Techreport

After building speculation fueled by media reports (including our own) ahead of a planned coordinated release, researchers at Google, academic institutions, and other companies have revealed a pair of attack classes this afternoon that exploit fundamental operating principles of modern CPUs to allow attackers to arbitrarily read data from the memory of vulnerable systems.The first, called "Meltdown," breaks down CPU-level protections that prevent unprivileged applications from reading arbitrary system memory, including privileged memory locations corresponding ...Read more...

The market for PC laptops includes entries with large, high-resolution displays, but sometimes even a built-in 17.3" 4K panel just isn't enough. At last year's CES, Razer showed off its Project Valkyrie triple-screen prototype laptop, but Asus' two-pronged approach to the mobile screen space conundrum is a bit more practical. Those needing lots of pixels and professional-grade color accuracy should cast their eyes at the company's OLED ProArt PQ22UC, while those that need improved portability can check out the ZenScreen Go MB16AP with its built-in battery. ...Read more...

Update 1/3/2018 2:20 PM: Intel has issued a statement regarding this potential vulnerability. The company claims its CPUs are not uniquely affected by the root cause that has provoked the changes to the virtual memory layouts in common operating systems, that reports attributing this issue to a "bug" or a "flaw" in Intel CPUs are incorrect, and that it is working with ARM, AMD, and operating system vendors to "develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively." Intel's statements would appear to directly contradict statements from AMD employees regarding the nature of this potential vulnerability, so we await further details of the security issue to be disclosed next week. The original post continues below.Like many TR readers, we are following news regarding a potential hardware-level security flaw in a range of Intel CPUs. Absent an official statement from Intel or operating system vendors, however, we are holding off on attempting a ...Read more...

Like many TR readers, we are following news regarding a potential hardware-level security flaw in a range of Intel CPUs. Absent an official statement from Intel or operating system vendors, however, we are holding off on attempting a detailed report on this issue or issues because the cart seems to have gotten in front of the horse on what exactly is going on and the people in the know may be bound by a non-disclosure agreement.What we do know from initial reports around this vulnerability is that a series of Linux kernel patches to implement kernel page table isolation (KPTI) are in the works . The goal of KPTI is to segregate user and kernel memory mappings in virtual ...Read more...

Whether due to connotations of manliness or an association with popular action shooter games, military aesthetics are always popular with certain people. G.Skill appears to be seeking to serve that segment with its latest memory modules. The new Sniper X DDR4 memory series looks similar to the company's flagship Ripjaws series in specifications, but wraps the modules in a metallic exterior with camouflage accents. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils! We figure you're still reeling from New Year's festivities. We hope you didn't have too much to drink and then proceed to make too many online purchases under the influence. After all, you'll need your credit card fresh and ready because we scoured the lands of e-tailers and found the best hardware deals for you today. ...Read more...

Our testing demonstrates that Thunderbolt 3 isn't the panacea for laptop gaming that some expected, but the interface does make it convenient to attach a compatible notebook to a larger display. Samsung's CJ791 curved 34" QLED monitor makes it easy for mobile users to use a single cable to connect to a big, high-res display that doubles as a power source. ...Read more...

Folks looking for a monitor capable of high-dynamic-range output (HDR) breathed a sigh of relief last month when the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) introduced a set of standards for what consumers should expect from a monitor with the HDR label. Asus is one of the first manufacturers to announce a display that's certified under the new spec: the ProArt PA27AC. ...Read more...

Ironically, I just can't come up with a good caption for today's image...

The wide-ranging backward compatibility of the PC is one of its greatest strengths as a gaming platform, but folks trying to step back just a few years on their Radeon-equipped rigs might be having trouble right now. The Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition release apparently broke a significant part of the DirectX 9 driver stack for the red team's video cards. Fortunately, Terry Makedon—director of roadmap, strategy, marketing and user experience for AMD GPU software—says AMD is hard at work on a hotfix for at least some of the affected titles. ...Read more...

The biggest news in PC hardware in 2017 was AMD's return to the mainstream and high-end desktop spaces with its Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper CPUs. Qualcomm and Microsoft spent the year working to bring Redmond's OS and the associated software to a new class of ARM-powered laptops. In all the hubbub, one could be forgiven for forgetting that Via Technologies also has a license to produce x86-compatible processors. Chinese site EEFocus reports that Zhaoxin Semiconductor, Via's joint venture with the Chinese government, has announced the KX-5000 line of x86-64-compatible chips, which it claims are the first Chinese processors with full integration of platform controller chips and dual-channel DDR4 memory controllers. ...Read more...

At next week's CES show in Las Vegas, LG Display will be showing what it claims is the largest-ever OLED display. The new screen boasts an 88-inch diagonal and has a resolution of 7680x4320—better known as UHD 8K. That's four times the pixels of the most common "4K" display, and sixteen times the pixels of your typical 1920x1080 (or "1080p") monitor. Don't expect retina-class pixel density from those arrangements, though, as the 88-inch monster only rings in at 100 ppi. ...Read more...

Intel's Indian web site leaked some tasty details of the company's upcoming CPU with Radeon graphics on package yesterday. One of those CPUs, now officially known as the Core i7-8809G, showed up on the company's overclockable desktop CPU list before being scrubbed. The leak revealed several tantalizing new facts about this union of blue-team and red-team technologies. ...Read more...

Adata is following in the footsteps of fellow memory-and-storage vendors like Corsair, Kingston, and G.Skill by expanding its brand into the realm of PC gaming peripherals. The fruits of the company's latest expansion are the Infarex M10 Gaming Mouse and Infarex R10 Mousepad. The mouse and pad come packaged together and both light up the room with integrated RGB LED illumination. ...Read more...

In the wake of Apple's recent revelations regarding reduced performance of iPhones with aged batteries, major Android device makers have gone on the record to make hay of Cupertino's woes. LG and Samsung both provided statements to Phone Arena confirming that they don't reduce performance to compensate for battery aging, and HTC and Motorola both told The Verge that they don't include battery age in the processor power management decisions of their devices.Although these statements certainly sound positive and user-friendly in light of Apple's revelations—who wants their device to slow down as it ages?—they also carefully skirt the underlying issue that Apple claims it's trying to solve through the power-management behavior it's instituted on its older phones. Apple's statement yesterday specifically notes that the company implemented ...Read more...

Building a machine in 2017 was painful. Here at the end of the year, we're looking at average per-gigabyte SSD prices that are the same or even higher than they were a year ago. It's a frustrating situation. According to the state-run China Daily newspaper, that nation's National Development and Reform Commission is getting fed up with NAND chip prices as well. The paper quotes an official with the NDRC who says that the commission "will pay more attention to future problems that may be caused by 'price fixing'" in the memory market.

Some PC enthusiasts put a priority on cramming as much power as possible into compact Mini-ITX (or smaller) enclosures. DeepCool's jumbo-size Quadstellar goes in the opposite direction, providing ample room to spread heat-generating components into four separate cooling zones. Each of those zones has a large active inlet shutter that can open when temperatures start to rise. ...Read more...

Over the past few days, there's been a furor regarding the performance of some aging iPhones on the popular Geekbench benchmark under iOS 10.2.1 and newer. Testing by a number of users on Reddit and by Geekbench maker Primate Labs itself revealed that some iPhones were putting up lower single-core Geekbench scores than others with the newer software, leading to outraged iPhone owners and a wide range of inflammatory headlines.Apple responded to the controversy by acknowledging that recent versions of iOS "smooth out" peak power demands to prevent the annoying sudden shutdowns that have plagued some iPhone owners, ...Read more...

While AMD's Ryzen processors generally chat directly with graphics cards and NVMe storage devices over 8 GT/s PCIe 3.0 lanes, peripherals attached through existing 300-series chipsets are limited to the bandwidth offered by PCIe 2.0 lanes. The company's upcoming 400-series chipsets could bring PCIe 3.0 capabilities to all slots of future Ryzen motherboards, according to recent updates in the PCI-SIG Integrator's List.As a refresher, AMD's Ryzen chips communicate directly with storage devices over four dedicated PCIe 3.0 lanes, with another 16 top-speed lanes set out for one or two graphics cards. Another four PCIe 3.0 lanes attach ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils. If you've been feeling like it's been a really slow week news-wise, you're not alone. We'd wager that CES 2018 is going to be a non-stop announcement fest, since PR departments everywhere seem to be saving up their shots for two weeks from now. Even still, daily life at hardware e-tailers goes on, and we dug up today's best deals for you. ...Read more...

Jeff says "RIP GR Tron"

The almost-past year of 2017 was a big one for CPU technology announcements. We got AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper units plus Intel's Core X family and a range of Coffee Lake processors. Over on the graphics card aisle, we got the mighty GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and AMD's Radeon RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 cards.With all that new hardware, we bet that more than a few of you took the upgrade plunge and built spankin' new systems for yourselves, friends, or family. But time goes on ...Read more...

A while back, we reported on G.Skill's then-fastest SO-DIMMs running at 3800 MT/s. The company has since released mini-modules running at 4 GT/s, but both of those ultra-high-speed kits top out at 32 GB. There are few uses for a four-module SO-DIMM kit, and one of them is in the very ASRock X299E-ITX/ac motherboard that G.Skill uses for testing. If you want to fully outfit that board with 64 GB of top-speed DDR4, you'll need G.Skill's newest kit of Ripjaws SO-DIMMs with its four 16 GB modules at 3466 MT/s. ...Read more...

As enthusiasts, we tend to bloviate about the beauty of high-resolution HDR displays with IPS and VA panels, but the fact remains that most folks are perfectly fine with regular old TN LCDs. Certainly for a competitive gaming workload, the most important part of a display's performance is its motion clarity. We've seen 240-Hz monitors before, but LG's 27GK750F-B is the first of its kind to also include a blur-reducing backlight. ...Read more...

Good morning, gerbils. We hope you haven't put on too much weight over Christmas. After all, we wouldn't want you to be so pudgy that you can't get your credit card out of your wallet. We bet you're still dying for hardware deals. Here's what we found for you today. ...Read more...

Close enough.

Greetings, gerbils! Christmas day may be just around the corner, but there's still one final issue to take care of. I'm sure you've been waiting with bated breath for the reveal of the winners in TR's 2017 Christmas giveaway. Well, start the drum roll—here they are. ...Read more...

If you feel your wallet tugging itself from your pocket, gerbils, it's because it's time once again for yet another game sale. The Steam Winter Sale is in full swing. As usual, we've taken up the task of trawling the store pages for the best deals.

Acer's 14" Swift 3 has rapidly become one of my favorite budget laptops of the year. The version with a GeForce MX150 inside is especially compelling. It's not any heavier or thicker than its Intel IGP-powered counterpart, yet it provides fine basic gaming experiences with today's most popular titles and can even run older AAA titles plenty well at lower resolutions. The Core i5-8250U is also an impressively powerful and power-efficient chip, delivering a huge performance boost to ultrabooks like this one. Best of all, Newegg has been offering compelling prices on these machines lately. You can get one today for $659.99 with promo code GAMEWNE20—the lowest price we've seen so far for such a system. ...Read more...

Nvidia announced the end of driver support for certain operating systems and some driver features in three separate support posts yesterday. The big news is the end of driver support for 32-bit OSes after driver version 390 comes around. Smaller notes include the upcoming discontinuation of driver support for the NVS 310 and NVS 315 business graphics cards, and the end of support for quad-buffered stereo features starting with driver version 396.Nvidia says that drivers after the 390 branch will not install or work on 32-bit Windows, Linux, or FreeBSD operating systems. The notes also say that future feature enhancements and optimizations will not be rolled back into older driver versions. Nvidia says it will provide "low ...Read more...

Go ahead, complain about how this is actually tempura.

We've seen a number of external graphics enclosures from PC parts manufacturers at the beginning of the alphabet, and now Zotac is entering the fray with the Amp Box and the diminutive Amp Box Mini. Both of Zotac's boxes are smaller than some of the units we've seen, which makes sense given the company's fetish for making mighty-mite video cards like the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Mini. ...Read more...

Hello, gerbils. 'Tis almost the night before Christmas, and decorated pine trees everywhere probably have more than a few boxes laying underneath them by now. There's still time to do some last-minute shopping, though. To help with that endeavor, we've scoured the e-tailer lands and bring you the best deals we found. Here's what we have for today. ...Read more...

We're not quite in the midst of the CES rush yet, but a few companies are advising us about what they'll be showing in Vegas come January. For its part, LG will be showing three new displays at the expo. LG refers to the new monitors as upgraded models of existing popular displays, and all three of them will support the company's Nano IPS display technology, as well as the DisplayHDR 600 spec. ...Read more...

Time's running out, gerbils! In case you forgot, TR's 2017 Christmas giveaway is only open for entries until noon tomorrow. We know you're all busy, running around fetching presents, making eggnog, and fixing your family's computers. However, there's hardware to be won courtesy of our friends at Antec, Toshiba, and MSI. ...Read more...

Anyone who's built a PC lately knows that if you want fast memory, modules based on Samsung's RAM are probably the clearest choice. The company's memory might get even faster pretty soon. Samsung just announced that it's moving a second-generation of its "10-nanometer class" DDR4 DRAM into mass production. The new chips step performance up to 3600 MT/s (compared to 3200 MT/s for the previous generation) and simultaneously reduce power usage by about 15 percent, all without significant changes to the process technology involved. ...Read more...

When we reviewed it nearly three years ago, the Fractal Design Define R5 won itself an Editor's Choice award thanks to the incredible care and thought that went into its design. Fractal Design has now announced the Define R6, an update to one of our favorite cases that accounts for current trends in PC building. ...Read more...

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) has been tearing up the Steam charts since it went into Early Access back in March. The game has sold an amazing 25 million copies in the meantime. It's already the most-played game in Steam's history, with a staggering 1 billion hours logged and over 2 million more peak concurrent players than the previous record holder, Valve's free-to-play Dota 2. The PUBG developers are putting a bullet in its Early Access status and adding a host of new content and optimizations. Nvidia's driver team is ready for the PUBG update with its GeForce Game Ready Driver 388.71. ...Read more...

If Oculus and HTC have created most of the buzz around virtual reality, then the secretive Magic Leap has been the company we've been waiting to hear from regarding augmented or mixed reality—the placement of simulated objects in real-world fields of vision. Rumors have long swirled regarding what, exactly, the company's mixed-reality product might look like. As of today, we need wonder no longer. The company has unveiled its Magic Leap One Creator Edition goggles, a pair of sensor-studded glasses that connect to a self-contained computing pack that can be worn on one's person. ...Read more...

AMD's last driver update, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 17.12.1, marked the latest in the company's traditional cycle of major yearly releases. Large changes to complex software packages usually mean new bugs, and today's Radeon Software 17.12.2 update fixes some of the problems that overhaul introduced, including stuttering and graphical corruption in Star Wars: Battlefront II, Ark Survival Evolved, and Netflix playback. ...Read more...

We reported on rumors of future baked-in ad-blocking in Google's popular Chrome web browser back in April. We spilled words on the subject again in June when the search giant confirmed its plans to block ads on pages that didn't conform to guidelines for unobtrusive advertising. The company has now announced that its browser software will start blocking nonconforming ads on February 15. One can probably guess many of the types of ads that won't meet the guidelines: full-page interstitial ads, ads that play sound unexpectedly, and pop-ups, among others. ...Read more...

You may recall that way back in May when Intel released the Core-X series of high-end desktop CPUs, EVGA announced three motherboards for the new mega-tasking CPUs. The X299 FTW-K and X299 Micro already hit the market, but EVGA held off its most hardcore, overclocker-oriented X299 motherboard until today. The X299 Dark is finally ready for prime time. ...Read more...

This game is 'hard candy' for me.

Do you feel that in the air? The ever-growing tension, the electricity, the anticipation for Santa's presents. Regardless of how you feel about the incessant advertising and Christmas music, it's still a season for cheer and family love. If you're thinking of offering hardware and tech-related gifts, you can do no better than our selection of deals below. Take a look. ...Read more...

The latest generation of Crucial's mainstream SSDs has hit the shelves. The Crucial MX500 is Micron's first consumer drive using its 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. The MX500 pairs a Silicon Motion SM2258 controller with up to two terabytes of the new memory. ...Read more...

The small-bezel "infinity" display was a big trend in high-end smartphones in 2017, showing up in Samsung's co-flagship Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S8 phones, as well as Apple's iPhone X. The Korean electronics goliath is bringing the edge-to-edge display to lower price points with the Galaxy A8 and Galaxy A8+, a pair of midrange phones sporting glass-and-metal bodies, IP68 water and dust intrusion resistance, and dual user-facing cameras. ...Read more...

Technologies like shingled magnetic recording (SMR), heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) all promise to improve the capacity of spinning platter drives, but none of them were developed with performance in mind. While HAMR and SMR could indirectly offer better throughput by way of increased data density, large jumps in hard drive performance have been rare in recent years. Seagate says its multi-actuator technology could double hard drive performance while maintaining magnetic hard drives' advantages over SSDs in cost per storage unit. ...Read more...

Some companies claim their ultra-wide monitors can replace multi-display arrays for gaming. Those massive screens are nice, but having used both 3x1 and 3x2 setups I can comfortably say that there's nothing quite like Eyefinity and 3D Surround. The setups I used had the monitors' bezels removed, but with AOC's G90 series displays you could skip that hassle. Our friends across the pond at Hexus spotted the AOC G2590VXQ, G2590PX, and G2790PX. These upcoming FreeSync gaming monitors all share the same three-sided "frameless" styling.

Intel's Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology is one of the most interesting developments in package-level design this year. These tiny slices of silicon allow Intel to connect heterogeneous dice together on the same substrate without large interposers. Today, Intel revealed how it'll use EMIBs as part of the new Stratix 10 MX family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to break through the challenges of feeding those accelerators with enough memory bandwidth. As it's doing with the HBM2 RAM on board the as-yet-unnamed marriage of an Intel CPU and Radeon graphics, Intel will use EMIBs to hook up Stratix 10 MX FPGAs to as many as four "tiles" of HBM2 RAM for aggregate bandwidth of up to 512 GB/s. Besides the HBM2 memory stacks, Intel is also using EMIBs to join four transceivers to the FPGA fabric for signals like PCIe. ...Read more...

Hello, gerbil population at large. I hope you've bought all your presents by now. E-tailers and brick-and-mortar stores alike are buzzing with activity, and you better get your geeky best half (or yourself) a little something before it's too late. Meanwhile, we'd like to remind you that our partners Toshiba, MSI, and Antec have joined forces and offered a hefty pack o' hardware in TR's 2017 Christmas giveaway. ...Read more...