Desktop

Comet Lake is the code-name for a possibly imminent series of upcoming Intel CPUs. Accord to some leaks, they will then be followed by Rocket Lake. A leaker claims to have uncovered a reference to a new ATX motherboard that may pertain to some of these chipsets.

Fresh evidence for hardware-accelerated ray tracing in what is purported to be Intel GPU driver code has surfaced. The driver references several ray tracing features of the DXR API. Although speculation about ray tracing support in Intel Xe is not new, the company did not officially confirm any of those rumors but only indicated that ray tracing is on the roadmap for datacenter Xe GPUs.

An interesting survey released by the Game Developer Conference has shown which platforms are the most interesting to developers at the moment. In the console wars, the PlayStation 5 just pips the Nintendo Switch for being the device that sparks the most interest, but it is the good old PC that remains the favorite.

Small form factor builders who prefer to use AMD processors now have the option of Noctua's ultra-compact NH-L9a-AM4 Chromax.black for their colour themed builds. The Chromax version is better suited for windowed cases where the standard L9a would look out of place.

8K is the next up-and-coming thing in display-tech standards. However, devices that support it may only be so effective at showing it without compatible, high-quality cables. The company Austere has put just such a product on the market.

Is Matrox going to follow Intel's example to rise against Nvidia and AMD in the gaming GPU market? Probably not, as the Canadians are still focusing on professional and enterprise GPU solutions, but it is interesting to see the Canadian company's choice of allying with Nvidia. The joint venture has designed a custom embedded Quadro GPU that supports up to four 4K commercial wall displays.

PNY has launched a new version of its 48GB NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 graphics card. This one, however, lacks a fan of any kind. Nevertheless, the OEM asserts that it is still capable of a memory bandwidth of 624 gigabytes per second (GB/s) and 14.9 TFLOPS of FP32 performance.

A noted data miner has dug out an impressive result for AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800H in 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark. The Ryzen 4000 series chip from the new Renoir family of APUs amassed a total of 8,350 points in the test, putting it ahead of potential competitors such as Intel’s Core i7-9700K, which managed 8,209 points in the same benchmark.

Industry insider sources inform that Intel's Comet Lake lineup of desktop CPUs will not provide support for the PCIe 4.0 standard as advertised back in late 2019. Intel's CPU shortages combined with the impossibility to adapt circuitry in time have led Intel to completely drop support for the PCIe 4.0 standard on this year's desktop platform.

The RX 5600 XT has been well received so far, but a new rumour claims that AMD has 80 CU and beyond GPUs planned for this year. The lower-end model in what will supposedly be called the RX 6000 series will target the RTX 2080 Ti too, as AMD attempts to regain ground on NVIDIA's stranglehold of the high-end consumer GPU market.

Aimed at industrial applications where complete silence may be desired, the mini PC encases a Fujitsu mini-STX motherboard in a huge heat sink with configurations up to the octa-core Core i9-9900T.

To help drum up the hype ahead of the launch of Half-Life: Alyx in March, Valve is offering gamers an unbeatabale deal. For the next two months, anyone with a Steam account can download and play each of all previous Half-Life titles for free to help refamiliarize gamers with the franchise or attract new fans.

AMD and NVIDIA are locked in a battle for the midrange currently, with both manufacturers pulling moves to make their cards look more attractive. First we had NVIDIA, which cut the RTX 2060 by US$50, and now AMD has reportedly pushed out new firmware to AIBs to tweak their editions of the RX 5600 XT. The enhancements promise to bring up to 15% better performance and put the RX 5600 XT within spitting distance of the RX 5700.

PUBG is getting a new Season 6 update next week. Season 6 offers a new 64-player map, Karakin, which is designed to offer a challenging gameplay and a new hazard called Black Zone in which the map layout changes with every match. Also available is a new Motor Glider vehicle, Survivor Pass, and a host of other enhancements that will go live on January 25 for PC and console players.

Facebook has encountered serious opposition to its intentions to use WhatsApp for ad revenue-building purposes. Now, a new report has indicated that the social media giant has ultimately dropped its efforts to achieve this aim, which apparently included disbanding a corporate team that was dedicated to this contentious task.

Microsoft's president, Ben Smith, has publicly acknowledged the scientific consensus that is anthropogenic climate change. Accordingly, the executive has announced an initiative by which the company aims to throw its carbon emissions into reverse. This will include reducing them to negative values by 2030.

If you thought that 2019 was good for graphics cards and gamers, then think again. 2020 is already shaping up to be even better than last year, with not only new consoles and RTX 3000 around the corner, but also RDNA 2. AMD's next GPU architecture will sport huge improvements over the likes of the RX 5700 series, while the work that has gone into may help the PlayStation 5 too.

AMD has just announced the release of the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition (20.1.2). It confers support for Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, as well as Vulkan 1.2. It also fixes a problem for some UE4-based games in which they could not load under its predecessor.

PC shipments increased by a small percentage in 2019 and this is mostly due to Microsoft discontinuing support for the venerable Windows 7 OS. 261 to 267 million PC system shipping throughout 2019 are nothing to scoff at, but these figures pale in comparison to the amount of smartphones shipped solely in Q3 2019.

Microsoft has ended official support for Windows 7 on January 14, but many home users and businesses still use it as their primary operating system. Enterprise customers can still avail the option of paying for extended support leaving other users reluctant to upgrade in a lurch. This article describes a workaround that non-enterprise users can use to make them eligible for extended security releases.

Intel has announced a shake-up in its line of Xeon scalable processors. The OEM will cease sales of the M variants of these server-grade SoCs (the Xeon Platinum 8280M, for example) will. However, their L (the Platinum 8280L, and so on) counterparts will take their place in this tier of chipsets.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano IoT is a rugged but silent mini PC suited for IT deployments and enterprise use. Unfortunately, the little desktop's performance suffers under load, primarily because of thermal throttling.

Apple has started selling the Mac Pro in a server-friendly rack-mountable form factor. While the internals of the new model are the same as the tower Mac Pro, the rack-mount design runs an extra US $500.

Reports coming from Taiwan and China reveal that AMD will collaborate with ASMedia in order to produce all upcoming motherboard chipsets, including the more affordable B550 and A520 for Ryzen 3000 desktop CPUs, as well as the upcoming 600-series chipset for the Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs that are scheduled to be launched in 2H 2020.

Excited by the prospect of a high-end Navi GPU or two? Well, AMD's partners are seemingly prepping themselves for some new product releases too, with one filing trademarks for four unreleased Navi SKUs at the EEC. We discuss whether this new finding means anything or not, as the case may be.

Sources told Krebs on Security that Microsoft is working to patch an "extraordinarily serious" vulnerability, potentially affecting every Windows system released in the last 20 years.

Zotac is the latest company to join AMD's mini PC initiative. For now, there is only a ZBOX Nano barebones model that is powered by the Ryzen 3 3200U APU with integrated Vega 3 graphics and support for up to 32 GB of DDR4-2400 RAM, but models powered by the new Ryzen 4000 APUs are also expected to launch later this year.

Market research estimates by Gartner and IDC indicate that Apple's share of the PC market continues to decline. With a 7.5 percent share as of Q4 2019, Apple remains the world's 4th largest PC seller. However, it is outsold significantly by market leaders Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

Asus has launched its first custom GPU for Intel’s forthcoming ‘Ghost Canyon’ modular gaming NUCs. The new card is a compact version of Nvidia’s RTX 2070 features two Axial-tech fans two help maximize frame rates during play.

A user on the ChipHell forums posted unconfirmed evidence of the Intel i9-10990XE. If the post is genuine, it could mean that Intel's attempting to brute force its way to multi-core dominance with an insane 380W, 22-core, 44-thread monster CPU.

With the incredibly wide range of refresh rate displays available, 60Hz is starting to look like a thing of the past. While high refresh rate displays have numerous benefits, is it really worth it in the long run?

No, you don't need a stable 144 FPS to take advantage of a 144 Hz display. For gaming laptops in particular where CPU and GPU power are limited, these 240 Hz and 300 Hz high refresh rate panels are more useful for their wide range of divisors than their native refresh rate.

Mozilla adds natural language voice processing to FireFox with the new FireFox Voice feature. Currently limited to desktop, FireFox voice gives you near-total control over the FireFox browser using just your voice and natural language commands.

The official page for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor has gone live. Many of the details about the HEDT chip were already revealed at CES 2020 but now the powerful 64-core desktop CPU has its own home to boast of. AMD is advertising the Threadripper 3990X as the “One Processor to Render Them All”.

With the arrival of the source code on Gitee, Huawei's CentOS-based openEuler Linux distro is taking one step forward. However, this notable effort by the Chinese tech giant is currently sabotaged by its unfinished website and documentation, as well as the apparently non-bootable ISO available for download.

Even though the high-end Navi GPU is supposed to launch this summer, engineering samples appear to already be tested in the wild. The alleged high-end Navi model that popped in cyubeVR OpenVR benchmark, for example, is 17% faster than Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti, and performance could slightly improve for the commercial version.

Audio-Technica has packed its Las Vegas showcase with high-tech new products. They include 3 pairs of TWS earbuds, the flagship of which are the QuietPoint ATH-ANC300TW with hybrid noise cancellation. There are also headphones directed at audiophiles, finished with premium materials such as striped ebony.

The Wacom One is a new, 13-inch digital-art display. It has an FHD panel and in-built, foldable legs for various modes. It is aimed at those looking to get into electronically-enhanced or -generated art, and can also leverage Microsoft Office features with its corresponding pen.

Intel shied away from revealing too much about the Xe DG1 earlier this week, but a leaked set of renders and pictures have lifted the lid on the company's upcoming GPU. Sporting a smart metal design, the DG1 will likely turn heads.

Surprisingly enough, Samsung was not among the first companies to introduce the PCIe 4.0 standard for its popular 900-series NVMe SSDs last year. However, this year, with the announcement of the 980 Pro models, the South Korean giant finally acknowledges the real market demand for speedier storage solutions.

Seemingly in response to AMD's RX 5600 XT announcement, Nvidia's slashed prices on the RTX 2060. The new EVGA RTX 2060 KO is set to arrive on January 13th, priced at just $299. What will this do to the RX 5600 XT and GTX 1660 Ti?

The CES keynote did not touch on important aspects, but press representatives were able to obtain new info immediately after, when AMD CEO Lisa Su was kind enough to answer a torrent of questions at a separate Q&A session. Among the new details, Su confirmed the launch of high-end Navi-based GPUs with hardware-level ray tracing this year and the Navi APUs scheduled for 2021.

If current top-of-the-line PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs reach peak sequential read/write speeds of around 3,500 MB/s do not cut it for you, maybe save up for the upcoming XPG Sage from Adata that promises to deliver double the performance, at least for read speeds. The included Innogrit Rainier controller is also the first to break the 1 million mark for sequential write IOPs.

AMD has launched the 64-core 128-thread Threadripper 3990X at CES 2020. The new HEDT processor is the world's most powerful CPU for content creators and can boost up to 4.3 GHz in a 280W TDP envelope. The Threadripper 3990X will be available from February 7 for US$3,990 SEP.

AMD has introduced the Radeon RX 5600 XT at CES 2020 to take on NVIDIA's GTX 1660 series for 1080p Ultra gaming. Using the RDNA architecture with 36 CUs and 6 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, the RX 5600 XT seems to show considerable gains over the GTX 1660 Ti and is all set to retail on January 21 from US$279.

The Panasonic SC-HTB01 is a soundbar developed in partnership with Square Enix to suit gaming-related audio content. It has 3 appropriately-themed audio presets: RPG, FPS and Voice. They can inform the device's dual frontal speakers and sub-woofers, which are rated for a total 80 watts (W) of power.

NVIDIA has announced the release of a new Game Ready driver at CES 2020. The new driver brings support for variable rate supersampling (VRSS), Freestyle splitscreen, updates to image sharpening, and frame rate limiting among others. Also being announced today is support for RTX in more games with Wolfenstein: Youngblood set to deliver an RTX patch this week.

Reports have been warning about possible NAND memory price hikes ever since late 2018, but the actual increases could happen this year. DigiTimes reports that a minor power failure problem has set back NAND memory production by 3 days at Samsung's Hwaseong facility last week and the effect of this supply shortage could ripple throughout 2020.

Though HP is marketing the Envy 32 AiO to general consumers and multimedia users, its fast Core i7 CPU, GeForce RTX 2080 graphics, and large 31.5-inch DCI-P3 HDR600 display can also appeal to content creators, power users, and some professionals.