Latest Tech News

Only one week away from the official announcement of the next gen gaming GPUs powered by the Turing architecture, and the leaked benchmarks are already starting to pop up on the Internet. This time it looks like an alleged RTX 2080 made it in the hands of an overzealous tester who stressed it in Ashes of the Singularity on Crazy 4K settings.

The Threadripper 2990WX was already pushed to 5.4 GHz last week, but it looks like there is room for more overclocking when enough liquid nitrogen is used. Overclocker Ivan Cupa managed to get all 32 cores of the 2990WX model running at an outstanding 6 GHz, but there is no way of telling how much better it performs, as no benchmarks were provided.

Asus' main flagship for the year, the Zenfone 5Z is finally making it over to the US. While currently unavailable, it's said to be on pre-order at the moment and will go on sale on August 13 with a bargain price tag of US$499.

OPPO has unveiled its new F9 sub-premium device. The F9 is a solid offering on paper, and continues the new trend of innovative design factors with one of the best notch implementations we've ever seen.

Motorola has launched three new devices in China. The E5 Plus and Z3 are known quantities, so the main arrival is the Snapdragon 636-powered Moto P30.

Xiaomi released the Mi A2 in India last week, with the device being, for the most part, an Android One rebrand of the Mi 6X. It also fails at being a worthy successor to the popular last-gen Mi A1.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple's next trillion dollars could come from its services business, AR glass, and Apple Car. The Apple Car is expected to launch sometime between 2023 to 2025 and will be positioned as the 'next star product'. While the idea of an Apple-branded vehicle was shelved sometime ago, some of the recent hirings of the company might mean Apple is indeed reconsidering getting into the automobile industry.

Phoronix has done a performance comparison of the AMD Threadripper 2990WX in Windows 10 Pro and Linux and the results show Threadripper numbers significantly lower under Windows 10 Pro than in Linux. In some tests such as 7-Zip Compression, the Threadripper 2990WX posted almost 58% higher scores in Linux compared to Windows 10 Pro implying that Linux is a better OS of choice when testing high core count CPUs.

Although it will use the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor as the regular Mi Pad 4, the upcoming Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 Plus is expected to come with a larger display and a higher-capacity battery. Rumored to arrive in black or gold finish, this Android slate should come with 4 GB RAM and 64 GB or 128 GB internal storage.

Although ZTE can sell its products to the civilian consumers all over the US, a recent bill that was signed by Donal Trump bans the government use of any device made by the Chinese brand due to security issues. Even more, this bill also forbids the use of Huawei hardware for the same reason.

Lenovo has introduced the AMD Ryzen variant of the Lenovo Yoga 530 convertible notebook in without much fanfare and initial reviews seem to show promising performance. The Lenovo Yoga 530 is powered by the AMD Ryzen 5 2500U with Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics and benchmarks have shown the laptop beating the Intel Core i7-8550U by a fair margin. The dual-channel DDR4-2400 memory in the Yoga 530 also helps it gain leads over the Ryzen 7 2700U-powered IdeaPad 720S.

The Galaxy Note 9 comes with a display that managed to raise the bar "significantly higher" compared to the previous Samsung handsets that were praised by DisplayMate for the quality of their screens. In this case, the display lab claims that the Note 9 sports "the most innovative and high-performance smartphone display" it ever tested.

On August 13 at Siggraph Nvidia announced its new Turing based RTX Quadro GPUs, designed to process real time ray tracing. The full Turing GPU is the second biggest in the world (the first being Volta) and it is the world's first GPU with ray tracing functionality built in. The new RTX Quadro lineup will be arriving in Q4 or sooner.

AMD's Threadripper 2990WX has finally launched, and it is officially the fastest CPU in the world. With 32 cores, 64 threads, and an all core frequency of 3.4 GHz, it's a monstrous CPU. However, the path to 32 cores on the desktop is paved with compromises and some disappointments.

The NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs implement Samsung's latest 16 Gigabit GDDR6 memory. The enhanced bandwidth of GDDR6 helps in improved performance and memory efficiency while consuming 35% less power. The Quadro RTX is the first product to implement Samsung's GDDR6 VRAM.

Rumors about a BlackBerry KEY2 Lite smartphone are have just been refueled with TCL's teaser of a new model that will be announced at IFA 2018 on August 30. The Lite version should keep the same appearance as the regular version, complete with the QWERTY keyboard, but some key hardware components like the SoC, memory, camera setup and battery would be downgraded.

The new BI329 mini PC is Zotac's latest model dedicated to the HTPC and IoT markets. It comes in three variants: a barebones one without RAM and storage, one with 4 GB RAM and 120 GB SSD, and a Windows variant that has 4 GB of RAM, 32 GB M.2 storage plus pre-installed Windows 10 Home. All these variants are powered by Intel's Celeron N4100 quad-core ULV CPU.

Microsoft has finally added the long-missing dark theme for File Explorer. While Windows 10 and many 'modern' apps have support for a dark theme, legacy framework used in File Explorer made this a more difficult task.

Shortly on the heels of unveiling the Quadro RTX cards at SIGGRAPH 2018, NVIDIA released a new teaser video for the upcoming 'GeForce Gaming Celebration' event. The teaser drops quite a few hints, which indicate that the upcoming GeForce cards will indeed have an RTX 20xx nomenclature.

Macs are more or less impervious to hacking, right? Not any more, according to two cybersecurity researchers during a briefing at the Black Hat USA Conference 2018. However, the attacks involved are difficult to achieve and need to be launched at very specific times during the computer's set-up.

According to the official Twitter handle of Poco India, the Xiaomi Poco F1 is all set to launch on August 22. While no specifications have been revealed, we do know that the Poco F1 is Xiaomi's shot at the affordable flagship category.

The barebones NUC with Core i5-8259U CPU is now shipping for just under $400 USD with the promise of Optane support, Hyper-Threading, and an integrated Iris Plus Graphics 655 GPU.

India remains a solid market for the Chinese smartphone brand, as Xiaomi accounted for no less than 10 million units sold in Q2 2018, which translates to a market share of 29.7 percent. Samsung got the second place, while Vivo and OPPO came in third and fourth. The Indian market grew by 20 percent since the same period of 2017.

After it impressed everyone with the sophisticated Find X, OPPO now presents the R17 mid-range handheld with outstanding premium features. Besides being the first OPPO model integrating an in-display fingerprint scanner, the R17 comes equipped with the Snapdragon 670 SoC coupled with 8 GB of RAM and 128 storage. It also features a notch, but this one seems less intrusive.

Intel is rumored to release its octa core i9-9900k in October with an all core turbo of 4.7 GHz, which is the fastest stock clock speed that has ever been offered on an eight core CPU on either the AMD Zen or Intel Core architectures. Intel's new mainstream flagship would be going head to head with AMD's Ryzen 2700X, which only has an all core boost of about 4 GHz. With such a high all core boost on so many cores, will Intel's 9900k be too hot to handle?

The race for the first foldable smartphone to hit the market might involve LG and a few others as well, but it looks like Samsung and Huawei are the strongest brands in it. According to DJ Koh, the company focuses on making the foldable smartphone a popular product from the first try, but this does mean it will wait for Huawei to steal the start.

MSI has announced a new mobile workstation for creatives. The WS65 is a professional makeover for the GS65 Stealth Thin and comes with processor options up to the Intel Core i9-8950HK and GPU options up to the NVIDIA Quadro P4200. The MSI WS65 will be on display during SIGGRAPH 2018 and is expected to be available from September.

The new Radeon Pro WX 8200 only gets 56 CU and 8 GB HBM2 VRAM, but the Vega 10 GPU can still boost to 1.5 GHz and the memory bandwidth is slightly higher than that of the WX 9100 flagship. Even with these downgrades, the WX 8200 is only ~20% slower than the WX 9100, but its price is more than halved.

Although the release date is not public yet, HTC has just confirmed that Android Pie will reach the U12+, U11+, U11, and U11 Life (Android One) handsets. The company also revealed that the timeframes will be announced in a timely manner, so it is rather safe to assume that the update will not arrive too soon.

Intel's next-generation of Core series chips will launch October 1. Although still fabricated on a 14nm node, the 9th gen chips will feature more cores to counter the threat from AMD

Acer is announcing discount offers for its Nitro 5, Chromebook 15, and Chromebook R11 for the Back to School season. The limited period offer gives up to US$50 discount on select models of the Nitro 5 and first-gen Chromebook 15, and Chromebook R 11. Acer is also offering US$100 discount on the second gen Chromebook 15.

Apart from introducing their thinnest mobile workstation ThinkPad yet, Lenovo updated their most powerful ThinkPad laptop today as well. The new ThinkPad P72 ditches the DVD drive and opts for a thinner chassis, while also offering far more powerful GPU options than any other ThinkPad, up to the Nvidia Quadro P5200.

Expect the same ThinkPad carbon fiber and magnesium alloy finish but in a newer design inspired by the ThinkPad X1 Carbon series. Intel 8th gen Xeon and Quadro GPUs complete the package, but the high starting price of just under $2000 USD may turn off some workstation users.

Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is finally coming, next generation GeForce 11xx/20xx details continue to leak, and AMD is slowly but surely making a comeback on desktop. Catch up on some key topics in the industry you may have missed over the past week here.

Google is expected to miss out cashing in on the Fortnite craze due to Epic Games' decision to distribute the Fortnite Mobile APK outside the Play Store. App Store intelligence firm Sensor Tower projects that Google might stand to miss out on more than US$50 million in platform fees for the remaining part of 2018. Circumventing the Play Store might have a slight impact in overall downloads of the game but its revenue potential stands to remain fairly unaffected.

As we inch closer to the launch of NVIDIA's next generation GPUs, fresh rumors and leaks have started cropping up on the web. New info points to a possibility of a dual-fan Founders Edition and ray tracing capabilities in the top-tier SKIs. The company has also registered the Turing, Quadro RTX, and GeForce RTX trademarks. Here's a roundup of such rumors and more.

Epic Games is now accepting invitation requests for installing Fortnite Mobile on non-Samsung devices. Once signed up, users have to wait for a confirmation email before Epic activates the account for playing Fortnite. However, developers have found a way to modify the APK so that any phone can be spoofed to be the Galaxy Note 9 in order to instantly play the game.

Sony has launched its most expensive digital music player and in-ear headphones to date. The new Signature Edition DMP-Z1 and IER-Z1Rs come in at a whopping US$7,900 and US$1,780, but promise an unmatched audio quality.

Visually, the UX580 is nothing more than a UX550 with a secondary trackpad display. Users not interested in the dual-screen capabilities of the UX580 can now get the UX550 with an Intel 8th gen Core i7 processor for $1800 USD.

AdoredTV, a PC analyst and reviewer, has claimed to have obtained information on Turing from an Nvidia employee. The reviewer previously railed against the idea Nvidia would call their new series 2000 instead of 1000 and was initially skeptical of the employee's credibility. In his latest video, AdoredTV examines these supposed leaked documents, saying "For me, the first believable Turing leak." Disclaimer: this rumor does not necessarily reflect Notebookcheck's opinions or views and that until it is confirmed or disproven that this information is speculative.

Preorders for the Galaxy Note 9 have already started. The prices associated with this event confirm what has been suspected for months: the new Samsung phablet will set you back considerably. The prices also compare well with those of the iPhone X.

Parisa Tabriz is a director of engineering and also leads Project Zero, a cybersecurity research core, at Google. Tabriz delivered the opening keynote at a recent conference in Las Vegas, in which she dismissed blockchain's potential as a means of securing data.

Those who had any hopes of being able to acquire the Dell XPS 15 9570 updated with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 11 graphics before the end of the year should change their shopping plans because Frank Azor has just confirmed that this machine will not receive any hardware refresh in Q4.

This light version of the PUBG Mobile game received an update to version 0.5.0 and now features a new sniper rifle, clans, and a new War Mode. Sadly, this title is still not available in many markets, although it made its debut on Google Play back in March. PUBG Mobile Lite uses Unreal Engine 4 and can run on devices with rather low specs.

Sony managed to sell more than 500 million PlayStation consoles since the launch of the PSOne in 1994, and, to celebrate this monumental achievement, it is launching a special Limited Edition PS4 Pro that comes with a dark blue translucent casing, a 2 TB HDD, a PS Camera, and a translucent controller. The console itself has bronze-gold insignia and a special plaque that lets the owner know which of the 50,000 units is in his possession.

Per-key RGB lighting, 1800p QHD+ IGZO touchscreen, Thunderbolt 3, and 16 GB of RAM for just $900 USD. The new Razer deal is one of the better promotions from the manufacturer. Unfortunately, there is one caveat that hardcore gamers should be wary of.

The upcoming Pocophone F1 is more than just another Xiaomi handset because this will be the first smartphone by POCO, which is a new sub-brand of the Chinese company. POCO's first effort focuses entirely on speed and sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 with liquid cooling, an IR blaster, and a generous 4,000 mAh battery.

TCL might be taking the Palm brand name a bit too literal with the newly leaked 3.3-inch model that will be available only in the US from Verizon later this year. Insider sources claim that this model will be powered by a Snapdragon 435 SOC and will integrate 3 GB RAM with 32 GB storage. To keep things ultra-light, TCL will only equip this model with an 800 mAh battery.

A bevy of new NVIDIA GeForce and Quadro cards were spotted on the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) website. While the certification entries themselves do not reveal much about the cards, this is one of the last stages before the cards are released into the wild.

The event that provided the Galaxy Note 9 with its debut also introduced the Galaxy Watch, Samsung's new smartwatch. This device, like the latest Note, uses Bixby as a virtual assistant. The new Galaxy Home smart speaker also runs Bixby.