Techreport

Eurocom's Tornado F5 SE looks like a standard desktop replacement-style laptop that you might find on a shelf in a big box electronics store. However, its unassuming all-black chassis hides hardware that's fairly unique in portable systems, and the company believes these bits give it the leeway to call the F5 a "mobile server." The eye of the Tornado is a choice among three Intel Xeon E3 v5 four-core, eight-thread Skylake-based CPUs. The processor communicates with the system's parts through an Intel C236 server chipset, which is certainly uncommon in laptops. ...Read more...

For three generations of Xbox consoles, game developers have used Microsoft's Pix tool for graphics performance tuning and debugging. Microsoft says that developers looking to work with its DirectX 12 API have been asking for a similar tool. Now, the company has released a beta version of Pix for Windows 10. ...Read more...

Cooling company Cryorig has unveiled a pair of new fans based on its existing QF120 series, but in an enlarged 140-mm form factor. Where Cyrorig offered three models in the QF120, though, the QF140 line is shaved down to two simple choices: QF140 Performance or QF140 Silent. ...Read more...

When the dual-chip Radeon Pro Duo initially launched, AMD presented it as a premium GPGPU compute card rather than as a graphics accelerator. It's certainly easier to fill up Fiji's 4096 shaders with compute work than with graphics tasks. Along with its Pro label, the card got a professional-tier price: $1,499. Perhaps in anticipation of the new Vega high-end graphics processors from AMD, Newegg has an XFX-built Pro Duo marked down to just $799. ...Read more...

Yes, that headline is correct. No, you didn't "Quantum Leap" back to the halcyon days of the first terabyte-capacity hard drives. Seagate is actually releasing 3.5" magnetic hard drives for the enterprise market in 1TB and 2TB capacities, built for data centers with replicated servers and legacy solutions that require 512-byte sectors. The drives spin at 7,200 RPM and sport 6Gbps SATA interfaces, rather than the 12Gbps SAS interface commonly found on server drives. The drives employ conventional magnetic recording rather than the trickier and slower shingled magnetic recording. ...Read more...

We shared news about Biostar's Z270 Racing motherboards with you gerbils a couple of days ago, and now we are back again to spill the beans on the company's motherboards based on Intel's B250 chipset. There are two boards on offer: the full-fat ATX Racing B250GT5 and the pint-sized microATX B250GT3. Both models support Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs and sport four DDR4 DIMM slots alongside six SATA ports and a pair of M.2 slots. ...Read more...

Samsung announced today that its rollout of Android 7.0 Nougat is underway. Surprising no one, the company's current flagship models Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are leading the charge into the future. The Nougat update puts those handsets in sparsely-populated territory occupied by the HTC 10, the HTC One M9, the Moto Z, the LG G5, a bunch of Nexus devices, and the Pixel. ...Read more...

While it's still hard to tell if VR is going to become a permanent part of our electronics landscape, the first generation of headsets has pretty much established itself. Accessory makers are now working on ways to cut the headset's wiring. TPCast has a wireless kit for the HTC Vive, while Zotac wants to put a PC on your back and pack it with batteries. Sixa is the latest company to that party with its Rivvr Wireless VR Upgrade Kit. Sixa makes some ambitious claims about its wireless system, saying it's compatible with all modern VR headsets," easy to set up, and has "zero latency." ...Read more...

Some of us see a cool hardware design and immediately open our wallets. Others start devising plans for making that product themselves. One such self-described "tinkerer" is Joshua Dennis of website Pixel Six Designs. Like us, Joshua was intrigued by the translucent LCD side panel on iBuypower's Snowblind gaming PC. Unlike us, though, Joshua made one for himself. Here's his process:...Read more...

Mirrorless cameras may be all the rage in digital photography right now, but Leica has been cranking out shots without the benefit of a reflex mirror for the better part of 100 years. Its latest M rangefinder, the M10, slims down to the same 33.75-mm depth as the Leica M4 film camera of the 1960s, and it gives photographers more direct control with a dedicated ISO dial on its top plate. ...Read more...

People who really like the color purple (or perhaps Kinzie Kensington) will be pleased to see NZXT's latest additions to its catalog. The company took to Twitter to announce white-and-purple versions of its S340 and H440 ATX cases, along with matching HUE+ lighting controllers and cable-routing pucks. ...Read more...

We gave Asus' refreshed Zenbook 3 Deluxe a brief mention during CES earlier this month. We now have the full details on the machine, whose full name is Zenbook 3 Deluxe UX490UA. As it turns out, the changes from the original Zenbook 3 go significantly deeper than just a Kaby Lake CPU swap and the addition of a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports. ...Read more...

Intel's first stab at making an affordable PCIe NVMe storage device resulted in last summer's crop of 600p-series SSDs packing 3D TLC flash. The company offers these drives in four capacities ranging from 128GB up to 1TB, but curiously launched them with the same 72 TBW endurance level for all versions. Those numbers were revised later on with figures as high as 576 TBW. TR has previously shown that most SSDs are capable of reliably writing data far past their specified endurance rating. Now, Chris Ramseyer over at Tom's Hardware decided to see what would happen if he pushed an Intel 600p 256GB drive to the bloody limit, and then shared the results with the world. ...Read more...

I haven't built a liquid-cooled rig since the days of the Athlon Thunderbird, but if I did, I'd probably be ordering most of the parts for it from Slovenia. EKWB is a foremost name when it comes to liquid-cooling gear, and the company has now graced Antec's Mini-ITX Cube case with its certification. Along with that bit of news, Antec has announced that builders can now purchase the Cube devoid of any branding. ...Read more...

Yes, it's colorful and it glows, but we promise it's not RGB LEDs this time around. This is iBuypower's Snowblind, a gaming PC equipped with a translucent side panel with an LCD screen. It generated some buzz at CES this year, and it's now available for preorder. Take a look....Read more...

The latest batch of AMD's Radeon drivers, version 17.1.1, is now out in the wild. The new version packs support for the upcoming release of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, along with fixes for a raft of minor issues.

NexDock is probably a new name to a lot of our readers. The company's first product was a crowd-funded $120 device that made a 14" laptop-of-sorts out of pretty much anything with an HDMI output. Now the company is back with a second revision that can also turn one of Intel's recently-announced Compute Cards into a hybrid tablet-laptop device with a touchscreen. ...Read more...

Remember how friend-of-TR David Kanter established that Nvidia's GPUs since Maxwell have used tile-based rendering? And how AMD Vega is moving in that same sort of direction? The guys in charge of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPUs are probably smirking to themselves right now because they were doing tile-based rendering before it was cool. The company is still using that technique in its latest mobile GPUs, the Series8XE Plus family. ...Read more...

The original Raspberry Pi was originally intended to be a low-powered, easily-extensible computer to help children learn computer science concepts. Those traits made the unit popular with all kinds users, including retro video game enthusiasts, IoT developers, and embedded systems designers. Back in 2014, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Pi Compute Module variant, a single-board computer with 4GB of integrated eMMC storage and a smaller footprint. The Foundation has now released a refreshed Compute Module 3, sporting the same quad-core SoC and 1GB of RAM as the latest Raspberry Pi 3. The CM3 is intended for use in embedded applications and IoT devices. ...Read more...

The silence seekers at be quiet! have been toiling away at making computer components less audibly-noticeable for over a decade. The company's Pure Base 600 ATX chassis seemingly takes that approach and applies it to the visual aspect, by eschewing the contrasting trim and side-panel windows of some of its brethren. The new case retains many traits from its larger brothers, including modular drive bays and noise-dampening panels. ...Read more...

Some users have had luck in unlocking the disabled shader cores in standard AMD Radeon RX 460 cards, taking the Polaris 11 GPU from 896 SPs up to its full unlocked harem of 1,024. The rumor mongers over at WCCFTech report that Sapphire will be launching a graphics card with a factory-unlocked Polaris 11 GPU. Proving that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Sapphire's Chinese website has a product page for the "蓝宝石RX460 1024SP 4G D5 超白金 OC," a name that translates to "Sapphire RX460 1024SP 4G D5 Super Platinum OC." The name is a mouthful, but its verbosity leaves little room for misinterpretation. We should note that this card appears to be offered exclusively to the Chinese market for now, much like the AMD Radeon RX 470D and its 1,792 SPs. ...Read more...

When we're browsing the web with our phones, bandwidth is usually at a premium. Even carriers that promise unlimited bandwidth often pin an asterisk to the end of that statement that reminds us that they don't really mean that. Google's new image compression tool might just help save you some of those precious 4G bytes. I'd like to introduce you to Google's most recent application of its machine-learning technology RAISR, or Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution. ...Read more...

Biostar skipped the CES rush and let us know today about its high-end offerings for Kaby Lake CPUs using the Z270 chipset. The company is sticking with its Racing theme for the new boards, and is releasing three variants: the Z270GT8, Z270GT6, and Z270GT4. ...Read more...

Synology is a company best known for its NAS devices, but it's also been building up a family of routers. The company has now launched the RT2600ac, a wireless router aimed at homes and small businesses, packing 802.11ac Wave 2 support with MU-MIMO and beamforming capabilities. ...Read more...

Seasons's greetings, gerbils. 'Tis the season of upgrading, after Intel's recent release of its desktop Kaby Lake CPUs. You know what that means: deals everywhere. We've trimmed the fat, tucked the tummy, and extracted the best from the deals out there. Here's what we found.That's it for today, folks! If you come across any juicy deals that we ...Read more...

We knew a few things about Nintendo's upcoming Switch hybrid home-handheld hybrid console after the first reveal back in October, and the rumor mill speculated on additional things like screen resolution and details on the Nvidia-sourced SoC. Yesterday, the house that Mario built offered more details about the Switch, including a release date, a list of launch titles, and pricing for the system and its first-party accessories. ...Read more...

Consumer Reports (CR) has generally been a fan of the build quality and performance of Apple's computers. However, the consumer watchdog recently cautioned its readers against purchasing Apple's newest MacBook Pro due to discrepancies between Cupertino's published battery life specifications and the figures CR derived in its lab.Apple and CR were eventually able to pin down and correct a bug related specifically to CR's testing methods , and the nonprofit agreed to rerun its tests. The results of the second round of tests are ...Read more...

After four years of decline, the desktop PC market is starting to stabilize, according to analyst firm IDC. While 2016 started out slowly for the industry, things started to move in the second half of the year. A total of 70.2 million desktop computers shipped in the Q4 2016, a year-on-year decline of just 1.5%. Total annual sales reached 260 million, a decline of 5.7% compared to 2015.Lenovo was the best-performing of the big players in the market and grew 1.7%, though IDC notes that HP wasn't far behind and increased its shipments by 6.6%. Dell Technologies sat in ...Read more...

RGB LED-illuminated products were the most conspicuous new additions to many products at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. Though they may not have been on the show floor, we recently got our hands into one of the warmest new RGB products to bring you gerbils a mini-review just in time for the coldest part of winter. We present to you the Chnano LED gloves. ...Read more...

Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 and the flames it left in its wake received considerable attention. The FAA banned Note 7 handsets from passenger flights and from transit as air cargo back in October after a deflagration onboard a Southwest flight on October 5. At the same time, the agency decreed that all airlines must notify passengers of the ban before boarding. Between the attention paid to the Note 7's problems by news outlets, wireless network operators, and Samsung itself, the FAA feels that the pre-flight warnings about the Note 7 are no longer necessary. ...Read more...

Folks looking for stealth-fighter design in their computer case could do a lot worse than the NZXT Noctis 450. However, the original model lacked the RGB LEDs that the gamers of 2017 demand. The new ROG-certified version of the Noctis 450 amends that omission with Aura-compatible RGB lighting. It comes in the standard ROG color (called "Gunmetal Grey"), and includes a special backlit ROG-Certified logo on the top-right corner of the left-side panel. ...Read more...

The prolonged demise of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 has left something of a vacuum in the high-end Android smartphone arena. HTC seeks to fill that empty ecological niche with its U Ultra smartphone and its 2560x1440, 5.7" display. The phone courageously omits the headphone jack, but packs HTC's new Sense Companion AI assistant and a second 2" screen above the primary screen, in a similar fashion to the Touch Bar on Apple's newest Mac Pro laptops. ...Read more...

Kaby Lake's the hottest act in town, and everyone wants a piece of the action. Eurocom, a developer of upgradable notebooks, has refreshed its Tornado F5 notebook with the latest Intel Core processors. Since it's in the upgrading mood, the company also took the opportunity to add Nvidia's top-end graphics cards to the mix. ...Read more...

AMD has a lot riding on Ryzen. The company's CPUs and SoCs haven't been able to compete with the performance of Intel's mainstream desktop offerings in most workloads for some time, and competition with the blue team's high-end desktop and server chips has been further out of the question. To say that the red team has a lot riding on Ryzen would be something of an understatement. Anandtech reports that the description of a presentation that AMD will give at the Game Developer Conference gives away a launch date some time before the end of of the conference on March 3. ...Read more...

Need a solid graphics card upgrade? We have just the thing. Newegg is selling MSI's Radeon RX 480 Armor 4G OC graphics card for just $184.99, making it the cheapest RX 480 4GB card on the site right now. A $25 mail-in rebate could bring that price tag into RX 470 territory, too. ...Read more...

Companies like Samsung and Google continue to pump out flagship Android phones, while Huawei and OnePlus aim for more affordable handsets. All the while though, Apple has been tightening its grip on the smartphone market. A report from analyst firm Kantar Worldpanel has named the iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, and iPhone 6s the "three most popular smartphones" in the United States in the three-month period running up to the end of November 2016. ...Read more...

The peripherals in Logitech's Prodigy lineup are beautifully basic, but often come with spec sheets and prices for the unapologetically hardcore. Folks who are after high-end performance without the high-dollar price can now look a little further down the Logitech site for the G203 Prodigy mouse. This pointer-pusher has six programmable buttons, a 6000-DPI maximum resolution, and tracks at up to 200 inches per second. ...Read more...

Buyers of high-end consumer routers have sent manufacturers the message that aggressive styling based on next-generation fighter aircraft and science-fiction space ships helps move product. Netgear's Nighthawk series of routers was perhaps the first to fly down that corridor, and the company is now hawking a managed switch with aggressive aesthetics and a performance-oriented feature set. The Nighthawk S8000 is an eight-port managed Gigabit Ethernet switch with QoS, traffic prioritization, link aggregation, plus the angular looks and not-boring-green lights that Nighthawk products are known for. ...Read more...

As of last August, about two-thirds of gerbils who responded to our poll said they took Microsoft's offer of a free Windows 10 upgrade. In the comments section, though, some readers who were eligible for the upgrade turned it down, citing privacy concerns about Microsoft's new operating system. Microsoft is apparently listening to user feedback, and is rolling out some changes in an upcoming Windows Insider build that are intended to make the company's data collection practices more transparent and easier to adjust. ...Read more...

For decades, Consumer Reports (CR) has acted as a fairly respected consumer watchdog, testing the claims of countless products and offering up assessments to help the public choose in a world filled with dubious advertising. When the magazine said that Apple's new MacBook Pro was lacking in the battery life department, there was general surprise. After some investigation, though, it appears that the testing conditions were unusual. CR's methodology may have been flawed, though it exposed a Safari bug in the process. ...Read more...

Up until now, the biggest difference between Intel's budget Pentium chips and its Core i3 offerings has been the presence of Hyper-Threading. The line between Pentiums and Core i3s is blurring with the release of Kaby Lake Pentium chips, though. Eagle-eyed Hardware.info forum user J_C_W spotted the HT-enabled Pentiums in Intel's ARK and tipped off his forum mates to the change. Here's a list of the SMT-enabled Pentiums arriving with Kaby Lake:Aside from the clock speed boosts common to many Kaby parts and the addition of Hyper-Threading, there's little difference between these chips and their Skylake counterparts. In its endless march to segment ...Read more...

Hey, folks. You may have noticed a certain lack of post-CES floor reports on the site over the last couple days. I have several CES-related articles I need to finish up, but I came down with the flu on the way back from the show and I've been completely out of commission since. The UPS man awoke me from my feverish slumber this morning and left a nice surprise, though: Intel's Core i3-7350K.

Even though Valve offered up its tracking technology and SteamVR APIs for free last year, we've yet to see a proliferation of third-party VR products. That may be about to change, though. At CES, HTC was showing off its latest attempt to entice peripheral purveyors: the Vive Tracker. The new device is essentially a Vive-styled hockey puck with three stubby legs. HTC says you can slap it on any suitable object to track it in VR, in as similar fashion to the touch controllers included with the Vive. ...Read more...

Gerbils who have been following along with TR's coverage of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti are aware of the cards' low power consumption and small thermal footprint. Companies like MSI and Gigabyte have capitalized on those characteristics by offering half-height cards suitable for use in SFF desktop systems. Nvidia and its partners have even been able to shoehorn fully-enabled GP107 silicon into mobile GTX 1050 Ti-equipped gaming laptops. The hard-working people over at Tom's Hardware wondered what would happen if a GTX 1050 Ti was run without any fans, so they rolled up their sleeves and found out.

Remember that fancy Dell OLED monitor? According to Francophone tech site les Numériques, it won't be seeing the light of day. The site says it spoke with Dell personnel at CES, and that it was told the UP3017Q was canceled due to unresolvable image quality problems. Specifically, according to les Numériques, the issue was color drift when viewing the monitor off-angle. ...Read more...

When you're serious about a hobby, you pick up the right tools. A power drill, a mixer, a premium paintbrush. Pretty much anyone who uses a desktop computer has a keyboard attached to it, but there's a subset of us who spend a huge chunk of our time at our computers staring down the barrel of a digital gun. Chinese gaming peripheral maker Aula is joining the ranks of Razer and Logitech and hoping gamers will look at its new specialized keyboard designed specifically for FPS gaming.

When you're serious about a hobby, you pick up the right tools. A power drill, a mixer, a premium paintbrush. Pretty much anyone who uses a desktop computer has a keyboard attached to it, but there's a subset of us who spend a huge chunk of our time at our computers staring down the barrel of a digital gun. Chinese gaming peripheral maker Aula is joining the ranks of Razer and Logitech and hoping gamers will look at its new specialized keyboard designed specifically for FPS gaming.

Microsoft is starting the New Year offering a ton of goodies to its Windows Insiders. Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002, comes with wide variety of updates, notably improving user experience in Edge, continuing to phase out Flash, improving support for high-DPI displays, and implementing a blue-light reduction feature. ...Read more...

At Computex last year, Plextor announced the M8Pe NVMe SSD. That drive is a high-end model with a Marvell 88SS1093 controller and planar MLC flash memory. Seeing as not everyone's budgets can stretch to lofty heights, Plextor has announced the mainstream successor to that SSD, the M8Se, at CES last week. This drive will use the same controller as its bigger brother, but with TLC flash instead of MLC. Tom's Hardware got some information from the company about the upcoming drives.

Greetings, gerbils. Last week's TR CES coverage produced a bounty of news that you should totally read through. However, there was little time to breathe, and we missed our usual Friday deals. No matter, because they're here today. Needless to say, with so many new products out, companies are running deals left and right. Today's box o' deals has a ton of laptops. Here's what we found.That's all for today, folks. If you happen upon a deal that we missed, ...Read more...