Techreport

We're probably not all that far away from the Radeon RX Vega launch, which AMD has slated for the first half of this year. Supplies of Fiji-powered Radeon graphics cards appear to be drying up at online retailers, and a new set of information turned up by the inveterate leakers at VideoCardz suggests that certain implementations of Vega silicon could be in testing now.The site noticed that a new AMD graphics chip has shown up in the CompuBench database of OpenCL and CUDA performance numbers . This device, called AMD 687F:C1, apparently shares an identifier with earlier Vega ...Read more...

External drive buyers can have unique priorities. Some want 8TB of storage and are willing to put up with the relative fragility and low performance of spinning platter disks. Other want speed and portability, and Adata's SD600 external SSD nicely fits that bill. The SD600 series includes 256GB and 512GB models built with 3D NAND flash. The SSDs operate over the USB 3.0 interface and boast DRAM and SLC buffer caches for increased performance. ...Read more...

Keyboard hipsterism just took another step forward, as Hall-effect keyboards are making a return to the market. The resurgence of the nearly-forgotten keyboard technology is happening thanks to a Massdrop group-buy (login required) run by a man named José Soltren, better known as XMIT. The keyboard is likewise called the XMIT Hall Effect Keyboard. There have apparently been a few production issues along the way, but the first keyboards have now made their way into the hands of lucky buyers. ...Read more...

Pretty much everyone hates CAPTCHA forms, the often-annoying checkboxes or miniature surveys that many web sites force upon a user in order to access a particular page. A CAPTCHA's purpose is to serve as a verification tool to ensure that only conscious entities like living, breathing human beings can access certain internet resources, and prevent bots from spamming contact and e-mail forms. Various flavors of the tool have required unique inputs, from clicking a box that says "I am not a robot," to forcing users to type in words that OCR software couldn't figure out, or categorize different images. Google claims its Invisible reCAPTCHA technology can now keep out bots without requiring any intervention from actual users....Read more...

PC hardware and computing

We're sure there were at least a few prospective buyers that liked the idea of Thermaltake's Core P3 or Core P5 wall-mountable open-frame PC chassis, but were stymied by the standard ATX-size of the Core P5. Perhaps thsoe buyers had too much hardware to pack inside the case, or maybe they needed something more mural-sized to bring the room together. Whatever the reason, Thermaltake's Core P7 TG goliath should appeal to these size-seeking shoppers. The P7 is designed to ensconce E-ATX motherboards, along with a pair of 420-mm or 480-mm radiators and their associated plumbing. ...Read more...

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is out, and that means you need a driver that knows what the heck it is. Fortunately Nvidia just released GeForce driver version 378.78, and it supports the "Ultimate GeForce." It's also Game Ready for Ghost Recon: Wildlands, something that could help you keep performance up with all those fancy GameWorks effects the game can use. Neither of those items are the most interesting parts of the new driver, though. Nvidia says the 378.78 driver has the potential to improve performance by as much as 33% in DirectX 12 and 50% in Vulkan....Read more...

Buzzwords like "AI" and "machine learning" are thrown around like candy these days, but the use cases for those technologies are growing at a rapid pace. Microsoft and Nvidia see burgeoning demand for cloud-based artificial intelligence in fields like healthcare, voice recognition, molecular simulations, and self-driving vehicles. To accelerate the deployments of AI-oriented technologies, the two companies have been working together on the HGX-1, a "hyperscale" GPU accelerator chassis. ...Read more...

Windows 10 has had ads of some kind since launch. Most of them were easy to turn off, but the upcoming Creators Update may make things more confusing. ExtremeTech reports that along with all the appreciated features in the upcoming Creators Update, Windows Insiders are seeing an uptick in Microsoft ads prompting users to start OneDrive and Office 365 subscriptions.

It seems a bit wild to say this, but Mass Effect: Andromeda is less than two weeks out from release. That's still plenty of time to get our rigs into gear for the game, though. Nvidia offered up minimum and recommended specs lists, along with details about the graphics options that PC gamers will be able to tweak.

Imagination Technology's last major GPU architecture revision was 2010's Rogue. The comapny has produced six iterations on the architecture in the meantime, and now it's time for something new. The upcoming Furian architecture promises to be the biggest departure in ImgTech GPU design since the earliest days of the present decade. Furian is designed to deliver improved performance in the mobile VR, AR, and machine intelligence applications with a reduced silicon and power consumption footprint. ...Read more...

Well, that cat's finally coming out of the bag. In what's seen in the tech world as an inevitable future, ARM-based chips look to be heading en masse to servers worldwide—in this case, those in Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. According to Bloomberg, the computing giant ported Windows Server to the ARM architecture and is currently testing ARM chips in servers, in preparation for a production deployment in the near future.Bloomberg says that Microsoft made Windows run on ARM CPUs in a partnership with Qualcomm and Cavium . Microsoft is testing the new chips in search, storage, machine learning, and big-data tasks. The chips ...Read more...

Perhaps in a nod to increasing awareness of the possibility of melting polar ice caps as a result of global climate change, Arctic has released its Freezer 33 series of semi-passive CPU coolers. There are three models on offer, each sharing the same heatsink design with four direct-contact 6-mm copper heatpipes connected to an aluminum fin array sized to fit at least one 120-mm fan. ...Read more...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation makes some fun and well-supported single-board computers, but sometimes a small embedded system needs more graphical horsepower than the four 300 MHz stream processors in the Raspberry Pi 3 can provide. Nvidia's Jetson TX2 single-board computer module is ready to tackle that situation with its 256 Pascal SPs, six CPU cores, and 8GB of LPDDR4 memory. The machine also packs multiple Pi-pounding connectivity options with built-in USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. ...Read more...

Phrases like "100% Japanese capacitors" are thrown around on all different kinds of computer and electronics items. Cooler Master went one step further and partnered with Japanese electronics house Murata to develop and build the informatively-named MasterWatt Maker 1200 MIJ power supply. The 1200 predictably stands for the 1200W output on offer, and MIJ is "Made in Japan." Cooler Master says the Maker 1200 MIJ is 94% efficient, which should be superior to even the coveted 80 Plus Titanium rating. ...Read more...

Spring is nearly here. The grass is growing, rain is falling, and the sales are starting. At least GOG's Spring Sale is, anyway. If you've somehow run out of games to play despite this ridiculously-full winter, GOG should have a few worthy deals for you to check out between now and Sunday, March 12.

This list is not supRyzen

Ghost Recon: Wildlands is upon us. If you're planning to play it on your Radeon, make sure you grab the just-released Radeon driver 17.3.1 package. The new driver has specific optimizations for the military open-world co-op game, and AMD says it improves performance by as much as 6% on Radeon RX 480s. That may not sound like much, but remember that game performance is a tricky thing to measure. A 6% overall performance uplift could mean a significant improvement in the worst-case scenarios.

Cherry and its colorfully-named products are probably the first thing that pops into mind when discussing mechanical keyboard switches, but several other manufacturers produce those components. Logitech developed its own reduced-travel Romer-G mechanical switches back in 2014, and the unique clickers are used in the company's G Pro mechanical gaming keyboard. Gamers looking for short-stroke keys and customizability will find a lot to like in the G Pro. ...Read more...

New reports from IDC indicate that 2016 was a good year for Toshiba's storage division. The company saw growth in revenue, units sold, and market share in both its hard disk drive and solid-state drive segments, and claims that it grew faster than any other storage vendor. ...Read more...

Now that the Zen core is out of the gate in consumer systems aboard Ryzen CPUs, AMD is launching its fight to retake data-center market share this morning with more details of the configurations and performance of its Naples server platform. The company is demonstrating Naples at the Open Compute Summit this week in Santa Clara, California. ...Read more...

Four days after Ryzen CPUs officially hit the market, you can easily pick one up at Newegg or Amazon. Both sites have the new AMD processors in stock, although Newegg has temporarily run out of the top-end 1800X model. Unfortunately, you may have a hard time finding a place to put your cutting-edge octo-core CPU. Both storefronts are almost completely sold out of Socket AM4 motherboards. ...Read more...

Four days after Ryzen CPUs officially hit the market, you can easily pick one up at Newegg or Amazon. Both sites have the new AMD processors in stock, although Newegg has temporarily run out of the top-end 1800X model. Unfortunately, you may have a hard time finding a place to put your cutting-edge octo-core CPU. Both storefronts are almost completely sold out of Socket AM4 motherboards. ...Read more...

The biggest competitors for Microsoft's Surface Book premium convertibles don't have discrete graphics chips. While that limits their 3D performance, it also means they can be thinner, lighter, and longer-running. Now Microsoft has apparently decided that folks who have no need for the standard model's GeForce graphics can have a Book as well. The company has new listings up on its web store for models of the Surface Book that skip the discrete graphics card. ...Read more...

Games have been used as a measure of AI capabilities for quite some time. Despite the idea starting off in the eighteenth century with fraudulent chess-playing machines, computer algorithm approaches started to pop up in the 1940s. Twenty years ago, IBM supercomputer Big Blue made headlines for beating reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in a set of matches.Texas Hold 'Em poker represents a different kind of challenge than chess, since each player has access to only a limited part of the game's total state. Despite this challenge, researchers published work in 2015 claiming that an algorithm could defeat human players one-on-one in the limited-bet form of Texas Hold 'Em ...Read more...

Just a few months after the first formal product announcements in October 2016, Nintendo's Switch home-portable-hybrid video game console went on sale on Friday. The relentless disassemblers over at iFixit took one of its specialty screwdriver kits to a fresh-off-the-store-shelf Switch console to take a look at the hardware inside and the techniques used to put it together. The first-revision Switch appears to be a refreshingly-modular system with a substantial potential for easy repairs. In separate but related news, device skin maker dbrand announced that it will not offer its vinyl veneers for Nintendo Switch consoles, saying that the coating on the Switch and its accessories will be damaged by the adhesive used in "all skins and wraps". ...Read more...

One of the hottest topics in the wake of AMD's Ryzen CPU launch has been the appropriate monitor resolution at which to test CPU performance. AMD claims that the trend among high-end systems is toward higher-resolution displays like 2560x1440 and 4K, making CPU performance less relevant for gaming. The Steam hardware survey says otherwise: that more people play on 1920x1080 displays than all higher-resolution gamers combined. That's before we get into the plethora of refresh rates that are available on high-end gaming monitors today.With all that in mind, we figure the best course of action is to ask ...Read more...

Since the cat's out of the bag now, behold: ...Read more...

Previews of aftermarket GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards seems to be the hot topic today. Never one to be outdone, EVGA took to Twitter to tease its own GTX 1080 Ti FTW3. This board wears a new triple-fan iCX cooler, and it's probably laden with more sensors and microcontrollers than an amateur robotics project. ...Read more...

While many publishers put off announcing PC specs as long as possible to hedge their bets, the recently-announced Middle-earth: Shadow of War goes straight in for the kill. Word of the sequel to 2014's Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor leaked through Target earlier this week, and an official announcement soon followed. So what sort of rig is it going to take to run Talion's second adventure at a playable level? Nothing too radical, as it turns out....Read more...

The recent announcement of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is a thing, defying earlier rumors that Nvidia would save the GP102-based GeForce for the top of a refreshed Pascal lineup. Nvidia will have its Founder's Edition cards, of course, but the more interesting cards are always the third-party models. MSI has joined the teasing parade and announced its GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X. ...Read more...

Not to be left out of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti party, Zotac is passing around pictures of what will probably be its top-end GTX 1080 Ti card. The GTX 1080 Ti PGF appears to pack an enormous triple-fan cooler that extends well into a third expansion slot. The cooler is bedecked with RGB LEDs, as is the backplate. The card also appears to take a pair of 8-pin power connectors. While non-standard, that power configuration should allow for some beastly overclocking. ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils! The buffalo's out on the loose and gerbils are probably stampeding after it. Despite all the attention turned towards the new and shiny Ryzen CPUs and motherboards, there are still deals out there on other hardware. We selected the best of them this week.That's it for today, folks! If you found any sweet online deals that we ...Read more...

Many gerbils who didn't skip to the conclusion in our recent Ryzen review probably picked up on the notion that AMD's octa-core processors are sensitive to memory bandwidth in some applications. Ryzen's core and thread count look ready to take on Intel's high-end Broadwell-E desktop chips, but the dual-channel memory configuration's peak theoretical bandwidth is more in line with Intel's more pedestrian Kaby Lake Core processors. G.Skill probably saw this scenario coming, and it readied up its Fortis and Flare X lines of memory specifically designed and tested for AMD's AM4 platform. ...Read more...

Last November, Microsoft announced an initiative to adjust the way that Windows devices of all kinds receive updates. Broadly speaking, the purpose of the initiative is to reduce the download size of updates, make them require less local processing, and give users more control over the time of installation. After a few rounds of testing with its Windows Insiders, Microsoft announced that its PC users can soon expect the download size of major Windows updates to decrease by about 35%.This drop in size will be made possible by what Microsoft calls differential download packages. These packages don't include the files that will remain unchanged in the new build. Instead, these packages contain only new files and "binary deltas" designed to adjust existing files ...Read more...

Over the last couple of days you may have noticed some of your favorite websites having problems, or even simply being down altogether. The source of the issue was a failure of two key subsystems in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, better known as S3. A message straight from AWS says the issue was caused when an "authorized employee working from an established playbook" entered an improper command and removed a much larger set of servers than intended from a pool supporting the S3 index and placement subsystems.Affected sites included huge swathes of the web. We at TR were mostly unaffected, but BusinessInsider, Quora, Imgur, Giphy, and the file upload features of many services (including Slack and Discord) were disrupted. Folks with ...Read more...

Every bit of news we have reported today has had at least a hint of Ryzen flavor. The latest announcement from MSI doesn't deviate from the trend, in the best of ways. The dragon afficianados have launched a slew of AM4 Ryzen-ready motherboards packing mainstream B350 and high-end X370 chipsets. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

As nice and convenient as all-in-one liquid coolers have become, not every system needs the cost, complexity, and risk of leakage that comes with such systems. For those still looking to air cooling to provide relief to hot-running chips without the physical imposition of something like the humoungous Noctua NH-D15, Enermax offers its ETS-N31, a relatively-compact tower cooler with a 92-mm fan. ...Read more...

Roman "der8auer" Hartung is one of the more hardcore overlockers out there today. I'm a fan of his work over at Overclocking.Guide, and today he posted up a video on his YouTube channel demonstrating the dangerous process and the results of delidding one of AMD's Ryzen CPUs. I'll skip to the end for you: the heatspreaders are soldered on....Read more...

As you're reading this, AMD's press embargo for its Ryzen CPUs has lifted. We're still putting the finishing touches on our piece, and we expect we'll have it up within the next hour or so. Sit tight and enjoy the many fine Ryzen reviews popping up elsewhere on the web—we think ours will be worth the wait. Thanks for your patience.Read more...

Chromebooks are a popular, growing product. Their combination of a simple operating system, decent specs, and affordable price has proven popular with shoppers everywhere. Google first released its own premium, here's-how-it's-done take on the concept with its Pixel laptop back in 2013, ending it last year with the Pixel 2. However, the company's now putting the kibosh on more iterations of the Pixel laptop, at least for the time being. ...Read more...

Late last year, Oculus introduced its asynchronous spacewarp technology, allowing the company to relax its headset's famously-demanding hardware requirements. Now, its VR system is getting even more accessible, as Oculus has announced that it's significantly reducing the prices of its hardware. As of today, the price of the Rift-and-Touch bundle has been reduced from $800 to $600. ...Read more...

In a tweet early this morning, Asus' Republic of Gamers account announced the first graphics cards based on the latest addition to the Pascal GeForce family, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The tweet was accompanied by a picture and a link that was probably meant to go to a micro-site for the cards, but that as of this writing simply redirects to the main Asus website.The new ROG Strix and ASUS Turbo GeForce GTX 1080 Ti have been announced! ...Read more...

Philips' E-series monitors are intended to be more affordable than the higher-end P-line. Affordable doesn't have to mean mediocre, though. The company's new beautifully-named 278E8QJAB monitor is a 27" LED-backlit display with a curved VA panel. Philips says the new display can reproduce a particularly-wide color gamut: up to 130% of the sRGB space, or 104% of the NTSC color space. ...Read more...

Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang had a lot to say last night at GDC. The biggest news was the announcement of the $700 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and a $100 price drop on the existing GTX 1080. The crowd in attendance was arguably more interested in the company's updated development and performance measurement tools. Lost in all that madness was a smaller bit of hardware news: Nvidia has given board partners the green light to ready up GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB and GTX 1080 cards using faster memory. ...Read more...

Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang had a lot to say last night at GDC. The biggest news was the announcement of the $700 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and a $100 price drop on the existing GTX 1080. The crowd in attendance was arguably more interested in the company's updated development and performance measurement tools. Lost in all that madness was a smaller bit of hardware news: Nvidia has given board partners the green light to ready up GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB and GTX 1080 cards using faster memory. ...Read more...

Hardware enthusiasts tuning into Nvidia's live-streamed GDC presentation last night were probably most interested in Jen-Hsun Huang's announcement of the almost-a-Pascal-Titan-X GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Nvidia's announcements regarding the DirectX 12 version of the company's GameWorks software development kit and the FCAT VR performance-monitoring tool were probably more relevant to most of the show's attendees, though. The green team also promised substantial performance increases in DirectX 12 titles in upcoming GameReady driver updates, something that's sure to please developers and gamers alike. ...Read more...

Well, the cat's officially out of the bag. Surprising nobody that was paying attention to the TIme teaser at GeForce.com, Nvidia has launched the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti this evening at GDC.Time for something faster than TITAN X. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is here. ...Read more...

Well, the cat's officially out of the bag. Surprising nobody that was paying attention to the TIme teaser at GeForce.com, Nvidia has (or will soon) be launching the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The card leaked from a trustworthy source ahead of Nvidia's GeForce event at GDC.Folks like us that like to keep an eye on the comings and goings of graphics cards were expecting a card faster than the GTX 1080 but a bit slower than the eye-wateringly-expensive ...Read more...