Techreport

Chinese display manufacturer AOC recently announced that it planned to release a new line of gaming monitors under the brand name Agon. Today it's released details for the first display in the series, the AG271QX. ...Read more...

HP's new Chromebook 13 G1 could compete with Apple's MacBook at half the price. The Chromebook 13 G1 offers an aesthetically pleasing, brushed-aluminum body that may be the best-looking Chromebook since the Pixel (even if it doesn't come in pink). This the first Chromebook we know of with Intel's Skylake Core M processors. That class of CPU might let HP's Chromebook strike the right balance between performance and battery life for this platform. ...Read more...

Market research firm IDC has published its report on the state of the tablet market for the first quarter of 2016, and it's not a glowing one. Consumers remain disinterested in tablets as a category, and worldwide shipments of these devices—including both slates and convertibles—dropped 14.7% compared to this time last year. That drop continues a year-and-a-half-long slide in tablet sales, which IDC blames on "first quarter seasonality and an overall disinterested customer base."Apple and Samsung bore the worst of the slump. That's not surprising, since Apple has the biggest share of the market at 25.9%, while Samsung holds the runner-up spot with 15.2% piece of the pie. Those marketshare numbers are down versus last quarter too, from ...Read more...

MSI has announced a round of new C232-chipset motherboards today: the E3 Krait Gaming V5 and the E3M Workstation V5. These boards are designed to work with Intel’s Xeon E3-1200 v5 processors. Both models support ECC DDR4 RAM, possibly the biggest selling point of these professional boards versus more consumer-oriented products. ...Read more...

As the cost of flash storage continues to drop, buyers are demanding larger SSD capacities for their money. With its new Z410 line, SanDisk is adding a 480GB capacity tier to its most affordable series of drives. On top of that, the new lineup offers a modest performance boost over the company's current Z400s budget SSDs. ...Read more...

As the cost of flash storage continues to drop, buyers are demanding larger SSD capacities for their money. With its new Z410 line, SanDisk is adding a 480GB capacity tier to its most affordable series of drives. On top of that, the new lineup offers a modest performance boost over the company's current Z400s budget SSDs. ...Read more...

Samsung Electronics has reported its first-quarter financial results. The company made an operating profit of 6.7 trillion Korean won ($5.9 billion) on revenue of 49.8 trillion won ($43.7 billion). Operating profit was up 12% over the same time a year ago, and revenue increased 5.7%. The company slightly beat its own guidance of 49 trillion KRW in revenue and 6.6 trillion KRW in profit.The company said its Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones led its earnings growth, thanks to an early launch and strong sales ...Read more...

If you own a Samsung Gear VR and often have a jonesing for a dose of VR Minecraft on the go, Oculus has a fix for you today. The company announced that Minecraft: Gear VR Edition is now available on the Oculus Store for $6.99. Game development legend John Carmack says "my strongest memories of being inside VR are from the time I’ve spent exploring Minecraft on Gear VR." 'Nuff said....Read more...

We first learned about Seagate's 10TB Enterprise Capacity hard drive back in January, and now the company reports that it's shipping these monster drives "in volume." In particular, the company says its partners at Supermicro and Ciara are incorporating these 10TB spinners into their mass-storage products for the data center, like Supermicro's four-rack-unit, 90-bay JBOD chassis for 3.5" drives. Fill that baby up with 10TB Enterprise Capacity drives, and you'd have nearly a petabyte of unformatted storage to work with. ...Read more...

Luxury audio hardware aficionados, rejoice. Onkyo is releasing its DP-X1 portable digital audio player. No longer do you have to suffer through the noise and distortion of your smartphone's woefully inadequate output hardware when you're on the go. The DP-X1 features dual ESS Sabre ES9018K2M DACs and Sabre 9601K amplifiers. That hardware lets the DP-X1 generate a balanced output signal. ...Read more...

Intel discussed its vision for the USB Type-C connector during its IDF16 presentation. The biggest changes the company wants to make center on the USB Power Delivery specification, but two new alternate mode specifications with interesting implications for future peripherals were discussed, too: USB Authentication and USB Bridging. Another interesting tidbit involves USB Type-C Digital Audio, a feature that might motivate headphone makers to put a USB Type-C plug on the ends of their cans. ...Read more...

Apple has released its financial results for its fiscal second quarter, and the champagne is staying in the bottle today. The company made $10.5 billion in net income on $50.6 billion in revenue. Those numbers are down from the $13.6 billion in net income and $58 billion in revenue the company took in during the same quarter a year ago. Gross margin fell a bit to 39.4%, down from 40.8% a year ago.They say all good things must come to an end, and Apple's long record of skyrocketing iPhone sales appears to have reached its peak. ...Read more...

Rejoice, Fallout 4 fans! Bethesda has an announcement for you today, and it's a doozy. The game is finally getting official support for mods, which players can create themselves using the in-game Creation Kit. ...Read more...

TR readers jumping into VR are likely consulting our System Guide already, but some folks just want the convenience of a prebuilt, VR-ready PC. Oculus is catering to those buyers with its Oculus Ready program. That program already features PCs from Asus, Alienware, and Dell. Now, Falcon Northwest is joining the party. The company is introducing two PCs to the Oculus Ready lineup today: the diminutive Tiki mini-tower and the beefier Talon mid-tower. ...Read more...

If you hadn't already heard, our friends at Macrium are now offering deeper discounts for TR subscribers. Silver subscribers are now eligible for a 20% discount on purchases made from the Macrium online store, and Gold subscribers get a whopping 40% off. To celebrate, the company has handed us five Reflect v6 Workstation license keys to give away for home use. Less than 24 hours remain for you to enter.For a chance at one of those licenses, we want to hear your best data-loss or disaster recovery story. Tell us all about your experience with that dead hard drive, corrupted SD card, bankrupt cloud storage provider, or even the crazed storage reviewer in your life ...Read more...

Acer's Predator gaming monitor series has been growing rapidly since its inception last year. While the brand has been used primarily for ultra-high-end, does-it-all gaming displays, now Acer is showing off three new monitors in what it is calling the Predator Z1 series. These monitors bear the now-familiar Predator branding: blacked-out frames with red accents. ...Read more...

We're fans of building small form-factor systems at TR, as evidenced by our Breadbox system from earlier this year. As part of that process, builders need to do their homework to make sure that everything in a Mini-ITX system will fit together comfortably. With the Raven Z RVZ01-E, Silverstone has updated its slim small-form-factor case to accommodate standard ATX power supplies. That change will give builders a bit more flexibility when selecting parts for their new rig. ...Read more...

Man, these first world problems sure are rough. You've just shelled out $800 for your new HTC Vive, but you keep tripping over that darn cable connecting your headset to your PC. What's a poor gerbil to do? Zotac thinks it has the solution to your problem. The company's upcoming Mobile VR system puts a VR-ready gaming rig into a backpack so that you can play in VR without the cable breaking your immersion....Read more...

The rise of SSDs has brought about a small revolution in the speed and responsiveness of PCs, but those drives' capacities can be an obstacle for folks with huge collections of files. That's especially true on entry-level laptops or tablets, where 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB of storage is fairly common. Dropbox and other cloud services offer a way around those capacity limits by offering tons of cloud storage, but syncing files to a local folder from those cloud services still eats up disk space.Today, Dropbox is previewing a way around this problem. Its "Project Infinite" feature puts shortcuts to remote files in the user's local Dropbox folder, allowing the user to see those files ...Read more...

AMD has released version 16.4.2 of its Radeon Software Crimson Edition drivers. This hotfix release includes "full support" for AMD’s XConnect. XConnect is a feature that allows hot-plugging of Radeon graphics cards in external graphics enclosures using Thunderbolt 3 ports. AMD announced XConnect back in March along with preliminary driver support. Razer was among the first to include support for external graphics enclosures with its Core dock and Blade notebook, and Intel's Skull Canyon NUC is also poised to support external graphics when it begins shipping in May.XConnect has a laundry list of requirements aside from this latest driver release. Thunderbolt firmware v.16 or later, a Thunderbolt 3 port, and an active Thunderbolt 3 cable ...Read more...

Juniper Systems' new Mesa 2 tablet introduces Windows 10 to the company's ruggedized PC lineup. Some may claim this is just a ruggedized tablet, but I tell you that it's a yellow submarine of durability. Juniper Systems claims this tablet meets IP68 standards for water resistance. It's also claimed to exceed MIL-STD-810G environmental designs for water, humidity, sand and dust, vibration, altitude, shock, and temperature conditions. Whew. ...Read more...

We all complain about the battery life of our portable electronics these days. From thin-and-light laptops with anemic batteries to cell phones that last half a day, we always want more life from our critical devices. Anker may have a solution for the most juice-thirsty out there. The company best known for its pocket-sized lithium-polymer batteries has released the mother of all portable power sources—a 400Wh power supply aptly named the Powerhouse. ...Read more...

Cloud storage and backup company Backblaze is becoming a household name among enthusiasts these days. The company annually releases one of the only high-count hard disk reliability reports available, based on all of the SMART data and failure history of its drives. Backblaze uses consumer hard drives in custom high-density enclosures to achieve its redundancy and uptime requirements. Today, the company announced the next version of this custom enclosure: the Storage Pod 6.0. This rackmount chassis crams 60 3.5" SATA disks into four rack units. ...Read more...

Those of you who follow the Raspberry Pi might have been aware of the demise of the popular digital camera module for the system. The Pi Foundation has since found a new and much-improved 8-megapixel part to use as a replacement: Sony's IMX219 sensor. The new sensor is used in both the visible-light and infrared camera modules available for the Pi. ...Read more...

AMD's gleaming white corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California has long served as an iconic representation of the company. If a new report is correct, though, AMD's time at that location may be coming to a close in the next couple years. The Silicon Valley Business Journal suggests California real estate developer Irvine Company is in talks to acquire the campus from its present owner, W.P. Carey, which leases the site to AMD. The Irvine Company plans to convert the site into a residential complex, the paper's sources say. Irvine, W.P. Carey, and AMD all declined to comment. ...Read more...

Windows 10 Insiders on both PC and mobile platforms should be receiving Preview Build 14328 today. Microsoft calls this a "major" build that brings quite a few new things to the OS. Some of the new features discussed at Build 2016 are now included, like the Windows Ink Workspace. Using an active pen, users can draw on a whiteboard, create sticky notes, and mark up digital maps and websites.There are also refinements coming to tablet mode. The full-screen All Apps menu ( à la Windows 8) is back as an option. The lock screen now hides your e-mail address, and it can ...Read more...

The smoke around Nvidia's next-generation graphics chips keeps getting thicker, and if Tuesday’s purported GeForce GTX 1080 cooler shots didn’t warm things up enough for you maybe this will. A leaker from ChipHell.com has posted a fairly legit-looking shot of GP104-200’s die, and the folks at Videocardz have picked it up:

If you hadn't already heard, our friends at Macrium are now offering deeper discounts for TR subscribers. Silver subscribers are now eligible for a 20% discount on purchases made from the Macrium online store, and Gold subscribers get a whopping 40% off. To celebrate, the company has handed us five Reflect v6 Workstation license keys to give away for home use, and there's less than a week left in our contest.For a chance at one of those licenses, we want to hear your best data-loss or disaster recovery story. Tell us all about your experience with that dead hard drive, corrupted SD card, bankrupt cloud storage provider, or even the crazed storage reviewer in your life ...Read more...

Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the greatest show in the Sol system! Stand in awe as I conjure arcane interstellar magic and twist your notions of reality into a spiral galaxy. Watch as I reduce these price stickers to a fraction of their original size. Observe: the conjuring of the deals!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 , ...Read more...

MSI unleashed its Aegis barebones system today. This Mini-ITX gaming PC has striking looks and surprisingly petite dimensions, thanks to the use of a PCI Express riser. The Aegis' 600W 80 Plus Silver power supply is integrated into the machine's base, making the body of the PC even smaller. ...Read more...

AMD is justifiably proud of its Wraith cooler. At launch, though, that cooler was only available with a relatively expensive FX-8370 CPU. We expressed hope that AMD would include the Wraith with more of its chips in the conclusion of our review, and today, the company is answering that call. The eight-core FX-8350 will get a Wraith in the box for a suggested price of $179.99, while a Wraithed six-core FX-6350 will sell for $139.99. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Microsoft released its fiscal 2016 third-quarter results today. The company made $5.3 billion in operating income on $20.5 billion in revenue. That's a 20% decrease in operating income and a 6% decrease in revenue compared to a year ago. Here's a quick summary of the results:The company's More Personal Computing division, which handles familiar products like Windows, Surfaces, and the Xbox, took in $9.5 billion in revenue, up 1% year-over-year. Windows OEM revenue fell just 2%, while Surface revenue ...Read more...

AMD has released its financial results for the first quarter of 2016. The company posted an operating loss of $68 million on $832 million in revenue, and it posted a net loss of $109 million. Revenue was down 19% from the year-ago quarter, but the company narrowed its operating and net losses compared to a year ago. Here's a tabular summary of the results:AMD reports that it's forming a joint venture with Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Company, Limited (THATIC) to develop system-on-chip products for the Chinese server market. The underlying IP licensing agreement for "high-performance processor and SoC technology" is worth $293 million. AMD says ...Read more...

Acer has been betting heavily on its Predator lineup of gaming-oriented hardware lately. Today marks a new offensive for the black-and-red monsters. Let's first inspect the mobile attack unit. The Predator 17 X is a beefy gaming notebook with a Core i7-6820HK CPU. That chip offers four cores and eight threads clocked at 2.7GHz base and 3.6 GHz Turbo speeds. A fully-fledged mobile GeForce GTX 980 graphics card pushes this machine's 17.3" G-Sync display. Acer offers the 17 X with 1080p and 4K IPS panel options. ...Read more...

At its next@Acer event today, Acer revealed a number of interesting new products, including its Switch Alpha 12. The Switch branding for Aspire convertibles isn't new, but the Alpha is a bit different from the usual fare. Instead of the Core M processor featured in the previous Switch 12, the Switch Alpha uses Skylake Core i-series processors. Acer says that kind of power is possible thanks to its new "LiquidLoop" cooling system. The company describes this system as a "liquid cooler," but we're guessing it's some sort of passive vapor-chamber design. ...Read more...

At its next@Acer event today, Acer revealed a number of interesting new products, including its Switch Alpha 12. The Switch branding for Aspire convertibles isn't new, but the Alpha is a bit different from the usual fare. Instead of the Core M processor featured in the previous Switch 12, the Switch Alpha uses Skylake Core i-series processors. Acer says that kind of power is possible thanks to its new "LiquidLoop" cooling system. The company describes this system as a "liquid cooler," but we're guessing it's some sort of passive vapor-chamber design. ...Read more...

We spend a lot of time talking about the biggest and best graphics cards that hardware vendors have to offer, but sometimes it's good to take a step back and talk about simple utility products. In this vein, we have Zotac’s adorable GeForce GT 710, an entry-level discrete graphics card. What makes this card unusual among GeForce GT 710s is its PCIe x1 interface for data and power, letting it fit into a wide range of systems. ...Read more...

Opera wants to become the browser of choice for users concerned about privacy. In March, the company introduced a native ad-blocking service. Now it's taking another step in that direction. The company has announced that it has integrated a free and unlimited VPN service into the latest developer build of its browser. ...Read more...

Corsair is updating its popular K70 keyboard this morning with a model that's built for speed. The K70 RGB Rapidfire features a new type of Cherry key switch—the MX Speed RGB—that only has to move 1.2 mm before it registers a key press. Corsair claims that short stroke makes the MX Speed RGB switch among the most responsive on the market, and there may be something to that claim. Gaming peripherals competitor Razer says its in-house mechanical switches have a 1.9-mm actuation distance, for example, and regular Cherry switches need two millimeters of travel to trigger. Otherwise, the MX Speed RGB's 45-gram weight and linear operation sound similar to Cherry MX Reds. ...Read more...

I know what you're thinking after reading that headline: what the heck does "second-10th" mean? It's pretty simple, really. We started hosting The Tech Report BBQ in 2004, and it took place near Detroit for its first three years. From the fourth BBQ onward, the venue for our annual get-together has been my family's cottage on the big lake in Holland, Michigan. We celebrated our 10th BBQ with style in 2013, but this summer will mark the 10th year since the move to Holland. I want to go overboard all over again.The date for this year's event is Saturday, July 23 , but BBQ regulars know that you can make a whole weekend out of it. The TR BBQ is a family-friendly event open to all friends and readers of The Tech Report. ...Read more...

Lian-Li's DK-04 was properly unveiled today after being shown in an early state at CES this year. This is (somewhat ironically) the fifth case in Lian-Li's series of desk cases and its largest to date. None of these desk enclosures are cheap, but this version may present the best value for the money. It doubles as piece of furniture that's pretty expensive on its own: a motorized standing desk. Using buttons on the front of the desk, the height of the desktop can be adjusted between 31" (78 cm) and 46" (117 cm). ...Read more...

Microsoft released a range of updates for the Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4, and Surface Book this morning. The Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book both get new system firmware, camera drivers, audio drivers, and graphics drivers. Unique to the Surface Pro 4 is an embedded controller firmware update that improves thermal tuning. For gamers on the Surface Book, the Nvidia GeForce graphics driver update adds support for some of the latest popular games, too. The Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4, and Surface Book should all exhibit improved stability and compatability with external monitors and passive video adapters when they're plugged into the Surface Dock after these updates. ...Read more...

Asus' ROG GT51CA gaming desktop first made an appearance at CES 2016, and now it's coming to market. This high-end desktop can be configured with overclockable Intel CPUs, a range of Nvidia graphics cards, and NVMe PCIe SSDs. It also features aggressive styling and an optional NFC module that works with Asus' ROG Band wearable to trigger included system tuning and security features. ...Read more...

Nvidia has pulled out the world's smallest chainsaw again. Last time we heard of this mythical tool, Nvidia split the GM204 inside the GeForce GTX 980 to produce the GM206 of GeForce GTX 960 fame. This time, the workstation-oriented GM204GL found inside the Quadro M4000 and M5000 is on the chopping block. When the silicon sawdust clears, we're left with the GM206GL and the shiny new Quadro M2000.AIDA64's patch notes effectively spilled the beans on the lineage of the GPU inside the newest Quadro a little over a week ago. The Maxwell GM206GL GPU in the M2000 has 768 CUDA cores, roughly half of the M4000's GM204GL GPU with 1664. The ...Read more...

Intel announced its first-quarter 2016 financial results today. The company made $2.6 billion in operating income on $13.7 billion in revenue. Profits were unchanged compared to this time last year, but the company grew its revenue by 7% compared to the year-ago quarter. Net income remained flat at $2 billion, and gross margin fell 1.2 points to 59.3%. Here's a table of the company's results for easy reference:The company said that it'll be eliminating as many as 12,000 positions worldwide—or 11% of its workforce—by mid-2017 as it transitions from "a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices," according to a separate press release . Intel says its growth is coming primarily from ...Read more...

Things are already a little smoky in the TR newsroom lately with the volume of next-gen graphics card rumors floating around, but we might have to call the fire department this morning. A user on Chinese social media site Baidu Tieba has posted an image that purports to show the reference cooler for Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. Behold:

Blizzard's iconic antihero Illidan returns to Azeroth this summer. The demon armies of the Burning Legion will invade on August 30, and pre-orders are now available. In this new expansion to the ever-popular World of Warcraft, players will have access to a new continent called the Broken Isles, a new hero class, and, of course, a new set of dungeons and raids....Read more...