Techreport

AMD's Radeon RX Vega graphics cards continue to trade hands for inflated figures, but PowerColor is doing its part to bring down the price for a custom-cooler-equipped Vega board with the Red Dragon RX Vega 56. The new card slots in below the company's existing Red Devil RX Vega 56. As one would expect, the clocks of the middle-child Red Dragon are a bit slower than those of the range-topping Red Devil. Thankfully, the Red Dragon's power requirements are a bit relaxed when compared to its devilish sibling, as well. ...Read more...

At this year's OCP Summit, Seagate teased a new drive for its storage-hungry enterprise clients. This hard drive adds a new tier of storage to its helium-filled Exos X line. Seagate says the 14-TB Exos X14 offers higher capacity than its siblings in the same form factor, while maintaining the same efficiency and performance.

Talk at the Games Developers Conference seems to be dominated by news about real-time ray-tracing technology from AMD, Microsoft, and Nvidia, but virtual reality hasn't lost its buzzword status. HTC announced today that its Vive Focus standalone VR headset will, in fact, make its way out of its current home in China to customers in other parts of the world. The company also says it has development kits available to registered application developers starting today. ...Read more...

We were quite impressed with the Core i7-8700K when we reviewed it. Who could complain about a CPU that boasts the fastest out-of-the-box single-threaded performance on the planet as well as multi-threaded performance similar to processors sporting two more cores? Apparently Intel isn't satisfied, because reports are flooding in, seemingly confirming earlier rumors about an as-yet-unnamed eight-core desktop CPU from the boys in blue. The latest such report is detailed over at Videocardz and consists of an entry in the 3DMark database for an eight-core, 16-thread Coffee Lake S processor.

Although we figure the majority of our readers are micro-computer enthusiasts, we know that there are more than a few gerbils out there knee-deep in systems administration. If that describes you, you might have an interest in today's Toshiba announcements. Three new datacenter-oriented SSDs based on the company's 64-layer BiCS 3D flash memory are on the way, and they're called the CD5, XD5, and HK6-DC. Toshiba is also offering a network-storage abstraction software called KumoScale. ...Read more...

All the real-time ray-tracing talk this week might give on the impression that the Game Developer's Conference is the only computer-related gathering going on. As it happens, the Open Compute Project is holding its US Summit this week in San Jose. Samsung is taking the cloud- and datacenter-focused conference as an opportunity to show off its PM883 high-density datacenter SSDs, along with 64-GB DDR4 registered memory modules made with the company's own monolithic 16- Gb memory chips. ...Read more...

Amid the tumult that CTS Labs stirred up with its questionably-conducted disclosure of a range of potential vulnerabilities in AMD hardware last week, it's important to remember that those vulnerabilities are, by the accounts of all who have seen proof-of-concept code, legitimate. While the vulnerabilities generally require administrative rights to exploit, they reward that privilege escalation with the potential to compromise a system's hardware root of trust or install persistent malware. Today, AMD announced plans to begin mitigating the four categories of exploits that CTS Labs revealed through its disclosure. Happily, the company believes it can safeguard its processors and chipsets against all of these vulnerabilities through firmware updates.As a brief refresher, the so-called "Masterkey" vulnerability allows an attacker to compromise the AMD Secure Processor, an integrated ARM core that handles some platform security functions for some Ryzen and Epyc systems, by installing a corrupted firmware that the Secure Processor does not detect during its own self-checks. Once the Secure Processor is compromised in this way, ...Read more...

Remember the Ataribox retro console? Well, it's not called that anymore. Yesterday, Atari revealed that its upcoming game system will be called the Atari VCS—just like the original Atari VCS 2600 whose design it mimics. The company also revealed the two types of controllers for the machine: a modern gamepad with dual analog sticks, and a joystick with a single button, just like the one included with the original VCS. ...Read more...

Offering high-end internals is only one of the ways to motivate customers to buy a particular smartphone. HTC is betting on a fancy finish to spark purchases of its new mid-range Desire 12 and Desire 12+ handsets. The new phones' headlining feature is the "acrylic glass" body that mimics the look of the company's glass-finished U11 phones but purportedly offers increased shatter resistance. Let's take a deeper look.

Seems like there are a lot of days dedicated to pasta...

The technology in the spotlight at the Game Developers Conference this year is definitely ray tracing. Microsoft announced its new DXR real-time ray-tracing feature for DirectX 12, and Nvidia is showing off its proprietary RTX acceleration technology that runs on its Volta chips. For its part, AMD is taking the wraps off of Radeon Rays, an open-source "intersection acceleration library." The technology is said to work on all OpenCL 1.2-compatible platform and doesn't require AMD hardware. The company is also showing off a new version of ProRender software with real-time ray-tracing capability....Read more...

Hi there, gerbils! Yesterday's real-time ray tracing news brought a wave of nostalgia over me. It's interesting to look back at how the technology has always been promised but never delivered, even as far back as the days of the Playstation 2. However, two enormous companies are now putting their weight behind it, and it's hard to argue that today's hardware is up to the task. But until I can play ray-traced Witcher 3, I have to hunt hardware deals. Here's today's rather bountiful crop. ...Read more...

AMD isn't the only graphics company hoisting sails in preparation for Rare's Sea of Thieves. Nvidia's developers have also added day-one support for the nautical-themed title into the latest GeForce 391.24 driver release. The green graphics gurus brought the Ansel in-game photography tools to Pure Farming 2018, Q.U.B.E. 2, and Star Wars Battlefront II. In this release, the Nvidia Highlights kill-shot recording feature arrives in Call of Duty: WWII, Dying Light: Bad Blood, Escape from Tarkov, and Tekken 7. Additionally, the Nvidia Freestyle color-filtering feature also gets new "Old Film" and "Tilt-Shift" modes.

Can you believe it's already March 20? Yes indeed, we're in the third week of the month, and AMD has apparently taken that as a cue to launch its next Radeon driver release. Radeon Software version 18.3.3 is a full driver release and adds official support for Sea of Thieves and A Way Out. This release is also the first non-beta package with support for version 1.1 of the Vulkan specification.

Real-time ray tracing has been the elusive Holy Grail of computer graphics as long as there have been computer graphics. Ray tracing has long been used in films and other places where it's okay to take a few hours or more to render a single frame, but historically the technology's just been too demanding to use in games. That said, computers have gotten awfully fast in the past couple decades. Microsoft and Nvidia both announced new software at GDC that could help bring real-time ray tracing to upcoming games: DirectX 12 DXR and Nvidia RTX.

We've seen a number of boards based on Intel's latest Goldmont SoCs, but the models we looked at all used the silicon maker's two-core, two-thread Celeron J4005 chip rather than the faster Pentium Silver J5005 processor. That changes with ASRock's J5005-ITX, a board that packs the four cores, four threads, and substantially-faster UHD Graphics 605 of the Pentium Silver J5005 chip into a fanless Mini-ITX form factor. ...Read more...

When SSDs started to show up in PC build guides for enthusiasts, the first question on my mind was "why are they 2.5" drives?" As it turns out, SSDs are complex devices and making them physically bigger isn't necessarily going to increase their capacity. There are some exceptions, though, like Nimbus Data's new ExaDrive DC100. The name is informative enough—this drive is a datacenter-focused SSD that holds one hundred terabytes. ...Read more...

We wrote about HTC's announcement of the upcoming high-end Vive Pro VR headset just before CES a couple of months ago. Back then, the company was happy to talk about the Pro's 78% pixel count increase versus the original Vive (from 1080x1200 per eye to a screen-door-effect-reducing 1440x1600 per eyeball), but wouldn't let on the asking price for the higher-res model. HTC's now revealed that the Vive Pro will go for $799 for the headset alone. The standard Vive kit also got a permanent $100 price cut. ...Read more...

It doesn't take a genius to realize that there's no love lost between Apple and its suppliers, including but not limited to Samsung. The two companies have been bitter rivals in the smartphone space for nearly a decade despite the fact that Samsung supplies many components for Apple's devices, including the OLED display in the iPhone X. The pair's partnership may get a little less fruitful for Samsung soon. Bloomberg reports that Apple is secretly working on micro-LED display technology to eventually use on its own devices.For those not in the know, micro-LED is a new type of display closely related to OLED. Essentially, it skips the backlight-and-filter approach of liquid crystal displays and instead forms subpixels out of microscopic ...Read more...

Google showed off its Daydream standalone VR platform back in May of last year. At the time, HTC and Lenovo both said they would bring Daydream headsets to market before the end of 2017. HTC eventually gave up on Google's platform in favor of its own for the Vive Focus standalone unit, and Lenovo has been pretty quiet on the matter until today. A product page for the PC maker's Mirage Solo headset has now appeared at B&H. ...Read more...

It's easy for us enthusiasts to forget that the high-powered CPUs we favor aren't even a majority of the market. Intel still has a whole bundle of desktop Coffee Lake CPUs to launch, and it looks like they're on the way sooner than later. Videocardz has a list of chips that either popped up on Amazon for pre-order or were found in listings on Asus' website.All the new chips have TDPs of 65 W or below and fill out the remainder of Intel's eighth-generation desktop ...Read more...

The January reveal of the Meltdown and Spectre speculative-execution attacks sent ripples through the entire computer industry. Part of Intel's response was a boost in bug-hunting bounties up to a cool quarter-million dollars for finding side-channel vulnerabilities. Microsoft has now joined the party and ponied up a $250,000 bounty of its own for the identification of speculative-execution flaws. Like Intel's payout bump, Microsoft's program has a ticking clock—it'll end when 2019 comes around.Microsoft's payout program has four tiers, shown in the table below. The biggest award is handed for discovering a new class of speculative-execution attacks. The company has a separate blog post with more technical information ...Read more...

I just had a hard drive fail on me, and I'm not looking forward to buying more spinning rust for my desktop. Unfortunately for me, it doesn't look like flash memory prices will be falling any time soon. TechNews of Taiwan reports that Samsung's massive NAND flash memory plant in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, surprisingly suffered a roughly 30-minute power outage on March 9. Due to the outage, Samsung reportedly lost between 50,000 and 60,000 wafers, or around 11% of its flash production for March.TechNews goes on to say that number amounts to around 3.5% of the world-wide flash memory production for this month. The site remarks that foreign investors don't expect the accident to have a major impact on Samsung's profitability or future operations, owing to the fact that Samsung apparently has ...Read more...

Videocardz reports that online retailers in a number of countries in North America and Europe have pre-order pages for AMD's second-generation "Zen+" Ryzen 2000-series desktop processors. AMD's opening salvo reportedly includes the six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 2600 and 2600X, plus the eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 2700 and 2700X. The 2700X appears to be the fastest processor in the line, at least for the time being. The new chips are expected to share much in common with AMD's first-generation Ryzen chips but are built using Global Foundries' 12LP process technology rather than the silicon maker's 14LPP node. ...Read more...

Good afternoon, gerbils. It looks like I'm finally going to be on the receiving end of some rays of sunshine next week. I'm already planning a few outings and picking out the cool t-shirts I'll be wearing. I assume that Americans everywhere are already dusting off their BBQ grills. It's a new season, and there's new hardware on sale. Check it out. ...Read more...

Mondays, amiright?

Back in January, Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich wrote an open letter promising speedy Spectre and Meltdown patches. He later on remarked that the company's first products to "address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware" would show up this year. Today, Krzanich authored a blog post that says the company has microcode updates ready for all of its products released in the past five years, and that CPUs with "hardware-based protection" for the security flaws will launch toward the end of 2018....Read more...

CTS Labs has received scrutiny this week for its decision to publicize the flaws it claims to have located in AMD's chipsets and Secure Processor architecture rather than pursue the traditional responsible vulnerability disclosure model. Security researchers typically contact the manufacturer of the vulnerable technology and give the company or companies 30-90 days to create and distribute fixes. In a public letter, CTS Labs' CTO Ilia Luk-Zilberman describes how he takes issue with the traditional model, and how the group of researchers decided the best course of action was to make the public immediately aware of the alleged flaws but withhold the technical details. ...Read more...

There's a huge gulf in immersion between playing a game on a monitor and playing it in VR. There aren't many ways to step out into that gap, but one of them is through reactive mood lighting. Technologies like Philips' Ambilight improve immersion by smoothing over the harsh disconnect between what you're looking at and what's in your peripheral vision. Logitech is the latest company to offer a product in this vein with its Lightsync technology found on the new G560 speakers and G513 mechanical keyboard. ...Read more...

Intel's eighth-generation Core i5 and i7 mobile CPUs have demonstrated their ability to effectively cram four cores and eight hardware threads into a 15 W TDP. Fujitsu's Lifebook U938 laptops cram that power into a package weighing in at just 2 lbs (0.92 kg), a bit lighter than than LG's similarly-specced 13.3" Gram.

It's no secret that Google makes most of its money on advertising. Heck, some of our own ads are served through Google's networks. Due to the nature of the ad business, it behooves Google to accept as many advertisers as possible. Having said that, it's also important that the ad content Google is serving is trustworthy. That's likely the reason that come this June, Google will be banning advertisements for a range of financial products that includes all cryptocurrency-related offerings.Specifically, Google is banning ads for "cryptocurrencies and related content, including but not limited to initial coin offerings, cryptocurrency exchanges, cryptocurrency wallets, and cryptocurrency trading advice." News of the ban comes from an update to Google's advertising policies , ...Read more...

As you may have heard, a group calling itself CTS Labs yesterday revealed what it claims are no less than 13 security vulnerabilities in AMD hardware. There's a cloud of controversy and confusion surrounding the announcement, the manner in which it was made, and the motivation behind it. Ars Technica and TechPowerUp (TPU) have both done some digging and came up with a little more info.TechPowerUp reportedly contacted CTS Labs directly . The group told TPU that it had provided "a complete research package" including "functional proof-of-concepte exploit code" to AMD, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Symantec, ...Read more...

As you may have heard, a group calling itself CTS Labs yesterday revealed what it claims are no less than 13 security vulnerabilities in AMD hardware. There's a cloud of controversy and confusion surrounding the announcement, the manner in which it was made, and the motivation behind it. Ars Technica and TechPowerUp (TPU) have both done some digging and came up with a little more info.TechPowerUp reportedly contacted CTS Labs directly . The group told TPU that it had provided "a complete research package" including "functional proof-of-concepte exploit code" to AMD, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Symantec, ...Read more...

The Pi Foundation has released many takes on its Raspberry Pi line of ARM-based single-board computers (SBCs) over the years. Today's release of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ marks the first time the foundation has launched a new model on Pi Day. The big improvements compared to the existing Raspberry Pi 3 are a 200-MHz clock speed bump, a Gigabit Ethernet controller, and improved Wi-Fi with 802.11ac and 5-GHz band support....Read more...

If the Broadcom-Qualcomm buyout story was an episode of Looney Tunes, you'd now be reading "that's all, folks." After yesterday's presidential order blocking the deal, Broadcom has now issued a press release saying that it's "withdrawn and terminated" its offer to acquire Qualcomm.Along with tabling the buyout offer, Broadcom will also pull back its nominations for Qualcomm's board of directors. The company will, however, proceed with its plan to re-home its heardquarters stateside and ...Read more...

Do you use Firefox, gerbils? You don't have to answer—we already know a significant portion of you do. The latest Firefox update is called Quantum like its predecessor, but it brings the app's version number to 59. Big changes this time around include improvements to page load time, enhanced security in private browsing mode, and added features to the screenshot editor. ...Read more...

When it comes to SSDs, the "gaming" adjective can mean a couple of different things. Intel would have enthusiasts buy its spanking-new, 3D XPoint-based Optane SSD 800P drives. Another point of view is that a gaming SSD is a low-cost, large-capacity device holding a game library and sitting beside a turbo-speed NVMe boot disk. Adata's latest XPG SX950U drives seem to adhere to this second notion. The drives combine a Silicon Motion controller, DRAM and SLC caching, and 3D NAND chips to deliver speeds that come close to saturating the SATA interface. ...Read more...

CTS Labs, an Israeli security research firm, purports to have discovered 13 separate security vulnerabilities related to AMD hardware across four categories of exploits. This surprise news arrives without any form of coordinated disclosure or pre-developed vendor mitigations.The firm claims that flaws in AMD's Secure Processor, a separate ARM processor on AMD Zen CPUs that performs various encryption and root-of-trust functions, can be exploited to run arbitrary code. The "Masterkey" vulnerability requires the attacker to install ...Read more...

Good afternoon, gerbildom. It is with great pleasure that after almost two months of convulsive coughing, my nose and throat are apparently done with their battle against me. Let me tell you, that was no fun at all. The occasional ray of sunshine is finding its way onto my office window every now and then, so perhaps we can say that Spring has, in fact, arrived. A new season begets new hardware deals, and here they are for you. ...Read more...

ProTip: when you find a stock image like this, use it.

Broadcom's attempt to take control of rival chipmaker Qualcomm appears to have hit a tough barrier, as US President Donald Trump has weighed in with a presidential order forbidding any merger between the two companies. Furthermore, Trump disqualified all 15 of Broadcom's candidates for Qualcomm's board of directors. The order cites national security concerns as the primary reason for blocking the acquisition of San Diego-based Qualcomm by Broadcom, an organization with elements in the US, Singapore, and the Cayman Islands.Trump cites subsection 721f of the Defense Production Act of 1950 in the order, but does not specifically refer to how a merger between the two silicon design firms would "impair the national security of ...Read more...

A new Radeon software package just rode in, little more than a week after the last one. This release arrived astride a chocobo—one of the ever-adorable avian mounts from the Final Fantasy series. In a similar vein to the previous release, Radeon Software version 18.3.2 focuses almost entirely on Final Fantasy XV. ...Read more...

Broadcom's attempt to take control of Qualcomm is a tech business story that will seemingly never stop giving. In this latest episode, Reuters reports that the Singapore-based silicon design firm disobeyed orders from the US Treasury Department when it started a plan to move its headquarters from Singapore to California without giving sufficient notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).According to Reuters, CFIUS member Aimen Mir wrote in a letter on Sunday, addressing both companies, that Broadcom "took a series of actions in violation" of a March 5 Treasury Department order. Namely, Broadcom was supposed to inform the CFIUS five business days before making any moves to ...Read more...

If you were to ask me, I'd reckon a fair few gerbils are familiar with Asus' venerable VG248QE gaming monitor. It was one of the first displays to offer the now-commonplace 144-Hz refresh rate, and it introduced many of us to backlight-strobing blur reduction. Asus has already released a newer version of that monitor with FreeSync support, known as the MG248Q. Now that blur-reducing backlights are coming into vogue with mainstream PC gamers, Asus has added another entry to the series: the MG248QE display. ...Read more...

We wrote a few words about Philips' 492P8 double-wide 49" display when it was unveiled it at IFA in Berlin back in September. The company has given the screen an interesting spec bump and issued a US release date. The display shown at IFA had a resolution of 3840x1080, but Philips is now saying that the 492P8 will have a more ambitious VA panel with 5120 columns and 1440 rows of pixels. ...Read more...

On Saturday, Microsoft launched a new series of monthly livestreams called Inside Xbox. The first episode had details on Sea of Thieves, PixArk, and the Xbox version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. However, the most interesting information was about the next system software update for the Xbox One S and Xbox One X consoles. According to Microsoft, Xbox gamers will be able to enjoy AMD's FreeSync 2 variable-refresh-rate (VRR) tech when the update hits later this spring. ...Read more...

As the TR staff gears up for our next system build, we've teased two sets of critical components over the past couple of days: our CPU, graphics card, and motherboard plus our memory, power supply, and solid-state drive. Now it's time to round out our build with a case, cooler, and high-capacity mechanical storage. ...Read more...

For those just joining us, the TR staff is getting ready to put together an enviably high-end system with some help from some of our favorite sponsors. Yesterday we looked at our CPU, graphics card, and motherboard. Today we're teasing some memory and peripherals, courtesy of G.Skill; our power supply, courtesy of Antec; and our solid-state drive, courtesy of Samsung. ...Read more...

The Tech Report staff is about to kick off a new build log with help from a wide range of great sponsors. We've got a great story to tell, but sharing any details of why we're putting this system together will spoil the surprise. For the moment, enjoy the first round of high-octane components that will make up some of our build. ...Read more...

Microsoft introduced Windows 10 S along with the Surface Laptop just over ten months ago, but rumors that the pared-back version of the company's flagship operating system would go the way of Windows RT started swirling as soon as last month. This week, Microsoft Windows Corporate VP Joe Belfiore addressed those rumors with a blog post. In the post, Belfiore says Redmond received customer feedback that the "Windows 10 S" name was confusing to customers and partners. The company and its partners will instead ship future PCs with "Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro with S Mode enabled." Users will be able to disable S Mode at no charge. ...Read more...