Techreport

Nvidia might be trying to sway some of those people who were going to wait on Vega to go for a graphics card upgrade a little early. The company is running one of its famous game bundles right now, and while you only get one game, the choices are pretty good. New buyers of a GeForce GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 graphics card—or a laptop equipped with one of those cards—can grab a free copy of Ubisoft's For Honor or Ghost Recon: Wildlands....Read more...

Nineteen months have passed since AMD introduced its Fiji-based R9 Fury X graphics card. With bite-size and double-wide siblings along for the ride, the Furies remain the only consumer graphics cards with HBM memory on the market. We don't know anything about how graphics cards with AMD's next-generation Vega GPUs on board will look, but some shifts in the memory market might provide one clue.The rumor-mongering internet detectives over at WCCFTech noticed a subtle change to SK Hynix's product catalog recently, and the site thinks the change is related to the specs of AMD's next-generation graphics chip. According to the article, the last version of ...Read more...

German PC parts house be quiet! just announced a revision to its entry-level Pure Power line. The updated series, called the Pure Power 10, comprises a set of modular and fixed-cable units with peak load capacities ranging from 300W to 700W. Like the previous-generation Pure Power 9 units, the new PSUs from be quiet! are 80 Plus certified at the relatively uncommon Silver level. ...Read more...

Gaming peripherals company Razer seems to be making a habit of acquiring interesting technology companies. In 2015, Razer purchased Ouya, the short-lived maker of an Android game console. A year later, Razer picked up THX. This year, Razer is buying Nextbit, the manufacturer of the Robin smartphone. ...Read more...

We already know Gigabyte's Aorus sub-brand from its laptops and motherboards, and now the eagle is landing on the company's graphics cards. Say hello to the Aorus GTX 1080 Xtreme Edition 8G: ...Read more...

Dropbox's newest business-focused collaboration tool, called Paper, launched globally yesterday. The company first announced Paper back in October 2015 as a collaborative editing tool aimed at businesses, in the vein of software like Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. Paper is now out of beta and free to check out in your browser and on both Android and iOS devices....Read more...

Microsoft has been waging a war against Chromebooks on a number of fronts, including reducing the price of OEM Windows licenses on machines with certain specifications, working with manufacturing partners like HP to develop Windows laptops that could compete with Chromebooks on price, and negative ad campaigns. The next phase of Microsoft's campaign might be Windows Cloud, a version of the operating system that Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet speculates will only be able to run Unified Windows Platform (UWP) apps from the Windows Store. Foley goes on to predict that Windows Cloud may be released in conjunction with the Windows 10 Creators Update, scheduled for April. ...Read more...

Most driver updates these days are released in concert with high-profile games, arriving with support for said titles along with a few bug-fixes for good measure. The new Radeon driver 17.1.2 does things a little differently and comes with support for beta versions of upcoming titles. For this driver release, AMD added support for Conan: Exiles and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands in their respective beta incarnations.

If you're still hooked on Fallout 4 and roaming around the Commonwealth's post-apocalyptic scenario (or thinking of taking the first hit), there's good news for you: the wasteland will soon be a lot prettier. Bethesda has announced a couple free updates for Fallout 4, and the biggest one offers a graphics upgrade to the PC version of the game. ...Read more...

Fancy motherboards that allow for custom PWM fan curves based on CPU, motherboard, and graphics card temperatures are wonderful. For example, I'm typing this story with only the sound of the fan inside my power supply and the clacking of my mechanical keyboard tickling my tympanic membranes. Unfortunately, not all motherboards have these features—gasp—even in 2017. Arctic Cooling now offers its Freezer i32 Plus CPU cooler to grant the gift of silence to owners of mobos without fine-grained PWM controls. The Freezer i32 Plus is a tower-style heatsink with four heat-pipes and two 120-mm fans in a push-pull configuration. The cooler's party trick is the fans' ability to shut off completely when their PWM duty cycle is under 40%. ...Read more...

Delidding Intel CPUs is a somewhat dangerous task with meager benefits for most users. Traditionally, the process required pliers, a vise, a blade, a little sweat, and no small measure of skill. It doesn't have to be that way, though. We previoulsy reported on Rockit 88's Haswell and Skylake delidding tool a few months ago, and now YouImagine user Chri has uploaded a 3D-printable design for a Kaby Lake delidding tool.

Benchmarking VR content is something of a sticky issue. Among other problems, the real-time, largely non-repeatable nature of the content makes creating objective benchmarks rather difficult. Fortunately, Finland's Basemark took a break from the sauna long enough to develop and release VRScore PC. Basemark claims this is the world's first "comprehensive" VR benchmark, and it looks quite promising. VRScore PC supports DirectX 11 and 12, and can test performance of machines with or without a connected head-mounted display....Read more...

All good things must come to an end. In turn, all outdated software meets its maker in the grand scheme of things. The terminus we're talking about today is the final driver release for the IGPs inside Intel's Haswell Core, Pentium, and Celeron processors running Windows 7 and 8.1. The driver series is going out on a bit of a high note with respect to HTPC scenarios, at least: "advanced users" can now use third-party tools to modify Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) and create custom display timings and modes—an ability that'll come in handy when using a television with poor EDID support as a display.The 15.36 driver release notes also list a handful of squashed bugs, along with a few known issues that will apparently never be resolved for Windows 7 and 8.1. The unresolved problems ...Read more...

When we said the hardware inside the updated Nvidia Shield Android TV was "essentially unchanged," we weren't kidding. Nvidia has pushed out a software update for the original Shield that upgrades it with Android 7.0 Nougat and most (if not all) of the newer model's features. Owners of the 2015 Shield console can stream movies and shows in 4K HDR from the internet, and games from a local network in similar 4K bliss. ...Read more...

Advances in virtualization technology and web applications coupled with ever-rising memory and storage capacities have progressively turned the stage lights away from Wine, a software tool for directly running Windows applications on Linux and macOS. The Wine developers kept on working, though, and earlier this week, the team released the stable release of Wine 2.0.The highlights of the new version are support for Microsoft Office 2013 and the ability to run 64-bit Windows executables on macOS. Macintosh systems with Retina displays should work much better with the 2.0 release, too. The release notes list other enhancements, including ...Read more...

Some of Google's projects, like Google Voice, go years between updates. Higher-priority projects like the company's Chrome web browser see more frequent refreshes. Faster refreshes are one of the key features of the new Chrome 56, along with support for the Web Bluetooth API and another step in relegating Adobe Flash to the dustbin in favor of HTML5....Read more...

Behold, gerbils! Welcome to the magic show of El Dealino, the Mexican wizard known throughout lands far and wide. He is able to pull incredibly small price tags from under his sombrero, astounding shoppers everywhere. He is putting on a special performance just for us today, and the quivering of his mustache and the trembling under his poncho mean he's about to start. Let the show begin!That's it for today, folks! If you found any sweet online deals that we ...Read more...

While an optical media drive might seem like a relic to some users, it's often a necessity for those with PCs at the center of their home theaters. Ultra HD Blu-ray discs are increasing in popularity, and now Pioneer has announced a pair of drives to get the newest discs spinning in our systems: the BDR-S11J-BK and BDR-S11J-X. ...Read more...

As the new and incredibly-fast kids on the block, solid-state drives get a lot of attention these days—particularly as they get large enough to handle the average user's everyday needs without the services of a second drive. However, there are many usage scenarios where a drive's size matters more than its speed. For these applications, Seagate has new high-capacity hard drives coming to market relatively soon, with the largest of them reaching 16TB.In an earnings call this week , Seagate's CEO Steve Luczo revealed that the company will release those drives in the next 12 to 18 months. Seagate also has plans to expand the number of different capacity points that it offers its ...Read more...

Microsoft reported financial results for the fourth quarter of 2016 (the second quarter of its fiscal 2017) yesterday. The company earned $24.1 billion in revenue and made $6.2 billion in operating income on that take. During the quarter, Microsoft also completed its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn.The More Personal Computing business, which encompasses Windows, search, devices, and gaming, brought in $11.8 billion for Microsoft, a decrease of 5% from this time last year. Windows OEM ...Read more...

Intel closed out its 2016 books today, and the results are rosy. The company posted $16.4 billion in revenue for the last quarter of 2016, up 10% from a year ago, and operating income of $4.5 billion, up 5% from a year ago. For its fiscal 2016, the blue team took in total revenue of $59.4 billion, up 7% from its fiscal 2015, and $12.9 billion in operating income, down slightly from the $14 billion in operating profit it generated in 2015. Gross margin for the year fell to 60.9% from 62.6%.Intel's Client Computing group took in $9.1 billion , up 4% year-on-year, despite a 7% decline in platform sales (the combination of processors and chipsets). That's thanks in part to a 7% increase in the average selling price of those platforms. Drilling down into those numbers, the company says desktop ...Read more...

Now that Oculus' Touch controllers are out in the wild, the company has started posting blog entries that detail the best ways to set up the motion-tracking sensors. The first two posts, dealing with sensor placement and USB bandwidth management, are already up on the Oculus blog. Those instructions elaborate on earlier documentation. ...Read more...

We're really quite spoiled for choice these days when buying monitors. Gaming monitors that refresh at 240Hz, ultra-high-definition displays that can reproduce over a billion unique shades simultaneously, and ultra-wide monitors with black-hole contrast are all available. A lot of folks just want a pleasing monitor with few fancy frills, though, like the BenQ EW2770QZ. This monitor has a 27", 8-bit IPS panel with 2560x1440 resolution. The EW2770QZ can reproduce the full sRGB color space, and includes an ambient light sensor to adjust both brightness and color based on lighting conditions. ...Read more...

Another day, another story about defective batteries. This time, it's Hewlett-Packard recalling laptop batteries and urging customers to stick to AC power until their units can be replaced. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says that 101,000 laptop computers marketed under the HP and Compaq brand names contain lithium-ion batteries that can overheat and potentially catch fire. HP is offering customers a free replacement battery, so gerbils expecting a Kaby Lake replacement for their 2013-vintage Celeron laptop shouldn't get their hopes up. ...Read more...

Hugo Barra didn't have a hard time finding gainful employment after his departure from Xiaomi on Sunday. The Brazilian technology executive will now be the vice-president of virtual reality at Facebook, a move that puts him in charge of the social media company's Oculus VR platform, among Facebook's other VR ventures. ...Read more...

The Xbox One follow-up known as Project Scorpio hasn't been much more than a set of promises since its unveiling at last year's Electronics Entertainment Expo. Microsoft has been tight-lipped about Scorpio since that original announcement. Now, thanks to some whitepapers MS provided to developers and analyzed by the technomancers at Digital Foundry, we have a slightly better idea of what to expect from the system....Read more...

Remember that "Game Mode" feature that Twitter user WalkingCat found in Windows 10 build 14997? When we first heard about it, we were left wondering exactly what it did. Windows Central got to speak with Kevin Gammill from Microsoft's Xbox team, and the short version is that Game Mode is an OS feature that should slightly improve performance consistency in both UWP and Win32 games when it's activated.

The educational market has slightly different priorities than the enthusiast and enterprise domains. Machines destined for the classroom need to be affordable, durable, and easy to manage. Dell has launched a bevy of new Chromebook and Windows laptops designed with educational institutions and students in mind. All models sport spill-resistant keyboards and touch pads, along with torque-resistant metal brackets around the power connector. ...Read more...

A while back, we got a clue that Socket AM4 would use a new heatsink mounting system when be quiet! announced it would be giving away free mounting kits for its existing cooling gear. As it happens, the AM4 mounting system is similar to that of AM3+ (a system that traces its roots back to the Socket 754 era), but the AM4 backplate uses slightly larger dimesions. Overclock3D got a few pictures of the mounts and confirmed those larger dimensions. Most existing heatsinks and waterblocks aren't going to fit the new socket without a new mounting apparatus. Happily, a handful of heatsink manufacturers have now posted information about their approaches to AM4 compatibility for customers who already own aftermarket coolers.

We haven't covered In Win's 303 ATX mid-tower case, but other sites seemed to like it. The company probably figured it had a good product on its hands and is now back with the 301, a similar design to the the 303 case but with microATX dimensions. The 301's product page is fairly short on details at the moment, but Gamers Nexus and Hardware Canucks were able to get a look at the new case at CES. ...Read more...

Rosewill has excelled for years at offering up gear for enthusiasts who love PCs but don't have the budget to match the hobby's high cost. The latest addition to the Rosewill family is the RGH-2100 gaming headset. ...Read more...

At GDC last year, Microsoft pulled back the curtain on the graphics technologies coming with Shader Model 6.0. As it turns out, the company still had some surprises up its sleeve. Microsoft has released the DirectX Shader Compiler as an open-source project, built on the popular Clang/LLVM toolchain.Broadly speaking, shaders are programs that modify colors and shapes to add effects to rendered images or polygon meshes. Modern games employ a large number of shaders, and they're often targeted for optimization in graphics driver releases. HLSL is a shader language ...Read more...

I've said many times before that the monitor is the most oft-neglected part of an enthusiast PC build. Folks who've just built a murder machine with the latest graphics card from the green team will be ill-served hooking it up a 60Hz 1080p TN display. There's a much better choice for a new gaming PC: the AOC Agon AG352UCG, a 35" curved ultra-wide monitor with a 3440x1440 resolution. ...Read more...

Now that seemingly every PC component vendor has at least one RGB LED-illuminated keyboard in its respective product portfolio, the companies that got to that market first are releasing second-revision hardware. A couple of weeks we told you about Corsair's updated K95 RGB Platinum keyboard. Today is Razer's turn to launch a refreshed RGB LED keyboard, the BlackWidow Chroma V2. ...Read more...

Now that seemingly every PC component vendor has at least one RGB LED-illuminated keyboard in its respective product portfolio, the companies that got to that market first are releasing second-revision hardware. A couple of weeks we told you about Corsair's updated K95 RGB Platinum keyboard. Today is Razer's turn to launch a refreshed RGB LED keyboard, the BlackWidow Chroma V2. ...Read more...

We spend a lot of time talking about SSDs, whether they come packaged as 2.5" SATA disks, PCIe expansion cards, or flavor-of-the-month M.2 formats. While SSDs are hard to beat when it comes to performance, trusty old spinning aluminum platters covered in magnetic dust still reign supreme in terms of storage capacity per unit of currency. Toshiba's 3.5" N300 High Reliability Hard Drives, available in 4 TB and 6 TB sizes, are targeted at NAS and server owners looking for capacious storage that's available 24/7. ...Read more...

Nvidia posted a new GeForce driver release, numbered 378.49. The driver is WHQL-certified, and adds official support for the notebook versions of the GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti. Besides bringing support for the new portable Pascals, the driver 378.49 is also Game Ready for some recent games. The latest entry in Capcom's seminal horror series, Resident Evil 7, the open-world competitive survival title Conan Exiles, and Ubisoft's duelling-focused PvP wargame For Honor all get official support in this driver.

After five years without a significant update you'd be forgiven for thinking that Google Voice was going the way of Reader or iGoogle—projects that seemed to have some traction and a healthy user base but were abandoned as the company moved on to other things. Not only is Voice getting a much-needed UI facelift and new organizational tools, however, but Google is also committing to rolling out new updates and features going forward. ...Read more...

Apple's iOS 10.2.1 update is now available to the public. The new version doesn't include major feature changes or improvements, but it fixes a number of bugs and security holes plaguing the current version of the OS. ...Read more...

The perceived lack of applications has been the biggest knock against Google's Chrome OS platform since the very beginning. Last May, Google announced plans to bring most of its Android's software library to at least some Chromebooks. A few models, including the Asus Chromebook Flip we sampled in June, have since then gained the ability to run Android apps, as Google Play Store compatibility moved from Chrome OS's development channel to the stable branch. The search giant now announced that all future Chromebooks will have access to Android apps, by just adding just a few words to the Chrome OS Systems Supporting Android Apps page. Approximately sixty existing models are on the compatibility list already. ...Read more...

The Steam client got a big update for all platforms last week. Steam users will be happy to find that it's now possible to move individual games between Steam library folders. Valve has also extended Steam's game controller customization interface to work with a wider range of hardware. ...Read more...

By now, most people have heard about Samsung's revelation of the causes behind the overheating and fires of its ill-fated Note 7 handset. In what could be related news, Samsung mobile chief Koh Dong-Jin announced that the company won't be showing an updated Galaxy S8 handset at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona at the end of February. Reports say the replacements for the current Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge may not be offered for sale until some time in April. This development represents a departure from Samsung's regular schedule of unveiling updated Galaxy S-series handsets at MWC.For now, the Galaxy S8's features and improvements are still a mystery, though faster SoCs, more system memory, and an improved camera seem like foregone conclusions. The new phones could ...Read more...

Hugo Barra left Google back in 2013 to join Chinese cellphone maker Xiaomi. After leading many of the company's biggest initiatives over the last few years, Barra is now departing, with his sights set on a return to Silicon Valley. Barra announced his resignation today on Facebook, citing the toll the job has taken on his life and health in addition to keeping him far away from his family. Xiaomi says Barra's departure is entirely for personal reasons, and told the Wall Street Journal that Barra would continue to advise the company. ...Read more...

Intel's Kaby Lake desktop CPUs brought a ton of motherboards with them for enthusiasts of all stripes, and we've barely scratched the surface of what's out there so far. Asus is helping us get a fuller picture of the Z270 landscape with its ROG Strix Z270E Gaming motherboard, the fanciest in a new family of Republic of Gamers boards. ...Read more...

So how about that Samsung Galaxy Note 7? The would-be Korean competitor to Apple's iPhone 7 ended up being a literal flaming disaster. It's a shame for several reasons, not the least of which that it seemed like a real nice phone. Samsung has completed its in-depth investigation and come to the conclusion that both the original battery and the model given out as a replacement in the first recall had completely separate defects that caused them to be prone to short-circuiting. The company held a press event in Korea early this morning to talk about what happened, and why it hopefully won't happen again. ...Read more...

We don't have to tell you the memory market's been pretty rough lately, with prices only recently coming up from rock-bottom. One solution companies look towards when their primary market turns sour is diversification. For example, both Patriot and G.Skill are selling peripherals. Not to be left behind, Mushkin is also moving into the gamer gear space, and its first product in that arena is the Carbon KB-001 mechanical keyboard. Eteknix got to see a prototype of this keyboard first-hand at CES.

Remember how we used to hear all the time about PC gaming dying? It's been a while since we've heard that sort of chatter, and for good reason. In case you haven't had a look around lately, PC gaming is thriving. According to a report from analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, the PC gaming hardware market broke $30 billion worldwide for the first time ever in 2016. ...Read more...

Serious overclockers need serious hardware, and that usually means going with liquid-cooling setups. Given the nature of computer components, though, a good portion of liquid-cooling gear has to be tailored for the hardware it's going to chill. Folks looking to build a seriously-screaming Kaby Lake rig can take a shortcut by picking up the Asus Z270 ROG Maximus IX Formula board with its included EKWB CrossChill II Hybrid waterblock. ...Read more...

Most would say the original Raspberry Pi got the single-board computer craze (SBC) going. Since then, the Raspberry Pi got three major hardware revisions, and the market at large has come up with similar devices in countless flavors, including Orange and Banana. According to Hexus, Asus decided to throw its prodigious engineering muscle into the SBC ring with the cheerfully-named Tinker Board, which one-ups the Raspberry Pi 3 with significant connectivity advantages, double the memory, and higher clock speeds. ...Read more...

At last, gerbils. 'Tis Friday, and you know what that means. The cream of the crop, the bee's knees, the sweetest juice from the landscape of online PC hardware stores, distilled down to its essence here. Today's edition is jam-packed with high-powered hardware and peripherals, so get your racing helmet on. Let's hit the road.That's it for today, folks! If you found any sweet online deals that we ...Read more...