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Cards using the diminutive Radeon RX 550 GPU are among the only AMD graphics boards available at prices near MSRP right now, thanks to the ever-escalating demand from cryptocurrency miners. Sapphire's latest Pulse Radeon RX 550 2GD5 and Pulse Radeon RX 550 4GD5 cards offer up 128 extra stream processors (SPs) on top of the 512 we've seen in previous Radeon RX 550 cards. ...Read more...

Not all that long ago, if you had asked me about PCs for your office, I would have told you to build some small-form-factor desktop boxes. These days, I recommend you just throw some NUCs on the backs of your monitors. The NUCs based on Intel's low-power SoCs are quiet, power-efficient, and surprisingly quick. That should be especially true of the company's latest NUC7JY series based on Gemini Lake SoCs. ...Read more...

We've seen many companies announce updates of their various laptop lines with Intel's latest eighth-generation Core mobile parts, but Toshiba's refresh of its Portégé and Tecra lines is the first we can recall with eighth-generation vPro-enabled chips. All in all, the company is adding four-core, eight-thread Core i5 and Core i7 options to its Portégé X20W, Portégé X30, Tecra X40, Tecra Z50, Tecra A50, and Tecra C50 lines. The Portégé X20W is unique among the other machines for its convertible 2-in-1 design with a 360° hinge. All of the clamshells laptops except the Tecra C50 have a Thinkpad-style trackpoint, too. ...Read more...

AMD announced its fourth-quarter 2017 financial results and full-year 2017 financials this afternoon. On the way to another fully profitable quarter under GAAP, the company took in $1.48 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, up 34 percent year-over-year, and it posted operating income of $82 million, compared to a $3 million loss a year ago. The company's net income also stayed in the black with a $61 million result, compared to a net loss of $51 million a year ago. Gross margin was 35%, up three percentage points on the year.The company's Computing and Graphics business brought in $958 million in revenue, up 60% on the year. AMD attributed this performance to strong sales of Ryzen CPUs and Radeon graphics processors. The division ...Read more...

While I have your attention, don't forget about TR BBQ XV when making your summer plans.

Here at The Tech Report, we take our office chairs seriously. We spend most of our workdays in front of test systems, and when we're not in front of those systems, we're pounding out lengthy reviews at our desks. That means a lot of sitting, and in spite of the widespread understanding that getting up and moving around is a best practice for good health, we often fail to leave our desks for hours at a stretch. Good workspace ergonomics have to start with a good chair, then, and most basic office chairs are sorely lacking in adjustability. We've written in the past about the wonders of the Herman Miller Mirra and the Steelcase Leap, and yours truly has parked his behind in a Steelcase Gesture for over four years. Whenever Herman Miller or Steelcase revise their flagship seating, we take notice. ...Read more...

Good afternoon, gerbils. Carnaval is just around the corner, and in the next couple weeks my little hometown will be nuts with samba, reveries, and drunk people. I don't really care for it, though I do appreciate the work that goes into the suits. There's no time for partying around the TR HQ, though. There's hardware to be found and deals to be considered. Take a look at what we found today. ...Read more...

It may be difficult for some gerbils to accept this, but there are many people out there—and not just me—who genuinely enjoy RGB LED-equipped peripherals. If you're in that group, you may have skipped over Corsair's K68 spill-resistant mechanical gaming keyboard due to its lack of das Blinkenlichten. Well, have another look, light show lovers. Corsair's now offering the K68 studded with RGB LEDs. ...Read more...

It seems like most high-performance wireless routers we talk about around here have styling that can be described as somewhere between edgy and threatening. Asus' Blue Cave router takes a different approach with a white-and-blue color scheme and a design free of an arachnoid array of external antennas. The box-with-a-hole-in-it promises to deliver up to 1733 Mbps of 802.11ac bandwidth. To increase the user-friendliness factor, the Blue Cave is compatible with Asus' Router App on iOS and Android, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, and If This Then That (IFTTT). ...Read more...

Intel's Optane SSDs and the 3D Xpoint memory they're based on offer impressive latency and quality-of-service consistency. Samsung is now ready to fire back with its own high-end SSDs based on a technology that it calls Z-NAND. The new drives are called Z-SSDs, and judging from what Samsung says, they're quite credible competitors for Intel and Micron's technology. ...Read more...

If you work from a laptop computer, there's a pretty good chance it's a Lenovo. The company's ThinkPad and IdeaPad lines are popular with businesses. Lenovo revealed late last week that a huge portion of those machines have a potentially serious security flaw. If your Lenovo machine has a fingerprint sensor and is running Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, keep reading. ...Read more...

Among all of the market segmentation methods Intel has used to separate Core i3, i5, and i7 mobile processors over the years, the one constant was that Core i3 chips lacked Turbo Boost support. That's held true even as Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs have grown into quad-core, eight-thread parts in 15-W power envelopes.That one major point of distinction could be about to change if new rumors prove correct. Online publication Laptop Media claims to have new information on a future eighth-generation Core i3 mobile part, the Core i3-8130U, that CPU investigator InstLatX64 claims will be among the first Cannon Lake CPUs produced on Intel's oft-delayed 10-nm process . InstLatX64 also points out a new entry in the Geekbench database ...Read more...

For buyers looking to build a new gaming PC, high SSD and RAM prices are a pain, but the futility of searching for a graphics card on sale for less than double its suggested price is even more crippling. If you're after a whole new machine, you might be in luck, as long as you live near a Micro Center. The US PC gamer's favorite brick-and-mortar retailer has announced that it will sell graphics cards at prices "well below the market" if you're buying a whole system's worth of parts simultaneously.If you're not familiar with Micro Center, the electronics retailer is known for offering big discounts on its already-low prices if you walk into a physical location and buy a couple of parts together. Unlike a lot of retailers, you don't have to buy a ...Read more...

Nvidia graphics cards between the GeForce GTX 1050 and the $3000 tensor-stuffed Titan V are thin on the ground these days. Gamers that already own cards get to enjoy the green graphics team's latest GeForce 390.77 drivers. The big news in the latest driver is support for the upcoming Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Metal Gear Survive. The driver developers also added Ansel in-game photography support for Black Desert Online and ShadowPlay Highlights kill footage capture for War Thunder. ...Read more...

If you're one of the unlucky few affected by "higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior" as a result of a security patch for your Intel system, rejoice. You can now disable the patch, restoring at least a modicum of sanity to your machine. Microsoft just issued update KB4078130 that specifically disables only the mitigation against CVE-2017-5715—better known as "Spectre, variant 2."Of course, disabling the mitigation will make you vulnerable to that exploit. As Microsoft itself points out, there are no reports of this exploit being used in the wild so far. When the vulnerabilities were initially revealed , researchers did ...Read more...

We're finally starting to see the marriage of higher resolutions and higher refresh rates in displays. After years of "just works" standardized cabling, we need new cables, and picking them can get confusing. In the case of DisplayPort (DP), VESA is trying to smooth the transition with its certification program. Today Club3D announced that its DisplayPort cables are the first to be DP8K-certified. If your display doesn't support DisplayPort, the company also has a couple of new active DP-to-HDMI adapters.

As part of its earnings call yesterday, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shared some of the measures the company is taking to harden its chips against the Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Krzanich says that the company "is working to incorporate silicon-based changes to future products that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware," and he promises that the first products with those mitigations "will begin appearing later this year."It's important to note that Krzanich describes the company's work on Meltdown and Spectre in both software and hardware as "changes" and "mitigations," not "fixes." That's because similar, as-yet-undiscovered or as-yet-unexploited microarchitectural attacks could still arise in products as complicated as modern ...Read more...

We wrote about Gigabyte's Gemini Lake motherboards a couple of days ago, and now fellow mainboard maker ASRock is showing off a couple of Mini-ITX boards based on Intel's latest efficiency-first SoCs. The J4105-ITX and J4105B-ITX are similar in terms of overall capabilities, though differences in ports and slots separate the pair. The twins use soldered-in, four-core, four-thread Intel Celeron J4105 SoCs and have a pair of DDR4 SODIMM slots supporting up to 8 GB of 2400 MT/s memory. Like Gigabyte's Gemini Lake boards, ASRock's fraternal twins bear no fans. ...Read more...

Setting up liquid cooling in a case can be a real pain, and closed-loop systems are arguably harder to install than custom loops. Balancing a heavy radiator in place and screwing it down while the unwieldy hoses and waterblock flop around is an art. If you want liquid cooling but would rather skip that trouble, check out Deepcool's New Ark 90 full-tower case and its integrated Captain 280EX liquid cooler. ...Read more...

We all like to lust after ludicrous Thermaltake creations like the Level 20, but I'm willing to bet that most gerbils have their PCs inside a case similar to TT's Versa H17. This budget-oriented micro-ATX mini-tower chassis has been available in other territories for a bit, but it's just now made its way to the US of A. ...Read more...

Amid some of its stormiest seas in years, Intel released healthy fourth-quarter and full-year 2017 financial results today. The company took in $17.1 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 4% versus a year ago. The company made an operating profit of $5.4 billion for the quarter, up 19% versus a year ago, but that profit was wiped out in part in the final reckoning by a $5.4 billion one-time income tax expense related to foreign earnings under the United States' recent corporate tax reforms. Overall, the company recorded a GAAP net loss of $700 million with that charge. Gross margin increased 1.4 percentage points to 63.1%.The company's client computing group brought in $9 billion for the quarter , down a hair from $9.1 billion a year ago. Operating income contracted slightly to $3.3 billion, down from $3.5 billion a year ago. Platform revenues (a combined measure of processor and ...Read more...

Chromebooks have made impressive inroads in the educational sector since the company's release of the beta Cr-48 laptop back in 2010. Google's results in the classroom certainly have been strong enough to get Microsoft's attention. Dell has sold several different Chromebooks designed for student use, but the models in its latest Chromebook 5000 Series have features unavailable in the company's previous offerings. The new series contains traditional clamshell laptops as well as 2-in-1 machines with keyboards that tuck behind the screen for tablet-like use. ...Read more...

Moo.

Windows Insiders on the Fast ring are getting a sneek peak at some features destined for the next big Windows Update in Build 17083. The highlights include a heavily revised font preview applet, the ability to look at the data the operating system is beaming back to the mothership in Redmond, and other improvements. The release will also offer an option to correct one of my personal pet peeves with Windows 10: disappearing scroll bars. ...Read more...

Good morning, dear gerbils. It's a really slow day today news-wise. For some reason, there's nothing currently going in the PC hardware world. But that's fine. This lull in the action is only a chance for online retailers to get buyer's attention, and we've collected the best deals for you today. Take a look. ...Read more...

Most of the video content shown in my house comes through a browser. We don't have an HDR display yet, but thanks to the latest Chrome update we'll be all set up when we do. Chrome version 64 is a pretty big release that battens down the hatches with bug fixes in bulk. However, it also brings a couple of new features: support for HDR video and persistent per-site muting. ...Read more...

Gamers looking to play away from home on a thin-and-light system with high-end Nvidia graphics have a new option thanks to Falcon Northwest's latest TLX laptops. Falcon's skinny machine crams the four-core, eight-thread Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor and Max-Q GTX 1070 graphics into a 4.8 lb (2.2 kg) package. ...Read more...

Nvidia's Big Format Gaming Displays (henceforth BFGDs) proved to be among the biggest news for PC gamers at CES, both figuratively and literally. I got to see both HP and Asus' takes on the idea while bouncing among the various booths and press events at the show, and from my limited time with both companies' products, I think Nvidia and its partners are primed to succeed in their mission to push high-refresh-rate and variable-refresh-rate gaming out of the bedroom or basement and onto the biggest screen in the house.

We caught up with the case, power, and cooling crew from Silverstone at last year's Computex, but we didn't cover a few of the company's more far-off products. Silverstone just released one such item: the Argon AR11 low-profile cooler. This little bit of kit is designed exclusively for the Intel LGA115x socket series (meaning all desktop sockets since Lynnfield), and it claims to be able to cool CPUs with TDP ratings up to 95W. ...Read more...

We've covered some pretty exotic methods of taking data on the go, but sometimes low cost, high durability, and reliable compatibility are the most important factors. Adata's reasonably-priced ED600 USB 3.1 Gen 1 hard drive enclosure is IP54-rated against water and dust intrusion and offers users the ability to install any 2.5" SATA hard drive or SSD. The enclosure's silicone overmold helps reduce vibration and provides a measure of shock resistance for the drive ensconced within. ...Read more...

Qualcomm got another round of bad news this morning, this time from the European Commission. The EC has imposed a €997 million ($1.23 billion) fine on the mobile silicon designer for "abusing its market dominance in LTE baseband chipsets." The investigation stemmed from an exclusivity agreement between Apple and Qualcomm in which the iPhone maker received "billions of dollars" in payments in exchange for using Qualcomm's modems in iPhones and iPads. That agreement began in 2011, was extended in 2013, and began to wind down toward the end of 2016, when Apple began sourcing LTE modems from Intel, as well.The European Commission believes this agreement prevented Intel (or other competitors) from challenging Qualcomm's dominant position in LTE modems during the period because of two incentives. Not only would Qualcomm stop paying Apple in the event that ...Read more...

When did the number of words that you've typed overtake the number of words that you've handwritten?

Ever since the departure of Raja Koduri as honcho of the Radeon Technologies Group, AMD CEO Lisa Su has been leading the division as it dusts itself off. Today, AMD appears to have found the new graphics leadership that it's been looking for. The company has tapped Mike Rayfield as the senior vice president and general manager and David Wang as senior vice president of engineering for the Radeon Technologies Group. Both men will report to Su.Rayfield comes to AMD from Micron Technologies, where he was senior vice president and general management of the memory maker's mobile business unit, according to AMD's press release. Rayfield's résumé also includes a seven-year stint at Nvidia, where he was the general manager of that company's mobile ...Read more...

Have you read our review of Samsung's 860 Pro SSD yet? I won't spoil it for you entirely, but I will say that there are no big surprises. We expect Samsung's 860 EVO line to be similarly unsurprising in comparison to its last-gen predecessors. The company announced both lineups of SATA SSDs today, and if our experience with the 860 Pro is anything to go on, the new EVO SSDs are likely to be more of the same.

Some controversy has arisen today regarding the state of primitive-shader support on Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, stemming from a post on the 3DCenter forums. That poster (who the AMD subreddit identifies as Marc Sauter, an editor at German site Golem.de) asserts AMD has dropped its efforts to include an alternate driver path for primitive shaders on those cards. Some have questioned the validity of this single source, so I wanted to back up this statement with my own breakout-session experience during the company's pre-CES tech day. At least in the session I was present for, AMD gave us a surprise update regarding the status of various Vega architectural features after I asked about the ongoing confusion regarding the status of primitive shader support in the latest Radeon drivers. The company may have offered that same briefing to other members of the press in other sessions, as well.

Howdy, folks. I wonder how many of you are in a similar predicament as me, with some sort of whooping cough that's keeping me awake most of the night—and possibly my neighbors too. Seems like it's a particularly bad season for flu and its derivatives, at least around here. The PC hardware world doesn't stop just because of a handful of viruses, though. We've collected the best deals for you today. ...Read more...

Siri was the first AI-powered digital assistant to gain major traction in the market, but it's not her you'll be talking to in most assistant-equipped households. Even though Apple showed the HomePod over six months ago at WWDC 2017, the product has failed to materialize until now. The Cupertino corporation just announced that you'll be able to put Siri on a shelf on February 9. ...Read more...

We've seen a number of consumer-focused SSDs based on various 64-layer implementations of 3D TLC NAND flash chips. Micron says its 5200-series SATA SSDs are the first such drives to deliver the capacity, performance, and reliability needed by large businesses. ...Read more...

Good as they are, Samsung's 850 series of SSDs has grown rather wizened. The line made its debut with the high-end 850 Pro all the way back in the summer of 2014, followed by the 850 EVO a few months later. But despite all the time that Samsung's competitors have had to try to close the gap, no drive has truly been able to displace the 850 EVO as the market's mainstream darling. With as little competitive pressure as Samsung has faced and with the SATA interface's ceiling on performance, there's been little reason for drastic change in the company's SATA SSD lineup.But Samsung hasn't spent the last few years taking its advantage for granted. 3D NAND was still a young technology in 2014. The 850-series drives were powered by Samsung's second-generation, 32-layer V-NAND. The first-gen stuff never made it into a client drive. Samsung's stacks of ...Read more...

Microsoft wants to keep the next generation of computer users familiar with its products as mobile devices become increasingly valid options for more use cases. Apple has always been Microsoft's competitor in the educational sector, and now the company must also do battle with Google's Chromebook platform in the classroom. The software juggernaut from Redmond took a moment today to announce some new inexpensive portable machines from its manufacturing partners and publicize some of its efforts at creating software especially for young minds. The company announced a pair of Windows laptops starting at $189 and a second duo of 2-in-1 devices at less than $300 each.

The Meltdown and Spectre security flaws are certainly scary, but there are reasons to be leery of the various updates intended to mitigate them. Even if you aren't affected by the performance hit these updates can produce (leading some folks to refer to the patches as "SpecDown"), you could be at risk of suffering random reboots. Fortunately, Intel's now identified the cause of those restarts, at least for Haswell and Broadwell machines.Unfortunately, identifying the root cause means a new round of patches is in the works for Haswell and Broadwell systems. The company says it has a new patch nearly ready for systems with those CPUs that offers mitigation against the Spectre vulnerability and comes without risk of random restarts. Newer Intel platforms could still experience ...Read more...

Most of our attention on CPUs in the past year or so has been focused on high-performance x86 cores from AMD and Intel. The blue team hasn't stopped developing its low-power family of Atom cores, though, and the Goldmont Plus core that recently debuted aboard Gemini Lake Celeron and Pentium Silver products is one of the fruits of that work. Intel widened the out-of-order execution window in the Goldmont Plus back end, added a more capable divider, and improved the core's branch predictor relative to its non-Plus predecessor, among many improvements only outlined in Intel's developer optimization reference manuals. All in all, Goldmont Plus likely represents a substantial advance in potential performance versus the Goldmont core before it. ...Read more...

Asus is bringing RGB LED illumination to its Fusion line of headsets with the high-end ROG Strix Fusion 500. The Fusion 500 virtual-7.1 gaming headset leaves the source device's sound quality out of the equation by integrating an ESS ES9018 DAC and a Sabre 9601K amplifier to convert a digital stream to analog signals suitable for the 50-mm drivers. ...Read more...

Due to insane demand from cryptocurrency miners, it's been hard to even find gaming graphics cards lately, much less buy them at a reasonable price. Nvidia is one of many entities that isn't entirely pleased with the situation, and the company has confirmed to German hardware site ComputerBase (Google translation) that it has requested retailers to focus sales on gamers rather than miners. ...Read more...

Intel's October launch of its eighth-generation Core mainstream desktop parts was sparser than normal: just six models included in the original rollout. The four-core, four-thread Core i3-8100 and i3-8350K, the six-core, six-thread Core i5-8400 and i5-8600K, and the six-core, 12-thread Core i7-8700 and i7-8700K have remained the only eighth-generation Intel Core options for desktop builders over the last three months. The release of only a single, high-end chipset for the new range of processors was even more unusual.We recently talked about benchmark database entries for Core i5-8500 chips , and the rumor mongers over at Videocardz say they have gotten their hands on information about eight ...Read more...

While you can open any of the major Microsoft Office apps on either a Mac or a PC, it only takes a few minutes to figure out they're hardly the same experience across both platforms. For years, Office on Mac has lagged behind its Windows counterpart, lacking some of the individual apps' most useful features. That's set to change, as Microsoft has released an update for Office on Mac that finally brings real-time collaboration features and automated cloud saving. More significantly, the Windows and Mac versions of Office now share a codebase for the first time in two decades, a move that should lay the groundwork for better feature parity across different platforms. ...Read more...

From the looks of it, HDR displays are set to take the spot of "most-confusing product category" now that mobile GPU naming has started to make sense. As an exemplar of the form, LG's just released the 27UK650-W. This 27" monitor uses an LED-backlit IPS LCD with a 3840x2160 resolution, and LG says it can display HDR10 content. ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of Samsung's announcement yesterday that it's starting volume production of GDDR6 memory chips, SK Hynix has now updated its product catalog with 8 Gbit GDDR6 silicon in three different speed grades, from a fast 10 Gbps to a muy caliente 14 Gbps. Given the challenges of building affordable graphics cards with unconventional HBM2 memory, we expect GDDR6 to be popular in the next wave of discrete graphics silicon from AMD and Nvidia both. ...Read more...

There aren't any big AAA game releases this week, so AMD directed its focus on bug fixes with its just-released Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.1.1 graphics drivers. The biggest of those bugs is the incompatibility with some DirectX 9 titles that was introduced in the initial Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 17.12.1 release. The driver still has all the new stuff brought along in 17.12.1, including expanded Radeon Chill support and the Radeon Overlay real-time performance data display with smartphone integration.