Techreport

The passing of each year implies the release of a new iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. However, Apple is much slower about updating its core computing devices. The MacBook Pro has been subject to a few hardware refreshes in the last few years, but it hasn't seen a major overhaul since 2012. That's all set to change in just over a week at Apple's October 27 event, says Recode. Apple is expected to release a new MacBook Pro, along with updates to its Macbook Air and iMac lines, and a new 5K monitor. ...Read more...

Intel wiped away any bad feelings from its bumpy second quarter yesterday with what it describes as record revenues and strong profitability. For the third quarter of 2016, the company took in $15.8 billion in revenue, a nine-percent year-on-year increase, and made $4.5 billion in operating income, up six percent from this time last year.While CEO Brian Krzanich touted the company's continuing metamorphosis into a cloud-computing and Internet of Things company, Intel's traditional businesses also turned in strong results. The Client Computing Group took in $8.9 billion in revenue, up five ...Read more...

If I had a dime for every GTX 1050 card that I scrutinized today, we wouldn't be here having this conversation. Alas, we must make do with what we have: MSI GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti graphics cards, most dressed in black, some with red accents. MSI has a total of ten cards on offer with GPU overclocks ranging from mild to strong.

Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti graphics cards are getting a lot of attention here at The Tech Report today. Gigabyte is launching a whole fleet of cards based on the new GP107 GPUs. ...Read more...

Everyone likes to salivate over the latest high-end monitors with top-dollar features and matching pricetags, but we reckon most gerbils are running something a little more basic. Something like Asus' new VG245H "Console Gaming monitor." This 24" FreeSync display uses a TN panel with 1920x1080 resolution and a stated 1ms response time. Asus talks up the new display's low-input-lag design, calling it "GameFast Input Technology." The company doesn't explain what GameFast is, but DisplayLag tested the monitor and found it has around 10ms of input lag, which is pretty good. ...Read more...

Most of us know THX for that tone that plays before some movies—that deep, body-shaking sound that tells you a theater has THX-certified audio. The frequency with which we see that logo has tapered off in the last few years, but the company is still around and it's now a part of gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer. THX was founded by Star Wars director George Lucas in 1983 and the iconic THX Deep Note first appeared before Return of the Jedi....Read more...

I love the smell of fresh graphics cards in the morning. Gerbils around the world have surely noticed by now that the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti have been announced. That should come as little suprise, given that that info the rumor mill provided about these cards mostly came true. EVGA has just announced its complete lineup of GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti cards. As usual, the company has a card for every taste and price point.

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon X50, which the company claims is the industry's first commercially-available 5G modem. The package is targeted at handset manufacturers and mobile bandwidth network operators, who can all use the X50 for testing as they roll out their next-generation mobile broadband networks.The Snapdragon X50 modem operates in 5G's 28 GHz band in the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum, and supports beamforming and beam-tracking MIMO antenna technology. Qualcomm says the X50's maximum theoretical download speed can hit 5 Gbps. The X50 only ...Read more...

The GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti cards were just announced, and every manufacturer is getting in on the fun. Zotac is the first out of the gate with its GTX 1050s. The company tells us that it's launching three graphics cards based on the GP107 GPU: the simply-named Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti, and an OC Edition of the 1050 Ti. ...Read more...

If the rumor mill is to be believed, we know just about everything about the technically-unannounced GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti. We have a rumored release date of mid-to-late October. There are even plausible benchmarks floating around that put the 1050 Ti on par with Nvidia's GTX 960 and ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 460. There's corroboration of those results coming from ChipHell, too. Thanks to Videocardz, we also have an unconfirmed-but-believable price tag reportedly originating from a leaked slide. The slide shows the GTX 1050 costing $109, while its big brother gets a price tag of $139. ...Read more...

Samsung is on a product-release tear lately. Not content with gracing the eyes of gamers everywhere with quantum-dot-infused monitors, the electronics giant has used a little Touch of Midas on its Galaxy TabPro S. This new Gold Edition comes dressed in a golden finish, to nobody's surprise. ...Read more...

Cloud infrastructures require hardware. The buck can only be passed so far before someone has to own and maintain a server. Google Cloud has announced its plans for the Zaius P9, an Open Compute Project server based on IBM's POWER9 CPU. The server design is chock-full of next-generation buzzwords like PCIe 4.0, OpenCAPI, 48V-POL, and 48v OpenRack 2.0.The Zaius P9 server design sports a pair of IBM POWER9 CPUs and DDR4 memory. Google says the design draws on its ...Read more...

Half a year ago, Samsung announced that it was fabricating DRAM on a "10-nm class" process. Now, the company is announcing that it's fabricating microprocessors with 10-nm feature size—unspecified SoCs, more specifically. The company skips the vague "class" descriptor this time around, and says that it is using a new 10-nm FinFET process called 10LPE. This move is in contrast with GloFo's decision to skip 10nm and go straight to 7-nm manufacturing.LPE, to delve into jargon for a moment, stands for Low-Power Early. Chipmakers usually use the term to describe a fabrication process that sacrifices some efficiency in exchange for a rapid ...Read more...

Rumor mill Benchlife.info claims to have new information about the first round of 3D XPoint "Optane" storage products for the consumer and enthusiast space. According to Benchlife's source, Intel will roll out its Optane Memory 8000p series devices in 16GB and 32GB capacities. Optane is not intended to be primary storage—Intel presents their NAND flash alternative as a sort of intermediary between system memory and storage.As is the case with flash memory, the higher capacity model offers additional performance, as shown in the table below. Read performance is five to 10% faster on the larger model, and write performance ...Read more...

Folks who are into high-performance gaming monitors are always looking for the holy grail—that perfect combination of clear motion, bright colors, high resolution, and a high refresh rate. Well, how about three out of four? Samsung is announcing the global launch of the CFG70 curved gaming monitor series, comprising two models called C24FG70 and C27FG70. The CFG70s tick a lot of boxes on gamers' wishlists: high contrast, a 144 Hz refresh rate, AMD FreeSync support, and a low-persistence strobe mode, among others....Read more...

Looking at the Sky MX5 R2, one has to wonder if the designers at Eurocom understands what "laptop" means to most people. They're definitely stretching the definition. The company released the original Sky MX5 last fall with a Nvidia GTX 970M card and Intel's Core i7-6700HQ CPU on board. This revision adds Nvidia's 10-series graphics cards to keep the lineup fresh. ...Read more...

Microsoft might be getting ready to drop Kaby Lake CPUs into its Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 devices, if a change to Amazon's listings is anything to go on. The company has an event set for October 26, where experts are expecting it to show off a Surface-branded All-In-One system alongside some news on where Windows 10 is headed. Windows Central spotted a change on Amazon that shows all listings for the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 now tagged with "(OLD VERSION)," and we wouldn't be surprised to see a refresh announced at the event. ...Read more...

Do you visit The Tech Report every day looking for the latest news on input devices, but consistently leave disappointed by the focus on mechanical keyboards and mice with Omron switches designed for audible feedback? Today is your lucky day, because Logitech has launched the M220 Silent mouse just for someone like you. Logitech says the M220 Silent has switches with special sauce to deliver the same tactile feedback of a normal mouse button but with 90% less audio output. The manufacturer also claims the feet are made of "high performance" material that contribute to a diminished sonic signature. ...Read more...

Back at Computex, Aerocool's Dream Box got all the attention, but the company had another project on display there too. Sorry, that's "Project", as in "Project 7," Aerocool's new PC component sub-brand. Today Aerocool is releasing the first product from the Project 7, a steel mid-tower ATX case known as the P7-C1, standing for "Project 7 Chassis 1." ...Read more...

Happy day, gerbils! It's sunny and warm out there, and today there's no shortage of hardware deals to be found. For the first time in forever, we have many items on offer, and not a single one is a discounted SSD. I believe we had your curiosity, and now we have your attention. Let us proceed.That's all for today, folks. If you spotted a deal we missed, ...Read more...

The AMD rumor mill never stops churning. The latest rumors from WCCFTech piggy-back speculation on the back of the late-September release of Radeon embedded graphics cards in order to postulate a desktop Polaris refresh. The new theoretical cards would be labeled Radeon RX 465, 475, and 485 and offer lower TDPs compared to current-gen models. Grab a shovel and get started on that salt pile over there. ...Read more...

Yesterday marked the release of the ultra-violent FPS Shadow Warrior 2. The game itself is apparently fantastic, judging by its 95% positive rating on Steam—but that should be no surprise to players of the previous release in the series. Besides being an excellent game in its own right, the oft-overlooked 2013 Shadow Warrior was a visual spectacle that competed with any of its contemporaries. Shadow Warrior 2 continues that tradition, and is the first released non-VR PC game to support both HDR output and Nvidia's "Multi-Res Shading."...Read more...

Samsung officially killed off the dangerously explosive Note 7 smartphone earlier this week, and mobile carriers have asked users to return the devices as soon as possible, whether they're faulty or not. Now, Samsung is offering up a big credit to anyone who still has one, in hopes of quickly getting every Note 7 off the market. Whether you're willing to buy another Samsung phone or not, you can look forward to getting a little something, though the company has a bigger bonus in store for those staying in-house. ...Read more...

Most first-tier graphics card manufacturers these days have liquid-cooled versions of their top-end cards. MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus all offer GTX 1080 cards with an AIO liquid cooler strapped around them. Gigabyte is now trying a different tack: a GTX 1080 that comes from the factory with a waterblock installed, ready to be slipped into existing liquid-cooling loops. Say hi to the "GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming Waterforce WB 8G," not to be confused with its "WB"-less cousin. ...Read more...

Way back when the 2.4GHz band was still somewhat useful, Linksys' WRT54G and WRT54GL were the enthusiast's choice in routers. Linksys is hoping to restart the love affair with the WRT3200ACM. All of those digits provide clues about the router's key features: compatibility with the open-source DD-WRT and OpenWRT firmware and maximum combined Wi-Fi throughput of 3.2 Gbps via 802.11ac Wi-Fi with MU-MIMO support. The cherry on top of this technological sundae is a feature Linksys calls "Tri-Stream 160." ...Read more...

Thermaltake's new Black FP mouse offers lazy and the paranoid gamers a new way to log into their PC. The Black FP mouse adds a FIDO UAF-certified fingerprint sensor to an otherwise conventional gaming mouse. ...Read more...

Yes, you read that headline correctly. The ROG blog is teasing the PG248Q, an upcoming 24.5" monitor in the Swift series with a staggering 240-Hz refresh rate. That refresh rate isn't achieved through overclocking; it's a native, standard refresh rate for this 1920x1080 display. ...Read more...

The Steam Controller is one of the topics of discussion at Valve's SteamDevDays developer conference in Seattle this week. Jeff Bellinghausen from the Steam Controller team at Valve delivered a presentation on the Steam Controller, including information on upcoming support for the Sony's PlayStation 4 DualShock 4 controller. Gamasutra has a transcript of the presentation here. ...Read more...

Time was when back-to-school computer promotions were a major sales driver for the PC industry. Unfortunately, those hoping to see computer sales start to grow again this fall are leaving the back-to-school season disappointed. Preliminary numbers from Gartner indicate that worldwide shipments of PCs declined 5.7% compared to the same quarter of last year. Shipments have now declined for eight consecutive quarters, the longest such stretch in the PC industry's history.Gartner offers two reasons as to why this decline is continuing. The first is that consumers are waiting longer to upgrade their PCs. Consumers in mature markets indicate in Gartner's surveys that they use and own at least three devices, and that ...Read more...

Shortly after Intel started bringing NUC PCs to market, MSI jumped in with its Cubi mini-PCs. Now, MSI has a hardware refresh on the way, bringing Intel's Kaby Lake processors into these little boxes. ...Read more...

All-in-one liquid coolers for CPU thermal management have exploded in popularity over the last few years. Alphacool is now touting their Eiswolf series AIOs as the world's first expandable AIO liquid coolers for graphics cards. ...Read more...

Longtime case manufacturer Antec has release the GX330 chassis, and update to its entry-level GX300 case. The GX330 is a mid-tower case with room for motherboards as large as E-ATX and a 360-mm radiator on the front panel. The rear end of the case can take a 120-mm raditator or a plain ol' fan. Antec includes two LED-lit 120-mm spinners in the box. ...Read more...

Small-form-factor PC builders with an eye for color coordination can rejoice. The inexplicably-named Steelwing microATX chassis from Enermax increases the number of choices aluminum-and-tempered-glass fetishists can select from when building a compact gaming rig. Steelwing takes flight in two color combinations: black with red anodized accents or silver with green trim. The accent color is mirrored in the LED-illuminated 120-mm fan installed in the front of the case. ...Read more...

Asus spinoff ASRock has followed its progenitor company in releasing BIOS updates adding support for the upcoming Kaby Lake CPUs. Firmware updates for 21 of ASRock's existing Intel 100-series LGA 1151 motherboards add support for what the company dubs "Next Generation" Intel Core processors. ...Read more...

Gerbils, it's October, and you know what that means: time to get the Christmas decorations out. At least, that's how marketing executives seem to think. HP's getting out ahead of the trend and releasing the first part of its holiday portfolio now. The company has an updated Spectre x360, a refreshed Envy laptop, and an all-new Envy 27 all-in-one leading the charge. ...Read more...

Get your arrows out and your knees ready! It's almost time to go on another adventure in the region of Skyrim. The release of Skyrim Special Edition is just a few weeks away, and Bethesda Softworks has revealed game's minimum and recommended requirements. The Skyrim Special Edition overhaul brings with it remastered art and effects, volumetric lighting, screen-space reflections, and new snow and water shaders. All this makes it sound like more than a simple tweak to the original's textures, but we'll have to see it in action to know for sure. ...Read more...

AMD, Lenovo, IBM, and a host of other big names in computing have joined together to form the Gen-Z Consortium. The group is working together to create an "open systems interconnect" known as Gen-Z that aims to bridge the gap between memory and storage. Specifically, Gen-Z is a "fabric protocol" that allows systems to abstract all types of memory and storage, both local and networked, as Gen-Z devices.Essentially, the idea is to allow software to access any type of storage as memory using low-latency, high-efficiency operations. To that end, the new protocol is "memory-semantic." That means that all operations are ...Read more...

Google turned a few heads recently with its new Pixel and Pixel XL phones, the successors to its Nexus line of in-house devices. The phones' availability is currently limited, so people have been paying a little more attention to Google's Project Fi cellular service, which is one of the few places where one can pre-order a Pixel. To turn that interest into a sale or two, Google added group plans to Project Fi recently. It's also deeply discounted Nexus phones bought with the service.The basics of Project Fi remain the same. With Project Fi's contract-free service , phones attempt to use Wi-Fi for as much communication as possible, using free, Google-vetted Wi-Fi hotspots when they're available. Sprint or T-Mobile cellular ...Read more...

When Google showed off Android 7.1 Nougat and the new Pixel phones at the company's hardware event last week, the search giant said that Nexus devices would receive an update to 7.1 sometime later in 2016. Dave Burke, the VP of Engineering for Android, announced today via blog post that a preview version of the point release will be released for the Nexus 5X, 6P and Pixel C later in October. The final version of 7.1 will be released in December. Owners of Nexus phones older than the Nexus 6 should not plan on receiving any officially-sanctioned update to Android 7.1. ...Read more...

The state of Internet service in the United States is a bit of a mess. Unless you're a lucky soul in a Google Fiber neighborhood or a city with a municipal broadband provider, truly high-speed internet access can be hard to get. Even if one does luck out in an area where a high-speed connection is available, service providers can impose onerous restrictions on what customers can do with those tubes.One such restriction is the dreaded usage cap, the dubious technical merits of which the industry freely admits . Exceed some pre-defined amount of data transfer in ...Read more...

Samsung may have its hands full with Note7 fires and washing machines that might spin until they explode, but some things are still going according to plan for the Korean electronics giant. The company's mobile chip division continues to churn out compelling products. The Exynos 7 Dual 7270 system-on-a-chip is what the company calls the first application processor (AP) built on a 14-nm process, and also the first AP with an integrated LTE modem. ...Read more...

It's pretty hard to read the news these days without hearing about drones. However, most of the news are about amateur-level drones, or commercial offerings for relatively simple tasks. Intel's latest effort aims to fly a little higher than that, though. Meet the Intel Falcon 8+ System UAV, a V-shaped octocopter packed with redundant systems, announced today at the Intergeo conference in Hamburg. ...Read more...

Mammoth hard drive manufacturer Western Digital is once again selling solid-state disks under its own name. This news comes a scant five months after the company completed its acquisition of SanDisk, a name so universally associated with flash memory that some people think SD stands for SanDisk. WD's new SSDs are named the same way as its entry-level hard drives, with two lineups called simply Green and Blue. ...Read more...

Just one day after Samsung temporarily halted production of the maligned Galaxy Note7 smartphone, reports from numerous outlets say the company will scrap the Note7 entirely. Some news outlets are reporting that the black cloud surrounding the Note7 has led Samsung to consider ending the whole Galaxy Note series. ...Read more...

Sometime in the last few years, all the big hardware and data companies out there must've had a secret meeting, because it seems like everyone wants to put a light-up cylinder in our homes. Companies like Amazon and Google have simple assistants like Alexa and Google Home in small devices. Apple's Mac Pro and HP's Pavillion Wave pack full computers into cylinders. Even smaller vendors like MSI has joined the fray with its Vortex. Now, Samsung is getting into the cylinder game with the ArtPC Pulse, a subwoofer and bug-zapper lookalike intended to meet all your modern computing needs. ...Read more...

Microsoft's Paint accessory app, included with Windows in one form or another since the very beginning, is finally getting a huge revamp. The application got a rework in Windows 8, but nothing like what the company has in store now. In addition to becoming a Universal Windows app, the new Paint is tuned for pen and tablet input, and supports object creation and painting in 3D....Read more...

Content creators and other users longing for more LAN bandwidth than the long-in-the-tooth Gigabit Ethernet standard has to offer can look towards the XG-U2008 hybrid 10GbE switch from Asus for some reprieve. The new switch combines a pair of 10GbE ports with eight GigE ports to allow up to ten times the bandwidth of a Gigabit Ethernet connection for a couple of machines—all without the dizzying $700+ price tag of an eight-port 10GbE switch. Instead, the XG-2008U is available from Newegg today for $250. ...Read more...

This past Friday, Microsoft's official Windows blog detailed the updates coming in Windows 10 build 14942. The biggest changes will please power users and system administrators immensely. Front and center, the Windows Registry Editor is finally getting an address bar. Folks keen on hand-editing their registry will be able to copy-and-paste or manually type their way to locations in the registry. It's mind-boggling to imagine that Microsoft hasn't implemented this feature in the 23 years since the launch of Windows NT, but better late than never, we suppose. ...Read more...

Intel subsidiary Altera has launched the Stratix 10 field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The Stratix 10 comprises 5.5 million logic elements, HBM2 memory, and a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor. Those components are joined together using what Altera dubs Heterogeneous 3D System-in-Package (SiP) integration. The upshot of this stack of acronyms is up to 10 TFLOPS of single-precision output and 10 Tbps of local memory bandwidth to go along with up to 30 Gbps of chip-to-chip capacity. ...Read more...