Techreport

The Windows 10 Creators Update is set to release next spring, and it's poised to bring all sorts of enhancements to Windows 10, from stuff like better support for holographic computing, long overdue enhancements to Microsoft Paint, and support for the upcoming line of inexpensive VR and AR headsets. That's all pretty cool stuff, but a report from Thurott.com suggests that gamers relying on the Windows Store may want to be wary of the update. Microsoft announced that future Windows Store game downloads will come bundled with the latest video drivers for the user's graphics card. The driver download starts when the machine's existing drivers don't meet the minimum version required by the game in question. ...Read more...

Gerbils, we bring good tidings. Let's say you have plans to buy an HTC Vive. Assuming you do, and that you're also going to buy a desktop, laptop, or graphics card with a Nvidia GTX 1060, 1070, or 1080 GPU inside, you're in luck. The green has teamed up with Valve to offer three high-profile VR titles for the princely sum of zero dollars. The promotion applies to new purchases of a bundle including a headset and a high-end GeForce card or system, "at participating retailers, e-tailers, and system builders." So far, that means Microsoft and Newegg. ...Read more...

If you didn't read our recent overview of AMD's recent Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition software release, you may have missed our look at one of the more intriguing graphics-card-related utilities to come around in recent memory. Radeon Chill, as it's called, can dynamically adjust frame rates to avoid doing wasted work when the user is standing still or not moving the mouse in-game, all while providing plenty of performance and responsiveness when a user is providing input. AMD says Chill's dynamic frame metering can reduce graphics-card noise and GPU temperatures, and as a pleasant side effect, it can actually improve responsiveness to user input by leaving GPU resources at the ready when a user suddenly throws a lot of mouse and keyboard inputs at a game. ...Read more...

Over the past year, you've probably seen G.Skill's Trident Z RAM turn up in TR test systems in a variety of speeds and capacities. That's no mistake—this memory has proven nothing but rock-solid no matter what we throw at it. It doesn't hurt that it's probably the best-looking RAM on the market, as well. When we started to plan for our next-generation CPU test system, it only made sense to grab another Trident Z kit to support our benchmarking efforts, and G.Skill happily obliged us. Behold: ...Read more...

It seems like there's no love for the regular old ATX mid-tower case these days. Everyone's either going big, or going really small. If you're in the former camp, you've probably already seen Thermaltake's Core X71 case. The original version of that chassis included an acrylic window, but now TT's added a touch of glass to the case. ...Read more...

System builders looking for lots of power and efficiency in their high-powered compact PCs should take a gander at Silverstone's SX800-LTI 800W power supply. The SX800-LTI has the highest-available 80 Plus Titanium efficiency rating and delivers 800W of continuous power from an SFX-L form factor. The company claims that combo is good for a power density of 775W per liter. For an apples-to-car-engines comparison, a Mercedes-Benz CLA 45 AMG's 375-horsepower, 2.0L engine produces over 132,000 watts per liter of piston displacement. ...Read more...

Folks willing to try their luck have long had success "unlocking" the full-fat forms of certain AMD chips. The Phenom II X3 720 is perhaps the most recent example. Some builders were able to turn on that chip's ostensibly-disabled fourth core with the right motherboard and firmware, although the long-term stability and reliability of that fourth core was an open question.

The chip-making world may be gearing up for 10-nm chip manufacturing processes, but according to a report by the Nikkei Asian Review, contract silicon manufacturing house Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is getting ready to build a fab for what it calls "5-nm" and "3-nm" process nodes. The company reportedly expects the plant to cost approximately $500 billion New Taiwan dollars, an amount equivalent to $15.8 billion U.S. dollars. According to the reports, TSMC has already asked the Taiwanese government for assistance in finding a location of sufficient size for the new factory. ...Read more...

If you're hanging onto your Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and it hasn't yet turned into a mobile bonfire, it'll soon be little more than a brick. Samsung announced that it will soon issue an OTA update to "further increase participation" in its successful recall program. The update, set to roll out December 19, will disable both the handset's charging and "the ability to work as a mobile device." ...Read more...

Don't you hate it when you're wrists-deep in a compact build and realize your Intel stock cooler won't fit in the chassis? If that's the case, Silverstone's got your back. The company's new cooler in its Nitrogon series, the NT08-115XP, is just 1.3" (33 mm) tall and is ideal for super-compact builds, particularly those in Mini-STX size. ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils. Today's deals are of a rather unique tack. Instead of the usual selection of PC motherboards, CPUs, and graphics cards, today it's (almost) all about computing on the go. The recent splash of Intel's mobile Kaby Lake CPUs means that laptops manufacturers everywhere are refreshing their lineups. That also means that there are good deals to be had on perfectly serviceable, current-generation machines. Roll the tape.That's all for today, folks! If we missed any juicy ...Read more...

Maybe 2017 will be the year that ARM servers finally become a thing. After demoing a 24-core server chip a little more than a year ago, Qualcomm's Datacenter Technologies subsidiary has announced the Centriq 2400 CPU. This new chip is a 48-core ARMv8 processor based on a new in-house CPU core design called Falkor, and it's compliant with ARM's Server Base System Architecture specification. Earlier in the week, Qualcomm showed off the new hardware running "a typical datacenter application" comprising Linux with Java and Apache Spark. ...Read more...

Our not-all-that-secret allegiance with the insidious RGB Illuminati requires us to write an average of one RGB LED-related news post per day. So we're leading Friday's case news with BitFenix's Shogun E-ATX PC enclosure. The Shogun is a willing receptacle for a pretty sizeable stash of PC hardware, offering support for the largest motherboards, plenty of storage, video cards as long as the Lord of the Rings extended edition films, and liters of water-cooling gear. BitFenix knows there is no point in having all hardware hidden away, so the Shogun has two tempered glass side panels and a pair of Asus Chroma-compatible RGB LED strips to mount inside the case. ...Read more...

Rumors of an allegiance between AMD and rival Intel concerning a future combination of the blue team's CPU technology and the red team's GCN graphics cores have been swirling around the internet over the last couple of days. We aren't so sure if there is a real fire generating all that smoke, but the companies are definitely teaming up for a holiday PC gaming promotion along with Newegg. From now until December 31, Newegg is offering Intel's unlocked sixth-generation Core i5-6600K CPU and MSI's Radeon RX 480 Armor 8GB OC graphics card in a significantly-discounted bundle that also includes free copies of both Doom and Civilization VI. ...Read more...

First, phone screens grew, and now it's time for the bezels to shrink and disappear. That seems to be what phone makers have decided, at least. Samsung has been working in that direction with the Edge line of Galaxy phones, but according to a report from Bloomberg, the company plans to take the bezel-reduction concept all the way to its logical conclusion with its upcoming Galaxy S8 handset in 2017. The site says the S8 will drop the home button entirely and offer up a screen that completely covers the front of the phone.The bezel, that edge around your monitor, television, or phone, has long confounded electronics manufacturers. It's a convenient spot for necessary things like cameras, light sensors, or microphones, but its presence ...Read more...

Wake up, gerbils! It's time for your favorite: more RGB LED-equipped hardware news! Today's bit of blinky-flashy excess comes courtesy of Gigabyte and its new Xtreme Gaming XK700 mechanical keyboard. Like most new LED-infused mechanical keyboards, this specimen uses Cherry MX switches fitted in the German company's MX RGB housings. For this particular model, Gigabyte went with linear, non-clicky Red key switches. ...Read more...

At WinHEC 2016 today, Microsoft unveiled its take on the augmented reality concept, called "Project Evo." Evo is a collaboration with Intel that entails a combination of both companies' hardware and software. Microsoft says that head-mounted-displays (HMDs) will make people expect more out of a Windows PC, and that Project Evo will fundamentally change the way people interact with computers. Those are big words, but inspiring demos (like dragging virtual furniture off the screen and placing it in your room) show a vision of the future that looks set to become reality sooner rather than later....Read more...

We reported on the founding of the Khronos VR Standards Initiative just yesterday. The big players in the PC VR space are present in Khronos' membership list, but Samsung and Sony were conspicuously absent. Given the comparatively lower entry price, Sony's PS4 VR console platform and Samsung's Gear VR mobile headsets are likely to be the gateway for many individuals' first experience with modern VR. Since today, though, those two Asian consumer electronics juggernauts are on board with the newly-formed Global Virtual Reality Association (GVRA), along with familiar names like Oculus, HTC, Google, and Acer. VR-newcomer Microsoft and HTC partner Valve are notably absent from the membership roll. ...Read more...

Fitbit, one of the biggest fitness band makers, has acquired "specific assets" of Kickstarter-fueled smartwatch maker Pebble. The official press release from Fitbit clarifies that this acquisition includes "key personnel and intellectual property related to software and firmware development," but excludes Pebble's hardware products. Bloomberg reports the price of the acquisition as being under $40 million. In a prepared statement, Fitbit CEO and co-founder James Park said that "with basic wearables getting smarter and smartwatches adding health and fitness capabilities, [Fitbit sees] an opportunity to build on [its] strengths and extend [its] leadership position in the wearables category." ...Read more...

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group pulled back the curtain on the Bluetooth 5 Core Specification. According to the SIG, the new specification's low-energy mode should now offer up to twice the bandwidth and four times the range of the Bluetooth 4.2 spec. The SIG says these improvements should allow developers to carefully tailor their hardware and application's data transmission requirements. ...Read more...

Microsoft never seemed to have put together a cohesive strategy for mobile device software. The company's Windows Phone operating system has never been able to carve out significant market share, despite its relatively early entrance on the smartphone scene. Redmond's ARM-powered Surface RT devices were met with a collective yawn, likely due to their substantial app gap when compared to Android and iOS tablets. The company seems like it might have finally learned the lesson that application compatibility is Windows' most important asset. Microsoft has announced that it's preparing full Win32 compatibility for Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 ARM SoCs at the WinHEC hardware developer conference in Shenzhen, China....Read more...

Well, time's up. We're giving away Corsair's gorgeous limited-edition RM1000i PSU in white, in exchange for the 10 best and funniest reasons why the winner should get it. We had well over a hundred entries, but alas, there's but one power supply to offer. And the winner is... our forum old-timer "deruberhanyok," whose username is either an onomatopoeia for a sneeze or some sort of insult in a foreign language. Here are his or her 10 reasons reproduced in full:0:

Jonsbo might not be a particularly familiar name to some readers, but the company has been building PC chassis for other vendors for some time, including Newegg's Rosewill house brand. The manufacturer recently announced a pair of elegant-looking PC cases. Let's take a good look at the ATX-size QT03 and the more compact microATX VR2. ...Read more...

A number of other technology news websites are reporting on "wireless" RGB LED-illuminated SSDs and memory modules from a brand known as Zadak511. The DDR4 memory modules and dual-interface SSDs are festooned with RGB LEDs, and the light show on these devices can be controlled through the company's "ZArsenal" software without any external cabling. No additional details were provided, because none are needed. These are DIMMs and SSDs with customizable lighting, after all.PR: Zadak511 reveals SHIELD Series with RGB DDR4 RAM and RGB ...Read more...

Raidmax is offering up a new chassis called the Alpha. The case ticks the "2016 gaming PC case" checklist with RGB LED lights and its ability to swallow radiators and other water-cooling components. There's a twist, though—the Alpha comes from the factory with RGB LED strips sitting behind a perforated metal front grill. Neat freaks will also appreciate the case's power supply shroud, ample cable management nooks, and the removeable frontal dust filter. ...Read more...

The Venn diagram of Japanophiles and PC enthusiasts probably has a sizeable intersection. Scythe has updated its popular Mugen CPU cooler for the residents of this middle area. The Mugen 5 has a revised asymmetrical design with clearance for memory modules. The cooler comes fitted with Scythe's PWM-controlled 120mm "Kaze Flex" fan. ...Read more...

It's no secret that the world of virtual reality is fragmented. This fragmentation requires developers to port and customize their software for multiple devices, a costly and time-consuming process. As a result, consumers selecting a headset are buying into a more-or-less specific set of games and applications. To address this problem, the Khronos Group announced a new initiative to define an open standard for virtual reality devices.The Khronos Group, whose resumé includes the OpenGL and Vulkan standards, has broad ambitions and a wide array of industry partners for this initiative. Khronos intends to create open, royalty-free standards ...Read more...

RGB LEDs? Cherry MX switches? Everyone has those. It's tough for a keyboard to distinguish itself from its competition these days, with about a million and a half mechanical keyboards on the market. A typewriter, though—that'd stand out. That's the idea behind Nanoxia's new Ncore Retro Keyboard. ...Read more...

Western Digital unveiled a raft of HGST-branded enterprise storage products today, including a range of NVMe PCIe drives, high-capacity 2.5" SAS SSDs, and 3.5" SAS hard drives. Keep in mind, these goodies are meant for high-end datacenter operators. Mere mortals will have to wait a while for this kind of performance to trickle down. ...Read more...

Remember the Samsung Note 7 battery issues? Instrumental, a company that produces tools for remote quality assurance, certainly does. On its blog, Instrumental used its proprietary processes to tear down one of the recalled Galaxy Note 7 phones and figure out some possible reasons Samsung decided to cancel the product rather than work out a fix.

The terms 4K and HDR are thrown around quite a bit in reference to TVs lately, but this combination of buzzwords hasn't really hit the PC arena just yet. BenQ is changing that with the SW320, a 3840 x 2160 31.5" IPS LCD display with HDR10 support. The SW320 is actually the first 4K HDR computer monitor that we have seen. The monitor is aimed at digital imaging professionals, and to that end, it can reproduce 99% of the Adobe RGB color space and 87% of the DCI-P3 gamut. The monitor does not support the competing DolbyVision HDR standard. ...Read more...

Nvidia's latest GeForce Game Ready driver is out, bringing along game optimizations and a few bug fixes with it. While most driver updates these days happen alongside a specific game or a couple simultaneous high-profile releases, this one is slightly more generalistic. The 376.19 Game Ready driver is optimized for the 53 Oculus Touch-enabled titles that are either lauching today or being updated with support for the new controllers. ...Read more...

Being one of the world's leading NAND flash manufacturers, one could say that Micron would like nothing more than to see hard drives go away. The company launched another salvo today with its 5100-series SATA SSDs packed with 3D TLC NAND, aimed at servers and datacenters. Micron says these drives are "cost-optimized" and offer a better value than normal server hard drives. We take that to mean they're affordable, at least as server-grade hardware goes. ...Read more...

The rumors of Atom's death were greatly exaggerated. Intel just released documents with the final specifications of its latest NUC kits, called the NUC6CAYH and NUC6CAYS. Both NUCs are based on the Apollo Lake-family Celeron J3455 SoC and its four Goldmont cores. The CAYH is the barebones version, and the CAYS includes a 2GB SO-DIMM and 32GB of eMMC storage. The two kits are otherwise identical. ...Read more...

Some readers may recall Leap Motion, a rather nifty hand-tracking technology first offered in development kits back in 2012 and subsequently integrated into VR headsets and even some keyboards. Leap's technology has mostly been targeted at desktop VR products, but the company is now applying it to mobile VR experiences with the Leap Motion Mobile Platform. The platform will allow manufacturers to develop and sell mobile VR products with integrated hand tracking controls. ...Read more...

I love the smell of a freshly-unboxed power supply in the morning. Don't you? I bet you do. Just in case you've missed it, we're running a contest in partnership with Corsair for a limited-edition, individually-numbered RM1000i power supply that's all dressed up in an exclusive white finish. ...Read more...

BattleTech fans, ready your sticks and throttles. Piranha Games (the developers of MechWarrior Online) took the opportunity afforded by Saturday's Mech Con event to announce MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, powered by Unreal Engine 4. This primarily single-player-focused title is set for release in 2018, and Piranha Games says a dedicated team is hard at work on the project. The company also showed off some pre-alpha footage, and it sure does look like MechWarrior. See for yourself:...Read more...

Until now, Microsoft has been relegated to bit player status in the emerging digital home assistant sector, with the lion's share of attention going to Amazon's Alexa software running on the Echo family of devices. Windows Central reports that Redmond is gearing up for a massive assault on the smart home market with a software feature called Home Hub that will be baked into future Windows 10 updates. ...Read more...

Between the proliferation of cheap eMMC storage devices, crazy-fast NVMe SSDs, and cloud backup services, users' interactions with platters of spinning rust is increasingly uncommon. Seagate has been straddling the gap between hard drives and SSDs for a while with its hybrid disk drives. Now, the company's Duet portable drive bridges the divide between local storage and the cloud. The Duet offers a 1TB capacity with a twist: software that automatically uploads the drive contents to Amazon's Drive cloud storage platform, along with a one-year unlimited-storage subscription to the service. ...Read more...

Greetings, fellow gerbils. I know, I know, your credit cards are beaten, bruised, and broken from all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. And yet, they must endure the onslaught with a stiff upper lip, as we have yet more deals on offer, some of which will surely tempt you. So you may as well get your wallet out already and step closer to the counter. Here's what's on hand today.That's all for today, folks. Please don't tell your credit card about ...Read more...

Japanese technology industry giant Panasonic has developed a new type of IPS LCD panel that the company says is capable of a contrast ratio in excess of a million to one. That's 1,000,000:1, to be clear, and that's a static contrast measurement, too, unlike the often fudged "dynamic contrast" figures. Assuming that Panasonic delivers on its word, that would mean these new panels are among the highest-contrast displays we usually see. ...Read more...

Every shake of the magic eight-ball seems to deliver the same conclusions regarding Intel's Kaby Lake seventh-generation Core CPUs: a little extra battery life for mobile devices, improved hardware video decode support, and slightly increased clock speeds. Gamers and content creators who don't care about power consumption or integrated graphics may not find particularly compelling reasons to upgrade to Kaby Lake, but users of mobile and low-power systems might be more interested. ASRock is aiming its refreshed Beebox-S at the last group. The company's updated Beebox-S barebones systems come fitted with Kaby Lake Intel Core i3 or i5 CPUs. ...Read more...

Skipping the 5.25" drive bays gives case manufacturers a lot of liberty to improve the airflow of a computer chassis. Silverstone takes full advantage of that liberty with the Primera mid-tower ATX case. The entire front of the case is a "supercar-inspired" filtered grille that feeds the three included 140-mm fans. Silverstone says the positive-pressure design and filtered intakes of the Primera should keep it dust-free. ...Read more...

2016 is the year that VR took off, at least if you listen to the companies making VR headsets. The Oculus Rift rolled in on a tsunami of hype rivaled only by that of the HTC Vive. AMD and Nvidia are both devoting substantial effort to accommodating the needs of VR rendering in their products, and pretty much every PC maker is catering to aspiring gogglenauts in one way or another.Those developments don't even begin to consider the apparently-burgeoning PlayStation VR, the countless snap-in mobile VR headsets, and prototype standalone goggles from Intel and others. Given the Cambrian explosion of ...Read more...

Product development takes time. Some products are first offered up in final form when they are days away from shipping. Others, like Zotac's VR Go Backpack first shown in April, tease the public for a while. After almost eight months of honing, the VR Go system is now out in the wild. The VR Go Backpack will be available in several configurations, but for now, Zotac is offering up a fairly high-powered system with an Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, 16GB of DDR4 memory, and a 240-GB SSD. ...Read more...

Oculus may have had a commanding lead in VR technology when the most recent push for goggling in started a few years ago, but Valve and HTC have achieved remarkable success in their own right with the Vive, its tracked hand controllers, and Lighthouse system for "room-scale" VR experiences. The soon-to-be-released Touch controllers may give Oculus owners a hand with more direct VR interactions, and the support documents for those controllers give us our first look at what room-scale experiences will look like through the Rift's lenses.Oculus' default setup for Touch cameras appears to be side-by-side, three to six feet apart, in front of the area where the controllers will be used. That configuration apparently won't allow a full 360 degrees of rotation, ...Read more...

Remember back when laptops were first becoming a thing? Some folks thought we'd see every high-schooler carrying around their own personal PC by now, some 20 years later. That may not have happened, but that hasn't stopped companies like HP from making PCs targeted directly at classrooms. The new ProBook x360 11 Education Edition is an 11" 2-in-1 PC with a 360° hinge explicitly designed to be "student-friendly." ...Read more...

Gigabyte announced the fancy-looking XH300 headset at CES earlier this year, and it seems it's headed for an imminent release. The headset is displayed prominently in the company's social media pages, making an appearance on Gigabyte's Facebook and Twitter feeds. ...Read more...

Are you a gamer? Are you an extreme gamer? Your build obviously requires extreme hardware, and what could be more appropriate than full-tower PC? Gigabyte's bringing the Xtreme Gaming brand to its chassis lineup with the XC700W full-tower ATX case. The massive monolith has a sheet of smoky tempered glass for a left side panel, with an RGB-LED-lit Xtreme Gaming logo underneath. ...Read more...

The Mini-ITX standard is great, and the reduction in power requirements and thermal footprint in even the fastest gaming graphics cards has been remarkable. But even with these advances, too many compact gaming systems are still built around miniscule motherboards in kind-of compact cases designed to fit full-fat ATX power supplies. Enermax's Revolution SFX 550W and 650W power supplies are designed to power the next generation of down-sized gaming rigs and high-end HTPCs with tidier external dimensions. ...Read more...