Techreport

One of the more contentious divides between Intel's X299 platform and AMD's X399 platform is AMD's baked-in support for ECC RAM, a feature that Intel only offers workstation users as part of the much more expensive Xeon-W family. While we certainly understand the value of ECC memory and support its inclusion in any workstation platform worth its salt, we find ourselves wondering whether the number of users with ECC RAM in their systems holds up to the weight being placed on the feature in measuring up today's high-end systems. With that in mind, we turn to you, dear TR reader, to tell us where you use ECC memory using the poll options below.Read more...

Greetings, gerbils. You're probably raring to have one of Intel's recently-announced Coffee-flavored desktop CPUs, but you're going to need the proverbial holder to set that cup o' joe on. Gigabyte is here to help, and it's just announced a whopping total of eight Z370-based motherboards. Any resemblance to existing Z270 offerings is but a coincidence—there's no need to adjust your monitor. ...Read more...

The two biggest advantages of PC gaming compared to consoles are the promise of both better and faster graphics and the prospect of customizability. The self-assured folks over at Glorious PC Gaming Race are taking pre-orders for the phenomenally-named Glorious Modular Mechanical TKL Gaming Keyboard. The keyboard boasts the ability to hot-swap switches made by Cherry, Gateron, Kailh, or Zealios switches. This board's concept is similar to that of the EpicGear Defiant that we reviewed recently, except it offers much broader switch compatibility. ...Read more...

Apple threw Imagination Technologies into a tailspin when it announced in April that it would no longer use the British graphics chip designer's PowerVR GPU designs in the proprietary SoCs inside iOS devices. The Cupertino-based company was Imagination's biggest customer until it decided to develop its own GPUs. The mobile graphics design firm then announced in June that it was up for sale. CBFI Investment Limited, a subsidiary of Chinese investment firm Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, has now acquired Imagination Technologies for approximately £550 million—equivalent to around $750 million. ...Read more...

If you're a regular TR reader, you may recall that just a few weeks ago we reviewed the Gigabyte Aero 15 thin gaming laptop. The idea of combining "thin" and "gaming" in a single device usually goes poorly, but Gigabyte pulled it off with aplomb. The Aero 15 offers impressive gaming performance and battery life despite being just 0.75 inch thick (1.9 cm) and packing a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. If you need more speed, though, Gigabyte is readying up the Aero 15 X with a GeForce GTX 1070 inside. ...Read more...

The embargo for performance results of Intel's Core i9-7960X and Core i9-7980XE lifts this morning. Right now, in fact. I'd have our full review for you, but other things kind of got in the way, and let's be real: you're not going to read thousands of words about CPUs at two in the morning. Here's a sneak peek at some of the results we'll be talking about soon: ...Read more...

Thanks to an early leak, Intel is taking the wraps off its full eighth-generation Core desktop CPU lineup now. After a brief and refreshing stop at Kaby Lake for quad-core chips in 15W power envelopes, the next vista to behold is Coffee Lake. As has been widely rumored, the Coffee Lake CPU family will be the first to bring six-core CPUs to Intel's mainstream LGA 1151 socket.

Geil may not show up in the face of newspapers as often as Corsair or G.Skill, but the Taiwanese manufacturer also plays in the big boys' gaming gear club. The company is presenting what it says is the first DDR4 memory with RGB LEDs and an Asus ROG certification. Geil calls the new series the Evo X ROG-certified. ...Read more...

Google's Compute Engine is expanding the availability of powerful compute GPUs in its Compute Engine cloud platform. The search giant is now offering access to its battery of Nvidia Tesla P100 compute GPUs in its Compute Engine in a beta rollout. Also, the company's collection of Tesla K80 dual-GPU compute cards is now available to the general public for number crunching. ...Read more...

Boy, I love my new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. It runs everything I play full-bore in 4K resolution without breaking a sweat, and it's quiet while doing so, too. Yes, it sure is nice to have the fastest gaming graphics... wait, what's that? EVGA's just released a new GTX 1080 Ti with 12 GT/s memory? Son of a gun. Indeed, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Elite card is now available in a version with 12 GT/s GDDR5X memory. ...Read more...

Debates over whether memory performance is worth messing with have raged in hardware forums for decades. There are arguments to be made on Intel platforms, but on AMD's Ryzen CPUs there's no question: you want fast RAM. That extends to Ryzen Threadripper, too, which still benefits quite a bit from hot-clocked DIMMs. Fortunately, G.Skill is ready to serve. The company just announced a new set of Trident Z RGB kits aimed directly at Ryzen builders, ranging up to 3200 MT/s with a crazy-low CAS latency of 14 cycles. ...Read more...

With a ZenFone 4 Pro in your hand, Asus wants you to be taking tons of photos and sharing them at blazingly-fast speeds. The company's latest phone has a big focus on photography, and some impressive network connectivity you probably don't even have at home yet. ...Read more...

If you've just picked up a shiny new Radeon RX Vega card and you're keen to do some hyper-realistic racing, make sure you grab the latest AMD drivers. Just like the guys in green, AMD released a driver update yesterday that adds specific support for Project Cars 2. Radeon Software version 17.9.2 also adds CrossFire support for Radeon RX Vega cards, though only dual-card configurations are supported. This release is marked as Optional, so it's not super critical if you're not experiencing issues or not planning to play Project Cars 2. ...Read more...

When the X299 platform and its associated motherboards debuted, extreme overclockers like der8auer remarked that the new boards' mostly-decorative VRM heatsinks were actually interfering with cooling the hot hardware underneath. A couple of weeks later, the aforementioned Deutschlander showed that you could resolve that problem just by grinding a few grooves into the heatsinks. Asus has apparently taken that advice to heart, as the new ROG Strix X299-XE Gaming is identical to its "X"-deprived forebear save for the grooved VRM heatsink. ...Read more...

Surely, it can mean nothing else.

Lately, racing enthusiasts have had a pretty nice selection of PC titles to choose from. There's Forza Motorsport 7, Codemasters' excellent F1 2017, and just last week a killer HD remaster of Baja: Edge of Control hit Steam. If you're into racing games for the graphics, though, you're probably chomping at the bit for Project Cars 2. Nvidia just dropped a new GeForce driver numbered 385.69 that's "Game Ready" for Project Cars 2, among a trove of other titles. This is a big update, so strap yourself into into your racing-style gaming chair. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils! Our latest System Guide is up and contains lots of great hardware-buying advice. Sadly, despite the turn of the season, we didn't find any pumpkin-spice-flavored gear to recommend. We have, however, found some tasty deals for you this Thursday. Please do read on. ...Read more...

In a blog post today, Google's SVP of Hardware Rich Osterloh announced that the company is making a major acquisition from HTC. However, unlike typical acquisitions, only a specific part of the company's workforce is changing hands in the deal. According to the New York Times (NYT), Google is picking up some two thousand of HTC's employees in exchange for $1.1 billion in cash. The deal also includes a non-exclusive licensing agreement for some of HTC's intellectual property.The move is a huge expansion of Google's hardware division, and Osterloh described it as "a continuation of [Google's] big bet on hardware." Google said ...Read more...

AMD's Mark Papermaster announced today that the CPU and GPU vendor will be "transitioning graphics and client products" to a new "12nm" process at GlobalFoundries in 2018. The announcement came today at the GlobalFoundries Technology Conference in mostly-cloudy Santa Clara. GlobalFoundries calls the new process 12LP, and as usual, the LP stands for "Leading Performance."

Intel does fine work as a silicon designer, but its manufacturing technology is probably what truly sets the company apart from its competitors. The company held a technology and manufacturing event in Beijing on Monday to show off its latest advances in silicon manufacturing. The most interesting showpiece was a wafer of Cannon Lake silicon built using the company's next-generation 10-nm process technology. The company also talked about its plans to manufacture field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) on that process, and announced that it's shipping what it calls the world's first 64-layer 3D NAND for datacenter applications.

Intel does fine work as a silicon designer, but its manufacturing technology is probably what truly sets the company apart from its competitors. The company held a technology and manufacturing event in Beijing on Monday to show off its latest advances in silicon manufacturing. The most interesting showpiece was a wafer of Cannon Lake silicon built using the company's next-generation 10-nm process technology. The company also talked about its plans to manufacture field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) on that process, and announced that it's shipping what it calls the world's first 64-layer 3D NAND for datacenter applications.

We've already written once about AOC's Agon AG322QCX gaming monitor, but its spec sheet is impressive enough to revisit now that the screen is shipping. Besides the alphanumeric soup name, the AG322QCX sports a host of letters and numbers that should make gamers happy, like a resolution of 2560x1440, 1800R curvature, a 144 Hz refresh rate, and a 4-ms response time. That's all realized on a vision-filling 16:9 VA panel that's 32" across and infused with AMD's FreeSync. AOC says the display should reach a somewhat pedestrian 300 cd/m² brightness level, but that it also has an impressive 2000:1 contrast ratio. ...Read more...

AMD's Ryzen Threadripper CPUs are so big that we've taken to using them as an object of scale to represent the size of other devices. Giant CPUs beget giant cooling hardware to fully cover their heatspreaders, and Aqua Computer wants to make sure that liquid-cooling enthusiasts with Threadripper processors aren't left in the lurch. The German group has updated its Cuplex Kryos Next waterblock with a TR4-compatible version.

Amazon's Kindle Fire 7 is probably the undisputed champion of the under-$50 tablet segment, and it often forays down to $35 impulse-buy territory thanks to discounts. The company's Kindle Fire HD tablets compete in more contested territory, but the online retailer-slash-cloud-computing-provider is upgrading its premium tablet's arsenal for the holiday shopping season. The new Kindle Fire HD 10 gets a big screen upgrade from a 1280x800 unit with a pixel density of 149 PPI to a 1920x1200 unit with 224 PPI. For some users, the addition of an Alexa voice interface might be even better news than the screen update. ...Read more...

The stock heatsinks that AMD includes with most of its Ryzen processors are quite capable but also relatively tall. The fastest Ryzens don't even include coolers. If you're building a Ryzen ITX machine and can't decide what to slap on your socket to keep things chilled, Noctua can hook you up. The company just announced the NH-L12S and NH-L9a-AM4, both updated versions of existing designs. ...Read more...

As more hardware gets integrated into processor packages, it becomes trickier for motherboards to stand out. Some certainly do, though, and one such model is Gigabyte's upcoming X399 Designare EX. Gigabyte's Designare series represents the best of the best from the company's engineering team, and the new board looks to be no exception to that rule. ...Read more...

Gather 'round, gerbils, I've got a tale to tell. See, before AMD's Ryzen Threadripper released, notorious hardware destroyer der8auer ripped apart a chip and found what appeared to be four silicon dice under the lid. This interesting bit of info arrived shortly before AMD said that Threadripper made use of only two eight-core "Zeppelin" dice, and that the two extra bits of silicon were non-functional "dummies."

Me ship looks like a s'more!

The release of Apple's port-deficient MacBooks caused some gnashing of teeth regarding its lack of legacy connectors, but the upshot is that there's a new breed of professional monitors with lots of functionality integrated into a USB Type-C port. Philips' new 328P6AU and 328P6VU displays are members of this new clade with their integrated speakers, Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, and multi-port USB 3.0 hubs, all working over a single connection that also carries the display signal. Anton Shilov spotted these monitors at IFA in Berlin and wrote about them over at Anandtech. ...Read more...

Every five years or so, I buy my parents a new TV. It makes for a nice gift, and that's about the right pace to keep them up with the latest advancements in display tech. Of course, I'm a cheapskate, and that means I look for the big deals. That's right gerbils—it's that time once again. Today we've turned up some terrific offers, including some glorious GeForces, a Ryzen motherboard, a massive chunk of storage, and really big, really cheap TV. ...Read more...

EVGA and its competitors make some fantastic high-end graphics cards with power delivery sections that are both beautiful to behold and incredibly capable. Those sophisticated circuits still aren't enough for some extreme overclockers on the freezing edge of silicon clock rate capabilities, though. EVGA's Epower V standalone VRM board is designed for these people. The Epower V board is designed to deliver two fully-independent voltage outputs that can be adjusted on the fly using the integrated EVGA EVBot MkII controller. ...Read more...

Apple's big phone events get considerably more attention than the company's software-related announcements. It's easy to get excited about big increases in processing performance and graphics capabilities. For some users, though, Apple's commitment to maintaining the software on its devices as they age is an even more compelling reason than hardware for choosing fruit-flavored smartphones and tablets. As a reminder, iOS 11 is set to be released tomorrow for folks using phones all the way back to the iPhone 5s and tablets back to the iPad mini 2, though some older models won't get the full set of new features. ...Read more...

We were pretty impressed with Optane memory when we got to test it in the system provided by Intel. Now, MSI has sent over one of its little Decepticon-like Aegis 3 gaming PCs, and it too has come equipped with an Optane memory module. Besides the 16GB cache drive, this mini-machine has a Core i7-7700 CPU, 16 GB of DDR4 memory, and a GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB graphics card. That means it's kitted out rather similarly to the Trident 3 I reviewed before. ...Read more...

Early last month, we saw some leaks out of China that gave us our first potential bits of detailed information about Intel's Coffee Lake CPUs. At that time, we were told that the purported top Coffee Lake-S CPU would be the six-core Core i7-8700K. However, thanks to a slip of the keys by a Eurocom support rep on the Notebook Review forums, it seems possible that we could see eight-core, 16-thread chips on that same platform late next year. Here's the post in question. ...Read more...

Enthusiast PCs seem to be going away from towers packed full of mechanical hard drives and towards compact enclosures with limited room for 3.5" drives, or large cases with lots of space dedicated to water cooling hardware. Synology's latest DiskStation devices provide a safe place for pack rats to easily store and share all the drives and data that don't fit in modern PC cases. ...Read more...

External graphics cards (or eGPUs) are one of the hotter developments in PC gaming this year. Gigabyte is getting in on the game with the Aorus GTX 1070 Gaming Box, a Thunderbolt 3 graphics enclosure that puts one of the company's mini GTX 1070s, a 450W power supply, and a Thunderbolt 3 controller into a case that's barely larger than a dual-disk external hard drive enclosure. We've got one of these little powerhouses in the lab now: ...Read more...

Remember those power supplies that Enermax announced back around CES? Well, they're headed to an e-tail shop near you soon. As you probably could guess from their names, the Platimax D.F. series carries 80 Plus Platinum certification, while the MaxTytan series has the highest 80 Plus Titanium certification. All power supplies across both ranges are fully modular. ...Read more...

Gigabyte has been expanding its Aorus gaming brand over the last couple of years, and the company is now growing its presence into the realm of gaming audio with the Aorus H5 headset. The H5 is built around a pair of 50-mm drivers made from stiff, lightweight beryllium. "Gigabyte Aorus" contains the letters R, G, and B, and so does this headset. The sides of the cans can glow in conjunction with the rest of the lighting in an Aorus system thanks to Gigabyte's RGB Fusion software utility. ...Read more...

Western Digital (WD) has a wide range of hard drive variations, sometimes a little tricky to keep track of. Regular consumer drivers come are labeled and colored Blue and Black, NAS drives are the Reds, surveillance storage is colored Purple, and the datacenter, endurance-oriented HDDs come in a Gold outfit. The Gold family is now getting a new member with a whopping 12 TB capacity. ...Read more...

As far as we know, the next big release from AMD's CPU division should be the Ryzen-based APUs code-named "Raven Ridge." These chips are rumored to pair up to four Ryzen CPU cores with a graphics processor based on Vega's "NCU" design. A result popped up on Geekbench yesterday for just such a chip: a quad-core, eight-thread APU listed as the Ryzen 5 2500U. Grab the salt shaker. ...Read more...

Online video can be great. Netflix's customer base is constantly growing and people watch over a billion hours of Youtube videos every day. Everything good brings something bad, though, and the dark side of streaming video is annoying undesired autoplay video ads. Google is working to add features to future versions of Chrome to limit automatic video playback to situations where the video doesn't play audio or when the user has chosen to play video from a particular website in the past. The Chromium blog says those features are coming to Chrome 64, due for release in late January or early February next year.Chrome will allow automatic video playback ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of G.Skill's announcement of what it claims is the world's first 4600 MT/s DDR4 memory, comes Corsair's unveiling of its Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) 4600 MT/s memory kits. Corsair tested this high speed with the same ASRock X299 OC Formula motherboard that G.Skill used for demonstrating its Trident Z modules. ...Read more...

I was more of a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz guy back then. Wait, what?

It's that time of year. No, I'm not talking about the leaves changing colors. All the big smartphone vendors are unleashing their new handsets. The iPhone X and the Galaxy Note 8 have joined the party, and now it's Google's turn. A new placeholder page from the search giant is pointing to an October 4 reveal of what's presumably the Pixel 2 phone....Read more...

It's Thursday afternoon in the western hemisphere of the blue marble we call Earth, so that means it is deals time again at The Tech Report. Today's goodies include a couple of mechanical gaming keyboards, an ultra-wide FreeSync monitor, and a crazy-fast 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD. ...Read more...

Back when I was a kid, I got soundly trounced for turning our old desktop-style Packard Bell Legend PC on its side to make it more like a then-becoming-popular tower PC. Folks who can't decide whether they want a stand-up or lay-down case will appreciate Lian Li's latest releases, as they can be used either way. The PC-Q50, PC-V320, and PC-V720 cases have their aluminum feet in the form of thumbscrews that can be repositioned on one end or one side of the case. We saw these cases back at Computex, but they're finally finding their way to the market.

Zotac has developed a fanbase around its tiny PCs and compact versions of typically-long graphics cards. The company's latest Zbox Magnus EK and Zbox Magnus ER machines aren't the smallest Zotac has ever developed, but they're the first in the Magnum series of compact gaming PCs armed with full-sized desktop graphics cards. The Zbox Magnus EK machines are built around the Intel Core i5-7300HQ processor and the Zbox Magnus ER PCs come packing AMD Ryzen 5 1400 chips. ...Read more...

Typical mechanical keyboard switches are inherently a certain height, and that presents some problems for some scenarios. Even if you aren't creating a wacky design, keyboards with Cherry MX-like switches still have to be a certain thickness. If you'd like a slimmer mechanical keyboard, you should be pleased to hear about Kailh's new Mini Choc switches, model number PG1232. ...Read more...

The trade shows never end. HP is in Amsterdam gearing up for the 2017 International Broadcasting Convention. The show doesn't actually start until tomorrow, but the company already revealed some of the goods it'll have on display: the new fourth-generation Z-series workstations. The new series is a complete revision from top to bottom, and the branding is getting a tweak too: the last-generation Z840, Z640, and Z440 are now the Z8 G4, Z6 G4, and Z4 G4.

Microsoft's Windows 10 Creators Update introduced several changes in the privacy settings of the operating system. The Fall Creators Update will shake up Windows 10's privacy model again by adding per-application privacy settings for applications obtained through Microsoft's Windows Store. The software company is also taking steps to make it easier and simpler for users to learn more about Windows' data collection and privacy policies. Enterprise customers will also gain the ability to control the amount of diagnostic data that is shared with Microsoft. ...Read more...