Techreport

If you see a recent HP computer with a "Z" prominently featured in the name, it's probably intended for professional users. So it goes with HP's new ZBook x2 that the company calls "the world's first and most powerful detachable PC workstation." Yes, HP created a detachable convertible PC that's intended as a workstation. Kidding aside, the machine's modern quad-core CPUs, 32 GB of RAM, and Quadro graphics might just give it a legitimate claim to that title. ...Read more...

NZXT's newest cases have an interesting "smart device" controller with a built-in microphone that the company says can tune the system's fan speed profile to reduce noise by up to 40% (we guess compared to standard controllers). Gerbils whose ears perked up when reading about that feature in the new H-series cases might be interested in NZXT's Grid+ v3 fan controller that has the same machine learning-powered adaptive noise reduction. ...Read more...

Razer sells three models of gaming laptops. The Blade Pro is the largest and most powerful, and the original Blade retains much of its power while trimming the fat. The Blade family's smallest member is the Blade Stealth, a 13.3" ultra-portable machine that, on its own, wouldn't seem to qualify for the gaming purpose Razer's hardware usually serves. It's meant to be paired with the Razer Core external GPU dock, and both devices are getting an update today. ...Read more...

Intel unveiled its beefiest and most specialized deep-learning hardware yet this afternoon. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's D.Live event, CEO Brian Krzanich unveiled the first fruit of Intel's Nervana acquisition: the Neural Network Processor, or NNP. The company claims this application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is purpose-built to handle AI workloads such as matrix multiplications and convolutions, unlike general-purpose compute hardware like CPUs and GPUs. ...Read more...

Yes, these are legit suggestions based on my actual shopping history.

Astro Gaming, despite recently being acquired by Logitech, is still hard at work pumping out new gamer-focused audio gear. The latest release is the Astro A20 wireless headset, the wire-free companion of the A10 model. ...Read more...

Mini-ITX builders with a hankering for AMD's Ryzen CPUs haven't had a lot of high-end motherboards to choose from, but Asus seems set to change that. The company teased its ROG Strix X370I-Gaming motherboard on Twitter today, and it looks like a serious high-end contender for tiny systems. ...Read more...

Making high-end PC enclosures is a tough business. Basic cable management features, RGB LED illumination, liquid cooling support, and tempered glass side panels are all available in affordable cases from a number of manufacturers. NZXT's new H-series cases introduce new features, updated fans, and accessories that buyers will actually want to keep in their premium PC builds.The mini-ITX H200i , microATX H400i , and ATX H700i all pack NZXT's Aer F fans and a built-in "smart device" that's compatible with NZXT's Hue+ and Grid+ illumination and fan control systems. The device can control both fans and LED strips, ...Read more...

Geeks can be a fussy bunch. We want our hardware to be fast and capable, and we also want it to be as small and convenient as possible. Going small usually means sacrificing a bit of top-end power, but ASRock clearly thinks that's hogwash. The company just announced the X299E-ITX/ac motherboard, which is exactly what you think it is. ...Read more...

Microsoft surprised us with its Surface Book 2 this morning. In one fell swoop, the company cleared away most of the head-scratching hardware choices that have graced older versions of its flexible, flippable detachable. The new machines can tap Intel's eighth-generation Core CPUs with four cores and eight threads, and they'll get graphics horsepower from Nvidia's Pascal chips. For the first time, Microsoft is also scaling up the Surface Book to 15 inches to give creators a larger canvas to work with. ...Read more...

The folks at Tom's Hardware dug up some juicy info about Samsung's upcoming NVMe SSDs. According to the site, the company is readying up two series of consumer SSDs labeled Samsung 970 and Samsung 980, forgoing the well-known Evo and Pro branding. The information is corroborated by a listing for a PM981 SSD that appeared at Vietnamese seller Saiback over the weekend. For reference, PM-series drives are Samsung's OEM counterparts of their similarly-numbered consumer SSDs. ...Read more...

The folks at Tom's Hardware dug up some juicy info about Samsung's upcoming NVMe SSDs. According to the site, the company is readying up two series of consumer SSDs labeled Samsung 970 and Samsung 980, forgoing the well-known Evo and Pro branding. The information is corroborated by a listing for a PM981 SSD that appeared at Vietnamese seller Saiback over the weekend. For reference, PM-series drives are Samsung's OEM counterparts of their similarly-numbered consumer SSDs. ...Read more...

So you're interested in liquid cooling, but maybe closed-loop units are too limiting for you. You want to jump straight into a custom-loop liquid cooler. That's a big jump, though—there's a huge number of parts to peruse, and picking the right stuff for your rig is a daunting task. If this is the situation you're in, EKWB has the solution: water-cooling kits with preselected parts. The new EK-Kit S140 and S280 Slim Series kits are identical save for the larger radiator and extra fan on the S280.

Huawei just announced the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro smartphones this morning. That's right—like other premium phone vendors, Huawei is doing the "dual flagships" thing. Although the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro are similar in many ways, the "Pro" model isn't strictly a clear upgrade from the standard model. Both phones have Kirin 970 SoCs, 4,000 mAh batteries, dual rear cameras, and "almost borderless" screens. The Kirin SoC inside the handsets is accompanied by a dedicated AI processor.

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team has issued a warning about a new attack that affects Wi-Fi networks using the commonly-used WPA2 protocol. The vulnerability is called a KRACK attack and affects the four-way handshake that occurs between an access point and a client device when the client wants to join the protected network.Attackers can decrypt packets on WPA2 networks by forcing the re-use of a cryptographic nonce with a key already in use by manipulating and replaying cryptographic handshake messages. Should the attack succeed, it's then possible to monitor any ...Read more...

Qualcomm's legal team is probably skipping lunch and working late in recent weeks, especially in China and Taiwan. While the company is attempting to fight off accusations of anti-competitive business practices, it's also taking on Apple in the courts. According to Bloomberg, Qualcomm has now filed lawsuits in China with the intent to ban both the sale and manufacture of iPhones in the country. ...Read more...

If you've gotten to use an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift headset, you'll already be aware that the experience is enthralling, but still with some flaws. Even though VR has been around in various forms for over 20 years, it's not wrong to call the Vive and the Rift the first generation of modern VR hardware. A startup of engineers and entrepreneurs based out of Shanghai and Silicon Valley called Pimax thinks its Pimax 8K headsets will herald the next generation of VR. ...Read more...

Just about everyone agrees that VR is more immersive when it works without a rat's nest of cables. Not worrying about tripping over wires is part of the allure of untethered operation, but reducing the number of connections that must be made to get the experience started is likely just as important. We covered TPCast's wireless interface kit for HTC's Vive VR headset, as well as the Sixa Rivvr add-on that is said to work with HMDs from both HTC and Oculus. HTC also has a partnership with Intel to develop a cord-deletion kit using 802.11ad Wi-Fi. TPCast is now back again, announcing an upcoming kit made to work with the Oculus Rift. ...Read more...

NEC Display isn't a name you hear a lot shopping for consumer monitors, but the company's offerings in the professional display space are extremely well-regarded. For example, the MultiSync PA242W got itself an Editors Choice from PC Mag four years ago when it debuted. NEC has just announced an updated version of the PA242W called the PA243W, and this 24" AH-IPS professional monitor appears to carry on the company's tradition of providing superior image quality for serious users. ...Read more...

We got a brief look at Riotoro's Prism CR1088 ATX case at Computex at the beginning of June. The case appears to be nearing release, as the company has put up a product page and substantially more detail about what kind of hardware builders can expect to stuff into the squat-and-wide chassis. That width is put to use in a two-chamber layout with the motherboard and all its hardware friends on one side of a divider, and the power supply and storage devices on the other. ...Read more...

Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission announced yesterday that it suspects Qualcomm to be guilty of unfair business practices. The commission says that the California-based chipmaker forced licensees of its modems and platforms to agree to expensive licensing deals and reject competitors' offers. The decision comes along with a hefty fine to the tune of $23.4 billion New Taiwan dollars, or around $774 million USD.Qualcomm naturally denies the allegations and intends to contest the decision. The company announced that it "intends to seek to stay any required behaviorial measures" and that it will appeal the decision in the Taiwanese courts. Qualcomm says that ...Read more...

Let me have this.

Corsair knows that fans with RGB LED illumination are nothing new, and it's stepping up the game. The company has offered rotating airflow generators with the multicolored diodes in the plastic ring that surrounds the fan, as well as disco party fans with light coming from the hub. Now, Corsair's latest LL Series RGB fans combine hub and ring lighting into a single 16-LED amalgam that users control using the Lighting Node Pro hardware module and the Link software utility. ...Read more...

When it was time for a video card upgrade, I picked up an MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X largely based on the praise that Gerbil-in-chief Jeff heaped on MSI's Twin Frozr VI cooler. I don't care what my graphics card looks like, though. If you're the sort who bedecks their box in RGB LEDs and color-coordinates their components to match, the red color scheme of the Twin Frozr VI cards might not appeal to you. In that case, check out what MSI's got coming up: "Trio" versions of the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming and Gaming X cards. ...Read more...

Good afternoon, gerbils and gerbilettes. It's a sunny warm day here, the birds are singing, and I can see deeply-discounted price tags flying everywhere. I'm going to try and grab a few for you. ...Read more...

Western Digital showed off a a prototype hard drive with a potentially revolutionary new energy-assisted magnetic recording technology called microwave-assist magnetic recording (MAMR). The company says the new tech could potentially be ready for market by the end of 2019, and it could allow the manufacture of 40 TB hard drives by 2025. For context, WD is now currently offering 14 TB drives to datacenter customers and 12 TB drives are just entering the general market. The company performed the reveal at its "Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data" event at its headquarters in Silicon Valley yesterday. ...Read more...

Oculus took a minute to show off the latest version of its Santa Cruz prototype standalone VR headset. Santa Cruz looks to be a higher-end follow-up to the entry-level Oculus Go standalone device scheduled for release early next year. The prototype headset's headlining feature is the inclusion of six degrees-of-freedom motion control using inside-out tracking. The company says Santa Cruz is the first standalone headset with full inside-out tracking, which we suppose is true given that Windows mixed reality headsets all attach to a host PC. ...Read more...

Remember the Summer of Rift promotion? The previously-expensive Oculus Rift-and-Touch combo pack had its price dropped to $399 during summer. According to Oculus, the move resulted in shipping a couple truckloads of headsets, so the company took the next logical step. The Oculus Rift bundle is now permanently priced at $399....Read more...

At its Oculus Connect 4 conference today, the virtual-reality firm debuted the standalone headset it intends to bridge mobile VR and PC-powered VR headsets. Called Oculus Go, the more-accessible headset will be available for $199 early next year, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.The easiest way to experience VR is here with Oculus Go, ...Read more...

Would you like to donate to the GameChanger charity? What if there's a custom-built PC worth $15,000 as a potential prize? Bet that whet your appetite. Nvidia is putting up a Ultimate GeForce PC up for grabs in a charity drive raffle. The machine's unique enclosure was designed and built by UK-based Parvum Systems....Read more...

E-readers with E Ink displays are amazing. The experience they offer is often better than reading on paper, so long as you don't need color or large pages. The devices can be held in one hand, work fine in low-light scenarios, and reduce the mass and dimensions of weighty tomes like those found in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. Amazon's latest Kindle Oasis e-reader one-ups paperbound books in an impressive new way: offering IPX8 water resistance. Readers can now get their fill of the printed word in the bathtub or at the beach without fear of damaging their e-reader. ...Read more...

Besides multi-zoned RGB LED lighting and tempered glass side panels, the biggest trend in PC cases in 2017 has to be flat, featureless front panels. Cooler Master's MasterBox MB600L dips one toe into the slab-faced party while still optionally offering provisions for a single 5.25" drive. The case will arrive in versions with or without the external-facing bay. Available finishes include gunmetal grey, blue, and red trim for buyers with varying degrees of extroversion. ...Read more...

It seems like we're spending more time updating our drivers than playing games these days. After three updates last month, AMD is getting an early start in October with the Radeon 17.10.1 drivers, primed to get the most out of the newest games.

Purse? Laptop bag? You decide.

Afternoon, folks! The TR HQ is all abuzz today with upcoming reviews, and I barely have a minute to catch my breath and look for some deals. Here are the juicy hardware offers for today. ...Read more...

We covered most of Asus' motherboards for Intel's latest CPUs back when they were announced two weeks ago. Apparently the company still had a couple of cards in the hole though, because the Republic of Gamers is welcoming two new members soon: the Maximus X Formula and Maximus X Code. These two new ATX motherboards are near-identical twins, but the Formula favors liquid-cooling while the Code eschews excess features.

We string many words together around here describing the gaming performance of Nvidia's desktop and mobile graphics silicon, as well as the ever-expanding applications of the company's chips in the context of data center machine learning and artificial intelligence. The company wants to take that AI and put it out onto city streets with the Drive PX Pegasus, the next generation of its Drive PX platform for autonomous vehicles. Nvidia says Pegasus packs ten times the performance of its predecessor, the Drive PX2. The company wants its partners to deploy Pegasus in a future fleet of fully-autonomous taxis. ...Read more...

There are a huge number of factors that influence heatsink performance, but one of the most obvious for tower coolers is the number of heat pipes they use. That could be the reason that Cooler Master's latest Hyper H411R and Hyper H412R 92-mm tower coolers have four copper thermosiphons, up from three in the preceding Hyper 103. The new units are fundamentally the same; your choice of model simply determines whether you get a white-LED-equipped fan or one with no lights at all.

Last week, I held off reporting estimated power efficiency numbers for AMD's Ryzen 7 family against those of Intel's Core i7-8700K in my Coffee Lake review. The power consumption numbers I observed for the Ryzen 7 CPUs during my tests were unusually (and improbably) high even though performance remained in line with expectations. I didn't track down the precise cause of the issue, but a reinstall of Windows on our AM4 test rig today fixed the problem. With everything in order again, I finally have load power numbers and estimated task energy calculations to share.Blender is useful for estimating the amount of energy our CPUs consume over time because it's an unusually steady-state workload—power consumption varies little over the course of a render. We use the "bmw27" test file and monitor system power consumption using our trusty ...Read more...

When I started building computers back in the early days of Socket 7, 60-mm fans were the standard option and 80-mm fans were the exotic oversized choice. These days we've moved up to 120-mm and 140-mm spinners because they move more air at lower RPMs, meaning they cool better while producing less noise. As EKWB points out though, 140-mm fans are becoming less "exotic" and more "standard" by the day. The company just launched a new line of radiators called CoolStream Slim in 140-mm and 280-mm sizes. ...Read more...

MSI's flashy, feature-packed X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC mobo has been around since Threadripper's launch back in August. That board is now getting a less-ostentatious sibling in form of the X399 SLI Plus. The board's enormous TR4 CPU socket is flanked by eight DDR4 DIMM slots capable of running up to 128 GB of memory in four-channel mode at speeds as fast as 3600 MT/s. ...Read more...

Nvidia's released its latest GeForce graphics drivers, numbered 387.92. The new drivers are Game Ready for VR title Arktika.1 and Shinji Mikami's The Evil Within 2. It also has further optimizations for Middle-earth: Shadow of War and Forza Motorsport 7. Of less interest to gamers but more relevant to developers, the new drivers add support for OpenGL 4.6. ...Read more...

Internet kids, pour one out. AOL Instant Messenger, one of the oldest messaging services around, is shutting down this year after 20 years of service. Oath announced the shutdown today, and the service will finally go dark on December 15. ...Read more...

Seemingly everyone wants to go for a swim in the deepest reaches of Coffee Lake with Intel's range-topping Core i7-8700K. The chip has been pretty hard to find so far, but der8auer and his employers at German retailer Caseking have some very special i7-8700K's in stock for those willing to pay premium prices. Caseking's chips are de-lidded, binned, and at the most extreme level, topped off with an aftermarket heat spreader made of 99.9% silver.

Howdy gerbils! Everyone at the TR HQ is still reeling from the Coffee Lake madness, but as an incredible singer once shouted from the top of his lungs, the show must go on. It's Friday, and there's deals to be found, and spiffy hardware to be bought.That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with ...Read more...

The day after the launch, can you actually buy a Coffee Lake CPU? The short answer is yes. Intel's new silicon is readily available at e-tail, as long as you don't want the range-topping Core i7-8700K. In that case, you may have to hurry up and wait. We've gone traipsing around the top shops to find fine CPUs for you to snag. Here's what we got.

You're getting ready to build your new Coffee Lake-based box and you've pored over the motherboards on offer. Still, you can't shake the feeling that you've forgotten someone. Someone who doesn't make a lot of boards, and who you associate more with graphics... oh right, EVGA makes motherboards! The company's getting in on the Coffee Lake action with three Z370-based boards including a not-often-seen microATX offering. ...Read more...

Do you use Microsoft Edge? While I haven't spent a huge amount of time with Microsoft's newest browser, I have to admit it's fast and slick. If you're a fan of the app, rejoice: Microsoft is bringing Edge to iPhones and Android handsets. Along with that news, Microsoft also announced that it's releasing its own launcher for Android. ...Read more...

Spy-cat is chic af.

Barely two weeks ago, WD announced that it would begin offering datacenter-oriented hard drives in 12TB capacity. Not to be outdone, Seagate has now announced that it will also begin offering 12TB hard drives in multiple categores. That's a whole twelve terabytes in a single 3.5" form-factor hard drive. The company will have 12TB models on offer in its BarraCuda, IronWolf, and IronWolf Pro series. ...Read more...