Techreport

I'm taking this as a not-so-subtle hint from my editor that I haven't been busy enough with hardware reviews: this afternoon, yet another gaming notebook arrived at my front door. Looks like the Aorus X5 currently sitting on my desk has a new friend, the Gigabyte Aero 15 notebook. ...Read more...

Despite what you may have heard elsewhere, gamers can be a pretty charitable sort. This was first proven by the Penny Arcade Child's Play charity way back in 2003, an effort that's still ongoing. More recently, gamers have started tuning in to twice-yearly live speedrun marathons held by Games Done Quick. The group is named after the famous Quake Done Quick speedruns and takes donations during its events to support charitable causes like the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Summer Games Done Quick 2017 just had its curtain call, and the final tally is $1,781,425.20 raised across 30,080 individual donations for Doctors Without Borders. ...Read more...

Intel's launch of its Core X high-end desktop CPUs and the accompanying X299 platform has seen some controversy in overclocking enthusiast circles. The mish-mash of architectures, core counts, memory configurations, and PCIe lane allowances on the X299 platform has been the source of confusion ever since Intel's announcement, and complaints about apparent high system power draw and underspecced voltage regulation on X299 motherboards started soon after demanding overclockers got their hands on the first wave of boards. Igor Wallossek at Tom's Hardware rigged up a Core i9-7900X CPU and an MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC motherboard for a closer look at what happens when that gear is pushed to the limit. ...Read more...

Only a few months ago, Oculus reduced the price of its Rift-and-Touch bundle from $799 to $599. Apparently the company wasn't done discounting the Rift, however, because it's temporarily reducing the price of the bundle again as part of its "Summer of Rift" promotional event. During the event, stepping into VR with an Oculus Rift will cost just $399....Read more...

Apple's dispute with Qualcomm is making plenty of headlines this week, but Qualcomm isn't the only supplier with whom Apple is having a bit of a spat. Back in April, Imagination Technologies announced that Apple had decided not to use its PowerVR GPU technology in upcoming A-series SoCs. Today, Apple gave a statement to Bloomberg that not only challenges Imagination's account of the timeline of events between the two companies, but also provides information that has the potential to be legally damaging to the British firm.When it first revealed that its relationship with Apple would be coming to an end, Imagination suggested it was caught off-guard by the decision. Apple had been using the PowerVR graphics IP in various devices since the ...Read more...

With the explosion in indie game developers (and the games market in general), demand for 3D artists is at an all-time high. The thing is, 3D art is hard. Like, really hard. If you don't have the exceptional spatial skills that allow you to easily transform a 3D image in your head to a 2D image on-screen, creating tridimensional art is a time-consuming process of trial-and-error as you make a change, rotate the model, revert the change, and repeat. However, today Google says "what if you could walk around your model while you're creating it?" Enter Blocks....Read more...

Qualcomm's legal battles with Apple rage on. The chipmaker requested that the U.S. International Trade Commision (ITC) halt imports of certain iPhones and iPads into the United States, alleging that these devices violate some of Qualcomm's patents. Additionally, Qualcomm filed a separate lawsuit that seeks monetary damages for patent infringement.The devices that Qualcomm wants barred are those with cellular baseband processors supplied by anyone but the company and its affiliates. Presumably, Qualcomm is referring to chips made by Intel. However, the exact ...Read more...

Week's greetings, gerbils! The sun is out, the coal is hot, and I can almost smell the roasting meat already at the upcoming TR BBQ XIV. I'll be flying out a few days from now, and I'm looking forward to insulting meeting the people I work and virtually talk with in person. But alas, right now I'm tasked with hunting for deals, something that was done with aplomb. Today's selection is wide and appetizing... just like zgirl's ribs, I'm told.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...

You may recall around ten months ago that Shuttle released a pack of NUC competitors called the XPC nano NC02U series. No? Well that's alright, because today we're here to tell you about the XPC nano NC03U series. The new mini-PCs are fundamentally unchanged from the previous version, but Shuttle's swapped out the Skylake chips in those for the latest Kaby Lake hotness from Intel. ...Read more...

RED isn't exactly a household name, but you've seen the company's work. The camera-maker's products have been used to film movies like Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Prometheus. For many tech fans, the company's name mostly comes up when YouTubers like MKBHD and LinusTechTips talk up the company's wildly-expensive, reference-grade digital video cameras. Now, the company is working on the Hydrogen One, a phone that will bring to bear the two things the company is known best for: high-end imaging and eye-watering price tags. ...Read more...

Keyboards—even ones with fancy mechanical switches—are cheap as heck these days, but typists of the 1980s would have sneered at the plasticky tick-tick-tick of Cherry MX switches. Back in those days, we were banging away on zinc-housed monstrosities that weighed ten pounds and used buckling-spring switches. Unicomp still sells keyboards based on the IBM Model M design, but now one man has completed his quest to revive the original buckling spring keyboard: the IBM Model F.

PC hardware and computing

A number of outlets are reporting that analysts expect Samsung to overtake Intel as the world's largest manufacturer of silicon chips by revenue, in anticipation of the company's financial statements for the second quarter of 2017. Intel has dominated the number one position among chipmakers since the early 1990s, but increased demand for DRAM and NAND storage chips may push Samsung past Intel for the first time ever.Demand for memory and storage chips has exploded as datacenters and mobile devices have become centers of growth and demand for PCs has generally declined. Samsung manufactures those memory and flash chips, in addition to SoCs used in its own mobile devices and custom parts for third parties like Apple. The Motley Fool cites investment bank Nomura ...Read more...

While we recognize that not all gerbils are gamers, most of us probably put all our fancy hardware to use for some digital escapism once in a while. So, what's your rig like, folks? The latest edition of the Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out, and there are a few interesting needles buried within the haystack of data.

RGB LED illumination has definitely been the leading aesthetic trend in PC hardware over the last couple of years, ahead of the distant-second tempered glass. Manufacturers in every conceivable product category have worked color-changing lighting with varying levels of control into new and updated products. Some components have physical switches to toggle between a handful of colors, while others have rather sophisticated software with complex effects and pallets of millions of shades. Compatibility between gear from different vendors has been spotty, judging by the existence of competing ecosystems from the likes of Asus, Corsair, Gigabyte, MSI, and others. Asus is looking to bring some order to the RGB chaos with its Aura SDK that will allow programming-inclined gamers greater control over the lighting in their PCs and the surrounding environment. ...Read more...

Despite the many and important functions of cables in a computer system, plenty of users just don't want to look at them. Many system builders aren't happy with a new rig until its cables are lined up, straightened out, and tucked out of sight as much as possible. AOC thinks that there are two cables that builders haven't yet figured out how to hide: the ones connecting to the display. To address this problem, AOC has two new monitors on the market that tuck the cables away inside the monitor stand. ...Read more...

Online image hosting service Photobucket has been a favorite of Amazon, eBay and Etsy sellers (among others) for hosting pictures of their wares on display. Now, websites all over the internet are filled with placeholder images advertising an upgrade to Photobucket's Plus 500 plan ever since the company made an abrupt change in its terms of use. Some of the Photobucket's users are now accusing the company of blackmailing them for their own content. ...Read more...

Howdy folks! If you're a TR regular and have never heard about the annual BBQ at the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan, you're probably living under a rock, or a bridge, or a pineapple under the sea. Well, get out of there and come catch some sun with the rest of the crowd. You still know what "sun" is, right? The event takes place a week and a half from now on July 15 in Holland, Michigan.

What's better than snapping a few photos of a notebook inside a busy conference hall at Computex? Getting one into our hands and putting it through a few benchmarks. We saw a number of notebooks that we liked at this year's event, and the first one on our list was just delivered to my front door this morning. The Aorus X5 v7 looks like a potent little gaming rig wrapped up in a sleek exterior. ...Read more...

The many Radeons and GeForces in the TR labs aren't being harnessed for the Ethereum cryptocurrency craze, but many other prospective tycoons have been buying AMD Radeon RX 570s and Radeon RX 580s by the truckload to take a crack at getting some of that digital dinero in their wallets. That means retailers have largely been able to sell through their stocks of Polaris 10 and Polaris 20 cards even with stickers many hundreds of dollars more than AMD's suggested retail price, leaving midrange system builders without a shot at our favorite affordable graphics cards.Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 cards aren't immune from the craze, either. Our preferred GTX 1060 6GB cards are now selling for about $300 and up, while GTX 1070s are selling for nearly as much as the GTX 1080. If you're after a GTX 1060, it's still possible ...Read more...

We have already written about Nvidia's GeForce Game Ready driver version 384.76 twice: once regarding its compatibility with the Lawbreakers beta and Spider-Man: Homecoming VR, and again when users discovered the undocumented addition of DX12 support on older Fermi graphics cards. Turns out there was even more going on in that release that Nvidia didn't tell anyone about. Reddit users are reporting that the new driver enables Netflix 4K streaming on non-Insider Windows 10 PCs with Pascal graphics cards regardless of whether they have Intel Kaby Lake CPUs, and we've confirmed it on our own PCs.

Folks looking to jump on a new system but lamenting the high price of memory might want to go ahead and take the plunge. Electronics supply and manufacturing news blog Evertiq is reporting that Micron's Fab-2 in Taiwan halted production at the beginning of this month following a failure in the facility's "nitrogen gas dispensing system."The failure apparently led to the contamination of wafers and equipment in the facility. According to Evertiq, this will cut Micron Taiwan's production capacity from 125,000 wafer starts to around 60,000. ...Read more...

Folks looking to jump on a new system but lamenting the high price of memory might want to go ahead and take the plunge. Electronics supply and manufacturing news blog Evertiq is reporting that Micron's Fab-2 in Taiwan halted production at the beginning of this month following a failure in the facility's "nitrogen gas dispensing system."The failure apparently led to the contamination of wafers and equipment in the facility. According to Evertiq, this will cut Micron Taiwan's production capacity from 125,000 wafer starts to around 60,000. ...Read more...

MSI has lately associated its brand with gaming hardware that provides solid value for money. The company is continuing that tradition with its Optix monitor brand. Back in December we took a look at the 27" Optix G27C display, and now the company has put up a product page for the smaller Optix G24C version. Like the G27C before it, this monitor melds a tightly-curved Samsung VA panel with FreeSync support at up to a 144 Hz refresh rate. ...Read more...

In an odd twist of fate, Cherry MX might be better known for its mechanical keyboard switches rather than its actual keyboards. The company's steadily filling up its garage with a fleet of appealing clickers, however. The latest model in its lineup is the Cherry MX Board 1.0 TKL, a minimalist typer of the tenkeyless variety. ...Read more...

As fast as modern GPUs are, there will always demand for more horsepower. Beyond gamers looking to drive multiple 4K displays with one graphics card, there are researchers and businesses with an ever-increasing thirst for greater compute acceleration. Judging from a recent research publication, Nvidia thinks it's rapidly approaching the limits of its current GPU architectural model, so it's looking for a way forward. The idea is still in the simulation stage, but the paper proposes a Multi-Chip Module GPU (MCM-GPU) that would comprise several GPU modules integrated as a single package. ...Read more...

Their shell-shocked eggspressions cracked me up. I'm glad you guys can take a yolk.

Apacer has announced its firearm-themed PT920 Commando PCIe NVMe SSD just in time to celebrate Independence Day, the kaboom-iest of all American holidays. The PT920 Commandos are PCIe 3.0 x4 SSDs available in 240 GB and 480 GB sizes. They go into a standard PCIe slot, rather than the M.2 slots en vogue for this type of device....Read more...

Way back in 2014 when Microsoft was still finalizing DirectX 12, Nvidia pledged that all of its then-current hardware would support the new API. At the time, that meant GPUs from the Maxwell, Kepler, and Fermi families. Kepler and Maxwell DX12 support came around on day one of Windows 10's release, but Fermi languished on DirectX 11, meaning it never completely supported the OS's WDDM 2.2 standard. That is, until now: the latest 384.76 drivers quietly added DirectX 12 support for Fermi GPUs.The new feature wasn't listed in the patch notes, possibly because users have been complaining for a while about Nvidia's apparent failure to live up to its promise. The change was first spotted by a couple of sharp-eyed folks on the Guru3D forums. User ...Read more...

High refresh rates, VRR, and backlight strobing are technologies that can go a long way toward improve a gaming experience. Meanwhile, good color reproduction and support for wide color gamuts are critical for photo editing, video production, and other types of content creation. Many developers and office workers don't need any of those particular frills, but they do need high-resolution displays tuned to minimize eye strain. Asus' BE27AQLB business monitor is a 27" display designed for these and other folks that need good image quality without a headache at the end of the day. ...Read more...

When we talk about LAN parties here at TR, your mind probably conjures images of unwashed teenagers staring at CRT monitors as they frag each other in Quake. To a big group of today's grown-up gamers though, LAN parties meant hooking up a quartet of Xboxes for some sixteen-player Halo action. If you pine for those days—or simply miss whacking people with plasma swords on Xbox Live—you should keep a close eye on Installation 01, a community-made love letter to the classic Halo series. The development team behind the title just recently announced that it has the tacit approval of the current stewards of the Halo property, 343 Industries. ...Read more...

Are you familiar with real-time projection mapping, gerbils? It's a complicated technology that uses advanced spatial sensors in combination with clever geometry mapping (read: tons of math) to project an image that moves and shifts along with the surface it's being projected on. This video from Panasonic and creative studio P.I.C.S. demonstrates the technology's current state-of-the-art. Watch it until the end because it's a little slow to show the really impressive stuff....Read more...

Top-of-the-mountain graphics cards with factory-issue waterblocks ready for integration into open-loop cooling systems are awesome. The Gigabyte Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Waterforce WB Xtreme Edition 11G that we covered a couple weeks ago is an amazing piece of hardware, but not everyone has the stomach or patience to deal with the custom tubing and all the other minor and major headaches involved in building a custom loop. Buyers looking for liquid-cooled performance without the implicit headaches have another option in Gigabyte's just-announced Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Waterforce Xtreme Edition 11G. ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils! The 4th of July is close, and I bet more than a few of you are already setting up fireworks cannons in your backyards. For me, it's just another day... that happens to be a day off. So, thanks for that! A lot of stores are running their 4th-of-July promotions, and Newegg and Best Buy are predictably among them. You want to buy some hardware to celebrate, right? Here's what we found 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...

LCD and plasma TVs keep getting bigger, and what used to be considered large panels keep dropping in price. Some folks want an even bigger screen, though. Xiaomi is offering up a 1080p short-throw laser projector for buyers looking to play video on an area as large as 150" diagonal in a shallow room. The resolution and specifications aren't as amazing as Dell's S718QL 4K projector, but the image is larger and the price tag is quite a bit smaller. ...Read more...

As we get further out from the idea of keeping real, physical records of things, protecting our digital documents is more important than ever. With ransomware like WannaCry out there trying to lock up files for extortion, it's also more complicated than ever. Microsoft is making some security-related additions to the Fall Creators Update that might help mitigate ransomware's effectiveness. ...Read more...

The launch of Intel's latest X-Series processors might seem like a summertime Christmas present for overclocking guru Roman "der8auer" Hartung. Unfortunately, Hartung doesn't seem to be happy with his gift. In a blunt and scathing video on his YouTube channel, he makes the bold claim that overclocking on X299 motherboards right now is limited due to what he regards as poor VRM heatsink design....Read more...

If you're fond of the looks of that My Passport SSD but not so keen on its per-gigabyte pricing, then check out WD's latest: the revised My Passport Ultra external hard drives. These drives borrow their styling from the My Passport SSDs, then combine it with USB 3.0 interfaces and 2.5" hard drives up to 4 TB in capacity. ...Read more...

MSI has hatched the Clutch GM60 and Clutch GM70 to add to its brood of dragon-branded gaming mice. Both rodents have swappable top covers and side grips on top of de rigeur RGB LED illumination. The main button switches are made by Omron and the scroll wheels come from ALPS. Both models have a total of eight input buttons. The hybrid wired-wireless Clutch GM70 mouse adds a pairing button and a power switch for the wireless mode. ...Read more...

If you need an external hard drive that won't suffer a head crash when your personal artillery piece fires, Adata can hook you up. The company's launching the HD710 Pro external hard drive family that builds on the original HD710 by adding IPX8 dust and water resistance, as well as "military grade" shock resistance. Along with releasing the HD710 Pro drives, Adata is also adding a 4 TB model to its HD650 series. ...Read more...

A graphics card driver development team's work is never done. Nvidia's software department has just released the latest GeForce Game Ready 384.76 drivers in time for the Lawbreakers "Rise Up" beta. The other highlight of the release is support for Spider-Man: Homecoming VR. The fast-paced Lawbreakers is an FPS with an emphasis on omni-directional movement. It's also the first release from Cliff Blezinski and Arjun Brussee's Boss Key Productions game development studio. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

The memory card shelf at your local electronics shop is going to have a few empty hooks soon. Longtime media storage brand Lexar is being discontinued by parent company Micron. ...Read more...

Alongside its rollout of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition cards, AMD is releasing some tools for the designers who'll be putting that silicon to work. The company's Radeon ProRender photorealistic rendering engine is now available as a plug-in for Blender and Solidworks. ...Read more...

The first smartphones had full, physical keyboards featuring not only the entire alphabet, but all the punctuation and other keys necessary to communicate. Since then, though, makers have been working to remove every single button and port from each new generation of devices. Qualcomm is taking one more step in that direction with its new under-screen fingerprint sensor, shown off in its prototype phase in a modified Vivo XPlay 6 phone at Mobile World Congress 2017....Read more...

Toshiba's announcement of four-bit QLC NAND flash isn't the only big event in the realm of flash memory production today. The company has also let the world know that it's begun producing fourth-generation BiCS TLC 3D NAND silicon, developed in a joint venture with Western Digital. The new generation chips stack 96 layers in order to build 256 Gb (32 GB) packages. ...Read more...

A lot of companies are pouring a lot of money into accelerating and improving deep learning tasks, but how do you tell which hardware offers are the best value for this purpose? Naturally, with benchmarks. China's Baidu—a company that can be fairly described as a Sino-Asian Google—operates a research division called Baidu Research. Last year, the research launched the open-source DeepBench tool to wide acclaim. Now the company has released a major update for the tool that includes benchmarks for deep learning inference as well as training. ...Read more...

Data density is critically important to manufacturers of flash storage chips. Increasing the number of bits in a given amount of die space allows for reduced manufacturing costs, potentially lower power requirements, and gets large amounts of information into ever-shrinking packages. Flash memory comes in flavors with a single bit per cell (SLC) to three bits per cell (TLC), and now Toshiba has announced that it has started manufacturing quad-level cell (QLC) 3D NAND chips. Like it says on the tin, these chips are capable of holding four bits per cell. ...Read more...

After the well-publicized WannaCry ransomware attack this spring, there's been some pressure on Microsoft to improve the security features of Windows 10. The company says that its customers have been asking for an integrated, comprehensive security tool that provides analysis and protection over and above what's currently baked into the operating system. To make that happen, Microsoft is reintroducing an old friend: the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET)....Read more...

Man, I can't wait for that FE. No, not the Vega Frontier Edition—I'm talking about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Fandom Edition. That's right, gerbils—the most notorious handset in recent memory is making a return to the market in the form of refurbished handsets with "different components" inside. ...Read more...