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Many Skype users may be reluctant to take a call due to how messy or inappropriate their surroundings may be. Now, however, the app's latest update adds a toggle that blurs everything but the caller out of a camera's shot. This new 'background blur' option is generated by AI, and should function on most PCs.

The first reviews for the 7 nm AMD Radeon VII GPU are out and they all seem to give an impression that AMD has managed to take the fight to the RTX 2080's pavilion. With a whopping 16 GB of HBM2 VRAM and a 1 TB/s memory bandwidth, the Radeon VII seems to focus more on raw power and compute performance versus niceties such as ray tracing or AI supersampling. Is the added power enough to move past the RTX 2080? The initial reviews seem to say, not just yet.

Previous rumors about launch supplies of 5,000 units might not be too far off, as new sources cite very limited Radeon VII availability at least for Europe. Overclockers UK cite 100 units available for Great Britain, while France and Spain would be getting only 20 units each. The reasons for reduced allocations seem to be the Lunar Year celebration in China and AIB partners not having enough time to come up with custom cards.

The next Oculus VR headset to be released is rumored to be called the Rift S. The latest leaks on this device suggests that it will come with its own onboard tracking cameras, rather than rely on USB-connected sensors. It may also fix the original Rift's problems with the appearance of 'god rays' on the lenses, and adjust for room lighting with 50-to-60Hz modes.

Zotac has introduced the Zbox Magnus EC52070D, which is a new, and compact desktop PC. The company has made a few compromises to pack such a powerful GPU within a small form-factor case, but it remains a powerful pre-built system that has plenty going for it.

It is now clear that AMD will be first to launch 7 nm desktop CPUs, but Intel is not sitting on its hands. Even after all the problems it faced in 2018, Intel is now carefully planning for its upcoming 7 nm CPUs. According to sources from Oregon, the D1X fab will be the first one to manufacture 7 nm CPUs, and the facility is currently going through an expansion that will take at least 1.5 years, so the first 7 nm CPUs from intel could arrive in late 2020.

The latest update to the VLC media player (4.0) will bring more features, especially for iOS. However, it will also no longer support older versions of the same platform, along with some others (e.g. Windows XP). It also now offers the ability to play a full list of music without pauses of any kind.

Latest report coming from RBC analyst Mitch Steves presents Nvidia misinforming its investors about revenues recorded during the crypto boom of 2017. We're talking about over US$1.3 billion that were not attributed to GPU sold to crypto miners. The report also claims that AMD's revenues at that time only amounted to US$234 million, which is unusual to say the least, as the Radeon cards were more efficient back then.

Chromebases may have fallen out of fashion years ago, but Acer is reviving the Chrome OS form factor with the Chromebase 24I2 and 24V2, two business-centric Chrome OS all-in-one desktops. Both devices will feature 24-inch Full HD touch displays, Intel 8th generation Core CPUs, and plenty of ports and hardware to support teleconferencing, business work, and more.

A post on Reddit allegedly contains a screenshot of a Gmail app interface that integrates many features taken from Inbox. They include a pinned-only toggle, per-subject bundling and Assistant-esque reminders. They may have been picked for preservation by Google before Inbox shuts down for good.

An image of an AMD Radeon VII graphics card being tested has been uploaded to TweakTown’s Twitter account. Clearly the photo is being used as a teaser for the site’s upcoming benchmarks for the much-anticipated GPU from the red team. LegitReviews has also announced that tests are underway on the world’s first 7nm gaming graphics card.

The Intel Core i9-8950HK represents the top of the line, but users with tighter budgets can opt to get one of the variants sporting Core i5-8300H / i7-8750H / Xeon E-2176M CPUs. All models may be equipped with up to 32 GB of DDR4-2666 RAM and up to 1 TB of NVMe SSD storage, plus there is room for a 2.5-inch HDD as well. With a standard issue CPU cooler, these mini PCs will be anything but quiet.

The new Xeon W-3175X workstation-oriented processor sports no less than 28 cores and 56 threads, runs at 3.1 GHz (4.3 GHz turbo boost), has a TDP of 255 W, and supports up to 512 GB of hexa-channel DDR4 ECC memory. Announced back in October, now it is finally available for purchase at a price of US$2,999.

HP is currently promoting a deal that will give gamers a chance to properly test out a system that includes an Nvidia GeForce 20 series GPU. The manufacturer is giving away either Battlefield V or Anthem with qualifying PCs that have an RTX 2070, while both titles can be obtained for free if an RTX 2080 or RTX 2080 Ti gaming desktop computer is purchased.

Although it cannot match the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 in Final Fantasy 15 — a title that features some technologies exclusive to the RTX series — the AMD Radeon VII appears to be a much better choice for 4K gaming, scoring higher than its competitor in the Fire Strike Ultra benchmark. The Radeon VII will hit the market on February 7.

The Austrian company Noctua has issued a press release to announce the introduction of the new NT-H2 thermal compound. The award-winning cooler manufacturer claims the second generation of its “enthusiast-grade” paste managed to deliver up to 2 °C lower temperatures in the firm’s tests than the predecessor NT-H1. The thermal paste will be available in 3.5 g and 10 g packages.

Besides integrating UHD Blu-Ray players or DVD writer drives, the new VivoMini HTPCs come with internal PSUs and generous room for storage expansions. These mini PCs are powered by Intel's 35 W Core T CPUs that bridge the gap between the ULV chips and the desktop processors. Additionally, there is support for up to 32 GB of RAM and up to 4 HDDs.

The significantly reduced base clock rate and TDP allow the mobile RTX 2080 to fit into a wider range of gaming laptop designs. Fortunately, memory bandwidth and number of CUDA cores remain unchanged.

Can the fastest consumer desktop GPU available beat the fastest laptop with SLI graphics? Not quite, but it's at least 50 percent faster than any gaming laptop out there equipped with a single GeForce GTX 1080 GPU.

Facebook has just announced an initiative in which messages from its own Messenger, as well as from its acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp, will be integrated using a singular infrastructure. This contravenes an earlier commitment on the part of the parent company that these 3 services would remain independent. This plan has also raised alarm among privacy experts and WhatsApp staff.

A new report by ResearchAndMarkets.com indicates that the wireless headphone market will continue to show healthy growth into the year 2024. At that point, it could be worth as much as US$34 billion. The report indicates that this could be driven by increasing sophistication in wireless audio features and technology.

The engineering sample spotted by Tum Apisak in the UserBenchmark database has a designation that is consistent with previously leaked codenames. As far as specs go, the early sample can boost to 3.7 GHz on a 105 W TDP, and also features 32 MB of L3 cache. In single-core tests, the 12-core CPU is 13% faster than the Ryzen 7 2700X.

Navi is the currently-accepted name for the generation of AMD processors to succeed the Radeon VII GPU. Cards based on this upcoming 7nm platform may be released later this year. A new leak points to new chipset variants for the series that may differ from those mentioned in previous rumors.

Now that Nvidia almost cleared its Pascal inventories, gamers are looking for a good price/performance ratio. The RTX 2070 and 2080 cards are certainly overpriced for now, and even the RTX 2060 could be a bit too much for the budget builds. According to the latest rumors, the budget gaming sector should get the GTX 1660 / Ti GPUs next month, and these may also replace the GTX 1050 / Ti laptop GPUs, as well.

The CR400 is a cheap Mid-Tower case with a large side window and a ventilated mesh front panel. The case has mounts for two 240 mm radiators to keep components cool and is big enough to handle full-size GPUs and PSUs.

Jensen Huang is trying to divert attention from stock prices and investor troubles with an optimistic outlook over the inventory troubles that the green team has been having since early 2H 2018. Nvidia's CEO was happy to announce that the entire Pascal GPU inventory is almost gone, but this might not actually be good for end users who will be stuck with overpriced RTX 2000 cards.

Consumer PCs will finally benefit from PCIe 4.0 devices this year thanks to AMD's support via the Ryzen 3000 CPUs, but the high-end sector will also be getting a taste of the PCIe 5.0 some later in 2019, and the two standards are expected to coexist for a few years. PCIe 5.0 will push the theoretical bandwidth to 128 GB/s on x16 duplex lanes running at 32 GHz.

AMD has issued a statement in regard to the recent rumor that only 5,000 Radeon VII GPUs were going to be made available for sale at release time. However, the statement has not explicitly confirmed or refuted the claim of a limited run of units. It simply mentions that the company expects to be able to meet initial demand for the much-heralded chip.

An ever-increasing body of leaks point to '1660 Ti' as the name for one of the first GTX cards to feature the Turing architecture. It suggests that it may be an RTX 2060 counterpart, just without ray-tracing. A new rumor has indicated, however, that it will not have as many CUDA cores as the low-tier RTX.

Netflix has announced plans to inflate its prices by up to 18%. However, this will only affect new and existing customers who use US dollars to pay for their subscriptions. This move resulted in a 6.5% increase in its stock price yesterday (January 15, 2019).

Recently, Twitter revamped its platform with the 'Interesting Tweets' feature. However, some users have asserted that the tweets chosen by its algorithm persisted in timelines regardless of whether they turned it off in Settings or not. Now, a new option to return to a completely chronological order of tweets is being rolled out.

AMD could make 5000 - or less - Radeon VII GPUs for sale for their February release, according to sources cited in a new TweakTown report. This may be because the new 7nm cards are Radeon Instinct cut-downs. In addition, this report indicates that there will be a dearth of Radeon VII custom cards.

Anandtech claims to have obtained access to some materials that indicate Intel is planning to release a new, extremely high-end desktop CPU. This processor, the i9-9990XE, is described as having a base clock of 4.0 GHz, 14 cores, 28 threads and a TDP of 225 watts. However, it will be open to OEM bids only.

The new Infinite S budget-friendly series will feature mid-range specs like the gen 9 i7 / i5 CPUs accompanied by the RTX 2060 GPU from Nvidia, while the Trident X models now represent MSI's mid-to-high-end compact gaming solutions that integrate top specs like the gen 9 i9-9900K CPU and Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti GPU.

According to preliminary estimates by Gartner, Lenovo was the world’s largest PC vendor in 2018 in terms of units shipped. The Chinese company was at the top of the pile for the last quarter of the year (4Q18) and beat out HP and Dell for the year overall. However, Lenovo only came third for 4Q18 shipments in the US, behind HP and Dell.

The developer studio Bungie has announced that it will publish its flagship series, Destiny, independently, thus ending its partnership with Activision. This eventuality has been anticipated by industry insiders and observers for some time. However, this is the first time that Bungie has made an official statement on the subject.

The MXM form factor preceding DGFF never took off even though it was marketed for its versatility and ability to support future GPUs. If Dell isn't careful, they may repeat the same mistakes and run into a wall with DGFF once Nvidia launches a Turing successor.

The AMD keynote for this year mainly revolved around the announcement of the Radeon VII GPUs. However, the company's CEO also revealed that the third generation of Ryzen desktop processors would become available soon. There was not much additional detail given on this new CPU line, besides that it is definitely of a 7-nanometer architecture.

As a direct competitor to Nvidia's RTX 2080 GPU, the Radeon VII will target gamers as well as content creators. AMD is citing more than 30% average performance gains for content creators and more than 25% improved performance in games over the Vega 64 GPUs. Also, it looks like the Radeon VII can beat the RTX 2080 in certain scenarios, but costs US$50 less.

Lenovo has introduced the Yoga A920 — a venerable alternative to the Microsoft Surface Studio lineup featuring some nifty enhancements that cater to the creative professional crowd. The Yoga A920 offers very good specs and most of the functionality of the Surface Studio 2 for a whole US$1,000 less.

The upcoming Optane products will get a considerable speed boost, as Intel will switch from the PCIe Gen X2 interface to the Gen 3 X4 one. There will be a new M15 caching module, a new stand-alone 815P SSD and a new H10 combo module that will feature caching and QLC NAND storage. All these new products should be launched in Q2 2019.

Dell is pulling a Clevo by offering a laptop with desktop CPU options and an upgradeable GPU. Instead of adopting the MXM GPU form factor like MSI and Clevo, however, Dell has created its own proprietary DGFF GPU form factor that promises better support and easier serviceability.

Intel has announced expansion of its lineup of 9th generation desktop CPUs by introducing six new CPUs with F and KF monikers. While both F and KF series have their iGPUs disabled, the KF series is overclockable. These new CPUs include the Core i3-9350KF, Core i5-9400F, Core i5-9400, Core i5-9600KF, Core i7-9700KF, and the Core i9-9900KF. Intel also announced that mobile versions of these CPUs will be coming in Q2 2019.

ZOTAC has announced two new GPUs based on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 at CES 2019. The RTX 2060 Twin Fan and RTX 2060 AMP feature the company's IceStorm 2.0 cooling mechanism and FireStorm fine tuning utility. The latest ZOTAC Magnus E series Mini PC now comes with the mobile GeForce RTX 2070 GPU and an 8th generation Intel Core i5 CPU in a compact footprint.

Initially believed to be stripped of the whistles and bells brought by the RTX features on the high-end desktop GPUs, the RTX 2060 is now confirmed to be a powered-down version of the RTX 2080 SKU. Nvidia claims it is 40-60% faster than the GTX 1060 and it even occasionally beats the GTX 1070 Ti. It should be able to provide 60 fps with RTX features enabled on low details in Battlefield V.

The Razer Raptor 27 is the gaming company's entry into the gaming laptop market. The 27-inch 1440p monitor boasts a quick 144 Hz refresh rate, response times as low as 1 ms, and a bright (420 nit) HDR400 certified IPS panel. The monitor will ship with flat acid green cables tailor-made for the display's cable management system.

Popular hardware review channel Hardware Unboxed is "fairly confident" that AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 series for the desktop will not be using AMD's chiplet design. Instead, AMD has allegedly opted for another traditional monolithic design, similar to last generation's Ryzen 2000 and 1000 series.

Twitter user APISAK, a prolific leaker and data miner, has leaked an alleged codename for a Ryzen 3000 series engineering sample. According to speculation, this CPU will have 12 cores and a TDP of 105 watts, meaning the previously rumored 12 core 3700X could be real.