Techreport

Today is launch day for a whole salvo of AMD hardware. There's the new third-generation Ryzen CPUs, of course—go read our review, if you haven't already—but today also marks the release of the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. As it happens, our review kit included both CPUs and GPUs. Check 'em out: ...Read more...

AMD began its Zen-aissance with the first-generation Ryzen CPUs in 2017, proving that it was not to be discounted from the high-performance CPU race just yet. While those CPUs weren't perfect, they offered high-end desktop core counts at formerly unheard-of prices.Barely a year later, AMD launched the second-generation Ryzen CPUs . Smarter dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, a lower-latency memory controller, and higher peak clock speeds went ...Read more...

You could call it giving up, but I'm going to call it reaching a conclusion. I know what I would do differently if I were to make a third attempt at a VR face-cooler but I don't think I have the patience for another go after building my second one. This is the story of where I got with take two, shared in the hopes that someone is inspired to do better. Let's start with the plan.

Howdy, gerbils! Bruno is away and so it's amateur hour on Wheel of Deals here at TR today. I hope you're all stuffed full of excellent foods and have had your eyes properly seared by staring directly at the fireworks last night. I know I'm sporting a nice sunburn on my face and shoulders and a little extra in my belly today here on July 5th. Anyway, there are plenty of deals to be had so let's take a look at the best of the best, starting with PC components. ...Read more...

Mmm...

Corsair's HS50 has been its low-end gaming headset for a couple years now, and Eric had good things to say about it. However, the company just recently released the HS35 as its new low-end gaming headset, pricing it $10 under the $50 HS50. As Eric said in his HS50 review, purchasing a headset in the $50 range can be a risky proposition, and the same is even more so true in the $40 range. Thus, it is quite natural to be skeptical of any headset at that price, but at the same time the low price should lower expectations. A $40 headset isn't going to be the greatest headset in the world, so the question is whether or not the headset is a good proposition at the given price. ...Read more...

In case you've been under a rock since yesterday, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2060, 2070, and (to a lesser extent) 2080 Super GPUs turned the performance-per-dollar scale on its head. The graphics giant isn't shipping its own cards this time, however. That duty falls to its many partners, and Asus, Gigabyte (along with its Aorus brand), and MSI have lined up at the front door to show you their Super wares as the Super Newsapalooza continues.We'll start with the ways in which every manufacturer's cards are the same. All three vendors have equipped their cards 8 GB of GDDR6 memory that runs at 15.5 GT/s on the RTX 2080 Super variants and 14 GT/s for the 2060 and 2070 models. ...Read more...

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Look up in the sky—it's a bird! It's a plane! It's Super GeForce! Last week's rumors and mistaken Amazon listings were apparently true, because Nvidia has announced the GeForce RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080 family of Super graphics cards. Nvidia's refreshed Turing lineup includes some purportedly meaty boosts to performance which could heavily shift the balance of price vs performance against not only AMD's current Radeon RX Vega lineup but the upcoming Navi-based RX 5700 cards, too.These over-the-top announcement videos always crack me up ...Read more...

It doesn't take long before a few of these floating around on the right night starts looking eerie.

On Friday, Western Digital disclosed that a factory operated by Toshiba Memory Corporation as part of the two companies' joint production operations in Japan's Yokkachi region had been affected by a power outage on June 15. According to to the storage manufacturer, the outage not only affected the facilities and tools used to make its flash storage, but six exabytes of Western Digital NAND that was in production was lost.According to Reuters , the plant has been running at less-than-full capacity since the outage occurred, and won't be able to resume full production until the middle of July. Western Digital says that this will affect the company's bottom line during the first fiscal quarter, which runs July through September. Western DIgital ...Read more...

A little over a month ago, Nvidia released a YouTube teaser indicating that something "super" was on the way. According to a report from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, that something super is a refresh of Nvidia's entire GeForce RTX lineup. They're reportedly coming soon, too—July 9th, to be exact.Thanks to some early product listings on Amazon, several RTX 2000-series Super cards will be available in just over a week. Listings for GeForce RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080 Super editions showed up on the e-tailer earlier today but they've since been removed. From the screenshots captured by RPS, it seems that these cards will have ...Read more...

Gerbils, there are too many games. There are just so many. Even though I already own more than I will likely ever play, I've picked up five more games in the Steam Summer Sale. I imagine you already knew the sale was ongoing whether you're a Steam user or not. Still, I'm going to show you a fair few deals I think you shouldn't skip.This time around, I didn't write a blurb for each game as I normally do; there are simply too many titles, and I'm already overburdened with another, top secret project. Let me note that this is ...Read more...

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As some that venture into our amazing forums may be aware, I kicked off an experiment last month where I asked gerbils to nominate and then vote for something that I could review. I was open to nearly any suggestion, but I put a $100 cap on the expense involved to keep things reasonable.I got some great suggestions and narrowed them down to seven options that I put in a poll. After a week of voting, we had our winner. It turned out that ...Read more...

Rumors indicating that Apple wants to move its Mac lineup to ARM CPUs designed inhouse have been swirling for more than a year. Come to think of it, those rumors started as far back as 2012. It's seemingly been a matter not of "if" Apple would bid adieu to the x86-64 ISA, but "when" that change would take place. Those rumors have spun up once more now that the company has hired former ARM, Intel, and AMD system architect Mike Fillipo last month, according to his LinkedIn profile....Read more...

This could have been you, cats, but you never learned to play the game.

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!