Techreport

PC hardware and computing

A snowstorm just swept through my city this morning, and it appears that MSI has been feeling the arctic winds, too. The company has four new motherboards based on Intel's 200-series chipsets, and they're all as white and frosty as my neighborhood streets. The new offerings come in pairs—two Tomahawk Arctic ATX mobos and two Mortar Arctic microATX boards. ...Read more...

Almost everyone's expecting Ryzen processors to be reasonably competitive with Intel's offerings in terms of performance, but if they're priced the same, then "reasonably competitive" isn't going to cut it. The latest leaks about the new chips paint a rosy picture for the prces of the upcoming CPUs, though. Spanish tech site El Chapuzas Informatico got its hands on some European pricing for the chips. Even more encouraging, Connecticut-based Bottom Line Telecommunications has three of the new chips listed for sale already. Grab the rock salt. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

I was pretty interested in that Lian-Li PC-O10 tempered-glass case until I realized it required an SFX power supply. I didn't tell the company, but apparently somebody did, because Lian-Li just released the PC-O11. This dual-chambered tempered-glass tower case is almost a copy of the O10, just wider and deeper. The PC-O11 is huge, and Lian-Li goes so far as to call it "titanic." As a result, it will accept standard ATX power supplies and motherboards up to E-ATX size. ...Read more...

When humans hallucinate, it's usually considered a problem. When computers do it, it's science. Research divisions of Google's parent company Alphabet have recently been working hard on improving the way computers perceive and generate images. Last month, Google showed off RAISR, a tool meant to save bandwidth through heavy image compression and restoration. In a newly-published research paper, the Google Brain team now demonstrated its work in "pixel recursive super resolution," which uses deep-learning techniques to look at ultra-low-resolution images and try to recreate the original high-res pictures. Sound familar yet?...Read more...

The World Wide Web Consortium, better known as the W3C, allows members to propose community groups for discussion and consideration of future web standards. Yesterday the team behind the popular WebKit engine for browsers proposed just such a group to help develop and standardize an API—tentatively called "WebGPU"—that will allow web-based applications to interface with graphics processors in the low-level manner enabled by modern graphics APIs like Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12.The proposal is still at an extremely early stage, although the WebKit team says it has been working on its prototype for a few years. The group says its decision to work on a new standard came out of the realization that the existing WebGL standard for 3D web graphics wasn't keeping pace with developments ...Read more...

Intel's 10-nm products are likely in production as we speak. Seven nanometers is the next stop on the roadmap, and the company revealed today that it'll be pouring $7 billion into its Chandler, Arizona facilities to complete an entirely new foundry for production on that node. Intel expects that Fab 42, as it'll be known, will require three to four years of construction before it's complete. When Fab 42 comes online, Intel says it'll be "the most advanced semiconductor factory in the world."

Intel's 10-nm products are likely in production as we speak. Seven nanometers is the next stop on the roadmap, and the company revealed today that it'll be pouring $7 billion into its Chandler, Arizona facilities to build an entirely new foundry for production on that node. Intel expects that Fab 42, as it'll be known, will require three to four years of construction before it's complete. When Fab 42 comes online, Intel says it'll be "the most advanced semiconductor factory in the world."

Perhaps it's in the nature of technology companies to constantly expand into new fields. Corsair started out making memory modules, but over the years has started offering all kinds of input devices, cases, power supplies, and headsets. Enthusiasts everywhere have praised that expansion, since most of the new products have been strong offerings. Corsair also has a little experience with barebones PCs, as evidenced by the Bulldog line of couch gaming-HTPC kits. Now, the company seems to think it's time to jump into fully-assembled compact gaming rigs, and it's teasing a machine called the Corsair One. ...Read more...

Stacking layers of silicon is all the rage these days, and Sony is getting in on the party with a new image sensor for smartphones at the ISSCC conference. The company is using 3D fabrication to layer a 125MB DRAM cache in between a conventional backside-illuminated image sensor and the accompanying processing circuitry. That DRAM buffer solves some annoying problems with smartphone image capture and lets the sensor capture more frames per second of slow-motion video. ...Read more...

Western Digital is expanding its subsidiary Sandisk's portfolio of SSDs with a pair of massive drives designed for its enterprise customers. Sandisk claims that the new Skyhawk series of drives offer capacities up to 3.84TB and impressive speeds, combined with lower-than-average power consumption. The Skyhawk drives are compliant with the NVMe 1.2 protocol and use four lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity. Unlike most NVMe drives released recently, the Skyhawks come in a 2.5" form factor instead of little M.2 gumsticks. ...Read more...

AMD has had a tough time competing with Intel's CPUs over the last few years. The modular philosophy in AMD's construction-core processors could never find the type of integer-heavy parallel workloads it needed to shine. At the same time, Intel continually extended its consistent advantage in manufacturing technology every year, while pushing AMD out of the mobile and server markets almost entirely.The red team claims it's now back and ready to compete in every CPU metric, including logic gate density. In a paper published as part of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the company claims that its ...Read more...

If we had to guess at the most-feared word in the CPU industry, "erratum" would be a top contender. When a major silicon bug makes itself known, like the Pentium FDIV bug and the AMD Phenom TLB problems of years past, the costs can be enormous. These bugs only cause problems bad enough to make their way into the public eye once in a blue moon, but today's is a doozy. The Register reports that a circuit degradation problem inside some Intel Atom C2000 embedded CPUs can render systems with those chips inside permanently unable to boot.El Reg says that neither Intel nor any of the companies whose products are apparently affected by the issue would actually confirm or deny that C2000 Atom CPUs are the point of failure, but Synology apparently tipped Intel's hand when it issued a statement to the site regarding some of ...Read more...

Intel makes a range of chipsets for its desktop processors, and the fully-enabled Z270 model sits right at the top. The thing is, the Z270 is overkill for most users' needs. For folks who aren't overclocking and don't need three M.2 sockets, a B-series chipset will serve just fine. Gigabyte clearly agrees, as the company's new B250M-Gaming 5 motherboard packs a fancy feature set worthy of a high-end gamer board but skips the high-end chipset. ...Read more...

Webcams these days are asked to do lots of things beyond simple video conferencing. Windows Hello turns a compatible camera into a biometric login device. Several competing technologies allow streamers to strip out backgrounds, sparing viewers the sight of a backdrop of empty Mountain Dew bottles, dirty socks, and depleted packets of Soylent. Logitech's 4K Pro Webcam and Brio Webcam go one step further, and are the first webcams to add 4K (4096 x 2160) resolution to their spec sheets. ...Read more...

Solidworks is holding its annual Solidworks World designers' conference right now in lovely Los Angeles, and Lenovo is one of the show's major sponsors. The company took the opportunity to annouce major updates to its mobile workstation lineup, known as the Thinkpad P series. Unsurprisingly, the new models are called the Thinkpad P71, P51, and P51s. The new series includes Lenovo's thinnest and lightest mobile workstation, as well as the company's first laptop certified for VR development. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

We were impressed by Cooler Master's modular MasterCase 5 and 5 Pro when we reviewed them at the end of 2015. The company's designers have definitely not been sitting on their hands since then, as evidenced by the release of the even-more-customizable MasterCase Maker 5 and Maker 5t cases. Cooler Master has a new model out, the MasterCase 6, espousing the same "FreeForm" modular design principles as its forebears. ...Read more...

Here's one that we missed in our CES coverage—perhaps because we weren't looking in the IR spectrum? FLIR is releasing two new models of its FLIR One thermal imaging smartphone attachment. The first model, an updated version of the FLIR One model, offers some quality-of-life improvements and a lower price tag. The new FLIR One Pro, meanwhile, has an improved thermal sensor and more powerful tools. ...Read more...

Overclocking a processor takes a lot of guesswork–especially when it's a freshly-released CPU like Intel's Core i7-7700K. From figuring out the target voltage you need to picking out an adequate cooling solution, there are tons of variables to account for. The minds over at Asus's EdgeUp blog have done a bunch of research on overclocking Kaby Lake CPUs, and have come away with some interesting results. Cranking your Kaby Lake CPU to 5GHz with just air cooling is within reach—if you're lucky. ...Read more...

With a little care, you can build a Mini-ITX system that packs the punch of a PC many times larger. Keeping a high-end Mini-ITX machine cool usually involves liquid-cooling, though, as giant heatinks don't tend to fit in compact ITX cases. Folks who are amenable to trading available space for cooling performance might favor the new version of Thermalright's Silver Arrow cooler, appropriately named the Silver Arrow ITX-R. ...Read more...

The internet is ablaze with rumors of a leaked lineup of AMD's hotly-anticipated Ryzen CPUs. The leak in question first originated on Chinese forum Coolaler. The post has since then been removed, but Google has a cached version here. The list shows a total of 17 Ryzen models, ranging from a so-called R3 1100 with four cores, all the way up to the R7 Pro 1800X with the eight-core, 16-thread design that AMD has touted since the first Zen announcements. Perhaps the most interesting nugget in the leak is the presence of four six-core, 12-thread models. Drop the wimpy little salt shaker and grab the 40-pound bag of ice-melting magnesium chloride from the garage as we dig into this.

It's been a little over six months since Nvidia launched the Quadro P6000 and P5000. Those Pascal-powered pro graphics cards were built with the GP102 and GP104 processors, and the Quadro GP100 should now satisfy pros with a need for double-precision speed. For professionals with a less-pressing need for high-precision pixel-pushing, Nvidia is also launching a full Pascal refresh of its mid-range and lower-end Quadro products. Say hello to the Quadro P4000, P2000, P1000, P600, and P400. ...Read more...

Nvidia's power-efficient GeForce GTX 1050 Ti offers excellent gaming performance within a small power envelope. The design is so efficient that we've reported on three different implementations of half-height GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti cards, Nvidia packed every last stream processor from the desktop GTX 1050 Ti into the mobile version, and we've even seen DIY experiments of strapping fanless coolers onto retail GTX 1050 cards. Palit's latest offering capitalizes on the mini-Pascal's power efficiency. GeForce GTX 1050 Ti KalmX is a full-height double-slot PCIe graphics card with no fans to disturb users' delicate ears. ...Read more...

Nvidia's GP100 graphics chip has shown up in two different forms for datacenters already: first as a Tesla P100 NVLink mezzanine card for HPC systems, and second as a Tesla P100 PCIe accelerator. The green team has now finished its GP100 hat trick with the Quadro GP100, a graphics card that brings the most potent Pascal chip to workstations for the first time.

The Pick 6

We've been fans of Rosewill's limited-nonsense approach to keyboard design in the past. The company has done a good job of putting Cherry MX switches into understated chassis for years now. The company is back at it again with a pair of keyboards sporting buyers' choice of Cherry MX Blue or Brown switches. The Rosewill RK-9300 is a straightforward mechanical keyboard with per-key blue backlighting and clicky Blue switches. The RK-9300 BR has the same blue illumination paired with quieter Brown switches. ...Read more...

Cooler Master has a history of encouraging modders and makers to get busy. As a part of that history, the Case Mod World Series contest is kicking off once again. The company has some $40,000 of cash and prizes up for grabs for the 2017 edition of the contest. Categories include Tower Mods, Scratch Builds, and the People's Choice Award, as usual. Since 2017 also marks Cooler Master's 25th anniversary, the company is throwing in an extra 25th Anniversary award. ...Read more...

Folks who really enjoy shooting other (virtual) folks in the head are probably already fans of the Sniper Elite series. The fourth Sniper Elite game is set to hit both physical and digital storefronts on February 14, and developer Rebellion just announced that the game will be coming with support for both the DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 graphics APIs. ...Read more...

Builders of Kaby Lake systems have tons of motherboard choices from Asus. The company updated almost 90 of its 100-series boards to work with Intel's seventh-generation Core CPUs, and it's launched a bevy of Z270 motherboards, to boot. The company must feel like it still has a gap in its product line, because it just announced the Z270-WS, a workstation motherboard built with Intel's upper-level mainstream chipset. ...Read more...

As games grow ever larger, the slightly-over-400GB of storage available on the PlayStation 4's internal disk drive looks more and more cramped. One solution is to upgrade the drive, but that's a little involved, and it means having to re-download everything you had on the stock disk. A better option is on the horizon: when system software version 4.50 hits, users will be able to connect USB 3.0 hard drives up to 8TB in capacity. ...Read more...

Welcome to today's edition of TR's Compute Cooking Show. First, we need to start with a good motherboard. Then, we liberally sprinkle as much RAM on it as we can. Then we add that meaty shader protein, in the form of graphics cards. On the sides, a couple of nice hard drives for extra flavor. Finally, for gravy, a dash or two of studio-grade audio. Overclock until perfection, and serve to a party of one. We've sourced the best ingredients for you from the local internet, and here they are.That's it for today, folks! If you found any sweet online deals that we ...Read more...

It appears that the Mozilla Corporation has decided to trim a few of its side-projects. On Thursday, Mozilla announced to its employees that it will lay off most of its connected devices team, including Ari Jaaksi, the team's senior vice-president. Roughly fifty people will be laid off in total.Mozilla's connected devices team had been working on a variety of projects , including a crowd-sourced air quality monitoring system, a " personal agent ," and a product to ...Read more...

Once you get used to all the real estate offered by a big, high-resolution screen, it's tough to go back—especially for gaming. You can only go up from there. Acer knows it, and offers its new FreeSync-powered ultrawide 37.5" XR382CQK as the next step up in gamers' eternal quest for immersion. ...Read more...

PC hardware and computing

Gigabyte and MSI have both released half-height graphics cards that allow stuffing Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti into tiny computers that one might want to use as an unobtrusive HTPC. Now, Galax is gearing up to enter that market niche with its GeForce GTX 1050 OC LP and GeForce GTX 1050Ti OC LP cards. ...Read more...

You remember that GeForce bundle we told you about the other day? Unlike Nvidia's previous bundles, the codes for these games aren't coming on cards or e-mails. In fact, there might not be any codes at all. Redeeming this latest pack-in apparently requires linking your Steam or Uplay account with GeForce Experience. The app will then perform a "hardware verification" process before unlocking your title. ...Read more...

First and foremost, let us make it clear that this story is not about Apple moving to replace the Intel Core CPUs currently found across its Mac lineup. Bloomberg reports from sources within Apple that a new in-house chip will take over some ancillary functions from the main processor. The new chip is codenamed T310 and said to be related to the T1 chip that powers the graphical Touch Bar on high-end MacBook Pro laptops. ...Read more...

EVGA is showing off a pair of new closed-loop liquid CPU coolers, very simply called the EVGA CLC 120 and CLC 280. EVGA is no stranger to liquid-cooling—it even has graphics cards with CLCs strapped on them. These are the first mount-and-go closed-loop CPU coolers from the company, though. They look pretty slick, and include an RGB-LED-lit EVGA logo on the block itself, plus a new fan design that EVGA says offers "superior cooling and lower noise" over typical radiator fans. ...Read more...

Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs are out now, and AMD's Ryzen CPUs are slated for a first-quarter release. With those winds of change blowing, we figure it's time to see how the PC builders in our audience are making their plans for their next systems. Are you sticking with what you have? Did you already build a Kaby Lake PC? Or are you waiting for Ryzen no matter what? Let us know using the poll options below.Read more...

While the lawsuit between ZeniMax and Oculus isn't over, the jury for the case has made decisions on a couple significant aspects of the suit. The court has awarded ZeniMax $500 million in damages over its allegations.TechCrunch's man on the ground broke down the verdict . The jury awarded ZeniMax $200 million for its finding that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey violated a non-disclosure agreement he'd signed with the publisher. It awarded another $50 million ...Read more...

Who doesn't like cars? Wait... I think I see a raised hand. You over there, get out! Now, back to business. There's a double-whammy of fun coming up for racing aficionados. Dirt 4 was announced a few days ago, and today a leaked trailer for Project Cars 2 popped up, leaving mouths agape everywhere.Dirt 4 seems to be the unofficial sequel to Dirt Rally , a game praised for its extremely realistic take on tire and gravel mechanics, but also criticized for being tough on beginners. Codemasters is apparently trying to bridge the gap between starter and pro wheel jockeys, ...Read more...

Cloud backup outfit Backblaze runs its business by buying large quantities of mostly consumer-grade hard drives, running them in close quarters, and planning around the failure of those spinners when they do croak. Along the way, the company releases quarterly reports about the failure rate for the tens of thousands of drives it uses. The company released its latest report just yesterday, and as always, the results are worth a read. ...Read more...

The GeForce drivers 378.49 may have come out of the oven a little undercooked. Users on the GeForce forums are complaining about a myriad of issues, like broken PhysX on Maxwell cards, crashing Java OpenGL apps, and overclocked Pascal cards stuck at reference speeds thanks to drivers' "debug mode" being stuck on. While there's no fix for the first issue yet, Nvidia has addressed the latter two problems with the latest hotfix driver, numbered 378.57.According to EVGA technical support agent "MDecker," the debug mode is only available on graphics cards with factory overclocks. Digging a bit deeper, it seems that this mode will ...Read more...

The "magic mirror," arguably the hottest Raspberry Pi project of 2015, is now coming to Windows users without a wood shop at their disposal thanks to a German company called Dirror. The simpler Raspberry-Pi-based mirrors tend to be passive affairs, simply giving the time, weather report, and other notifications. Dirror's devices, on the other hand, are full Windows 10 PCs with microphones, speakers, and touch-screen displays. ...Read more...

Is this the year of the disappearing bezel? Smartphone and notebook manufacturers alike have been pursuing designs that minimize bezels, hoping to focus our attention entirely on the displays. AOC uses the same aesthetic for its Q2781PQ, an ultra-slim 27" monitor. ...Read more...

You might think you abuse your graphics card. You overclock it, you tweak every little setting to squeeze a few extra frames out of each game. But Asus' newly-unveiled Expedition GeForce GTX 1070 OC Edition isn't for you or me. This is the latest entry in Asus' Expedition lineup, first unveiled with the Expedition GTX 1050 back in October. This is a truly heavy-duty card, meant to be put to work for hours at a time in places like the netcafés so popular in Asian countries. ...Read more...

Apple released its fiscal 2017 first-quarter financial results today. Over the holiday season, the company raked in $78.3 billion, up 3% from this time last year, and it made $23.4 billion on that take, slightly less than the $24.2 billion it made this time last year. Apple claims that revenue figure is an all-time record, and it also reported an all-time earnings-per-share record of $3.36 for the quarter. Gross margin rang in at 38.5%, down slighly from the 40% figure from this time last year.Those record numbers rode in on the back of 78.3 million iPhones sold, a 5% increase over this time last year. Apple made $54.4 billion off its phone business, also up 5% from this time last year. iPad sales continue to decline, however. ...Read more...

AMD's fourth-quarter 2016 financials are in. The company reported $1.1 billion in revenue, up 15% year-over-year, and it held operating losses to just $3 million, down substantially from the $49 million it bled away this time last year. For all of 2016, the company reported $4.27 billion in revenue, up 7% over its 2015 take.The Computing and Graphics segment enjoyed a 28% year-on-year boost in revenue to $600 million. AMD says this increase is primarily thanks to increased GPU sales. Even with that boost, the ...Read more...