Techreport

Finnish phone maker HMD Global took this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as an opportunity to unveil three new handsets. The midrange Nokia 6 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 SoC and a 5.5" display, the spiffier Nokia 7 Plus packs a Snapdragon 660 and a 6" screen, and the flagship Nokia 8 Sirocco brings a Snapdragon 835 to go along with its curved 5.5" OLED panel. The newcomers are also part of the Android One line of phones running an unmodified version of the Android OS. Let's take a closer look. ...Read more...

Although we're hurtling toward the end of February at breakneck speed, there's still time for one more GeForce driver release this month. The GeForce 391.01 drivers are WHQL-certified and "Game Ready" for Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and World of Tanks 1.0. The new release also has further optimizations for mega-hit PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds....Read more...

Samsung's unveiling of its latest flagship Galaxy S9 Android smartphone is probabaly the big story of this year's Mobile World Congress in Barecelona. Qualcomm, maker of the largest bit of silicon in US-bound S9 handsets, also has some interesting demos in its booth, including results of simulations of next-generation mobile broadband networks that show what kind of speeds users might see when those systems roll out next year.The company simulated Non-Standalone 5G New Radio (NSA 5G NR) networks in Frankfurt, Germany and San Francisco, California. Both simulations predicted huge increases in available bandwidth along with substantial reductions in latency, ...Read more...

Huawei has taken the a path opposite to Apple's when it comes to consumer gear. Rather than being a personal computer company that began selling phones, Huawei is a telecoms company that also sells laptops—pretty fancy ones, too. Huawei is showing off its latest creation, the MateBook X Pro, at Mobile World Congress 2018 (which starts today in actually-sort-of-rainy Barcelona). This 14" ultrabook sports a 91% display-to-chassis ratio and discrete graphics in a body just 0.57" (15 mm) thick. ...Read more...

Intel announced the next product in its Stratix 10 family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) this morning. The Stratix 10 TX family of network transceivers uses Intel's EMIB technology to integrate as many as five 58 Gbps transceiver modules alongside FPGAs comprising anywhere from 600K to 2.8 million programmable logic elements, according to Anandtech. Intel expects Stratix 10 TX chips to power networking devices for optical transport, perform network function virtualization, and find homes with cloud service providers and companies building 5G network infrastructure. ...Read more...

You have heard more than a few mutterings about the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Although the event proper only starts tomorrow, Samsung pulled a fast one and released its Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus handsets today with great pomp and circumstance. They look quite impressive, so let's examine them in great detail.Samsung's presentation had an almost-unhealthy focus on the capabilities of the S9's camera, though with good reason. The snapper around the back is a dual-aperture unit that can work with an f/2.4 aperture on well-lit settings, and ...Read more...

We reported on the death of Google's Project Tango and the repackaging of some of its tech into the ARCore framework a couple of months back. The company is taking advantage of the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as an opportunity to launch the promised 1.0 version of the platform. The search giant already released two developer previews and says that today's 1.0 release works on 13 different smartphones occupying at least 100 million pockets. The company also talked up improvements and expanded availability of the Lens photo analysis app. ...Read more...

Howdy there, folks! If you're on the hunt for a tablet, phone, convertible, or laptop, you positively have to check out our latest mobile staff picks guide. That's an order, gerbils! In the meantime, check out the deals we have for you today. ...Read more...

Samsung announced today that it's going to be pouring $6 billion into a new semiconductor fabrication facility in Hwaseong, South Korea. The new facility is going to focus on extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography for "single-digit nanometer" process technologies like Samsung's upcoming 7-nm LPP process.

Microsoft's sometimes-aggressive data collection policies received criticism, but if AdDuplex's Windows 10 Fall Creators Update adoption figures are accurate, the software giant might be doing something constructive with all the ones and zeroes gleaned from customer PCs. The "cross-promotion network for Windows Phone and Windows applications" reports that 85% of all PCs running Windows 10 have upgraded to the Fall Creators Update, which started rolling out to customer machines at the end of October. For comparison's sake, the previous Creators Update had reached about 66% of Windows 10 devices at the four-month mark, accoridng to AdDuplex. ...Read more...

The fine folks at AMD's Radeon Technologies Group have been busy bees. The latest Radeon Software release is numbered 18.2.3 (as it's the third release this month) and has a nice pack of performance patches for Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age and Sea of Thieves. There's also the usual bunch of bugfixes, too.

Remember Alphacool, the funky Germans with a passion for CLCs? The company's at it again with the Eisbaer LT line of closed-loop liquid coolers. These new coolers boast a slim-profile pump-and-heatsink assembly and fittings compatible with both Alphacool Eisbaer Ready products and standard G1/4" gear. ...Read more...

When the first wave of liquid AIO coolers hit the market, their ease of installation and high level of compatibility were major selling points. Over time the market expanded to include models with ever-longer radiators, fans sandwiched around the heat exchanger, and complicated mounting hardware intended to fit every CPU socket in the last fifteen years. EVGA's CLC 120 CL11 liquid AIO cooler goes back to those early days with its 120-mm radiator, simple wiring, and simplified, Intel-only mounting. The kit has an affordable price, though fancy stuff like RGB LED illumination, fill ports, and expansion options are left at the chopping block. ...Read more...

Could slow computers increase productivity by forcing you to stay on task?

Tweakers and tuners might form the majority of the case market, but there aren't a lot of computer cases out there designed for easy access to the internals. Corsair's seemingly decided to address this apparent deficiency with its new Obsidian 500D enclosure. The sides of the new mid-tower chassis are formed from tempered glass with a smoky finish. Rather than being suspended by thumbscrews, these panels are hinged at the back of the case so they can swing open. ...Read more...

Fractal Design's Meshify C ATX chassis looks pretty awesome with its polygon-esque front panel and tinted tempered glass side panel. The case maker is expanding the Meshify C range with new variants. Buyers now get additional choices: a version with a lighter tint on the tempered glass, or one with a second metal panel. If the original Meshify C's tempered glass panel didn't offer a good enough view of the high-end system carried within, the new lighter-tinted version should provide better opportunity to display your build. Those who want to completely obscure the rat's nest of cabling covering their hardware can pick up the version with two metal side panels. ...Read more...

PCs with cellular connectivity inside are having a bit of a moment right now. On top of recent buzz around Qualcomm's Always Connected PCs, Intel is announcing this morning that it will collaborate with Dell, HP, and Lenovo to put its XMM 8000 family of 5G New Radio (5G NR) modems inside PCs running Windows. Intel will also work with Microsoft to further this effort. The company expects the first shipping products using this silicon to begin shipping in the second half of 2019. ...Read more...

Many Bluetooth headphones still have some sort of physical connection between the earphones, whether it's a wire or a host unit. A while back, Qualcomm launched a tech called TrueWireless Stereo that does away with the wires in favor of connecting left and right earphones themselves via Bluetooth. Now, the company has baked a new version of the tech into its latest low-power Bluetooth SoCs that it says solves most of the issues of the earlier revision.TrueWireless Stereo headphones are "truly wireless"—two separate headphones that lack physical connections. With first-gen TrueWireless hardware, one headphone is the designated the primary unit, and it gets the audio stream from the device (e.g. a smartphone). It then shares one ...Read more...

Most would agree that a high-end PC with a fast CPU and a discrete video card can deliver better graphics to a VR headset than a smartphone SoC, and with better frame rates and lower latency to boot. However, the issues of a fractured developer community, device drivers, sensors, and a potential tangled mess of cords could make standalone VR headsets more attractive and immersive. Qualcomm is hoping for increased adoption of standalone VR headsets with its SoCs inside, and it's unveiled its latest Snapdragon 845 mobile VR reference platform in an effort to guide the company's hardware partners on the way forward. ...Read more...

Those Windows 10 on ARM devices that we were just talking about yesterday are representative of Qualcomm and Microsoft's "Always Connected PC" initiative. The idea is to have a PC laptop with the battery life and always-on connectivity of a smartphone. It's going to take more than just Microsoft and Qualcomm to make that happen, though. Qualcomm just announced that it's partnering with nine more telecom operators in addition to the five it already had.The original announcement included China Telecom , TIM in Italy, EE in the UK, and Sprint and Verizon in the US. Today, T-Mobile and AT&T join the party in the US, as well as Swisscom in Switzerland, Telefónica in Spain, ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils! If you've been hearing dog-cough sounds all the time, it's me. I've been fighting this stupid flu-inflicted throat infection for over a month, and now I'm on a steady diet of get-better drugs. I'd really like to stop waking up the whole building at night and, you know, sleep. At least I have sweet, juicy hardware deals to comfort me in these difficult times. Take a look at today's selection. ...Read more...

AMD is bringing the power of Zen and Vega to embedded markets this morning. The Epyc Embedded 3000 processor family is targeted at network function virtualization, software-defined networking, industrial applications, and other compute- and I/O-hungry workloads, while the Ryzen Embedded V1000 series of SoCs taps the Raven Ridge silicon to offer support for up to four independent 4K displays or at least one 5K monitor for applications like medical imaging where clarity is paramount. ...Read more...

Intel announced new progress on its efforts to mitigate the Spectre vulnerability today. The company says it has finished "production microcode updates" for its OEM customers and partners for products in its Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and Skylake-X processors. It also has ready-to-roll updates for partner products built with the Xeon Scalable Processor family and the just-announced Skylake Xeon D line. It's now up to Intel's extensive circle of partners to incorporate those microcode updates into firmware for customers to install.Intel has also greatly expanded its document outlining microcode update plans for a wide swath of platforms past . According to this document, Broadwell and Haswell microcode designed to mitigate Spectre remains in beta. Although the company isn't listing every Ivy Bridge product as ...Read more...

Baxter shouldn't be allowed in this fancy chair, but what kind of monster would stop him?

We've heard rumblings for a while that Intel's initial wave of mostly-upper-tier Coffee Lake CPUs wasn't going to be the only round of chips built using the company's 14nm++ process technology. We also have a pretty good idea of what we might expect from the second wave of Coffee Lake chips with respect to core counts, clock speeds, and graphics capabilities. A new round of rumors concern the critical detail of US pricing. Previous leaks provided a forecast of prices in Australia, but even in today's era of globalization, CPU prices inevitably vary from region to region. E-tailers Provantage, PC Connection, and CompSource have added minimal product pages with apparent pricing for a variety of new Coffee Lake processors, including entry-level Pentium Gold and Celeron models.The new models include one Core i3 and two new Core i5s. The purported four-core, four-thread Core i3-8300 sits between the similar Core i3-8100 and the faster, unlocked Core i3-8350K . The new model will reportedly share the larger 8 MB cache size of the 8350K. The six-core, six-thread Core i5-8500 and Core i5-8600 nestle between the Core i5-8400 ...Read more...

The second-generation of modern VR hardware is upon us, but perhaps not in the form you were expecting. Windows Mixed Reality headsets are compatible with most of the same content as HTC's Vive, but the newer WMR units are sporting slightly spiffed specs compared to the older set. One such headset is the just-released Asus Windows Mixed Reality Headset HC102. ...Read more...

Crucial's MX-series SSDs have long been major players in the enthusiast SATA market. The MX300 was the first 3D-NAND equipped SSD that Micron's retail arm released to the masses. Despite a downgrade from its predecessor's MLC to TLC, the drive still delivered enough performance to satisfy us. ...Read more...

In the realm of the consumer-focused SSDs we normally cover around these parts, a capacity of 2 TB is generally considered to be pretty large. Spinny metal hard drive capacities top out in the mid-teens these days. Samsung's latest PM1643 12 Gbps SAS SSD, on the other hand, stores a whopping 30.72 TB spread out across 512 of the silicon maker's 64-layer, 512-Gb V-NAND flash chips. The company's previous capacity king was March 2016's 15.36 TB PM1633a....Read more...

Are you absolutely stoked for the launch of Windows 10 on ARM devices? We first heard about the project more than a year ago, and in May of last year Microsoft explained a little about how regular old Win32 x86 apps would run on the systems. In the meantime, Asus and others have announced upcoming laptops built on the technology. Even with all that talk around the platform, there were still some questions left unanswered, like whether we'd be able to run 64-bit apps or use Hyper-V. Microsoft put out a document last week that provided some answers.The original document at the Microsoft site was titled "Limitations of apps and experiences on ARM," but the company replaced it with another page intended to help developers troubleshoot their x86 apps on ARM clients. Both pages have more or less the same information, though the new version presents it in a ...Read more...

The world and its dog are now familiar with the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities that affect multiple types of processors but foremost those from Intel. You'd think that some lawsuits would be flying over the issue, and you'd be right. The company revealed in a recent SEC filing that it was facing a total of 32 class-action lawsuits.The 32 total lawsuits comprise 30 class-action lawsuits and two securities class-action lawsuits. The class-action complainants generally consider being misled by Intel's disclosures about its knowledge of the vulnerabilities, plus the fact that the fixes for them come with a performance drop. According to Intel, "the securities class-action plaintiffs [...] ...Read more...

Since it's totally unmoderated, the SiSoft Sandra benchmark results database is kind of a mess to navigate. Even still, TR tipster SH SOTN spotted a result in the database that identifies itself as an "Intel Ice Lake Client Platform." The result is for Sandra's OpenCL-based General-Purpose Processing benchmark, and it identifies the graphics part in our purported processor as "Gen 11 LP" with 48 execution units running at 600 MHz. ...Read more...

Most folks doing the kind of work that calls for Intel Xeon processors and Nvidia Quadro cards perform their duties in controlled, air-conditioned environments. Compulab's Airtop2 is built for rugged folks that need workstation hardware in a silent package that can handle harsh environments. The fanless PC displaces just 7.5 L (458 ci) but brings an Intel Core i7-7700 or Xeon E3-1275 v6 processor and Nvidia Quadro P4000 Pascal graphics to bear. ...Read more...

You may not be aware of this, but huge swaths of Asia don't use the Gregorian calendar we tend to favor in the West. The traditional Chinese calendar divides months based on the phases of the moon, and under that system, today is New Year's Day. As we enter the Year of the Earth Dog, Steam is holding one of its infamous wallet-busting sales to celebrate, appropriately titled the Lunar New Year Sale. The service's wishlist function has also been heavily improved. ...Read more...

Back when I reviewed the Corsair One, I annoyed my friends and colleagues thoroughly by going on at length about just how cool the machine was—both literally and figuratively. That machine was based on the last-generation Core i7-7700K, though, and the new six-core hotness is the Core i7-8700K. Fortunately, Corsair's on the ball. The company has a new version of the One ready for sale with Intel's latest-and-greatest desktop CPU. ...Read more...

Oh man, I need to restock!

Howdy, folks! Valentine's Day is over, and we hope that all of you enjoyed either the company of your significant others, or at least spent the night playing games. For our part, we love deals, and there's a varied selection today. Let's take a gander, shall we? ...Read more...

Gamers are used to getting updated graphics card drivers from AMD and Nvidia just about every week, but the unique needs of professional users mean a more controlled quarterly pace is appropriate. AMD's has just released the latest iteration of its Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition, and the new 18.Q1 version packs big gains in selected professional applications plus new virtualization and security features. ...Read more...

We imagine most buyers of prebuilt network-attached storage systems just want to plug the box in and forget that it exists for at least a couple of years. QNAP's latest TS-253Be and TS-453Be NAS units promise that kind of reliability and convenience. They're also expandable through either two or four drive bays and a versatile PCIe slot for adding Wi-Fi, 10-Gigabit Ethernet, or M.2 devices. ...Read more...

If you were curious about the actual specifications of Gigabyte's Gemini Lake-equipped fanless mini-ITX motherboards, keep reading. The company just put up the full specs for the J4005N-D2P. As attentive gerbils will have already divined from the model number, this board comes strapped with a Celeron J4005 dual-core system-on-a-chip as well as a fairly meaty fanless heatsink to keep it cool. ...Read more...

Update 2/14/18 4:45 PM: Intel confirmed to me via email that its specifications regarding these chips are accurate. The original article continues below.Despite initial word from the horse's mouth that Intel's Core i7 Skylake-X CPUs would boast only one AVX-512 FMA unit per core and Core i9 CPUs would have two such functional units per core, official documentation pointed out by CPU detective InstLatX64 on Twitter today confirms that Skylake-X ...Read more...

Intel isn't the only company affected by the recent spate of processor-related security vulnerabilities, but the ubiquity of the silicon giant's chips and some of its design decisions over the years have made its products the juiciest targets. The company started its Bug Bounty Program last March in an effort to get security researchers to approach Intel before they release their findings to the public. The chipmaker is now expanding that program by opening it up to any participant and increasing the maximum bounty to the princely sum of $250,000.Intel says the bounty program allows it to work with researchers to develop responses to security flaws before the knowledge of any vulnerabilities spread to the public. The company says the changes to the program are ...Read more...

As we reported back in December, Chrome's going to start filtering ads by default this month. Google posted an entry today on the official Chromium blog that talks exactly how the filters will work when they hit production tomorrow. Let's dig in and look at the specifics. ...Read more...

The X20 Gigabit LTE modem baked into Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 845 SoC is pretty fast, hitting download speeds as fast as 1.2 Gbps. Hardware partners looking for even more performance can choose the just-announced discrete Snapdragon X24 LTE modem. Qualcomm says the X24 is the first announced Category 20 LTE modem supporting up to a whopping 2 Gbps of downstream bandwidth....Read more...

As Jeff recently showed, while it may not be the best experience around, you can play a lot of games on contemporary Intel IGPs. However, like any other graphics processor, Intel's GPUs require a pretty complex driver that needs regular updates to run new games properly. The latest such update is upon us. Intel just released the Windows graphics driver version 15.65 for Gen9 and Gen9.5 graphics. Those are the units found in Skylake and newer CPUs.

Update 2/14/2018, 9:45 AM: AMD has posted a support page with steps users can take to resolve this specific issue should they build an unbootable system with a Ryzen APU and an older motherboard. The company suggests updating motherboard firmware using a compatible CPU, requesting assistance from a retailer with a compatible CPU, requesting an RMA exchange for a compatible motherboard, or using an AMD-provided boot kit to update the firmware. The original article continues below.As builders shop AMD's Ryzen desktop processors with Radeon Vega graphics onboard , they can rest somewhat assured that a Ryzen 3 2200G or Ryzen 5 2400G will physically fit into and light up the various ports and slots of Socket AM4 motherboards ...Read more...

Is anyone else hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice in their head, right now?

Hello, gerbils! It's a muted and dreary day outside, and it's actually a little comfortable to stay in where there's air conditioning and lots of games. Uh, right, and work. I almost forgot that I had deals to do, and here they are. I think you'll like today's selection. ...Read more...

If cryptocurrency mining is the biggest force driving graphics card demand right now, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds just might be right behind. The game is certainly has the largest player base on Steam at the moment. AMD already has a considerable following among miners, and its latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.2 driver update could curry some favor with the PUBG community. The company claims a 5% uptick in 2560x1440 PUBG performance on its Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card and a larger 7% speed bump on the older Radeon RX 580 card compared to the previous driver version. ...Read more...

A couple of weeks ago we reported on a rumor that Intel's Turbo Boost technology could make its first-ever appearance in a Core i3 CPU in the Cannon Lake family. As it turns out, we were half right. Turbo Boost is coming to Core i3s, but much sooner than we thought. Intel just announced the Core i3-8130U, the newest arrival in the Kaby Lake-R mobile chip family. ...Read more...

If you use Google's Chrome browser—or any of its Chromium-based siblings—you're probably familiar with seeing "not secure" up in your address bar next to sites that use a standard HTTP connection instead of secure HTTPS for login prompts and other forms. Over the last year, Chrome's been tightening the restrictions on what it considers to be a secure page in an attempt to push the web toward using HTTPS everywhere. Starting in July this year, Chrome will be marking any site and page that still uses HTTP as "not secure." ...Read more...