers have tons of options for the Gaming 15. Shoppers get multiple choices for processor sub-family, discrete graphics cards, display type, plus the usual variations in memory and storage capacity. ...Read more...

We just wrote about new gaming laptops from Asus featuring Intel's latest eighth-generation Core mobile processors last week. The mega-manufacturer also let loose a pair of power-efficient-yet-potent portables aimed at e-sports gamers. The company has refreshed its ROG Strix GL503 and ROG Strix GL703 with a choice of eighth-gen Core CPUs to go along with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards.

GPUs aren't the only kinds of compute accelerators finding their way into servers these days. Field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, help bridge the gap between general-purpose processors and application-specific integrated circuits. Intel announced today that major server vendors will be offering its Programmable Acceleration Cards (PACs) as configuration options for their products. The blue team says Dell EMC is ready to deploy PACs "in volume" in its PowerEdge R640, R740 and R740XD servers and that Fujitsu will offer PACs as an option in its Primergy servers. ...Read more...

The high-contrast combination of black and white is one of the more striking color schemes you can choose for your PC parts. You might have had a hard time finding RAM that matched that aesthetic, though—at least, until now. Corsair's latest memory modules are the Dominator Platinum Special Edition Contrast, and as you've no doubt already guessed, they blend pearly white with gloss black for a bold look. ...Read more...

If you've been CPU shopping today, you may have noticed some weird new products on offer at e-tail shops. Don't be confused: the Core i5+ 8400, Core i5+ 8500, and Core i7+ 8700 are all the same CPUs as their non-"plus" brethren. These new models simply include a 16-GB Optane Memory module in the box. Slot that module into an M.2 socket on your motherboard, and you can cache the contents of a hard drive for SSD-like responsiveness. ...Read more...

When Intel launched more Coffee Lake CPUs and their accompanying motherboards last week, the absence of the rumored Z390 chipset was conspicuous. As it happens, that chipset may still be on the way for an upcoming release. The manual for Biostar's B360 Racing GT5 motherboard clearly references a "Z390GT5" model and even lists specifications for the board inside. ...Read more...

We wrote about Be Quiet's Dark Rock 4 and Dark Rock Pro 4 CPU coolers when they were on display at CES in January. The pair of plus-sized tower coolers is now available, and we have the full details on them. Let's take a deep look.

Today is April's Patch Tuesday for Microsoft operating systems, and AMD CPU owners will want to fire up Windows Update as soon as possible. This round of patching includes operating-system-level mitigations for Spectre Variant 2, also known as CVE-2017-5715, on at least some AMD processors running Windows 10. The update exposes control over the Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier, or IBPB, within AMD CPUs that support the feature. According to AMD's latest security white paper, using the IBPB is the company's recommended mitigation for Spectre Variant 2.While its CPUs do support other methods of controlling the behavior of the branch predictor in response to past predictions (a special bit indicating Indirect Branch Restricted Spectulation, or IBRS) and ...Read more...

Would calling these "cygblings" be an awesome portmanteau or just fowl word play?

In the famous words of the Portal turrets, "ow, ow, ow." I've just come back from my periodical chiropractor appointment and I have tape on my neck and shoulder. I keep putting the appointments off, and every single time I regret doing that. Hunting deals doesn't require a lot of movement, though, and we've come across a handful of interesting ones. Check them out. ...Read more...

It wasn't all that long ago that if you wanted a mouse with a fancy sensor, you had to deal with all sorts of gimmicky features you probably didn't care about. Nowadays there's a number of mice out there based on top-class hardware without unnecessary cruft. One such pointer-pusher is HyperX's Pulsefire Surge. This simple six-button ambidextrous design echoes an earlier era of mouse chic. ...Read more...

Asus' ROG Swift PG27UQ and Acer's Predator X27 could be the holy grails of gaming monitors with their 4K IPS panels, 144-Hz refresh rates, and G-Sync HDR support. We've seen plenty of these monitors in press releases and trade show displays over the past year and change, but actual shipping versions of those displays—and sticker prices for them—have been elusive.

Intel's Hades Canyon NUC is an impressive machine for a lot of reasons, not least its performance and quiet manners. We're eager to see more machines hit the market with Intel's Kaby Lake-G chips inside, and it looks like the next such offering will be the Chuwi HiGame. This mini-PC comes equipped with a four-core, eight-thread Core i5-8305G CPU with accompanying Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics.

Leap Motion shipped its first commercial product all the back in 2013. The original Leap Motion controller didn't cause quite the revolution in man-machine interaction the company was hoping for, and Leap shifted to adapting its hand-tracking technology for virtual reality applications back in 2016. In the intervening time, the company has released sensor-mounting kits for the big two PC VR headsets. Now, Leap Motion has taken the wraps off its Project North Star prototype augmented reality display with some bold claims about its capabilities and price tag. ...Read more...

Acer was the first company to pull Google's browser-based Chrome OS into tablet territory a couple of weeks ago. Now, HP is taking the search giant's "other" operating system into the increasingly-popular 2-in-1 detachable form factor. HP's Chromebook x2 packs a 12.3" high-resolution display, an Intel seventh-generation Core processor, and up to 8 GB of memory. Unlike with Acer's education-focused Chromebook Tab, HP has widespread consumer availability in mind for the Chromebook x2. ...Read more...

We bet that more than a few gerbils still have a Fermi-era Nvidia GeForce graphics card laying around, perhaps in a secondary machine still running 32-bit Windows. All good things must come to an end, and this past Saturday, Nvidia announced that it's officially dropping driver support for GeForce graphics cards with Fermi GPUs on board. The company is also ending support for GeForce cards on 32-bit operating systems. Nvidia Quadro drivers aren't affected by these announcements.

Workstations are essentially very powerful desktop PCs, and often quite large. These days, though, all but the most demanding design workloads could run just fine on something like Zotac's Zbox Magnus EN1070—except that professional software may not play nice with its GeForce GPU. To alleviate this issue, Zotac now offers the Zbox Q series machines with lots of connectivity and Quadro GPUs in packages smaller than a cereal box. Let's check out the QK7P5000, QK7P3000, and QK5P1000.

EVGA is primarily known for its Nvidia-powered graphics cards, but the company's PSUs rectify and condition power for many users' computer systems, including a couple of my own. The company's latest SuperNova PQ Series power supplies are designed for system builders and upgraders looking for premium components, high efficiency, and a long warranty. Today's rollout includes 750-W, 850-W, and 1000-W models. ...Read more...

Do you like buying games online, gerbils? Of course you do. How do you feel about buying them from Razer, though? If that sounds appetizing, it's a thing you can do now. Razer just launched the simply-titled Razer Game Store where you can buy games that are delivered—at least for now—as Steam or Uplay keys.The Razer Game Store is tied into the company's zVault service . We didn't really talk about zVault when it launched last year, but it offers a unified currency that gamers can use for game sales and in-game purchases. The ...Read more...

Oh my, today is a unique day. We usually come up with lots of PC component deals, but for some not-so-strange reason, today it's almost all about mobile powerhouses. It's a great time to pick up a deal on a laptop fitted with last-gen-but-high-end Intel processors, and we picked out the best just for you. Let's get this show on the road. ...Read more...

PC displays keep getting bigger, and their resolutions continually increase. Sometimes, though, even a modern 32" 4K display can't provide enough information at once. EVGA's latest Z10 mechanical keyboard is ready to offer gamers vital performance stats and other information on a red monochrome LCD display, in the vein of Logitech's G15 clicker. The Z10 is available with the buyer's choice between Kailh Blue and Brown switches. Kailh's switch color coding mimics that of market leader Cherry—the Blue type means "clicky tactile" and Brown corresponds to "quieter tactile." ...Read more...

If you'd asked me around this time last year, I might have told you that Apple had apparently lost its interest in the professional market altogether. Instead, last April the company announced that not only was it readying up the iMac Pro, but that a new Mac Pro was also in the works. It's been a year now, so you could be forgiven for asking where it is. TechCrunch was one of a few outlets that was recently invited to talk to Apple about the future of its Pro offerings. Here's the short version: the new, modular Mac Pro "will not arrive before 2019."To assuage the concerns of Pro users who feel left out in the cold, Apple says it has created a group called the Pro Workflow Team. While this is the first time it's been mentioned publicly, the team has apparently been hard at work working directly with ...Read more...

Over the last few days, we've covered tons of gaming laptops built around Intel's latest eighth-generation Core processors, but business and productivity machines are getting those new chips, too. To wit, HP has updated its ZBook mobile workstations and ZBook Studio portables with new Core and Xeon CPUs to go along with high-resolution displays and Nvidia Quadro graphics cards.

Super-thin portable powerhouses like Asus' ROG Zephyrus M look awesome, but some folks' circumstances don't make room for for a $2200-plus gaming laptop with an origami cooling system and a GeForce GTX 1070. Asus itself comes to the rescue with the TUF Gaming FX504, the first gaming laptop we can recall with durability as its main claim to fame. Compared to the Zephyrus M, the FX504 has thick bezels around its screen, and its optional GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics can't match the might of a GTX 1070. However, the 15.6" laptop does have a display with a 120-Hz refresh rate and a claimed 3-ms response time.

There are signs on the horizon that we might see a respite from ridiculous graphics card and RAM prices. For now, though, one way to pick up a gaming machine without being price-gouged is to buy it pre-built. There have always been advantages to that approach, one of which is that you can get a machine with styling and creative design that's not easy to pull off in custom-built rigs. Nothing we've seen lately exemplifies that better than Asus' new ROG Huracan gaming desktop. ...Read more...

Thank you to all the photographers who, by staging scenes like this one, make my life a little bit easier.

Modern NAND flash chips in a compact package can deliver stunning throughput once they're freed from the shackles of the legacy SATA interface. Many drives have demonstrated the truth in this statement, and WD is adding to the body of evidence supporting the case for SATA's obsolence. The company's latest-generation WD Black NVMe SSDs come in the now-ubiquitous M.2-2280 form factor and deliver up to 3400 MB/s of sequential read performance and as much as 2800 MB/s when writing. The drives come in the usual 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB sizes, and push data back-and-forth over four PCIe 3.0 lanes. ...Read more...

If you want to work on HDR content, you need a suitable display just as much as someone who simply wants to enjoy HDR content. More than that, though, you'll want a display that you can trust to have accurate color representation. A suitable candidate would be Eizo's latest display, the ColorEdge CG319X. This 31.1" monitor uses an IPS panel in 4096x2160 resolution—that's DCI 4K rather than UHD 4K—and supports both Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) and Perceptual Quantizer modes for HDR images. ...Read more...

Samsung launched its Odyssey series of gaming laptops last year. While they look like nice machines, the graphics options topped out at a GeForce GTX 1050, probably leaving some gamers unsatified. The company's latest gaming laptop, the Odyssey Z, takes a leap toward high-end gaming performance by stepping up to a GeForce GTX 1060. ...Read more...

Kingston made the leap into the realm of NVMe SSDs about ten months ago with the release of the KC1000-series SSDs. Someone in the company's marketing department must really like the number 1000. Not only does Kingston sell the DCP1000 datacenter-class drives, it's now let loose a new lineup of affordable PCIe storage devices bearing the A1000 moniker. ...Read more...

Good afternoon, gerbils. We're still reeling from Intel's simultaneous release of its eighth-gen mobile and desktop CPUs and consumer chipsets. But as they say, there's no rest for the wicked. We need to hunt down deals. Here's today's catch. ...Read more...

Yesterday we wrote about Gigabyte's 31 new motherboards in standard and primo Aorus flavors, plus six-core fortification of its Aero laptops. That means today we'll be spilling the Coffee Lake beans on the company's Aorus X9 DT, X7 DT v8, and X5 v8 laptops. All three new models sport Intel's eighth-generation Core processors and, 2666 MT/s DDR4 memory, factory-calibrated 144-Hz IPS G-Sync displays, and room for two M.2 storage devices plus a 2.5" hard drive. The NVMe drives on all three machines are accompanied by 1-TB spinning platter hard drives.

When word started circulating that Intel would be following up Kaby Lake with a round of eighth-generation CPUs built on a 14nm++ process, logic dictated that less-expensive Celeron and Pentium-branded offerings would follow. We've written once, twice, and thrice about those rumored cheaper chips, and now they're here. As rumored, Intel is introducing three new Celeron models and five new Pentium Gold models just in time for the mainstream H370, B360, and H110 chipset releases.Intel bestows all new Pentium Gold chips with two cores and Hyper-Threading, while Celerons make do with two cores and only two hardware threads. T-model chips are a little slower and cost the same as ...Read more...

Do you remember when we told you that Intel was preparing Spectre mitigations for chips as old as 45-nm Core 2 Duo hardware? It turns out that's no longer happening. Intel just published another update to its Microcode Update Guidance document—a list of chips that have gotten, are getting, or will get Spectre-mitigating microcode updates. The new version lists Core 2 Duo processors among a number of models that are no longer slated to get updates.Specifically, no Core 2 chips are getting Spectre mitigations. Intel also canceled updates for the Bloomfield , Clarksfield , Gulftown , and Jasper Forest families. Those chips are primarily higher-end processors from the original Core ...Read more...

As part of the onslaught of Coffee Lake chips percolating their way into notebooks and desktops today, Dell introduced three new models of accessible gaming laptops under a new G brand. These notebooks range from the basic G3 to the mid-range G5 all the way up to a G7 model with the potential to house Intel's first Core i9 mobile CPU. ...Read more...

Dell's XPS 15 notebook has made a name for itself as one of the best premium Windows notebooks around. The company recently introduced a 2-in-1 version of this machine with Intel's G-series processors inside, and now it's time for the traditional version to get more cores and threads thanks to Intel's recently-revealed eighth-gen mobile Core processors. Let's dig in and take a look at the refreshed version of Dell's clamshell XPS 15. ...Read more...