Techreport

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

Hot on the heels of Microsoft's hardware event yesterday, Apple took the wraps off a new lineup of MacBook Pro hardware this afternoon. The company has trimmed off the usual millimeters, shaved some pounds, and trimmed some legacy ports from its these machines, but we've come to expect as much from new Macs. The headline feature of these notebooks is a multifunction touch strip that Apple calls Touch Bar. This display can adapt to the needs of the in-focus application and give users quick access to commonly-used tools and settings. The Touch Bar also incorporates a Touch ID sensor-cum-power-button that brings Apple Pay and improved security to the machines. ...Read more...

We've already seen what Nvidia's board partners are doing with the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, and now we have that chip's slightly cut-down sibling in the lab with Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 1050 G1 Gaming card. Behold: ...Read more...

Google had a big hardware event a couple weeks ago, but the search giant didn't show all of its physical devices then. The company has now announced the Jamboard, a digital whiteboard with a 55" 3840x2160 display and tight integration with Google's G Suite services. The manufacturer says the Jamboard's screen is "built for precision drawing" and has the "best-in-class touch response time." Google doesn't say what hardware specifications and software technology go into the Jamboard, though we wager it's based on Android or Chrome OS. ...Read more...

We don't talk about Transcend a lot here at TR, but we were pretty fond of its SSD 370. Transcend's latest offering is called the SSD 230, and it's the company's first solid-state storage device with 3D NAND. The new aluminum-cased drives will come in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities. ...Read more...

We don't talk about Transcend a lot here at TR, but we were pretty fond of its SSD 370. Transcend's latest offering is called the SSD 230, and it's the company's first solid-state storage device with 3D NAND. The new aluminum-cased drives will come in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities. ...Read more...

There's less than a week left before Apple is set to ship its AirPods, the company's upcoming wireless earbuds. Our friends over at Ars Technica reached out to Apple about the situation, and learned that the product's launch has been delayed. ...Read more...

There's less than a week left before Apple is set to ship its AirPods, the company's upcoming wireless earbuds. Our friends over at Ars Technica reached out to Apple about the situation, and learned that the product's launch has been delayed. ...Read more...

Everybody wants to rule the VR world, and Microsoft is no exception. Sony, Oculus, and HTC all have headsets on the market promising the full VR experience, while Samsung and Google have mobile-focused headsets. Today at its Windows event, Microsoft unveiled its entry into the VR fray. The company is looking to bring affordable VR headsets to the market by way of partnerships with companies like HP, Lenovo, Dell, Acer, and Asus. Prices will start at $299, a far cry from the $500-and-up tags on other VR headsets. ...Read more...

When it comes to datacenters, not all storage is created equal. Datacenters move more data around in an hour than most of us will in a lifetime, and they need storage that can handle that. SSDs are already in wide use in datacenters, but the M.2 form factor isn't widely adopted yet. Intel wants to help with that, and it's giving businesses an M.2 option in the form of the P3100 NVMe SSD, which it calls the first M.2 SSD designed with datacenter use in mind. ...Read more...

Part and parcel of the Surface brand is the hip, urban styling that comes with the devices. Something like an old Model M would look positively gauche underneath a gorgeous machine like the newly-announced Surface Studio. Fans of ergonomic keyboards usually don't get a lot of choice when it comes to style, but Microsoft's new Surface Ergonomic Keyboard lets typists have the best of both worlds. ...Read more...

The refreshed Surface Book i7 wasn't the only sleek, high-end system Microsoft trotted out at the company's Windows event this morning. The company unveiled its first desktop all-in-one system, the Surface Studio. The Studio appears to tweak the form factor of Apple's iMac and add extensive touchscreen input, much like the Surface Book does versus the MacBook Pro....Read more...

Microsoft has refreshed part of its Surface Book lineup. The company announced the Surface Book i7, an updated model packing new graphics hardware and Intel Core i7 CPUs. The device's internals have been reorganized for better thermal performance, and to open up room for a second fan and additional battery capacity. Microsoft claims battery life is up 30% compared to the original i7 Surface Books. This improvement translates to a stated 16 hours of battery life on a single charge. ...Read more...

Folks looking for a minimalist mechanical gaming keyboard are spoilt for choice lately. Hot on the heels of the HyperX Alloy, G.Skill has announced the Ripjaws KM570 MX. Unlike the Ripjaws KM780R we reviewed that was packed to the brim with features, the KM570 MX skips the showy extras for a basic design using Cherry MX switches in a more-or-less standard layout. ...Read more...

Intel and Micron have been generating buzz for 3D XPoint, their upcoming non-volatile memory product. Rumors have been swirling about when this technology will be hitting the market. The latest rumor suggets we'll see 3D XPoint powering Optane memory modules before the end of the year. Other implementations of 3D XPoint appear to be delayed, however. In a recent earnings call, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the new memory won't be a part of its next server platform.In the call, Krzanich says that Intel has been sampling a variety of server products to some of its "leading edge customers." In addition to talking about 3D XPoint, Krzanich mentions omni-path fabric and ...Read more...

Performance results for Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti hit the wires today, but we didn't manage to get our hands on either of those cards before the embargo lifted. Happily, EVGA surprised us with a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti this evening. The company sent along one of its GTX 1050 Ti Superclocked cards for us to put through its paces, and we'll be getting it in our test rig ASAP. ...Read more...

Apple closed out its fiscal 2016 today with fourth-quarter revenue of $46.9 billion, down from $51.5 billion a year ago, and net income of $9 billion, down from $11.1 billion. The company's gross margin fell to 38% from 39.9% a year ago. The company made 62% of its revenue from international sales.iPhone sales are where Apple makes most of its bacon, and the company took in $28.2 billion from 45.5 million iPhone sales. Those numbers are down from last year's 48 million units and $32.2 billion in revenue—a five-percent decline in ...Read more...

Apple is holding an event this Thursday, presumably to introduce a new line of Macs, but the eagle-eyed folks over at MacRumors have seemingly spoiled some of that upcoming keynote's magic. The site found images of a new MacBook Pro lurking in the macOS Sierra 10.12.1 update that was issued yesterday. Have a look at one of those leaked shots:

Eizo's new 27" FlexScan EV2780 is the company's first monitor with a USB Type-C port. That Type-C port allows for transmitting video, audio, USB, and power over a single cable. This ought to make the monitor a good choice for laptop users wanting a single-cable connection to a docking station. The Type-C connector can also provide up to 30W to power and charge an attached device. Owners of machines with traditional DisplayPort or HDMI outputs need not worry—the EV2780 has an input for each of those, as well. ...Read more...

Eizo's new 27" FlexScan EV7280 is the company's first monitor with a USB Type-C port. That Type-C port allows for transmitting video, audio, USB, and power over a single cable. This ought to make the monitor a good choice for laptop users wanting a single-cable connection to a docking station. The Type-C connector can also provide up to 30W to power and charge an attached device. Owners of machines with traditional DisplayPort or HDMI outputs need not worry—the EV7280 has an input for each of those, as well. ...Read more...

Narrow-bezel design is all the rage in PC monitors right now, but the idea is more than just fashionable in the context of a smartphone. Less bezel means more screen in the same-size phone, and Xiaomi apparently agrees. Its new Mi Mix "concept phone" uses a 6.4" IPS display that the company calls "edgeless." While that's obviously not quite true, the 91.3% screen-to-body ratio is the best we've seen. ...Read more...

The name of Zotac's new card can almost stand in as the news' the lede: GeForce GTX 1080 ArcticStorm Thermaltake 10 Year Anniversary Edition. The company is celebrating its tenth anniversary by releasing a top-of-the-line GTX 1080 with a full-coverage water block from Thermaltake. While those two companies are known for flashy colors and flamboyant styling, this card has a subtle shades-of-gray aesthetic. The card's name may be long-winded, but the card itself is liquid-cooled and has no fans of its own. ...Read more...

When Zotac initially unveiled the Magnus EN10 series a few months ago, we were surprised to find that there wasn't one equipped with a full-fat GP104 GPU. As it happens, Zotac just wasn't ready to show it yet. At its 10th-anniversary event today in Hong Kong, Zotac announced the Magnus EN1080 mini-PC. Predictably, this micro-machine comes with a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics chip inside. ...Read more...

The cloud is great, but it's not always there—especially when we're moving around with our devices in tow. Sometimes we need sheer capacity, and Seagate aims to help us out with two new drives designed to push the boundaries of mobile storage. The Seagate 5TB BarraCuda and 2TB FireCuda drives are available now, after being introduced earlier this month. ...Read more...

Most gerbils are familiar with the Rambus name from the ill-fated RDRAM popular back in the Pentium 4 days. Although the company appeared to vanish from the consumer space, it continued on to offer its services to high-flying customers like Boeing. One of Rambus' products series is called DPA Countermeasures (standing for Differential Power Analysis), a suite of side-channel attack prevention solutions. Now, Nvidia has licensed that technology for its own wares.Nvidia didn't specify what it's using Rambus' DPA for, but the press release mentions "artificial intelligence, autonomous cars, virtual reality and professional visualization." ...Read more...

One of the promised benefits of the second 12-megapixel camera Apple saw fit to add to the iPhone 7 Plus was a "portrait mode" that could simulate the "bokeh," or background blur, characteristic of high-end cameras with large sensors. The iOS 10.1 update takes the portrait mode feature from keynote slides to customer handsets, at least in beta form. Apple says the iPhone 7 Plus uses the pair of 12-megapixel cameras in conjunction with "advanced machine learning" to apply the depth-of-field effect. ...Read more...

Particularly attentive gerbils may recall that when we last looked at AMD's PRO APUs, the company had announced the chips would be inside machines from HP and Lenovo. At that time, we look at a few HP boxes packing the new APUs. Now, AMD is showing Lenovo's hand. The ThinkCentre M715 Tiny, ThinkPad E475, and ThinkPad E575 will all make use of AMD's seventh-generation business-oriented PRO chips. ...Read more...

The vendors often spotted in The Tech Report's system guides are busy announcing GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti cards based on the latest iteration of the Pascal GPU. Biostar may be a little late to that party, since TechPowerUp says the company is only now lifting its curtains on a couple versions of the GTX 1060. The new cards are available as a 6GB variant packing GPUs with the full complement of 1280 stream processors, or as a 3GB version whose GPU offers 1152 SPs. ...Read more...

If you're like me, you prize your keyboard's numeric keypad and use it daily. Still, nobody likes to give up a bunch of desk space to an oversized keyboard. HyperX's new Alloy "FPS Gaming" keyboard attempts to satisfy both of these requirements. The company says that the Alloy's almost-borderless design gives FPS gamers more room for mousing. HyperX's cut-down design is also blissfully free of cladding or other gaudy "gaming" features that we usually dread from gamer-branded gear. ...Read more...

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards don't start hitting store shelves until next Tuesday, but it seems AMD is already girding itself for a battle over budget and mainstream graphics superiority. In an email it sent out this afternoon, the company reiterated some of the benefits of its Radeon RX 460 and Radeon RX 470 cards, including FreeSync support and DirectX 12 performance. We've already painted an independent picture of how those cards perform in our reviews, and their performance will soon be available at a lower price: $99 and up for Radeon RX 460s, and $169 and up for Radeon RX 470s. Those new prices kick in this Sunday, October 23. ...Read more...

Chinese tech sites are reporting on a new variant of the Radeon RX 470 called the RX 470D. This model is based on a further-cut-down version of the Polaris 10 GPU with 1792 stream processors. AMD pairs 4GB of GDDR5 memory with this chip, just like it does on the normal RX 470. If the reasonably-reputable rumor-site Videocardz is to be believed, the new model will probably be released in China only.Leakers have passed Videocardz some benchmarks for the new card, too. If they're valid, the 3DMark scores the site received place the RX 470D's performance ahead of the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and behind the standard RX 470. Of course, the standard disclaimer regarding 3DMark scores applies—these indices offer only a rough idea ...Read more...

Reports are going around of late that the 32GB iPhone 7 has demonstrably slower write performance than its larger siblings. Under the provocative title "iPhone 7 - What Apple Doesn't Want You To Know," YouTuber Unbox Therapy has shown that the 32GB version of the phone has much slower write performance than the 128GB version. He concludes that Apple "probably went a little bit chintzier on the lower-capacity models in terms of the quality or caliber" of the devices' storage, leading to the performance difference....Read more...

Countless words have coalesced into reviews of Apple's iPhone 7 and 7 Plus smartphones, lauding their improved cameras, faster SoCs, and newfound ability to withstand a splash of water—all while lamenting the absence of the headphone jack. Something that's missing from most of those reports is test data regarding the capabilities of the handset's 4G modem. The RF performance analysts over at Cellular Insights have taken up the slack, and their findings are interesting. ...Read more...

Happy Friday, gerbils. We had a dearth of cheap SSDs in last week's deals, but the component market has returned to form today. Here's what we think are this week's best bets for hardware deals.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...

Nvidia's GeForce 375.57 drivers are WHQL-certified and up for download on GeForce.com. The new driver is "Game Ready" for Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, and Civilization VI. Nvidia has also made special refinements for the VR titles Eagle Flight and Serious Sam: The Last Hope.Besides those game-specific optimizations, the new drivers add an SLI profile for Lineage Eternal: Twilight Resistance , and 3D Vision profiles for Civilization VI ...Read more...

Right along with the Enthoo Pro M and Enthoo Luxe from yesterday, Phanteks is now offering a tempered-glass option for the ATX mid-tower Eclipse P400 chassis. The Eclipse series is Phanteks' budget case line, although it only encompasses one case so far. ...Read more...

The next couple weeks of gaming are packed with a Great War, a bunch of Titans, and the rise and fall of entire civilizations. Battlefield 1, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, and Titanfall 2 are hitting gamers' PCs everywhere. AMD has new Radeon Crimson 16.10.2 drivers out that add support for all these new games, in addition to fixing a few bugs. ...Read more...

AMD posted a remarkable increase in revenue for its fiscal third quarter of 2016. The company took in $1.3 billion, up 23% year-on-year, thanks to "record" sales in its semi-custom SoC business and improved sales figures in its GPU and mobile APU businesses.However, that cash inflow wasn't enough to offset losses from the $340 million one-time charge the company recorded earlier this year as part of a revision to its wafer supply agreement with ...Read more...

A short while ago at its "Unveil the Shadow" event in Berlin, Razer unveiled the "Shadow," which turned out to be the Blade Pro. The new machine is a 17.3" laptop that stuffs a Core i7-6700HQ, RAID-ed PCIe SSDs, and a desktop GeForce GTX 1080 into a package less than an inch thick. ...Read more...

Nvidia loyalists may be despondent about the limited selection of monitors with Nvidia's G-Sync adaptive refresh technology compared to the seemingly geometrically-increasing number screens with the red team's competing FreeSync. Those folks can take some solace in Acer's release of the 24" Predator XB241YU 2560x1440 monitor. ...Read more...

AMD board partner PowerColor has announced the Devil Box external graphics card enclosure, based on AMD's XConnect technology. The Devil Box is a Thunderbolt 3 external graphics solution compatible with "qualified" AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. Owners of laptops and ultra-small-form-factor machines like Intel's Skull Canyon NUC can connect full-fat desktop graphics cards to their systems on the fly for enhanced performance in games and GPU-accelerated computation. ...Read more...

With high-resolution screens, 4K video, and VR applications becoming more popular—or at least on the horizon—Samsung sees a need to increase the speed and capacity of the memory available to smartphone and tablet manufacturers. Today, the company introduced an 8GB mobile DRAM package powered by four of its new 16Gb LPDDR4 chips. Manufactured on Samsung's 10-nm process, these chips have a higher capacity than the company's 20-nm chips while purportedly consuming a similar amount of power. ...Read more...

Nintendo has released the first teaser video for its next game console, the Switch. The three-minute clip makes it clear that a return of cartridges and an attempt to blur the distinction between home and portable gaming will indeed be elements of the company's latest system, as the rumor mill suggested....Read more...

We weren't sure what to think of Doom as previews rolled out and the game approached release. As it turned out, the reboot completely understood its source material, making for a fast and fun single-player campaign. Since then, the team at id Software has continued to support the game, adding support for Vulkan and a fan-requested deathmatch mode. That support continues this week with the release of the Free Update 4, which packs a new Arcade Mode and lots of other goodies....Read more...

Researchers at Microsoft have built a pair of experimental methods of haptic feedback for virtual reality controllers. The researchers' NormalTouch and TextureTouch are novel ways of allowing users to experience the sense of touch in a more satisfying manner than video game-style rumble feedback....Read more...

Back in April, Phanteks released a version of its Enthoo Evolv case with tempered-glass side panels. That case was apparently a popular choice, as the company is now adding tempered-glass side panels to two other models in its lineup. Enter the Enthoo Luxe Tempered Glass and Enthoo Pro M Tempered Glass.Unlike the Evolv—which got a pair of glass panels—both of the cases Phanteks is releasing have a single sheet of tempered glass for the left-side panel. The new versions look to be unchanged from ...Read more...

Netgear is stomping all over Linksys' latest MU-MIMO dual-band WRT3200ACM wireless router with its new tri-band Nighthawk X10 AD7200 device. The X10 is Netgear's first 802.11ad device, and offers support for the 60 GHz wireless band, a 1.7 GHz quad-core CPU, and an SFP+ port for a NAS or any other high-bandwidth device. Support for Plex Media Server is the software cherry on top of this hardware sundae. ...Read more...

Just when you think a scandal can't get worse and that all the sordid details have surfaced, something new comes to light. Samsung's ongoing problems with the discontinued Galaxy Note 7 is the story that won't go away. The New York Times reports that Samsung employees offered a new phone and cash to a Chinese man who filmed his new Note 7 catching on fire, on the condition that he would not publicly release the video.According to the Times, a man named Zhang Sitong bought a Note 7 in Tianjin after being assured by Samsung that the phones being sold in China did not suffer from the same hardware problem that triggered the ...Read more...

Not to be out-done by its competitors, Asus is piling on the puny Pascals. The Geforce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti each get four models branded Dual, Phoenix, Expedition, and of course ROG Strix. Aside from the cooler that Asus straps to them, the cards in the first three series are identical. The ROG Strix version has a few extra tricks up its sleeve. ...Read more...