Techreport

At its Financial Analyst Day last week, AMD created a buzz by announcing the availability of its Radeon Vega Frontier Edition pro graphics card, set to launch late next month. In subsequent discussions, the company remained cagey about when it expected consumer cards powered by Vega GPUs to arrive. AMD CEO Lisa Su shed slightly more light on this issue today at J.P. Morgan's Global Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference.In an interview with J.P. Morgan analyst Harlan Sur , Su said that would-be Vega customers will see "the enthusiast gaming platform, the machine learning platform, [and] the professional graphics platform very soon thereafter," ...Read more...

Back at CES, Samsung announced the Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Pro. The two machines are externally-identical magnesium-cased convertibles poised to fill the curious market niche of "high-end Chromebook." The only difference between them is the choice of processor. The Chromebook Plus uses a Rockchip-manufactured and Google-approved OP1 ARM-based SoC, while the Pro taps Intel for its processing power. The Plus model came out in February, but the Pro is only just hitting the market. ...Read more...

The never-ending beat of graphics driver updates just keeps on thumping along. Nvidia's software team is the group handling the sticks today, and the result is the 382.33 version of the GeForce Game Ready drivers. The big news is support for upcoming PC releases of Tekken 7 and Star Trek Bridge Crew. ...Read more...

By most accounts, Microsoft has done a pretty good job of iterating and expanding its Surface hybrid tablet machines since their introduction at the beginning of the Windows 8 era. One of the original purposes of the Surface line was likely to provoke other Windows PC builders to explore novel form factors. If that was the goal, HP's refreshed line of portable PCs makes it look like Microsoft's push was successful. ...Read more...

AMD launched its high-end Ryzen processors first and saved the lineup's mid-range offerings for later. Now that Ryzen 5 processors have been out on the market and Ryzen 3 processors are getting closer, it appears that Asus thought it was a good time to announce a pair of upper-midrange AM4 motherboards. These new offerings are the ROG Strix X370-F Gaming and ROG Strix B350-F Gaming. ...Read more...

AMD launched its high-end Ryzen processors first and saved the lineup's mid-range offerings for later. Now that Ryzen 5 processors have been out on the market and Ryzen 3 processors are getting closer, it appears that Asus thought it was a good time to announce a pair of upper-midrange AM4 motherboards. These new offerings are the ROG Strix X370-F Gaming and ROG Strix B350-F Gaming. ...Read more...

If the Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 cards are too much for your build, but the RX 550 is too little, perhaps the RX 560 is just right. AMD's refreshed Polaris chip is showing up aboard more cards like MSI's Radeon RX 560 Aero ITX OC. The card comes in flavors with 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5 memory running at 7 GT/sec. ...Read more...

For myself, I like my PC to be used and not seen or heard. Some people are into ostentatious displays of processing power, though. Those enthusiasts should check out Lian-Li's PC-O12WX. This aluminum-and-glass structure is a uniquely-designed mid-tower case that can put a pair of dual-slot graphics on ostentatious display. ...Read more...

Not every gaming system needs an overclocked CPU and memory. Some folks just want to buy their chip of choice, pick up some inexpensive memory, and a graphics card and go on with their lives. Asus' ROG Strix B250I Gaming is designed for the gamer that wants the bling and blinkenlights of an enthusiast motherboard without paying for the extra hardware needed for CPU overclocking. To wit, the board sports the aesthetic features of Asus' other ROG Strix boards in a smaller size with a smaller price tag. ...Read more...

When people are shopping for a new gaming laptop, I tend to point them in the direction of MSI, Gigabyte, or Asus. If they're feeling spendy, I'll direct them to a Clevo reseller. Perhaps we shouldn't discount the big OEMs' offerings entirely, though. Lenovo's latest luggable, the Legion Y920 gaming laptop, ticks a lot of boxes on the "high-end gaming laptop" application form. ...Read more...

Graphics driver optimization is a seemingly never-ending task. AMD's previous Radeon Software update focused on improving performance in Arkane Studios' survival-horror-action reboot of the Prey franchise. The driver team apparently kept digging for extra performance, though. Today's Radeon Software update, numbered 17.5.2, adds a boost for Prey of up to 4.5% on the RX 580. That's atop the previous release's claimed 4.7% improvement. ...Read more...

These gerbilssss... theys conssstantly out on the prowl. Tricksy gerbilses. I knows what they wantses, my preciousss hardware. But I gives it not to them, no, my preciousss. I musst find distractions for them. I musst fish out tasty deals, let them have those instead. Rabid gerbilses, they never leaves me alone. Fine, heress dealss, goes away, gerbilsses!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...

Fingerprint sensors are rapidly becoming the standard tool for securing mobile devices. Synaptics believes that these sensors typically aren't as safe as users think, however, especially in laptops. To prove its point, the company recently set up a demo in which it quickly gained access to a notebook and a smartphone by means of a tiny $25 device.

Amazon has pretty much abandoned of the high-end tablet space since the retirement of 2014's second-generation Fire HDX, focusing instead on low-end devices with enough power for content consumption. This trend continues with the release of the retailer's new Fire 7 and Fire 8 tablets. Both machines pack 1.3 GHz quad-core SoCs of undisclosed provenance and microSD card slots for extra storage. Amazon says the updated IPS displays on the new units deliver better contrast and crisper text than the outgoing models. Perhaps the biggest news is that Amazon added its Alexa assistant to the new tablets. ...Read more...

We all love solid-state storage. Modern SSDs are fast, dense, and not too expensive, relatively speaking. That is, relative to what they used to cost. SSDs are still pretty expensive compared to hard drives, so if you need to cram tons of terabytes of data into a server somewhere (and you don't work for a national laboratory), you probably want spinning rust. WD can actually let you do it ten terabytes at a time now with its new 10TB Red and Red Pro hard drives. ...Read more...

Careful fish, you don't want to get addicted to royalty-free stock images...

There's a strong argument to be made that current virtual-reality hardware isn't easy enough to set up and use. At its I/O event this week, Google shed some light on two upcoming products that aim to make augmented and virtual reality easier to dive into and more comfortable to use: a standalone VR headset and a smartphone equipped with augmented-reality tools....Read more...

If you're on a budget, can't use a lot of mobile data, or just like to keep things simple, a super-powered smartphone like the Galaxy S8 or Google Pixel XL doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an enormous worldwide market of users with limited budgets and limited data access. At its Google I/O conference, the company announced Android Go, a configuration of Android aimed squarely at budget handset markets.You might remember Android One a couple years ago, a similar effort that focused on low-priced phones. This time around, instead of focusing on the phones themselves, Google is sticking to what it knows best—software. Android Go is a configuration of Android O that's optimized for smartphones with just 512MB to 1GB of RAM and will activate automatically when installed ...Read more...

If you keep up with technology news at all, you've probably heard a rumor over the last few months that Intel is licensing, or planning to license, AMD graphics technology for use in its IGPs. The idea seems to have had its genesis in a forum post on HardOCP, and it didn't take long for other sites to pick it up and run with it. Giving further energy to the rumor is the fact that Intel made its final payment to Nvidia as part of a lawsuit-settling patent-licensing agreement this March.We now know that rumor is simply incorrect. In a statement given to Barron's Tech Trader Daily column, Intel explicitly says that " the recent rumors that [it] has licensed AMD's graphics technology are untrue ...Read more...

Intel's Optane Memory tech showcases what 3D Xpoint memory can do on a limited scale, but the potential for Optane extends well beyond hard-drive acceleration. Intel began shipping Optane DIMMs to partners for testing early this year, and yesterday the company committed to delivering Optane DIMMs as a product called "Intel persistent memory" alongside a refresh of its Xeon Processor Scalable family called Cascade Lake. Both the persistent memory product and Cascade Lake CPUs will arrive sometime in 2018.

With heatsinks on RAM getting taller and flashier by the day, tower-style CPU coolers have had less space to work their magic. Cryorig's H7 Quad Lumi aims to provide powerful cooling performance while maintaining a trim and compact profile. ...Read more...

The world of big iron computing seems to be laser-focused on machine learning these days. Whether it's graphics chip makers Nvidia and AMD producing silicon exclusively for machine learning, or search engine Bing using custom FPGAs to accelerate repetitive mathematical operations, every technology company these days seems to have an AI accelerator strategy.Google isn't resting on its laurels, either. At its I/O conference today, the company introduced a second-generation version of its Tensor Processor Unit from a year ago , called the Cloud TPU. Google can combine multiple Cloud TPUs into four-chip clusters, and the cluster pictured below offers up to a claimed 180 TFLOPS of floating-point capability ...Read more...

We have already written today about EVGA and MSI graphics cards based on Nvidia's smallest Pascal graphics chip, the GeForce GT 1030. Not wanting to be left out, Gigabyte is also prepping a pair of low-profile takes on Nvidia's latest. The GeForce GT 1030 Low Profile 2G has a single-slot cooler and a low-profile design. The GeForce GT 1030 Silent Low Profile 2G has the same low-profile design but sports only a single large heatsink. The two cards otherwise share the same feature set and the same clock speeds. ...Read more...

MSI clearly wants to make sure that it can serve every available customer looking for a GeForce GT 1030. The company has no less than six models coming out based on the peewee Pascal, including passively-cooled cards, low-profile cards, low-profile passively-cooled cards, and even one with a standard dual-slot GPU cooler attached. ...Read more...

During a portion of its 2017 Financial Analyst Day, AMD made a splash by officially showing its 32-core Epyc (née Naples) server chips. Each of those chips comprises four eight-core Zen units, connects up to 8 memory channels, and has 128 lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity.Those specs are enticing enough on their own, but the first questions on every datacenter administrator's mind are how exactly do these CPUs perform and how exactly does AMD intend to fit them onto rack units. As it turns out, AMD isn't trying to aim cannonballs at top-end Xeon ...Read more...

AMD's Vega Frontier Edition reveal yesterday provided us with some important pieces of the performance puzzle for one of the most hotly-anticipated graphics chips of 2017. Crucially, AMD disclosed the Frontier Edition card's pixel fill rate and some rough expectations for floating-point throughput—figures that allow us to make some educated guesses about Vega's final clock speeds and how it might stack up to Nvidia's latest and greatest for both gaming and compute performance.Dollars and sense

The low-end discrete graphics card space has seen something of a resurgence after a long nap. The last new cards introduced into the sub-$100 space were based on AMD's GCN 1.0 Radeon R5 240 from 2013 and Nvidia's Kepler GT 730 from mid-2014. AMD's Radeon RX 550 has had the low-end space all to itself for the last couple of weeks, but EVGA graphics cards based on Nvidia's GT 1030 are now available to shoppers looking to add a little bit of graphics grunt and next-generation display outputs to new and existing systems. The company has three different models on display, each in its own unique form factor. ...Read more...

A few years ago, Corsair was inside our computers. Then the company's products spilled onto our desks. Now, like a black, red, and yellow virus, Corsair's on the floor right beneath us. The company is getting into the gaming chair market with its new T1 Race Gaming Chair. ...Read more...

It seems that lately, 10 out of every five news pieces are about machine learning. During its Financial Analyst Day presentation, AMD talked a lot about going after high-margin, fast-growing markets. Machine learning is one of those markets, and AMD has unveiled its first product made specifically for compute performance. Meet the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, meant for "data scientists, immersion engineers, and product designers." ...Read more...

We regularly write about the latest water blocks and accessories from EK Water Blocks and the legion of Asetek's all-in-one liquid cooler partners. It seems that we rarely flip bits related to Swiftech, one of the oldest outfits in the PC liquid cooling market. The company has expanded its range of parts with a pair of waterblocks designed for use with Nvidia's fire-breathing GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card, as well as other models based on Nvidia's reference PCB. The cooling specialist's Komodo NV-Eco and Komodo NV-LE full-coverage waterblocks are both CNC-machined from chrome-plated copper and acrylic but differ in aesthetic details like the cover panel and illumination. ...Read more...

AMD's Ryzen 7 CPUs already offer eight cores and 16 threads for those who can take advantage of as much multithreaded compute power as possible, but some folks need even more. For those power users, AMD will be introducing CPUs with up to 16 cores and 32 threads this summer, and they'll be called Ryzen Threadrippers. ...Read more...

Here's a big announcement from AMD's 2017 Financial Analyst Day: Ryzen is finally coming to laptops and notebooks. AMD senior VP Jim Anderson pulled the cat out of the bag. The Ryzen Mobile CPUs won't just bring a lower-TDP Zen architecture—the CPUs will pack on-die Vega graphics cores, too. ...Read more...

The news continues to flow out of AMD's Financial Analyst Day this afternoon. During his presentation about the Zen core and the company's future product roadmaps, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster confirmed that the company's Vega-powered products will arrive "in June." ...Read more...

Staff deliberations are over and the winners of our Fur E Napkin Sketch Contest have been chosen. A large percentage of the entries got votes from the TR staff, but in the end, three crazy ideas rose to the top.First place goes to long-time gerbil ludi and the Coolin'art. In ludi's own words, the Coolin'art is all about "bringing the convenience of the kitchen to the PC accessories market." Ludi went above and beyond the contest requirements by building, ...Read more...

We first heard about AMD's Zen-powered Naples datacenter CPUs back in March, and at its Financial Analyst Day today, AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed that these many-core CPUs will be called Epyc. ...Read more...

Everybody loves the high performance of NVMe SSDs, but the fact remains that packing a whole bunch of them into a server can be problematic. CPUs only have so many PCIe lanes to go around, after all. The SAS-3 interface isn't going anywhere for a while yet, and HGST's Ultrastar SS330 series SSDs makes good use of it. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Lian-Li makes a lot of computer cases, but as an overclocker, I think my favorites are the test benches. The company's latest ATX test bench chassis is called the PC-T70, and it can change from an open-air bench to an enclosed environment (not unlike a regular PC case) at a moment's notice. ...Read more...

Apple and Samsung get the lion's share of attention in the high-end smartphone space, but competitors like HTC keep plugging away, trying to unseat the incumbent handsets by any means possible. HTC is seemingly throwing every idea it can come up with into its U11 flagship smartphone in the hopes of catching buyers' eyes with an long spec sheet, novel features, and an attractive glass-enrobed water-resistant body. ...Read more...

Late last year, we heard that Microsoft was working on bringing Windows 10—not Windows RT, or Windows 10 RT, or something like that—over to ARM processors. In December, Qualcomm and Microsoft demonstrated Windows 10 running on a Snapdragon 835 ARM SoC. Now, the company says that not only is Windows 10 running on ARM, but that standard x86 applications can run seamlessly on those CPUs with little performance loss....Read more...

A few weeks ago, SK Hynix announced that it would start mass-producing 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory, and teased its plans to have the high-speed graphics memory show up in graphics cards by early 2018. Imagine our surprise, then, when GDDR6 made it first entry into SK Hynix's databook—but not quite at the blistering speed the company initially claimed.The two GDDR6 products that SK Hynix lists in its databook operate at 12 Gbps and 14 Gbps, lower than the 16 Gbps that the company talked about in its initial news. Those are still respectable ...Read more...

Not too long ago, we briefly reported on the fully-loaded Asus ROG Crosshair VI Hero AM4 motherboard, powered by an X370 chipset. Even though it's only been a short while, Asus is already making a variation of that mobo, the ROG Crosshair VI Hero Wi-Fi AC. Like the name implies, the major feature over the previous model is the presence of a 802.11ac 2x2 Wi-Fi adapter with MU-MIMO and Bluetooth 4.1 support. ...Read more...

There's no slick sales pitch to go with this reminder. I just headed to the lake this morning to snag a video that would let the location speak for itself. So, take a couple deep breaths, full-screen the 4K video below and just take a couple minutes to relax....Read more...

The web is filled with reams of pages detailing how Android's slow updates and fragmented ecosystem are trouble for users, developers, and vendors. We've written on the topic ourselves in the past. Google has a new project in the works to improve the situation, though. Meet Project Treble.

Gigabit Ethernet has been around for what seems like forever. The standard is so ubiquitous that TR staff has discussed no longer mentioning the presence of standard-issue network adapters in motherboards and other PC hardware. The 10GBASE-T standard has been in place since the middle of the last decade, but the requirement for pricey Cat 6 cable and the substantial work needed to replace existing installations has stymied its adoption. Meanwhile, the IEEE 802.3bz 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T standards ratified last year allow for extra bandwidth on existing cabling, but desktop NICs with support for the new technology have been few and far between. We've only seen a few mobos with the new adapters, and Asus' ROG Areion NIC. Aquantia, a high-end network transceiver manufacturer, has announced a pair of cards that will make it easier to upgrade network speeds on existing PCs. ...Read more...

Lately, it seems like every morning we wake up to a single dewdrop of information about AMD's upcoming RX Vega graphics cards. This morning's sprinkling comes from an entry in the online CompuBench database suggesting the existence of a Vega development board with higher core clocks and memory pools than previously reported. The database entry shows a card with a "CL_DEVICE_GLOBAL_MEM_SIZE" of 16978542592, suggesting a 16GB pool of memory, and a "CL_DEVICE_MAX_CLOCK_FREQUENCY" of 1600, which probably means a 1600 MHz core clock. Both of these figures represent big steps up from previous reports of Vega development cards clocked at 1200 MHz and with 8 GB of on-package memory. ...Read more...

Lately, it seems like every morning we wake up to a single dewdrop of information about AMD's upcoming RX Vega graphics cards. This morning's sprinkling comes from an entry in the online CompuBench database suggesting the existence of a Vega development board with higher core clocks and memory pools than previously reported. The database entry shows a card with a "CL_DEVICE_GLOBAL_MEM_CACHE_SIZE" of 16384, suggesting 16 GB of on-package memory and "CL_DEVICE_MAX_CLOCK_FREQUENCY" of 1600, which probably means a 1600 MHz core clock. Both of these figures represent big steps up from previous reports of Vega development cards clocked at 1200 MHz and with 8 GB of on-package memory. ...Read more...

Back at CES, Roccat showed off a bunch of new hardware it had coming out. Fast-forward to May, and the last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. Check out the final version of Roccat's Leadr wireless gaming mouse. This is one of a rare breed of murids, featuring a top-class optical sensor, 1000-Hz polling rate, and a whole bevy of buttons. ...Read more...

One of the highlights of Microsoft's Build conference last year was the announcement of an Ubuntu-based Linux subsystem for Windows 10. The company's recent announcement of Windows 10 S and its Store-bound app installation left many wondering if the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) would be present in the new version of the operating system. Microsoft yesterday cleared that right up and announced that WSL installations based on Fedora, SuSE, and Ubuntu will all offered in the Windows Store. ...Read more...

It seems like every manufacturer of high-end graphics cards is partnering with liquid cooling specialists to deliver cards with a pre-installed all-in-one or open-loop liquid cooling hardware. Zotac's Arcticstorm GeForce GTX 1080 Ti takes the world-conquering GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and slaps on a full-coverage, RGB-illuminated water block. Unlike some other vendors, Zotac is not co-branding its übercard, though. ...Read more...