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Philips' enterprise branch EPI announced this week a new 32" display aimed primarily at the business market, the BDM3270QP2. This 2560x1440, 92-PPI display stands out from much of its competition simply for the display technology powering it. Instead of using the typical TN or IPS panel technology, Philips' monitor uses a 10-bit AMVA panel. ...Read more...

Youtube announced support for streaming HDR video in its blog today, along with a short playlist of sample videos. The streaming site supports HDR video in a variety of resolutions from 720p (1280x720) to 4K (3840x2160) and frame rates from 23.976 to 60 FPS. On that note, viewers will need an HDR display along with a playback device that supports HDR output. ...Read more...

If you like cases that can double as cages for misbehaving children, you might take a liking to Xigmatek's new Talon H. The company describes its new case as a "Super Tower." The appellation fits, thanks to the chassis' ten expansion slots and support for motherboards in sizes up to E-ATX, XL-ATX, and HP-TX. The case can also fit up to 13 disk drives. ...Read more...

Two members of the trio of AMD Radeon Pro WX workstation graphics cards announced at Siggraph at the end of July will soon be available for purchase. The Radeon Pro WX 4100 and the Radeon WX 7100 will be available November 10, while the mid-tier Radeon Pro WX 5100 will arrive November 18. All three cards are based on the company's Polaris architecture and pack chips built on 14-nm FinFET fabrication technology. AMD says these cards take the performance crowns in their specified form-factor or power classes, though it must be noted that rival Nvidia doesn't yet offer directly-comparable competitors based on its Pascal architecture. ...Read more...

BenQ acquired eSports fanatics Zowie last year, and has been busy stamping the name on its gaming monitors. The latest display bearing the Zowie name is the XL2540, a 24.5" 1920x1080 monitor whose claim to fame is its native 240Hz refresh rate. ...Read more...

There's been a rash of small and compact cases and systems lately. Sometimes, though, what you want is a glorious hunk of metal that can take in an enormous motherboard, a cadre of hard drives, and the biggest graphics card you can get your hands on. HBT's Gravity6 case meets those requirements and then some. ...Read more...

All good things must come to an end. Unfortunately for me, that includes the time I've spent using the Aimpad R5 prototype. That's good news for Josh Pozzolo, though, because he is the randomly-drawn winner of our Aimpad R5 giveaway. ...Read more...

Huawei has formally announced the Mate 9, its latest competitor in the crowded high-end Android smartphone market. Thankfully, the 9 in the phone's name doesn't refer to its screen size, a large-but-manageable 5.9". The Mate 9's Kirin 960 octa-core SoC is produced by Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon. That chip packs four Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53s alongside a Mali-G71 GPU, and Huawei touts the SoC as the "world's highest performance smartphone processor." That chip hides in a svelte metal body that Huawei claims needs an hour inside a CNC machine to get right. ...Read more...

Asus' progression of Pascal-powered portables proceeds with the updated ROG G701, called the G701VI. This 17.3" gaming laptop is mostly unchanged from the previous version, which was itself a somewhat saner version of the ludicrous GX700 water-cooled gaming laptop. The real magic here comes courtesy of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 and the attached 120Hz G-Sync display. ...Read more...

The German Wasserkühlung enthusiasts at Alphacool have introduced the VPP755 Eispumpe, the successor to their VP655 line of pumps. The new pump maintains the D5 form factor for compatibility with existing tops and brackets. The company says the pump's internals are completely new, with a design based on a ceramic shaft instead of spherical bearings. Alphacool says the new design uses about half the power, runs quieter, and vibrates less than their older pumps, while maintaining a four-meter head. The company posted a video featuring its always-entertaining spokesman here. ...Read more...

Just as new AAA game titles trigger driver update releases from Nvidia, the same thing happens with the folks over at AMD. Today's bit of driver news is the red team's latest Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.11.1 driver release. The new driver's main feature is support for the latest titles in the Call of Duty universe, Infinite Warfare and Modern Warfare Remastered. ...Read more...

Greetings, Gerbils of the Round Table, and welcome to our humble gathering. Your sovereign has decreed that you should receive titles and lands, so rejoice! But before that happens, we want to discuss a number of amazing opportunities, hand-picked just for you. You can be the proud owner of any of these pieces of hardware, for low, low prices.That's it for today, dear gerbils. Don't forget to grab your complimentary cheese wheel on the way ...Read more...

It's a tough time to be a memory vendor right now. When the needs of most PCs are more than satisfied with 16GB of DDR4, it's difficult to stand out among the crowd. G.Skill is taking the "bigger numbers" approach, and today announced that the Trident Z series RAM is getting 16GB modules with a 3600 MT/s transfer rate. The latency takes a bump from the last Trident Z kit we loooked at, but this kit's 17-cycle CAS isn't too bad. Of course, G.Skill had to bump the voltage to 1.35V to get there, but that's not actually out of spec for Skylake CPUs. ...Read more...

It used to be that each company in the PC world had its own thing. One company was known for memory, another for coolers, and another for peripherals. These days, though, everyone's broadening out, and that includes Zalman. Zalman has a whole slew of peripherals, but right now we're taking a look at the Zalman K900M mechanical gaming keyboard. ...Read more...

Panasonic's Toughbooks are well-known and respected in industrial and emergency environments for their durability, reliability, and long battery life. The company also sells similarly-ruggedized tablets under the Toughpad brand, and today it announced that the latest version of its 10.1" Toughpad FZ-G1 is now available in the U.S. ...Read more...

High-end PC VR headsets require substantial computing horsepower to deliver immersive experiences, even after Oculus and Valve introduced technologies aimed at reducing VR's hardware requirements. Quantifying how well a PC meets those requirements has been tricky business thus far. Futuremark has stepped into the breech and released VRMark, aimed at benchmarking PCs for VR applications. VRMark is offered in Basic and Advanced Editions. ...Read more...

As process nodes become smaller and smaller, chip manufacturers have to work harder to squeeze performance and power savings out of each step. To wit, Intel's recently changed from its familiar "tick-tock" cadence of alternating die-shrinks and architecture updates to a three-step "process-architecture-optimaztion" model. Likewise, Samsung's fabrication arm recently presented the latest revisions of its 10-nm and 14-nm process nodes to its manufacturing partners at its Device Solutions America headquarters.Samsung showed off the latest version of its 14-nm process, the company's fourth generation at that node size. The new fabrication technology, dubbed 14LPU, ...Read more...

If you've read Jeff's review of the Fractal Design Define C, you already know that it's a fantastic ATX case that offers a lot of value for the money. (And if you haven't, go read it!) Some folks don't need all those extra expansion slots that ATX provides, though. For those people, Fractal Design has the Define Mini C. The new case strips off two expansion slots in its move to the MicroATX form factor, but is otherwise more-or-less unchanged from the full ATX version. ...Read more...

It doesn't come with a long list of changes, but Nvidia released a new hotfix display driver for its GeForce family of graphics cards, version 375.76. With this update, the green team first tackled the distracting flicker that some of their users were reporting when using high refresh rate monitors. Judging from the response in the company's forums, however, this issue might not be entirely cleaned up.Second, the hotfix addresses some artifacts that people have been seeing in GIFs. Those who purchase high-end graphics cards to look at internet memes will undoubtedly ...Read more...

If you're on top of your cable-routing game, Thermaltake has the case for you: this year's take on the Core P5 chassis, the aptly-named Tempered Glass Edition. The original came out last year and made a mark with its bare-bones modern-art look meant to show off a carefully arranged cabling job, and the new edition takes that a step further. ...Read more...

We saw a prototype of Zotac's VR backpack at Computex, but now the user-mounted gaming PC has a name: VR GO. To produce the VR GO, the company essentially packed one of its Magnus EN1070 mini-PCs into a backpack. That means the wearable PC has a quad-core Core i7 processor and graphics horsepower by way of a GeForce GTX 1070. ...Read more...

Microsoft made a splash last week with its creator-focused Surface Studio all-in-one desktop PC. Windows Central reports that Dell is throwing its hat into the ring with a machine it showed at Adobe's Max conference in San Diego. Dell showed a 90-second clip of its new machine, along with a Surface Dial-like input device and a second display that serves double duty as both a keyboard and digital clipboard.Windows Central reports that the main screen of the machine in the teaser video had tiny bezels on the top and sides to go with ...Read more...

Zotac keeps finding ways of fitting beefy hardware into its diminutive Zbox Magnus mini-PCs. In the past, the company relied on Nvidia's GPUs and Intel's integrated graphics to drive displays. Now, for the first time, consumers can buy a Zbox powered by a Radeon card. For the new Magnus ERX480 line, Zotac turned to AMD's Radeon RX 480. In fact, this appears to be the first implementation of the RX 480 outside of a desktop. ...Read more...

Taiwanese peripheral manufacturer i-Rocks has produced one of the more unique products to grace our press desk. The K76m Fun Illuminated Mechanical Keyboard is exactly what it sounds like: a mechanical keyboard with LEDs and, well, "fun." In this context, "fun" means a customizable faceplate surrounding the keys that you can stick Lego on. The K76m's custom-built mechanical switches are inspired by the classic Alps design....Read more...

Internet forums and rumor mill sites have been ablaze with chatter regarding overheating PWM circuits and memory chips on EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 graphics cards fitted with the company's ACX 3.0 coolers. EVGA has issued a formal response regarding the problems, and offers two different remedies that can be administered by users without shipping their cards in for service. ...Read more...

While some gaming peripheral manufacturers are going for complicated hardware with more functionality, others are simplifying and streamlining. That's exactly what Fnatic is going for with its new Duel TMA-2 headset and Clutch G1 mouse. ...Read more...

Microsoft is really serious about the adoption of Windows 10. The company has used free upgrade promotions and obtrusive advertisements built into Windows Update to prod users into dumping older versions of the operating system in favor of the 2015 release. Curmudgeons clinging to Windows 7 will now have a tough time buying new PCs with the old operating system, as Microsoft has ended sales of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 to computer manufacturers. ...Read more...

We liked what we saw when we reviewed the prototype Aimpad R5 analog keyboard. Now we're giving it away to some lucky gerbil so he can try out the analog goodness for himself. Only 20 of these prototypes were made, and none are for sale anywhere, so this giveaway is your best chance to own a real collector's item in potentia. If you haven't entered yet, go read up on the details in our giveaway post. Make sure you enter the contest before the end of the day this Thursday, November 3. We'll announce a random winner on Friday.

MSI is celebrating its 30th Anniversary with the launch of the GeForce GTX 1070 Quick Silver. The new card will come in standard and OC variations, twins in all but clock rates. Both models make use of MSI's excellent Twin Frozr VI cooler. ...Read more...

Remember the enormous Lian-Li PC-O9 dual-chamber half-glass case? If you saw that and thought "I like it, but I wish it was tiny," Lian-Li has you covered now. The latest addition to the aluminum aficionados' catalog is the PC-Q37, essentially a mini version of the company's larger tempered-glass-sided cases. ...Read more...

NZXT is offering a special edition of its H440 ATX chassis for fans of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or buyers for whom the colorful trim on the standard H440 is not expressive enough. The aptly-named H440 Hyper Beast Limited Edition combines the standard features of the H440 case with front and side panels covered in timeless artwork from Brock Hofer, creator of the CS:GO M4A1-S Hyper Beast weapon skin. ...Read more...

Multi-core processors have become ubiquitous, but it took some time for the software industry to start taking advantage of their capabilities. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), this is partly because modern microprocessors require careful management of communication between cores. Researchers at Intel and North Carolina State University believe they have a solution: a Queue Management Device (QMD).The QMD works by using hardware instead of software to take care of lock-protected software queues, which coordinate data access and usage between CPU cores. According to the IEEE, this strategy doubles core-to-core communication speed, making certain tasks much more efficient. For example, the researchers found that using a QMD for ...Read more...

Multi-core processors have become ubiquitous, but it took some time for the software industry to start taking advantage of their capabilities. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), this is partly because modern microprocessors require careful management of communication between cores. Researchers at Intel and North Carolina State University believe they have a solution: a Queue Management Device (QMD).The QMD works by using hardware instead of software to take care of lock-protected software queues, which coordinate data access and usage between CPU cores. According to the IEEE, this strategy doubles core-to-core communication speed, making certain tasks much more efficient. For example, the researchers found that using a QMD for ...Read more...

While game services like Origin, Steam, and GOG allow for playing their games offline, Microsoft's Windows Store has lagged behind its competitors in this respect (along with plenty of others). However, after it made some improvements to the Windows 10 Store, Microsoft has posted instructions for enabling offline play of games purchased there. ...Read more...

Thermalright is releasing a "heatpipe direct touch" version of its True Spirit 140 heatsink, aptly named the True Spirit 140 Direct. Like the Macho Direct before it, the new heatsink takes an existing design and drops the baseplate to bring its heatpipes into direct contact with the CPU. The cooler includes a 140mm PWM-enabled fan, and mounts up to pretty much every socket that's newer than LGA 775. ...Read more...

The specs for the desktop versions of Intel's "Kaby Lake" CPUs have leaked onto the internet, thanks to an Intel-provided PDF intended for manufacturing partners. In addition to that, a separate informational release confirms existing speculation that Intel has new chipsets on the way. Kaby Lake will work on many existing 100-series motherboards, but Intel will have 200-series chipsets ready for those who can't bear to mix a new CPU with an old motherboard. ...Read more...

David Kanter over at Real World Technologies has released his ruminations on the GPU portion of Apple's latest A10 SoCs. Apple has licensed Imagination Technologies' PowerVR graphics IP since the earliest days of the iPhone and iPad. However, after comparing developer documentation from both Apple and Imagination Technologies, Kanter concluded that Apple has been slowly replacing off-the-shelf components of PowerVR GPUs with its own proprietary designs. He argues those components have been appearing in Apple SoCs since the A8 chip that powers the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.Roughly speaking, Kanter describes a GPU as having three parts: fixed-function hardware, shader cores, and a software driver. The fixed-function hardware manages API commands and rasterization. The shader cores perform programmable graphics computation, and the driver translates API calls into ...Read more...

Just a few weeks after refreshing the Brix lineup with Kaby Lake CPUs, Gigabyte is launching a couple of Brix mini-PCs based on Intel's Apollo Lake SoCs. The awkwardly-named GB-BPCE-3455 and GB-BPCE-3350 are minuscule black boxes packed with the latest low-power silicon from Santa Clara. The GB-BPCE-3455 uses the quad-core Celeron J3455, while the GB-BPCE-3350 comes with a dual-core Celeron N3350 SoC. The machines are otherwise identical. ...Read more...

Gigabyte has spruced up its Aero 14 laptop with Nvidia's latest GeForce GTX 1060 mobile GPU. The new graphics muscle allows Gigabyte to claim the laptop is now "VR Ready." The company says the Aero 14 is aimed at professionals, though we're not sure the optional orange and green "nano-imprint lithography" finishes entirely illustrate that. ...Read more...

Information about the operating conditions of one's PC is worthless unless it's easy to obtain and even easier to understand. That's the goal with Aqua Computer's new Cuplex Kryos Next water block. Aqua Computer claims the block has the best cooling performance on the market, of course, but that's not what sets it apart....Read more...

Storage specialist OWC has a product for Mac Mini owners who are tired of hooking their fashionable micro-machines to ugly external disk enclosures. The OWC Ministack is a USB 3.0 external hard drive enclosure that shares the Mac Mini's dimensions and overall design language. That makes it easy to physically stack together with the diminutive Mac.

And then there were none. On the heels of Asus and MSI, Gigabyte has now announced BIOS updates for its existing LGA 1151 motherboards, adding support for Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake CPUs. The motherboard vendor says it's "tested and validated" the new firmware across its entire lineup of 100-series mobos. ...Read more...

Greeting, fellow gerbils. I know what you're looking for. Deals, isn't it? You crave them and can't get enough of 'em. Fret no more, for here at TR we have the finest selection available for your pleasure. Take a gander at our wares.There's a chance you're looking for a deal on something we didn't feature here. 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 ...Read more...

In case you weren't aware, Apple tends to release new monitors to go along with new devices. The refreshed MacBook Pro announcement yesterday didn't include any monitors with Apple's name on them, though. The honors were given to a pair of LG displays called "UltraFine," which the company says were designed specifically for the new MacBooks. The UltraFine displays are available in 21.5" size with DCI 4K resolution and as a 27" variant with 5K resolution. ...Read more...

Geil is showing off its what it calls the the world's first RGB-LED-lit DDR4 modules, in the form of the Evo X DIMMs. We previously reported on Corsair's Vengeance LED memory, but those DIMMs limited purchasers to white or blue illumination that's configurable only at the time of purchase. The Evo Xs are shipping now in speeds up to 3200 MT/s, as 8GB and 16GB kits. Geil expects to deliver higher-spec variants in the future, and says it's readying up kits of two 16GB modules. ...Read more...

Just a few days have passed since the most recent Nvidia Game Ready GeForce driver update, and the company is already following that release up with version 375.70 of its software. The new driver's release notes tout performance improvements for a who's-who list of new-release, remake, and sequel content that includes Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, Dishonored 2, Titanfall 2, and Myst-successor Obduction. ...Read more...

Just a few days have passed since the most recent Nvidia Game Ready GeForce driver update, and the company is already following that release up with version 357.70 of its software. The new driver's release notes tout performance improvements for a who's-who list of new-release, remake, and sequel content that includes Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, Dishonored 2, Titanfall 2, and Myst-successor Obduction. ...Read more...

The needs of a business and the needs of a consumer are very different, even when it comes to graphics cards. Gamers need their cards to run Battlefield 1 smoothly, but a graphics professional needs his card to reliably render expensive, time-consuming graphics—"reliably" being the key word there. It's with that idea in mind that AMD announced a new set of Radeon Pro drivers for enterprise users. The first release in the new series is fresh from the oven, titled "Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Driver 16.Q4."The drivers offer support for existing FirePro and Radeon Pro cards, as well as the upcoming Radeon Pro WX cards. AMD says the drivers will be updated ...Read more...

If you've read our review of the Aimpad R5, you already know that we're pretty big fans of the concept behind this keyboard. If you haven't read it, be sure to check it out, because the Aimpad R5 is no ordinary input device. As much as I'd like to keep using the prototype I reviewed, it's time to send it on its way. Luckily for one of you gerbils out there, we're not sending it back to Aimpad. We're going to send it to one of you, so you can own one before anyone can buy one. We don't have any regional restrictions for this giveaway, either, so everyone can enter. ...Read more...

Apple's latest MacBook Pros house a new line of Radeon Pro graphics processors: the Radeon Pro 450, the Radeon Pro 455, and the Radeon Pro 460. AMD has given us some more info on those graphics processors in the wake of Apple's unveiling. While the red team didn't say as much, the fact that it's touting the thinness of these chips and the GPUs' spec sheets point to a Polaris 11 chip underpinning these products. First, though, let's take a look at the specs of these new chips (along with a couple educated guesses about their performance). I've marked my guesses with question marks.Boost