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Enterprise customers looking to assemble storage systems have a number of interfaces available for connecting drives, but the physical form factor of the devices generally follows one of four forms, traditionally designed for client machines: the familiar 2.5" or 3.5" cuboids, M.2 gumsticks, or PCIe cards. Intel is adding a new option that the company says is tailored to the density and connectivity needs of datacenters, the "ruler" form factor. ...Read more...

AMD's new Socket TR4 CPUs are mammoth microprocessors that might not be adequately cooled by a lot of existing hardware, even assuming you can mount your present heatsink or liquid cooler atop them. For that reason, companies are bringing out Threadripper-specific cooling hardware, and next up on the list is Enermax. The company just announced the Liqtech TR4 all-in-one liquid cooler series, specifically offering huge baseplates that Enermax claims will cover the entire Threadripper integrated heatspreader. ...Read more...

Solid-state drives leveraging the PCIe interface and the NVMe protocol have been the stars of the storage world recently, but speedy storage normally tends to come in small capacities. With its new line of Micron 9200 SSDs, the company's looking to ease the adoption NVMe storage by offering drives scoring high marks in both capacity and speed. ...Read more...

Most of Fractal Design's cases share a minimalist aesthetic with featureless, smooth front panels. The company's Meshify C ATX chassis bucks that trend a bit with its tesselated mesh fascia, reminiscent of Nvidia's Pascal Founders Edition graphics cards and the concrete barriers in the DX11 version of Crysis 2. Fractal Design unambiguously states that the Meshify C was designed to create an unrestricted airflow path from the front to the back of the case. ...Read more...

When I was a kid, the closest thing I had to my own TV show was a big cardboard box with a hole cut into it. You can get frighteningly close to being a TV host these days, and Elgato has been helping move that idea along. This week, the company unveiled a pair of devices to help streamers get one step closer to the perfect setup: the Elgato Cam Link and the Elgato Green Screen. ...Read more...

Toshiba's 64-layer 3D BiCS TLC NAND flash is turning up in all kinds of storage products lately. The latest entry in that list is the company's line of SATA SSDs. The SG6 drives come in 2.5" and 2280 M.2 form factors and are targeted at mainstream desktops and laptops. Toshiba is offering 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB SSDs in both form factors, as well as self-encrypting models that comply with the Trusted Computing Group Opal 2.01 specification. ...Read more...

Get your shades ready for August 21. The same day that the moon will be covering the sun over large sections of the United States, Intel will be unveiling its eighth-generation Core CPUs, codenamed Coffee Lake. Intel will be streaming the announcement on Facebook Live starting at 11:00 AM Eastern (8:00 AM PDT). ...Read more...

We may be a couple days late, but we have AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 1920X and 1950X CPUs in the lab as of this afternoon. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils. The Summer of Hardware is in full swing, and the pace of product announcements in the CPU and graphics card world has barely let up since the beginning of the year. Not everyone is in a position to upgrade every three months, though, and the current deluge of hardware releases requires sifting through with some care.High-end desktop platforms in particular don't see refreshes all that often, and it's been a long, long time since "AMD" and "high-end" belonged in the same sentence. Intel's letting loose the X299 platform and its associated Core X CPUs in flavors ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

When we talked up the rumors about Coffee Lake CPUs last week, there was a remark about a claimed "Core i3-8300"—a would-be quad-core, 65W CPU part. At the time we didn't report on it, since the PCEva forum poster himself said the information was shaky. However, today a poster on the massive Chinese PTT.cc forum posted the image below describing purported Core i3-8350K and Core i3-8100 CPUs. Although the table looks fairly complete, we have no way to judge its legitimacy or origin, so take it with as many grains of salt as your blood sodium level will tolerate. ...Read more...

Just in time for the full reveal of Intel's Core i9-series processors, Asus has a second salvo of top-tier X299 motherboards ready to fire off. The boys with the hard-to-pronounce name have two new mobos: the ROG Rampage VI Extreme and Rampage VI Apex. As you likely expect, both models are E-ATX exhibitions of Asus' finest engineering. What might surprise you is that these boards don't share the same basic design with different feature tiers—rather, they're designed with different philosophies and purposes in mind. ...Read more...

Just in time for the full reveal of Intel's Core i9-series processors, Asus has a second salvo of top-tier X299 motherboards ready to fire off. The boys with the hard-to-pronounce name have two new mobos: the ROG Rampage VI Extreme and Rampage VI Apex. As you likely expect, both models are E-ATX exhibitions of Asus' finest engineering. What might surprise you is that these boards don't share the same basic design with different feature tiers—rather, they're designed with different philosophies and purposes in mind. ...Read more...

Magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) is hitting a milestone this year. Everspin has announced that it's begun sampling 1 Gb (128 MB) ST-MRAM chips and that products packing this high-endurance, non-volatile memory are on the way. ...Read more...

AMD's Ryzen processors' abundance of CPU cores and threads combined with Linux's ability to efficiently use them seems like a match made in heaven. Even the strongest marriages have some ups and downs, though, and Michael Larabel at Phoronix was able to uncover a consistent sore point between Ryzen and Linux. The site's compilation test consistently causes segmentation faults (usually known as "segfaults," causing application crashes) on Ryzen CPUs. Larabel contacted AMD and the company's engineers confirmed the issue, describing it as "a performance marginality problem exclusive to certain workloads on Linux." AMD's engineers went on to explain that the problem is unique to Ryzen desktop chips and is not present in the upcoming Ryzen Threadripper high-end desktop CPU line or in the Epyc server processors. ...Read more...

Android OS updates can take ages. The last time I updated my (admittedly now vintage) Motorola Droid Turbo, the phone was unusable for nearly 45 minutes while it slowly shuffled around system files. For that and other reasons, Google created a feature in Android 7.0 called Seamless Updates. Soon, with Android 8.0, Google will be updating that feature to "Streaming Updates". Not only will it eliminate update downtime (as Seamless Updates can already do), it will also discard the user-area free space requirement.Seamless Updates split the on-disk system partition into two separate spaces: one "online" space for the currently-running system, and one "offline" space for pending updates. The idea is that the phone could update critical system files while the machine is running without having to unmount them, allowing the user to continue working (or more likely, ...Read more...

Intel took the wraps off the remainder of its Core i9 CPU lineup today. We now have full specs for the Core i9-7920X, i9-7940X, i9-7960X, and the i9-7980XE. Here's the Core i9 lineup in its place with the rest of Intel's Core X CPU family:Price ...Read more...

Samsung's flagship Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones are already resistant to water and dust intrusion. The company is now set to release the Galaxy S8 Active for folks who need extra impact protection on their S8 to go along with immunity to being dropped in the pool or a less-pristine body of water. The most visible difference between the standard Galaxy S8 and the new Galaxy S8 Active is that the signature wraparound display has given way to a more conventional screen with larger bezels and sides encased in rubber bumpers. ...Read more...

The Ryzen 7 desktop CPUs have a top-tier no-holds barred model, the 1800X. The two variants below it then share the same model number. The Ryzen 7 1700 and 1700X primarily differ in clock rate, and as a result, the lower-clocked 1700 has a 65W TDP versus the 95W designation of the faster 1700X. It turns out that AMD may be doing something similar with the new Threadripper HEDT CPUs. Alongside the previously-announced Threadripper 1950X and 1920X, Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock all have included a "Threadripper 1920" in motherboard CPU support listings. ...Read more...

Heads up, enterprisey gerbils. Toshiba's putting its 64-layer 3D BiCS flash pretty much everywhere. Ahead of the Flash Memory Summit, the company is letting the world know that its PM5 and CM5 server SSDs put the latest NAND flash to good use. ...Read more...

Cougar's making a name for itself in the gaming gear arena. After showing off a nifty enclosure and a fancy PixArt 3360-equipped mouse, the hardware maker is now striking again with its Immersa Pro headset. ...Read more...

The various varieties of 3D NAND are quite a bit of a hot topic lately. Every NAND maker is set on stacking layers ever higher, and last May Toshiba spoke of 64-layer BiCS flash inching closer to production. That memory is now in an actual shipping product: Sandisk Ultra 3D solid-state drives. ...Read more...

We always recommend waiting for our review before taking the plunge on a brand-new CPU and its accoutrements, but gerbils who can't wait to trade in green portraits of presidents for AMD's many-core Threadripper CPUs can order a cooler with confidence thanks to AMD's official list of thermal solutions.Most of the entries in the list are vendor-specific versions of Asetek's closed-loop liquid coolers, including units from Arctic Cooling, Cooler Master, Corsair, Cryorig, EVGA, NZXT, and Thermaltake. The Asetek-based coolers all use an adapter ring that comes inside Threadripper's large retail box . AMD's list also includes ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils! It truly is the season of hardware. This year has barely let up in hardware releases, and we're betting that more than a few of you are looking forward with bated breath to the impending releases of AMD's Threadripper CPUs and RX Vega graphics cards. We think you should celebrate by buying some extra hardware, of course. See what we have here for you.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 Newegg ...Read more...

UPDATE 8/4/2017 1:15 PM: AMD has contacted me and has guaranteed that The Tech Report will receive Threadripper review hardware ahead of the launch date. Stay tuned for our coverage August 10. Our original post continues below.As any long-time reader of The Tech Report or any other PC hardware site knows, we are largely dependent on manufacturers for access to review hardware. Usually, this process is straightforward. We attend a ...Read more...

As any long-time reader of The Tech Report or any other PC hardware site knows, we are largely dependent on manufacturers for access to review hardware. Usually, this process is straightforward. We attend a manufacturer event, agree to any embargoes, get briefed, and return home with review hardware or have it shipped to us shortly thereafter. We then write a piece for the launch-day embargo lift. Everybody is happy.In what has been one of the most relentless series of hardware launches in years, we have consistently held our side of the bargain with AMD's Ryzen 7 , Ryzen 5 , and Ryzen 3 ...Read more...

Just as the monochrome LED has largely given way to its more advanced RGB descendent, strips of individually-addressable RGB LEDs are on the verge of sweeping across the horizon of PC hardware. Razer is making sure it can be the center of that disco party with its Chroma Hardware Development Kit (HDK). ...Read more...

AMD's forthcoming Radeon RX Vega will be launching in both air-cooled and liquid-cooled versions. The truly hardcore liquid-cooling fans won't want to mess around with the AIO cooler AMD will be including, though. Patching their fancy new Radeon into their custom loop means they'll need a custom waterblock. Fortunately, EK is ready to oblige with the EK-FC Radeon Vega. ...Read more...

Despite sharing the same socket, Intel's Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors have a few key differences that buyers need to know about. Notably, Skylake-X CPUs have quad-channel memory support, while the Kaby Lake-X processors do not. There's potential for confusion there, as Kaby Lake-X builders might not be expecting to leave half of their DIMM slots empty. In an apparent attempt to simplify things for those looking to get Kaby Lake-X CPUs, Gigabyte has released the X299 Aorus Gaming motherboard. ...Read more...

The oldest gerbils probably think about magnetic tape in the context of data storage for Commodore VIC-20s and the like. The youngest gerbils probably think of tapes as the way their parents used to record TV shows before the days of online streaming and DVR boxes. Magnetic tape is alive and well in the realm of large-scale backup operations, and Sony and IBM have worked together to create a prototype system that can store a mammoth 330 TB of data on a single cartridge with a volume of one third of a liter. For comparison's sake, a standard 3.5" hard drive displaces about 0.4 L and currently tops out at a capacity of 12 TB. ...Read more...

Never underestimate the refreshment of a station wagon full of watermelons hurtling down the highway.

That Toshiba XG5 is a pretty nice SSD, eh? Toshiba's storage division has been knocking it out of the park lately. That group has another new product to announce, and even though it's not nearly as flashy as the XG5, it's pretty exciting for entirely another reason. The Toshiba BG3 is the company's latest release in its BG family of low-cost SSDs, and it packs up to 512GB of 64-layer BiCS TLC flash memory onto a 30-mm-long M.2 card. ...Read more...

We were impressed by the blend of gaming chops, thermal performance, and diminutive dimensions embodied in the Corsair One when we reviewed it at the end of April. We were a little bit less enthused about the difficulty of upgrading the machine and the inclusion of Corsair's Force LE SATA SSDs instead of one of the company's faster NVMe offerings. Buyers looking for better storage or graphics performance can now opt for some spec-bumped One Pros that are available today. The addition of the mighty GeForce GTX 1080 Ti to the list of available graphics cards makes the difficulty of graphics upgrades an easier pill to swallow, and all three of the new One Pro configs come with a 480GB NVMe SSD as standard issue. ...Read more...

Thanks to the rumored info offered by some purported leaks, it looks like Intel's product stack might get even more complicated. A user over on Chinese hardware site PCEva posted up some legitimate-looking Intel slides that dole a dram of data on the blue team's upcoming Coffee Lake processors. The headlining info is that Intel's next desktop CPUs, codenamed "Coffee Lake," will apparently not work in existing LGA 1151 motherboards despite slotting into LGA 1151 sockets. Have the salt shaker handy. ...Read more...

We were impressed enough with Fractal's Define C enclosure to tag the compact ATX case with an Editor's Choice badge when we reviewed it. The Define Mini C variant brings the same design elements into an even smaller box for those who prefer microATX motherboards. Previously, Fractal offered versions of the Define C and its mini-me sibling with the buyer's choice of an acrylic window or a fully opaque panel with additional sound insulation. The company is now adding a third panel option for both models with the material of choice for 2017, tempered glass. ...Read more...

In case you haven't heard, AMD's Ryzen Threadripper CPUs are huge. Enormous, even. The cause for their magnificent bigness is that they are formed from four silicon dies underneath that big plate of aluminum and nickel (even though only two are actually active.) That means the area of the Threadripper CPU that is generating heat is more spread-out than your typical desktop CPU, or even that of Intel's high-end parts. To address this issue, Noctua has created special Threadripper-specific editions of its NH-U9, NH-U12S, and NH-U14S CPU coolers.

When it works correctly, Tobii's eye-tracking technology seems like something straight out of a near-future science fiction movie. So far, the company's EyeX peripherals have mostly been put to use translating eye movements into input for games and VR applications. The company has now teamed with Microsoft to add native support for eye-tracking devices to Windows 10. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced at the company's most recent hackathon that an eye-tracking technology called Eye Control will be integrated into the operating system, in order to make PCs more accessible to people unable to use a mouse and keyboard. ...Read more...

When it works correctly, Tobii's eye-tracking technology seems like something straight out of a near-future science fiction movie. So far, the company's EyeX peripherals have mostly been put to use translating eye movements into input for games and VR applications. The company has now teamed with Microsoft to add native support for eye-tracking devices to Windows 10. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced at the company's most recent hackathon that an eye-tracking technology called Eye Control will be integrated into the operating system, in order to make PCs more accessible to people unable to use a mouse and keyboard. ...Read more...

There's a fairly convincing argument to be made that AMD's Ryzen Threadripper CPUs are best suited for workstations rather than gaming rigs. AMD and Nvidia might be downplaying the relevance of multi-GPU gaming, but multi-GPU compute acceleration is bigger than ever. If you've a mind to build a Threadripper-based compute box, have a look at ASRock's X399 motherboard offerings. The company's first two Socket-TR4 motherboards are the Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming and the X399 Taichi. Both will accept up to four graphics cards in their metal-reinforced PCIe x16 slots.

Gamers are a picky bunch when it comes to displays, always on the lookout for a model that will bring their games to life for many years to come. Philips' new 326M6FJSB pulls together a number of features that gamers might find attractive and comes with a reasonable price tag. ...Read more...

Gamers are a picky bunch when it comes to displays, always on the lookout for a model that will bring their games to life for many years to come. Philips' new 326M6FJSB pulls together a number of features that gamers might find attractive and comes with a reasonable price tag. ...Read more...

Competitive gaming is growing fast, and so is the market for high-end hardware. Each new keyboard promises to give you some kind of competitive edge. Razer is hoping the delay-reduction tech in its new BlackWidow Tournament Edition Chroma V2 keyboard will sell you on the new plank. ...Read more...

Intel's range-topping Core i9-7900X may be making the most noise on the X299 platform right now, but we imagine more builders are interested in the eight-core, 16-thread Core i7-7820X and its somewhat wallet-friendlier $599 price tag. Intel sent us an i7-7820X of our own today, and here it is: ...Read more...

Apple announced its financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2017 today. The company took in $45.4 billion in revenue, up 7% year-over year, and posted operating income of $10.8 billion, up 6.6% from a year ago. Net income rose 11.8% to $8.7 billion, up from $7.8 billion a year ago. Gross margin was 38.5%, up slightly from a year ago.iPhone sales grew 2% to 41 million units, up from 40.4 million a year ago. iPhone revenue totaled $24.8 billion, up 3% on the year. iPad sales grew for the first time in recent memory. The company moved 11.4 million units, up from about 10 million ...Read more...

AMD wasn't the only company with big announcements at SIGGRAPH. Dell took the opportunity to announce that it's launching a whole new series of mid-range and high-end workstations as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of its Precision brand. The Precision 5820, 7820, and 7920 towers, as well as the 7920 rack, all feature the latest Xeon CPUs and can come strapped with high-powered graphics hardware. Dell is also launching a limited-edition commemorative version of its Precision 5520 mobile workstation. ...Read more...

I don't even see the code.

Lian Li seems to have the "PC desk" space pretty much all to itself, but that hasn't stopped the company from improving its products. Its latest PC desk-and-case is the DK-05. This model is made of aluminum and tempered glass, and combines electric height adjustment with the ability to contain two complete systems with minimal clutter. ...Read more...

AMD's Vega Frontier Edition cards didn't set new records for gaming performance, but the company's marketing team never said playing games was the Frontier Edition's mission. The cards did offer up compelling performance for their price point in certain professional workloads, and they could work with laptop computers using external graphics enclosures through AMD's XConnect feature. Nvidia is striking back on both fronts today with new drivers that claim a three-fold performance increase for Titan Xp cards in professional applications like Maya. The company is also making the Titan Xp and Quadro workstation graphics cards available in external graphics boxes. ...Read more...

The primary driving force behind the growth of PC hardware as a consumer market has undeniably been gaming. Likewise, when you hear "virtual reality," your mind surely floats to VR games. VR has tremendous potential outside gaming, though. Job training, collaborative 3D design, and medical applications are just a few of the places where VR is finding a foothold. It seems like HP is looking to speed that process along with its new Z VR Backpack G1 Workstation. ...Read more...

Having a good mouse sensor can be incredibly important, especially in fast paced FPS games. A bad sensor will hinder reliable accuracy and muscle memory build-up. SteelSeries seems to understand the importance of sensors, as it's collaborated with PixArt to create the new SteelSeries TrueMove3 optical sensor, which it describes as the first gaming mouse sensor with true one-to-one tracking. ...Read more...