Techreport

It's been a little over a year since Apple introduced the ultra-thin MacBook, so that means it's about time for a refresh. For its spiced-up MacBook, Apple retained the overall design from last year's model while upgrading a few key pieces of hardware and adding a new color option. ...Read more...

Western Digital's RE series of data center hard disks has been renowned for its top-tier performance and durability for some time now. Buyers will need to stop looking for the RE branding and start looking for Gold in the near future, though. The RE series of drives will soon be superseded by a new product line called WD Gold. ...Read more...

Cooler Master's next generation of all-in-one liquid CPU coolers is here. The company's MasterLiquid Pro 120 and MasterLiquid Pro 240 coolers incorporate a number of design changes over the Nepton 120XL and Nepton 240M that could potentially improve their performance and durability. As their names imply, the MasterLiquid Pro 120 uses a 120-mm, 1.5"-thick (or 38-mm-thick) radiator, while the Pro 240 is built with a 240-mm, 1"-thick (or 27-mm-thick) radiator. ...Read more...

Huawei is bringing its latest flagship smartphones on par with Samsung's in an important respect. At the Shanghai launch of its P9 smartphone Friday, the Chinese mobile giant announced its plans for "Huawei VR." This plastic shell with optics inside looks outwardly similar to Samsung's Gear VR. Both devices cradle a smartphone inside to take the wearer inside 360-degree videos or other VR experiences. Huawei says there will be two different versions of the Huawei VR: one for the P9 smartphone and one for the company's Mate 8 phablet. ...Read more...

Over the past few months, we've been reporting on financial troubles at Toshiba. In December, the company announced its intent to lay off 7,800 workers in 2016 as part of a plan to stabilize its business. That news was bad enough on its own, but according to Nikkei Asian Review, Toshiba has announced that it now plans to cut over 14,000 jobs, or almost double the number it projected in its December announcement.7,610 of the jobs on the chopping block come from Toshiba's "lifestyle" division, which handles consumer electronics and PCs. Most of the remaining cuts come from the company's semiconductor division. Nikkei Asian Review says 4,590 employees ...Read more...

Tower workstations are very nice, but sometimes what one needs is a powerful piece of machinery that takes up less space. Enter HP's Z1 G3 all-in-one (AIO) workstations. The Z1 G3 machines, as you might have guessed, are a refresh of the previous Z1 G2 models. HP claims the newcomers are 47% smaller, 51% lighter, and about 20% cheaper when compared to the previous generation. I bet you're dying to hear about the hardware, though. ...Read more...

At the Intel Developer Forum in Shenzen last week, Intel announced Apollo Lake, a new family of SoCs that will replace Cherry Trail parts. This low-cost SoC family appears to continue the trend of minor performance and power improvements that we have come to expect from Intel's generational releases. Intel says Apollo Lake SoCs will become available in the second half of this year under the Atom, Celeron, and Pentium brands.According to Anandtech , Apollo Lake will be built on a new microarchitecture code-named Goldmont. Goldmont is etched onto silicon using the same 14-nm process as Intel used for the Airmont cores in Cherry Trail SoCs. The SoC’s graphics ...Read more...

Many were disappointed by the lack of a consumer Pascal graphics card announcement at Nvidia's GTC a couple weeks ago, but new rumors from the graphics card supply chain suggest we won't have long to wait for more info about those cards. Korean site Hardware Battle and WCCFTech claim that Nvidia is discontinuing production of the GM200 and GM204 GPUs that power the GTX 970, GTX 980, and GTX 980 Ti, and new production of those cards has also been halted by Nvidia's board partners. This move is purportedly being made to allow existing inventory of those graphics cards to clear ahead of a June launch date for consumer Pascal graphics cards.WCCFTech claims a Pascal launch event is scheduled a few weeks prior to Computex 2016, which runs from May 31 to June 4. After that event, the site claims that GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti replacements will launch in early June, followed by a GTX 970 replacement in mid-June. Both WCCFTech and Hardware Battle refer to the new model line ...Read more...

Owners of top-end Radeons looking for the fastest possible boot times may have been stymied by those cards' firmware. Although the majority of modern motherboards include UEFI firmwares, the R9 Fury X and R9 Nano still use the legacy VGA option BIOS for maximum compatibility. This choice means slower boot times, since UEFI motherboards have to load a "Compatibility Support Module" for legacy firmware. Video cards can now use the UEFI Graphics Output Protocol for initialization, but graphics cards with UEFI-compatible firmwares don't work with motherboards that rely on the good old BIOS. ...Read more...

NZXT's Manta case caught our attention a couple months back with its curvy exterior panels and atypically large footprint for a Mini-ITX case. We've got a Manta in our labs now, and we can see why there's a lot of buzz around this enclosure. The curved metal panels (and window, no less) are quite unlike anything we've seen in a case before. The power button and front I/O ports even follow the curve of the top panel, as well. Slick. ...Read more...

Momma always said I should work hard so I can make a man of myself. I may have dropped out of school, but I'm making my name as a salesman. Me and my truck travel far and wide, from desert highways to pack ice roads. I have a quest, you see. To be like a caravan from the days of old, and bring you the best wares I can find, hand-picked just for you. Check them out.I hope the deals are to your liking, sir or ma'am. If you happen ...Read more...

While things are still quiet on the consumer graphics card front, a small battle is being waged in the professional graphics arena. Nvidia recently refreshed the M6000, its flagship workstation graphics card, with 24GB of RAM. This put it ahead of AMD’s flagship, the FirePro W9100. Not to be outdone, AMD has announced the release of a 32GB version of the W9100. ...Read more...

Following news from Trend Micro that QuickTime for Windows has two new serious security vulnerabilities, Apple has decided to end support for the plugin and player on Windows entirely. Apple justifies the move by claiming that essentially nothing uses QuickTime anymore—not even the company's own iTunes for Windows—and it also says HTML5 video playback is common and well-supported these days.While Apple's stance isn't an alarmist one, security researchers are taking a much more urgent tone. Trend Micro and the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team advise all users to uninstall ...Read more...

Gigabyte is bringing Thunderbolt 3 to small-form-factor PCs with four new Brix barebones: the GB-BSi5T-6200, the GB-BSi5HT-6200, the GB-BSi7T-6500, and the GB-BSi7HT-6500. These four Brix are divided into two classes. A "T" in the name signifies a version with M.2 support and Thunderbolt 3, while the HT designation indicates support for an M.2 SSD, a 2.5" SATA device, and Thunderbolt 3. The BSi5T-6200 and i5HT-6200 include Intel's Core i5-6200U CPU, while the i7T-6500 and i7HT-6500 get the somewhat more powerful Core i7-6500U. ...Read more...

Just this week we reported on the continued post-support life of Windows XP, and now Google is distancing itself from the aging OS, too. Version 50 of Google’s Chrome browser, which released yesterday, drops support for Windows XP as well as Windows Vista. Google is also putting support for older versions of Apple’s OS X on the end-of-life chopping block. Versions 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 of OS X will stop receiving Chrome updates after version 49.This end-of-life includes a pretty sizeable group of PCs. These OSes together account for about 13 percent of OS market share, according to Netmarketshare . Windows XP represents the lion's share of soon-to-be-unsupported Chrome users at about 11 percent. There's still some good ...Read more...

Just a few short days after Oculus' Rift hit our labs, HTC's Vive VR headset is also in our hands now. Yours truly is clearing out his office to make the Vive's room-scale VR experience practical, but for now, gaze upon some sweet, sweet hardware: ...Read more...

Razer must be running out of names for poisonous snakes, because it's now turning to other kinds of nasty bugs to name its wares. The company has a spiffy new headset out now that it's calling the ManO'War. Not the Portuguese variety, mind you, which is a nasty thing you don't ever want to shake tendrils with. ...Read more...

Amazon unveiled its Kindle Oasis e-reader yesterday. The Oasis hardware, with its 300-PPI e-ink display and 10-LED backlight, is reminiscent of the Kindle Voyager's. The Oasis' wedge-body design tapers from .33" to .13" thick, though, unlike more slate-shaped Kindles. That taper is being billed as an ergonomic handgrip. In our review of the Kindle Touch, the device's balance was a concern for extended reading sessions, and the Oasis' new body might solve that problem. However, this design does mark a departure from the symmetric beauty we've enjoyed in the past few Kindle generations. ...Read more...

Software and hardware platform locks have long been a method of setting products apart, and VR headsets are no exception. The HTC Vive’s standard software platform is Valve’s SteamVR, which can work for users running the Oculus Rift, too. SteamVR is based off of the OpenVR SDK, which allows developers to write VR software for a range of VR devices without worrying about being vendor-locked. The Rift's Oculus Home software doesn't work with the Vive, though, preventing Vive users from running some of Oculus Home-exclusive software. For users who are willing to install a third-party patch, Oculus Home titles may soon work on the Vive, too.A group called LibreVR has released a proof-of-concept patch for Oculus Home called Revive, which allows owners of the Vive to run some Oculus Home-exclusive titles. According to Ars Technica , the patch translates some functions of the Oculus Runtime to OpenVR calls. Ars reports that the patch works to varying degrees ...Read more...

Three new gaming monitors—the MG28UQ, MG24UQ, and MG248Q—are joining the extended family of Asus gaming displays. These new displays have familiar specifications along with a few new tricks. All three monitors are FreeSync-enabled, and they also work with Asus' DisplayWidget Windows app. DisplayWidget lets users customize a number of on-screen display settings without actually fiddling with the monitors' controls.The MG28UQ and MG24UQ are both 4K displays with maximum brightness of 300 nits. Fancy new features aside, that's where the similarity between these two ends. The MG24UQ is a 23.6-inch monitor with a 4K IPS display. It ...Read more...

Intel has a new lineup of solid-state drives on the market, and it's full of options. The 540s series comprises twelve drives available in six different capacities and two form factors. For these drives, Intel turned to 16-nm TLC NAND, a first for the company. The cache, however, is SLC.CapacityForm FactorsMax sequential (MB/s)Max 4KB random (IOps)PriceReadWriteReadWrite120GB80mm M.2, 2.5"56040060,00050,000$80180GB80mm M.2, 2.5"56047571,00085,000$100240GB80mm M.2, 2.5"56048074,00085,000$120360GB80mm M.2, 2.5"56048074,00085,000$180480GB80mm M.2, 2.5"56048078,00085,000$2201TB80mm M.2, 2.5"56048078,00085,000$450 ...Read more...

Nvidia released firmware version 1.2 for the Shield Tablet K1 today. The two highlights of this release are support for the Vulkan API and a number of Android 6.0.1 changes. Those Android changes include repostioned landscape mode navigation buttons, updated emojis, a quick-launch camera feature that's invoked with a double-press of the home button, and a do-not-disturb-until-next-alarm mode. ...Read more...

A while ago, Google engineer Benson Leung ran into a small problem with a USB 3.0 cable he got from Amazon: it fried his Chromebook Pixel. Leung's experience helped raised awareness of potentially dangerous cables and devices, and his research has spurred similar efforts from various corners of the internet. It seemed only a matter of time, then, that the USB Implementers Forum would address this issue. The USB-IF has now added new specifications and a certification process for two particular features: USB power delivery and USB Type-C authentication.To earn the updated USB logos, devices and cables must meet the USB-IF's strict standards for power negotiation and delivery. Some might see this move as an unnecessary precaution and burden on manufacturers, but Amazon ...Read more...

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 also handed us five Reflect v6 Workstation license keys to give away for home use.To determine who wins 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...

Asus just took the wraps off its ROG Spatha wireless gaming mouse. This 12-button rodent comes with with a magnetic charging dock that doubles as the wireless receiver. The Omron switches under the main mouse buttons are user-swappable, and Asus includes an alternate pair of switches in the box for a different tactile response. The Spatha features a distinctively-patterned set of six buttons under the thumb and multi-zone RGB LED lighting. Different lighting colors can be assigned across the scroll wheel, thumb buttons, and palm logo. ...Read more...

It's a good day for datacenters across the world. Micron, purveyor of all things related to memory, has unveiled its updated lineups of datacenter-oriented SSDs. Say hi to the 9100 and 7100 PCIe NVMe SSDs, and to the S600DC series of SAS drives.Let's kick things off with the big daddy. The 9100 series of drives is available in both HHHL (half-height, half-length) PCIe card and 2.5" U.2 form factors, ...Read more...

ASRock appears to have blown the cover on Intel's entire Broadwell-E CPU lineup today. In a press release we received today, the company touted its readiness for the new chips and confirmed that the Core i7-6950X will be a 10-core, 20-thread part. It also advised owners of its X99 motherboards to apply firmware updates in preparation for the as-yet-unnanounced Core i7-6900K, Core i7-6850K, and Core i7-6800K. ...Read more...

It's no secret that the PC market has been in decline for a while, and the latest report from Gartner's analysts doesn't bring any better news to the table. According to Gartner, the worldwide shipments for desktops, notebooks, and "ultramobile premium" computers dropped to 64.8 million units during the first quarter of 2016—a 9.6% decrease when compared to Q4 2015. This result marks the sixth consecutive quarter of falling shipment numbers in the industry, and the first time since 2007 that total unit shipments worldwide fell below 65 million. Gartner's analysts point fingers to a number of reasons for the low numbers.First and foremost, the U.S. dollar has remained strong against a number of worldwide currencies. Second, low oil prices led the Latin American and Russian markets to sharply contract. Those two markets in particular were past drivers of growth in the sector. Third, the political and ...Read more...

Windows XP was the first version of Windows to bring together Microsoft's client and server product families. It became immensely popular after its 2001 release. This is all ancient history familiar to any regular TR reader. What you may not realize is that Windows XP is still immensely popular, despite being obsolete and unsupported for nearly two years. ...Read more...

It seems like the TR staff may have been lucky to get our Oculus Rift when we did. Today is the day that Oculus promised to update order statuses for Rift pre-orders, and it would seem that many woke up to bad news in their inboxes. The r/oculus subreddit is aflame this morning with tales of early pre-orders being bumped one to two months from their original projected ship dates. So far, Oculus hasn't offered a reason for these delays, but it would seem the "unexpected component shortage" that the company originally offered as the cause of slow pre-order fulfillment is more severe than one might have thought.Ordered a Rift ~4 hrs after open. Had a May ship date. ...Read more...

It seems like the TR staff may have been lucky to get our Oculus Rift when we did. Today is the day that Oculus promised to update order statuses for Rift pre-orders, and it would seem that many woke up to bad news in their inboxes. The r/oculus subreddit is aflame this morning with tales of early pre-orders being bumped one to two months from their original projected ship dates. So far, Oculus hasn't offered a reason for these delays, but it would seem the "unexpected component shortage" that the company originally offered as the cause of slow pre-order fulfillment is more severe than one might have thought.Ordered a Rift ~4 hrs after open. Had a May ship date. ...Read more...

If you'd like a little refinement in the keyboard cover for your Surface Pro, check out the newest item in Microsoft's lineup of Surface accessories. The Signature Type Cover is a magnetically-attached folding keyboard cover for the Surface Pro 3 and 4. The difference between the average Type Cover and this special edition is the Signature's lush coating of Italian synthetic covering Alcantara. This material is often used in high-end auto and furniture products, and it's often mistaken for suede. ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of the Vive launch, HTC has announced its next flagship smartphone. With the HTC 10, the company has done more than drop the "One" and the "M" from the device's name. The phone's design and hardware suggests that HTC is taking aggressive steps to reclaim a corner of the competitive smartphone market. ...Read more...

The past few months has produced a rash of glitzy RGB LED keyboards with all sorts of weird shapes and lighting systems. It's a little refreshing, then, that the just-released SteelSeries Apex M500 keyboard keeps things comparatively simple. The company actually jokes a little about this, saying that "products shouldn't look like they came through a portal from the future." ...Read more...

After what seems like an eternity of hype, Oculus' Rift VR headset is a real, shipping product, and we got ours in the mail today. Here's a quick look at what comes in the handsome, monolithic black box: ...Read more...

Rockit Cool's Rockit 88 is a Kickstarter project that aims to make delidding—the practice of removing a CPU's integrated heat spreader, or IHS—easier. Delidding a CPU for extra cooling potential is a well-known but risky practice for extreme overclockers, since it usually involves pliers, a vise, and an X-Acto knife. A slip-up with any of these tools could harm the CPU. The Rockit 88 appears to work by holding Haswell and Skylake CPUs in a dedicated bracket and shearing off the IHS with a moving block. Rockit Cool claims that reducing the thickness of the thermal interface material between the processor die and the IHS on an unspecified, overclocked Devil's Canyon CPU resulted in a 10°C improvement in load temperatures. ...Read more...

Tomorrow marks the much talked-about release of the patch for the Samba bug branded Badlock . While we don’t know a whole lot about the vulnerability, its discoverers assure us the patch is worth staying ...Read more...

Not content with making ever-larger and ever-faster RAM kits, G.Skill is pushing speed and latency boundaries this time around. The company's latest 16GB Trident Z kit clocks in at 3600 MT/s with 15-15-15-35 timings, and it spreads its capacity across two 8GB DIMMs. This responsive kit turns in those numbers while running at 1.35V. We've built systems with Trident Z RAM in the past, and the two-tone aluminum heat spreaders on these DIMMs look pretty snazzy, too. ...Read more...

Regular TR readers know that a solid power supply is essential to a successful PC build. Spending a bit extra on that little black box can net you a unit that will last you a couple of builds, or in some cases, a decade. To make sure that its high-end PSUs stay in service that long, Corsair is extending the warranty on its AXi, HXi, RMi, and RMx power supplies to 10 years. ...Read more...

Dun dun dun, another one bites the dust. Last year, we reported that Google Chrome would start blocking Flash ads and some auto-playing media. Today, Microsoft Edge is following in Chrome's footsteps. An upcoming version of Edge will automatically pause Flash content that's not "central to the web page" in question.Starting with Windows build 14136, Flash advertisements in Edge will show up in a paused state unless the user explicitly clicks on them. Microsoft says that Edge ought to recognize and not affect Flash content that's integral to ...Read more...

It seems geometric styling is becoming the fashion in cases of late. Corsair's contribution to the trend is the Carbide Series Spec-Alpha ATX mid-tower chassis. This case pairs an outlandish exterior with an open interior design that omits 5.25" drive bays in favor of improved airflow. That's a choice I hope makes its way into more cases. ...Read more...

Look in my eyes. Relax and take a deep breath. Now look at this swinging pocket watch. Can you read the time? Your eyelids are starting to get heavy. Now repeat after me: you want new hardware. You would love to upgrade your computer. That's right, you need a new graphics card and a bigger SSD. Now open your eyes slowly, and look at these deals here.When I snap my fingers, you'll wake up from your trance. Should you have encountered any ...Read more...

Nvidia's Tesla P100 is certainly an impressive bit of kit, but we'd wager more than a few gerbils were disappointed that the company didn't announce consumer graphics cards based on the Pascal architecture. If a report by Digitimes is correct, however, green-team gamers everywhere could soon have reason to rejoice.According to "sources from graphics card players," Nvidia will unveil a consumer Pascal chip to the public at Computex 2016, in the form of its GeForce GTX 1080 and ...Read more...

HTC is trying to get on the level with Vive pre-order customers concerned about shipping dates and order processing. In a post on the Vive blog, HTC assures all pre-order customers that Vive order fulfillment is "on track," and that folks who pre-ordered will recieve their Vive system "in the month noted in [their] confirmation e-mail."The post also clears up some issues regarding payment methods. HTC says orders are being processed in first-come, first-serve order, regardless of the payment method used. Some of the customer frustration seems to stem from the fact that Paypal ...Read more...

Gigabyte is introducing a low-power GTX 950 that doesn't require a six-pin PCIe power plug today. This GTX 950 follows similar cards from EVGA and Asus, who have already announced their entries into the power-sipping GTX 950 arena. Gigabyte sets apart its black marvel by highlighting its fan design and OC Guru II software. ...Read more...

There's an old saying among IT folks that Intel is the 800-lb gorilla in the CPU space. That description also fits Samsung when it comes to memory fabrication. The Korean company has now unveiled its first 8Gbit DDR4 RAM chips built on a "10-nm class" process, a name which Samsung uses to describes process nodes ranging from 10 to 19 nm. ...Read more...

New kids on the block Riotoro have announced a compact ATX enclosure called the CR1080. This case uses a dual-chamber, inverted-motherboard design to fit full-sized ATX motherboards, power supplies, and full-length graphics cards in a space that measures just 9.6" x 14.1" x 15.5" (WHD). Thanks to its compact dimensions, the CR1080 has limited space for storage. Two combo mounts for 3.5" or 2.5" devices, a single 5.25" drive bay, and a dedicated 2.5" drive mount should serve the needs of most users these days, though. ...Read more...

Two significant hurdle that virtual reality displays have had to overcome are latency and persistence. If there’s too much delay between the movement of a user’s head and a corresponding change on the head-mounted display, or too much image persistence between frames, the user will likely feel nauseous. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive already employ 90Hz, low-persistence displays to counteract this problem, but Nvidia thinks it can all but eliminate display latency by pushing the refresh rate even higher. At GTC 2016, Nvidia demoed a prototype display that runs at about 1700Hz....Read more...

Futuremark is releasing a preview of its VRMark benchmarking tool for owners of its 3DMark Advanced and 3DMark Enterprise benchmarking suites today. VRMark is designed to test VR hardware like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and it can run on 2D monitors for those still waiting on VR hardware. The VRMark preview doesn't produce a benchmark score, but viewers can still freely explore two interactive scenes in this release. One of the scenes is meant to be run on the minimum-spec GeForce GTX 970, while the other is meant for more demanding hardware. The scene below depicts the two dioramas that can be viewed. ...Read more...