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Once upon a time, LCD monitors with accurate colors and wide viewing angles were the exclusive purview of professionals and nerds. These days, there's not much reason to buy a TN monitor if you don't need blinding-fast refresh rates. That fact rings especially true in the face of new displays like AOC's P2779VC. This 27" monitor uses a 1920x1080 PLS panel with true 8-bit color, and includes Qi wireless charging functionality in its stand. ...Read more...

So, Private Gerbil, you just bought a fancy-pants computer with three graphics cards and a high-end processor with more cores than a nuclear reactor. In a sudden flash of clarity, you realized you're going to need an enormous power supply to bring all those parts to life. There's just one problem: yesterday's order of Cheetos maxed out your credit card, and now you're stuck with a powerless computer. Thanks to our buddies at Corsair, we have the solution. The Tech Report and Corsair are teaming up to give away a limited-edition, individually-numbered Corsair RM1000i power supply clad in an exclusive white finish. ...Read more...

Google may not be a fan of the proprietary Quick Charge technology baked into Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoCs, but that doesn't mean other companies aren't on board. Adata's A10050QC Power Bank brings Quick Charge 3.0 compatibility and reversible USB-C connectors to mobile users unable to make it back to a plug in order to charge their ever-thinner mobile devices. The model number refers to the Power Bank's capacity: 10,050mAh carried in Panasonic battery cells. According to Adata's calculations, this is enough juice to charge four smartphones or one full-size tablet. ...Read more...

AMD has a new page up with a countdown to December 13. On that day, we'll be treated to a web-show called "New Horizon" where the company will give the first public demonstration of Zen silicon in a gaming context. Tortilla-chip pontiff Geoff Keighley will be hosting, and pro gamer Peter "ppd" Dager (of American e-sports group Evil Geniuses) will be on hand to give the new chip a workout.If early reports are to be trusted, it's possible that Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake processors may not make a huge performance leap over the company's current-generation Skylake chips. That situation could leave AMD in a ...Read more...

If you're going to go with RGB-illuminated case fans, you might as well see how far the rabbit hole goes. Thermaltake's Riing LED RGB Radiator Fan TT Premium Edition spinners certainly dig that hole a little deeper. The Riing fans are available in 120mm and 140mm sizes and combine two of 2016's biggest technology buzzwords: RGB LED lighting and the Internet of Things. Thermaltake also offers a Riing kit including three fans and a Wi-Fi-enabled fan hub that lets users control the fans with their PC or mobile device. ...Read more...

A good bit of the PC enthusiast product space is devoted to solving problems most computer users rarely experience or notice. The proliferation of mechanical keyboards, RGB-illuminated graphics cards, and tempered-glass case panels serve as examples. MSI seems to think that thermal throttling on high-end M.2 storage devices may be next product to separate corporate desktops from enthusiast rigs. The company may be onto something, if our experience with Samsung's otherwise excellent SM951 SSD is anything to go by. MSI dropped a photo of a specially-shaped heatsink called the M.2 Shield on its Twitter feed early this morning. ...Read more...

This morning, we opened the hardware book on the "glorious excess" page. Today's edition comes from the fine folks at Inno3D, who decided the best way to make a GTX 1060 was to strap both air and liquid cooling to it. Meet the Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX 1060 Black. ...Read more...

Intel's desktop Kaby Lake CPUs haven't even been officially announced yet, but the folks at Tom's Hardware got their hands on a sample of the blue team's biggest, baddest next-gen chip for the desktop so far—the Core i7-7700K—ahead of its launch. The site did what any of us would do in that enviable situation: test the chip's performance in both stock-clocked and overclocked configurations.The basic specs of the Core i7-7700K that Tom's reports are about in line with the rumors and leaks we've seen so far. Tom's says the chip has a 4.2 GHz base clock and a 4.5 GHz Turbo speed, and its four cores and eight threads slip into a 95W TDP—up slightly from the Core i7-6700K's ...Read more...

AMD has just slipped in its fifth Radeon driver release for November. The Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.11.5 is out now, and it primary feature is game-specific support for Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2. That's not the only improvement, though. Dishonored 2 now has a CrossFire profile for DirectX 11, and flickering issues with CrossFire setups in The Division and Battlefield 1 should be resolved. ...Read more...

For over a decade, high-end graphics cards have been taking up at least two slots, and in recent years even mid-range cards have gotten wider. According to Videocardz, XFX might have some RX 460s that buck that trend. The single-slot coolers on the purported Radeon RX 460 Core Edition cards are sharp-looking, with a clean design that recalls the Radeon Pro WX series.

Greetings again, gerbils. In the previous installment of Cyber Monday deals, we covered components and peripherals. Now, it's time to get your mobile computing and audio needs taken care of. Take a gander at the finest selection of deals below.Mobile computing ...Read more...

Dutch PC component X2 is looking to inject a little wizardry and a lot of light into users' PC cases with its new Magic Lantern RGB-PTY illuminated case fan kit. The kit includes three 120-mm cooling fans, each lit with 22 individual LEDs. The included control box and infra-red remote allow the user to pick six preset colors, seven different lighting patterns, and select the fan speed without the need for software. "RGB-PTY" refers to red, green, blue, purple, turquoise, and yellow, the fans' only selectable colors. ...Read more...

Someone's got a case of the Mondays, it seems. The cure for that, as we all know, is a set of heavily-discounted hardware deals, courtesy of the Thanksgiving season and the now-ubiquitous Cyber Monday. Take a look here and see what we found.Components ...Read more...

Nvidia's driver team never seems to take a break, even when there is turkey and stuffing to be eaten. Today's harvest of ones and zeros yields the GeForce Game Ready 376.09 driver release. This holiday season looks like it's packed with AAA titles, and Team Green's latest driver release looks to cover the latest wave of games. Newly-supported titles include the open-world hacking game Watch Dogs 2, zombie-slasher Dead Rising 4, and exxxtreme sports title Steep. ...Read more...

Nvidia's driver team never seems to take a break, even when there is turkey and stuffing to be eaten. Today's harvest of ones and zeros yields the GeForce Game Ready 376.09 driver release. This holiday season looks like it's packed with AAA titles, and Team Green's latest driver release looks to cover the latest wave of games. Newly-supported titles include the open-world hacking game Watch Dogs 2, zombie-slasher Dead Rising 4, and exxxtreme sports title Steep. ...Read more...

Everyone loves the wide viewing angles and vivid colors of IPS and VA LCD panels. The TN panel technology has been all but abandoned in the high-end monitor space. Sometimes, though, you really need a monitor that can update every four milliseconds. AOC is serving the market of gamers on near-lethal doses of crank with the Agon AG251FZ. This 25" 1920x1080 monitor supports FreeSync at refresh rates from 48Hz all the way up to 240Hz. ...Read more...

Antec may be best known for its cases, but the manufacturer has other product lines on offer, too. The company is launching an all-out assault on the budget CPU heatsink market with its A- and C-series coolers.

Getting the lighting right in a case mod can be a tricky task when working with just one color. What about when you want to introduce a whole new spectrum into the mix? Lighting up your case can get complicated fast, but CableMod's new WideBeam Hybrid LED strips should make mixing UV light and technicolor lighting into a build a bit more simple. ...Read more...

It's Black Friday, and you know what that means. Prices are slashed on almost everything, almost everywhere, and video games are no different. We dragged ourselves out of our turkey-induced stupor to point out some of the finest deals on fantastic games.First, the ...Read more...

Greetings, gerbils. We're writing this as we run from the stampede of Black Friday shoppers behind us. We're getting away by the skin o' our teeth, and we have deals for you. Here they are.There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg , but ...Read more...

Building any PC—especially a liquid-cooled system—is a bit of a science project. So why pretend it isn't? That seems to be the idea behind Thermaltake's new The Tower 900 Series chassis, the first modder-friendly case in the company's TT Premium line. Initially shown off back in May at Computex, The Tower 900 Series is now available for pre-order. ...Read more...

We took a look at early Black Friday deals on graphics cards, CPUs, and SSDs, and now it's time to share the rest of the deals we've come across today. This time around, we've got a mixed assortment of "everything else" for you to browse.We think that covers all the bases for today, folks. Spend away but don't forget—save at least a few bucks for the real Black Friday and ...Read more...

The early Black Friday deals keep rolling in. This round is for Intel CPUs. Several Skylake and Broadwell-E chips are on deep discount at Newegg, and it'd be a crime not to share.Those are the best CPU deals we've seen so far in this pre-Black Friday period, ...Read more...

Hello, gerbils! It seems that online retailers couldn't wait until Black Friday to get their grubby little hands on your credit cards and decided to start the onslaught a little earlier. We've gathered a bundle of SSD deals, all fresh from the oven. We've got regular SATA units and fancy PCIe drives for your pleasure.That's it for SSDs, folks. If you come across some nice flash drive deals we happened ...Read more...

Recently, I was browsing Twitter and came across a Tweet spurring the communities at two major tech websites to fire up their Folding@Home machines for some friendly competition. That Tweet made me think about our own position in the world of F@H. The Tech Report has a long history of Folding success, and the various participants contributing to Team 2630 have propelled us to a pretty astounding 22nd-place standing among all of the F@H teams out there.Things aren't all rosy, though. According to our Extreme Overclocking stats page , Team Barnacules Nerdgasm will overtake us in just a couple of days. Team Tom's Hardware will race past us with a little under a week of production. Team AnandTech is just three weeks away from feeding ...Read more...

Recently, the fine folks over at Tom's Hardware and AnandTech issued a challenge to their readers: fold some proteins for the Folding@Home distributed-computing project to help their favorite site's team come out on top in work-unit production for the month of December. Nothing is better than making some numbers bigger and helping do science at the same time, right?When the announcement Tweet for that challenge crossed my feed, a light bulb went on in my head. As it happens, The Tech Report has a long Folding@Home history of its own, and the various participants contributing to Team 2630—The Tech Report—have ...Read more...

The tea leaves suggest next year will bring significant new products from Intel and AMD in the desktop CPU space. As we start getting ready for testing these next-generation CPUs, we want to get an idea of the age of the Intel chips that power our readers' main PCs.The performance of Sandy Bridge and its Ivy Bridge follow-up , along with the less-robust performance increases offered in subsequent generations of Intel processors, ...Read more...

'Tis the week for giving thanks, and AMD's board partners may give system builders something extra to be thankful for ahead of the Black Friday deals extravaganza. PowerColor and Sapphire have both aggressively cut prices on some of their graphics cards today, and those stickers are good through Saturday, according to Newegg.We'll be keeping an eye on deals around the web as ...Read more...

Power supplies are arguably the component in a computer that is under the most stress, and one of the most likely to fail. For that reason, big servers have redundant power supplies that can be swapped out while the machine is running. Historically, these redundant PSUs have been proprietary affairs that required custom chassis and mountings. FSP Group's new Twins series redundant power supplies takes a different route, cramming a pair of hot-swappable modules into an ATX-sized shell. ...Read more...

The topic of AMD stock has made the news, though not necessarily in the best of ways. AMD stockholders have started a lawsuit against the company and a group of its executives over the demise of Llano APUs. The court allowed the complaint to proceed as a class action lawsuit.The lawsuit claims that AMD leaders, including Rory Read and Lisa Su, made "false and misleading statements to investors about the manufacturing and subsequent launch of, as well as the demand for, its Llano microprocessor" back in 2011 and 2012. The ...Read more...

The line between console and PC gaming used to be a clear one. It's still there, but it's blurring around the edges. Microsoft's Xbox Play Anywhere program adds some games to both your Xbox One and PC gaming libraries. The Windows 10 Xbox app allows for streaming games directly from the console within your home, too. Now, Microsoft has announced in-home Xbox One game streaming will be arriving on the Oculus Rift headset starting on December 12. ...Read more...

Remember the Surface RT? Microsoft's ill-fated attempt to break away from its dependence on Intel was more or less ignored by the market, probably due to its reliance on the Windows Store and its limited selection of ARM-compatible apps. As it happens, Windows on ARM isn't actually dead yet. I know, I was surprised too. A few companies are still producing Windows phones and tablets. There are even rumors regarding an upcoming Surface-branded smartphone. Perhaps in an effort to make those devices more broadly useful in the Windows ecosystem, rumors are surfacing that suggest Microsoft is working on an x86 emulator that could let most of today's Windows applications run on ARM devices.Apps from the Windows Store should already work seamlessly on any Windows device (thanks to the Windows Runtime ), but desktop apps obviously aren't going to work on an ARM machine without ...Read more...

With the amount of buzz generated by the launches of Pascal and Polaris graphics cards over the past year, one might be left wondering whether prospective buyers would walk the walk. Wonder no further, then. The latest graphics card market report from Jon Peddie Research sheds some light on the behaviors of graphics-card buyers, and AMD's bet on Polaris seems to have paid off. Since the third quarter of last year, the red team has clawed back 10.3% of market share from Nvidia.AMD still has a long way to go to reach parity with Nvidia's share of graphics add-in board shipments, though. The green team still holds a dominant position in the market, ...Read more...

Microsoft has announced that Netflix 4K support is coming to a small number of Windows PCs over on its Windows Blog. Owners of 4K TVs and high-end HTPCs shouldn't get too excited, since this support has some meaningful restrictions.First, Netflix 4K streaming is supported only on seventh-generation Intel CPUs, more commonly known as Kaby Lake. These chips pack hardware support ...Read more...

When you're planning out an ATX case, there are only so many things you can do to make it stand out. Instead of adding fancy lights, a flashy plastic fascia, or a wacky frameless design, Corsair opted to stick with really nailing the basics on its new Carbide 270R. This compact ATX mid-tower case might not stand out in a line-up, but that could be exactly why you'd remember it. ...Read more...

While Intel's mainstream desktop CPUs have been stuck at four cores since the introduction of the Core 2 Quad in 2007, the core count in the silicon giant's Xeon server line of CPUs has continually increased. A Skylake-based Intel Xeon E5-2699v5 chip posted for sale at Chinese e-commerce site Taobao suggests the next round of Intel server CPUs will pack as many as 32 cores and 64 hardware threads into one socket. For comparison, the current top-of-the-line Xeon E5-2699v4 has 22 cores and 44 hardware threads.The actual listing provides scant information about the CPU in question, but TechPowerUp reports that the chip uses Intel's new LGA 3647 socket . Owners of servers with LGA 2011v3 sockets can forget about a drop-in ...Read more...

Microsoft announced a partnership earlier this fall with companies like Asus, Lenovo, and HP to bring cheaper virtual reality headsets to the market, along with a plan to integrate VR experiences into Windows 10 via the upcoming Creators Update. Now, some information spotted by The Verge suggests the company is making sure that these less-expensive headsets can work fine with computers that the average user can buy. ...Read more...

Say what you will about Thermalright, but the company listens to its fans. The low-profile AXP-100R down-draft heatsink wouldn't fit on certain high-end motherboard with tall heatsinks on their voltage regulators. Unwilling to leave a market un-served, Thermalright now offers the AXP-100H Muscle, which is a quarter-inch (7 mm) taller than the previous version. ...Read more...

Another day, another problem with Apple's popular iPhone line of handsets. This time, the trouble involves batteries in some iPhone 6S models. Unlike the Samsung Note7, the issues don't revolve around safety concerns or spontaneous combustion. In the case of the iPhone 6S, some phones occasionally shut off even when the battery is at half capacity. The company says it will replace batteries on affected phones for no charge. The handsets in question have a serial number in a specific window and were built in September and October 2015. ...Read more...

Laptops with Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs inside are becoming more and more common, but the company's seventh-generation CPUs have yet to materialize on the desktop. That's not stopping the rumor mill from dredging up information on products that are further out still. Today's leak comes from BenchLife and contains info about Coffee Lake CPUs, which are purported to come out in 2018. Most tantalizingly, the new chips might come in variants including a six-core desktop part.

Nvidia's Pascal-powered GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti deliver substantial graphics performance inside a 75W TDP. MSI is taking advantage of the cards' efficiency with a pair of low-profile pixel-pushers based on Nvidia's latest entry-level gaming GPUs. The two new cards are bus-powered, so they could be a good way to add some gaming horsepower to pre-built desktop PCs and compact HTPCs. ...Read more...

What good are RGB-illuminated PC components if they have to toil away in the dark confines of an opaque PC chassis? Corsair's Crystal Series 570X RGB ATX case renders the question moot with four large panels of tempered glass. Corsair says the case has glass on "every side" of the case, though the rear and the bottom of the case still appear to be made of metal. ...Read more...

We don't hear about Nanoxia too much on this side of the pond. The last time we checked out one of its products, it was the decidedly unique Project S case. Today, the German silence enthusiasts are launching the CoolForce 1 ATX chassis. Somewhat confusingly, this is actually the second case in the CoolForce series. ...Read more...

Cooler Master has released many a variation on its MasterCase platform this year, and the most fast-and-furious version of the case is in the TR labs now. Have a look at the MasterCase Maker 5t: ...Read more...

Apple iPhone 6 Plus owners suffering from flickering displays or inconsistent multi-touch response finally have official recourse, though the service will hit affected iPhone owners in the pocketbook. Apple published a new page on its support site with guidelines for repair of what independent repair shops have been calling "Touch Disease." Apple avoids the use of this turn of phrase, but the fix doubtless involves the repair of a touch controller chip that can come loose from the logic board. ...Read more...

Trigger warning: individuals with a fixation on cable management and prevention of dust buildup may wish to look away from Raijintek's Paean dual-chamber PC chassis. The Paean is built something like a club sandwich, with exterior bread slices made from 5mm-thick tempered glass panels and a middle piece of toast constructed from 4mm-thick anodized aluminum. The buyer gets to decide what blend of motherboards and water cooling components go in the "turkey side" and what storage and power supply go in place of the "ham chamber." ...Read more...

Howdy, gerbils! The Wild West isn't an easy place to make a living, but if you've struck gold and find yourself with a purse full of nuggets, my caravan just arrived from a long trek up to Taiwan and back with the best deals on hardware this side of the Mississippi. Please, indulge yourself, look in these crates over here.That's all for today, partners. If you spotted another caravan with good deals, ...Read more...

The rumor mill can't seem to exhibit any mindful self-control when it comes to AMD's upcoming Zen CPUs. The latest accounts suggest the specifics enthusiasts have been waiting for: release dates, clock speeds, and pricing. The trail of evidence is pretty nebulous here, so try to follow along: Guru3D reports that a user of Chinese internet search company Baidu claims to have access to an internal "micro-newsletter" from hardware retailer Maxsun.Maxsun may be an unfamilar name to Western readers, but the company is a division of Palit Microsystems. Palit is one of the world's largest manufacturer of graphics cards by volume ...Read more...

Firaxis' recent release of Civilization VI hasn't gone unnoticed in the gaming world, to say the least. The game has received plenty of praise from the gaming press, and its cover art is plastered everywhere on the internet. Having said that, according to plenty of gamers including yours truly, Civ 6 could do with a little improvement, and maybe DirectX 12 support. Today's Fall Update charges ahead on both those fronts. ...Read more...

A widespread bug in the recent 375.86 GeForce driver release caused some Pascal cards to keep their VRAM clock at 810 MHz. Given that the nominal memory clocks for most Pascal cards to date range from 2 GHz to 2.5 GHz, that's a pretty serious bug. Owing to the seriousness of said bug, Nvidia now issued an hotfix driver version 375.95 to curtail the problem. The company says this beta driver addresses the VRAM clock issue on "certain factory-overclocked Pascal cards."There's no word on the other known issues affecting recent GeForce drivers, though. Posters in the release thread for hotfix drivers are still complaining about a litany of issues, even though some of them don't appear to be ...Read more...