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Way back in June of last year, we reported on an upcoming VR headset from Starbreeze Studios, the StarVR. Now, Acer and Starbreeze have signed a joint venture to design, produce, and sell the device. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Asus has released a ROG Strix headset to complement the ROG Strix laptop it announced today. True to its name, the ROG Strix Wireless gives gamers the option of cutting those pesky cables. Flip the earcups inward, and an owlish face stares back at you, too. ...Read more...

Greetings, fans of interstellar space operas. It's been a while since you had your last Mass Effect fix, and now Bioware has put out the official word: Mass Effect: Andromeda will arrive in "early 2017." The game was originally expected to ship sometime this year. In the official statement, Bioware's Aaryn Flynn noted that this will be the first Mass Effect title built using DICE's Frostbite game engine. Players ought to have more freedom to explore than before—something which should go hand in hand with the fact that humanity will be flying out of the Milky Way and into Andromeda. ...Read more...

There’s a rumor going around that Google is going to throw its hat into the VR headset ring. The Android news site Android Police has spied something that lends credence to the rumor. The Google Play Developer Console has added an entry for Android VR in its Pricing and Distribution settings.We've been hearing murmurs of a Google entry into the VR space as far back as February of this year, when Android Police reported on a rumor that the purported Android VR would stake out a middle ground between PC-tethered headsets and Samsung's $100 Gear VR. Tech investor Peter Rojas revived those rumors yesterday on ...Read more...

Asus is broadening the reach of its ROG Strix brand today with the ROG Strix GL502 gaming laptop. This machine has a 15.6", matte IPS display in your choice of resolutions: 1080p or 4K. For pushing those pixels, Asus suggests buyers will have the choice of a GeForce GTX 980M with 8GB of GDDR5 RAM or a GTX 970M with 6GB of GDDR5 memory. Nvidia's G-Sync tech could smooth out any frame-rate hiccups those graphics chips run into. ...Read more...

Welcome to another Friday deals of the week, the only lucky place to be on this Friday the 13th. Just like every Friday, we’ll be sharing some of the best deals in quality tech goodies. 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...

Given what we've heard from various motherboard manufacturers over the past few weeks, Intel's new high-end desktop CPUs, codenamed Broadwell-E, will slot into existing X99 motherboards with nothing more than a BIOS update. Those building new rigs might want something fresher than motherboards released alongside Haswell-E CPUs nearly two years ago, though. Times have changed, and users expect new machines to have features like U.2 connectors, USB 3.1 Gen2 ports, and—of course—RGB LEDs. MSI's new X99A Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard offers these niceties and more. ...Read more...

If you're one of the 57% of Steam gamers using a GeForce graphics card, and you're trying to fight like hell, make sure you have the latest driver. Nvidia's GeForce 365.19 driver is WHQL-certified and "Game Ready" for Doom, Homefront: The Revolution, and Master of Orion. ...Read more...

It's fair to say that one of the most exciting things to look forward to with a VR headset is to be inside a car or a spaceship, looking out the virtual windows. Project Cars has now announced patch 11.0, which adds support for the HTC Vive headset. I feel a great disturbance in RPM, as if millions of virtual engines sped up in joy. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Nvidia has released its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal 2017. The company posted quarterly revenue of $1.3 billion, a year-over-year gain of 13%, beating its projection of $1.26 billion for this quarter. Nvidia also made $245 million in operating income, a 39% improvement over the same quarter last year.The company made most of its revenue from GPU sales , and most of that money came from the gaming market. GPU sales totaled $1.08 billion, up 15% year-over-year. The gaming segment accounted for $687 million of that revenue. Nvidia appears to have ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Zotac’s Zbox is a pretty well-respected name around here. The Zbox family has a reputation for cramming powerful components into tiny enclosures without compromising too much on fan noise. Now Zotac has announced two new members of the Zbox family: the Zbox PI221 and Zbox PI220 stick PCs.These machines have a shared set of specs. Both hang off of an HDMI port for video and for mounting, like the Intel Compute Stick , and draw power from a single USB port. They both have a 10/100 Ethernet port, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and ...Read more...

Taiwanese computer chassis manufacturer Lian Li might offer one of the widest variety of cases on the market. From ITX cases that hold eleven drives to motorized standing desk computer cases, Lian Li probably has you covered. Last year at Computex, the company showed off the PC-O8, a large, dual-chamber design with tempered glass side panels. This year, Lian Li is revising the design with a little less glass and a little more color to make the PC-O9. ...Read more...

AMD is keeping up the pace of its driver releases with Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.5.2. The highlight of the release is support for Doom and a new Battleborn AMD Crossfire profile. Additionally, AMD has addressed a variety of bugs in the Radeon Settings software and fixed graphical issues in Hitman, League of Legends and Star Wars: Battlefront.AMD fixed a number of other issues in this release, as well. The biggest change is that the Radeon Settings should no longer recommend a downgrade to an older driver revision when using the new driver notification feature. The "restore factory defaults" ...Read more...

When we talk about VR here, we usually talk about the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Samsung's Gear VR is a major platform in its own right, too. The Gear VR is only $100, but it requires a recent Samsung smartphone to operate and lacks some of the niceties of the other HMDs. It does have one major advantage, though—it's readily available. Oculus is now looking to widen the appeal of the Gear VR by making it easier for customers to find and share VR content. ...Read more...

Anandtech has gotten wind of some fancy new networking hardware from Asus: the PCE-AC88 4x4 Wi-Fi adapter. According to the site, this PCIe x1 802.11ac card is capable of throughput of up to 2167Mb/s—theoretically higher than most wired Ethernet installations in the home. ...Read more...

AMD roadmaps from the Capsaicin event in March showed its mid-range Polaris GPUs launching in mid-2016, while the presumably higher-end Vega GPU was supposed to follow sometime in 2017. Rumors flying around the web now indicate that AMD has advanced Vega's launch to mid-October after Nvidia's GTX 1080 announcement. ...Read more...

Firaxis has announced Civilization VI. I'm going to let that fact sink in, along with its implications for all your spare time. Polygon published an interview with Firaxis' lead designer Ed Beach, detailing all the wondrous new ways in which you'll forego the company of your family and friends for months on end. ...Read more...

Microsoft released a new preview build for Windows 10 Insiders on the fast ring today. The headline news for today’s build, Build 14342, is a change to the way that Edge users will interact with extensions for the browser. We also get the usual laundry list of bug fixes in this update.In the past, browser extensions for Edge have been extracted and loaded from a local folder. With the new build, Microsoft says the extensions can be downloaded directly from the Windows store. It sounds like the change ...Read more...

In a blog post yesterday about the GeForce GTX 1080 launch, Micron confirmed something we've suspected since this past Friday: GDDR5X memory is in mass production now. That news beats the projected "summer" timeline for GDDR5X mass production we reported on earlier this year. ...Read more...

It's no secret that companies love preying on consumers' insecurities about size—whether it's for height, trucks, or body appendages. The mean folks at Thermalright have joined that party by trying to make us all feel bad about the inadequacy of our CPU coolers. Enter the Le Grand Macho RT CPU cooler—all 2 lbs (900g) of it. ...Read more...

Back in October of last year, Western Digital announced its intent to buy SanDisk for $19 billion. While the road to completing that acquisition has been rocky, it looks as though the two companies have cleared the last of the hurdles keeping the deal from going through. SanDisk reports that it has received approval from the Ministry of Commerce of China to allow the deal to go forward. The two companies expect to close the deal May 12, 2016.Back in February, it looked like this deal might fall through . Western Digital had initially expected a $3.7 billion equity investment from Unis United as part of the deal, but Unis backed out when the US Committee on Foreign Investment ...Read more...

Cooler Master's MasterCase 5 and MasterCase Pro 5 are both solid, flexible cases that can be upgraded at will thanks to their modular interiors and a variety of aftermarket parts. Today, Cooler Master is releasing the next evolution in its modular MasterCase family: the MasterCase Maker 5. This case features redesigned top and front panels, a built-in fan and lighting hub, and a refreshed front I/O panel with what we believe is a first for an ATX mid-tower: a USB Type-C port. ...Read more...

In a Windows 10 update that will be released "later today," Microsoft is finally adding support for uncapped framerates to apps on the Unified Windows Platform. This update also gives UWP titles support for Nvidia's G-Sync and AMD's FreeSync technologies.Until today, UWP games were required to use vertical sync, so these two changes are a welcome relief for titles like Gears of War Ultimate Edition. That game was fraught with technical issues ...Read more...

Broadwell-E’s release is on the horizon, finally marking an end to the two-year reign of Haswell-E processors. The X99 chipset that's hosted Haswell-E CPUs isn’t ready to give up its throne, though. Broadwell-E is socket-compatible with Haswell-E motherboards, and a firmware update is all that's required for existing X99 motherboards to support the upcoming processors. Enthusiasts willing to shell out for Intel's latest high-end CPUs aren’t likely to be content with two-year-old boards, though, and Asus is ready to solve that problem today with four updated X99 motherboards.1 x M.2

TR gerbils might be tired of all the Nvidia news since Friday's event, but here's another bit: those GTX 1080 graphics cards are one step closer to market now. Gigabyte, Zotac, EVGA, Galax, and Inno3D have all made announcements regarding Founders Edition (read: reference) GTX 1080 boards in one form or another. As we reported yesterday, the Founders Edition version of the new 10-series GeForce cards will be the first ones to ship. ...Read more...

Phanteks' latest release is an update to its Enthoo Pro M. The new Enthoo Pro M Acrylic offers all the versatility and flexibility of last year's model, along with a huge acrylic window that showcases your rig's internals. ...Read more...

Heads up, anyone who's a fan of The Witcher 3. CD Projekt Red (or perhaps Valve) may have inadvertently revealed the release date of the game's upcoming expansion: Blood and Wine. Twitter user Wario64 managed to grab a few screenshots of the expansion's Steam store page before it was pulled down. That page showed a release date of May 30.The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine out ...Read more...

Digital assistants are a big part of how we interact with our mobile devices these days, and a big leap in digital assistant functionality could give a big advantage to a mobile OS. Siri, originally an independent product that was purchased by Apple in 2010, was touted as a major step forward for Apple’s iPhone. Now, the team that created Siri has given the first public demonstration of Viv, its new personal assistant. The Viv demonstration took place at the TechCrunch Disrupt NewYork event recently. Take a look at what it can do:...Read more...

Hot on the heels of Bethesda’s announcement last week that Fallout 4 would officially begin supporting mods, the company has given fans of the series another reason to rejoice. On May 19, the company will be releasing an expansion called Far Harbor for its popular post-apocalyptic RPG....Read more...

AMD is making it easier to figure out the details of compatible monitors on its FreeSync page. A recent update added refresh-rate ranges and panel types for a large number of FreeSync monitors from Acer, LG, and Samsung, among others. AMD now includes the following details to help make picking a FreeSync monitor easier: manufacturer, model, size, panel type, resolution, refresh-rate and FreeSync range, inputs, and low-framerate-compensation support. ...Read more...

Over at the Overclock.net forums, user Maintenance Bot has apparently run a couple of tests on a Core i7-6850K engineering sample. In case you aren't already aware, yes, that's a Broadwell-E chip from Intel's upcoming high-end desktop product line. He compared the chip's multi-core Cinebench results to his own Core i7-5820K at the same overclocked speed—4.2GHz—and came away with an impressive performance improvement: a score of 1311 with the Broadwell-E chip, versus 1191 with the Haswell-E CPU. ...Read more...

Everyone's doing a little spring cleaning lately, and HP is no exception. The company is refreshing its entire consumer-oriented Pavilion series of PCs, with all-new desktops, all-in-ones, laptops, and convertibles. The focus for the new line seems to be on saving space and establishing a coherent design. The new Pavilions stay the course for the most part, but these machines have a few new features worth mentioning. ...Read more...

Well, looks like the rumor mill may have gotten the June reveal date of Pascal-based gaming cards wrong. A mysterious new site called "Order of 10" has popped up, completet with a countdown timer and imagery of gray polygons heading towards Earth. Look familiar? It should. The countdown ends Friday, at which time these mysterious polygons will land. ...Read more...

Philips is releasing the BDM4350UC in the United States and the UK today. This 43-inch 4K IPS display supersedes the company's BDM4065UC monitor, which was a little smaller and used a VA panel. Thanks to its relatively large size for a PC monitor, this display offers a relatively standard 103-PPI density—about the same as that of a 27" 2560x1440 display. That PPI figure might make the BDM4350UC a good choice for folks who want the information density of a 4K display without the eyestrain of running smaller 4K screens without a scaling factor. ...Read more...

Back in March, we reported on the demise of Intel’s long-held “tick-tock” product development strategy. For years, Intel has predictably released a line of CPUs with a new manufacturing process one year, and a line on the same process with a new architecture the next. This cadence is changing with the current 14-nm process node. Under the tick-tock schedule, we would have seen products made on a new process node—10-nm—this year. Instead, we are looking at an optimization of the 14-nm process, called "Kaby Lake." Now we have purported benchmarks of a Kaby Lake processor, courtesy of an anonymous posting in the SiSoftware Sandra database.The leaked benchmark shows a four-core, eight-thread processor with 3.6GHz base and 4.2GHz Turbo clock speeds, along with 8MB of L3 cache. That base clock puts it about in the middle of the i7-6700 (3.4GHz) and i7-6700K (4.0GHz), and the 4.2GHz Turbo speed aligns with the i7-6700K. Even if this benchmark does actually represent a Kaby Lake processor, it ...Read more...

Last fall, Dell announced that it was acquiring major business storage and services corporation EMC. The $67 billion deal is moving forward, and Dell has now revealed details about how the combined businesses will be branded and organized.The combined company, with its entire family of brands, will be known as Dell Technologies. There will be two primary sub-brands: Dell and Dell EMC. The company's client PC and technology business will continue to operate ...Read more...

It's been well over two years since Nvidia tried to block all shipments of Samsung's Galaxy phones and tablets, claiming that these devices infringed on a number of Nvidia's patents. Now, it appears that the story has come to a close. According to Nvidia, the two companies have agreed to settle all pending litigation.The settlement agreement covers cases in a number of courts. Nvidia initially filed complaints against Samsung with the U.S. District Court in Delaware and the U.S. International Trade Commision (ITC). Shortly thereafter, however, Samsung filed a countersuit with the ITC and another in ...Read more...

Oculus announced a program today that should allow more potential VR customers to get some hands-on time with the company's Rift headset. Starting May 7, some Best Buy stores will have the Oculus Rift in stock, both for purchase and as a demo. ...Read more...

Antec's newly minted P9 Window mid-tower case provides an unobstructed view of its interior through a large side-panel window, as its name suggests. Visible on the inside are cooling vents on the top, bottom, front, and back and tool-less expansion trays, bays, and slots. Not so obvious are the mounts for fans or radiators and hidden cable routing areas behind the motherboard tray. ...Read more...

Variations on MOBA games are everywhere these days. There's Blizzard's Overwatch, Epic's Paragon, and 2K's Battleborn. And, of course, there are new Nvidia graphics drivers geared up for all this multiplayer action. Please welcome Nvidia's WHQL-certified 365.10 driver release.If it's not clear by now, Nvidia says the new release is "Game Ready" for the titles mentioned above. Our own Nathan "Jr. Damage" Wasson has given his preliminary seal of approval to Overwatch and Battleborn in particular. There's also good news for ...Read more...

Intel has had a rough go of the last couple of weeks. Following its April 19 earnings report, Intel announced a plan to lay off 12,000 workers, representing about 11% of its workforce. The company also said it would be re-aligning its operations as it transitions from "a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices." We now have word about the product lines under the axe, as well as some clarification of those that aren’t, courtesy of a Forbes.com report.According to Patrick Moorhead from Forbes, the biggest takeaway from his conversations with Intel is that the company is continuing its focus on the products that TR gerbils will be most concerned with. Moorhead says the company’s bread-and-butter processor lines ...Read more...

Last year or so, AMD showed off a prototype of an upcoming dual-Fiji card. The two-headed cat eventually came out of the bag, and it was shown to the world as the Radeon Pro Duo. While AMD initially hinted at the Pro Duo being a new breed of gaming monster, the company is now billing the card as a simple, easy-to-install solution for VR developers and other professional users. There's a burning question, though: "how well does it game?" Well, PC Perspective got a hold of one of these babies and put it through its paces.The Radeon Pro Duo has two full-sized Fiji GPUs and 8GB of HBM RAM. That sounds oddly close to a couple of R9 Nanos, and if you think "Nanos-on-a-stick," you're close enough for most purposes. Since the Pro Duo is a high-powered card, PC Perspective ran ...Read more...

Back in March, we reported on Microsoft’s plan to stop development of the free-to-play MMO version of Fable, named Fable Legends. Fable Legends was being produced by Lionhead Studios, and when the cancellation announcement was made there was some uncertainty about its future. Today, in a statement to Polygon.com, Microsoft has announced the closing of the studio.Fable Legends was one of the first titles to make use of DirectX 12, and even back in September of last year, a pre-release version was complete enough for us to use it in an early benchmark of the API . The title was in closed ...Read more...

A few months ago, AMD announced that it was spinning off its chip assembly, test, mark, and pack (ATMP) operations into a joint venture with Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics (NFME). The companies jointly announced the successful closure of that deal today. AMD will receive $371 million from NFME as part of the bargain. In exchange, NFME will get an 85% share of AMD's ATMP operations in Penang, Malaysia and Suzhou, China. AMD will retain a 15% stake in those businesses.

You guys are terrible. Every time we run a contest here at TR, we're reminded that our gerbil collective is skilled at... everything, really. Whether it's sculpting antropomorphic art with hardware, drawing computing-related cartoons, or writing up mock diary entries in the life of a PC, it's pretty much settled that gerbils can do anything, perhaps up to and including ruling the world. Hmm—there's an idea for later.Since you're all so good at these things, contest entries tend to be very difficult to judge. We have to say, though, that the entries in our Macrium Data Disasters contest are nothing short of amazing. Your work this time around made our task particularly difficult. A lot ...Read more...

It's deals-of-the-week day, gerbils. Today we have a System-and-Peripherals-Guide themed list for you. If you were hedging on a new rig based on one of our System Guide recommendations, we have some price drops courtesy of Newegg to sweeten the deal:That's all for this week, folks. If we missed a great deal somewhere else, be ...Read more...

Phanteks is giving builders a a more expansive view of the systems they build inside its Enthoo Evolv ATX case today. The company's Tempered Glass Edition case swaps the Evolv's standard side panels for two full sheets of tempered glass. This version of the case also adds 10-color RGB LED accent lighting around the power button and on the front panel. Those lights can be configured to run in solid, "breathing," or "color cycle" modes. ...Read more...