Techreport

AMD released the 16.11.4 driver update for its Radeon graphics cards, adding support for Sid Meier's Civilization VI and fixing few bugs. All told, this is a fairly minor update, at least when compared to some recent versions that saw support for three or more games added and a whole pile of bugs squashed. ...Read more...

Playing racing games with a gamepad is doable and entertaining enough. A proper racing wheel is where it's at, though. Thrustmaster's simulator gear has always been well regarded, and today the company added a new racing wheel to its arsenal: the fancy-looking Thrustmaster TS-PC Racer. ...Read more...

Solid-state drives don't have moving parts, and that simple fact makes them intrinsically suited for use as portable storage. Adata's SD700 external SSD combines the inherent robustness of SSDs with a dust-proof and water-resistant case to create a tough and tiny take-along drive. ...Read more...

PC component vendor Lepa has a new CPU cooler for those who feel like copper and aluminum are boring. The company's NeoIllusion CPU cooler feigns stealth by covering those shiny metals with a black "Super Nano Thermal Conductive" coating, then goes for the kill with RGB LED illumination. The NeoIllusion packs four copper heat pipes in direct contact with the CPU heat spreader and connects them to an aluminum fin array. The whole setup is capable of cooling CPUs with TDPs as high as 200W. ...Read more...

Qualcomm's just-announced Snapdragon 835 SoC promises all sorts of performance and battery life improvements compared to its predecessors. The new chip also brings the newest version of the company's Quick Charge proprietary charging technology. Qualcomm claims phones supporting Quick Charge 4.0 will be able to extend running time by five hours by spending as little as five minutes on a compatible charger. Furthermore, the company says a phone's battery can be charged from zero to 50% capacity in "about 15 minutes or less."Five appears to be a key number in this fourth revision of the Quick Charge standard. Besides the aforementioned "5 for 5" capability, ...Read more...

Linux and Microsoft were, for years, fully at odds with each other. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer considered Linux a bigger threat to Microsoft than Apple, and fans of one have often not been fans of the other. That's changed in recent years, as Microsoft has taken a bigger role in the Open Source Software community and in contributions to the Linux ecosystem and community. Now the company is making its commitment to Linux and open source official by joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member.The Linux Foundation outlined some of Microsoft's big contributions in a press release. In the past few years, Microsoft has opened up core parts of .NET, brought Canonical's Ubuntu ...Read more...

Qualcomm and Samsung announced this morning that the next "premium" Snapdragon SoC, the Snapdragon 835, is already in production on Samsung's 10-nm FinFET process. This will be the first major revision of Qualcomm's top-end processor since the 820 introduced the company's custom Kryo CPU core. ...Read more...

Some of you may have already read our review of the Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 240 and 280 CLCs. If you have, and you'd like the same basic elements in a 140-mm form factor, Cooler Master has just the thing: the MasterLiquid Pro 140. ...Read more...

WDLabs has refreshed it PiDrive Foundation Edition series of drives designed for the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 2 and Pi 3 single-board computers. The first product in the updated lineup combines a 250GB 2.5" magnetic hard drive, a Sandisk microSD card preloaded with the Pi Foundation's NOOBS Installer software, and a PiDrive cable. Like previous PiDrive models, the magnetic drives have USB ports in place of the usual SATA power and data connectors. ...Read more...

The new driver for GeForce graphics cards only dropped yesterday, but users on the official forums at geforce.com are already reporting major issues. Nothing like broken fan profiles, thankfully. Multiple users reported that their Pascal processors' video memory is getting stuck at 810 MHz. That has dire consequences for the performance on the affected cards. For reference, the GeForce GTX 1080 runs its memory at a blistering 2.5 GHz normally, for a final transfer speed of 10 GT/s.There have also been continuing reports of Folding@Home work units being incorrectly calculated, and a few users are reporting that they're still seeing flickering on their high-refresh monitors. Users ...Read more...

Don't adjust your monitor—the image you see below isn't distorted to make the headphones look big next to the box. HP researchers had a little too much time on their hands and pointed a shrink ray at a CAD workstation. The result is the Z2 Mini Workstation, which the company calls the "world's first" mini-workstation aimed at CAD professionals. ...Read more...

The engineering team at Seagate must have heard the phrase "you can't take it with you," and taken it as a design challenge. The company's new Backup Plus Portable 5TB drive offers buyers the ability to carry 5x10 bytes around, inside a package that measures 4.5" x 3.1" x 0.8" (or 11.5cm x 7.8cm x 2.1cm). ...Read more...

Cooler Master's MasterCase 5 left us with a positive impression when we checked it out earlier this year, and the Maker 5 followed shortly after. Now, the company is looking to take the idea of a moddable case to the next level with the MasterCase Maker 5t. While the Maker 5t resembles its predecessors, the premium touches added by Cooler Master make it stand out. ...Read more...

Just a few months after the OnePlus 3 put an affordable price tag on a Snapdragon 820, the roguish smartphone maker is updating its flagship phone with new internals and a new name. The OnePlus 3T puts a mildly clock-bumped Snapdragon 821 SoC and as much as 128GB of storage in the same aluminum body as its predecessor. A new 16MP selfie shooter will let a certain Kardashian break the internet in crisper detail. ...Read more...

The Rift and Vive VR headsets offers substantially better audiovisual fidelity compared to mobile-based VR experiences. Unfortunately, the packaging and setup for PC-based VR rigs is less convenient, particularly for those that wish to transport their VR systems for demonstrations. MSI seeks to stick a fork in those pains with the Trident, which the manufacturer calls the "smallest VR-Ready gaming PC." ...Read more...

Another couple of game launches, another GeForce driver release. This time around, Nvidia is serving up GeForce drivers version 375.86. The new package is WHQL-approved and Game Ready for the latest updates to Battlefield 1, Civilization VI, and The Division. These drivers also add specific support for Ubisoft's new snowboarding game Steep, ensuring that GeForce gamers will be ready for this weekend's open beta....Read more...

When Razer first unveiled the Core external GPU dock, it was met with equal parts hype and hesitation. The promise of plugging in a external graphics card is great, but most gerbils balked at the $499 price tag. Powercolor's Devil Box is cheaper, but $379 is still more than most people are likely to spend on a graphics card to begin with. Folks who are still chasing the external-graphics dream might want to take a look at Akitio's Node eGPU dock. ...Read more...

Dual-chamber computer cases are an intriguing option for builders who want to separate heat-generating CPUs and graphics cards from other components. Those dual-chamber cases like Lian Li's PC-O9 tend to have an unmistakably square profile, however. For those who want to a dual-chamber layout but insist that computers should be rectangular, Lian Li has a new case: the PC-O10. ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of its class-leading 960 Pro, Samsung is unleashing the more-affordable, TLC V-NAND-driven 960 EVO this morning. The good news is that we've got both the 250GB and 1TB versions of this drive in our storage labs. Unfortunately, our drives arrived a little late, so we don't have a full review to share just yet. For now, be content with Samsung's quoted specs.The 960 EVO's numbers aren't all that shy of the 960 Pro's. Like the Pro, the updated EVO packs Samsung's brand-new Polaris controller and third-generation V-NAND goodness. The big difference, as usual, is that the EVO's NAND is in TLC configuration rather than MLC. To make up part of ...Read more...

Fast cars have a fantasy attached to them that fuel-efficient ones do not. The latter, though, are much more practical in just about every case. The same might go for high-performance computing, where speed usually makes the news, but efficiency means much lower operating costs. That was exactly Nvidia's goal with its DGX SaturnV, which the company announced this week as the world's most efficient supercomputer. ...Read more...

Cray isn't a name you hear about every day. For the unitiated, the company has been making supercomputers ever since "computers" were a thing. Today at the SC16 conference, the company pulled back the curtain on the XC50, which it calls its fastest supercomputer ever. Cray says the XC50 ought to offer 1 PFLOP (yes, that's petaflops) per cabinet—and the entities buying these don't tend to stop at just one. ...Read more...

Mini-PCs tend to be small and cute things that end up on the corner of a desk or perhaps next to a TV. That's definitely not the case with the Sparton LPC-140G4. This mini-machine is aimed at industrial, military, and marine applications, among others. ...Read more...

A year ago at the intuitively-named SC15 supercomputing conference, AMD announced its intention to improve its software stack for high-performance computing. The name of that program was the Boltzmann Initiative, and the project's first software fruits came out in April, collectively known as the Radeon Open Compute Platform, or "ROCm." Now, at SC16, AMD is announcing the release of version 1.3 of the platform. ...Read more...

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has been growing his company into something greater than a graphics chip vendor for some time now. A new partnership between IBM and Nvidia to make computer systems for deep-learning applications reinforces the idea that the graphics giant's technology can be put to more interesting uses than rendering video games at blistering frame rates. The fruit of IBM and Nvidia's collaboration is the Power System S822LC, a server that joins two eight or ten-core IBM Power8 CPUs with up to four Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs over Nvidia's NVLink architecture. ...Read more...

Intel has historically been at best ambivalent when it comes to allowing overclocking of its low-end and mid-range CPUs. The golden days of Celeron 300A CPUs being overclocked to near-performance-equivalence with the Pentium III 450 are in the distant past. The only throwback to that time that the silicon giant has offered in the last decade was the multiplier-unlocked Pentium G3258 from mid-2014. That situation could change, if rumors that sprung up over the weekend about an unlocked Core i3 CPU prove true. A price list posted by online vendor ShopBLT suggests the existence of a Core i3-7350K CPU based on Intel's latest 14-nm seventh-generation Core "Kaby Lake" architecture.Notorious rumor mill website WCCFTech goes on to speculate that this CPU will have an unlocked multiplier and support for Intel's Turbo Boost feature, something that up until now hasn't been offered in Core i3 processors. The anticipated ...Read more...

There's high end, and then there's high end. The ROG GT51CA from Asus is the second kind, and it's now arrived. The guts of the system are as impressive as you'd expect, but what makes the GT51CA stand out is the wrist band that comes with it. Yes, I'm serious. Called the ROG Band, this little piece of wearable tech gives its owner special access to their computer. ...Read more...

Who wants a free game? I do, you do, everyone does. The humble folks at the Humble Bundle store are offering up a juicy morsel: a copy of Dirt 3 Complete Edition for a minimum of exactly zero dollars, no euros, zilch Imperial credits or nil pieces o' eight. ...Read more...

Remember Oculus' "asynchronous spacewarp" technology? If you're not up to speed on the topic, the technique uses complicated interpolation and reprojection algorithms generate extra frames for VR applications. That means that you can be looking at 90 FPS while your PC is only churning out 45 FPS. Oculus revealed the technology early last month, but today it's out of testing and officially available on the Oculus 1.10 runtime. ...Read more...

Corsair's new K55 RGB keyboard and Harpoon RGB mouse offer prospective buyers the bling factor of 16.7 million colors without the swollen sticker prices and key noise that often accompany "RGB gaming" peripherals. ...Read more...

G.skill joined the rapidly-expanding world of backlit mechanical keyboards earlier this year with the Ripjaws KM780R. Now, the company is looking to fill out its ranks with the KM570 RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard, a more streamlined plank for those of us that want the blinking lights and little else. ...Read more...

Hello madam, may I come in? I'd like to offer you this leaflet. If you'd be so kind to spare me but a scant few minutes, I'll be able to point you in the direction of the best hardware deals on this side of the internet. No, ma'am, you won't find better anywhere else.That's all for today, folks. Should you come across any juicy deals ...Read more...

Let's cut right to the chase. HTC and its partner TPCast want to chop all the cables connecting Vive headsets to host PCs. The companies announced an add-on to allow for tether-free operation of HTC Vive headsets at Alibaba's Shopping Festival in Shenzhen, China. In a phone interview with UploadVR, an HTC spokesman said the add-on would "greatly improve" the VR experiences with the Vive and made "no noticeable difference" with respect to latency. The included headset-mounted battery pack is said to provide enough power for about 90 minutes of use. A larger battery intended for for stowage in a shirt pocket will be offered in the future. ...Read more...

As immersive as VR tries and claims to be, there's always going to be the problem of real world objects getting in the way. More specifically, I'm talking about cords. Some of the best VR experiences want us out of our chairs and on our feet, and they're great until a cord ends up underfoot or tugging at the back of your head. MSI has your back covered, though. The company's VR One backpack, first shown off back in September, is now going up for sale. ...Read more...

Nvidia enjoyed another banner quarter as it posted $2 billion in revenue, up 54% year-on-year, and operating income of $639 million, up 161% year-on-year, for the third quarter of its fiscal 2017. The company said its revenue, gross margin, and earnings all set records, thanks to a fully-ramped Pascal GPU lineup for gaming, deep learning, and computer vision.Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was especially proud of the company's success in the deep learning market. He touts the versatility of the company's GPUs for running every major AI framework, and he says ...Read more...

Xigmatek is announcing a new version of its 120-mm Tyr heatsink, designated the Tyr SD1264B. The redesign addresses long-standing complaints about overly large tower coolers by narrowing the fins at the bottom of the heatsink. The updated design should improve the cooler's compatibility with tall DIMMs or excessively-large motherboard heatsinks. ...Read more...

Enermax has expanded its Ostrog line of budget-friendly cases with the Ostrog Lite, a steel mid-tower case designed to swallow up ATX motherboards. This enclosure packs features usually reserved for more expensive chassis, like a power supply shroud and both top and bottom magnetic dust filters. ...Read more...

Asus is expanding its ROG Strix lineup of graphics cards with the Strix GeForce GTX 1060 OC edition 6GB, the company's most recent take on a GTX 1060 6GB card. The new entry is fitted with what the company calls its Classic DirectCU II cooler. The visually obvious differences between the new DirectCU II Strix 1060 OC and the two existing DirectCU III models are the dual-fan cooler and shorter PCB. The card offers 1569MHz base and 1785MHz boost clocks, slotting it between the existing three-fan models. ...Read more...

If you've got a Radeon and are of a mind to engage in some of the ol' sneaky-stabby-shooty, you may want to pause your endeavors and grab the Radeon Software 16.11.3. The new release dropped yesterday with support for Arkane's Dishonored 2. The update also resolves a major bug with X-Connect wherein Steam and Origin would self-terminate when unplugging an external GPU. ...Read more...

Google's Daydream View virtual reality goggles are now available at Google's store. That's well and good for owners of Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, but how about devices from other manufacturers? The latest compatibility document for Android specifies what a phone needs in order to be compatible with Google's latest foray into VR. ...Read more...

A little while back, we were intrigued by Antec's Cube Mini-ITX case, designed in partnership with Razer. Antec's engineers fused the usual Razer black-and-green palette with a stylish enclosure whose looks are both classy and unlike anything else on the market. We've got one of these cases in the TR labs now, and we're interested in seeing whether its performance matches its style. ...Read more...

We missed Deepcool's GamerStorm Genome case when it was first being shown at CES this year. The Genome is an ATX mid-tower chassis that includes a 360-mm liquid-cooler with a unique-looking helix-shaped reservoir right up at the front. Now, Deepcool is announcing that it's releasing a new version of the Genome case that's been certified by Asus' Republic of Gamers. ...Read more...

"Are we rushing in, or are we going sneaky-beaky-like?" That's the running motto of the Dishonored series of games, combining stealth and action (not mutually exclusively) in a first-person perspective. The first game had those contents wrapped in RPG elements, a great storyline, and a distinctive steampunk-victorian art style. Dishonored 2 is set to emerge soon, and it's looking as moody as its predecessor. Check out the launch trailer below....Read more...

Asus' ROG Claymore Series keyboards have just entered the growing ranks of gaming keyboards stuffed with Cherry MX RGB switches, with one small twist: a detachable 10-key pad that can go on either side of the keyboard by way of direct physical contact. The ROG Claymore includes the whole enchilada: the main keyboard and the ten-key block. Meanwhile, the ROG Claymore Core offers only the lonesome primary keyboard, though Asus says the ten-key block is available separately should buyers change their minds. Asus will offer the ROG Claymore with a choice of Cherry MX Red, Blue, Brown, or Black switches. ...Read more...

Acer released a new 27" display this week aimed at the non-gaming crowd. The BE270U arrives with a focus on color reproduction and comfort instead of high refresh rates and low response times. This display uses an 8-bit 2560x1440 IPS panel framed with a thin bezel that won't distract from the content onscreen. ...Read more...

EVGA is announcing the Supernova G3 series of power supplies today. The company says these units will carry on the G2 models' traditions for high efficiency and high performance, with reduced noise output and size versus the older models. All five new models—rated at 550W, 650W, 750W, 850W, and 1000W—are fully modular and 80 Plus Gold-certified. ...Read more...

German gaming peripheral manufacturer Roccat has announced the Suora FX keyboard, its latest entry into the growing marketplace of mechanical keyboards with RGB illumination. The keyboard has minimal bezel space beyond the key locations in what Roccat calls a "frameless" design. Some hasty research suggests that Suora is a Finnish word meaning "straight," and the curve-free design of the Suora FX suggests that might be a valid translation. ...Read more...

Remember LAN parties? Taiwanese case-and-cooling vendor Reeven does. The company's new Koios is a cube-style micro-ATX chassis with a handle along the top of the front panel. Like some modern cube cases we've seen, the Koios offers a split interior with a horizontal partition that separates the power supply and storage devices from the computer-y bits. ...Read more...

Monitor manufacturer AOC is expanding its range of its range of FreeSync-enabled monitors with the alphabet-soup-inspired Agon AG352QCX. The monitor is built around a 35" VA ultra-wide panel with a maximum refresh rate of 200Hz. The panel's native resolution is a pedestrian 2560x1080 pixels, though this is probably a good thing for gamers who value frame rate over pixel density. The display offers a FreeSync range of 30Hz to 200Hz, suggesting it has support for Low Framerate Compensation (LFC). ...Read more...

Helping consumers find products they like from a large, ever-expanding collection is a good problem to have, but nevertheless a problem. As of the last tally, Steam had over 6,000 titles available. Valve now decided to update its Discovery system to give its users more tools for finding games. ...Read more...