Techreport

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided developer Nixxes has released the first patch for the game, version 524.7. This update should fix a common crash in the Prague train station level, as well as "crashes caused by third party programs" like MSI Afterburner. Inverted look settings should now display correctly in the menu, too.The game still has a few other problems, and Nixxes says it's looking into them. Among the standout issues is an odd default setting for the game's mouse sensitivity. Our own code-monkey Bruno is among many players who complain that even ...Read more...

Wired networking in the home is nice if you can swing it, but many folks are content with the convenience of wireless networking. Even with wireless networking, however, some are going to want the fastest adapter around. Trendnet has just the thing for those speed demons. Its TEW-809UB Wireless-AC adapter plugs into a free USB 3.0 port on the host machine to deliver peak claimed transfer rates of 1300 Mb/s on Wireless-AC networks or 600 Mb/s in Wireless-N environments. (Add those numbers up, and you get the formidable-sounding AC1900 marketing fluff on many Wi-Fi spec sheets. Who knew?) ...Read more...

Along with the MasterMouse Pro L we covered yesterday, Cooler Master is also releasing a new headset: the MasterPulse Over-ear. Cooler Master already has a set of MasterPulse earbuds, but this new set of cans is an over-ear headset that uses a pair of 44-mm drivers. ...Read more...

Nvidia first took the wraps off its Tesla M10 high-density server graphics card (can we call them virtualizable GPUs or vGPUs yet?) back in May, and it's now shipping those cards in volume. The company says system administrators will soon be able to get Tesla M10s in 23 systems from its major hardware partners, including Dell, Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock Rack, and that number should only grow from here on out. To help sysadmins cope with the hundreds of virtual users that might soon reside on M10s within an organization, Nvidia is also updating its Grid software platform with deeper performance profiling and analytics tools for planning, deployment, and support of virtual GPU users. ...Read more...

A scant month ago, TR gerbils from across the country made their annual pilgrimage to the sandy shores of Lake Michigan for the "second-10th" TR BBQ. Only some of the hardware that G.Skill donated as giveaway items for the event made it to the BBQ on time, though. Several prizes showed up after the festivities concluded. Ultimately, I think things worked out better this way, because it gave the TR staff time to decide who was most worthy of that second prize haul. After some discussion, it was clear that the best option was to "think of the children" and award the hardware to the winners of the first annual TR BBQ Youth Cornhole Tournament. ...Read more...

When Gigabyte launched its GeForce GTX 1060 line, the fastest model on offer at the time was the GTX 1060 G1 Gaming. We had a hunch the company wasn't done yet, though, and today, Gigabyte quietly updated its website with a product page for the GTX 1060 Xtreme Gaming. ...Read more...

External graphics docks have emerged as one of the more buzzworthy product categories in computer hardware this year. Gigabyte, Asus, and Razer have all showed off takes on the concept, though only Razer has shepherded the idea all the way to a shipping product so far. A group of Harvard students may be next in line, though. Under the banner of Wolfepack, Inc., these students are throwing their hat in the ring on Kickstarter with a Mac-friendly Thunderbolt graphics dock called the Wolfe. ...Read more...

The Hot Chips conference is going strong in Cupertino, California, and the first juicy tidbits of information have started popping up from folks at the event. According to sites reporting from the conference, SK Hynix and Samsung talked about the new generation of High-Bandwidth Memory, aptly called HBM3.HBM3 improves on the current-generation HBM2 in nearly every regard. It'll use dies with higher capacity and bandwidth. Each die should now pack 16Gb (2GB) per layer, meaning it's possible we'll eventually see graphics cards with up to 64GB of HBM3 on board. As a point of reference, ...Read more...

We've been fans of Fractal Design's Dynamic series of fans for some time now. We've tested them in several of the company's cases, and they deliver adequate cooling performance while remaining whisper-quiet. Now, the Swedish company is bringing out its second series of Dynamic fans: the Dynamic X2 family. These fans come in 120-mm and 140-mm varieties, with black or white fan blade assemblies. ...Read more...

Cooler Master is bringing its modular design philosophy to the mouse market today with its MasterMouse Pro L. This refreshingly simple design comes with a pair of top covers that have different heights for palm and claw grippers. It also includes two pairs of side covers—one with a smooth finish, the other with a rougher texture—so that gamers can get the feel they want under their fingers. If you're one of those "makers" that seem to be getting more and more common these days, Cooler Master also provides 3D schematics of those side panels so that the truly particular can make a pair of grips that's suited to their unique physiology. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

TR readers are probably most familiar with EK Waterblocks for its extensive line of custom liquid-cooling components, but the Slovenian company also launched a line of Predator closed-loop coolers in September of last year. Yesterday, the company announced that it's adding new models to the line with beefier 140-mm and 280-mm radiators. ...Read more...

Android development at Google has been going on at a steady clip. The computing giant has begun the rollout of Android 7.0, codename Nougat, to recent Nexus devices worldwide. ...Read more...

Few peripheral interconnects are as common as PCI Express these days, so major changes to that standard are big news. Last week at IDF, Tom's Hardware got to sit down with the PCI Special Interest Group to get an idea of where the next major update to the standard will take the interconnect technology.According to Tom's, the next version of the PCIe standard, version 4.0, will have two major updates over PCIe 3.0. For one, each PCIe 4.0 lane will be able to transfer data at speeds of 16 GT/s (just short of 2 GB/s), double that of ...Read more...

At the Polaris launch in Macau earlier this year, spicy food aficionado and Radeon Technologies Group leader Raja Koduri noted that one of his goals with the new product family was to retake a significant share of the discrete GPU market. Now, AMD has provided us with some information that suggests the RTG is succeeding in that mission. The company provided us with some numbers from the latest PC graphics market report from Mercury Research, and they're relatively rosy.Going by Mercury Research's information, AMD increased its share of total discrete GPU sales to 34.2% of the market (by unit volume) in the second quarter of 2016, an ...Read more...

We've been reporting on a power bug of sorts with Nvidia graphics cards for quite some time now. The issue rears its ugly head whenever high-refresh-rate monitors are connected to GeForce cards in certain configurations. At first, the problem showed up with a single high-refresh-rate display connected. Nvidia fixed that clock speed surging with version 361.43 of its drivers, but the behavior didn't go away for folks with multiple high-refresh-rate monitors. A reader tipped us off to that problem in March, and we confirmed it independently on one of our test rigs. We later verified that Pascal cards still exhibited the issue, as well.With the release of GeForce driver version 372.54 , however, us folks with multiple high-resolution displays can enjoy the same relief as our single-monitor brethren. One of the new-feature bullet points for this driver release says that Nvidia "enabled mclk switches on 144 Hz G-SYNC monitors in multi-monitor use cases in order to lower power consumption." While that ...Read more...

You may be thinking "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?" after reading that headline, but yes, it's true. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a title meant to be among the "first wave" of DX12-enabled games, won't actually support the new API on the game's August 23 release day.This move comes as a surprise, to say the least. Last year, Square-Enix made a point of showing off a video of the game's "Dawn Engine" that highlighted plenty of fancy graphical effects. The publisher then ...Read more...

Not to be outdone by its competitors, Gigabyte has some 3GB GTX 1060s ready to go, as well. Three of them, in fact. The 3GB family includes Windforce OC, G1 Gaming, and shorty ITX versions. ...Read more...

Happy Friday, gerbils. We're back from IDF now, and we've sifted through the computer hardware deals that have stacked up in our absence to see what's hot.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...

We don't have any boots on the ground at Gamescom in Germany, but news regarding some of the products on display there has reached our ears regardless. MSI has a VR booth set up powered by the GTX 1080 Gaming X graphics card, but it's also showing off some new stuff. The company is premiering a pair of motherboards—including one for Socket AM3+—as well as its first CPU cooler. ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of Nvidia's confirmation of the 3GB GTX 1060 are a bunch of vendors with their versions of the new product. MSI, true to recent form, is fast out of the gate with no less than five different models. From the top-end Gaming X to the simply-named GTX 1060-3GT-OC, all of them use the same slightly-neutered GP106 GPU and 3GB of GDDR5 memory. ...Read more...

The GeForce GTX 1060 certainly looks to be an impressive machine, but budget-conscious gamers on the green team may be looking for something a little closer to the $200 mark. Those people need to look no further than the new GTX 1060 3GB. All the big manufacturers are releasing their takes on this GPU, and it's now time to take a look at EVGA's offerings. ...Read more...

Nvidia made the GTX 1060 3GB card official this morning. As the rumor mill suggested, this card will have one of its SMs disabled, bringing the total number of stream processors on board the chip down to 1152. The card will also have eight fewer texture units, for a total of 72. In exchange for those cuts, Nvidia has set the GTX 1060 3GB card's suggested price at $199.

You may all be wondering what's up with the Internet's coverage of IDF, since there wasn't a lot of news coming from that front yesterday. And yet, all of a sudden, something big comes along. The item in question is called Knights Mill, a codename for the next generation of Intel's HPC-oriented Xeon Phi processors.Our own Jeff Kampman has his boots on the ground as we ...Read more...

Adata is announcing a pair of external storage products today with an emphasis on stylish design and light weight. Both the Premier HC660 and SC660 are USB 3.0 external drives using a single micro-USB connector. Externally, the drives are identical, save for the the HC660's somewhat greater weight versus the SC660. That's because the SC660 is an SSD, while the HC660 is a traditional hard drive. ...Read more...

AMD is adding source code for two of its SDKs—TrueAudio Next and version 1.3 of the Advanced Media Framework—to its GPUOpen developer resource today. Both SDKs are available free of charge to interested developers under permissive MIT-style licenses.Unlike the original TrueAudio block in some Radeons , TrueAudio Next runs in software, and it's built atop AMD's Radeon Rays ray-casting engine . Together, these programs could provide more accurate simulation of the way sound waves interact with physical spaces to deliver a better sense of immersion in VR applications. TrueAudio Next also ...Read more...

The health benefits of standing desks are the subject of a lot of controversy, but even the staunchest proponents of standing to work agree that sometimes you just need to take a load off. A motorized desk seems like the perfect solution to let you stand when you can and sit when you need to. We showed you Lian-Li's DK-04 combination PC-case-and-motorized-desk before, but today Lian-Li is announcing two more motorized desks, this time sans the PC case. ...Read more...

Just in case you thought it wasn't serious about serving the gamer market, HP is growing its Omen gaming PC line again. A new desktop featuring a very distinctive case takes center stage, but the 17.3-inch Omen laptop is also getting its Pascal infusion. New Omen accessories—produced by SteelSeries—and an Omen-branded curved monitor are coming up, too. ...Read more...

Huawei's Honor smartphones are rapidly becoming entry-level favorites, and the company gave its budget lineup a boost last night with the Honor 8. This phone offers a glass-and-metal body, a dual-sensor camera system, and a HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa-core SoC for $399.99. ...Read more...

After a successful first run yesterday, we'll be live-blogging the IDF day two keynote this morning. Today, we'll hear from Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, president of Intel's Client and Internet of Things divisions and the Systems Architecture Group. We'll also hear from Diane Bryant, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group. Our live blog will kick off at 9 AM PT (noon ET). We hope you'll join us again as we listen to Intel's vision for the Internet of Things and the data center....Read more...

The Pascal Laptop Day continues in full force. Gigabyte is showing off the improvements it made to four series of gaming-oriented laptops. The company has taken a more sensible approach than some of its competitors, offering machines that blend high-end spec sheets with a demure design—something that's refreshing after the recent spate of gaudy RGB-LED-lit, uh, everything.Gigabyte's machines come in two types, with two sizes each. All models come fitted with IPS screens, backlit keyboards, Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPUs, M.2 PCIe SSDs, and ...Read more...

Intel's Pentium Anniversary Edition chip was a surprise to us when it launched a little over two years ago. Sure, that 53W chip offered just two cores and two threads, but the thing overclocked to 4.8GHz and kept pace with much beastlier chips from Intel and AMD in our review. Good times were had, and the chip became a fixture of our budget builds.When Skylake rolled around, however, a G3258 replacement wasn't among the many dual-core parts at the base of the towering sixth-gen Core processor model lineup . This omission made us sad. Sure, the Core i3-6100 is a great chip, but its $125 price tag ...Read more...

The recent release of mobile Pascal GPUs has given rise to a flood of laptop releases from all ends of the world. Aorus has thrown its chips in the pot, offering a choice of Pascal-powered laptops in sizes from 13.9" to 17.3". All the machines pack Nvidia GTX 10-series cards, Intel Core i7-6820HK CPUs slightly boosted with a 2.7GHz base clock, IPS screens, and M.2 NVMe SSDs. ...Read more...

ARM is broadening its 10-nm ambitions today with a surprising new partnership. The company is making its Artisan physical IP toolkit available for customers on the upcoming 10-nm FinFET node at Intel's Custom Foundry service. Artisan already includes ARM's POP pre-optimized physical designs for a variety of its products, like Cortex-A57 and A53 cores and Mali T628 and T678 GPUs. ARM says this partnership will extend POP to "two future ...Read more...

Oculus Rift and HTC Vive aren't the only companies dreaming big about virtual reality. At the Intel Developer Forum today, Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich revealed Project Alloy, the company's upcoming "merged reality" solution. Intel plans to offer the Project Alloy platform to developers sometime in 2017. ...Read more...

Nvidia's powerful Pascal graphics chips have arrived in laptops, and MSI has a fleet of machines at the ready. The laptops aren't powered by "M" model GPUs, folks—Nvidia indicates that these chips have cores and clocks comparable to its flagship desktop models. MSI is taking advantage of Nvidia's product launch by refreshing much of its laptop lineup, including its GT, GS, and GE series. ...Read more...

Now that the cat's out of the bag regarding the new mobile GeForces, everyone's announcing updates to their gaming laptops. Asus has no fewer than six new ROG notebooks coming soon with Pascal cards, in regular 15-inch, thick 17-inch, and massive 18-inch sizes. ...Read more...

The launch of the latest series of mobile GeForce chips today is a big deal, and everyone's getting new product launches in as a result. That includes a plethora of performance-oriented portables that we'll be talking about soon, but it also includes VR backpacks and other small form factor PCs. Zotac, master of the mini-PCs, sent us a note to let us know that the Magnus EN10 line is coming soon, and as you have no doubt already guessed, these little black boxes will pack Nvidia's latest mobile chips. ...Read more...

Morning, everybody. We're on the ground at the Intel Developer Forum this week, and Intel CEO Brian Krzanich will be kicking things off today at 9AM PT (12 PM ET) with his opening keynote. We'll be providing live updates from the event right here with a spiffy liveblogging tool from 24Liveblog, so you can just leave your browser open and new posts will automatically be added to the top of the list. This is the first time using this tool for us, so bear with us should any technical difficulties arise....Read more...

Logitech's G100 mouse came out three years ago with the initial launch of the company's gaming peripheral series, and its simple styling and reliable performance proved a hit with the e-sports crowd. The new G Pro mouse the company announced today draws inspiration from its ancestor, and as a result it has very little of the sharp angles and high gloss we see so often on gaming peripherals these days. ...Read more...

Along with its piping-hot new mobile GPUs, Nvidia has a fresh set of drivers for the masses. Version 372.54 brings support for the trio of new mobile Pascal chips, including the BatteryBoost dynamic quality and framerate control feature of those parts. These drivers are also optimized for No Man's Sky, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Obduction, F1 2016, and the Paragon open beta....Read more...

After setting a blistering pace of Pascal releases for the desktop, Nvidia is turning its attention to the mobile marketplace. The company is bringing its GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080 graphics chips to notebooks today. This time around, there's no M attached to any of these parts. Much like we saw with the mobile GTX 980 and its fully-enabled GM204 GPU, each Pascal mobile chip has provisions similar to its desktop counterpart.The chips aren't identical to their desktop siblings, though. Taking Pascal mobile requires minor clock drops on the GTX 1070 and GTX 1060. In the case of the GTX 1070, Nvidia ...Read more...

After setting a blistering pace of Pascal releases for the desktop, Nvidia is turning its attention to the mobile marketplace. The company is bringing its GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080 graphics chips to notebooks today. This time around, there's no M attached to any of these parts. Much like we saw with the mobile GTX 980 and its fully-enabled GM204 GPU, each Pascal mobile chip has the full provisions of its desktop counterpart. The only penalties to taking Pascal mobile appears to be minor clock drops on the GTX 1070 and GTX 1060. Here's a full spec sheet for each mobile Pascal chip: ...Read more...

Minecraft is such a ubiquitous cultural touchstone these days that it was only a matter of time before it officially arrived on a PC-powered VR headset. Now, that day is here. Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta can run natively on the Oculus Rift. Mojang team member Saxs Persson goes so far as to call the game "an innovation platform that goes everywhere and does everything" in a behind-the-scenes video that highlights how the company adapted the game to VR, and far be it from us to argue....Read more...

No Man's Sky is finally out on PC, but its launch has been a little unsteady. Widespread reports of technical issues plague the ambitious title. Radeon owners having issues with the game might find some relief in the latest Radeon Software Crimson Edition release, numbered 16.8.2. Both Hello Game's new title and Epic's Paragon are listed as officially supported in the new release, although the release notes don't describe exactly what that support entails.Hopefully these drivers will fix things up for the red-team gamers who can't even launch No Man's Sky . As for Radeon owners not interested in either of those games, there are some other fixes. Overwatch shouldn't crash while ...Read more...

All-in-one liquid coolers are great performers, but they often require large, dedicated radiator mounting points inside a case. Cooler Master may be giving system builders the best of both worlds today with its MasterLiquid Maker 92 all-in-one cooler. This heatsink packs a pump, radiator, and two 92-mm fans into a dense module that occupies no more space in a system than a traditional tower-style air cooler. ...Read more...

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided arrives August 23, and developer Eidos has released the system requirements aspiring augs will need to meet in order to run the game. Here are the minimum specs:And here are the game's recommended specs (apparently ...Read more...

Now that AMD has released its Radeon RX 470 and Radeon RX 460, the ball is back in Nvidia's court, and some insider photos of a press briefing or similar event obtained by Chinese site IT House might give us some insight about how the green team will respond. If the leaked photos are correct, Nvidia will offer a purported "GTX 1060 3GB." This card doesn't just lose half its RAM over the existing GTX 1060, though—the photo from the event shows that the card could have 1152 SPs, down from 1280 on the 6GB card.The full GP106 die on the GTX 1060 spreads its stream processors over 10 SM units, so the loss of 128 of those SPs most likely points to the disabling of one SM on the card (or the equivalent across multiple SMs). If Nvidia does take the world's ...Read more...

Back in 2014, we gave the original Nvidia Shield tablet a TR Recommended award thanks to its impressive performance, solid build quality, and particularly its robust feature list. According to FCC documents, Nvidia was planning to release a new Shield tablet this year, but that same documentation also says that the refreshed model has been canceled "for business reasons." ...Read more...

Gerbils, we bring you good tidings. As some of you may have noticed, our forum software has become a little outdated, lacking niceties like SSL support, a modern UI, and a responsive design to better fit mobile devices. After a hefty upgrade, those features are now all at your disposal. Feel free to visit the updated forums and enjoy all the new goodness.