Techreport

I had my fun on Sunday, you guys can handle this one, right?

Intel's new six-core laptop CPUs represent a big step forward in both single- and multi-threaded mobile CPU performance. The folks in Dell's Alienware division pride themselves on selling the fastest laptops Round Rock offers, so they clearly couldn't pass up the new kit. As a result, Dell's got new Alienware 15 R4 and 17 R5 laptops that come equipped with Intel's latest and greatest. ...Read more...

Acer's Nitro 5 laptops have offered a wide range of hardware configurations at relatively-affordable prices since their introduction last year. The manufacturer hopes that a heaping helping of Intel eighth-generation Core processors will make the package an even more attractive option for game-playing buyers.The headline news is the addition of new multi-core CPU options, but improved Intel 9560 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi comes along for the ride. Some configurations will bear a "+" next to the CPU name, denoting the presence of Intel's Optane Memory device in ...Read more...

Did you read our boy Eric's review of Gigabyte's latest Aero 15X laptop? If not, head over there and give it a perusal. That machine's combination of a hot-off-the-fab Core i7-8750H CPU and super-efficient GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q produces impressive performance for its size. It's the top model in Gigabyte's recently-refreshed laptop series, but it's not the only such laptop launching today. ...Read more...

Today's a seriously-busy day at TR HQ. Intel has let loose a truckload of new products, and so have a handful of major manufacturers. Right now, we're diving deep into the world of MSI motherboards packing Intel's latest H370, B360, and H310 chipsets. Let's roll.

If you thought Asus wasn't going to show up to today's eighth-generation laptop announcement party, you were dead wrong. The company is placing Intel's latest and greatest mobile silicon into sockets and soldered ball grid arrays all over its portable posse.

Any time you're talking about the launch of new motherboards based on new chipsets, you can't count out ASRock. The company has sixteen boards launching today: four based on Intel's H370 chipset, six based on B360, and another six based on the H310 variant. While ASRock is somewhat known for its unusual products, this most recent round of offerings seems to keep to the straight and narrow.

Intel really poured it on this morning, simultaneously opening the floodgates on mainstream 300-series chipsets and the second wave of eighth-generation Core laptop processors. This time around, we got some info on the MSI's new and refreshed gaming laptops.

Today's big motherboard news is clearly the release of Intel's mainstream 300-series chipsets that drop a couple of features from the higher-end Z370 in exchange for somewhat-lower price tags. Asus is all in with the new chipsets and is showing off models in its TUF, Prime, and ROG lineups.All of the company's new microATX and ATX boards sport four DDR4 DIMM slots. The physical limitations of the Mini-ITX form factor mean the two new boards in that tiny size have just two memory slots. In either case, each slot can work with modules up to 2666 MT/s in ...Read more...

If you read Jeff's story on Intel's new chipsets this morning, you already figured that Gigabyte is launching a full salvo of new motherboards today. In total, the company is releasing six motherboards based on the H370 chipset, ten motherboards with the H310 chipset onboard, and a whopping 15 motherboards based on the B360 chipset.

Any bit of news one reads on April 1 has a pretty good chance of being a joke, but yesterday being a Sunday meant the joke-to-reality ratio was especially high. We couldn't resist posting a couple of joke articles of our own. I will add that Jellies vs. Whales is a "real joke," as the game is actually under development. News outlets and manufacturers around the web got in the fun, too. Here are some of the highlights.

Apple is no stranger to switching CPU instruction set architectures in its Macs when there's an advantage to be gained, and if a new report by Bloomberg is correct, the company could be on the verge of another such transition—this time, to ARM SoCs designed in-house. Such a move could ultimately evict Intel's CPUs and chipsets from Macs.Bloomberg speculates that the move would begin in Apple's thin-and-light notebook PCs, followed by higher-power and higher-performance systems as Apple's chip-design efforts matured. The report suggests that Apple could begin powering ...Read more...

The first all-in-one PC I ever saw was a Compaq Presario CDS 520, but I expect most people's first contemporary experience with the "PC in a monitor" idea was with Apple's fruit-flavored iMac G3. Things have come a long way for the concept. For example, Apple's iMac Pro can house 18 CPU cores and Radeon Vega 64 graphics in a slim package. Folks who don't need all that hardware might prefer something a little simpler like Acer's Aspire S24. This svelte system boasts a 24" display just under six millimeters thick. ...Read more...

While some websites were busy yesterday posting mirthful product announcements and reviews, Samsung was tweeting about serious business. The company has updated Notebook 3 and Notebook 5 laptops in three different sizes. The announcement was a little vague about the hardware specs, but we'll do our best to describe the midrange laptops. What's quite clear is that the new portables have a sleek look thanks to metal bodies with no exposed fasteners. Although we have photos, all you'd need to do is imagine a recent MacBook Pro with more ports and the word "Samsung" on the lid.

Which Domain Name System provider are you using, gerbils? Most folks are relying on the Domain Name Service (DNS) offered by their internet provider, although some savvy folks are using Google's DNS or perhaps OpenDNS. A new option from Cloudflare just appeared on the public DNS landscape yesterday, and it's simply named after its IPv4 address: 1.1.1.1.Cloudflare promises that the new service will be both the fastest public DNS as well as the most secure. DNSs are a very easy way for a provider to track and manipulate users' traffic. According to Cloudflare, this idea came about after the US federal government discarded rules ...Read more...

Here at TR, we mostly leave coverage of game announcements to gaming-centric publications. Today, however, we're making an exception for some reason. Greefish Productions has announced a new game called Jellies vs. Whales, a title that's porpoisedly raising the bar on in-game purchases. I wasn't aware that was something the world needed, but I'll let the trailer speak for itself. ...Read more...

Light-up dog collars certainly aren't unprecedented, but the one that recently arrived at my house for future review breaks new ground. Check out the Real Good Boy Luminous Energy dog collar. Its claim to fame is an embedded Bluetooth module that allows remote control of the collar's colors with an app or via voice control courtesy of Amazon's Alexa.

Intel's "Hades Canyon" NUC isn't the only machine coming down the pipe with Intel's Kaby Lake-G chips inside—or more specifically, "eight-gen Core processors with Radeon RX Vega M graphics." Dell is now shipping the updated version of its XPS 15 2-in-1 convertible laptop with those chips inside. We wrote about the machine when it was announced back in January, so let's see what's changed. ...Read more...

More big changes could be on the way for Windows soon. According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, Microsoft announced a major reorganization of the company today. Foley says that the Windows and Devices Group is being split up, and that its former leader Terry Myerson is leaving Microsoft. Myerson has been with the company since 1997, although he's only been in charge of Windows since 2013.Microsoft's Windows and Devices Group (WDG) included not only the teams responsible for the Windows software itself but also the Surface, Xbox, and HoloLens teams. According to ...Read more...

Perhaps the biggest benefit of buying an Apple device over an Android competitor is iOS' far superior cadence and frequency of software updates. Today, vast swaths of iPhones and iPads will gain access to iOS 11.3, an update that Apple says brings new augmented-reality features and the ability to control the power-management functionality that was quietly introduced in a past release. ...Read more...

Obviously Photoshopped, but whatever...

Greetings, gerbils! You'll be happy to know that my boxing bag is now fully in place, and my foot's healed. I expect to test both items real soon now. Of course, the most likely result is that the boxing bag will swing back to me and knock me flat on my rear. Given that risk, I knew I had to get this deals post done before going on an adventure. Here's today's findings. ...Read more...

It's still a bit hard to believe that Intel's eighth-generation G-series processors are a real thing. The unholy union of an Intel CPU and a Radeon graphics processor scored a couple design wins in laptops when it debuted back at CES, but the most intriguing home for that chip at the show was Intel's own Hades Canyon NUC. One of those systems hit my doorstep a couple days ago, and I've been deep into testing it since. Say hello to Intel's highest-performance Hades Canyon system, also known as the NUC8i7HVK. ...Read more...

Once upon a time, building a server for high-performance computing meant finding a motherboard with as many CPU sockets and memory slots as possible and topping it off with an ATI Rage Pro with just enough graphics capability for troubleshooting and maintenance. The balance of computing power has shifted, and filling a compact chassis with as many accelerators as possible is now the preferred approach for many problems. Gigabyte developed its latest G190-G30 GPU server for buyers looking to stuff a 1U box with four Nvidia Tesla cards connected by NVLink. ...Read more...

Philips has a new monitor headed to stores that might be of interest to gerbils employed in the fields of photo editing or graphic design. The beautifully-named 272B8QJEB is a 27" monitor with a 2560x1440-resolution IPS panel with 10 bits per color channel and a 12-bit LUT. ...Read more...

The Irregular Corporation's PC Building Simulator really couldn't come at a better time for PC building enthusiasts. Sky-high prices for graphics cards and system memory, together with sometimes-limited power supply availability, have made building real-life high-performance system pretty painful. Enter simulated systems building. ...Read more...

ASRock is about to start selling graphics cards. Normally I'd make a joke here about the need for another video card vendor in the market, but there is clearly a necessity since every single model from every single maker is already flying off store shelves. The cards all fall under ASRock's new Phantom Gaming brand, and so far they're all based on GPUs from AMD's Radeon RX 500 series.

Hon Hai Precision Industry subsidiary Foxconn and Belkin have reached an agreement for the Taiwanese electronics megamanufacturer to purchase the router and accessory maker for $866 million in cash. The purchase includes Belkin as well as its Linksys, Wemo, and Phys sub-brands. The Financial Times says that Foxconn purchased Belkin in order to access its sales network, production capabilities, and portfolio of over 700 patents. ...Read more...

Tempered glass looks pretty, but the material doesn't lend itself to complex three-dimensional shapes. Cooler Master has therefore chosen acrylic for the dramatically-styled "diamond cut design" front and side panels of its MasterBox TD500L ATX chassis. The entire side panel is made from the transparent plastic and attaches using four thumbscrews, like many cases with tempered glass side panels. ...Read more...

Regular readers may recall Corsair's promise that its RGB-LED peripherals would offer lighting integration with Far Cry 5, and that new software to enable said integration would come along. Well, Far Cry 5 is here, and so is the new Corsair control app—or at least an early-access version of it. It's called iCue, and it replaces both the older CUE software as well as Corsair's Link software....Read more...

At its GPU Technology Conference today (GTC), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a fair number of announcements. However, none were likely as exciting to the machine-learning crowd as the announcement of the Nvidia DGX-2. As the successor to the DGX-1, the DGX-2 is likewise a pre-built computing cluster that combines a bundle of Nvidia GPUs and supporting hardware into a turn-key HPC system. This year's model doubles the number of GPUs to 16, and Nvidia says it offers a staggering 2 petaflops of compute throughput. ...Read more...

As part of his GTC 2018 keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company's latest professional graphics card: the Quadro GV100. This professional-visualization product offers 32 GB of HBM2 memory, up from 16 GB on past Volta V100 implementations, alongside the same 5,120 shader processors (80 of 84 Volta shader multiprocessors on the V100 GPU) that have appeared on past Volta products. Nvidia believes this card will be the optimal foundation for exploring its RTX real-time ray-tracing platform. ...Read more...

THAT's a knife.

Apple invited journalists to an event in Chicago to show off its latest education-related technologies, one of which is a new iPad that replaces the 2017-vintage suffix-less model. The new version of the popular tablet has one of the fruit-flavored company's A10 Fusion SoCs and a 9.7" display. ...Read more...

Who knew kids loved Wi-Fi so much? That's all I'm going to say about the plot that will unfold in my upcoming review. For now, I'm excited just to offer a peek at the pile of hardware that recently arrived at my house. Astute gerbils may recall that ever since Asus hooked up up the TR BBQ with some high-end networking gear, I've occasionally mused about replacing my own aging Asus RT-AC66U router. That time has come. ...Read more...

Howdy, folks! Now here's something for you to laugh at. I was hanging up a boxing bag in the garage yesterday. It was set too low because it's a two-man job and I was alone, but I nevertheless tested it. I pulled a mean left kick and swung hard. There was a bike to my left, which I accounted for, but it has a protruding pedal, which I did not. I proceeded to hit the top of my foot hard on the corner of said pedal. Lots of grimacing and cursing ensued, accompanied by copious amounts of pain. I am now the proud owner of a sore foot, but I also have a duty of finding deals. Here they are. ...Read more...

Nvidia gamers hoping to saddle up and save the land of the free in Far Cry 5 should hold their horses and grab the latest driver first. The GeForce 391.35 drivers just came out today, and it's Game Ready for Ubisoft's latest rooty-tooty point-and-shooty adventure. The new driver also comes with a few other little spot fixes and spiffs, as usual.

Laptops running Google's Chrome OS are gaining ground as the company widens access to the Play Store, making them suitable for a growing number of tasks. The browser-based OS is now spreading from its current home on laptops and small-form-factor desktop machines to tablets, and Acer's Chromebook Tab 10 is the first slate running Google's "other" OS. ...Read more...

Most keyboard manufacturers ask customers to choose between the membrane and mechanical key switches, but Roccat claims its Horde Aimo "membranical" gaming keyboard offers the best aspects of both switch types. The company says the switches offer a mid-travel actuation point for fast response along with the silent operation of a membrane switch. The "tuning wheel" in the upper-right corner can be configured to provide easy adjustment of illumination brightness, volume, or other system attributes. Roccat says the wheel makes the Horde Aimo the first keyboard to come equipped with a Windows Dial-compatible knob. ...Read more...

Hi there, gerbils. Today's not Tuesday nor Thursday, but we have a deals post for you nonetheless, thanks to a one-day sale that Amazon is running on PC gaming gear. Let's get right to it. ...Read more...

Yes sirree, March is almost over. Just five more days until we all shuffle off to the rainy days of April. There's still time in March for one more Radeon driver release, though. Radeon Software version 18.3.4 brings official support for Ubisoft's Far Cry 5 (launching tomorrow) along with a couple of bug fixes. ...Read more...

Using a high-refresh-rate monitor while gaming is a revelation. It's hard to overstate the improvement in quality-of-life for action gamers when going from a standard 60-Hz display to a 144-Hz monitor with variable-refresh-rate or blur-reduction technologies. For that reason, while we love our high-spec gaming monitors like the ROG Swift PG35VQ, we're also glad to see the introduction of entry-level monitors like the 24.5" Asus VG258Q. ...Read more...

Like it or not, ARM servers are here. You can buy high-throughput ARM CPU chips from a number of vendors. Options include the Centriq series from Qualcomm and the ThunderX2 family from Cavium. Gigabyte's been working closely with Cavium for a while now, and late last year began shipping server rack units based on ThunderX2 CPUs. You'll need workstations to develop the software for said servers, though, and once again Gigabyte is the shop with the goods. The company just announced the ThunderXStation, a dual-socket ARMv8 workstation system. ...Read more...

Fully-transparent case windows give a decent look at the components within a custom-built PC, but that glimpse isn't good enough for the designers at Thermaltake. The company's View 37 Riing Edition and View 37 RGB Edition E-ATX chassis have an acrylic panel that wraps around one side and the top of the case to offer up an unobstructed peek at the goods inside the box. ...Read more...

It wasn't all that long ago that a tempered-glass side panel was a premium feature on a case. Whether you love the looks or bash the fashion, you can find cases with glass panels at remarkably-low prices now. One such affordable chassis is Antec's P6. This sleek black enclosure lets you show off your build thanks to its single glass side panel, and it won't empty your wallet in the process. ...Read more...

Yesterday's storage news was all related to datacenter gear for those overseeing acres of tightly-packed server hardware. Today's data conservation talk concerns a new line of SATA SSDs from Mushkin. The company's Source-series SATA drives will be offered in both old-school 2.5" and latest-craze M.2-2280 form factors, with capacities ranging from 120 GB to 1 TB. ...Read more...

I reckon more than a few gerbils are familiar with Corsair's H60 closed-loop liquid cooler. It's Corsair's top-selling model, after all. Small radiators like these can go in places big tower coolers can't, and they also offer the cooling performance of a tower cooler without the potential to hit RAM sticks or cover other critical plugs or expansion slots. Corsair has just revised the H60 to match the styling of its Hydro Pro series coolers, but those aren't the only changes in the new version. ...Read more...

Yay, spring! Oh wait, it's winter. Never mind, it's spring again. This refrain is being heard around most of Europe and the US right now. If you ask me if I'm going out with a heavy jacket, a light sweater, or shorts, the answer is "yes." Thankfully, hunting deals requires no particular attire—I'm still in pajamas and robe typing this out. Check out what I found—today's harvest is bountiful. ...Read more...

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Adata XPG SX8200 is a minor upgrade or revision of the prior XPG SX8000, and that it sits behind the XPG SX9000 in performance. You would be mistaken, though. The SX8200, which we first saw at CES this year, uses what Adata calls "second-generation 64-layer 3D NAND flash" in combination with an NVMe-1.3-ready controller from SMI to produce the company's fastest SSD to date. ...Read more...