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It seems to me that this year's TR BBQ has approached at a significantly faster pace than any previous outing. According to the calendar, the July 15 date is only a week earlier than last year's event. However, for some reason time is just flying this time around. If you've been thinking about making the trip to Holland, MI this year, let this be a last reminder that the day is drawing near. Hit the BBQ thread for the details and firm up your summer plans.

It seems that lately every storage semiconductor company is engaged in an all-out war and crowing about chips made with an ever-increasing number of layers. Samsung's the latest to talk up its silicon cookies. The company says it's ramping production of its 64-layer V-NAND chips now, and it expects half of its V-NAND flash production to be of that type by the end of the year. 64-layer V-NAND previously began shipping to "key IT customers" in January. ...Read more...

Unless you happened to miss yesterday's reveal, all the talk in the graphics card world right now is about AMD's Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards. The price reveal is interesting enough if it's accurate, but there's another tidbit of as-yet-unofficial info that found its way into the wild—total board power ratings, courtesy of pro graphics retailer Exxact. Steal your budgie's salt lick and read on.First, the exact rumored figures. The air-cooled standard-issue Vega FE card with a blower cooler is rated for a square 300W of "max board TDP." Meanwhile, its under-water cousin can pull a whopping 375W at peak. These numbers may look a ...Read more...

The capabilities of machines doing network-attached storage (NAS) duties have expanded a great deal over time. Synology's DiskStation DS1517 and DiskStation DS1817 promise to deliver "private cloud" functionality to small and medium-sized businesses. Experienced model number decoders have probably already guessed that the DS1517 can hold up to five disks and the DS1817 can pack eight drives. Both models can be expanded by adding up to two of Synology's DX517 five-disk expansion units. A DS1817 and a pair of expansion boxes can hold a staggering 180 TB total. ...Read more...

A few days ago Globalfoundries announced that its "7LP" 7-nm FinFET process is ready for prime-time, meaning that customer companies can start building actual products on the process. That's a pretty quick turnaround, given that the company announced its plans to skip the 10-nm node and move directly to 7 nm in September of last year. GloFo says that compared to its 14-nm products, its 7LP process can offer a 40% performance improvement in the same power envelope or a whopping 60% power reduction within the same frequency range. ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils! I'll be heading to a dentist appointment shortly, but somehow I'm in a good mood. That's probably because it's Friday and I get to ooh and aah at fancy hardware with low price tags. Needless to say, I fully expect that mood to change after my appointment. Here are the cheap deals we came across 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...

If you can believe it, some people actually prefer the feel of a laptop keyboard to something beefier. Most likely, these folks enjoy the short throw and rapid response of the low-profile keys. Those aficionados can look forward to Microsoft's new "Modern Keyboard with Fingerprint ID." Nearly identical externally to the recently-released Surface Keyboard, the Modern keyboard adds an optional wired connection and—obviously—a fingerprint scanner....Read more...

AMD's Radeon Vega cards may be the most anticipated product family of the year, and now we may have an idea of how much the first cards in that series will sell for. Retailers SabrePC in the USA and Scan in the UK have product pages up for the Frontier Edition, as spotted by the eagle-eyed folks at VideoCardz. Assuming those product pages are accurate, the air-cooled Frontier Edition will run $1199, while the liquid-cooled version of the card will run a whopping $1799. Across the pond, the air-cooled card will go for £1139.99, while the liquid-cooled FE will go for £1656.49. ...Read more...

Thermaltake's just launched an update to its Versa N27 chassis. Whether you choose the black or white version of the case, you now get a trio of red-LED 120-mm fans. Two of those come pre-installed in the front of the case, while the third is set as an exhaust. The grilled intake on the front and the translucent panel of smoky acrylic on the side allow "fashion-conscious gamers" to bask in the crimson glow of their LED fans. ...Read more...

Adata showed off a whole batch of M.2 NVMe SSDs for enterprise and enthusiast systems at Computex at the beginning of the month. The company is back after just a couple of weeks to introduce the IM2P3388 family of "industrial-grade" SSDs. All IM2P3388 models are NVMe drives using the M.2 2280 form factor and are built with 3D MLC NAND flash chips orbiting Silicon Motion drive controllers. Adata is offering up four different capacities ranging from 128 GB all the way up to 1 TB. Sequential read speeds up to 2500 MB/s and writes up to 1100 MB/s are promised, though those high speeds likely apply to the largest model. ...Read more...

Nature Photography Day - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

One of the more unique set of products we saw this year at Computex came from Streacom. If you're not familiar with the brand, it's likely because it's one of the smaller and newer manufacturers around. The company tends to march to the beat of its own drum—"we don't do RGB," one of the representatives proudly relayed to us soon after we arrived at the Streacom room in Taipei 101. Streacom's signature products are high-end cases with an emphasis on quality materials, passive cooling, and silent operation. ...Read more...

What do you think about Tesoro, gerbils? I must confess that I haven't had a chance to lay fingers on one of the company's products yet. Tesoro sells a range of PC peripherals and accessories mostly centered around cost-effective gamer gear. We caught up with Tesoro at Computex and got some pictures of three upcoming keyboards from the company. ...Read more...

Mechanical gaming keyboards are wonderful, but the make and model of the key switches are only part of a luxurious typing experience. Cooler Master's new MasterKeys S PBT and MasterKeys L PBT keyboards come with keycaps made from polybutylene terepthalate (PBT) plastic rather than the usual acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), perched atop Cherry MX switches in Blue, Brown, Green, Red, and Silver varieties. As gerbils may have already guessed, the MasterKeys S PBT has a tenkeyless layout, while the MasterKeys L is a full-sized affair. ...Read more...

We just talked about one of Dell's new fancy monitors, but we realized that it's a puny 38" across. Surely that in this day and age a person can't possibly be expected to watch a postage stamp-sized display like that, so we found something a little better: Dell's new S718QL 4K projector. ...Read more...

Dell is a well-regarded name among computer types in general, but the company's display division might be its most lauded. There's a new UltraSharp ultra-wide monitor on the horizon, and it looks mighty fine. Say hello to the Dell U3818DW. ...Read more...

With the current popularity of tower coolers and water cooling systems, it's easy to forget the days when fans used to point down at CPU heatsinks. be quiet! hasn't forgotten, and the Shadow Rock TF 2 combines the shape of old-school CPU coolers with the larger fans used in modern heatsinks. The TF 2 is designed for applications where there's limited room for a cooler, though users obsessed with the temperature and airflow near the power delivery circuitry may equally appreciate its design. ...Read more...

Aerocool had a variety of cases and peripherals to show off at Computex this year. We've already covered the company's new Project 7 lineup, so we'll focus on the other products on display. ...Read more...

Razer's Blade Stealth laptops cram a heaping helping of high-end parts into a slim-and-trim package, but the screen and its associated bezels have lagged somewhat behind ultrabooks like Dell's XPS 13 models that have punched the display out to the very edges of the lid. Razer has made tangible progress on this front with the 13.3" screen in its updated Blade Stealth. ...Read more...

At E3, LG is showing what the company's VP of marketing calls "the ultimate gaming monitor." That's quite the bold claim, though the 34UC89G certainly does look nice. LG's new display is a 34" curved ultra-wide monitor rocking an IPS panel with a 2560x1080 resolution. The native refresh rate is 144 Hz, and there's support for Nvidia's G-Sync. ...Read more...

Enermax's booth at Computex had no shortage of hardware on display, but we've talked about the majority of it before. Power supplies that the company launched at CES as well as the NeoChanger pump-reservoir combo were both proudly presented. However, Enermax was also exhibiting its newest computer cases: the Saberay tool-less chassis and Equilence silent tower. ...Read more...

Memory was a hot topic at Computex 2017. Various brands were scrambling to overclock kits for X299, market DIMMs specifically to Ryzen builders, or simply festoon ordinary sticks with RGB LEDs. Of course, Geil was in the thick of it. ...Read more...

Having a house that's too big for one Wi-Fi router is decidedly a first-world problem, but plenty of companies have put considerable resources towards solving it. Eero was among the first on the scene with mesh Wi-Fi kits for the home, and now the company is releasing its second-generation systems along with with a home networking security subscription service called Eero Plus. ...Read more...

I'm around sewing machines nearly every day and I still think they work by magic.

The PC sound card has become something of an endangered species as more machines have limited upgrade options and onboard sound improves. Creative thinks there's life left in the gaming sound card market, though. The company just launched the Sound BlasterX AE-5, packing what it calls "the world's best PC headphone amp." This is a computer part aimed at gamers in the year 2017, so of course the sound card is festooned with programmable RGB LED illumination. ...Read more...

We took a pass through SilverStone's booth at Computex at the beginning of the month. Gerbils acquainted with the company's catalog know that it offers an expansive array of accessories. We're going to be focusing on the case prototypes on display at the show. ...Read more...

Besides the news that Alienware has a lock on pre-built machines using AMD's upcoming Threadripper CPUs (at least among tier-one OEMs), the company also let us know that it has some peripherals coming out. Two new monitors are on the way from Dell's extraterrestrial gaming brand, as well as a pair of keyboards and a pair of mice. Let's take a look at the monitors first. ...Read more...

AMD is setting the high-end processor market abuzz this year with its Threadripper CPUs, and Alienware is getting in on the game by sewing up the exclusive OEM launch partner spot for those many-core chips. Among prebuilt PCs, the upcoming Area-51 Threadripper Edition will be the only way to get up to 16 Zen cores and 32 threads in a system from a major manufacturer until the end of the year, according to PCWorld. DIYers will still be able to build a Threadripper system from scratch, though. Alienware says the Threadripper Edition will come factory-overclocked across all of its cores, but that's about all the company is revealing about the system at this time.

Lian Li needs no introduction to an audience of gerbils, as the company has been putting together and purveying some of the finest aluminum computer cases for twenty years. We met with the company at Computex to have a look at the company's wave of upcoming products, and we focused on seven new cases. Two of the cases have a new Alpha branding, while four of the other models can switch from flat to upright orientations as you like.

Cooler Master was showing off all kinds of goodies at Computex, so here's a quick roundup of the stuff we thought was most interesting in the PC enclosure, CPU cooler, and input device categories.

There's hardly a shortage of options at the budget end of the SSD market. Plextor's new S3 series SSDs—comprising a pair of drives, the S3G and S3C—join that particular crowd, but still one-up some of the competition thanks to their 256 MB DDR3 cache. The new units utilize a SATA interface and 14-nm Hynix planar NAND flash. ...Read more...

During the pre-show festivities for the PC Gaming Show at E3, Intel revealed the launch date for its Core X series of CPUs. The first Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X chips will go up for preorder Monday, June 19, and shipments will begin "the following week." The products launching at that time range from the four-core, four-thread Core i5-7640K all the way up to the 10-core, 20-thread Core i9-7900X.a Watch live video ...Read more...

RGB LED illumination seems like a trend with staying power in the enthusiast PC hardware market. Some consumers like it for the Unreal Tournament-inspired multi-colored lighting and fancy effects. Manufacturers have to love the ability to make a single "RGB" model that buyers can customize instead of offering parts in six or more different color options. Multi-zone RGB LED control has become a fixture of high-end motherboards, but Cooler Master's creatively-named RGB LED Controller brings four output channels to the disco party. ...Read more...

Did you see that Concept Zeus mouse that Corsair showed us at Computex? It's a pretty clever idea: combine the latency and power benefits of a wired mouse with the untethered freedom of a wireless mouse. Logitech apparently thinks it's a smart idea too, because the blue-G team just announced Powerplay, its own take on the concept. ...Read more...

Our boys Tony and Adam stopped by Patriot's hotel room to chat at Computex last week. The company was showing a number of products, including the Viper V770 keyboard it launched around CES as well as an RGB LED-equipped mousepad and some memory equally festooned with LEDs. However, the real items of interest in the room were a trio of new SSDs that the company has coming out soon. ...Read more...

A little while back, during the 2017 Build conference, Microsoft talked up the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (FCU). The company made a fair amount of noise about the upcoming enhancements in this service pack update, and today Windows Insiders can get a good look at the new shiny: the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16215 has now hit the Fast ring, and it's a whopper. Grab a knife and a fork, and let's dig in.During Build , Microsoft talked about an improved design language in the FCU. The first visible applications of those concepts are a tweaked Start menu, and a redesigned ...Read more...

New games are hitting shelves and older ones are going on sale? Must be summertime. Nvidia's staying one step ahead of the market with with its Game Ready 382.53 drivers, which pack optimizations for the recently-launched Dirt 4 and the upcoming Nex Machina....Read more...

Good afternoon, gerbils and gerbilettes. It's a beautiful day outside—sunny and fair, with only faint wisps of clouds. Even still, I am here laboring intensively for just for you. The journey through online storefronts was arduous, but we have a selection of goods for your new (or existing) setup. You better appreciate this, and buy something!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...

The ranks of gaming monitors with quantum-dot-enhanced LED backlighting has grown a bit today with Samsung's CHG70 and CHG90 displays. The new monitors are the first FreeSync 2-compliant displays, meaning that they support HDR, wide color gamuts, and the ability to communicate those characteristics to the host display adapter. All of these screens use VA panels with 1800R curvatures. ...Read more...

Summertime is the season for new hardware announcements, and EVGA is taking advantage of the moment to expand its selection of cases. EVGA's current DG-8 chassis series has a striking design and intriguing options, but the pricing starts pretty high and only goes up. With its new DG-7 series of computer cases, EVGA looks to augment its chassis lineup with models with elegant touches at affordable prices. ...Read more...

It's a new month, and that means there's a new second digit in AMD's Radeon driver version number. The latest release from the red team, version 17.6.1, hit yesterday afternoon after we'd closed up shop. The update has performance improvements for Dirt 4 and Prey, but it appears to primarily be a bugfix release. ...Read more...

Logitech says that its latest G233 Prodigy and G433 7.1 wired gaming headsets are designed for everyday life, and their detachable boom microphones, comfort-first design and materials choices, and multi-device compatibility bear out this claim. Both models also sport detachable cables that allow the headsets to easily work with mobile devices, game consoles, or PCs. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

The ride never ends, gerbils. Fresh from Computex, we now turn our eyes toward next week's E3 event in Los Angeles, as well as the simultaneous InfoComm 2017 exhibition in Orlando. LG is one of the "supporting partners" of InfoComm, so naturally the company is debuting a number of monitors (PDF) at the show. The highlights are a trio of 4K monitors intended to maximize desktop workspace, and a quartet of business-oriented 1080p displays.

Intel's push toward 10-nm production continues. The latest news on the street comes from a tweet in which the company says its Cannon Lake chips are "on track" and that its Ice Lake follow-up chips have been "taped in," which is to say that they've potentially reached the final design milestone before being sent to the company's foundries.Another milestone for 10nm: Cannon Lake on track and we’ve now taped in ...Read more...

Some things are better late than never. At its yearly developers conference, PCI-SIG announced the PCI Express 4.0 specification to its members. As expected, the updated I/O technology will offer twice the bandwidth of PCIe 3.x while retaining full backwards compatibility.Although it started as a key I/O component in PCs, PCIe now serves as the interconnect for any number of devices, including those in the server, storage, and mobile markets. The full details ...Read more...

If that headline has left you scratching your head, don't worry—I wouldn't have gotten it 12 hours ago. The short version is that Chrome 59 comes with upgraded parts for its V8 JavaScript engine. The Ignition interpreter and TurboFan optimizing compiler have both been part of V8 for a while, but now the stewards of Chrome have decided that the new parts are ready for prime-time. ...Read more...

The festivities at Computex 2017 are officially over, but there are more than a few pictures left on the camera roll for us to share. Deepcool had a number of intriguing cases on display at the event, so let's dig in and take a look. ...Read more...

Apple rolled out its proprietary Horizon screen repair machines to its 500 repair centers and stores three years ago when the iPhone 5 debuted. The machines have been shrouded in mystery, as the company never even formally acknowledged their existence. According to Reuters, some of those machines will be leaving the confines of Apple's walled gardens for new homes inside Best Buy stores and other locations around the world. Apple reportedly plans to send Horizon machines to "about 400 authorized third-party repair centers in 25 countries."