The Tech Report

Most folks don't buy a lot of graphics cards, and if you're anything like me, it's likely that your last graphics purchase was based less on brand and more on price. Still, there's a fair few folks here at TR that like EVGA, and we reckon there's a goodly number of gerbils who feel the same way. If you purchased an EVGA GeForce card from the 700 or 900 series, the company may have a new offer for you. ...Read more...

TV and movie streaming services are pretty awesome. Personally, I've been enjoying streaming the last couple weeks of the Women's World Cup via FuboTV. Since I cut the cord a while back, I wouldn't be able to watch these games without the ability to stream them, especially not the less popular early stages of the competitions. Once the World Cup is over, though, my "subscription" will be too.As nice as streaming can be, it's not particularly insightful to observe that it's also a bit of a mess—one that's only getting worse. Everyone in the game wants the proverbial theirs. This notion has led to a lot of nifty original programming in the form of exclusive shows and movies. Unfortunately ...Read more...

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These guys know what's up.

Even though my own system is housed in a girthy Define R6, I love little PCs, and so it goes that I have a big soft spot for the components that go in them. Components like MSI's latest GeForce GTX 1650 cards, the lovingly-titled GeForce GTX 1650 4GT LP and its "OC" variation. Check out this little low-profile pixel-pusher: ...Read more...

While many companies have taken a run at making a better single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi family of devices reigns supreme among enthusiastic SBC hobbyists. Today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the successor to its successful Raspberry Pi 3 line: the Raspberry Pi 4. This new model packs some big performance boosts and plenty of other new features onto a tiny motherboard.The Pi 4 boasts a Broadcom BC2711 SoC, which includes four ARM Cortex A72 cores running at a maximum speed of 1.5 GHz. Those Cortex A72 cores feature much-improved single-core performance over the A53 cores found in the previous-fastest Pi, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ ...Read more...

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Scott was right. Beat Saber is awesome. My story starts last year at the TR BBQ. It was the Friday night before the BBQ and the early gerbils had gathered for the traditional pre-BBQ pizza dinner. Scott was frenziedly detailing mechanical keyboard switch lubrication philosophies, but at some point during his gesticulated raving he passed along a recommendation: "You should really try Beat Saber, it's awesome." The timing wasn't ideal; I had just moved my PC into our basement, postponing the use of VR in our household until it emptied out a bit.Fast forward almost exactly one year. Our youngest had doubled in age and something resembling normality appeared to be within our reach. Time exists again. We decided to have some friends, who would definitely appreciate the Vive being up and running, over. So, with the space already cleared, I took about 20 minutes and set ...Read more...

Do you smell something burning? If you own a 15" MacBook Pro, it might be your computer. Apple has voluntarily issued a recall for a "limited number" of its Haswell-based portable computers in order to replace batteries that may overheat and become a safety risk.

Intel's Xe discrete graphics parts aren't launching until next year, but Intel still has a ton of graphics processors out in the wild, and they need drivers. That's right: this is another graphics driver news post. Today's new release is Intel Graphics Driver for Windows 10 version 26.20.100.6912.

Have you ever built a small-form-factor PC, reader? One of the major constraining factors for chassis dimensions is the relatively-enormous ATX power supply. There are smaller form factors, sure, but it can be hard to find good-quality SFX or TFX power supplies with sufficient power for an enthusiast (read: gaming) PC. Fortunately, times are changing, and I present exhibit A for my argument: FSP Group's new Dagger Pro 550W and 650W SFX power supplies.

I love a root beer float. Hard cider and sherbet is great. Blue Moon, Sprite, and pineapple juice—also awesome.

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Amidst all the fuss of trade shows and new product launches, it's easy to forget that day-to-day life must proceed. Part of that eventuality in the PC hardware world is the continual march of graphics card driver updates. So saying, AMD released Radeon Software version 19.6.2 yesterday, adding support for some important Vulkan extensions and patching up a few problems. ...Read more...

How short is the supply of Intel CPUs? Are supplies constrained enough to turn even part of its processor production over to another foundry? If a report from SE Daily is accurate, the answer to that question is yes. Intel may be contracting Samsung to produce some CPUs on the Korean chip giant's 14-nanometer process.None of the TR staff can read Korean, and the Google Translation of the article is rough, to say the least. However, what seems clear from the report is that Samsung will produce CPUs with the codename "Rocket Lake" for Intel starting sometime ...Read more...

How short is the supply of Intel CPUs? Are supplies constrained enough to turn even part of its processor production over to another foundry? If a report from SE Daily is accurate, the answer to that question is yes. Intel may be contracting Samsung to produce some CPUs on the Korean chip giant's 14-nanometer process.None of the TR staff can read Korean, and the Google Translation of the article is rough, to say the least. However, what seems clear from the report is that Samsung will produce CPUs with the codename "Rocket Lake" for Intel starting sometime ...Read more...

I've never been happier with a photo pairing.

Analogue's Mega Sg remains one of the more interesting niche products we've reviewed in the last little while, but one thing it couldn't do was play Sega CD games on its own. As we mentioned in the Mega Sg review, this hardware is all pushing 30 years old, and failures are bound to happen. What's a lag snob retro purist to do? Today on its live YouTube stream, Terraonion announced one possible answer: the MegaSD, an FGPA-based cartridge that not only plays Genesis and Master System games with full FM audio support, but Sega CD games as well.

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Greetings gerbils! At this time last year, the TR BBQ was only one week a way. I got a strong reminder that it's BBQ season this morning. The air just felt right, and the sound of a few nearby crows briefly transported my mind about ten miles to the west, right to the big lake. For just a split-second, I experienced everything I love about kicking off BBQ morning. I can hardly wait for the real thing.That said, I'm thankful there's still about two months to go before this year's BBQ . It's going down on August 10 in Holland, MI. That gives me plenty of time to prepare for your arrival. You are coming, right? I can't stress enough that everyone is invited to ...Read more...

More than almost any other computer hardware product, monitor specifications are frequently a load of smoke and mirrors. That's not to say that the numbers aren't meaningful—it's just that you really have to know what you're looking at. These thoughts occurred to me while looking at LG's latest UltraGear gaming monitors, which just might be the real deal. The 27" 27GL850 and 38" 38GL950G are LG's next gaming monitors to use the company's "Nano IPS" technology, and the South Korean company puts these two monitors down for a 1-ms GTG response time. ...Read more...

Other photo options were considered.

As they say, "there are no bad products, just bad prices." So it goes when comparing graphics cards, of course, and one big variable in the value of Nvidia's GeForce RTX series is those cards' namesake feature: RTX. At this time, it's easy to say that RTX support doesn't hold a lot of value for prospective purchasers, but that looks to be changing. At E3, a number of companies announced that their upcoming games would ship with support for Nvidia's ray-tracing technology. ...Read more...

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Muck boots, plush penguin, upside-down kitty-sunglasses, covering one eye—life made beautiful.

AMD just wrapped up its Next Horizon Gaming event at E3, and as the company promised at Computex, it served up some details on the company's upcoming Radeon products. That's not all we got, though—in the presentation's final moments, AMD dropped a sixteen-core bomb on us in the form of the Ryzen 9 3950X. I'll get to that in a moment; first, let's talk about these new Radeons for a moment.So right away, the above chart will probably give gerbils pause. "What is 'Game clock'?" you wonder. Simply put, AMD's old "Boost clock" was the maximum clock rate that the card would hit. Since that was more of a theoretical measure, the card ...Read more...

It's almost E3 and so it's time for game makers and platform owners to start dropping gooey morsels of gaming news. Microsoft dropped the first bit of chocolatey goodness this morning. The company has unveiled the price of Xbox Game Pass for PC: ten dollars a month, just like the Xbox version. However, at the service's launch Microsoft is offering it for half price. Five bucks a month doesn't seem too shabby for access to a bunch of games, if the titles are right.To give gamers a chance to find out if the selection is what they crave, Microsoft has cut the price of the first month to just a dollar. At a dollar I figure I can't lose, so I signed up just to see what's available. What I found was ...Read more...

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Back in the day, many of us convinced our friends and family that it was a good idea to spend several hundred dollars on a 3D accelerator card by demonstrating GLQuake running at nearly 60 FPS in gorgeous 640x480 resolution. Nvidia's CEO even admitted that his company may not have even existed were it not for Quake. That was his segue into the announcement of Quake II RTX, which is now available. ...Read more...

This is as much as I'm willing to act on today's theme.

Nvidia and AMD had a heck of a time getting G-Sync and FreeSync to work on Windows, but with Intel finally adopting the feature, variable refresh rate (VRR) appears to be well on its way to becoming a standard feature for Windows PCs. That means Microsoft needs to lurch to action, and it has: a post on the DirectX Developer Blog specifically highlights the new "Variable refresh rate" setting in Windows 10 version 1903.

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I couldn't decide, so we let Baxter choose. He picked cheese over hugs. Thanks for the pic, sis!

If you know me—and if you've been reading this site for the last few years, you know me well enough—then you know that I am just about as strident an Apple-hater as any. Knowing that should give you important context for the next thing I'm about to say: I think Apple's new Mac Pro looks fascinating. ...Read more...

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Microsoft really wants gamers to play their games on a PC running Windows 10. The company wants it so badly that it's made two PC gaming-focused announcements that are seemingly at odds with one another. Xbox chief Phil Spencer's blog post is kind of all over the place, so let's try to follow along. ...Read more...

One of my dumb jokes as a kid was to walk up to someone and ask them to draw a blank. It worked.

To the surprise of absolutely no-one, Gigabyte has a big presence at Computex. The company sent over a whole packet of photos of its booth, which was mostly Aorus-flavored. Unfortunately, I'm not at Computex, and if you're reading this, you're probably not either. So instead of the booth, let's talk about the new products Gigabyte has on the way. Besides the seven Socket-AM4 motherboards based on AMD's X570 chipset, there's a trio of monitors and a PCIe 4.0 SSD to talk about. ...Read more...

Intel held its Computex keynote Monday night (US time), and if we can be completely honest, we weren't exactly blown away by the company's announcements. There was the Core i9-9900KS that you've no doubt heard about—more or less a Core i9-9900K with "multi-core enhancement" built right in—and some new Xeon E-series CPUs, as well as a few other topics we'll be talking about eventually. ...Read more...

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Which number is the brisket? Don't cheat.

As part of its announcements yesterday, AMD proudly boasted that it had strong support from its partners for the launch of its third-generation Ryzen CPUs. Specifically, the company said that it had "over 50" new motherboards on the way. Well, Asus is certainly doing its part—the company is releasing no less than ten different boards bearing the X570 chipset. The Republic of Gamers is here with both high-end Strix boards and premium Crosshair models, there's a TUF gaming board, a couple of more mainstream Prime offerings, and finally a Pro WS platter.

AMD is going head-to-head with two of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, and perhaps the red team seeks to take the initiative against its blue and green rivals, because it is charging into battle with standard held high. Exactly as expected, AMD CEO Lisa Su announced a whole pile of new products during her opening keynote at Computex. Dr. Su specifically spoke about the third-generation Ryzen CPUs sporting the Zen 2 architecture and the Navi-based Radeon RX 5000-series graphics cards, but the Ryzen 3000-series CPUs are coming along with the new X570 chipset, too.

Remember the MMORPG, gerbils? Do you remember massive open worlds filled with hundreds or thousands of other players? Do you recall a time when "gank" and "aggro" were common components of your vernacular, when "voke" was intuitively understood to mean "provoke", and when acronyms like LFG, PST, KOS, and OOM (among myriad others) were ubiquitous?

Hi there good fellows! I'm back to writing terrible introductions to deals posts again. On today's episode, I'm happy to report that my rather worrying shoulder and back problems are on a good track to recovery. Ever since a couple or three months ago, I've been regularly doing stretches multiple times a day and undergoing physical therapy, including but not limited to ultrasonic cannons, needle poking, electrical torture, and vice-grip squeezing. My chiropractor has also done great work in piecing out and rearranging the parts that comprise my upper spine to roughly, sorta, more-or-less where they should be... ish.At any rate, I'm feeling much better both physically and mentally, because when one has a bad shoulder and back and proceeds to lose feeling on a thumb, one ...Read more...

That reminds me, I need new tires before winter returns...

Microsoft has released the May 2019 update for Windows 10, also known as version 1903. To celebrate the occasion, the Windows maker has also made some changes to the way Windows updates are delivered to PCs across the world. A blog post from Windows Servicing and Delivery Director John Cable covers an update for Windows 10 versions 1803 and 1809 that will enable PCs to get the latest feature update for the world's most popular desktop OS. ...Read more...

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If you're someone who reads this site regularly, I don't have to tell you that Nvidia is pretty much dominating the graphics card market right now. AMD's still holding out with refreshes of its Polaris and Vega designs, but they're looking awfully long in the tooth compared to Nvidia's Turing. AMD needs new Radeons, and fast. Fortunately, it looks like Navi is on its way pretty darn quick. A Sapphire representative speaking to the Chinese press blabbed a whole bunch of info about two new cards coming from the company. The details were, uh, detailed in a now-removed blog post over at Chinese-language site Zhihu; thanks to Videocardz and TechPowerUp for the info.

Just a couple of days after Huawei found its way onto a U.S. government trade ban list, the telecommunications giant has been given a 90-day reprieve. The Commerce Department has issued a Temporary General License (TGL) to allow Huawei and its 68 non-U.S. subsidiaries to continue "certain activities necessary to the continued operations of existing networks and to support existing mobile services, including cybersecurity research critical to maintaining the integrity and reliability of existing and fully operational networks and equipment."