Techreport

It's been a pretty busy period for major game releases. Just last week—among other major releases—we had Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and coming up soon we've got Call of Duty: WWII, Ni-Oh: Complete Edition, and Need for Speed: Payback. Nvidia promised us a new driver "early next week" this past Friday. The company has already made good on its word with the latest version of its GeForce software. Numbered 388.13, the new GeForce drivers are "Game Ready" for all of the above-named games. The release also adds official support for the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti.

The only thing better than having six cores and twelve threads of one of the speediest CPU architectures on the market is stuffing that horsepower into a tiny package. Gigabyte is ready to oblige with its Z370N WiFi Mini-ITX motherboard. As one might guess from the name, the board is based on Intel's Z370 mainstream desktop chipset with support for the big blue silicon giant's eighth-generation Core processors. The moniker might also hint at built-in wireless connectivity coming from an Intel 802.11ac dual-band Wi-Fi adapter with Bluetooth support. ...Read more...

Today's the day for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. If you're planning on spending your weekend shooting up sci-fi Nazis, pause just a moment to grab a new driver for your graphics card. Both Nvidia and AMD have new drivers out specifically for the game, so unless you're a true-blue gamer using integrated graphics, it's time to upgrade your software.

While "4K" is sure to be the buzzword of the season, the fact remains that most gamers still play at 1920x1080 and probably don't have the available scratch for the type of hardware needed for silky-smooth gameplay at 3840x2160. The jump to 4K is a big one, and AOC's 31.5" Q3279VWF is designed for gamers that want to pause at an intermediate step between console-plebian 1920x1080 and full-bore 4K. AOC's latest consonant-soup-monikered display couples a reasonably-high resolution of 2560x1440 with FreeSync adaptive-refresh-rate technology. ...Read more...

Geez, guys. We're still dizzy and reeling from the lightning-quick pace of releases over the last few days. We have Ryzen mobile APUs to deal with, a ton of GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics cards, and now there are these newfangled Intel Optane 900p SSDs. Some days I feel it's almost impossible to keep track of all of this, but I know that you loveable gerbils rely on us to keep tabs on all the gear and tell wheat from chaff. That task also applies to online hardware deals, and here's what we have for today. ...Read more...

Razer names its mechanical keyboards after spiders. The Cynosa genus has just two species listed in taxonomic records, so it's rather fitting that Razer has two new keyboards bearing that name. The Razer Cynosa Chroma and Cynosa Chroma Pro are full-sized 104-key membrane keyboards with per-key RGB LED backlighting and a spill-resistant design.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics card is in the wild now, and a Founders Edition version of the card just showed up on my doorstep. Behold: ...Read more...

These days, peak sequential read speeds for pretty much every new SATA SSD are limited by ye olde 6 Gbps SATA interface. NVMe drives promise to liberate flash storage devices from these limitations, but most drives that communicate directly over PCIe 3.0 have substantially higher per-GB prices than their SATA brethren. Adata is bringing down the barrier to NVMe entry with its SX6000-series M.2-2280 NVMe drives. The gumsticks come in capacities from 128 GB to 1 TB and promise to hit roughly twice the sequential speeds of SATA devices at comparable price points. ...Read more...

Not to be left out, Zotac has a trio of GeForce GTX 1070 Ti cards today, too. The company is offering up Mini, Amp Edition, and Amp Extreme versions of Nvidia's least-trimmed yet still not fully-enabled GP104 design. The offerings vary in size, shape, and quantity of RGB LED accents, but like most GTX 1070 Ti cards, they come out of the box at the reference speeds of 1607 MHz base and 1683 MHz boost clocks.

Intel posted its third-quarter financial results this afternoon, and the company is continuing its record of steady growth and healthy profits. According to GAAP, the company took in revenue of $16.1 billion, up 2% year-over-year, or up 6% when excluding results from its McAfee business. The company claimed record operating income of $5.1 billion, up 15% year over year, and net income of $4.5 billion, up 34% from this time last year. Gross margin decreased one percentage point, to 62.3%. Earnings per share were up 36% year-on-year, to $0.94.The Client Computing Group, which encompasses all of Intel's PC-related businesses, took in $8.9 billion in revenue, unchanged from this time last year. Operating income from the division increased 8% year-on-year to $3.6 billion. Overall platform revenues (a measure ...Read more...

Don't get this confused with this or you'll look like a real jackass.

In case you missed it, today is the day not only for AMD's Ryzen APUs but also for Nvidia's newest member of its Pascal portfolio. The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is upon us. Whereas the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is an entirely different chip from the GTX 1080, the GTX 1070 Ti slots in neatly between the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 like Ti cards of ages past. Asus has a trio of cards coming out with the new GeForce onboard: two ROG Strix models and a Turbo version with a blower. ...Read more...

This installment of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Report concerns MSI's full hand of brand-new graphics cards. All five of the company's offerings have identical loadouts of 8 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 8 GT/s and the same armada of 2432 stream processors running at 1607 MHz base and 1683 MHz boost clocks—the same configuration as Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition card. Seeing as these cards use Pascal GPUs, clock speeds in practice are likely to be higher.Apart from the Aero model, all the cards have six-pin and eight-pin PCIe power connectors, which is a change from the reference design's single eight-pin power connector. MSI's entire squadron of GTX 1070 Ti cards also one-ups ...Read more...

Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that Nvidia decided to seed some clouds to try and rain on AMD's Ryzen mobile APU parade today. GeForce GTX 1070 Ti cards are out and about, and every manufacturer's rushing to show off its wares. Right now, we have EVGA's offerings to look at.

In the grand scheme of things, the big technology news today is AMD's announcement of its upcoming Raven Ridge Ryzen CPUs with Radeon Vega graphics. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1070 Ti announcement will probably get more attention from PC gamers and cryptocurrency miners, though.Gigabyte is among the first wave of companies to announce GeForce GTX 1070 Ti cards with its informatively-named GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G (model GV-N107TGAMING OC-8GD). The 1070 Ti Gaming is a triple-fan card with the black-and-orange color scheme that has been ...Read more...

It's official: Nvidia announced the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti this morning. The GP104 GPU on board the card will have 2432 stream processors, 152 texture units, and 64 ROPs. That chip will be paired with 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 8 GT/s on a 256-bit bus for a total of 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth. If you want to know how the GTX 1070 Ti stacks up against a wide range of today's graphics cards, we already did that math. The short story is that the GTX 1070 Ti is most of a GTX 1080 with a potentially lower price tag. ...Read more...

Update, 14:24 on October 25: Bungie has posted a notice indicating that the approximately 400 bans issued were all handed out after manual investigation and that "overlay or performance tools" were not the cause. The original story follows below.Destiny 2 is surely one of the bigger PC game releases this year. This is Bungie's first PC game since the release of Halo 2 about 10 years ago, and the launch has been fairly trouble-free. The game runs well even on modest hardware, and crashes are apparently ...Read more...

In the last couple years, we've seen a shift toward lower-power CPUs and graphics chips coupled with advances in AIO closed-loop coolers. One could think those two movements could render custom open-loop systems completely unnecessary. However, recent power-hungry products like Intel's Core X CPUs, AMD's Vega graphics cards, and enormous Threadripper processors have injected new urgency into the task of cooling high-power silicon.EK Waterblocks never gave up on custom liquid-cooling hardware, and the company's RGB LED-infused reservoirs and reservoir-pump-top combo units are ready ...Read more...

Cooler Master's got another pair of coolers to show off. The MasterAir MA410P and MasterAir MA610P RGB LED tower coolers just appeared on the company's site. The MA410P has four heat pipes and uses a single 120-mm fan, while the meatier MA610P employs two 120-mm fans in a push-pull configuration and has six heatpipes underneath.

Zotac's official Twitter account seems to have added another log to the fire this morning concerning the existence of a new member in Nvidia's GeForce 10-series lineup. The company tweeted out a now-removed post with a picture of three video cards and a reference to a "GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Series" product family. The tweet did not include any additional information about clock speeds, shader core counts, or memory type, and the link in the Tweet didn't go anywhere. The image suggests that the company will offer at least three distinct flavors of GeForce GTX 1070 Ti with different PCB sizes and either two or three fans. ...Read more...

I bet that y'all heard that AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is one heck of a processor. It's one big honkin' chip with a healthy 16 Zen cores and simultaneous multi-threading support for a total of 32 threads. When we reviewed the Threadripper 1950X back in August, the decision to assign it a coveted Editor's Choice award was probably one of the easiest in recent TR memory. ...Read more...

AMD has posted its third-quarter financials, and the company ended up in the black across the board. The company took in revenue of $1.64 billion, up 26% year-over-year. The company's third-quarter operating income of $126 million stands in stark contrast to the $293 million operating loss the company posted a year ago, and the company's net income of $71 million finishes off a fully profitable quarter. Earnings per share rang in at $0.07, compared to a $0.50 loss per share a year ago, and gross margin increased 30 points year-over-year to 35%.The Computing and Graphics division drove the rosy results with $819 million in revenue, up 74% year-on-year, thanks to what the company calls strong sales of Radeon graphics cards and Ryzen desktop CPUs. The Ryzen tide lifted ...Read more...

When a piece of hardware is fundamentally good, there isn't much of a reason to make sweeping changes. Microsoft's Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 was released all the way back in 2006 and lived on without any big updates until the Redmond giant discontinued the model in 2012. The company may finally be releasing a worthy successor five years on: the Classic Intellimouse. The Classic shares the same styling and corded operation as its predecessor from over a decade ago, but the sensor now sports the Microsoft's proprietary BlueTrack sensor, a flat Windows logo, and white lighting in its tail instead of the older mouse's red illumination. ...Read more...

What were you expecting?

Gaming laptops have typically represented a small niche of the notebook computer market. Asus probably has the sales figures to let it further segment that little sliver based on the genre of game to be played on the portable machine. The company has three new laptops for specific types of games. The ROG Strix Hero Edition is built for MOBA gaming, and the two ROG Strix Scar Edition portables are aimed at FPS players. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils. I don't know exactly how it is possible to enjoy a summer week in almost-November, but it's happening here. Temperature of 27° C, just a tiny bit of wind, and super-pleasant humidity overall. It's so nice out that I dread to think how Lady Karma is going to make me pay when winter really rolls around. Alas, I can't sit in the sun, for there are deals to be found. Here's today's catch. ...Read more...

Once upon a time, before anyone had ever even imagined there would be dual-core CPUs, the truly hardcore PC enthusiasts were building and overclocking dual-CPU machines. The legendary Abit BP6 and similar dual-socket boards were popular choices for the task, and my best friend once built (and overclocked) a machine using a monstrous Tyan Thunder K7. We thought those days were long gone, but perhaps not. Have a glance at the Asus WS-C621E-Sage. You may want to sit down first. ...Read more...

The release of a new Windows version usually brings along a new Radeon driver, and so it goes today with the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.10.2. The second release in October provides a bounty of boosts to specific games as well as a new feature called GPU Workload. Additionally, you crazy crypto-currency fanatics will be pleased to learn that you can now stuff up to 12 GPUs in a single machine without complaint from AMD's graphics drivers. ...Read more...

Windows 10's Fall Creators Update has hit the mainstream. If you haven't updated yet, any Windows 10 machines you have will no doubt be nagging you before long. The latest update to Microsoft's bread-and-butter operating system comes just six months after the original Creators Update back in April. That's exactly according to Microsoft's plan, as the company has moved to a semi-annual release pattern for what we would once have called service packs. ...Read more...

PC chassis and accessory maker Sharkoon is expanding its line of AM5 ATX enclosures with the AM5 Silent version. Like its existing windowed sibling, the AM5 Silent is available with blue, red, or titanium color choices for its metallic gloss automotive paint-covered front panel. Both versions of the case have a flat, hole-free panel style that's seemingly sweeping across PC enclosure manufacturers. The Silent model ditches its sibling's acrylic window and adds sound dampening material to the sides, front, and rear panels of the case. ...Read more...

Graphics card driver development is a battle against the ever-changing tides of game releases. Nvidia's latest attempt at building its ideal sand castle just inches from the waterline is today's GeForce Game Ready 388.00 WQHL driver package. The whole number suggests this update is a big deal, and that's probably the case for PC gamers itching to play Bungie's Destiny 2 and Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Origins. There's even a Destiny 2 SLI profile for gamers still clinging to multi-GPU setups. ...Read more...

EKWB is at it again. The Slovenian liquid-cooling supplier has just showed what must surely be a contender for the title of "largest CPU waterblock ever." Designed for a trio of Asus X399 motherboards, the EK-FB Asus ROG ZE RGB Monoblock completely covers both the massive Ryzen Threadripper CPU and the power delivery hardware on those boards. ...Read more...

I've watched a lot of game streams, and I've streamed a bit myself. However, poor audio or video will make me stop watching a stream real fast. Razer has a couple products poised to prepare streamers for professional-grade productions: the Kiyo camera and the Seiren X microphone.

I can remember a time when having any type of computer in a room meant listening to the whine of spinning disk drives and the whoosh of high-RPM fans. Those days are over, and MSI's Cubi 3 Silent and Cubi 3 Silent S serve as evidence. Both machines pack enough horsepower for most tasks thanks to their 15 W Intel Kaby Lake-U processors and up to 32 GB of DDR4. Fans of silence will appreciate the machines' complete and total lack of any bladed spinny implements. The Silent and the Silent S are quite similar apart from the presence of a second Ethernet jack and a pair of serial ports on the S model. ...Read more...

Thanks to the ready availability of VR headsets as nerdy toys, there's been a huge uptick in the number of discussions about field of view. I don't know a lot about VR, but I can tell you that filling your view with a huge monitor is a great way to improve immersion in video games. One such display is Massdrop's Vast 35" ultra-widescreen monitor with FreeSync. ...Read more...

The smoke around Nvidia's purported GeForce GTX 1070 Ti has become too thick to ignore of late. We've seen full specs of the card leak over the past few weeks, and a prematurely-posted product page from board partner KFA2 (spotted by the folks at Hexus, and now removed) has more or less confirmed that such a card is coming. We don't know exactly when such a product might arrive yet, but that's not stopping me from pulling out my top-secret Excel spreadsheet and making some predictions about where a presumable GTX 1070 Ti will sit in today's graphics-card pantheon. I've done it before, and my predictions turned out to be dead-on, so hey. Let's do it again.GPU

Howdy gerbils! I have bad news for you. The fires here in Portugal did not hit my place, so you're still stuck with me. You didn't think you'd get rid of me so easily, did you? Dark and burnt humor aside, it's roughly a month until Black Friday, and that means we have to practice hunting deals down. Here's what we have today. ...Read more...

Laptop memory slots are the usual domain of SO-DIMMs, but a seemingly-increasing number of console-size-and-smaller gaming PCs are also using the parts. G.Skill's latest memory is designed to bring high memory clocks to gamers playing RAM-speed-starved titles like Arma 3. The company claims its 3800 MT/s DDR4 Ripjaws SO-DIMMs are the fastest modules available in the form factor. The company unveiled sticks in three speed bins, all using Samsung B-die integrated circuits and operating at 1.35 V. ...Read more...

Here at TR, we know what you gerbils want. When you're shopping for a closed-loop liquid cooling solution, there's only one thing on your mind: RGB LEDs. We feel the same way. That's why we're really excited about the release of Cooler Master's MasterLiquid Lite ML120L RGB and ML240L RGB. These coolers are functionally identical to the standard MasterLiquid Lite products, but they add scintillating streams of sparkling color on both the fans and the pump. ...Read more...

Razer's got a couple of new headsets that the company says are aimed at "value-conscious" gamers. The Razer Electra V2 and Electra V2 USB are revised versions of the original Electra headset and have been updated with improvements to comfort and quality. The standard Electra V2 headset only has a four-pole 3.5-mm analog connector, while the Electra V2 USB offers an optional USB connection. Both models support 7.1 surround sound virtualization with the Razer Surround software. ...Read more...

You've probably seen 3D cameras, and you've probably seen 360° cameras. You may even have seen a 3D 360° camera—a 3D60 camera, if you will. Well, Samsung just announced the 360 Round, its take on the concept. This puck-like device comes equipped with seventeen individual digital cameras. The 360 Round can record or live-stream a 360° video in up to 4096x2048 resolution at 30 FPS. Naturally, it can also be used to take 360° panoramic photos. ...Read more...

My apologies to the chef, but that bisque looks kinda nasty.

The last time we talked about MSI's GS63 Stealth series laptops was all the way back at Computex 2016. At the time, GS63 machines were characterized by Skylake mobile Core i7 processors and graphics options up to a GeForce GTX 970M. The manufacturer that puts dragon logos on all its products now has a version of the GS63 Stealth laptop with seventh-generation Core i7 CPUs and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics. ...Read more...

Liquid cooling is seeing a lot of renewed interest lately given how affordable and easy-to-use the gear has become. Once you've got a liquid-cooling rig in your setup, it's fairly trivial to expand it to include your graphics card, too. The hard part could be finding the right waterblock for your graphics card. Zotac could soon help you skip the shopping search with its GeForce GTX 1080 Ti ArcticStorm Mini. ...Read more...

There was once a time when having a laptop with a desktop-grade graphics card meant lugging around a 20-lb behemoth that could game for a half an hour or less on its internal battery. Recent upgrades in the efficiency of Intel's CPUs and Nvidia's graphics chips have mostly brought those days to an end. Gigabyte's latest portable gaming beast, the Aorus X9, packs not one, but two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics cards into a package just over an inch thick. ...Read more...

Qualcomm demonstrated progress on its 5G mobile broadband efforts at its San Diego laboratory yesterday. The company showed off two forms of next-gen mobile broadband connectivity using its Snapdragon X50 5G modem. The company also previewed its first smartphone reference design for testing and implementing 5G technology within the size and power envelopes of a handset. In a separate event in Hong Kong last week, Qualcomm and Microsoft also talked about progress in building always-connected Windows devices with Qualcomm's ARM chips.

Silicon manufacturing appears to be marching toward the era of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), but Samsung's process train is making one last stop before pulling away from traditional litography and moving into the brave new world of short-wavelength exposures. The company has announced that it has completed qualification of its 8-nm "Low Power Plus" (LPP) process.Samsung claims that chips built on the new tech offer 10% lower power consumption and a 10% reduction in die ...Read more...

Yesterday's news rush gave us no quarter and no time to dive into the sea of promotions, discount codes, and cut-throat pricing. We shall make amends for the omission today with aplomb. Dear sirs and madams, here is your selection of deals. ...Read more...

A couple weeks back, I posited that the market for powerful graphics cards was cooling off a bit. That trend appears to be continuing, as Radeon RX Vega graphics cards are inching toward their bare-board suggested prices. A glance at Newegg's wares today shows four RX Vega 56 cards available for $460 to $470 from PowerColor, MSI, Gigabyte, and Sapphire. That's down from the $500 or more those cards demanded when Newegg was selling them as part of Radeon Packs, although one doesn't get the two "free" games that used to come in those bundles any longer. (In fact, Radeon Packs seem to have disappeared from Newegg entirely.) Newegg will even kick back $20 on Gigabyte's RX Vega 56 card for a grand total of $450 if you chance a mail-in rebate. ...Read more...