Techreport

I bet all you little gerbils and gerbilettes are foaming at the mouth at the prospect of that juicy, sweet turkey and gravy. But alas, there are two more days until the ovens start cooking and the next best thing is, naturally, to look at sweet hardware deals in preparation for Black Friday. Here's what we have for today. ...Read more...

The Titan Xp is unquestionably the king of the consumer Pascal line-up, but Nvidia doesn't allow board partners to make custom versions of that card. Fortunately, the next step down is more like a lip than a stair. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the fastest card to wear the GeForce name, and we expect that EVGA's GTX 1080 Ti Kingpin Hydro Copper Gaming will be among the fastest variants ever created. The card comes with a single-slot waterblock pre-installed, and EVGA guarantees that every sample is capable of whipping its GPU core clock up to 2025 MHz. ...Read more...

Cooler Master's MasterKeys MK750 is a thoroughly modern high-end keyboard with a metal backplate, per-key RGB LED backlighting, and the buyer's choice of Cherry MX Blue, Brown, or Red switches. The company is following through on its "make it yours" slogan by giving buyers the options to use an included magnetic wrist rest and extra key caps. ...Read more...

The big acquisition deal in progress in the semiconductor space might be Broadcom's rejected bid to take over Qualcomm, but a pair of less-prominent names in the space have come to terms. Marvell Technology Group, a manufacturer of storage, networking, and processing chips, will purchase fellow fabless semiconductor firm Cavium for $6 billion. Cavium is one of the early players in the still-developing ARM server CPU space, and its ThunderX and ThunderX2 SoCs with up to 54 cores have Intel's Xeon processors in their sights for certain applications. Marvell hopes the acquisition will position the company to better compete with Intel, Qualcomm, and Broadcom.Marvell offered over $84 per share for Cavium, an 11% premium compared to the company's stock market value this past Friday afternoon. In the final deal, ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils. Black Friday is approaching, and many e-tailers are getting a head start on deals in preparation for the big day. We're breaking our usual deals schedule to bring you some tasty stuff we spotted while doing some virtual window-shopping. Shall we have a look? ...Read more...

Most people seem to prefer mechanical keyswitches over rubber-dome offerings. Dome switches require you to mash a key pretty forcefully for it to register, and they get progressively less reliable with use. Mechanical keyswitches are more reliable (so much that they'll likely outlive the keyboard's practical usefulness) but they're still vulnerable to moisture and corrosion. Aorus' new K9 Optical keyboard, which we saw briefly at Computex this year, uses optical switches that have no physical switch mechanism. As a result, the company claims the keyboard is spill-proof. ...Read more...

Asus is expanding its lineup of FreeSync-enabled gaming monitors with the ROG Strix XG32VQ and ROG Strix XG35VQ, a pair of 1800R curved jumbo screens each sporting 1440 rows of pixels and sitting atop a customizable Light Signature projection stand. Both monitors' VA panels should provide generous viewing angles and accurate color representation. Asus lists the grey-to-grey response time at 4 ms for both models, and there's FreeSync support on tap with LFC support. ...Read more...

The world of gaming laptops has been dominated by Intel CPUs and Nvidia graphics the last few product cycles, even as AMD's Ryzen 7 processors have proven themselves as worthy in the desktop space. We previously wrote about a laptop that would bring the silicon underdog's eight-core mainstream desktop chip into the mobile space, and that machine is now shipping. The Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC-WB74 packs a desktop Ryzen 7 1700 CPU and a Radeon RX 580 graphics card into a 17" chassis. ...Read more...

Ever since the Catalyst Omega update way back in 2014, AMD's been doing a major Radeon driver release every year. These big releases add new features and functionality to the driver software, like last year's ReLive update. It's getting to be about that time again. While we haven't heard anything from AMD directly, a fan going by the name of BlazeK_AMDRT tweeted a couple of curious images alluding to an upcoming update. ...Read more...

Demand for Intel's Coffee Lake processors has been as hot as a good cup of pour-over, judging by recent e-tail prices and stock levels. To keep up with this strong demand, the company is adding a new assembly-and-test site in Chengdu, China to perform final integration of those CPUs. Intel says it's spinning up the new facility "to ensure a continuous supply" of the entire Coffee Lake Core i5 and Core i7 lineup for desktops, so we can hope that the added capacity leads to more reliable stock and lower prices. Chips from the new facility should begin arriving to the company's customers (i.e. system integrators and retailers) December 15. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbil! I know, I know, I know, we just had a deals post yesterday. But how about the laptop you see in the picture below? It's a hot one, and we couldn't possibly let it go unnoticed by the gerbildom at large. Let it be known that our Editor-in-Chief Jeff Kampman's exact words about the Swift 3 were "that's an awesome machine, I'm testing its 14-inch counterpart here." Endorsements don't get much better than that. ...Read more...

Super-fast memory kits composed of two modules are all well and good, but some folks need large capacity to go with wickedly-high clock speeds. Last week Corsair claimed to have made the world's fastest four-DIMM 32 GB memory kit with its 4333 MT/s set. However, today G.Skill has trumped that figure with its DDR4-4000 four-module kit. The DIMMs' Samsung B-die chips are rated for CL19-19-19-39 timings and use Samsung B-die chips clocked at a sky-high 4400 MT/s. ...Read more...

We spilled some electronic ink describing EVGA's DG-7 line of cases back in June, and they're available now for preorder. As a refresher, the DG-7 cases sits right below the company's premium DG-8 line. All four DG-7 models (DG-73, DG-75, DG-76 and DG-77) are designed to ensconce systems assembled around Mini-ITX, microATX, or ATX motherboards. The frames and right-side panels are made of steel regardless of model, but going higher up the product ladder results in steel and plastic giving way to tempered glass. ...Read more...

Today's the day for the release of DICE's sequel to its 2015 Star Wars: Battlefront. Opinions on the new game run as wide a gamut as we've seen for a major AAA release, but if you're running a Radeon GPU and ready to dive in, you should first make a pit stop at AMD's download site. The latest Radeon driver is numbered 17.11.2 (since it's the second release in November), and it's primed and ready for EA's Star Wars-themed shooter. ...Read more...

5G networking promises to connect everyone and everything, and Intel doesn't want to be left out of the potentially huge wave of handsets and smart devices that will take advantage of the next generation of wireless connectivity. Today, the company announced the XMM 8000 series of 5G modems, of which the XMM 8060 is the first member.The nascent 5G New Radio, or 5G NR, standards are labyrinthe and cover multiple phases of next-generation wireless deployment. While we're still coming to grips with the full details of 5G, it's clear that the XMM 8060 will support both the intermediate 5G NR Non-Standalone networking ( a deployment phase that will piggyback on some LTE technologies and networks ...Read more...

It's possible I've been playing too much Ark: Survival Evolved. Copyright Universal Pictures

Even as the generational differences in smartphones have shrunk, the reign of a flagship handset has become shorter and shorter. To keep up with the frantic pace of flagship refreshes, OnePlus is updating its OnePlus 5 phone after just a third of a year. Like its predecessors, the OnePlus 5T's spec sheet can go toe-to-toe with pricey competitors like Samsung's Galaxy S8 without delivering a knockout blow to the wallet. ...Read more...

Which companies come to mind when you're thinking about gaming input devices, gerbils? Is Roccat on that list? If not, it probably should be. The German company sells some fine hardware for participating in computer-simulated conflicts, and has done so for a little over 10 years now. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of its original Kone mouse, Roccat has released the Kone Aimo. ...Read more...

Man, those colors are just so pretty. Oh, I'm sorry, was stuck in a reverie gazing at the vivid shades of Corsair's ML120 Pro fans. Our editor-in-chief had a good look at these cool 'n' quiet Technicolor spinners today and came away impressed. If those fans got you itchin' for a hardware upgrade or a new build, we can hardly blame you. Perhaps the deals we dug up today will help you in that endeavor. ...Read more...

We spend a lot of time talking about graphics here at The Tech Report—and rightly so! But after the benchmarks are done and we're diving into new releases (I'm playing Assassin's Creed Origins, currently), audio joins the visuals as a crucial part of a gaming experience. Whether you're going through the Egyptian desert on a horse with no name or hopping into Dust for another round of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the influence of audio on the gameplay experience can't be overstated. I'm always on the lookout for a way to get better audio out of my games, and the latest contender is Corsair's HS50 Stereo Gaming Headset. ...Read more...

Futuremark, the purveyor of graphics-card-crippling benchmark software, has added another tool to its arsenal. The next edition of VRMark will include the Cyan Room benchmark, a gauntlet run aimed at testing a system's VR performance with the low-overhead DirectX 12 API. ...Read more...

Intel has made the term "eighth-generation" pretty confusing when it comes to its mainstream Core processors. Eighth-generation desktop Core i5 and Core i7 chips are built around a new Coffee Lake die, while the corresponding laptop CPUs have more in common with seventh-generation Kaby Lake parts. Origin PC decided to mix it up further by shoehorning those impressive desktop chips into its Eon15-X, Eon17-X, and Eon17-SLX gaming laptops. All three models can be fitted with Intel eighth-generation Core processors up to and including the Core i7-8700K.The machines are adorned with backlit keyboards and pack Nvidia GeForce 10-series graphics cards hurling pixels at G-Sync displays. The laptops can be customized with varying hardware specifications, special finishes, and custom logos on their lids. Memory configurations range from 8 GB of DDR4-2400 all ...Read more...

When Intel first started talking about the 3D Xpoint memory it created in cooperation with Micron, the possible uses for the technology encompassed both storage-like devices as well as system RAM. Fast-forward over two years to the present day, and we've seen what 3D Xpoint can do in Intel's Optane storage devices. There's still a ways to go before we get to see what a system using 3D Xpoint for main memory is like, though. Intel confirmed yesterday that memory modules based on 3D Xpoint are slated for release in the second half of next year....Read more...

Nvidia's latest GeForce Game Ready drivers are here. Version 388.31 of the green team's software stands ready for the launch of the multiplayer-shooter-in-a-galaxy-far-far-away Star Wars Battlefront II and the DC Comics-infused fighting game Injustice 2. Although day-one optimizations are fine and dandy, they're not the biggest story with this release.

If 2017 is the year that RGB LEDs found their way into every conceivable PC component and accessory, 2018 is shaping up to be the year of the individually-addressable RGB LED. BitFenix is jumping on that emerging trend towards even more customizable multi-colored lighting with its spanking-new Enso E-ATX PC enclosure. The manufacturer says it worked in conjunction with Asus to make the fancy three-pin light strips inside fully compatible with the motherboard maker's Aura Sync lighting control software. ...Read more...

One of the bad things about paying three figures for a keyboard is that you feel that much worse when you break it. Back when I used to drink sugary sodas, I ruined more keyboards by backhanding drinks than I could count on said hand. Razer's newest revision of its popular Blackwidow keyboard might make you stop worrying about such things, though. The company says the updated Blackwidow Ultimate is "the most resilient gaming keyboard to date." ...Read more...

Nvidia has a lot to talk about at the 2017 Supercomputing Conference, thanks to the presence of its GPUs inside 34 recently-introduced members of the latest TOP500 supercomputer list. Out of those half-thousand machines, 87 now proudly boast Nvidia hardware inside. Furthermore, the company's wares power 14 of the top 20 most efficient supercomputer clusters on Earth. If all that wasn't enough, the company now announced a Volta upgrade to its own DGX SaturnV cluster.The specs for a single Tesla V100 chip are pretty impressive: 21 billion transistors running at up to 1455 MHz, 5120 stream processors, and 16 GB of on-package HBM2 memory delivering 900 GB/s of maximum theoretical bandwidth. A DGX-1 node packs eight of these ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Back when it became the most popular alternative to the then-dominant Internet Explorer, one of the best features of the Firefox browser was its speed. Its competitors caught up and crushed it in that regard long ago, but today marks the launch of a new version of Firefox that might turn things around. The latest release, simply numbered 57, brings Project Quantum's changes to the main release channel. ...Read more...

Sneeze, sniff, rinse, repeat. That's been my day so far, folks. The temperatures around here had a sudden whiplash from "almost summer" about three weeks ago to the current shiver-inducing figures, and I'm desperate for fairer weather already. But as the song goes, there ain't no rest for the wicked, and money don't grow on trees. I got deals to find, I got coupons to read. Here's what we have today. ...Read more...

I used to be one of those guys who would only build in full-tower cases. There's something to be said for having as much room as you need—however much that is. There's also something to be said for having a PC that isn't the size of a mini-fridge, though. Folks who need the capabilities of a full-sized ATX machine but don't want a full-tower chassis can pick up something like Be Quiet's new Dark Base 700 modular mid-tower ATX case. ...Read more...

Just weeks after Oculus' announcement of its Go standalone virtual reality headsets comes the Vive Focus, HTC's own standalone VR device. The Focus relies on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC found in just about every current Android flagship phone for processing and graphics, so we expect it'll offer an experience closer to mobile VR than what can be accomplished by a high-end PC and the original Vive headset. The manufacturer says the Focus will be the first standalone HMD to hit the market with inside-out six-degrees-of-freedom tracking that does away with external tracking sensors. ...Read more...

There's been a lot of talk in recent months about ARM-based server CPUs in one form or another. While it's been a reasonable assumption that said CPUs would offer impressive performance-per-watt ratios, the big question mark in everyone's mind is probably "how fast are they in absolute terms?" Answers for that question have now started to form thanks to a handful of recently-released benchmarks from academia and industry.Cloudflare is a name that may be recognized by a handful of gerbils. The company is primarily known for its CDN (Content Delivery Network) services , and I'm willing to bet that you may have noticed at least once that you're downloading something from a domain ending in cloudflare.com. Vlad Krasnov, one of ...Read more...

The SC '17 conference is taking place this week, and while many companies are taking the opportunity to launch new products and services at the show, Intel is quietly taking the opportunity to announce the removal of a chip from its roadmap. As part of a discussion of its plans for exascale computing, or systems capable of processing one thousand petaFLOPS, Intel noted that it will abandon its next-generation Xeon Phi accelerator, code-named Knights Hill, in favor of "a new microarchitecture and a new platform specifically designed for exascale."Although we didn't examine news of Knights Hill in depth when it first emerged, the few details that ever did come out regarding the chip suggested it would have been a follow-on to the Knights Landing Xeon Phi family fabricated on Intel's 10-nm process ...Read more...

Intel appears confident in the future of its 3D Xpoint media and the Optane products that incorporate it. The company announced today that it's finished an expansion of the facilities at IM Flash in Lehi, Utah (a joint Intel-Micron Technologies venture) that will allow it to produce more of its high-speed, low-latency non-volatile memory. Given the introduction of the Optane SSD 900P series of drives for consumers and the increasing capacities of Optane data-center SSDs, along with the existing Optane Memory line of storage-caching accelerators, Intel will likely have no problem finding homes for the chips it produces with this additional capacity. ...Read more...

To help deal with DRAM's volatile nature, some servers come equipped with NVDIMMs. They come in a few types, but the most common type are simply special memory modules that have DRAM and NAND flash on the same package. In the event of a power failure, the modules back up their contents onto the flash memory. The downside of using NVDIMMs—besides their higher cost—is that they limit your total memory capacity. That restriction just got relaxed quite a bit today, though. Micron has announced 32GB NVDIMMs. ...Read more...

Qualcomm announced this morning that it's officially rejecting Broadcom's unsolicited $130 billion takeover offer. Qualcomm's board of directors unanimously voted to turn down the bid, according to the company, citing a belief "that Broadcom's proposal signficantly undervalues Qualcomm relative to the Company's leadership position in mobile technology and our future growth prospects." Presiding director Thomas Horton additionally noted that the deal would burden the company with "significant regulatory uncertainty."Although Broadcom could conceivably overcome one of Qualcomm's objections to its offer by sweetening its potentially record-breaking deal with further cash and other incentives, it's hard to see how the company could convince Qualcomm's apparently-skittish board that its deal would meet with easy ...Read more...

What kind of chair are you using, gerbils? I'm still sitting in an ancient steel-framed office chair that pre-dates DirectX. A lot of companies are getting into the gaming chair business these days, and one of the oldest computer-cooling companies has now decided to turn its expertise toward cooling hindquarters, it seems. Thermaltake's latest creation is the X Comfort Air Gaming chair, and it has active cooling for the sitter's backside. ...Read more...

The big news in PC hardware this week was obviously the unexpected union of an Intel CPU and an AMD graphics chip with HBM2 memory within a single package, seemingly for a "new class" of thin and light gaming laptops. It looks like that combination may also be coming to desktop gamers in the form of a future NUC. An image leaked to Chinese rumor forum Chiphell gives a first glimpse of what the package could look like in the flesh. A presumption that the pictured SSD is an M.2 2280 unit combined with a bit of pixel-counting confirms that the leaked board is very close to the 140x147 mm dimensions of existing NUCs.

Super-fast memory is great, but more often than not the speediest kits are made up of only a pair of relatively-small-capacity modules. Corsair's latest Vengeance LPX set is made up of four 8 GB DIMMs clocked at 4333 MT/s in order to give speed freaks a combination of capacity and bandwidth. The company claims that this kit is the world's first four-stick kit at that speed, and that the modules are built using hand-sorted and binned Samsung B-die ICs. ...Read more...

Do you recall about two weeks ago when we informed you of the then-upcoming Asus WS-X299 Pro mobo? As it turns out, that motherboard has a bigger brother. "Sage" appears to be Asus' branding for its top-tier workstation boards, and the WS-X299 Sage certainly seems to fit the bill. Even though Core i9 CPUs already offer 44 lanes of PCIe connectivity to begin with, Asus goes one better and includes a PLX switch to split those PCIe lanes into a much wider arrangement. ...Read more...

Our inboxes are filling up with news of CES' various Innovation Award winners, but it's rare that something truly newsworthy gets highlighted in those messages. Samsung's slate of award-winning products includes at least one point of interest, though. The company bagged an award for its 16 GT/s GDDR6 graphics memory, so it revealed some interesting details of the progress on that product. Samsung says its GDDR6 RAM is already hitting 16 GT/s (presumably per pin), and presuming GDDR6 maintains the 32-bit-wide data interface per chip of GDDR5, that squares with Samsung's claim of 64 GB/s transfer rates per chip. ...Read more...

Optane SSDs have left a good impression here at TR. Some folks sneer at the performance claims Intel makes for them, and it's true that the sequential operation figures aren't shocking. The Optane drives are unmatched in terms of responsiveness, though—much the same way early SSDs weren't a lot faster than HDDs in sequential terms, yet blew them away in random performance. The fastest solid-state drive on the planet right now is Intel's Optane SSD DC P4800X, and the boys in blue just announced that you'll soon be able to buy a double-capacity version storing 750 GB. ...Read more...

Nvidia's financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2018 are in. The company reported another record quarter with $2.64 billion in GAAP revenue, up 32 percent from a year ago. The company made $895 million in operating income, up 40% year-on-year. Net income was $838 million, up 55% year-on-year. Earnings per share rose 60% year-on-year to $1.33. Gross margin was 59.5%, up half a percentage point from a year ago.As one would expect, the company made the lion's share of its revenue—$2.22 billion—from its GPU businesses. Of that, GeForce gaming GPUs accounted for $1.56 billion, and the company says that adoption of ...Read more...

Once upon a time, it was fairly common for laptops to have unique docking stations that added capabilities like multimedia or networking functions. Those days are mostly past, but in recent years we've seen the emergence of external GPU boxes. Like the docking stations of yore, these self-powered boxes are large, heavy, and intended to occupy a permanent spot on a desk. There's no reason you couldn't bring along a Sonnet Technologies eGFX Breakaway Puck, though. These little boxes pack a Radeon RX 560 or RX 570 into a one-liter package. ...Read more...

The Apollo Lake name might not excite gamers, but Intel's low-power SoC does allow manufacturers to pack the capabilities of a full desktop computer into ever-smaller packages. ECS says its Liva Q pocket computers are the smallest PCs around capable of 3640x2160 video playback at 60 Hz. ...Read more...

Radiators measuring 360 mm in length are considered large in a scene seemingly swimming in 120- and 240-mm AIO coolers. We really take notice when a case can accept plus-sized heat exchangers measuring 420 mm, too. EK Water Blocks is adding both that size and an enormous 560-mm model to its CoolStream Slim line of radiators. The number of cases we can recall that explicitly support 560-mm radiators is pretty close to the number of digits on a human hand, but we're sure plenty of EK's crazier customers can find ways to fit them in places not meant for such large cooling units. ...Read more...

Right now, the only chips based on the six-core die used in the Core i7-8700K are the series of Coffee Lake desktop CPUs to which it belongs. If you want the absolute top single-threaded performance, it's gotta be a Coffee Lake CPU. For professional users that don't necessarily need the assurance of ECC memory, a Coffee Lake-based machine like Boxx's Apexx S3 could provide the maximum performance on the market right now. ...Read more...

Hello, gerbils! It's a difficult morning here at TR HQ. Yesterday's industry announcements were a perfect one-two punch combo to our collective jaws, and we're still picking them up off the floor. Perhaps in an aftershock of sorts after those bombshells, there's a dearth of news for the time being. That's a perfect opportunity for us to show you the hardware deals we found. Today's harvest is bountiful, so get right to shoppin'. ...Read more...

This is my real server room. It doesn't usually act like this, though.