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Tom's Hardware is reporting that Samsung's follow-up to the SM951 first-generation NVMe SSD will be shipping to OEMs next week. This is the SM961 that we first heard about back in March, so the timing is right. The new drive features Samsung's new Polaris controller (no relation to a certain GPU), and it comes in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB NVMe models. The 1TB tier is a first for Samsung's NVMe drives.This information comes from a listing on Australian site RamCity , although the page has since been removed. To be clear, the pricing listed above is in US dollars. As we reported before, the new controller is a five-core, 8-channel design. Tom's ...Read more...

The rise of VR headsets has revitalized the desktop-replacement notebook for developers and demonstrators who need a powerful yet portable system. Aorus' X7 DT appears ready and able to rise to the challenge. This 17.3" beast trades the twin GeForce GTX 970Ms of Aorus' previous top-end notebook, the X7 Pro v5, for a single desktop GeForce GTX 980 card. Aorus also gives game streamers the option to offload video processing from the CPU with an available AverMedia M.2 capture card. That card is claimed to boost FPS rates up to 30% during game streaming. ...Read more...

It's a fair guess that the majority of users have a browser window open all day, often with multiple tabs or windows. That means it can considered an "always-on" piece of software for the most part, and software like that needs to go easy on that precious battery juice. Microsoft recently did a thorough comparison of power usage among major Windows browsers, and its Edge browser emerged as a clear winner. A video is worth at least 10,000 words, so here it is:...Read more...

When we wrote about Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming a little while back, we called it the company's "top-end" offering. At the time, that was true. Now, there's a new kid on the block: the helpfully-named GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming Water Cooling. Gigabyte puts this card's GP104 GPU under a closed-loop liquid cooler to let builders choose where to exhaust its waste heat. ...Read more...

Nvidia's Tesla P100 used a special mezzanine connector for its proprietary NVLink interface when it arrived in April. That interface isn't common in typical servers and workstations, leaving HPC customers out of the Pascal party unless they purchase one of Nvidia's DGX-1 systems. Today, Nvidia is making the Tesla P100 accessible to more traditional third-party systems with a PCIe 3.0 version of the card. ...Read more...

The Top500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world got a new king today. The Sunway TaihuLight, a new installation at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, took the top spot with a Linpack score of 93 petaflops. TaihuLight triples the performance of the former number-one system, the Tianhe-2. That's quite impressive by itself, but TaihuLight achieves its performance entirely with Chinese ShenWei CPUs and a custom interconnect. Tianhe-2 relied on two Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs and three Xeon Phi coprocessors in each of its 16,000 nodes to achieve its 33.9-PFLOP Linpack performance figure, according to the Top500 page on that system.

There's nothing quite like a brand that specializes in doing a particular thing and doing it well. Scythe is such a company, and it's just released an improved version of its top-down heatsink, the Kabuto 3. ...Read more...

Microsoft has a new tool in testing for Windows Insiders that purports to make fresh OS installs as painless as possible. The life of an Insider can apparently be a tumultuous one. Broken new features and buggy updates mean that it's probably good to make a fresh start every so often, and this tool could go a long way toward automating that tedious process. The new tool doesn't have an official name, but Microsoft seems to be using the phrase "start fresh" to manage communications about it. ...Read more...

It's Friday, gerbils, and you know what that means. That's right, you've survived another week, and your reward is a basket of PC hardware deals gleaned from the various online retailers we survey. Have a look.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...

Almost every game at Microsoft's conference at E3 2016 was introduced as an "Xbox One and Windows 10" title, highlighting the company's new Xbox Play Anywhere program. Cross-platform and cross-device play are the new order of the day at Microsoft. The company demonstrated Minecraft Realms with players on iOS, Android, Xbox One, and Windows, including Oculus' John Carmack on stage playing in a Gear VR headset.As part of that big news, several titles which were formerly couched as Xbox One exclusives are now coming to the Windows Store, including Gears of War 4 and Platinum Games' Scalebound . As Phil Spencer announced at Build 2016 , all of Microsoft's first-party Xbox One games ...Read more...

EKWB will happily sell you a full-coverage waterblock for your reference GTX 1080 already, but not everybody wants to go to the trouble of tearing apart a perfectly good card to slap a waterblock on. Folks who want a card they can plug into their custom loops right out of the box now have an answer with MSI's Sea Hawk EK X GeForce GTX 1080. ...Read more...

Early this year, SteelSeries showed off its Rival 700 mouse at CES, and it's now finally available for purchase. Thanks to SteelSeries, we have our hands on a Rival 700 now, and we're ready to put it to the test. ...Read more...

If you think 7" tablets are just a tad too small and you'd like something a little bigger with a very sharp screen, Asus has just the thing for you. Meet the ZenPad Z8 and all of its 8 inches of goodness. ...Read more...

The launches of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 didn't make retail inventory of Nvidia's Maxwell graphics cards disappear, and it looks like the first waves of major price cuts are starting to hit those cards as we speak. Those cuts are deepest at what used to be the top end of the market. A glance at Newegg shows GeForce GTX 980 Tis are now selling for anywhere from $430 to $450 at their lowest, and cheaper GTX 970s can be had starting from $240.These price drops might look good on their faces, so we'll be blunt: there's virtually no reason to buy any Maxwell card for the same price as one with a Pascal chip. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti and the GTX 1070 perform about the same, to be sure, but the Maxwell card doesn't benefit from Pascal's architectural or process improvements. Nvidia's latest chip has some especially tantalizing ...Read more...

The folks at TechPowerUp published an exposé of sorts this morning with the provocative headline "MSI and Asus send VGA Review Samples with Higher Clocks than Retail Cards." I nearly spit out my figurative coffee when I saw that lead-in. If that story was true, it would be quite the scoop. As with so much in life, it turns out that the situation on the ground isn't quite so simple.TechPowerUp's actual beef with Asus and MSI isn't that the companies shipped it GTX 1080s with higher clocks that one could get with a retail card, as that fiery headline might lead one to believe. Instead, what's going on is that these board partners are shipping the site cards with an aggressive clock profile ...Read more...

We've seen announcements for a fair few fancy GeForce GTX 1080s cross the TR news desk over the last couple of weeks. Some folks just want the GPU, though, and don't care for all the niceties of a high-end graphics card. Asus looks to be servicing those customers with the Turbo GeForce GTX 1080. It has the same 1733MHz boost clock, 1607MHz base clock, and 8GB of 10GT/s GDDR5X memory as the reference board, but ditches the pricey aluminum shroud for a more basic plastic look. ...Read more...

There's been a lot of talk about AMD's next series of Opterons based on the new Zen architecture. Earlier this year, a CERN engineer revealed that Zen server processors would have up to 32 cores and eight channels of DDR4 memory. Now, Fudzilla is reporting that the massive microprocessor, which the site calls "Naples," will have 64MB of last-level cache, 128 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, and an LGA socket called SP3.The rumor claims that Zen processors will range from that huge 32-core package all the way down to dual-cores. Thermal design power on the new chips purportedly ranges from 35W up ...Read more...

A few days ago at the PC Gaming Show event during E3, AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed the RX 460 and RX 470 graphics cards for the first time. The days of seemingly-endless Pitcairn rebrands are over: these cards, along with the RX 480 that was already revealed at Computex, will all be based on AMD's new Polaris graphics architecture. This is good news for AMD and for the market, and today we have some information on these cards courtesy of a deck of slides from AMD. ...Read more...

Windows Insider program lead Dona Sarkar updated the Windows blog yesterday afternoon to announce the release of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 14366 and Mobile build 14364. This update isn't as exciting as some of the past updates since it focuses primarily on performance and stability updates, but improvements in those areas are always welcome.Major fixes in this update include a solved crash in the privacy settings dialog, the squashing of buggy behavior with multi-monitor configurations, and an end to high CPU usage in the Edge browser under certain circumstances. Devices with multiple batteries should ...Read more...

Several companies showed products at CES last year promising to bring mouse-and-keyboard gaming into the living room. Among them, Roccat's Sova was the simplest design: simply a keyboard integrated into a large, cushioned board with mousepad and wrist-rest. We've actually reported on the Sova before way back in 2014 when it was first announced, but now the lapboard is available for pre-order, and things have changed a bit since then. ...Read more...

Upstart handset maker OnePlus revealed its latest take on the high-end smartphone formula today during a presentation in VR. The OnePlus 3 is an aluminum-bodied device housing a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC, 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and 64GB of flash storage. It runs OnePlus' Oxygen OS, a lightly massaged Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It'll be available in "granite" or "soft gold" finishes for $399. ...Read more...

Oculus updated its blog yesterday to let fans know that the Oculus Touch motion controllers will still be launching later this year. What's new is that the controllers will be useful in 30 "full, made-for-VR games," 20 of which are brand-new Touch-specific titles. Oculus posted a video to its Youtube channel demonstrating simulated gameplay with the Oculus Touch that recalls a similar video for the Vive and SteamVR. Titles on display in that video include Dead & Buried, Ripcoil, VR Sports Challenge, Wilson's Heart and Unspoken....Read more...

Alienware is on the ground at E3 once again this year with new models of its Area-51 tower, Aurora mid-tower, and Alpha small-form-factor PC, as well as the Alienware 13 laptop. Alienware says the new products are intended to commemorate the company's 20-year anniversary. All of the new machines have been refreshed with the latest CPUs and GPUs, naturally, but Alienware has made some more changes that are worth discussing. ...Read more...

Apple's WWDC keynote today was all about its major software platforms. The company teased upcoming features in watchOS, iOS, and tvOS, but the biggest changes are coming to Mac OS X—now called macOS.Apple File System: pic.twitter.com/4nrm4IllSK ...Read more...

At the PC Gaming Show today at E3, AMD revealed two more pieces of its Polaris lineup. The company will be releasing a Radeon RX 460 and a Radeon RX 470 underneath the already-announced RX 480. The company isn't releasing many details about these products yet, but it did say the Radeon RX 460 will slot in at under 75W as part of its mission to be "the ultimate eSports card."

Bethesda Softworks held its second-ever E3 keynote late last night in Los Angeles. As the developer of the recent Fallout games as well as the beloved Elder Scrolls series, Bethesda needs no introduction. The company's big news last night regarded titles it publishes for its partner studios under the umbrella of Zenimax Media....Read more...

Razer's Open Source VR project has long been a quiet third option for folks looking to strap on a VR headset. The affordable price tag of its Hacker Development Kit (HDK) hardware came with one drawback, though: a relatively low-resolution, 1920x1080 screen. OSVR is giving its headset a major upgrade today with the HDK 2. The new hardware will come with a 2160x1200 OLED display running at 90 Hz, putting it on par with the offerings from the industry's two big players. ...Read more...

Microsoft announced this morning that it will be acquiring professional social network LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, or $196 per share, in an all-cash transaction. That price represents about a 33% premium on LinkedIn's $131.08 closing price from last Friday. The companies say that LinkedIn "will retain its distinct brand, culture, and independence." The deal has already been approved by both companies' boards of directors, and the companies expect the transaction will close by the end of this year. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner will remain at his post, and he'll report directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.In its presentation regarding the deal (PowerPoint), Microsoft envisions a future where professionals' LinkedIn data will eventually become central to services like Windows, Outlook, Skype, and SharePoint. The company calls the profile a single "source of truth" for a professional's identity, background, and accomplishments. The company's vision also includes a future where data from Office apps is ...Read more...

Intel's struggling mobile efforts may have just gotten a major boost. According to a Bloomberg report, Apple will use Intel modems in some of its next-generation iPhones. The site's sources say that next-gen iPhones destined for AT&T's network in the USA will use Intel modems, as will some overseas models of the handset.Intel isn't getting a monopoly on the modems in Apple's next-gen phones, though. Qualcomm—whose modems have been inside at least some iPhones from the iPhone 4 on —will continue to supply chips for ...Read more...

TR BBQ fans will know that I have a new plan for live streaming the event this year. In order to truly capture the essence of the TR BBQ, though, I need to address the pathetic Wi-Fi situation at the cottage so I can move the camera freely without dropping the stream. We asked our friends at Asus to help us out, and they delivered by sending us an RT-AC88U router and an RP-AC68U wireless repeater. ...Read more...

Today is the day! The day when you can get your eager gerbil paws on a sweet GTX 1070 graphics card that should get you high-end performance at a more reasonable price than ever. To help you on your quest to obtain such a card, we've prepared a round-up of the multiple flavors of non-Founders-Edition GTX 1070s on offer.

Happy Friday gerbils, and welcome to another Friday deals-of-the-week post. We're hot off another Nvidia launch today, although you might have to fight to find a GeForce GTX 1070 you can actually buy. So how about some deals with a bit more stock behind them? Take a look.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...

Today's the day that the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition becomes available for purchase. The long-awaited transition off of 28-nm lithography started, of course, with the GTX 1080, but that high-end product has a high-end price tag to match. In traditional fashion, the GTX 1070 offers most of the performance of its sibling for a lot less money. ...Read more...

The fine folks at Valve must be feeling virtually generous. Hot on the heels of a feature-packed update to The Lab, the software maker is now turning its attention to landscapes and vistas. Enter the Destinations Workshop, a free VR application that lets users design their own interactive landscapes and share them with others. These are the same environments that appear in The Lab's Postcards minigame. ...Read more...

Lenovo's Phab 2 Pro phone and its Google Tango brains would have made an impressive enough announcement on their own, but the company wasn't done yet. It's also unveiling its next high-end Motorola smartphones today: the Moto Z and the extra-durable Moto Z Force.

At Lenovo's Tech World event today, the company announced the world's first production phone with Google's Tango (née Project Tango) environment-mapping technology on board: the Phab 2 Pro. This enormous phablet has four cameras, but the three on the rear are the most interesting. To power Tango, the Phab 2 Pro has a 16MP RGB camera, a depth-sensing camera, and a motion-tracking camera. ...Read more...

Networked media software Plex is announcing support for the Nvidia Shield TV set-top box today. While the program already had a media client available for Android devices, Plex now supports using the Shield TV as a server. This means you can stuff all your movies, TV shows, and music into your Plex library—on the Shield TV or elsewhere on your network—and then have it host your files for your other devices. The blog post says the Shield can broadcast 4K video at the coveted 60 FPS, as well as manage "multiple simultaneous streams," although it doesn't say how many. Formats supported include MPEG-2, H.264, and the new high-efficiency H.265 codec. ...Read more...

Fans of extreme graphics setups, get your handkerchiefs ready. Nvidia is largely killing off its in-house support efforts for three- and four-way SLI. First, some background. During its Pascal announcement, Nvidia unveiled a new SLI HB (for "high-bandwidth") bridge that would be required for optimal GeForce GTX 1080 SLI performance at high resolutions. Later, in its GeForce GTX 1080 whitepaper, the company advised that two-way SLI would be the default supported multi-GPU configuration, and that three- or four-way SLI would require signing up for an "Enthusiast Key" that would need to be loaded into a GTX 1080 somehow.That website never materialized, and now Nvidia appears to be dropping three- and four-way SLI support from future SLI profiles altogether. In a statement to PC Perspective ...Read more...

Fans of extreme graphics setups, get your handkerchiefs ready. Nvidia is largely killing off its in-house support for three- and four-way SLI today. First, some background. During its Pascal announcement, Nvidia announced a new SLI HB (for "high-bandwidth") bridge that would be required for optimal GeForce GTX 1080 SLI performance at high resolutions. Later, in its GeForce GTX 1080 whitepaper, the company advised that two-way SLI would be the default supported multi-GPU configuration, and that three- or four-way SLI would require signing up for an "Enthusiast Key" that would need to be loaded into a GTX 1080 somehow. That website never materialized, and now Nvidia appears to be dropping three- and four-way SLI support from future SLI profiles altogether. In a statement to PC Perspective, the company said that it's "focusing [its] efforts on 2-way SLI only and will continue to include 2-way SLI profiles in our Game Ready Drivers." ...Read more...

It seems like everyone's announcing new SSDs lately. Not one to be left out, Corsair is updating its highest-performance SSD family with the Neutron Series XTi. These drives will be equipped with a Phison quad-core flash controller. Those internals sound a lot like the Phison S10 Patriot's using in its new Ignite SSDs. Like the Ignite, the Neutron Series XTi's capacities will top out at 2TB. ...Read more...

Adata's Premier line makes up the majority of the company's SSD offerings, and the baseline SP550 is frequently among the best-priced SSDs around. Another member is joining that family today: the Premier SP580 SSD. This budget SSD is equipped with TLC flash, a Marvell controller, and a SATA 6Gbps interface. Adata is quoting sequential numbers of 560MB/s for reads and 410MB/s for writes. As we've come to expect for budget drives, Adata doesn't specify random I/O performance. ...Read more...

Firefox is getting multi-process support. No, seriously, this time it's for real! Only seven years after it was first announced, Mozilla is turning the knobs to enable the Electrolysis multi-process feature in Firefox 48, which is set to be released on August 2. ...Read more...

Gigabyte has officially announced its new top-end GeForce GTX 1080, the GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming. The company actually revealed the new card on Twitter during Computex, but now we have some hard info to discuss. The Xtreme Gaming line represents the highest-end of Gigabyte's graphics products, and while the GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming certainly seems to be a fine product in its own right, we think the most interesting feature of this packages is Gigabyte's new VR Link peripheral. ...Read more...

Intel recently sent us a 400GB, 2.5" version of its 750 Series SSD as part of its Broadwell-E review kit. We didn't think much of it at the time, but it turns out the drive we received is a little special. To make this formerly-U.2-cabled drive more accessible to system builders, Intel will soon be offering a version of the 2.5" 750 Series SSD with the M.2 adapter cable you see below. ...Read more...

We're told that if you're willing to deal with the cost and the clutter, the HTC Vive provides the best VR experience available right now. At least, that's what we took from early reviews of the device, and now the Vive has one more advantage over its competition: you can actually buy one. HTC issued a press release today stating that the Vive is not only shipping to select retail stores, but also that online orders are shipping within 2-3 business days. ...Read more...

Nvidia has posted a new set of GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 368.39 provides optimizations for Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which launches later today, and Edge of Nowhere, a new Oculus Rift title. The drivers also add support for the much-anticipated GeForce GTX 1070....Read more...

If you're a fan of rooftop-crossing parkour shenanigans and you've got a Radeon graphics card, you'll want to grab the new Radeon Software 16.6.1 update. The release adds official support for EA's new Mirror's Edge Catalyst title, as well as Epic's in-house MOBA-shooter hybrid Paragon. AMD doesn't clarify exactly what that support entails, but we expect generally improved performance and greater stability in supported titles. ...Read more...

Greetings, virtual-reality gamers everywhere! Well, greetings to those with a Vive headset, anyway. Valve has published a substantial update to its free VR game The Lab, adding a handful of enhancements to the mini-games, and a brand-new global scoreboard—in an attempt to introduce "a spirit of bloodthirsty competition to the world of ethically-questionable research." A noble goal indeed, we say. ...Read more...

TR head honcho and man-on-the-scene Jeff Kampman stopped by Colorful's booth at Computex 2016 and snapped a picture of a peculiar product last week. I could write a thousand words, or I could show you the picture: ...Read more...

Intel is flexing its big guns with its Xeon E7 v4 series. With up to 24 cores and 60 MB of L3 cache per chip, these Broadwell-EX CPUs represent the largest chips crafted using that microarchitecture. ...Read more...