Techreport

Liquid cooling used to be reserved for the performance-driven, the enterprising, or simply the crazy. Thankfully, with the advent of affordable all-in-one liquid cooling solutions, anyone can keep their CPU under water with minimal fuss these days. Thinking along those lines, Antec's Mercury AIO coolers keep things simple. ...Read more...

AMD led off its Vega assault by releasing two Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards at the very end of last month. The Frontier cards were aimed at a prosumer market in between the gaming-focused RX Vega and the true professional cards with certified drivers and similar perks. The red team has finally announced a pair of cards for the pro market: the traditional Radeon Pro WX 9100 and the new Radeon Pro SSG with 2 TB of solid-state storage on board. ...Read more...

Looming large like an alien spacecraft, Ryzen Threadripper is upon us. The size of AMD's new high-end desktop CPUs cannot be overstated, and such a prodigious processor needs a suitably massive motherboard. In a post on its EdgeUp blog, Asus is showing off its first three Threadripper-compatible motherboards: the Prime X399-A, the ROG Strix X399-E, and the ROG Zenith Extreme. All three are E-ATX platters primed to serve up a cornucopia of connectivity. Let's have a glance at each one. ...Read more...

Between Vega graphics cards and Threadripper, AMD is dominating headlines in the realm of PC hardware over the last few days. Gigabyte is getting in on the action with the formal announcement of its X399 Aorus Gaming 7 motherboard. The X399 Aorus dazzles the eyes with its 4094-pin TR4 socket and the light show coming from the eight DDR4 memory slots, the five full-length PCIe slots, and the various heatsinks and armor plates all over the board. ...Read more...

MSI wasted no time announcing its first motherboard for AMD's upcoming Ryzen Threadripper CPUs. The X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC surrounds the mammoth 4094-pin TR4 LGA socket with eight DDR4 memory slots, high-end voltage regulation, steel-reinforced PCIe slots, wireless connectivity, and a heaping helping of RGB LEDs. The company also announced its latest X370 Gaming M7 ACK and B350 Tomahawk Plus motherboards for AMD's Ryzen AM4 processors. ...Read more...

Many gerbils have read about AMD's three-pronged launch of its Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. The linup consists of the entry-level RX Vega 56, an air-cooled RX Vega 64, and a range-topping water-cooled RX Vega 64. A fourth member of the RX Vega family is also on the way, and this youngest member will also be the smallest. AMD was tight-lipped about the Radeon RX Vega Nano, but we know that it's coming and what it'll look like when it arrives. ...Read more...

In my personal experience, the centrifugal fan atop the reference-version Radeon RX 480 card was a step up from the shrieking banshee that AMD once strapped to the Radeon R9 290X. (That card did spawn some hilarious memes, though.) That's to say I expect the blower cooler on the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 to be pretty tolerable. Still, some folks just dislike that concept altogether. Fortunately for those, Asus has already announced the ROG Strix RX Vega 64 and its trio of fans. ...Read more...

This is a final retail version of a Radeon RX Vega graphics card: ...Read more...

Counter-Strike came along at the right time to serve a a fresh audience of young players thirsty for a more realistic experience than FPS games to date had offered. Its perfect blend of realistic weapons and locales with arcade shooting gameplay was immensely popular. Infinity Ward learned well the lessons of Counter-Strike when it created Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. That game was an unbelievable success among a second generation of gamers eager to take the skills they'd honed in Halo into a more realistic setting. Activision bundled a remake of the game with the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Legacy Edition, and promised it would be released separately at a later date. That day is today. ...Read more...

Microsoft made some big changes to the way it handles updates with the release of April's Creators Update. Major updates moved to a staggered release guided by telemetry data received from users' PCs. Today, almost four months after the April 11 initial release date, the Windows 10 Creators Update is available to "all compatible devices." The software giant has also announced a plan to keep Windows and Office updates synchronized. ...Read more...

Chinese electronics giant Foxconn—best known among tech geeks as the iPhone manufacturer—is looking to move some of its manufacturing stateside. President Trump announced that the Foxconn Technology Group will spend $10 billion to build a plant in Wisconsin, as CEO Terry Gou stood alongside. The company says the new factory will create 3,000 jobs and has the potential to add an additional 10,000 later on. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said at the White House that the state intends to award $3 billion in incentives, a package that has yet to be approved by the state's legislature.

Howdy, gerbils! Much to your collective chagrin, I'm back from my U.S. trip, wherein I discharged firearms, acquired explosives, enjoyed great portions of food, marvelled at the size of buildings, and routinely cursed at "champagne" colored cars. As the song goes, though, there ain't no rest for the wicked, and money don't grow on trees. Eager hardware-aficionado gerbils are always looking out for the best hardware deals, and it's our duty to oblige. Here's what we found today.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...

Inveterate leaker WhyCry over at Videocardz got ahold of a slide yesterday that appears to list the full specifications for the remainder of Intel's Core i9 CPU series. In case you missed it, Jeff reviewed the Core i9-7900X a little while ago, but more than a month later that remains the only available CPU from Intel's fledgling Core i9 CPU line. WhyCry himself admits he can't verify the veracity of this chart, so get out the Morton sifter.

Rosewill is a fairly well-known name among PC hardware enthusiasts. The company's keyboards are generally well-regarded (among the TR crowd in particular) thanks for their competitive pricing and "just-what-you-need" feature set. The RGB LED bandwagon is going full spead ahead, so it's only fitting that Rosewill expands its rainbow-lit offerings. Meet Rosewill's Neon family of peripherals. ...Read more...

Here at TR, we love the HTC Vive and what it offers. The thing is, a VR headset of the Vive's caliber has a whole bunch of barriers to entry. You need a fast PC, a relatively large empty space for room-scale VR, and have to spool out several meters of cables and set up tracking lighthouses. You also have to buy the headset itself, of course, and then you'll need a Steam account to make use of the majority of the software for it. If nothing else, the up-front cost is a major barrier to entry for folks outside economies where disposable income doesn't abound. That might be the biggest reason why HTC just announced its Vive Standalone VR headset. ...Read more...

Intel released healthy financial results for the second quarter of 2017 today. The company took in $14.8 billion in revenue, up 9% from this time last year, and it posted $3.8 billion in operating income, up 190% over the same period. Net income also increased hand-over-fist to $2.8 billion, up from $1.3 billion a year ago. Those big jumps in profitability are partially because of a troubled quarter a year ago, during which Intel was incurring charges because of restructuring efforts.Those past clouds aside, Intel's core businesses are undeniably performing strongly. The Client Computing Group brought in $8.2 billion in revenue, up 12% from a year ago. The increase appears to have come from strong notebook platform sales. Intel reported revenue for mobile ...Read more...

The big news from AMD today is obviously the availability of the company's latest entry-level Ryzen 3 processors, but the press release announcing the new chips included a little nugget of information about the Wraith Max, the chipmaker's top-of-the-line CPU cooler. Up until now, the only way to get a Wraith Max was to buy a pre-built system from one of a few AMD partners. As of today, eager customers will be able to buy these coolers separately. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

At the end of May, Toshiba introduced the OEM-focused XG5 NVMe SSD, the company's first product based on its own 64-layer BiCS 3D flash memory—a technology announced in July of 2016. Now, the Japanese manufacturer is introducing the TR200-series SATA SSDs, the first retail product with 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash onboard. The drives will be available in 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB capacities. ...Read more...

Today seems to be Threadripper Day, because Velocity Micro isn't the only one launching machines based on AMD's new HEDT CPUs. Dell's Alienware division and boutique builders iBuyPower and CyberPowerPC have all put up listings for new Threadripper PCs. We already know that HP, Lenovo, and other tier-one OEMs won't be offering Threadripper-based machines this year, but we would expect that other PC boutiques will be offering machines based on AMD's 16-core behemoth. Here's the current list of pre-built Threadripper machines on the market. ...Read more...

With new processor options on the way from both AMD and Intel for the server and high-end desktop market, it's no surprise that we're starting to get wind of powerful new workstation options from boutique builders. Velocity Micro announced several workstations headlined by AMD Epyc, Threadripper, and Xeon Scalable processors. ...Read more...

Some vocal gerbils probably appreciate the subdued design of the Silverstone Raven Z RVZ01-E case that we wrote about a little over a year ago. The general public has evinced a strong preference for all things bedazzled with multi-colored RGB LEDs, though, and the company's latest Mini-ITX Raven RVZ03 was built to suit buyers looking to build a compact and colorful PC. ...Read more...

Earlier this year Cooler Master (CM) debuted the MasterBox Lite 5, an attractive chassis with a very reasonable price tag. That case was a bit short on aesthetic extras, so CM is now is releasing the MasterBox Lite 5 RGB case, which keeps the same basic skeleton but adds a tempered glass side panel and gives users more customization options. ...Read more...

The Universal Serial Bus is about to become a little bit less "serial." The USB 3.0 Promoter Group just announced the USB 3.2 specification—a new standard that's pretty similar to USB 3.1, except that it defines multi-lane operation modes. That means USB 3.2 devices can have two lanes operating on the same cable, each running at 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps, for a total throughput of 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps. ...Read more...

When headset boxes mention "7.1 surround sound," they usually refer to virtualized surround sound using software like Windows Sonic or Dolby Headphone:X. The audio is pumped to one driver on each headset cup, and the complex software algorithms trick your ears into believing there's a wide soundscape. Some headsets do up the ante and offer discrete 7.1 audio, like Razer's Tiamat 7.1 V2 and its five drivers per cup. ...Read more...

Maybe you've got a thing for copper, or have a frequent buyers account at Praxair for all of your liquefied gas overclocking attempts. Or perhaps you're one of those folks that associates "most expensive" with "the best." If any of those apply to you, EVGA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti K|ngp|n Gaming graphics card ("Kingpin" henceforth) just might be just what you're looking for. Like its forebears, the newest Kingpin card was designed with input from EVGA's in-house extreme overclocker Vince "K|ngp|n" Lucido, and is intended to be the ultimate Geforce GTX 1080 Ti for overclockers. ...Read more...

Corsair announced this morning that it's selling a majority share of its business to private equity firm EagleTree Partners for $525 million. The company says CEO Andy Paul will remain in his leadership role and that he'll maintain a "sizable equity stake" of his own in the business. Paul says the move will allow Corsair "to continue to focus first and foremost on our loyal and passionate customers, and accelerate our investment in innovation and new technology and products to enhance the quality experience that enthusiasts and gamers have come to expect from us."As any TR reader already knows, Corsair has branched out from its traditional memory business into keyboards, mice, headsets, liquid coolers, graphics cards, flash drives, solid-state drives, fans, cases, and other accessories since its founding in 1994. The company recently combined those areas of expertise into the high-quality, high-performance Corsair One compact PC ...Read more...

AMD reported its second-quarter 2017 financial results today. At the end of a busy quarter, the company took in revenue of $1.22 billion and operating income of $25 million, though it turned in a net loss of $16 million. Revenue was up 19% year-over year, and the company's operating profit marks its first time in the black by that metric in quite some time.The company's Computing and Graphics division took in $659 million in revenue, up 51 percent year-over-year, and turned in an operating profit of $7 million versus an operating loss of $81 million ...Read more...

To the best of our knowledge, AMD didn't send out any review units of its Vega Frontier Edition video cards. Performance figures still trickled out despite the card's four-figure price tag, and its numbers in gaming benchmarks aren't that impressive when compared value-wise to the $500 GeForce GTX 1080 and the $700 GTX 1080 Ti.AMD has stated that the Vega FE's gaming chops aren't necessarily comparable to those of the upcoming Radeon RX Vega cards, though, and some new information may show the company has a point. Earlier today, the rumor mongers over at Videocardz.com probed 3DMark's Fire Strike database ...Read more...

Anyone been on one of these? I still wear the shirt from that video.

Ding dong, the witch is dead. Although Flash support has been getting skewered left and right by multiple browsers, word has now come forth from Adobe itself, and the message is simple: Flash will stop being distributed and updated by the end of 2020. It's as if millions of web developer voices suddenly cried out in joy, and were forever happier.Despite the final word on the matter, Adobe's move has been a long time coming. It's been more than a few years since talk first started about dropping Flash support in browsers, and any site in this day and age that still relies on Flash is a relic passed down ...Read more...

Ding dong, the witch is dead. Although Flash support has been getting skewered left and right by multiple browsers, word has now come forth from Adobe itself, and the message is simple: Flash will stop being distributed and updated by the end of 2020. It's as if millions of web developer voices suddenly cried out in joy, and were forever happier.Despite the final word on the matter, Adobe's move has been a long time coming. It's been more than a few years since talk first started about dropping Flash support in browsers, and any site in this day and age that still relies on Flash is a relic passed down ...Read more...

Sometimes, a PC builder's just gotta ask: "Does the heatsink on this memory truly express my individuality?" When the answer to that question is "no," perhaps it's time to consider some RGB LEDs. Adata's new XPG Spectrix D40 line of DDR4 memory is ready to fill that need, as it combines customizable RGB LED lighting effects with high-speed chips. ...Read more...

Competition between AMD's hotly-anticipated Ryzen Threadripper and the high-thread-count chips in Intel's Core X family is sure to be the hot topic of late summer 2017. Intel is playing its cards pretty close to the vest and has yet to disclose the clock speeds and cache structures of most of its Core i9 lineup. A recent entry in the Geekbench database may provide some insight into that information as well as an early (and very rough) comparison to AMD's 16-core, 32-thread silicon. Track down your wintertime supply of calcium chloride, because it's rumor time. ...Read more...

As it turns out, owners of Nvidia graphics cards have greater reasons to update their drivers than just getting optimizations for ARK: Survival Evolved. Nvidia has released a security bulletin detailing multiple vulnerabilities in its display drivers, and advises users to update the software to version 384.94.The problems were present in the kernel mode layer of the GPU display driver. Brought to Nvidia's attention by Andrei Lasu and Alastair Donaldson of Imperial College London, the vulnerabilities could be exploited to stop the drivers from working or to potentially gain access to user data. The bugs include ...Read more...

Not all that long ago, having a PC blinged out with RGB LEDs on every component was a privilege reserved for those with dosh to discard at will. Fortunately for light-pocketed fans of amazing technicolor PCs, Thermaltake is doing its best to festoon even low-end hardware with multi-colored points of light. The company's latest RGB LED-equipped power supplies are known simply as the Smart RGB series, and they come in 500 W, 600 W, and 700 W varieties. ...Read more...

Google's Android mobile OS never stops moving, and the company has released the fourth developer preview version of Android O. The company expects Developer Preview 4 to be the final preview release before the rollout of the final version of Android 8.0 later this summer. The official end of summer is September 22, so we suspect Android O will hit sometime before that date. ...Read more...

We wrote about Asus' planned entry into the booming mesh networking market back in January, and now the company is ready to launch its mesh Wi-Fi system. It seems Asus originally planned to launch two different product series under the HiveSpot umbrella: one tri-band set of devices with seven antennas and a more affordable dual-band line. Today, Asus has revealed that its mesh product family has been renamed Lyra, after the five-star constellation, and the fancy tri-band set is also called Lyra. The dual-band system, now called the Lyra Mini, will arrive at a later date. ...Read more...

A bunch of new games are either being released or about to be released, and a new GeForce driver to support them has appeared. Version 384.94 is WHQL-certified and "Game Ready" for LawBreakers, EVE:Valkyrie, Fortnite, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, and the official release of ARK: Survival Evolved. Along with support for those titles, this release brings the usual bunch of bugfixes and optimizations....Read more...

One of the most oft-repeated complaints from Intel's haters is that the company has allowed its mainstream Core lineup to top out at four cores since its inception. That means, depending on how you count it, we've had eight or nine generations of quad-core CPUs as the pick of the litter. We heard this past November that Intel would be bringing six-core CPUs to the desktop platform, and about a month ago a Geekbench result for a six-core Coffee Lake CPU popped up. Today eTeknix seems to have another bit of news corroborating the idea: a chart of unknown origin listing lots of specifications for what are purportedly a trio of Coffee Lake CPUs. Grab the salt-shaker and let's dive in.

We wouldn't normally worry about a product's box on TR, but AMD took to Twitter this morning to reveal its packaging design for Ryzen Threadripper. Said box seems suitably large and in charge for what's likely to be AMD's biggest product launch this year.Behold – the first look at #Threadripper packaging. Who else is counting down the minutes ...Read more...

In our experience, modern desktop M.2 SSDs rarely throttle under even the most strenuous real-world conditions, but that hasn't stopped PC component manufacturers from coming up with countless products to cool off storage devices. From SSDs factory-equipped with big red heatsinks, to motherboards with integrated M.2 coolers, to slabs of aluminum designed to be strapped to the back of an M.2 gumstick, builders have plenty of options to banish M.2 throttling if it's a concern. Alphacool is adding two more M.2 cooling products to the market with the Eisblock HDX-2 passive cooling kit and the Eisblock HDX-3 M.2 waterblock. ...Read more...

Corsair's Lighting Node Pro gave builders the ability to drive the company's strips of individually-addressable RGB LEDs. While 40 LEDs in a system might be enough for some people, those looking to expand their PC disco party can now add more lights without buying a whole Node Pro kit. Corsair's RGB LED Lighting Pro Expansion Kit comes with four additional LED strips and extension cables to allow placement anywhere inside a standard-sized PC case. ...Read more...

When you hear "single-board computer," you probably think of a Raspberry Pi, HardKernel ODroid, or BeagleBone. You probably don't think of a pocket-sized PC with a 1.6 GHz Intel chip, dual Gigabit Ethernet connections, dual 6Gbps SATA ports, and USB 3.0. Gigabyte's new SA-SBCAP3350 single-board computer has all that and more, and it's still smaller than a Mini-STX PC. ...Read more...

There are plenty of power banks on the market these days, as battery life for mobile devices still isn't quite a solved problem. However, many of them aren't built to survive the kinds of environments where many owners would seem most likely to take a power bank. Adata's D16750 Power Bank fills this niche by providing an enormous battery inside of a chassis that's designed to take a beating and keep on charging. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils. Bruno is still trekking across the United States right now, so you're stuck with me this week. I have to keep this short, but don't worry: the deals are as good as ever.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...

Getting everying color-coordinated in your case can be a headache. Even a pretty basic color like white can leave you at a loss to find the right parts to build that perfect-for-YouTube case. Even if there is a power supply in the right color, for example, it might be way overpowered for your build. We welcome any new entry that gives us a bit more choice in that respect, including Corsair's new RMx White Series power supplies. The new finish is available on the company's RM850x 850W and RM750x 750W PSUs for now. ...Read more...

It's been a couple years since Intel floored an old friend of ours with a computer miniaturized to the size of a disappointingly-small candy bar. Today, Intel announced a new type of compute stick, but this one isn't designed to replace your desktop computer. Instead, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick provides deep neural network processing inside a self-contained, low-power package....Read more...

Google bought its way into home thermostats by snapping up Nest Labs for a whopping $3.2 billion back in 2014. Microsoft is taking a different approach to home temperature regulation by partnering with Johnson Controls on the GLAS smart thermostat. The companies unveiled the fruits of their labor in a YouTube video. ...Read more...

I get it!