Techreport

German overclocking champion der8auer has released the Skylake-X Direct Die Frame, an kit that replaces the integrated loading mechanism (ILM) and the integrated cooler mounting holes on LGA 2066 motherboards. The kit is made principally from black anodized aluminum and permits the installation of an LGA 2066 cooler on a Intel Skylake-X CPU with its integrated heat spreader (IHS) removed. ...Read more...

AMD's second-generation Ryzen CPUs are only a couple months away from enthusiasts' desktops, and the company will be introducing new high-end motherboards using the X470 chipset to go with them. Although AMD's own press event revealed precious little about what to expect from X470, our meeting with Gigabyte at CES 2018 afforded us practically unrestricted access to one of those motherboards well ahead of its launch closer to this spring. ...Read more...

Thesaurus Day? Really? This may be the best I can do.

Greetings, gerbils. It's a cold day here and everywhere, and I bet that more than a few of you would rather sit home and do your shopping online instead of having to brave the cold and ice of the outside world. Luckily, we've found more than a few hardware deals for you. Here they are. ...Read more...

ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook yesterday. The majority of the interview was focused on the company's planned $38 billion tax payment to the US government and its plans to invest $350 billion and create 20,000 new jobs in its home country. Jarvis also asked questions about the company's response to recent revelations of deliberate performance reductions to iPhones with aging batteries. Cook responded that future iOS releases will include an option to maintain full performance at the cost of an increased risk of sudden shutdowns. That announcement comes on the tail of the upcoming software tools the company promised to users for gauging the health status of their iPhone batteries....Read more...

Going on two weeks since the reveal of Meltdown and Spectre, are you all patched up? (Windows users can grab InSpectre if they're not sure.) If so, how stable has your machine been lately? As Intel admitted last week, some folks on Haswell and Broadwell CPUs are seeing spontaneous system restarts because of the updates. Now, Intel has has a new blog post up with some more details, and as it turns out, that reboot problem can affect CPUs from the Sandy Bridge series on up to Kaby Lake.Not all systems are affected, and the severity of the symptoms varies. For its part, Intel says it has made "significant progress" toward finding the root cause of the issue. It doesn't seem ...Read more...

As cool and exciting as HBM might be, virtually all discrete graphics cards are still using GDDR5 or GDDR5X memory. That's not especially likely to change, either, given the relative complexity and cost of the ultra-wide and super-dense HBM. Most of the next generation of graphics cards is likely to continue using more traditional DRAM packages. Samsung just announced that it's begun mass production of 16-gigabit GDDR6 chips for that task. ...Read more...

Esteemed programmer and computer security advocate Steve Gibson has been doing his thing as the Gibson Research Corporation since 1985. I've personally made great use of his SpinRite disk repair software. Gibson's latest app, InSpectre, is decidedly more topical. This tiny free app for Windows can analyze your machine and determine whether you're vulnerable to the Meltdown and Spectre security flaws. ...Read more...

Recent discussions of Intel's process technologies have generally focused on the company's arguably diminishing lead over pure-play foundries. Proprietary designs on cutting-edge processes aren't the only way that Intel builds chips, though. The company announced its 22-nm FinFET Low Power (FFL) process last year for potential clients of its custom foundry offerings.We didn't go in-depth on 22FFL at the time, but long-time friend of TR David Kanter has written another one of his amazingly in-depth technical analyses regarding the virtues ...Read more...

Little more than a month after beginning US sales of its first-generation wireless adapter for Oculus' Rift virtual reality headset, TPCast has announced the adapter's follow-up, creatively dubbed TPCast 2.0. The company showed off the second-wave product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. The manufacturer says TPCast 2.0 uses an ultra-low-latency codec that can squish down VR content with a 50:1 compression ratio while adding just 1 ms of latency to the connection. ...Read more...

Edge-to-edge screens are poised to be the new hotness of smartphone design in 2018, but pushing pixels right out to a device's borders leaves little room for the range of sensors we've come to know and love on the front of a phone—especially fingerprint sensors. By all accounts, Apple is dealing with this new reality by gradually retiring the fingerprint as a biometric input. You can still get a Touch ID sensor on an iPhone 8 or some MacBook Pros, but the future as seen from Cupertino clearly relies on Face ID, its array of depth-mapping hardware, and the accompanying notch.Fingerprint sensors still have some advantages over face-sensing tech, though. They allow owners to unlock their devices without looking directly at the front of the phone, an important capability in meetings or when the device is resting on a desk or table. They can't be tricked by twins, and they can't be as easily spoofed as some less-sophisticated forms of facial identification. It's simple to enroll multiple fingerprints with ...Read more...

The silence specialists at Be Quiet have incremented the Straight Power line of power supply units up to their eleventh iteration. The company equipped the updated PSUs with its own SilentWings 3 135-mm fans and says the upgraded models are its quietest power supplies to date. The Straight Power 11 power supplies are available in six different power capacities ranging from 450 W to 1000 W, and all models are rated 80 Plus Gold for efficiency. ...Read more...

Cherry MX-style switches make up the bulk of mechanical keyboards these days. That's a problem for anyone who wants a slim keyboard but isn't willing to sacrifice the smooth feel of typing on Cherry MX switches. Fortunately, Cherry just announced the MX Low Profile RGB keyswitches. The first keyboard to use the new switches will apparently be Ducky's upcoming Blade Air. ...Read more...

Greetings, good gerbils. This year's CES may not have had the massive amount of announcements that peppered last year's event, but that doesn't mean that there wasn't a good amount of ground to cover, both figuratively and literally. After all, we produced 54 CES-related pieces. Our boys Jeff Kampman and Adam Eiberger were on the ground, and their walking around resulted in juicy info for a few upcoming articles. In the meantime, you can check out the entirety of our CES 2018-related news below.Cases, power, and cooling ...Read more...

Intel's October launch of its Coffee Lake eighth-generation desktop Core processor lineup was highly caffeinated, but seemed to be missing the cream and sugar. The most obvious missing elements were entry-level and midrange chipsets to accompany the overclocking-friendly Z370. The existence of the low-base-clocked 2.8 GHz Core i5-8400 and the 800 MHz-hotter Core i5-8600K also suggested there could be another model between them. A database entry seemingly confirming the existence of such a chip popped up over the weekend. SiSoft's database contains results for a purported Core i5-8500 six-core, six-thread CPU clocked at an even 3 GHz. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils! Around here everyone's reeling from the CES rush. Despite the holiday yesterday, we're still mostly bleary-eyed, jet-lagged (in the case of Adam and Jeff who were in situ), and generally hoping to take it easy this week. Nevertheless, the computing world doesn't stop, nor do online hardware deals. Here's what we found for you today. ...Read more...

TechPowerUp reported yesterday that Taiwanese e-tailer Autobuy had listings up for Intel's next-generation SSDs. The SSD 760p and 660p showed up on the site with full specifications. Autobuy has taken the listings down at this time, but the chart below—saved by TPU and reproduced with permission—has the full details on the new drives.

The show floor at CES was apparently too noisy for the silence seekers from be quiet! The company chose instead to show off its latest wares in a suite in Las Vegas, away from the actual show. Among the goods on display were the company's Dark Rock 4 and Dark Rock Pro 4 CPU air coolers, which TechPowerUp took a good look at. The similar names belie the large differences between the single-fin-array Dark Rock 4 and the twin-fin-stack Dark Rock Pro 4. Common between both units are perforations to increase surface area and a dark ceramic coating for improved heat dissipation.

Meltdown and Spectre are entirely new classes of security vulnerability. Even with Intel doing all it can to get microcode and firmware updates out as quickly as possible, there are also changes that need to be made in motherboard vendors' UEFI code. Fortunately, it looks like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI are on top of things—as long as you have a recent motherboard.All three companies have lists available of motherboards that have or will soon be receiving security-related BIOS updates. Glancing over them, it looks like the big three of ...Read more...

Exhibitions like CES are a great place to find the largest, wildest, and most extravagant pieces of hardware on the market. This year's show has been no exception. At EVGA's booth, convention-goers were treated to a peek at a monstrously-powerful power supply. The model name of EVGA's new Supernova 2200 P2 PSU isn't a misnomer—that's an actual 2200W power supply. ...Read more...

We reported yesterday on Microsoft's suspended patches for the Meltdown and Spectre speculative execution vulnerabilities on AMD systems. It seems that the Intel has also run into trouble with the update on some of its older CPUs. Desktop users and datacenters have reported "higher system reboots," which we take to mean more frequent spontaneous reboots. ...Read more...

Now that CES is winding down, attention is returning to the response to the major vulnerabilities caused by oversights in the way speculative execution is handled in most modern processors. Yesterday, AMD's Senior VP and CTO Mark Papermaster wrote the company's first response to the developing problem since January 3. Google's Project Zero (GPZ) divided Meltdown and Spectre into three different classes of attack, and Papermaster laid out AMD's planned response to each. Most notably, the company will issue microcode updates for Ryzen and Epyc CPUs as a preventive measure against one of the Spectre variants.AMD's chips are vulnerable to GPZ Variant 1 (Spectre, Bounds Check Bypass). The company believes this issue can be solved with operating system patches. The chip design firm says that Microsoft is distributing patches to the majority ...Read more...

Yesterday, Intel released an open letter, authored by none other than the company's CEO Brian Krzanich, praising the industry for its response to the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. In the letter, Krzanich expresses his thanks to other companies and groups involved in the detection, disclosure, and mitigation of the flaws, and explicitly names Google's Project Zero team. He then goes on to clarify Intel's "commitment to [its] customers," which refers to three pledges regarding continued exploit mitigation work.Starting off, Krzanich says that "90% of Intel CPUs introduced in the past five years" will have mitigation patches in place for the security flaws by January 15. He also promises that the remainder of those ...Read more...

The Apollo Lake ECS Liva Q tiny PC we reported on back in mid-November is just now starting to show up in the catalogs of online retailers. However, ECS is already showing off prototypes of its Liva Q2 and Liva Z2 pocket-size PC replacements at CES in Las Vegas. The new models pack undisclosed SoCs from Intel's latest power-sipping Gemini Lake family. The company also had Liva One SoC and Liva 850 models on display. ...Read more...

Intel and Microsoft have insisted that the performance impact of the Kernel Page Table Isolation fix for the recently-revealed Meltdown vulnerability will be much smaller than people feared. Now, Intel's released some hard numbers, and perhaps to the consternation of the "everything is 30% slower" doomsayers, the actual impact for client users on modern machines appears to be minimal.Intel's testing was done using Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake CPUs on Windows 10, as well as Skylake machines running Windows 7. All of the test rigs were equipped with SSDs, although Intel also tested the Skylake-and-Windows-7 combo on ...Read more...

Big, bright screens are a huge part of CES every year, and 2018 is no different. Sony has long been a provider of high-end televisions, and this year it has a few different products on offer at the show, each interesting in its own right. The highlights include a short-throw projector and a pair of big televisions. ...Read more...

It seems like you're not a computer hardware company if you're not peddling peripherals, these days. Thermaltake is no exception to the keyboard-and-mouse fever, and it's got some new hardware to show off at CES. The TT Premium X1 RGB mechanical keyboard, the Iris Optical RGB gaming mouse, and the Draconem RGB Touch Edition mouse pad are all debuting at the show. Thermaltake's also got a new 80 Plus Platinum-certified power supply line which we'll look at in a moment. ...Read more...

AMD's processors don't appear to have the exact same attack surface for the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities that Intel's chips have, but the systems with red beating hearts still need updates. Recently, a Microsoft Windows patch for the forementioned exploits caused boot failures on some AMD machines. After a temporary stoppage, Microsoft has now resumed pushing the update. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils! The product announcements at CES died down a little after the huge rush in the first couple days of this week, and that means it's time for hardware deals. Check out what we found today. ...Read more...

Late yesterday evening (or late this morning, in Seoul) Samsung announced that it's stepped up the speed of its HBM2 memory offerings from 1.6 GT/s to 2.4 GT/s. The speed increase comes without a change in supply voltage unlike the 2.0 GT/s intermediate step that required 1.35 V rather than the standard 1.2 V input. Samsung has apparently decided to call the new memory Aquabolt. ...Read more...

These days there are motherboards out there with three, four, and even five M.2 sockets. Most boards only have one or two, though. If you've got a need for a bundle of NVMe storage, something like the ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 card is probably what you'll want. This card is covered in an attractive brushed-aluminum heatsink parted by a 50-mm centrifugal fan. Inside, there are four M.2 sockets. The good folks at TechPowerUp got a close look at the card at CES, and here it is in all its glory.

Mushkin jumped onboard the M.2 train at last year's CES, and this year the company is expanding its offferings in the diminutive storage form factor. There's a new M.2 SATA version of its existing Triactor 3DL lineup, as well as three freshly-released M.2 NVMe drive families based on Silicon Motion controllers. Let's take a minute and examine these new offerings, going from mild to muy picante. ...Read more...

For whatever reason, few computer accessories get the "gaming" treatment quite as often as networking products. With its Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR500, Netgear seeks to prove that a router's gaming credentials don't just rely on styling and the number of antennae it sports. ...Read more...

The case-and-cooling crew from Deepcool is at CES showing off its latest goodies. The company is promoting Electro Limited Edition models of its Quadstellar four-chamber case, its New Ark 90 full tower chassis, and its Captain 240EX RGB liquid cooler. Deepcool's also showing off its upcoming Fryzen air cooler for AMD CPUs. ...Read more...

Back in the day, building a computer meant keeping a stack of add-on cards handy. Graphics, sound, and network cards made sure the inside of your case looked anything but empty. These days, add-on cards with gear that's generally included in mobos is a tough sell. Despite that, Rivet has done pretty well with its Killer brand of network cards, a series of high-end NICs that focus on gamers and enthusiast users, squeezing every last bit of efficiency out of the connection. Now the company has paired with Intel for its latest release, the Killer Wireless-AC 1550 chip. ...Read more...

Earlier this week we wrote a few words about Acer's updates to its Nitro 5 laptops with options for AMD Ryzen processors and discrete graphics. We've since then gotten our gerbil paws on more specific information. Buyers will have the option to select machines with AMD Ryzen mobile processors with Vega integrated graphics to go along with a discrete Radeon RX 560 video card. ...Read more...

A couple years back, Thermaltake caught our attention with its commitment to providing a one-stop shop for custom liquid-cooling setups. That intention hasn't waned in the meantime. At CES this year, the Taiwanese manufacturer has introduced the Pacific CL line of liquid-cooling radiators with new materials and a new design. ...Read more...

The traditional gift for a 20th wedding anniversary is tableware. But Thermaltake is taking a different route and it's dishing up tempered glass and aluminum for the big two-zero. The company celebrated 10 years with the Level 10 case. Now, it's time for the Level 20 enclosure. We got a close-up look at an early version of this case back at Computex 2017, and little has apparently changed since then—not a bad thing. ...Read more...

At CES 2018, SteelSeries added another member to its Rival mouse family. The SteelSeries Rival 600 is a seven-button gaming mouse with an optical IR sensor for mouse movements and a second sensor dedicated purely to detecting lift-offs. Steelseries calls the arrangement TrueMove3+, indicating that it's based on the same sensor technology at heart as the rest of the series including the Rival 310, Rival 500, and Rival 700 mice. ...Read more...

The continued response to the challenges presented by the Meltdown and Spectre speculative execution vulnerabilities has been somewhat overshadowed by all of the shiny new hardware on display in Las Vegas this week, but technology companies are still working to sort out the matter. Terry Myerson, the Executive VP of Microsoft's Windows and Devices Group wrote a blog post about Redmond's response to the vulnerabilities with a prediction of what users of new and old Intel CPUs can expect in terms of performance impact after the patches.Microsoft expects that most users of Windows 10 on Skylake and newer CPUs won't notice the small reduction in performance that will come with the microcode and software patches. The ...Read more...

The amount of data we can store and the ability to take it with us has improved in leaps and bounds over the years. We're often still left waiting when it comes time to copy it, especially in the case of portable storage devices. Samsung's T5 drives offer one solution to that problem, but Dell is looking to break the sound barrier with its new offerings, announced this week at CES: the Dell Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSDs.

CES 2018 - Intel announced a new Optane SSD for PCs this afternoon. The Optane SSD 800P is an M.2 SSD that bridges the gap between Optane Memory modules for hard disk drive acceleration and the Optane SSD 900P add-in card and U.2 devices for desktops. ...Read more...

If you're reading this site, you probably enjoy the process of building your own machines. Not everyone has that kind of time, though—and it takes a lot of work to make a custom-built PC look as nice as a turn-key boutique purchase. Maingear is proudly showing off the new version of the F131 gaming desktop at CES. Redesigned from the ground up in a slimmer aluminum-and-glass chassis, you can outfit one of the all-new F131s with a Coffee Lake-, Ryzen-, or Skylake-X-based system. ...Read more...

Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Tablet was a noteworthy 2-in-1 in both of its previous incarnations, and the third-generation machine Lenovo is showing at CES packs some drool-worthy hardware in an all-business shell. ...Read more...

The small bezels on Dell's XPS are certainly eye-catching, but for taking care of business on the go, the Texas-based PC builder's Latitude portables have developed a reputation that rivals Lenovo's ThinkPads. The company has updated its Latitude 5000 and 7000 lines with Intel's newest 15 W four-core, eight-thread Core U-series processors in time for CES. The manufacturer touts performance improvements as high as 72% in some workloads when compared to last year's machines. ...Read more...

Most people are probably drooling over Dell's XPS 15 2-in-1, but not everyone's on the hunt for a new notebook. Those shopping for a bright, colorful display would do well to look at Dell's S2419HM and S2719DM Ultrathin HDR displays. ...Read more...

Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) seemingly gets attention around here for its ability to attach displays, charge laptops, or conjoin ultrabooks with external graphics boxes. The PCIe 3.0 lanes that travel inside those expensive cables can be used for things other than graphics, and Patriot is putting them to use to connect a portable SSD built around the Phison E8 controller found in the company's Scorch entry-level M.2 NVMe SSDs. Anandtech says that chip lords over Toshiba BiCS 3D TLC NAND. ...Read more...

Besides the fascinating Project Linda, Razer announced a couple of other items today. The Razer Mamba HyperFlux mouse and its matching Firefly HyperFlux mouse pad purport to offer an ultra-lightweight wireless mousing experience. On the other side of the desk, the Nommo speakers come in basic 2.0 and fancy 2.1 varieties. ...Read more...

We're only a few days in, and 2018 is starting to look like the year of the massive display. Viewsonic's new professional-grade displays might not be quite as large as the ones that Nvidia has in mind, but there's something impressive on its list of new products: a 32" 8K display, among a host of smaller but by no means less interesting options. ...Read more...