Techreport

Eight is Enough

Remember that MSI Aegis gaming desktop that looked like Isaac's helmet? It's remarkably small despite the potent components inside. MSI is taking a page from Nvidia's book with a new Aegis gaming system called the Aegis Ti, and it is not impressively small. It is, in fact, quite large. Of course, you can't fit SLIed GTX 1080s and unlocked Intel processors in something the size of two shoeboxes. ...Read more...

Happy Friday, gerbils. It's time for another round of the best PC hardware deals we could find on the web. Here's what we panned out this week.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 with Newegg ...Read more...

AMD's driver team has been busy lately. A little over two weeks since the July 12 release of Radeon Software 16.7.2, AMD has published a new driver release, predictably numbered 16.7.3. The new release appears to be primarily a bugfix release, as the release notes list fixes for thirteen specific issues.Big-ticket items fixed this time around include Radeon Wattman retaining failed overclock settings, graphical corruption in Hitman's DX12 mode, and display flickering under Freesync on the Radeon RX 480. Radeon Settings should show the correct ...Read more...

Nvidia's choice to fit the GeForce GTX 970 with two tiers of memory performance has been the subject of an incredible amount of discussion, memes, and controversy since the issue came to light a year and a half ago. Opinions are varied on whether the issue was actually an issue, but some folks took enough umbrage that they brought a class-action lawsuit against the green team almost immediately. That lawsuit has now reached a preliminary settlement, and Nvidia has agreed to pay out $30 to each GTX 970 buyer.This news comes to us courtesy of Top Class Actions , who says that Nvidia agreed to pay all consumers who purchased the GTX 970 graphics card and "indicated there would not be a cap on the total amount it would pay consumers." This is only a preliminary ...Read more...

When Windows 10 launched on July 29 of last year, Microsoft made the surprising move of offering the operating system as a free upgrade to most Windows 7 and 8 users. As of May, Windows 10 has been installed on over 300 million devices. For those who've held out on Microsoft's free upgrade offer, it's been a long year of system tray notifications, recommended updates, and full-screen prompts. As of tomorrow, however, the free upgrade offer will end.The Windows 10 Anniversary Update , which will be released on August 2, offers features which might tempt some to make a last-minute switch to Windows 10. The updates to the Windows Store will be welcome, as will the changes to UWP that will allow ...Read more...

Intel's Mini-STX form factor (also known as 5x5) offers an intriguing platform for builders trying to build the smallest socketed desktop PC possible, but compatible motherboards have so far been available only as parts of complete systems. ASRock is breaking that mold with its H110M-STX mobo. This tiny board can run any 65W Skylake CPU that can drop into the LGA 1151 socket. ...Read more...

Like Acer's Predator G1 desktop, the Asus ROG G20CB is a small-form-factor desktop with an emphasis on gaming performance. The machine packs in quad-core Skylake processors, full-sized graphics cards, and three disks in its 9.5-liter volume. Today, the ROG G20CB's gaming performance is getting a shot in the arm from Nvidia's latest and greatest. ...Read more...

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced to his employees today that the company had recently sold its billionth iPhone. Tim had some unsurprisingly flowery things to say about the iPhone, claiming that the handset is "one of the most important, world-changing, and successful products in history." Heady words, but he probably isn't wrong. Steve Jobs famously described the iPhone as "an iPod with touch controls, a mobile phone, and an Internet communications device", and Apple's little three-in-one hand-held computer is commonly credited with the proliferation of the modern smartphone. ...Read more...

If you'd like to replicate the wall of RGB LED fans Thermaltake had on display at Computex this year, the company can now make it happen for you. The Thermaltake Riing LED RGB Radiator Fan TT Premium Edition spinners (yes, seriously) are described as Thermaltake's first "digital radiator fans." That's because they plug into a proprietary USB fan hub that allows software control over the color of the RGB LEDs in each connected fan along with fan speeds. By daisy-chaining fan hubs, users can create an array of up to 48 fans across 16 controllers. ...Read more...

Toshiba is stacking its 3D flash ever higher. In tandem with Western Digital (who now owns former Toshiba partner SanDisk), the company announced its third generation of BiCS flash chips today. These new TLC NAND devices maintain the same 256-gigabit capacity as their predecessors, but they stack those bits across 64 layers instead of the 48 in the last generation of BiCS flash. In time, the company expects to use this technology to deliver 512 gigabits (64GB) on a single chip. ...Read more...

Xiaomi had another announcement today besides the Redmi Pro handsets: it's getting into the notebook game. The Chinese phone vendor's first portable PCs—two models, both called "Mi Notebook Air"—premiered on the company's Twitter feed this morning. Xiaomi is clearly going after Apple's MacBook Air with the machines, as the all-aluminum chassis, uncluttered design, and even the name all evoke Apple's premium image. ...Read more...

Chinese up-and-comer Xiaomi introduced an impressive new budget smartphone today. The Redmi Pro boasts dual cameras, a brushed-aluminum body, and a 5.5" OLED display for RMB 1499 (or $225) and up. ...Read more...

After last quarter's iPhone sales appeared to reach a peak, Apple watchers were curious to see what the company's performance in the following quarter would look like, and now we know. The company released its results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2016 today. Apple raked in $42.4 billion in revenue, down 15% from a year ago, and it made $7.8 billion in net income, down 27% from a year ago.iPhone sales declined less on a year-on-year basis than they did last quarter. Apple sold 40.4 million of its handsets, down 15% from a year ago. iPad sales appear to be stabilizing, however—though unit shipments were down 9% from a year ago, revenue from the slates was up 7% ...Read more...

Asus's Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard made regular appearances in our system guides this last year, showing up in our coveted "sweet spot" category as a solid choice for builders working with Intel's Skylake processors. Asus has announced that board's successor today: the Z170 Pro Gaming/Aura. The updated motherboard retains the features that caught our attention last year while adding some novel aesthetic options. ...Read more...

When Seagate purchased LSI's flash business, it acquired a range of PCI Express SSDs wearing "Nytro" branding. Those drives currently come in PCIe add-in card, M.2 stick, and U.2 2.5" form factors, and today Seagate is announcing that it is releasing 2TB drives in that family. The company says this announcement marks an industry first in that the 2TB Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD is "the highest-capacity enterprise-class" drive of its type. ...Read more...

Crucial's MX300 SSD impressed us with a solid blend of performance and capacity for its price. That drive was the first to use Intel and Micron's jointly-produced 3D NAND chips. ...Read more...

360-degree video streaming is shaping up as a major application for VR headsets, and both Nvidia and AMD are working on ways to help content producers accelerate the production of those streams. Both companies revealed software packages that will let companies use GPUs to stitch and output 360-degree video in VR-ready formats at SIGGRAPH this week.Nvidia's VRWorks 360 Video SDK makes it possible for content providers to take input from up to 32 cameras and perform 360-degree video stitching in both offline and real-time workflows. It lets creators account for custom camera positions and lens types in ...Read more...

The professional content creation software industry is dominated by Nvidia's CUDA libraries, and as a result, a large number of professional applications won't run on Radeon GPUs without some serious trickery. AMD has been trying to court the developers of these programs for some time with the GPUOpen initiative and its FireRender SDK. In further news from SIGGRAPH, AMD has dropped its "Fire" branding and renamed FireRender to Radeon ProRender.For those who aren't already familiar—and we reckon that's most of you—Radeon ProRender is AMD's OpenCL photorealistic offline 3D renderer. Since it uses OpenCL, the renderer can run on CPUs, GPUs, or any combination thereof, although obviously ProRender is optimized for ...Read more...

Along with its innovative Radeon Pro SSG card, AMD unveiled three new workstation graphics cards under that same new Radeon Pro brand. The Radeon Pro WX series takes Polaris GPUs to the workstation market across three different cards targeted at distinct use cases. ...Read more...

AMD threw the latest in its series of Capsaicin events at the SIGGRAPH conference this evening. At the show, the company announced the Radeon Pro SSG, for "solid state graphics"—a new kind of graphics card that's meant to keep large amounts of data close to the GPU. This card has what AMD calls a "one-terabyte extended frame buffer" that relies on non-volatile memory to store all those bits—presumably NAND. In turn, the GPU is connected to that memory using a dedicated PCIe bus. For perspective, consider that AMD's previous capacity champ, the FirePro W9100, only has 32GB of GDDR5 RAM on board. ...Read more...

Just a couple days after it announced the next Titan X, Nvidia is extending the reach of its Pascal GPUs to even greater heights. The company revealed its Quadro P6000 and Quadro P5000 graphics cards today at SIGGRAPH 2016. ...Read more...

Phanteks is probably best known for its wide-ranging line of computer cases, but the company has a full folio of cooling products as well. Recently, that folio has expanded to include custom liquid cooling parts with the Glacier G1080. This water block is a full-coverage unit for the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition. It features configurable RGB LED lighting that can be linked into the lighting system on a compatible Phanteks case. Phanteks also has an adapter to connect the lighting to some system boards. ...Read more...

Samsung isn't the only company on the market with a portable SSD to its name. The folks at Adata are taking a couple different approaches to providing portable yet super-speedy storage. The SE730, SV620, and SC660 drives each offer a distinct approach to the external SSD concept. ...Read more...

Announcements of non-reference Radeon RX 480 cards are finally making their way through the grapevine to us, and today's comes from the Dragon Army. MSI is strapping its Twin Frozr VI cooler on AMD's Polaris 10 GPU to produce a family of Radeon RX 480 Gaming cards. These custom-designed Radeons each have an 8-pin PCIe connector and use eight power phases to feed their GPUs. Meanwhile, the Twin Frozr cooler lends them all of the same heatpipe goodness and RGB LED accents of their cousins in the other recent Gaming X families. ...Read more...

Yahoo's long-running struggle to reinvent itself is coming to an end today. Telecom giant Verizon is taking most of the iconic internet company under its wing for $4.8 billion, and it plans to meld the property with its AOL subsidary when the acquisition is complete. That means popular websites like Flickr, Tumblr, and a variety of Yahoo-branded portals will now be under the same roof as Engadget, the Huffington Post, and TechCrunch.According to Yahoo Finance , Verizon isn't getting Yahoo's 15% stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, its shares of Yahoo Japan, its patent portfolio, or its cash on hand as part of the bargain. Those parts of the business will remain with the shell of Yahoo after the transaction ...Read more...

TR gerbils from around the country scurried to Holland, Michigan this past weekend to take part in the "second-10th" TR BBQ. Though this was only my second time at the event, Colton "drfish" Westrate and his family are battle-hardened veterans at showing the rest of us a good time, and the BBQ is already a high point of my year. While a few regulars couldn't make it this time, it was great to hang out with some new blood. Hopefully we didn't scare those folks away with our antics. ...Read more...

The Pick 6

This year's TR BBQ is up and running. We'll be streaming it all day from our Theta S 360 degree camera so you can hang out with us by proxy. Keep a browser tab open to the stream and join in the chat throughout the day if you can. It should be a good time....Read more...

The "second-10th" TR BBQ kicks off tomorrow, and the folks at G.Skill have sent us some hardware to give away to some lucky attendees. G.Skill's contribution is a last-minute one, so the only hardware we have on hand to photograph is the Trident Z 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 memory kit shown relaxing in a hammock below. This kit spreads its capacity across four 8GB sticks with a spiffy black-and-white paint job. ...Read more...

Happy Friday, gerbils. We're getting geared up for the TR BBQ this weekend, but we'd be neglecting our duties if we didn't scour the interwebs for all the best PC hardware deals out there. Here's what we found this week.There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. 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 with Newegg , but ...Read more...

Sapphire officially took the wraps off its long-awaited take on the Radeon RX 480 this morning. The Nitro+ Radeon RX 480 puts a beefy twin-fan cooler on Polaris 10, and Saphhire uses the extra cooling capacity to dial in a boost clock of 1342 MHz (compared to 1266 MHz on the reference RX 480). The card uses an eight-pin power input, and Sapphire wraps its custom PCB with a sturdy-looking backplate, too. ...Read more...

AMD released its second-quarter financial results yesterday evening. The company posted an operating loss of $8 million on revenue of $1.02 billion. That revenue figure is up 9% year-over-year. Thanks to income from its recently-completed joint venture with Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics, however, AMD realized a net income of $69 million. The company says its increased revenue is thanks primarily to increased semi-custom SoC sales. Gross margin fell one point to 31%.AMD's Computing and Graphics division took in $435 million, a 15% year-over-year increase. The company says that number got a boost from higher notebook processor and GPU sales. The division narrowed its operating loss year-on-year to $81 ...Read more...

Nvidia unveiled the Pascal-powered version of its Titan X uber-card this evening. The new card features 3584 stream processors running at 1417MHz base and 1531MHz boost speeds. The company promises 11 TFLOPs of single-precision performance from a board power of 250W. ...Read more...

Talk to any forward-looking engineer at AMD or Nvidia about VR, and they'll tell you that producing life-like scenes is going to require new approaches than the brute-force methods that we employ today with traditional monitors. One of those approaches is foveated rendering, which improves efficiency by taking advantage of the fact that we see fine detail in only a narrow range of our field of vision. Nvidia has already toyed with a similar idea with its "Multi-res Shading" approach, which renders different portions of the VR frame at different resolutions to improve efficiency....Read more...

Eight is Enough

PowerColor introduced its take on the Polaris-packing RX 480 today with a press release heralding the Red Devil RX 480. PowerColor's take on the new AMD GPU is wreathed in a massive triple-fan cooler reinforced by an extensive backplate system. PowerColor says this design forms a "thermal module" that balances the weight of the card in a system, and it also purports to protect the card if a builder drops it for some reason. Perhaps you can run with this Devil after all. ...Read more...

Californian memory company Super Talent is throwing its ante into the NVMe pot with the new Nova SSD family. These 2.5" MLC drives are 9.5mm thick and come in capacities up to 2TB. They connect to hosts using a U.2 connector, and they provide transfer rates up to 3,000 MB/s on sequential reads and 2,200 MB/s on sequential writes. Unfortunately, Super Talent doesn't present random access performance data, so we can't compare it to the other U.2 disk we've tested. ...Read more...

On Intel's earnings call yesterday, CEO Brian Krzanich confirmed that the company is shipping its seventh-generation Core processors, code-named Kaby Lake. Kaby Lake CPUs will be the first product of Intel's new "process-architecture-optimization" product-development model, where at least three major families of chips will be produced on a process node.Though "shipping" is a rather exciting word, Intel clarified that it's moving chips out to its "customers and OEMs," not retail channels. The ...Read more...

Intel released its second-quarter financial results this evening. Compared to this time a year ago, revenue grew 3% to $13.5 billion, but operating income plunged 54% to $1.3 billion. Intel says that drop in profitability is linked to the restructuring program it announced in the first quarter of this year. The company also notes it's eliminated 6,000 of the projected 12,000 positions it expected to cut as part of its restructuring efforts. Net income fell 51% to $1.3 billion, and gross margin shed 3.6 points to fall to 58.9%.Intel's Client Computing Group revenue fell 3% year-on-year to $7.3 billion. Platform volumes (a figure that accounts for both processors and chipsets) fell 15%, but average selling prices (or ...Read more...

When I look around me, all I see are cracked phone screens. No matter how many gorillas crafted those phone's screens, it always seems the tiniest drop will send shards flying, tears running, and wallets whimpering. Corning hopes to make that scenario a thing of the past with its recently-announced Gorilla Glass 5.Gorilla Glass 4 already had impressive shatter-proofing specifications. 80% of phones with the stuff survived drops from a distance of one meter onto rough surfaces. That anti-shatter characteristic has gotten a substantial upgrade in the new version. Corning says ...Read more...

Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.7.2, AMD's most recent graphics driver, gained WHQL certification today. This driver actually released on July 12 and was marked as a beta at that time, but today the release notes (if not the download page) have been updated with the new certification. This is AMD's first WHQL-certified driver since version 16.3.2 in March.Not much has changed in this driver since version 16.7.1 , although AMD moved the "compatibility mode" toggle for the RX 480 into the Global Settings menu to make it more obvious. The previous ...Read more...

Acer's Predator G1 desktop, which we first covered back when it was announced during the next@Acer presentation, is a curious PC. It's a bit larger than what we usually consider "small form factor" in the post-NUC world, but the machine is still quite compact. At its launch, it used a Mini-ITX-like motherboard and a PCIe graphics card riser to stuff in full-length graphics card options ranging up to the GeForce GTX Titan X. Unfortunately, just two weeks after the Predator was released, Nvidia announced the GeForce GTX 1080, which quickly made the rest of its range obsolete. To keep the Predator current, Acer is now offering the mini-PC with a GTX 1080 inside. ...Read more...

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 is available now, and it's joining a heated battle with AMD's Radeon RX 480 in the $200-$250 price range. Both of these cards appear to deliver as much as twice the performance as a GeForce GTX 960-class card did at launch for about the same amount of money. While it feels like much longer, the GeForce GTX 960 came out just about a year and a half ago, and AMD's Radeon R9 380X has been out for just about nine months. Assuming you bought one of those cards at launch, it's not been a long time to have either one in your PC, and more recent midrange builders who chose those cards may not have had them for more than a few months.Considering that relatively short window of availability, we're curious how the GTX 1060 and RX 480 look to folks jonesing for an upgrade, and even folks looking at building new PCs. Do the GTX 1060 or RX 480 offer enough performance for you to make the jump? Is that GTX 960 or R9 380X—or even an older card—you ...Read more...

Microsoft released its financial results for its fiscal Q4 and its entire fiscal 2016 today. The company took in $20.6 billion in revenue and made $3.1 billion in operating income. While Microsoft earned 7% more revenue in the year-ago quarter, it also posted a $2 billion operating loss, so the return to profitability is welcome. Here's a quick tabulation of the company's results compared to a year ago:The More Personal Computing division (responsible for Windows and Surface devices) took in $8.9 billion in revenue, down 4% from a year ago. The company reported a surprising 27% increase in Windows ...Read more...

Today's high-end graphics cards can push tons of frames per second at lower resolutions, and Asus' PG248Q provides a lightning-quick sink for all those pixels. This 24" 1920x1080 display uses a TN panel to get a fast 1ms gray-to-gray response time, and it gives gamers a choice of Nvidia's G-Sync tech to eliminate tearing or Ultra Low Motion Blur to ensure crisp animation. Most impressively, this screen can run at refresh rates as high as 180 Hz. ...Read more...

Greetings, fellow gerbils. Welcome to today's episode of the 2016 Graphics Card Wars. Unless you've been living under Stonehenge, you're aware that the GeForce GTX 1060 has been released today. The card's $249 suggested price ($299 for the Founder's Edition) and its purported GTX 980-matching performance are a hard missile lock on the recently-released Radeon RX 480. Our labs have yet to be graced with the GTX 1060's presence, but we've collected some data from around the web to see what other reviewers discovered about the card.

Greetings, fellow gerbils. Welcome to today's episode of the 2016 Graphics Card Wars. Unless you've been living under Stonehenge, you're aware that the GeForce GTX 1060 has been released today. The card's $249 suggested price ($299 for the Founder's Edition) and its purported GTX 980-matching performance are a hard missile lock on the recently-released Radeon RX 480. Our labs have yet to be graced with the GTX 1060's presence, but we've collected some data from around the web to see what other reviewers discovered about the card.

It appears the green team wasn't content to let AMD own the midrange after all. Just two weeks after the launch of the Radeon RX 480, the Pascal-powered GeForce GTX 1060 is on store shelves. Jeff wrote some words about the GP106 chip powering the card this morning, so I'll spare you the technical stuff you probably already read anyway. If the card's performance proposition seems promising, you can ride the hype train all the way to the bank. ...Read more...

SSDs are all the rage in storage nowadays, but hard drives are still the winners for storing large amounts of data cost-effectively. Seagate is taking the 10TB hard drive to consumers today with its BarraCuda Pro series of drives, part of a broad rebranding effort that brings some clarity to the company's product lines. ...Read more...