Techreport

Palmer Luckey, one of the biggest forces behind the Oculus Rift headset and co-founder of the Facebook-owned Oculus, is leaving the company, according to a report from UploadVR. "Palmer will be dearly missed," Facebook said in the statement. "Palmer's legacy extends far beyond Oculus. His inventive spirit helped kickstart the modern VR revolution and helped build an industry. We're thankful for everything he did for Oculus and VR and wish him the best." ...Read more...

Intel's consumer-targeted Optane hybrid cache drives have yet to enter the TR labs, but when the 16 GB and 32 GB M.2 gumsticks arrive, a wide swathe of Asus' 200-series motherboards will be ready for them. The manufacturer announced on its Edge Up blog page that BIOS updates for 35 different models with B250, H270, Q270, and Z270 chipsets will enable Optane compatibility. ...Read more...

When Intel's Optane Memory technology launched this week, we overlooked a critical requirement for the platform. Despite seeming ideal for speeding up budget-friendly systems with hard drives as their sole storage devices, Optane Memory apparently won't have support from Intel's most budget-friendly Kaby Lake CPUs: the Celeron G3930, the Celeron G3950, the Pentium G4560, the Pentium G4600, and the Pentium G4620. Lower-power "T" variants of those chips won't work, either. Only Kaby Lake Core CPUs are Optane Memory-compatible, according to Intel's ARK database and the Optane Memory product page. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Just a couple days ago, Gigabyte introduced us to its Aorus take on the recently-revealed GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. That card is nice, but it's also $700. Gamers without quite that much scratch in the bank might be more interested in the recently-announced Aorus GeForce GTX 1070 8G. ...Read more...

The value proposition of AMD's Ryzen 7 lineup of eight-core processors in highly-threaded workloads is pretty clear-cut. It's harder to say the same about the CPUs' bang-for-buck in gaming when compared to Intel's Kaby Lake offerings. AMD has promised to work with game developers to improve performance of popular titles on Ryzen chips, and the company says progress has been made on this front. Additionally, AMD says it will soon ship microcode updates to motherboard vendors that should improve performance and prevent system instability in certain conditions. ...Read more...

So it's been another three weeks and change since we looked into Ryzen motherboard availability, and the situation was tricky. There were previous reports that a few manufacturers would be getting more stock into stores soon. Well, at least over at Newegg, that appears to be the case. No less than a total of sixteen Socket AM4 motherboards are currently in stock at the 'egg. They're going in and out of stock as we write, though, so grab them while they're hot. ...Read more...

AOC has a new 4K display for us to feast our eyes on. The AOC U3277PWQU is a straight-forward display that checks the boxes you'd expect, without tacking on anything superfluous. If you're in the market for a new screen, this one has a limited time promotion with an appealing price tag. ...Read more...

While Nvidia announced the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti at GDC, it said that it would allow companies like MSI and Gigabyte to build variations of the GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 with faster memory than the reference designs. Now we have eyes on the first tweaked cards, both made by Asus. The GTX1080-O8G-11GBPS and GTX1060-O6G-9GBPS are named exactly as they are: a GeForce GTX 1080 with 11 GT/s GDDR5X memory, and a GTX 1060 6GB card with GDDR5 memory clocked at 9 GT/s.

Like a mad scientist who has no idea when to stop, computer gear manufacturers are dropping more and more RGB LED lights into their wares. Just when we think they've maxed them out, they find more spots to jam them in and more designs to make up. Thermaltake's View 28 case takes what made its predecessor unique and goes right down the mad-scientist path. ...Read more...

Samsung's Unpacked presentation just came to a close in New York City, and as expected, the company announced its upcoming Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones at the event. Along with the new phones, the company also showed off its Dex desktop dock and the second-generation Gear 360 camera.This is Samsung's first big phone launch after the disastrous Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, and DJ Koh—Samsung's President of Mobile Communications Business—immediately acknowledged the company's troubles in his opening ...Read more...

So much functionality has been moved from the motherboard into the CPU itself that variations within a product line often come down to little details. That's the case with Gigabyte's Aorus GA-AX370-Gaming K5. This motherboard is a full ATX affair with four DDR4 DIMM slots, three metal-reinforced PCIe slots, four USB 3.1 ports, and support for AMD's latest Ryzen CPUs. Overall, the board is quite similar to the Aorus GA-AX370-Gaming K7 we described a few weeks ago, with only a couple of niche features pared back. ...Read more...

Microsoft's latest major update (don't call it a service pack) for Windows 10, called the Creators Update, will be launching on April 11 according to a post over on the Windows blog. This confirms prior "early April" release rumors and fits with TR's own expectations, given that April 11 is the next "Patch Tuesday."...Read more...

In our recent review of AMD's Ryzen 7 CPUs, we ran into some limitations with our usual suite of synthetic CPU benchmarks. Neither SiSoft Sandra nor AIDA64 had been updated for use with the AMD's latest architecture. In particular, we were unable to accurately test the R7 chips' memory or cache latency. The engineers over at SiSoft have done their due diligence, and Sandra Platinum 2017 is now ready for Ryzen.The new version also includes updated support for GPGPU testing, and for the AVX512 instructions rumored to be a part of Intel's eighth-generation Cannon Lake CPUs. Sandra Platinum 2017 ...Read more...

We love our Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs around here, particularly when it comes to gaming, but not everyone has time for such frivolity. Workstation users have a different set of processing needs, usually revolving around a stable platform, ECC memory, and certified drivers. That's where the Intel's Xeon E3 v6 family of Kaby Lake-based CPUs come in. ...Read more...

As if Samsung hasn't had enough of a black eye over the Galaxy Note 7 debacle, it's also been under pressure from environmental groups over its plans to simply dispose of the recalled smartphones. It appears that the Korean manufacturer bowed to pressure from groups such as Greenpeace, as it has detailed its plans for recycling the star-crossed device. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Just six months after introducing the pretty awesome Blade Pro 17.3" gaming laptop, Razer is updating it with an Intel seventh-generation Core i7-7820HK unlocked CPU. The rest of the high-end hardware in the machine is pretty much the same, topped off with an RGB-LED-illuminated keyboard stuffed with Razer's proprietary low-profile mechanical switches. ...Read more...

Popular system information and benchmark software AIDA64 has just received its latest update to version 5.90. The update includes various improvements, but the headline news this time around is that AIDA64 now properly supports AMD Ryzen processors and their Socket AM4 motherboards. FinalWire, the developer of AIDA64, had warned previously that benchmark results on Ryzen processors may not have been accurate before today's update.AIDA64's Ryzen support includes preliminary support for server processors based on the same Zen CPU core, like the Naples chip we've heard about before . Across the aisle, Intel's latest Atom-family chips—code-named Apollo Lake ...Read more...

A few weeks back, MSI was teasing a Gaming X version of Nvidia's best-on-the-block GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Last week we spread the word that the company was planning on releasing multiple custom riffs on the GP102 monster, including three air-cooled varieties. The product planners at the dragon-branded manufacturer are keen on offering plenty of options to buyers, since each of those three custom cards can be bought in two variations. We'll examine the bunch in sort-of-ascending order of clock speed. All clocks described below refer to GPU speeds, as all cards sport the same 11GB of 11 GT/s GDDR5X memory. ...Read more...

A month ago I reviewed MSI's Trident 3 compact gaming PC. I thought the machine was a solid performer, but got the feeling that the GeForce GTX 1060 it came with was holding it back a bit. MSI's PR folks assured me a version of the Trident 3 with a GeForce GTX 1070 was already on its way, and they weren't kidding. Check out the Trident 3 Arctic. ...Read more...

The custom-cooled GTX 1080 Ti onslaught rolls on. Today's teaser comes from Gigabyte, who tweeted about a trio of 1080 Ti cards bearing both Gigabyte and Aorus branding. ...Read more...

Owners of iDevices can rejoice today, for there's a new iOS release out and about. The update is labeled version 10.3 and includes a host of minor enhancements along with a big-ticket technical feature: the introduction of APFS (Apple File System), the company's replacement for the venerable HFS+, in use since 1998 on Macs and iDevices. Just like with iOS 10, owners of iPhones from the 5 onwards, fourth-generation iPads or newer, iPad Mini 2s or newer, and sixth-generation iPod Touch devices can all install the update.All iOS devices running version 10.3 will move over to APFS automatically. Be warned that due to this conversion, the update install time will take a bit longer than usual. Although there isn't a single big improvement stemming from using APFS, Apple probably wants to get the filesystem on the road to pave the way for future features and updates. For the technically-inclined, APFS offers plenty of modern ...Read more...

We tend to focus on virtual reality for entertainment purposes, but the technology has potential to aid with more productive tasks. HTC and developer Sixense Entertainment are launching a new software package called MakeVR that lets users take advantage of the Vive controller to aid in designing and modeling 3D objects. MakeVR allows users to create models and virtual sculptures, then export the results to CAD programs or 3D printers. According to Engadget, a more-capable version called MakeVR Pro will be available later this year. ...Read more...

Just like it was the first to race out of the gate with Ryzen-ready AM4 motherboards, Biostar is again first to market with a Socket AM4 board in mini-ITX form factor. The X370GTN just showed up on the company's website, and as its name implies, it uses the X370 chipset. Despite its small size, the X370GTN is a fairly full-featured motherboard, with a USB 3.1 Type-C port, a back-mounted PCIe x4 M.2 socket, and two DDR4 DIMMs supporting transfer rates up to 3200 MT/s. ...Read more...

After 19 years at a maximum resolution of 640x480 and a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio, StarCraft is getting a high-resolution widescreen update. Blizzard has officially announced that it's re-launching the legendary science-fiction RTS title as StarCraft Remastered. The game will support widescreen resolutions up to 4K, thanks to re-drawn 2D art. Meanwhile, the standard versions of StarCraft and Brood War will soon be free to download and getting a new patch....Read more...

The memory guys over at Transcend dropped us a note about the company's new NVMe SSD. The drive is called the MTE850, and it's the company's first storage offering using the NVMe protocol. The device uses 3D MLC flash as its primary storage medium, and like most NVMe SSDs out there today, it comes in the M.2 2280 form factor. ...Read more...

We've been getting teased by Nvidia board partners for what feels like weeks regarding their custom versions of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Now, one of those custom cards is finally in stock. MSI's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Armor 11G is on Newegg's virtual shelves now for just $10 over Nvidia's $699 suggested price. ...Read more...

We're pretty fond of AMD's Ryzen 7 processors, as you'll be aware if you've read our most recent System Guide. However, eight-core CPUs and the overclockers' motherboards to match are anything but entry-level. Ryzen 5 processors are launching soon, and there's little point in going for an economical $169 CPU and then sticking it on a $200 motherboard. For folks who want something simpler, Gigabyte just announced two boards based on AMD's A320 chipset. The GA-A320-DS3 and GA-A320M-HD2 are very similar aside from size: the DS3 is an ATX motherboard, while the HD2 comes in a micro-ATX form factor. ...Read more...

If you've ever looked through the subtitle options on a DVD or Blu-ray disc, you've likely noticed that there's often a set of subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing users. Much of the sound in videos we watch isn't pure human language, and those subtitles account for that, offering text descriptions of significant audio cues. Youtube has offered automatically-generated speech captioning for years. Now, Google is turning its machine-learning powers toward sound effects to bring audio-effect subtitling to its streaming video service.Like it happened with automatic speech captioning, sound effect subtitling is starting out pretty basic, with [LAUGHTER], [APPLAUSE], and [MUSIC] denominators. Google explains in the blog post that while there are many more types ...Read more...

Gigabyte's Designare branding is reserved for boards at the top of the company's range. The company says these boards are aimed at content creation professionals, and the just-announced Z270X-Designare ATX motherboard should fit that bill easily. Like most high-end motherboards, it's covered in fancy features. It's also fully validated for use with Nvidia's Quadro graphics cards. ...Read more...

How fare thee, kind gerbil? Have you meditated on that upgrade you've been putting off for the better part of six months now? Are the deals not to your liking, and you have a desire to curtail your spending as much as possible whilst partaking of the best hardware around? We can help. Our purveyors of deals and hunters of promotional codes have been out on the prowl, and they're back with their scribbled notepads full of price tags and spec sheets. Please, kind sir, patter this way.That's it for today, folks! If you come across any juicy deals that we ...Read more...

Does the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti's ability to play recent AAA games at 4K resolution make you long for the days when a 1600x1200 CRT could make a pair of 3dfx Voodoo2 accelerators beg for mercy? Maybe Dell's UltraSharp 32 8K monitor has what you're looking for. This monitor definitely isn't kidding around, packing 7680x4320 pixels onto a 32" IPS LCD display panel. That's a grand total of 33 million pixels, or four times the picture element count of a standard 4K display and 16 times the dots in a Full HD screen. Dell says the UltraSharp 32 8K can display 98% of the DCI-P3 gamut, further making it clear that this monitor is targeted at creative professionals. ...Read more...

Does the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti's ability to play recent AAA games at 4K resolution make you long for the days when a 1600x1200 CRT could make a pair of 3dfx Voodoo2 accelerators beg for mercy? Maybe Dell's UltraSharp 32 8K monitor has what you're looking for. This monitor definitely isn't kidding around, packing 7680x4320 pixels onto a 32" IPS LCD display panel. That's a grand total of 33 million pixels, or four times the picture element count of a standard 4K display and 16 times the dots in a Full HD screen. Dell says the UltraSharp 32 8K can display 98% of the DCI-P3 gamut, further making it clear that this monitor is targeted at creative professionals. ...Read more...

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the fastest graphics card we've tested. For some, its performance is just a jumping-off point. Getting those last few FPS used to require sourcing water blocks, pumps, radiators and tubing, then plumbing together a custom open-loop cooling system. EVGA's Titan X/1080 Ti Hybrid Waterblock cooler is a self-contained CLC that makes it easy to bypass an air cooler's thermal limitations. The Titan X Hybrid kit also contains a blower-style air cooler for cooling a card's memory chips and power delivery circuitry. Cooling these components has become increasingly important in recent graphics cards, much to EVGA's chagrin. ...Read more...

Elgato's just-announced Stream Deck puts the tactile macro buttons seen in use by news production crews into the hands of streamers. The deck seems to function like a macro keyboard on steroids, with configurable graphics for each button, along with visual and tactile feedback for button presses. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Everybody likes Microsoft's Surface tablets. Everybody, that is, except for those who want to use it on their lap. The kickstand that the Surface uses to prop itself up works fine on a desk, but not so much when it's resting on your legs or any other uneven surface. The Surface Book's design alleviates this problem, but it's also larger, heavier, and more expensive than the tablet model. Enter the Brydge 12.3 hinged keyboard. ...Read more...

A little over a month ago, Corsair started teasing its One compact gaming PC. The company sent out a couple of photos and promised a "category-defying new PC." Corsair has just now let the cat out of the bag with respect to the One's complete specs, and we're here to share them with you. All Corsair One configurations come with liquid-cooled Kaby Lake Core i7 CPUs, Nvidia Pascal graphics cards, and 16GB of Corsair's DDR4 RAM on a custom Z270 motherboard. An SFX 80 Plus Gold power supply powers the hardware, all packed in a compact enclosure measuring only 15" x 6.9" x 7.9" (38 cm x 18 cm x 20 cm). ...Read more...

The list of applications that support DirectX 12 or Vulkan isn't very long, and the list of applications that support both APIs is, as far as we can tell, empty. At least, it was until this morning. Futuremark has just announced that its API Overhead feature test, a part of 3DMark, now supports Vulkan in addition to DirectX 12 and DirectX 11. ...Read more...

E3 2017 is just a few months away, and game publisher Bethesda will once again have its pre-show event to parade its newest and best games. Much like the first time Bethesda did one of those events, Fallout 4 be prominently present—but this time around, in virtual reality.Bethesda showed off an early version of Fallout 4 VR last year, but the company's VP Pete Hines thinks the game is ready for prime time. Hines spoke to Youtuber Hip Hop Gamer, and said that Fallout 4 VR is "the most incredible thing you've ever seen ...Read more...

Phoronix reports that AMD just published 100 patches to the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver, adding support for the company's upcoming Vega GPUs. Just a bit later, AMD also published 140 patches adding similar support to its RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. The patches represent a lot of work, seeing as the commits to AMDGPU alone represent "over forty-thousand lines of code." ...Read more...

A little less than three weeks ago, MSI was teasing its Gaming X version of Nvidia's king-of-the-hill GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. If one card built around the fastest gaming GPU on the market is good, then five must be better. MSI will offer three different custom air-cooled 1080 Ti cards, a Sea Hawk model with a preinstalled Corsair CLC, and a Sea Hawk EK card with an EK waterblock for integration into custom water-cooled systems. These five cards join the company's already-shipping Founder's Edition model. ...Read more...

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 835 SoC is the company's next major revision of its flagship chip. The 835 is also the first high-performance SoC built on Samsung's 10nm process. Qualcomm recently invited a sprinkling of the tech press to its San Diego headquarters to take a look at a reference device built around its new design. The folks at AnandTech and PC Perspective both got some quality time with the new hardware.The design of the Snapdragon 835 is a considerable departure from the 820 before it. While the Snapdragon 820 had four custom-designed Kryo CPU cores, the 835 has eight CPU cores arranged as a pair of four-core clusters—one for high performance and another with an eye towards power efficiency. According to AnandTech, the CPU in the Snapdragon 835 ...Read more...

Last year's Android 7.0 Nougat release is only running on less than 3% of internet-connected Android devices, but Google is already charging forward with the next release, currently called Android O. The developer preview of the new version is available now. In a similar vein to Chrome 57, Android O is focused on extending battery life and throttling background tasks. Android's ever-evolving notification system is getting improvements and will now group notification content into app-defined categories called channels. ...Read more...

AMD's latest update to its Radeon drivers is ready for download, and this time around the update addresses issues in a specific configuration for just one game: Mass Effect: Andromeda. If you're running BioWare's latest epic space romp on a multi-GPU Radeon setup, the Radeon 17.3.3 driver update is for you. ...Read more...

AMD's latest update to its Radeon drivers is ready for download, and this time around the update addresses issues in a specific configuration for just one game: Mass Effect: Andromeda. If you're running BioWare's latest epic space romp on a multi-GPU Radeon setup, the Radeon 17.3.3 driver update is for you. ...Read more...

If you've been after a Ryzen machine yet struggling to find a motherboard, MSI might soon have the answer for you. The company is launching its second wave of Ryzen motherboards and has a micro-site up for your perusal. Five boards make up the new releases: the X370 Krait Gaming, the X370 SLI-Plus, the B350M Bazooka, plus "Arctic" versions of the B350 Tomahawk and B350M Mortar. ...Read more...

The first major bug affecting AMD's new Ryzen processors was found a couple weeks ago by folks using the open-source processor benchmark Flops. In short, certain sequences of code using instructions from the FMA3 expansion to the x86-64 ISA can cause Ryzen machines to hang irrevocably. That means that even software running inside a VM could force a hang-and-restart on a Ryzen host. Fortunately, just days after the discovery was made, AMD confirmed to Digital Trends that it has already identified the issue and that it's preparing firmware updates to distribute to motherboard vendors.Originally created by Alexander "Mystical" Yee for his own purposes, Flops first appeared on the web as a response to a question at Stack Overflow . In the creator's own words, the app seeks to "get as many ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing