Techreport

While Sony used to build Vaio-branded laptops in all kinds of wild form factors, the brand is now attached to more conservative, business-focused machines. The Playstation maker sold the Vaio brand to Japan Industrial Partners back in 2014, and the new owners brought the machines back to America in mid-2015. The latest 13.3" Vaio S models promise to continue the paradigm of functional design and high build quality while bringing a big jump in performance thanks to Intel's eighth-generation Core processors. ...Read more...

Early last month during CES, Asus released a few new machines of note. The ZenBook Flip 14 was among the most interesting—a machine the company said was the world's thinnest 2-in-1 laptop with discrete graphics. If you think that's peachy-keen but you're not really a 2-in-1 kind of person, have a look at the ZenBook 13 UX331. The Asus-described "world's thinnest discrete graphics laptop" isn't completely new, but it's just now hitting US shores. ...Read more...

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 SoC is the beating heart within just about every Android flagship phone on the market, but the drum beat of technology and commerce never stops. Indeed, the silicon design firm started dispensing pellets of information about the Snapdragon 845 back in December. The company recently held its technology open house and gave news outlets some hands-on time to run benchmarks on its Snapdragon 845 reference platform, a bulky handset with a 5.5" screen and 6 GB of system memory. ...Read more...

Morning, folks. Today is the day when we can finally share performance details for the desktop versions of AMD's Ryzen processors with Radeon Vega graphics, or Ryzen APUs for short. AMD isn't using the term "accelerated processing unit" to refer to these chips any longer, but it's a whole lot easier to call them APUs than it is to type out "Ryzen processor with Radeon Vega graphics" every time we want to refer to the family of chips. Naming conventions aside, what matters most is that AMD finally has a competitive CPU core that it can fuse with its muscular graphics processors, and it's used those resources to form a most exciting pair of chips for entry-level gaming builds, small-form-factor game boxes, and HTPCs. ...Read more...

We've always held EVGA's Supernova G1 power supplies in high esteem. They're high-output, fully-modular, high-efficiency, and not too expensive. Nevertheless, EVGA decided some improvements were in order, so now the company is shelving the G1s and bringing out the Supernova G1+ series. On the surface, the new models are quite similar to the last-generation hardware, but EVGA has made a few changes worthy of note. ...Read more...

Major updates to VideoLAN's VLC media player don't happen every day. The player's development goes all the way back to 1996. Its 1.0 release came around in 2009, and version 2.0 was pushed out in 2012. All of that work has led to today's VLC 3.0 Vetinari release, named after a character from Terry Pratchett's Discworld book series. ...Read more...

Next week we'll see the launch of AMD's Raven Ridge-family Ryzen processors with Radeon Vega graphics, but are motherboard vendors ready? The answer is a fairly unambiguous "yes" across the industry. We've checked the websites of Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, and Biostar to make sure each company is prepared for the new processors.What started this little voyage was a press release from Asus wherein the company specifically announced support for "AMD's Ryzen 2000-series APUs" across its whole range of Socket AM4 motherboards. Indeed, we can find BIOS updates on the Asus website from within the ...Read more...

The latest Windows Build 17093 has gone out to those brave users on the Insider Fast Ring update track. The most recent build includes all kinds of new features for power users and regular Joes alike, so let's just dive right in.

This past Monday, Broadcom was willing to offer almost $121 billion in cash and stock to acquire Qualcomm. It didn't even take a week for the US chip company to decline Broadcom's offer. In a press release titled "Qualcomm board of directors unanimously rejects revised Broadcom proposal", the company does exactly that. That would seem to be the end of the story, given that Broadcom's most recent offer was its "best and final." It seems this tale isn't quite told yet, though—Qualcomm goes on to offer an in-person meeting with Broadcom's CEO Hock Tan to discuss the terms of a possible deal.The aforementioned offer to meet with Broadcom's top brass comes in the form of a surprisingly frank public letter—signed by the chairman of Qualcomm's board of directors, Paul Jacobs—and says the purchase offer "raises more questions than it answers." ...Read more...

Nvidia released its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2017 (its fiscal 2018) today, along with its full-year results. The green team pulled in $2.91 billion in revenue, up 34% year-on-year, which it describes as a record result. The company made $1.07 billion in operating profit, up 46% on the year, and $1.1 billion in net income, up 71% on the year. The company realized gross margin of 61.9%, up 1.9 percentage points on the year.The vast majority of Nvidia's income continues to come from its various GPU businesses. The company's graphics processors pulled in $2.46 billion in revenue, up ...Read more...

We wrote about a new beta version of Valve's Steam Audio SDK a couple of days ago, and now the company has pulled a fresh-baked beta of its Steam client software out of the oven. The headline news is the addition of support for high-DPI monitor support on the Fall Creators Update version of Windows 10. The Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of the new Steam client should also use less CPU when drawing the main window and make better use of stored assets when installing games from crusty old retail disks and backup files. ...Read more...

Sometimes, I worry that I'm too predictable...

Next-generation mobile broadband is a chicken-and-egg problem: current carriers are still in the process of getting 5G service ready and client devices lack support for the technology. Qualcomm yesterday announced partnerships with some of the heaviest hitters on both sides of the proverbial eggshell. The company says it's partnering with 18 device manufacturers and 19 different carriers to build the network needed for 5G mobile broadband access. Big Q's Snapdragon X50 is the first 5G modem on the market, and now device makers and huge carriers across multiple continents will conduct their trials using that next-gen chip.

Howdy, gerbils and gerbilettes. I'm sure you're waiting with bated breath for Jeff's review of AMD's desktop Ryzen APUs, but you'll have to wait until the numbers are collected and crunched and embargoes lift. In the meantime, we suggest you ready up for the review with some hot new hardware. We've searched high and low for the best deals out there, and here they are. ...Read more...

AMD's Ryzen processors with Radeon Vega graphics (henceforth Ryzen APUs) launch next week, but AMD is letting us spill the look and feel of these chips ahead of that launch. ...Read more...

The latest chapter in the saga of Intel's response to the Meltdown and Spectre security updates has come about. Intel's most recent blog post announces that the company has released production-ready microcode updates for Skylake platforms to OEMs and system vendors, and that it expects to have patches ready for "more platforms" in the next few days.Executive vice-president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group Navin Shenoy says that the company is also still producing beta microcode updates so that its partners can assist in testing them before the updates go into production. Shenoy strongly ...Read more...

Most folks are plenty happy relying on the magic of emulation to go back to the olden days of memory measured in KB and processors that ran at a handful of MHz. The widespread availability of emulated classic titles and the sales success of Nintendo's NES Classic Edition and Super NES Classic Edition bear out this assertion. More demanding gamers, however, require the accuracy and low latency deliverable only by bare-metal hardware or its equivalent.Analogue produces its products for this later group. The company's latest product is the Super Nt , a console that promises fully-accurate emulation with zero latency. That feat is accomplished by using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) ...Read more...

We reckon we don't have to tell an audience of gerbils about Panasonic's Toughbooks. The ruggedized laptop series is famous for its impressive durability and solid performance, but Panasonic makes a number of other products in the "Tough" line including tablets and 2-in-1s. One such machine is the Toughbook CF-20, which we talked about when it first came out over two years ago. It's time for an update, and Panasonic agrees: the Toughbook CF-20 is getting a Kaby Lake CPU and double the storage of the previous model. ...Read more...

When I hear "mobile workstation" I don't think "thin and light." HP would like me to consider otherwise, though. The company just announced its fifth-generation ZBook mobile workstations, the 14u G5 and 15u G5, and it claims that these are the thinnest machines around that are fit for this role. Along with introducing fast Kaby Lake-R quad-core CPUs to the lineup, the new ZBooks also play host to the debut of AMD's Radeon Pro WX3100. ...Read more...

Two years after Intel introduced the Xeon D family of low-power server platforms, the wave of ARM processors for the data center that those Broadwell system-on-chips were meant to stave off hasn't yet broken. The Xeon D family, then, has most likely succeeded in its mission of providing capable and efficient computing hardware for what's now being called "edge" computing: the last step between large data centers and users on PCs, smartphones, or an increasingly broad range of smart devices. Think a lot of small, lightweight tasks instead of a few big, heavy ones. ...Read more...

HP introduced four new 4K displays yesterday. The stylish 27" S270n comes from the company's office-focused EliteDisplay line, while the Z27, Z32, and Z43 displays belong in the manufacturer's Z Display family. All four monitors have the same 3840x2160 resolution, and their USB Type-C connectors can send an input signal while powering a compatible attached device. These displays are built for work environments, so refresh rates top out at 60 Hz at full resolution and adaptive-refresh-rate tech isn't part of the spec sheet. ...Read more...

There are certain applications for which you just need a little bitty PC with no moving parts. For such scenarios, we might point you to something like Shuttle's XPC Slim series. The current-generation XPC Slim machines come with Apollo Lake SoCs and a pair of serial ports, but that series of chips is getting a bit long in the tooth. Fortunately, our friends at FanlessTech caught up with Shuttle at the Integrated Systems Europe 2018 expo and shot some pictures of the next-generation XPC Slim DL10J with a Gemini Lake SoC.

About a year ago, we brought news of Valve's Steam Audio SDK, a set of software tools designed to aid game and VR developers in adding positional audio effects to their titles. The game developer and publisher just released Steam Audio 2.0 beta 13, a release that adds support for AMD's TrueAudio Next technology (TAN). The new version supports TAN in the Unity and FMOD Studio development environments. TrueAudio Next uses standard GPU compute resources instead of the specialized audio processing hardware that the original TrueAudio required.

Ryzen's been on the market a while now, but systems based on AMD's Epyc server processors have been a little harder to come by—particularly if you wanted them from a major vendor. It doesn't get a whole lot more "major" than Dell EMC, though. Along with AMD, that group just announced three new rack-mounted server units based on AMD's massive microprocessors: the PowerEdge R6415, R7415, and R7425.

While it's not at all something you can stick in your PC, SpaceX will be attempting an ambitious first launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket today. SpaceX has an excellent run-down of just what the Falcon Heavy is and what its mission profile for today will comprise, but the short take is that it's a bundle of three Falcon 9-derived boosters strapped together to deliver five million pounds of thrust at lift-off. That combo should make what the company calls "the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two." That power could potentially be used to lift as much as 141,000 pounds of cargo into orbit. The company is live-streaming the event on YouTube, and we've embedded it below for convenience....Read more...

We touched on Lexip's "3D mouse" joystick-mouse hybrid in a Shortbread post last week, but in the intervening time a bit more information has appeared. For those that don't follow Colton's posts, Lexip's gaming mouse has two analog joysticks built in. The thumb-activated stick is the more visually obvious of the pair, but the whole mouse body acts as a primary joystick by way of tilting in two axes. The company promises novel control schemes from that simple arrangement, including the ability to pivot, zoom, strafe, and aim in FPS games without losing accuracy. ...Read more...

Greetings, fair gerbils. It's a fairly quiet day at TR HQ. Jeff's prepping up an extremely enticing review, and I'm hunting for deals in the meantime. We don't have many PC components on sale today, but the list o' deals is by no means any less interesting. Check it out. ...Read more...

Do you recall that Aorus AC300W case that we looked at last year? That enclosure is a pretty-standard mid-tower case with a big window, tasteful RGB LED accents, and fancy front-panel I/O. Perhaps Aorus thinks that the extra cost incurred by the front panel HDMI and USB Type-C connections put purchasers off the AC300W, seeing as the company is about to launch the AC300W Lite. The new case is externally mostly identical to its predecessor save for the loss of those two front-panel connections. ...Read more...

A lame duck? Yeah right. Here's an awesome duck instead.

Earlier this year, murmurs began to circulate that Samsung was producing ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) specifically for use in mining crypto-money, reportedly thanks to a rather large order from a Chinese client. A Samsung spokesperson has now confirmed the rumor to TechCrunch:Samsung’s foundry business is currently engaged in the manufacturing of cryptocurrency mining chips. ...Read more...

When I got up this morning, gerbils, do you know what was the first thing I thought? I wished there were more SSDs to choose from. Fortunately, SK Hynix is here to help me out. The company's been selling SSDs under its own name since 2012, but its newest models are enterprise drives based on its latest in-house 72-layer 64 GB NAND flash packages. As a result, they're going to top out at 4TB in capacity. ...Read more...

Google's Glass augmented reality eyewear could charitably be remembered as divisive back when it had consumer ambitions. Intel's New Devices Group is looking to change that perception about AR glasses with a pared-back new product called Vaunt. Dieter Bohn from The Verge got an exclusive chance to wear a Vaunt prototype and wrote about his experience.Compared to Glass, the Vaunt glasses have no buttons, no LCD screen, no speaker, no camera, and no microphone. What's left is a unique display that uses a low-power laser and a holographic reflector on the right lens to superimpose a red, monochrome image with a resolution of about 400x150 onto the user's field of view. Intel says the laser's power is so low ...Read more...

Microsoft officially unveiled Windows 10 S just nine months ago, but Brad Sams of Thurrott reports that Redmond is already pulling the plug on the locked-down version of Windows. The letter S will be sticking around, but it'll refer to a Windows 10 mode rather than a whole different version of the operating system. Thurott says that after the upcoming Redstone 4 major update is released, the software giant will no longer offer the Windows 10 S versions of its OS. As a reminder, Redstone 3 was the code name of October's Fall Creators Update release. All versions of Windows 10 will reportedly include an S Mode that limits application installs to programs from the somewhat-barren Windows Store. ...Read more...

Broadcom remains in the hunt for Qualcomm, and it's willing to pay quite a bit more than its initial $105 billion offer for the company from back in November. This morning, the acquisition-hungry chip designer released a revised bid for Qualcomm of $82 per share, up from $70 last year. Given Qualcomm's roughly 1.5 billion outstanding shares, the new offer values the company at about $120.8 billion. With $25 billion of net debt from Qualcomm in the bargain, the total value of the deal rises to about $146 billion.Broadcom notes that this new offer is a 50% premium over Qualcomm's share price on the last day those shares were unaffected by knowledge of Broadcom's offer and a 56% premium on Qualcomm's "unaffected 30-day volume-weighted average ...Read more...

The more CPU cores you have and the faster they run, the more memory bandwidth you need to keep them all fed. That's a fairly basic concept when understanding the balancing act that is PC performance. If you're severely starved for speed then G.Skill has what you need: a new world-record-breaking memory kit. The G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4 RAM kit will soon come clocked at up to 4700 MT/s. ...Read more...

The disaster recovery artists over at Backblaze have published the latest of edition of the company's eye-opening hard drive reliability reports. Andy Klein, the report's author, says that Backblaze has been collecting data since 2013 and has tabulated 88 million statistical records pertaining to 93,000 hard drives. That data set measures a staggering 23 GB. ...Read more...

Last year, Swiftech launched the SKF Heirloom Series as the flagship model in Apogee series of waterblocks and made it available to pre-order customers only. Besides the entirely new design both inside and out, the Apogee SKF Heirloom Series included significant cosmetic customization options for the top side, the cover plate, the logo, and even the mounting system. Folks who don't care about all those aesthetic options could instead check out Swiftech's latest release, the Apogee SKF. ...Read more...

Microsoft's Surface line of portable machines has made progress in advancing the Windows laptop market, but the sales increases the company likely expected from expanding the lineup haven't come. Redmond is apparently responding to the lack of meaningful sales growth by introducing lower-priced, lower-specced versions of the Surface Book 2 and the Surface Laptop. ...Read more...

The latest main-series entry in the ever-more-curiously-named Final Fantasy franchise is Final Fantasy XV. The title was a smash hit on consoles in 2016, and the Windows Edition isn't far off. Square-Enix says that the PC version has "advanced a generation" compared to the previous release, and to help assuage fears that nobody will be able to run the sprawling open-world title, the company has released a benchmark so users can see if their machines are up to spec.

AMD's previous update to its Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition drivers was focused on fixing bugs with old games rather than optimizations for new titles. Today's 18.2.1 release combines the old and the new by adding support for the spanking-new PC release of Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, a Japanese role-playing game originally unleashed on ye olde Playstation 2 almost 12 years ago. For those that don't follow the world of jRPGs on gaming consoles, Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age HD remaster was released on the PS4 last July and is now available on the PC for the first time. PC gamers are rewarded for their decade-long patience with higher resolution options, 60 FPS rendering when hardware allows, and immediate access to post-game-completion modes. ...Read more...

Corsair got into the gaming chair business early last summer with its motorsport-inspired T1 Race chair. The company is back with more of a grand tourer take on backside support with the T2 Road Warrior, touting increased long-haul comfort from a wider frame with less-agressive side bolsters. The T2's weight limit also increases from 264 lb (120 kg) to an even 300 lb (140 kg). ...Read more...

Apple released its fiscal 2018 first-quarter results today. Amid concerns about soft iPhone demand over the holiday season, the company posted what it calls all-time record revenue of $88.3 billion, a 13% improvement year-on-year, and operating income of $26.3 billion, up 12.5% on the year. Net income continued the trend with a 12% increase to $20 billion. The company's 38.4% gross margin for the quarter shrank about one-tenth of a percentage point from a year ago.Apple moved a whopping 77.3 million iPhones , down 1% from a year ago, but the company's most important product still brought in 13% more ...Read more...

Remember Xeon D, gerbils? If you're not employed in networking or systems administration, you probably don't—and if you are, you almost certainly do. The extant Xeon-D chips use up to 16 Broadwell CPU cores, take up to 128 GB of ECC DDR4 memory, and have dual on-chip 10-Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Those chips came out about three years ago though, so it's time for an update. Indeed, Intel's just updated its price list, and it now includes the Xeon D-2191, Xeon D-2161I, and Xeon D-2141I. ...Read more...

It's also "National Get Up Day" and "National Serpent Day" - who let that happen?

We wrote about Intel's Dawson Canyon NUCs back in October. Back then, the CPU options were a smattering of seventh-generation mobile Core i3 and Core i5 parts. The company has now taken its shiny and sparkly Core i7-8650U Kaby Lake-R eighth-generation four-core, eight-thread mobile chip and tossed it into the otherwise familiar miniature chassis. The blue silicon giant has also partnered with Simply PC to offer corporate-targeted versions packing the vPro-enabled variation of the Core i7-8650U processor. ...Read more...

Hi there, folks. Endless Space 2 has sunk its claws on me again thanks to the release of the Vaulters expansion, and it's been hard to let go. If you haven't tried the game out, it's as fine a 4X strategy title as you'll ever see. I need to stop rambling about games, as there's work to be done. I better get some deals going, right? Here they are. ...Read more...

Plextor has some new SSDs for the market segment looking to upgrade from a clunky old hard drive. The M8V series comprises the M8VC 2.5" drives and the M8VG M.2 SSDs. Both types connect to a SATA interface and come in capacities ranging from 128 GB to 512 GB.

You don't need us to tell you that Windows is the desktop OS of choice for almost everyone. Because of that, there's an incredible variety of crapware targeted at Windows users. We're not talking just about your usual malware and spyware, but programs that, while not actively malicious or dangerous, attempt to entice users to spend money that they simply don't have to. Microsoft knows this too, and the company announced yesterday that it's going to be taking measures against this type of software using Windows Defender.Specifically, the apps targeted by Windows Defender will be those with "coercive messaging." Microsoft's primary concern appears to be apps that report specious or misleading poor results after some sort of scan, and then ...Read more...

During its earnings call yesterday evening, AMD CEO Lisa Su signaled a possible change in the company's tack on cryptocurrency-mining demand for its Radeon products. As recently as October of last year, Su predicted that cryptocurrency demand would soften throughout the fourth quarter of 2017. The consistently high prices of Bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency in the intervening time, plus the gold-rush levels of excitement from folks hoping to cash in on the boom with GPU mining rigs of their own, have shattered that prediction. Su said that roughly a third of the company's $140 million sequential revenue growth in its Computing and Graphics business came from miners' appetites for its products last quarter. Demand for graphics cards to mine crypto-coins remains strong and appears as though it'll remain that way for some time yet.Even if demand from the crypto market is healthy today, it's widely expected that the price of Bitcoin and its satellite cryptocurrencies will fall from their current heights at some point. Despite that potential volatility, Su told investors that AMD is "working to replenish [the] channel environment" and "ramping up production" in response to the state of ...Read more...

Razer's Seiren and Seiren X microphones can already be seen on the desks of some of the internet's popular game streamers, but the company is pressing upmarket with the Seiren Elite, an all-in-one microphone that the maker claims can replace an entire rack of professional audio equipment full of bulky XLR cabling. The Seiren Elite has a single "professional-grade" dynamic capsule and plugs into the host computer with a USB port. ...Read more...