Techreport

It's driver update day in graphics card land. Both AMD and Nvidia have new driver releases out in preparation for some upcoming game releases. The red team has released Radeon Software Crimson Edition hotfix version 16.2.1, which brings an updated CrossFire profile for Ubisoft's Far Cry Primal. This minor update comes hot on the heels of the 16.2 release, which added optimizations for Ashes of the Singularity, CrossFire improvements for The Division and XCOM 2, and bug fixes for Fallout 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider.On the green side of the fence, Nvidia released version 362.00 of its graphics card drivers, which have a WHQL certification badge. Nvidia says they're "Game Ready" for a handful of new releases. Far Cry Primal gets performance optimizations and an ...Read more...

27" 4K monitors are all the rage these days, but it's rare to see a less-dense 30" or 32" 4K display. Acer's 32" Predator XB321HK could be just the thing for people who don't want to deal with the itty-bitty pixels of 27" 4K panels. Not only is the XB321HK a big 4K display, its IPS panel is driven by Nvidia's G-Sync variable-refresh-rate technology. ...Read more...

The VESA standards body has finalized the specification for the DisplayPort 1.4 standard. The association calls this the first major update to DisplayPort since the publication of DisplayPort 1.3, which became a specification back in September 2014.The most important new feature in this version of the spec is Display Stream Compression 1.2. VESA says DSC 1.2 ...Read more...

Apple has scored a point in one of its legal battles over iPhone security. It isn't in the San Bernardino case that has caught national attention in recent weeks, though. Rather, the company has been assisting the government in an investigation of the iPhone of Jun Feng, a man who has plead guilty to drug dealing. The investigators in Feng's case had argued that the All Writs Act (AWA) of 1789 allows them to compel Apple to bypass the passcode security on the defendant's iPhone. On Monday, magistrate judge James Orenstein ruled on Monday in the US District Court of the Eastern District of New York that the AWA does not give the government the power that it seeks.Orenstein looks to a federal law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act , or CALEA, for guidance in this case. The judge notes the All Writs Act is understood to have a "gap-filling" function, and Apple ...Read more...

An international group of researchers has discovered that web traffic encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS) can be decrypted if a server also supports the antiquated SSLv2 cryptographic protocol. The researchers estimate that a staggering 33% of HTTPS-enabled sites are vulnerable to this attack, which they call DROWN, for Decrypting RSA using Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption.While the SSLv2 protocol has long been known to be weak , the attack is significant because traffic encrypted with the stronger TLS protocol is potentially vulnerable. Communication from a client—like a web browser or mail transfer agent—that insists on TLS encryption may still be subject ...Read more...

Western Digital is charging full steam (or should I say helium?) ahead with its 8TB hard drives. The company has just added 8TB models to most of its internal and external drive lineups. The 8TB capacity option will soon be available in internal hard drives in the Red, Red Pro, and Purple lineups. Red drives are targeted at NAS boxes, while Purple spinners are meant to go into video and surveillance systems. Western Digital says the new drives are filled with helium, which purportedly lets the big platters spin more easily. Drives using this technology will carry the HelioSeal branding.For those who prefer their hard drives outside their computers, WD will offer 8TB models across its My Book and My Cloud series. External units with two-drive setups in RAID-0 will also available in 16TB capacities, too. The ...Read more...

AMD added two new top dogs to its A10 APU and Athlon CPU lineups this morning. On the APU side of the aisle, the A10-7890K runs at 4.1GHz base and 4.3GHz turbo speeds, a 200MHz clock speed bump over its predecessor, the A10-7870K. ...Read more...

Jon Peddie Research has published its Market Watch report on the ebb and flow of the graphics processor market for the fourth quarter of 2015. Although the GPU market overall is still going through a rough patch—consider the 9% year-on-year decrease in desktop graphics processors and a 17% year-on-year drop in notebooks, for an average of a 14% decrease—the last quarter of 2015 did produce a rise of 2.4% over the previous quarter if we look at all GPUs shipped.JPR thinks this indicates a rebound for the GPU market, which it says is outperforming the "stabilizing" PC market. Sales for the PC market as a whole increased 2% over ...Read more...

Hot on the heels of HTC and its Vive VR headset, Microsoft is opening up shop with a version of its HoloLens augmented-reality headset. Unlike Oculus' Rift and the Vive, however, Redmond isn't making HoloLens hardware available to just anybody. The company is taking applications for a Development Edition of the HoloLens hardware from developers in the USA or Canada. Prospective users also need to be Windows Insiders, and they'll need to be comfortable providing feedback on the AR headset to Microsoft. Applicants deemed worthy of a kit will then need to fork over $3000 for the hardware. ...Read more...

Some of the best things in life have the right curves, like cars and guitars. Samsung is looking to add monitors to that list, as it's just unveiled a trio of 1080p curved displays. Meet the 27" CF591 and the CF390 series, available in 23.5" and 27" sizes.

HTC's Vive VR headset is now available for pre-order. The $799 kit includes the Vive itself, two hand controllers, and the two base stations you'll need to set up the Vive's virtual environment. HTC is bundling Google's Tilt Brush app, Fantastic Contraption, and Job Simulator with the Vive to give owners a jumping-off point. If you're not in the USA, HTC has also published a list of international prices for the pre-order bundle. ...Read more...

Today marks the fourth birthday of the original Raspberry Pi tiny computer. To celebrate, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has released the Raspberry Pi 3, its third-generation model. With this iteration, the Raspberry Pi gets a delicious spec boost while holding on to the prior model's $35 price point. ...Read more...

In 2014, a San Jose federal court issued a verdict that ordered Samsung to pay Apple $119.6 million for infringing three of Cupertino's patents. Samsung appealed that decision, and today, a U.S. appeals court overturned the ruling. The full text of the decision is available here.The federal court had awarded Apple $98.7 million for infringement of a patent that "covers software to detect 'structures', such as a phone number, in text and to turn those structures into links." The ...Read more...

TR has covered news of various products from be quiet! for some time now, and I'm pleased to welcome a raft of the company's hardware into our labs for testing. The company sent us its Silent Base 800 case, its Dark Rock Pro 3 CPU cooler, and its Dark Power Pro 11 850W PSU for evaluation. Let's take a quick look at these in turn. ...Read more...

Wooting is a name you may not be immediately familiar with, but the fledgling company is looking to make a splash in the keyboard arena. The company has announced the Wooting One, a tenkeyless board targeted at the gaming market. ...Read more...

7 Up

Greetings! We have been tasked to inform you of the excellent selection of computing hardware deals offered by online purveyors. It is our solemn duty to separate wheat from chaff, a function which we believe we have performed admirably. Behold this week's deals.Gentlemen and ladies, it was a pleasure. Should you encounter any equally tasty ...Read more...

Microsoft's Project Astoria has been thrown out the window, so to speak. The project was meant to help developers bring their Android apps to Windows. Confirmation of its cancellation comes a day after Microsoft agreed to acquire Xamarin, a provider of cross-platform mobile app development software.Project Astoria was just one of four software bridges from other platforms that Microsoft announced last year to try and grow its library of Universal Windows Platform apps . The other three were ...Read more...

Like many in the software world, we've been closely following Apple's dispute with the United States government. Apple has been cooperating with the investigation into the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California until now, but the company recently ended up facing an order that it felt was unreasonable: to create a special version of iOS that would allow the government to brute-force one of the shooter's iPhones.Earlier this month, Apple's CEO Tim Cook penned an open letter objecting to one of the government's requests, and today, ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

AMD has just released its Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.2 hotfix drivers. This version comes with optimizations for the Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark 2.0. The company points out that this benchmark uses multiple DirectX 12 features, including asynchronous shaders, multi-threaded command buffers, and command buffer reordering.The Crimson 16.2 hotfix also includes performance optimizations for Rise of the Tomb Raider and the SteamVR Performance Test . AMD says its Radeon R9 390, Nano, and ...Read more...

Samsung has had great success in the SSD market with its 3D V-NAND flash memory. Now, the conglomerate is combining that technology with a new memory controller to mass-produce 256GB embedded flash chips that use the high-performance Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard. ...Read more...

When solid-state drives started to hit the performance ceiling of the SATA interface and the AHCI protocol, manufacturers started looking to PCIe and the NVM Express protocol to open up a new vista of performance. A few PCIe SSD options, like Intel's 750 Series and Samsung's 950 Pro, have been on the market for a little while, but the competition is starting to heat up. With its Sonix PCIe SSD, Zotac is officially entering the field. ...Read more...

Fallout 4 players, rejoice. In an interview with GameInformer, Bethesda's Todd Howard revealed that official mod support for Fallout 4 is coming in April. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Back in 2014, Imagination Technologies announced its PowerVR GR6500 ray-tracing GPU. That design taped out in July last year, and now the company is showing some actual real-time ray tracing demos using the Unity 5 engine and the GR6500 GPU at MWC 2016.Ray tracing has long been a staple of high-end 3D graphical work. Put simply, the technique involves casting virtual rays of light on a scene and accurately calculating where and how they will land, which shadows they ...Read more...

Boston Dynamics, maker of capable (and sometimes unsettling) robotic bipeds and quadrupeds, is probably well-known among TR readers for its YouTube videos of those bots in action. Every peek the company offers into its labs is more impressive than the last. This time around, the company is showing off a refined version of its Atlas robot....Read more...

Mobile World Congress continues in Barcelona this week, and that means new phones aplenty. Today, it's Xiaomi's turn to reveal its latest flagship device, the Mi 5, and no, the phone isn't designed for the British Security Service. Xiaomi has packed a lot of features into this phone, but it's priced it aggressively for a flagship. ...Read more...

Corsair announced its Void Surround headset this week, and we've got one in our labs for testing. This set of cans brings a dash of red-and-black styling to the Void lineup, along with 7.1 surround-sound emulation and universal compatibility for PCs and consoles. ...Read more...

The leader of the Linux Mint project, one of the more popular Linux distributions for the desktop, has revealed the project's website was attacked. In two separate posts to the project's blog, Clement Lefebvre wrote that the damage to the project includes a compromised ISO for Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition and a stolen forums database.The linuxmint.com domain remained down until earlier today, and now the blog.linuxmint.com subdomain isn't responding. ...Read more...

The Starting Five

Balancing mobility and utility can be difficult. At Mobile World Congress this weekend, Lenovo revealed the Yoga 710 and Yoga 510 laptops and a 2-in-1 detachable Miix tablet. All of these machines can be used as a laptop or tablet, but each one emphasizes different qualities of that combination. ...Read more...

A little while ago, Intel introduced its 5x5 motherboard standard, now called mini-STX. These mobos are even itty-bittier than Mini-ITX boards, measuring a mere 5" x 5". MSI is now taking advantage of that new standard for its Cubi 2 Plus lineup of mini PCs. ...Read more...

In the last few months, Western Digital has made moves to become a player in the SSD market. It acquired Skyera, a solid-state storage systems developer, before launching a $19 billion takeover of SanDisk. Today, despite some disappointing financial news, Western Digital affirmed its continued interest in acquiring SanDisk. Western Digital still expects that transaction to close sometime in the second quarter of 2016.The disappointing news for Western Digital is that a proposed $3.775 billion equity investment from Unis Union has fallen through. After the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States announced that it would investigate the investment, Unis bowed out. That exit has triggered an alternate offer for SanDisk, ...Read more...

Nvidia has released a software update for its Shield Android TV streaming box. Upgrade 3.0 brings an OS update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow and new external storage options. When we took the Shield for a spin last year, we noted that the ability to store apps on SD cards and USB drives was rather hit or miss. Considering the base model comes with 16GB of internal storage, owners could run up against a storage wall in a hurry. With this update, apps and games can now be encrypted and stored on SD cards and external USB drives. When plugged in, external storage should be seen as internal storage. ...Read more...

Construction kits never quite lose their cool. Today's Lego kits might not be as awesome as the ones I played with as a child, but they're still fun in a way that other kinds of toys aren't. Perhaps this is why Aerocool's new Dream Box DIY PC case construction kit caught my eye, even if it isn't the most convenient or practical way to build a system. ...Read more...

You've read the headline, and you're probably expecting to see a black monolith with weird angles and liberal use of red trim. Gigabyte's P57 gaming laptops mercifully don't follow that boring old route, though. The P57 series machines have an understated black aesthetic with a bit of orange trim that doesn't scream "720 noscope" from a mile away. ...Read more...

After HTC's price and pre-order announcement for its Vive VR headset this weekend, Valve has taken the wraps off its SteamVR Performance Test, a simple tool that lets aspiring VR junkies determine what kind of experience to expect from their PC. This test is free, and it doesn't require a VR headset to be hooked up to the host PC to run. ...Read more...

Microsoft has been talking about Windows Continuum—the ability to power a laptop or desktop-style PC experience from a Windows smartphone—for some time now. HP's Elite x3 is a Windows 10 phablet that's designed to deliver a fully realized version of that experience. ...Read more...

There have been rumors that Huawei might be getting into the high-end mobile computer arena. Now, the Chinese company has proved those rumors true with the release of the its Surface Pro-esque MateBook convertible running Windows 10. ...Read more...

LG has shown off the G5, its next flagship smartphone, at Mobile World Congress. The phone comes with the kind of high-powered specifications we've come to expect in flagship devices, but it adds a swappable battery and a degree of modularity to the mix. ...Read more...

Samsung taketh away, and Samsung giveth back. That may be most succinct way to describe Samsung's Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, the latest phones in its Galaxy S lineup of flagship handsets. Where the Galaxy S6 phones did away with Samsung staples like microSD card slots, removable batteries, and water resistance, Samsung says it listened to customers and brought water resistance and a card slot back to the S7 series.

HTC announced today that its Vive VR headset will cost $799. That price will include the Vive hand controllers, base stations, the headset itself, and a pair of ear buds according to an earlier report fromThe Verge. The final version of the headset will apparently be a bit more polished all around than the current developer hardware, and The Verge says it'll come with a built-in microphone, too. ...Read more...

Leaked reports ahead of an expected HTC announcement at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona suggest HTC's Vive VR headset will cost $799. That price will include the Vive hand controllers, base stations, the headset itself, and a pair of ear buds, according to The Verge. The final version of the headset will apparently be a bit more polished all around than the current developer hardware, and The Verge says it'll come with a built-in microphone, too. ...Read more...

Eight is Enough

Howgh! Sitting Metalhead has travelled the plains of online deals, and now he has brought you his hard-earned catch. Today's bounty has plenty of SSD deals, a cheap overclocked GeForce GTX 970, and a few assorted odds and ends.That's all for today, folks! If you spotted any good deals ...Read more...

Just last week, Ghost Games announced that Need for Speed would be arriving for PC on March 15th. Now, the developer has released the system requirements gamers will have to meet to get their drift on. ...Read more...

The Tech Report Podcast is recording live on Twitch. We're talking Soft Machines' VISC processors with David Kanter. Watch us here, or join us on our Twitch page:...Read more...

If you hadn't already heard, The Tech Report Podcast live stream is returning this evening. I'll be discussing Soft Machines' VISC architecture and the performance numbers the company released recently with special guest David Kanter. You can join us on Twitch at 9:30 ET/6:30 PM PT to listen in and ask questions in the chat.If you haven't already done so, be sure to email me or post here with your questions or comments about VISC or anything else happening ...Read more...

Remember that awesome FLIR sensor that Jeff got for his iPhone? Much like the GAU-8 Avenger is so awesome that the military decided to build the Warthog around it, CAT (Caterpillar) decided to make a phone around that FLIR cam. Nod politely to the badass CAT S60 phone. ...Read more...