Techreport

In a move sure to disappoint conspiracy theorists and the three guys still using Windows Vista because they really like the desktop gadgets, Blizzard just announced that its contemporary games will no longer support Windows XP or Vista. While this isn't exactly surprising, it's been a long time coming. The affected titles are World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. ...Read more...

Nvidia just announced a new partnership with the Tokyo Institute of Technology to create what it calls Japan's fastest AI supercomputer. The machine will be known as TSUBAME3.0, and predictably, this will be the third iteration of the TSUBAME cluster design. The 3.0 version will use Broadwell-EP Xeons in combination with Nvidia Tesla P100 accelerators to achieve an expected 12.2 PFLOPS of double-precision throughput. Nvidia says the new cluster will operate alongside the existing TSUBAME2.5 machine (which uses over four thousand Tesla K20X cards) to crunch up to 64.3 PFLOPS for AI work. ...Read more...

The dev kit for HTC's Vive Tracker peripheral is already a hot commodity among virtual reality developers. The company says it's received 2300 requests for an allotment of 1000 dev kits. A team called Master of Shapes just might make the peripheral even more popular, this time for owners of Google's Daydream View VR headset. The team says it has used the Vive Tracker to create a room-scale VR experience for the affordable Daydream platform.

Don't be buffaloed by leaks and rumors—the first official announcement of retail Socket AM4 motherboards for AMD Ryzen processors is here. In a weirdly-apropos manner (given the company's Racing theme), Biostar is first out of the gate with its announcement of five AM4 mobos. Three of the boards are based on the high-end X370 chipset, while the other two use the B350 chipset. Let's take a closer look. ...Read more...

Howdy! Have you upgraded to Kaby Lake yet? Well, if you haven't, now's a good time as any. We have some sweet hardware deals for you, including some nice Z270 motherboards begging to be installed in a powerful build. If that's not really your thing, then take a look at the rest of the hardware deals we collected. You're sure to find something that suits your fancy.That's it for today, folks! If you found any sweet online deals that we ...Read more...

Phanteks took the plunge into the depths of custom open-loop cooling parts with its July release of the Glacier G1080 water block for Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 FE graphics cards. The company is now expanding the liquid-cooling section of its catalog and has unveiled the Glacier C350i CPU water block and Glacier series water cooling fittings. ...Read more...

If there's one part of a build that's worth looking at through a windowed case, it's the graphics card. The shrouds and cooling solutions for high-end graphics cards often have gorgeous designs. Unfortunately, installing those cards typically means pointing all that artwork down at the bottom of the case, leaving the backside of the graphics card's PCB as the only part in view. Setups like the one pictured below solve that problem, but they require special cabling. Enter Thermaltake's TT Premium PCI-E 3.0 Extender. ...Read more...

After 14 years at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Apple is taking its Worldwide Developers Conference much closer to home. The company revealed today that WWDC 2017 will be held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, a return to a venue that hosted the event from 1988 to 2002. The event itself will be held June 5 through June 9.

The mention of Unreal Engine 4 (UE) often brings to mind impressive-looking demos that elicit more than a fair share of oohs and aahs. Epic Games isn't resting on its laurels, and it's just released UE 4.15 with support for alternate frame rendering (AFR) on Nvidia SLI configurations and experimental support for HDR output, along with a Kardashian buttload of performance optimizations and developer-oriented improvements. ...Read more...

MSI's on a roll with the teensy graphics cards today, it seems. The company set up product pages for a half-dozen Aero ITX cards packing Pascal GPUs. There are two cards riffing on the GeForce GTX 1070, two cards based on the GTX 1060 6GB, and then a card each for the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti. While past MSI Aero cards have been reference-esque blower designs, these new Aero ITX designs are smaller and trade the centrifugal-fan design of their siblings for heatsink shrouds with a single axial fan.

Either Thermaltake's management drives its product engineering team to the edge of exhaustion, or those engineers are very enthusiastic about their jobs, because the company's latest announcements could make for a day's worth of news. The company is showing off the Contac Silent 12 CPU cooler, the Water 3.0 Riing RGB 360 all-in-one liquid cooler, and the Pacific W4 RGB CPU water block. We'll proceed through the trio, starting with the most traditional and ending with the most out-there item. ...Read more...

Windows system administrators have grown to expect patches from Microsoft on the second Tuesday of each month. The software giant formalized the practice of releasing security patches at the same time each month all the way back in 2003. Microsoft Patch Tuesday was supposed to take place on Valentine's Day this month, and it was expected to contain a fix for a zero-day bug in the SMB file-sharing protocol. It looks like something broke down, though, since the February patch has been scrapped and delayed until next month, meaning the SMB bug will remain unpatched until then. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Remember those little Radeon RX 460 cards from MSI that showed up last August? The Dragon Army has apparently decided they still weren't small enough, because it has now shrunk the petite Polaris cards even further. The MSI Radeon RX-460-2GT-LP and RX-460-4GT-LP use a tiny two-fan cooler and a single rear expansion slot, although the cooler extends into the second slot some ways. ...Read more...

We're coming up on 45 years of the video game in 2017. A lot of older folks, even ones who played games in their young adulthood, have trouble with modern game controllers. All those sticks and buttons and levers and knobs are confusing. Can't we go back to the days when you had one stick and two buttons? If you share a similar sentiment about gaming mice and their myriad manipulables, then have a look at Asus ROG's new Strix Impact mouse. ...Read more...

Ask anyone with a set-top box or smart TV about the worst part of the user experience, and chances are the divided nature of the content will be high on the list. Content purchased through iTunes will only work on Apple's set-top box, Amazon Video doesn't play on Apple TV, and finding the right piece of content across dozens of other streamers can take the relaxation out of the entertainment experience.The Caavo box appears to be a unique attempt to bring all of its owner's streaming movies and TV shows into one interface. According to The Verge, the Caavo works by applying machine vision to video from other streaming devices attached to the eight HDMI inputs on the back of the ...Read more...

Boutique builder Falcon Northwest has a long history of working with Oculus, having built development and demo rigs for the VR headset maker for a few years now. Falcon Northwest's support for the Oculus Ready program continues with its new Tiki and Talon desktop configurations, both recently upgraded with Intel's latest Kaby Lake processors. ...Read more...

If you've been holding out hope for a Pascal-powered version of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, you might want to skip your afternoon coffee. Nvidia sent out invitations today to a "GeForce GTX Gaming Celebration" event in San Francisco on February 28 during the Game Developers Conference. The invitation to the event talks about "amazing surprises," and ends with a seemingly-portentous "you won't want to miss this" declaration. To be clear, there's nothing explicitly mentioned in the invitation other than "an evening of awesome PC gaming, hardware, tournaments, and of course free food." That doesn't stop us from imagining what will happen, though, and the office betting pool is running good odds on an unveiling of the rumored GTX 1080 Ti. ...Read more...

Just like the ice wall guards the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros from the White Walkers, Alphacool's Eiswand 360 CPU ("Ice Wall") wants to save your liquid-cooled rig from overheating. The Eiswand is an all-in-one CPU liquid-cooling solution, meant to stand alongside your PC instead of inside it. Old-enough gerbils may see a similarity to the Zalman Reserator from days of yore....Read more...

The flood of Z270 motherboards continues unabated, and we've plucked a distinctly high-end one from the stream for you this morning. Gigabyte's Aorus brand is already off to a solid start with the Z270X-Gaming 5, and now we're examining the second-highest-tier board in the lineup: the Z270X-Gaming 8. ...Read more...

The days of the high-performance SATA SSD may be dimming, thanks to NVMe M.2 drives' ever-smaller physical sizes and prices and their higher overall performance. In a couple of years, most new enthusiast systems will probably boot from NVMe drives, relegating SATA ports to handling hard drives for bulk storage. Adata thinks there's still life left in high-performance SATA drives, though, and its XPG SX950 SATA SSDs are designed to deliver high performance storage over the SATA 6Gbps bus. The SX950 is the company's first 2.5" SATA SSD to use 3D MLC flash memory, which the company says allows for higher density, increased performance, and higher durability over its other offerings. The drives are available in the usual 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities. ...Read more...

If you've bought any hardware in the last six months, chances are some part of it either has built-in RGB LEDs or a connector for an LED strip. I know a lot of gerbils don't share my affection for the blinkenlichten, but if you're coming around to the dark light side, check out CableMod's new WideBeam Hybrid RGB/W LED strips. As the name suggests, they combine RGB LEDs with pure-white LEDs. ...Read more...

Skype was originally released in 2003. Apple's FaceTime first appeared on iOS back in 2010. Video conferencing is definitely not anything new. Amazon is trying to shake up that established market with its Chime service. Chime looks ready to compete with business-focused video conferencing services like Microsoft's Skype for Business and Cisco's WebEx. The service includes voice calling, file sharing, and chat features that put services like TR-favorite Slack in Amazon's sights, too. ...Read more...

Don't feel bad if you skipped the 378.57 GeForce hotfix driver two weeks ago, because Nvidia is ready with a fresh and hot WHQL release for you. The new version is numbered 378.66 and is Game Ready for Halo Wars 2, Sniper Elite 4, and the release version of For Honor. The driver pack also includes support for version 8.0 of the GeForce Video SDK, allowing software to use hardware-accelerated 10- and 12-bit VP9 and HEVC encoding. ...Read more...

AMD's Kabini architecture is definitely not new, and neither is the A4-5100 implementation of that low-power APU design. That hasn't stopped Biostar from releasing the A68N-5100, a mini-ITX motherboard packing a permanently-attached APU under a fanless heatsink. The A68N-5100 is an upgraded version of Biostar's A68N-5000, released in 2014. The company also offers a faster A68N-5200, but that unit will disturb users' ears with a fan. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Looking at the way the Ryzen hype-train is building steam around these parts, it seems like folks have almost forgotten that AMD also makes graphics cards. That might change later this month at GDC 2017. AMD has opened registrations for the "Capsaicin & Cream" live-stream and developer sessions it will be running at the conference.

There are new games coming out, and you know what that means: an updated driver release from AMD. The Radeon drivers version 17.2.1 bring support for Ubisoft's For Honor and Rebellion's Sniper Elite 4. AMD says that armored knights can expect a 4% performance increase versus the 17.1.2 version, while prospective sharp-shooters should get a 5% scope speed upgrade. ...Read more...

Humble Bundle has a new bundle up this week (and this week only) for your consumption. For just $30, the Freedom Bundle will net you almost 40 games and a small pile of eBooks. For this bundle in particular, the entirety of the proceedings go to charity. The site hints that there may be more items coming to the bundle, too.

I suspect that most gerbils probably have the same love-hate relationship with Wi-Fi that I do. I love it when it works, and hate it when it doesn't. Qualcomm has announced a pair of chips that the company claims to be the first 802.11ax solutions in the industry, and the technology within has the potential to increase the love and decrease the hate in the complex relationship between Wi-Fi and users. Qualcomm's IPQ8074 SoC wil bring 802.11ax to network infrastructure and the companion QCA6290 will bring the standard to more exciting client devices.802.11ax's big claim to fame is a four-fold increase in peak bandwidth to 1.8 Gbps on the client side. The standard does not require a jump onto a new frequency band. Rather, 802.11ax's magic lies in combining the 2.4 GHz and 5 Ghz ...Read more...

Last year when Apple declined to refresh its Thunderbolt display in favor of promoting LG's UltraFine displays, we all ooh-ed and aah-ed at the glorious 5K resolution and wide color gamut of the 27" model. As it turns out, 9to5mac found that those displays have a fairly serious flaw for a device intended to be used with laptops: they don't work near Wi-Fi access points and routers. LG confirmed the issue last week, and says it already has a fix prepared. Now, AppleInsider has gotten positive confirmation from sources inside Apple that the company has temporairly suspended sales of the monitor. ...Read more...

Razer might get a bit of teasing for its gamer-focused marketing, but its 14" Blade laptop is surely one of the most powerful machines in that size class. The company's making sure it retains that label by changing out the machine's positively antiquated Skylake processor for a hot new Kaby Lake chip. The overhauled laptop keeps the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and the 16GB of DDR4 memory from before, but the graphics card can now optionally be hooked up to a 3840x2160 capacitive multi-touch screen. ...Read more...

Jonsbo might not be the first brand that springs into most gerbils' minds when the subject of PC chassis comes up, but the company has been offering aluminum enclosures with subdued styling for some time now. The company has reportedly been the OEM behind some of Rosewill's higher-end cases, and it's now expanding its own offerings with a pair of mid-tower ATX chassis—the mysteriously-named U4 and the big RM4. Both cases offer steel frames and tempered glass exterior panels. ...Read more...

The Fierce Five

The smoke around AMD's Ryzen chips grows ever thicker. Today's rumor concerns the entire Ryzen lineup from top to bottom. WCCFTech claims to have obtained the entire Ryzen spec and price list from a Chinese retailer, and it's removed what it believes to be the taxes and fees that retailer adds to its chips to arrive in the ballpark of final USA pricing for the Ryzen lineup. As always, grab a pallet of salt and enjoy what could be the most complete leak of Ryzen info yet.Table ...Read more...

The way independently-created games are making their way to Valve's Steam service is about to undergo a big change. According to a post on its official blog, Valve will be replacing Steam Greenlight with a new and very different service called Steam Direct, starting this spring. ...Read more...

Among MSI's gaming PCs, the smallest model is the Trident 3. I've been curious about the performance of one of these slabs ever since I saw MSI's lineup during CES. Fortunately, I won't have to wonder much longer, because MSI sent one over for me to put through the wringer. ...Read more...

As products featuring Intel and Micron's joint venture 3D XPoint storage chips get closer to market, the claims surrounding them seem to have gotten less and less audacious. Intel is reportedly targeting Optane at server platforms and small-capacity cache devices, rather than full-sized SSDs, on the desktop.We now have a better idea of how an Optane datacenter device might perform, at least. Tom's Hardware reports that several Chinese-language media outlets have obtained performance specifications for the purported P4800X device, a 375GB 3D ...Read more...

EVGA found itself in a bit of hot water late last year, water heated by insufficiently-cooled PWM circuits and memory chips on some of the company's flagship GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards with ACX 3.0 coolers. To its credit, the company offered card owners help on several fronts, from delivering firmware updates that increased the fan speed under load to sending out thermal pads to connect the hot power delivery and memory components to the heatsink.To ensure that its GeForces won't suffer from similar issues again, EVGA is now offering GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080 ...Read more...

RGB LEDs are in everything now. Keyboards, mice, video cards, fans and even RAM. Waterblocks are no exception, and cooling company EKWB has unveiled an RGB LED monoblock built specifically with Gigabyte's Z270 motherboards in mind: the EK-FB GA Z270X RGB Monoblock. ...Read more...

Whew. I'm in a rush today, fellow gerbils, so let's dive right into the best deals we found this week.That's it for today, folks! If you found any sweet online deals that we ...Read more...

Ashraf Eassa from The Motley Fool was at Intel's annual Investor Day in California yesterday, and he Tweeted a couple of interesting things. In the most surprising bit of news, Eassa confirmed that the next generation of Intel Core processors will once again be built on 14-nm technology. In a reply to Anandtech's Ian Cutress, he also reported that Intel's Vice President and General Manager of Client and IoT says that "process tech use will be fluid based on segment and what makes sense."Confirmed with Intel that 8th Gen Core will ...Read more...

Gamers are sometimes guilty of judging every new display by the unique needs for Counterstrike sessions. As it turns out, some of us also use our monitors to, you know, work. NEC's new MultiSync EX341R monitor offers a 34" ultra-wide curved display with some interesting features for productivity. ...Read more...

Gamers are sometimes guilty of judging every new display by the unique needs for Counterstrike sessions. As it turns out, some of us also use our monitors to, you know, work. NEC's new MultiSync EX341R monitor offers a 34" ultra-wide curved display with some interesting features for productivity. ...Read more...

In the weeks since CES, we've reported on the Nvidia's 2017 Shield TV set-top box, and the update for the original Shield TV with Android 7.0 and a backport of the 2017 version's features. To prove to customers that it hasn't forgotten about the Shield Tablet K1, the green team has announced the release of the Software Upgrade 5.0 for that device. The update brings Android 7.0 Nougat to the K1, along with compatibility with the 2017 Shield Controller. ...Read more...

Nvidia disclosed how much green it made during the fourth quarter of 2016 today, along with its whole-year results for its fiscal 2017. In the fourth quarter, the company's year-on-year revenue rocketed to $2.17 billion, a 55% year-on-year increase, and it made $733 million in operating income, up a gobsmacking 191% year-on-year. Gross margin was an impressive 60%, up 3.5% from this time last year.Nvidia's GPU division took in the vast majority of the company's Q4 revenue with $1.85 billion of the total pie. That's a 57% year-on-year increase. Nvidia says the boost came from growth across all of its GPU segments, but it put forth its GeForce ...Read more...

The people over at Croteam have a lot on their plate. Too much, some might say. But they're jazzed for all of it. In an epic-sized blog post yesterday, Croteam unveiled a few projects it's working on, including adding Vulkan and multi-platform support to its contemporary games. The team is making some big additions to its VR titles, too. ...Read more...

Take a break from fantasizing about the purported price-performance ratio of Ryzen to gawp with us at Intel's new Xeon. Designated the Xeon E7-8894 v4, the new chip sports 24 hyper-threaded Broadwell cores that start at 2.4 GHz and can boost all the way up to 3.4 GHz. The chips are designed to drop into servers with up to eight sockets and 24 TB of memory per node, and they're specced for a 165W TDP. ...Read more...

This isn't a deals-of-the-week post, exactly. Newegg will usually discount a particular set of items, and we'll sniff out the best of them. This time around, however, the retailer is offering 5% off anything on its site if you use promo code MBLNEZY29 from now until 9:59 PM PT tonight. ...Read more...

Japanese electronics manufacturer Toshiba has been suffering some financial difficulties as of late. These losses are at least partially related to a 2015 accounting scandal and trouble in the company's nuclear power business in the Unites States. The company has reportedly sought outside capital by seeking a buyer for a minority stake in its semiconductor manufacturing business. Someone in an expensive suit must believe the saying "you have to spend money to make money," because the company has announced the beginning of construction of a new fabrication plant and a memory R&D center in Yokkaichi, Japan. ...Read more...