Techreport

Samsung's quantum dot-backlit LCD monitors—known as QLED in the company's parlance—are some of the only displays on the market that can nip at the heels of OLED displays' image quality. That's not really news, but Samsung just hammered the point home by announcing that its Freesync 2-capable CHG90 and CHG70 monitors are the first monitors to be DisplayHDR-certified by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA). ...Read more...

We've already seen HP's first go-round with AMD's Raven Ridge mobile APU, and now Acer is entering the fray with mobile Ryzen variations of its mainstream Swift 3 notebook. The machines' all-metal bodies, backlit keyboards, and svelte 0.74" (1.9 cm) profiles are carried over from the Intel versions, but the Intel Core processors and optional Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics in those systems give way to four-core, eight-thread Ryzen chips with integrated Radeon Vega graphics. ...Read more...

Google has pulled the plug on its Project Tango augmented reality project, putting the knowledge gleaned during its development into ARCore, a "fast, performant, Android-scale SDK" that lets developers create augmented reality applications across a broad range of hardware. The search giant is now launching the second ARCore Developer Preview. While Project Tango required specific hardware in order to function, Google says ARCore will work on over 100 million devices when version 1.0 launches....Read more...

Imagine you're building a new PC using an RGB LED-encrusted motherboard and a matching video card. But then, you find a killer deal on Thermaltake coolers, power supplies, and fans with their own RGB LED controllers. Left unable to synchronize the sets of lights, you're forced to have a mismatched lightshow in your case. Thermaltake just announced the Thermaltake Sync Controller TT Premium Edition to fix that. This nine-port LED controller hub can accept inputs from Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI LED headers to synchronize the lights across Thermaltake devices. ...Read more...

I was pretty impressed with the performance of Intel's Optane caching solution when I messed around with MSI's Aegis 3 gaming desktop. Still, some folks aren't going to be satisfied with a simple Optane accelerator. If you're in that category, the Optane SSD 900P is your jam, and you have a choice between 280 GB or 480 GB models. What, that's not enough storage? Hang on a bit, then, because an Intel document suggests that 960 GB and 1.5 TB models of the 3D Xpoint-equipped SSD could be on their way. ...Read more...

We've already seen custom Radeon RX Vega cards from AMD-exclusive board partners PowerColor and XFX, and now it's Sapphire's turn at the wheel. The company has announced its Nitro+ Radeon RX Vega 56 8G HBM2 and Nitro+ Radeon RX Vega 64 8G HBM2 graphics cards, and those rather long-winded names suggest extra-spicy clocks. Both models are dressed in a custom vapor-chamber cooler topped off with three of the blue jewel brand's Quick Connect dual-ball-bearing fans. ...Read more...

Do you loathe noisy fans, despise tempered glass, and swear off RGB LEDs? Antec has the case for you. The Antec P110 Silent is the latest in the company's silent-running Performance Series, and rarely have we seen a case simultaneously so featureless and feature-filled. ...Read more...

Monkey on the right tried to steal my wallet, true story.

As much as we like the extra boost in performance afforded by Coffee Lake CPUs' two extra cores compared to their Kaby Lake predecessors, the benefit of extra cores to Intel's ultrabook processors is even more substantial. LG is the latest company to realize this, and it's just announced a refresh to its Gram ultrabook series that reduces the size and weight of its laptops even further despite the two extra CPU cores inside. ...Read more...

Hello, gerbils! I have a request for you today. I'm going to have a horizontal "wisdom" tooth (yes, really) pulled today, so I'll have an hour of two of horrible suffering followed by a few days of pain and eating mostly Queal. So if you have any best wishes, prayers, or positive thoughts, send them my way. On a happier note, here's today's collection of hardware deals. We have a wide selection, so get your credit cards out. ...Read more...

Samsung has announced three new slim portables with Intel's eighth-generation mobile processors inside. The 13" and 15" Notebook 9 models use the tried-and-true clamshell laptop form factor, while the Notebook 9 Pen has a 2-in-1 design with a 360° hinge and an included stylus that can sense 4096 levels of pressure. ...Read more...

The rumor mill has been reasonably quiet of late, but its engines are firing up. Citing a Digitimes report, MoePC claims that AMD's Ryzen 2 processors (codename Pinnacle Ridge) will show up in the first quarter of 2018. Separately, an as-of-yet unknown AMD "Fenghuang" APU has apparently broken cover in the SiSoft Sandra database.Should the rumors hold water, Ryzen 2 CPUs will be based on AMD's Zen+ architecture and manufactured on GlobalFoundries' 12LP (Leading Performance) process. Additional rumor has it that the improved process could let Pinnacle Ridge units clock higher than their predecessors and possibly offer better overclocking potential. Likewise, there's some expectation that the new processors could support higher DDR4 frequencies—a sticking ...Read more...

Heads up, gerbils! I'm writing in to remind you of TR's 2017 Christmas giveaway. The fine folks at MSI, Antec, and Toshiba all contributed some of their wares so that three lucky gerbils have a chance at grabbing some tasty, juicy hardware. ...Read more...

Heads up, gerbils! I'm writing in to remind you of TR's 2017 Christmas giveaway. The fine folks at MSI, Antec, and Toshiba all contributed some of their wares so that three lucky gerbils have a chance at grabbing some tasty, juicy hardware. ...Read more...

AMD's Radeon RX Vega cards are still hard to find on retail shelves, but the recent announcements of third-party designs seem to suggest that the stock situation could improve in the near-future. The latest Vega cards on the table are MSI's Radeon RX Vega 56 Air Boost 8G OC and Radeon RX Vega 64 Air Boost 8G OC. Both cards' PCBs appear to borrow heavily from the Vega reference design, though their blower-style coolers are slightly different from AMD's. ...Read more...

As computing moves to ever-shrinking desktop form factors, slow 2133 MT/s and 2400 MT/s DDR4 memory becomes less acceptable. Folks who demand the absolute top performance from their systems can't neglect memory performance, but until fairly recently there just weren't many high-performance SO-DIMM kits. Corsair is among the companies turning that around, and the nautically-named group just released what it says is the fastest 32 GB DDR4 four-stick SO-DIMM kit ever at 4000 MT/s. ...Read more...

If you're reading this site, you're almost certainly familiar with the wide-reaching "Intel Inside" branding. Intel Inside isn't just a fancy logo and a slogan, though. Since 1991, Intel has operated a "co-operative marketing program" under the name, and through the program Intel funnels a lot of cash into the industry by helping vendors cover advertising and marketing costs. Now, CRN is reporting that Intel intends to cut funding for the program by some amount between 40 and 60 percent of its existing budget. ...Read more...

Credit where credit is due, but yeesh, that early-2000s era watermark...

We last wrote about Apple's upcoming Xeon-and-Vega-powered iMac Pro all-in-one workstation machines back in June. The company has updated the product page for the iMac Pro and announced a launch date for the high-powered all-in-one computers. Suffice to say, they pack a ton of hardware. ...Read more...

G'day, gerbils. You can sit down, there's no need for all that ceremony and saluting. We know you're struck in awe and reverence, for you know that we are purveyors of the finest hardware deals around. There's time to meet-and-greet everyone and show you today's wares. Here they are. ...Read more...

Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition is the morning's big news, but we're putting some finishing touches on our in-depth coverage. For now, let's talk Intel drivers. Most game-playing gerbils' systems probably pack AMD Radeon or Nvidia GeForce discrete graphics, but many a monitor's pixels are pushed by the silicon integrated into the CPU die. Today's release of the 15.60 Intel Graphics Driver is highlighted by an updated control panel that showcases new game titles. Alongside the showcase, there's launch-day support for Okami HD. ...Read more...

Back when rumors were swirling about Apple's iPhone X, the prospect of where the Touch ID sensor for the device might end up was just one of the open questions. As it happened, the company eventually went so far as to basically miniaturize a Kinect, nestled it into the infamous notch, and called it Face ID. Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering later claimed that Touch ID was never even in the running for the iPhone X once Apple developed its facial-authentication tech. That outcome doesn't mean an under-glass fingerprint reader isn't a cool idea, though. As a guy with a twin brother, facial-identification tech is potentially insecure for my ugly mug. Touch ID and its ilk are still my preference, and a phone with both an edge-to-edge display and a front-mounted fingerprint reader would immediately grab my attention.

Season's greetings, my dear gerbils and gerbilettes. Snow is falling, presents are being acquired, and the holiday cheer is in full swing. Companies are getting in on the Christmas fun, too. We're sure that by now you've pictured where this is going. That's right, we have another world-famous TR giveaway!The fine folks at MSI, Antec, and Toshiba have joined our festivities. All three companies are purveyors of high-quality hardware, and there are contributions from each and ...Read more...

BenQ's latest "Video Enjoyment" entry-level display is the EW277HDR, a 27" monitor using a VA panel with a resolution of 1920x1080. BenQ says this monitor meets the requirements to display HDR10 content thanks to its high 3000:1 native contrast ratio and a powerful backlight capable of up to 400 cd/m² brightness. Those are impressive qualities in an affordable monitor, but there's even more. ...Read more...

When Intel added the "Gold" suffix to its Kaby Lake Pentium processors back in October, there were rumors that the company would add the "Silver" moniker to Pentium parts based on its pint-sized, power-sipping Gemini Lake architecture. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the blue silicon colossus has officially announced desktop and mobile Gemini Lake chips wearing Pentium Silver and Celeron badges. ...Read more...

Do you recall, back in May, when we reported on Acer's ProDesigner BM320? That's a 31.5" display with 4K resolution and 10-bit-per-pixel color depth. Acer is apparently trying to carve a niche in the professional display market, as it's just brought out the ProDesigner PE320QK with a similarly-juicy list of specifications. ...Read more...

Man, I just love mice with a bounty of buttons. It's so convenient to stick functions you'd normally have to stretch your left hand for on the mouse. It seems like Thermaltake is gearing up to serve folks like me with its just-launched Nemesis Switch gaming mouse. The shiny new pointer uses a high-end optical sensor and has RGB LED illumination built-in. ...Read more...

Zotac's been making mini-PCs for a long time. Ten years, in fact, if we're to believe the micro-site for the company's latest creation, the MEK1 small-form-factor gaming PCs. We first heard about them back around Computex time, but now the company has made the full details available to us. There's a black model and a white model, and I have to admit that they look pretty spiffy. ...Read more...

We love our SSDs around these parts, but when it comes to inexpensive storage of large volumes of crucial data like Bruno's collection of cat pictures, rusty old hard drives are still tough to beat. Spinning platter drives with 14 TB of storage capacity have been around for a couple months, but Toshiba says its MG07ACA-series drives are the first of that size to use conventional magnetic recording rather than the slower shingled magnetic recording. The company also claims the new drive is the first with nine platters inside its aluminum housing. ...Read more...

Soooo... anybody got a spare $3000 that I can use to get myself a Titan V card? I really need one for, um, research purposes. I'd totally not be playing games on it, no siree. Heck, maybe it's the one that will finally run Crysis after all this time. Alas, I can afford no such card. My budget only extends to the deals you see below. Take a look. ...Read more...

Late yesterday evening, Nvidia announced the Titan V graphics card at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). The Titan V puts the same 815 mm² Volta V100 GPU that's powered Nvidia's highest-end Tesla compute accelerators for some time into a desktop-friendly card. Volta V100 is easily the single most powerful GPU ever, so the Titan V is easily the single most powerful desktop graphics card—or compute accelerator—ever. Getting ahold of that unbridled computing power requires a cool $3000. ...Read more...

Late yesterday evening, Nvidia announced the Titan V graphics card at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). The Titan V puts the same 815 mm² Volta V100 GPU that's powered Nvidia's highest-end Tesla compute accelerators for some time into a desktop-friendly card. Volta V100 is easily the single most powerful GPU ever, so the Titan V is easily the single most powerful desktop graphics card—or compute accelerator—ever. Getting ahold of that unbridled computing power requires a cool $3000. ...Read more...

The graphics driver developer's job is a seemingly unending one. New games come out all the time requiring driver-level optimizations, but occasionally there's a far bigger reason for an updated driver package. Nvidia's GeForce 388.59 driver release is ready for the company's $3000 shock-and-awe GeForce Titan V graphics card and Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 4 VR. (We have a piece on the monster graphics card coming up shortly, so stay tuned.) ...Read more...

To the average gerbil, Lite-On is a name that's more likely to evoke memories of DVD writers than solid-state drives, but the company has a number of enterprise and consumer storage products. Its latest M.2 PCIe SSD is the Lite-On MU X, and it's targeted at "entry-level PC gaming." ...Read more...

Memes about Google Chrome's relatively heavyweight memory usage are widespread on the internet, regardless of whether they're justified. It's true that when it came about, Chrome liked to gobble up the gigabytes, but that was mostly due to its then-innovative sandboxed nature. That sandbox just got even more secure with Chrome version 63. The latest version brings the long-awaited site isolation feature to Chrome's stable channel. ...Read more...

There are a lot of ways to get files off of an iPhone these days, some more cumbersome than others. After all, it's almost like they're handheld computers. One of the simplest forms of file transfer is the good old-fashioned physical medium, and in the case of i-devices that means a flash drive. Adata's i-Memory AI720 is a prime example of a suitable device thanks to its USB Type-A and Lightning connectors. ...Read more...

My apologies for my ridiculous laughter

HTC announced the Vive Focus, the company's first standalone virtual reality headset with inside-out six-degrees-of-freedom tracking, last month. We already knew that the Vive Focus would come bearing the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC found in many flagship Android smartphones, but the original announcement was light on some other key specs. The company has now provided some additional details like the resolution of the single-piece display alongside a more specific launch date and full pricing info. ...Read more...

Qualcomm just lifted the veil on its newest mobile device SoC, the Snapdragon 845. The company's previous-generation Snapdragon 835 is used in pretty much every high-end handset that runs Android, and Qualcomm's building on that chip's success. Compared to its predecessor, the Snapdragon 845 includes an improved Kryo 385 CPU, a new whiz-bang Spectra 280 image signal processor (ISP), and a more powerful Adreno 630 GPU—all along with a host of minor improvements. ...Read more...

We reached out to AMD today about the company's decision to add a second, pared-down version of its Radeon RX 560 graphics card without a differentiated moniker. The company responded to our inquiry with the following statement:It's correct that 14 Compute Unit (896 stream processors) and 16 Compute Unit (1024 stream processor) versions of the Radeon RX 560 are available. We introduced the 14CU version this summer to provide AIBs and the market with more RX 500 series options. It's come to our attention that on certain AIB and etail websites ...Read more...

Oh hi, gerbils. I'd be a little more uppity if it wasn't so darn cold around here. By "cold" I mean a temperature that's probably considered summer weather in parts of the US, but the local temperate climate has left me quite spoiled. I learned the meaning of "hot" when I travelled over to the US in the summer, and I suspect that if I were to repeat the endeavor, I'd learn the meaning of "death chill" too. Alas, weather can't get in the way of deals delivery. Here they are. ...Read more...

A while back, we glanced at PowerColor's Devil Box external video card enclosure. It takes virtually any graphics card you want to throw in it short of a Radeon Pro Duo, and then wires up said card to a PC using Thunderbolt 3. If you liked the feature set of the Devil Box but were put off by its edgy styling, take a look at PowerColor's newest external GPU enclosure: the Gaming Station. ...Read more...

For whatever reason, we haven't seen the typical amount of variation in factory clock speeds among different board manufacturers' implementations of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. EVGA has pursued lower noise rather than increased clock speeds with its new GeForce GTX 1070 Ti FTW Ultra Silent Gaming card. The FTW Ultra Silent wears a two-and-a-half-slot version of the company's familiar ACX 3.0 cooler. The company says the new cooler and a unique fan profile work together to reduce fan speeds and noise. ...Read more...

I thought ninjas were more of a nighttime thing.

Howdy folks, this is going to be a quick one. Ubisoft appears to really have gotten into the holiday spirit and is offering quite the boon to gamers everywhere. Strategy title World in Conflict (plus the Soviet Assault expansion) is free on Uplay, and soon Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag will join game libraries for the amount of zero dollars. ...Read more...

At its technology summit in Maui this afternoon, Qualcomm provided some additional details of the results of its partnership with Microsoft to bring Windows to the chipmaker's SoCs. To further that vision, HP's Kevin Frost took the stage to introduce the company's upcoming Snapdragon 835-powered Envy x2 convertible. ...Read more...

Qualcomm's Snapdragon platforms won't be the only processors powering Microsoft's vision for always-connected PCs. At the Snapdragon Technology Summit, AMD's Kevin Lensing, corporate vice president and manager of the company's client products, got on stage to announce that the red team has been working to integrate Qualcomm's cellular modems with its Ryzen Mobile reference platforms from the get-go. ...Read more...

Qualcomm is holding its Technology Summit in Maui, Hawaii this week, and the company announced its complete vision for a new kind of mobile PC today: the "always-connected PC." We've heard bits and bytes about what a Qualcomm-powered Windows laptop might look like for some time now, but the company has unveiled its full vision for what those systems will be capable of today. Three of the basic tenets of these new PCs, developed in collaboration with Microsoft, are "instantly on," "always connected," and "better-than-all-day battery life." Asus CEO Jerry Shen presented the company's first implementation of the always-connected PC in the form of the NovaGo convertible. ...Read more...

When AMD launched the Radeon RX 560 back in April, the GPU sported 1024 stream processors inside of 16 compute units. That figure was an increase from the 896 SPs within 14 CUs in the otherwise-similar previous-gen Radeon RX 460. The reference base and boost clocks also received a spec bump from its predecessor's figures. For unclear reasons, though, it seems that some RX 560s will again ship with 896 SPs. AMD recently made some silent updates to the Radeon RX 560's product page that reveal a second, identically-named version with the smaller resource complement. ...Read more...