Techreport

It seems so long ago that PC enthusiasts made do with dinky little side windows. Who wants to peer through a window when entire sheets of glass are available instead? Thermaltake's View 21 Tempered Glass Edition boasts tempered glass panels on both the left and right sides of the case, and saves space for liquid-cooling setups by eliminating the drive cages. ...Read more...

Asus just announced what is likely to be the flagship of its fleet of Ryzen-ready motherboards. The Republic of Gamers Crosshair VI Extreme takes the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach that we frequently see on high-end motherboards and applies it to an EATX Socket AM4 platter powered by the X370 chipset. Aside from an integrated waterblock, we struggle to imagine a motherboard feature that this model misses. ...Read more...

Doom came out in May of 2016 to almost universal critical acclaim, and Id Software has continued to update the game regularly since then. Today, update 6.66 drops, bringing what Id is calling the "ultimate" Doom experience. Along with several fixes to multiplayer and SnapMap, there are a few big things worth making note of. Most importantly, all multiplayer DLC is now unlocked for all players. "We've retired the Doom season pass and are making all of the multiplayer DLC content free to all players," writes Doom Game Director Marty Stratton. "That's three multiplayer DLC packs, which include nine of our best maps, three additional guns, three additional playable demons, new equipment, armor sets and more." That's on top of free features like bot support that players are already enjoying.Also on the "free stuff" front, Doom is getting a free weekend across all platforms. For us PC kids, the free weekend starts on July 20—that's tomorrow—at 12:00 PM Eastern Time. Xbox users can check out the game on July 20 starting at 1 PM ET, while PlayStation 4 players will be able to play on Thursday, July 27, ...Read more...

Intel's latest graphics driver release is a pretty big one. The new driver, version 15.46, adds game-specific support for three new releases: Epic's building-and-survival game Fortnite, Motiga's hero shooter Gigantic, and season 2 of Telltale's Minecraft: Story Mode. A number of other games and applications also got fixes, and this release also expands the API support of Intel's graphics processors, too.

Nvidia's revenues, profits, and share price have all benefited from surging demand in both the PC gaming hardware and the graphics compute marketplaces. The company could potentially face growing competition in deep learning from rival AMD's Vega graphics chips, the Radeon Instinct family, and the company's ROCm platform, but the AI jockeying doesn't stop there. Intel is working on its own Lake Crest chips, and Google is working on its Tensor Processing Units.Fujitsu is now throwing its hat into the deep-learning ring, as well. The Japanese server and supercomputer manufacturer announced its intention to build a Deep Learning Unit (DLU) AI processor before the end of its fiscal 2018 (running from April 2018 ...Read more...

Arctic Cooling has quietly put up a page on its website listing coolers compatible with the mammoth TR4 socket for AMD's upcoming Ryzen Threadripper 1920X 12-core and Threadripper 1950X 16-core CPUs. So far, the only known members of this newly founded club of TR4-compatible coolers are the company's Liquid Freezer AIO closed-loop units. ...Read more...

Although you may not have heard of ASML, you've certainly heard of its customers. The company provides lithography equipment to major semiconductor manufacturers around the world, including Intel. That means ASML plays a crucial role in driving down process sizes and pushing Moore's Law forward. Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) is widely understood to be one of the next steps on that road. The company has been developing extreme ultraviolet lithography tools for some time now, but production-ready versions of that hardware have proven elusive. For just one example, an AMD presentation (PDF) projected that EUV "could be ready for high volume manufacturing of semiconductor chips in 2012 or 2013" all the way back in 2007. Today, GlobalFoundries has only committed to "EUV compatibility at key levels" for its upcoming 7-nm process, and TSMC expects to begin deploying EUV technology in 2020 at its purported 5-nm node. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

TR BBQ XIV is in the books. I'd tell you it was a good time, but that would be stating the obvious. drfish and his family have the art of entertaining internet people down after over a decade of hosting the TR community at their lakeside cottage. Mother Nature did her part by handing us a clear day with a high near 75° F (24° C)—perfect for hanging out by Lake Michigan and enjoying everything the BBQ has to offer. ...Read more...

The last we heard of Google Glass, the heads-up display spectacles had turned into something of a national punchline. Google stopped selling the devices to individual customers in 2015, and the public found other face-mounted displays to get hyped about. As it turns out, though, the Glass program didn't disappear. Instead, the Glass team has spent the last two years working with industry partners to develop a business-friendly variant of the spectacles called Glass Enterprise Edition. ...Read more...

Back when we initially saw BenQ's competition-ready Zowie XL2540 monitor, the first question on my mind was whether it supported the company's blur reduction mode. Not long before, BenQ had released the Zowie XL2735 featuring an apparently-new technology called "Dynamic Accuracy," or DyAc. DyAc isn't actually new, though; it's a new name for the company's austerely-named BenQ Blur Reduction feature. Firestarter, ready your wallet, because BenQ's latest Zowie monitor is the 25", 240-Hz, DyAc-equipped XL2546. ...Read more...

Protecting data in an information economy is a tough task. Bigger data breaches have been occurring more often in recent memory, affecting retailers like Target and decidedly more seedy victims. In response to this growing problem, IBM has tooled up the Z (or Z14), its latest line of mainframe computers, to take a shot at stemming the tide. The new mainframe systems' claim to fame is their end-to-end encryption chops, a capability that IBM says will help to protect sensitive information from cybercriminals, state actors, and rogue employees both at rest and in flight. ...Read more...

A month ago Adata took the wraps off its IM2P3388 series of industrial-grade M.2 NVMe SSDs. The company's product planners must be aware that plenty of older silicon is left overseeing all manner of industrial hardware in the field, because the company is back with its ISSS314 SATA SSDs in TLC and more robust MLC varieties. ...Read more...

Echoing the rest of the DRAM market, HBM2 memory has been in short supply. There are only two companies producing the parts: Samsung and SK Hynix. Of the two, only Samsung is currently making 8GB modules (although that could change later this year). Today, Samsung announced that it's going to step up production of 8GB HBM2 packages to serve "rapidly growing market demand." ...Read more...

If you find yourself in the curious position of needing a 4K gaming monitor and not wanting to pay a lot for it, Asus might be able to hook you up. The company just updated its site with details for a new display, the VP28UQG. Like the MG28UQ before it, this monitor is a 28" display with a 3840x2160 resolution. It boasts a 1-ms response time courtesy of its overdriven TN panel. ...Read more...

Do you have a big pile of data that you can't bear to put on moldy old spinning platter hard drives? If you have the cash, Viking Technology's 25 TB and 50 TB Ultra-High Capacity Silo Series SSDs should fit the bill. The Silo drives are built on a large-for-an-SSD 3.5" form factor and sport dual-port SAS interfaces. If you hadn't already guessed, these drives are primarily for large businesses with even larger storage needs. ...Read more...

HyperX's Alloy FPS gaming keyboard offers impressively solid build quality in a space-saving frame, but many gamers would likely prefer it be cut down even further through the removal of the number pad. HyperX has just the thing for those folks: the Alloy FPS Pro. This board drops the number pad for easier access to one's mouse in tense gaming situations and more ergonomic wrist angles in regular use. The board keeps the removable cable of its predecessor. We're checking to see whether it also includes the mesh carry case of its forebear, as well. Either way, the Pro should be friendly to gamers on the go. ...Read more...

Last week's announcement of the official release date and clock specifications of AMD's Ryzen 3 processors is probably the biggest news in the entry-level CPU market for the month of July, but Intel has some product introductions of its own to make. The company is adding four Core i3 desktop models and one four-core, eight-thread LGA 1151 Xeon variety to its CPU lineup, according to a specification update spotted by Anandtech.To answer the question at the forefront of most gerbils' minds: none of the new models support overclocking. All three new chips have the same dual-core, four-thread design as all other Core i3 chips to date. The Core i3-7120 enters the fray clocked at 4.0 GHz and with 3 MB of L3 cache. It has a 51W nominal TDP. Its Core ...Read more...

Remember that AMD AGESA update (version 1.0.0.6) that Jeff told y'all about back in May? It's finally finding its way to end users by way of motherboard firmware updates. Some gerbils have already gotten theirs, but if you have a Ryzen machine with some hot memory that hasn't been updated—and a few hours to spend tweaking the machine—you should probably go ahead and do that. AMD recently updated its gaming blog with some testing results from the new firmware, and at least with the configuration AMD's tester was using, there's some serious performance potential laying on the table versus stock settings. ...Read more...

Last month, Microsoft promised to accelerate the release schedule of Windows Server, revealing its plan to have new versions out twice a year. In preparation for the fall release, Redmond has rolled out Windows Server Insider Preview Build 16237. Among other things, the new build focuses on improvements to virtualization and containers.Concerning virtualization, Build 16237 exposes volumes on non-volatile DIMMs to Hyper-V virtual machines, letting the VMs take advantage of the performance characteristics of low-latency persistent memory. Additonally, a new feature called Battery Passthrough lets VMs share the ...Read more...

Roman "der8auer" Hartung recently cast shade on a handful of motherboards based on Intel's X299 chipset. According to the extreme overclocker, the boards' voltage-regulation circuits can hit temperatures as high as 105° C with a Core i9-7900X overclocked to a relatively modest 4.6 GHz. 105° C is the range in which many such circuits will begin to throttle the system for safety. Hartung also criticized the single eight-pin EPS +12V power connectors and current VRM heatsink designs on many X299 boards.Now Hartung is back in a new video discussing how some simple changes on Asus' ROG Rampage VI Apex motherboard avoid these temperature and power limits. While his comments reflect ...Read more...

Okay boys and girls, I'm going to keep this very simple. The TR BBQ XIV is tomorrow, and if you have even a snowball's chance in Beelzebub's joint to attend... be here or be square. I'm already in situ (and plain loco after the intercontinental trip), laptop in hands, and mentally preparing myself for the horde of gerbils set to arrive between today and tomorrow.

When Oculus announced a summer sale on its Rift-and-Touch bundle, there was some speculation whether that $399 price tag was going to become permanent. In a blog post today, Oculus squashed that rumor—the promotion is temporary. However, the company won't be returning the Rift-and-Touch bundle to its pre-Summer of Rift cost. Instead, the new permanent price for the set will be $499. ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils! I have to say, I'm getting accustomed to the American way of things. I've been here for three days now (for the first time) and I've already scratched quite a few items off my personal bucket list, including but not limited to eating BBQ ribs and wings, and punching holes in paper targets with careful application of gunpowder-propelled lead and brass. By the way, I'm already at the site of the TR BBQ XIV. If you don't know what that is about, click this link and hop on a car or plane right away. Alas, it's not all fun and games, as there are hardware deals to be hunted. Thankfully, my newfound skills helped with that particular task. Here you go.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...

Remember about six months ago when we thought the PC market might have stabilized? Yeah, maybe not so much. That report from a while back came from IDC, but now Gartner posted preliminary results from its Q2 2017 analysis of the PC industry. The new data shows that 4.3% fewer units were shipped during last quarter versus the same time last year. The final worldwide tally comes to 61.1 million units shipped, compared to 63.9 million for the same period in 2016. The company posits that high system prices due to component shortages were the largest cause for the slump. ...Read more...

The home cinema viewing experience typically takes its cues from the movie theater. Replicating the movie house experience at home has been the goal of many an A/V equipment company since the dawn of cinema. Samsung's 33.8'-wide (10.3 m) Cinema LED screen is seemingly going in the other direction, taking the typical movie room projector and canvas and replacing them with a supersized LED-backlit LCD for a more vivid experience. ...Read more...

Around the virtual TR office, we can be a picky bunch when it comes to our headsets. As gamers and music lovers, we insist on peripherals that provide a high-quality audio experience. This month, MSI is adding to our always-growing list of headsets to consider. The new Immerse GH70 gaming headset combines purportedly powerful drivers, swappable ear pads, and the company's ever-popular RGB LEDs. ...Read more...

We came away very impressed with the performance of AMD's Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 5 1600X CPUs in productivity applications, bestowing the coveted Editor's Choice Award upon them. The Ryzen 5 chips have gaming chops, as well, especially for gamers with high-resolution displays. System builders on a budget that don't need all those threads can now circle July 27 on their calendars. AMD has finally given us a release date and clock speeds for the first Ryzen 3 chips, both of which sport four cores without simultaneous multi-threading....Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Remember that nasty exploit from a couple of months ago in Intel's Active Management Technology? In short, if your machine was already configured for remote administration, it could be vulnerable to an exploit that essentially gives an attacker complete and total control of the machine at a sub-OS level. The security hole can be closed off with a motherboard firmware update, but the exploit affects many older machines that may not be getting firmware updates. That's not the case for owners of Gigabyte boards, though. The company just announced that it will be issuing security-focused firmware updates for affected boards going back at least as far as the 8-series chipsets.

When I need to transfer a whole bunch of data from one machine to the next, I just hook it into my home network. There are times, though, when Gigabit Ethernet isn't the best option—like when dealing with compromised machines, or when I'm simply not at home. If you ever have to make use of "sneakernet" to move data around quickly, something like Adata's SE730H could be just the thing. ...Read more...

Intel's Core X CPUs and X299 platform bring a truckload of processor cores and memory bandwidth to the table, and MSI's X299 XPower Gaming AC motherboard adds to that package with integrated Intel 802.11ac, Bluetooth connectivity, and a whopping five M.2 slots when the included PCIe riser card is installed. ...Read more...

AMD blew the lid off two of its Ryzen Threadripper CPUs this morning. The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X will offer 16 cores and 32 threads clocked at 3.4 GHz base and 4 GHz boost speeds at $999, while the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X will offer 12 cores and 24 threads with a 3.5 GHz base clock and 4.0 GHz boost speeds for $799. We already know both chips will offer 64 PCIe lanes and four channels of DDR4 memory. ...Read more...

Intel's Skylake-powered Xeon Scalable Processor family launched yesterday, and Gigabyte is ready to get those chips into data centers and workstations. The company has a pair of E-ATX motherboards and eight different barebones servers in its product catalog. Both motherboards and all the server models are designed to accept a matched pair of Intel's Xeon Scalable Socket P0 chips in Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum flavors. ...Read more...

Do you already have a VR headset, or did you pick up an Oculus Rift for $399? If so—and if you're rocking an Nvidia graphics card—you'll be pleased to hear about the latest news from Nvidia's VR team. The company's VRWorks libraries have been integrated into both version 4.16 of the Unreal Engine and the 2017.1 release of the popular Unity game engine. More immediately, folks with high-end graphics hardware and EVE: Valkyrie can enjoy new "Ultra" settings thanks to that title's recent VRWorks integration.

Team Group is throwing its hat into the light-up RAM ring with two lines of RGB LED-illuminated modules and some fixed-color sticks. The T-Force Delta RGB modules have a unique asymmetric design and LEDs that can shine in any of 16.8 million colors. The T-Force Night Hawk and T-Force Night Hawk RGB modules offer up a symmetric winged design, fast maximum speeds, and Asus Aura Sync support. The fixed-color Night Hawk modules are available in larger 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) capacities to make up for the lack of Technicolor. All modules are compliant with the XMP 2.0 specification for one-click overclocking. ...Read more...

While most of us here at TR probably prefer to build our own PCs, there's reason to purchase some pre-built systems right now thanks to cryptocurrency miners. AMD is offering up another reason to buy a pre-built PC, too: purchasers of pre-built machines equipped with certain AMD hardware will be eligible for up to three months of the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan, two months of the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite, or between one and three games from Square Enix's "Collective" indie publishing arm. The promotion is called "AMD4U." ...Read more...

Folks have been able to charge their smartphones wirelessly for some time, and we've even caught a glimpse of a mouse that charges wirelessly, but the tech hasn't yet spread to larger electronics. Dell is changing that with the Latitude 7285, a 12" 2-in-1 convertible that the company claims is the first on the market with wireless charging capability. ...Read more...

When you're left-handed, simply picking things up can be a hassle, whether it's scissors, a baseball glove, or a computer mouse. There might be tons of ambidextrous mice out there, but when you're looking for a gaming mouse your choices shrink fast. Asus is giving lefties another option with its ROG Pugio RGB gaming mouse. ...Read more...

More than a few times, folks around here have speculated about Microsoft making its Windows OS available to consumers through a subscription. As it turns out, those speculations were mostly correct. The company has taken the wraps off of Microsoft 365, its new subscription service designed for enterprises of all sizes.Microsoft 365 includes Office 365 Enterprise, Windows 10 Enterprise, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. There are a few variations of the subscription plan. Microsoft 365 Business is designed for organizations with 300 or fewer users. Microsoft wants to make IT ...Read more...

Last week, we mentioned that Tunai hooked up the TR BBQ with a bunch of its Bluetooth Clip headphone amplifiers and Firefly music recievers. We have 10 of each to give away at the BBQ, but Tunai sent me a couple extra to put through their paces. I checked out the Clip myself, while I farmed out the Firefly testing to my sister. Her vehicle's stereo is the perfect candidate for the sort of connectivity upgrade the Firefly provides.I tested the Clip by having it drive my trusty Audio Technica ATH-AD700X headphones while paired to my [gasp!] Nokia Lumia Icon Windows Phone. Every digital feature worked as advertised, including launching Cortana for voice ...Read more...

When it comes to storage, we hardware enthusiasts tend to focus on faster, cheaper, and more reliable stuff. Enterprise buyers like those things, but companies with large data centers also like power efficiency. Toshiba's BiCS 3D TLC NAND flash memory with through-silicon via (TSV) technology claims to reduce power consumption for storage applications that must provide low latency, high throughput, and high IOPS per watt in applications like enterprise SSDs. To our knowledge, this is the first market-ready NAND flash product to use through-silicon vias in its structure. ...Read more...

Over the past couple days, a number of unsubstantiated rumors have arisen regarding the future of Intel's budget CPU darling, the $65 Pentium G4560. This two-core, four-thread chip has been a staple of our Budget Box of late thanks to its strong bang-for-the-buck. As those rumors would have it, Intel is "creating an artificial shortage" to raise prices of the G4560 at retail. Another site even reported that Intel plans to "effectively kill" the chip.While those theories are tantalizingly scandalous, they seem to be news to Intel. I brought ...Read more...

What does a primary school student really need from a PC? These days, you can do almost everything in a web browser, and more and more educational institutions are turning to Chromebooks by the day. Asus wants a piece of that pie, and its Chromebook Flip C213 is primed and ready for schoolkids who need a basic portable PC. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

If you've been having problems with Tekken 7, Final Fantasy XIV, or Little Nightmares on your Radeon, AMD has a present in store for you. The company has released the Radeon Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.1 driver to resolve problems in these three titles, particularly on Radeon 300-series cards. This release is marked as "optional," so if you're not having any issues you probably could skip it. Crypto miners may want to take note of this release, however, since this is the first Radeon Software version that supports RX 460 and RX 470-based mining cards.

Gamers have lusted after Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards since their release back in March. The air-cooled cards came first, followed by an unprecedented number of liquid-cooled boards with open-loop water blocks and all-in-one coolers strapped to them. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Hybrid Gaming 11G, the latest addition to EVGA's 14-member family of GTX 1080 Ti cards, is the first plug-and-play liquid-cooled board with the company's iCX board design and the constellation of nine temperature sensors that goes along with it. ...Read more...

Microsoft announced its Windows Azure cloud computing service back in late 2008, brought it to market in early 2010, and dropped the "Windows" part of the name in 2014. Until now, Azure software ran exclusively on hardware owned by the software giant. That's changing, however. Starting in September, enterprise customers will be able to run the new Azure Stack on servers purchased from a small group of approved vendors including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Lenovo. All three companies have Azure-ready systems available for preorder now. ...Read more...