Desktop

Shortly after Apple announced the Mac Pro desktop earlier this week, AMD said that it is introducing two new Vega 20 cards for workstation users — the Radeon Pro Vega II and the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo targeted at high-compute workloads. The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo is the world's most powerful GPU at the moment with an FP32 performance of 28.3 TFLOPs. Sadly though, this GPU is only available to the Mac Pro and it will be some time before gamers can reap the benefits of Infinity Fabric on GPUs.

To celebrate an event in which more information on its first cloud gaming platform was released, Google has prepared a "Stadia Founder's Edition". It consists of a Stadia Controller in an exclusive Night Blue colorway and a Chromecast Ultra. It may help play the range of Stadia titles that were confirmed today.

The latest Insider's Preview version of Windows 10 (Build 18912) has updated from 19H1 to 20H1. This preliminary OS fixes some bugs found in its predecessor, but may also be associated with some new ones. It also adds a new ability for Windows Narrator: the ability to read and relay the URLs behind click me-type links.

Ampere was initially rumored to launch as the RTX 2000-series in early 2018, but sources now confirm that this new architecture will be featured in Nvidia's 2020 GPUs. No details regarding differences between Turing and Ampere for now. Interestingly enough, the Ampere GPUs will be manufactured by Samsung on the 7 nm EUV node, as TSMCs 7 nm foundries appear to have been overbooked by Apple and AMD.

Noctua, often a go-to brand for PC fans, is at Computex to highlight its new and updated products. They include the NF-A12x25, which gained the European Hardware Association's best case-fan of 2019 award. The company has also made new ultra-thin fans, improved CPU coolers and fanless coolers.

Apple's long-awaited Mac Pro has finally been revealed ahead of its fall launch. Apple initially promised it would arrive in 2018, but it appears that the design team got quite creative and developed several innovative design solutions worth highlighting.

Not much is known about the upcoming Comet Lake CPUs from Intel. Leaked benchmarks point out that these models are to replace the existing Whiskey Lake chips, and will still use the 14 nm manufacturing process. ECS confirmed that the Liva Z3 Plus will be available in 2020 with support for Amazon Alexa.

Seagate announces that it is now prepared to market enterprise- and server-grade hard-drives with capacities of 16TB for the first time. The Exos X16 is a helium-based 7200rpm drive, whereas the IronWolf 16TB and IronWolf Pro 16TB are NAS drives. Tencent Cloud has already picked up X16s for use in its operation.

Apple has taken off the covers of its both its long-anticipated all-new Mac Pro and companion 32-inch Pro XDR 6K display. At US$4,999 it is far from cheap, but for what it offers it is arguably a good value proposition.

Apple revealed a lot of interesting new technology at WWDC 19, but the one thing that almost everyone is talking about is the insane price it is charging for its fancy new Pro XDR monitor stand. The monitor is already eye-wateringly priced at US$4,999, although with all the technology packed into it that part makes sense. What makes little to no sense is that Apple is charging a whopping US$999 for the almost mandatory companion stand.

An AMD Ryzen 5 3600 was shown to beat the Intel Core i7-8700 in a leaked PUBG benchmark over at the Chiphell forum. The Ryzen 5 3600 was shown to average about 6.3% higher than the 8700 when both of them were paired with DDR4-3000 RAM and a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The larger cache size on Ryzen could work well for gamers, but further data and testing are needed for an absolute conclusion.

MSI has alerted its customers advising them of a fraudulent email that may be sent due to their possession of an account with the company. The message attempts to direct the reader to change their Apple IDs using its link. However, MSI asserts that no users' personal, financial or otherwise sensitive data is at risk as a result.

Announced today, the new 2019 Mac Pro looks like an updated "cheese grater" Mac Pro. Featuring a massive spec bump over the current Mac Pro, the new desktop features 8 PCIe slots and Apple's new Mac Pro Expansion (MPX) Module system. MPX Modules use a proprietary connection that allows for enough PCIe lanes to deliver 500 Watts and support dual Radeon Pro Vega Duo GPUs with a total of 56.8 teraflops of computing power and 128 GB of HBM2 VRAM.

The upcoming AMD Navi GPUs such as the Radeon RX 5700 will use a hybrid GCN-RDNA architecture according to information obtained from AMD by Swedish outlet, SweClockers. Apparently, AMD feels that GCN is a mature architecture that has been optimized well for modern games and therefore, will find place alongside RDNA in Navi 10 GPUs. AMD is expected to completely transition to RDNA with Navi 20 sometime in 2020.

The video-game industry could accrue as much as US$179.1 billion by 2024. This is in line with a new market-research report on the subject. This valuation may be driven by conventional platforms such as mobile devices, PCs and consoles; however, VR and AR are also likely to have an increasingly large influence on the space.

Nvidia recently teased the word “Super” in a very brief promotional video that created speculation that the graphics card specialist had some new products coming. A new leak has suggested that the green team is preparing two new graphics cards for release that will feature Turing technology and will be positioned at the premium end of the market.

An online retailer specializing in consumer electronics has added the five current members of AMD’s Matisse family to its database. The prices listed for the Zen 2 desktop processors aren’t too much higher than what was expected: Bottom Line Telecommunications (BLT) has the entry-level Ryzen 5 3600 with Wraith Stealth cooler for US$207.34.

Today, (May 31, 2019) Creative unveils a new partnership with the Taiwanese PC-smiths Clevo. It will involve the integration of Super X-Fi technology into this manufacturer's notebooks in the future. Therefore, this platform will focus on headphone audio in Clevo machines.

An unknown system incorporating an Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus motherboard and an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU has been tested on Geekbench. The device with the brand-new board and just-announced Ryzen 3000 processor managed a surprising score in the single-core test, where it managed to beat out every other Ryzen-based system that has appeared on Geekbench so far.

An AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor has made an appearance on UserBenchmark and the results it achieved seem to point in the direction of the 3rd Gen Ryzen series achieving what was expected from it. High hopes had been pinned on the Zen 2 Matisse CPUs, and early benchmarks are demonstrating that AMD has delivered the goods.

Finally, we will no longer need separate RGB customization software for our Lian Li PC case, MSI keyboard, ASRock motherboard, AMD CPU fan, or Zotac graphics card. Razer Chroma will support all these manufacturers and more.

Zotac released the MEK MINI, an appreciably compact high-powered gaming PC, some months ago. However, that has not stopped it from re-appearing as part of the OEM's showcase at Computex 2019. The unit in question has an Intel Core i7-9700 CPU, which is an improvement on the models on zotac.com.

The PCIe 4.0 standard support combined with the Phison PS5016-E16 controller and Toshiba's BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND memory chips allow the Aorus NVMe PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSDs to reach sequential read and write speeds of 5 GB/s and 4.4 GB/s, respectively. These models come in 1 TB and 2 TB capacities and feature a dual-sided copper heatsink that lowers temperatures by 14%.

AMD's Ryzen 3000 launch has been the talking point at Computex 2019 and all eyes were on the plethora of X570 motherboards unveiled by various OEMs. The excitement with this new chipset generation is largely due to the transition to PCIe Gen4 and the fact that these chipsets have higher power draws, requiring active cooling. This article presents all the information about AMD's new flagship chipset that we are hearing from the event and from other publications so far

Intel has been entertaining visitors at Computex 2019 with some images of graphics cards that could make their way into desktops by 2035. The concept designs, which were created by Cristiano Siqueira, were displayed during the recent Intel Odyssey event. The Prometheus concept graphics card has been particularly well-received.

A couple of photos of an AMD Navi chip and a Ryzen 3000 series processor have been published by a Japanese website. After months of rumors and leaks, the physical products are finally available to see. The Ryzen 9 3900X is easily distinguishable with its chiplet design. The rear sides of the processors show Navi’s smaller ball grid array.

In a recent Computex keynote, Microsoft presented its vision for a future Windows version that would include features like seamless updates, increased security, always-connected state via 5G, sustained performance, expanded cloud connectivity, A.I. integration, more form factors (including foldable devices), plus controls via pen, touch and eye tracking.

War Thunder 1.89 "Imperial Navy" comes with a full naval tech tree for Japan, a first — premium, as usual — helicopter for the same nation, a few new ground vehicles — the long-awaited French Leclerc tank is one of them — and planes for most nations, two new locations, reworked clouds, and more.

AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, has managed to allay concerns that development of 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper processors has been abandoned. An AMD Investor Presentation from March had the vaunted HEDT chips included in the 2019 AMD client lineup. However, May’s presentation removed the next-gen Threadripper from the roadmap.

The rumored 16-core Ryzen 9 CPU was tested behind-the-scenes at Computex by a group of overclockers, who managed to push the processor to 4.25 GHz on water cooling. Thus, the 16-core CPU that is rumored to cost around US$800 managed to score slightly higher than Intel's 18-core i9-9980XE priced at US$2,000.

ASRock has been displaying quite a few of its new products at the Computex 2019 trade event in Taiwan. Two especially interesting items from the Taiwanese manufacturer have already sparked speculation online as to what they could be. Although they are labeled as concept cards, it has been reported they could be Navi Radeon RX 5700 graphics cards.

HP is set to release a new all-in-one (AIO) for 2019: a modular one. The Mini-in-One 24 Display looks like just another 1080p monitor. However, it has an enclosure at the back into which certain HP Mini desktops can be slotted. The Display can then use this PC's I/O as its own.

The TUF sub-division of Asus has released new gaming monitors at Computex this year. There are 3 of these devices, 1 of which is a vertically-aligned panel. All 3 support HDR, Adaptive-Sync and HDMI v2.0.

A developer has recently unveiled a video that shows the latest Android Q beta on the Essential Phone, which is wired to a portable monitor alongside a Bluetooth keyboard. With this setup, he is able to take the upcoming Android Q desktop mode for a spin, but he is using an experimental launcher to make it all work.

Asus has revealed a new motherboard as part of its celebrations of enjoying 30 years in business. The Prime X299 Edition 30 supports the LGA 2066 socket that is compatible with Skylake-X, Kaby Lake-X, and Skylake-W processors from Intel. This means the special edition motherboard from Asus can operate with up to 18-core CPUs.

Available in 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB capacities, the Kingston KC2000 NVMe PCIe SSD can hit read and write speeds of up to 3,200 and 2,200 MB/s. In terms of security, this new storage solution comes with 256-bit AES hardware encryption and support for TCG Opal 2.0 security management.

AMD is taking on Intel with not just one or two but a total of five high-end desktop CPUs that promise far greater performance than Intel's offerings at lower TDPs and price points. The new Ryzen 3000-series is being fabricated on TSMC's 7nm process and offers a multi-chiplet layout with improved IPC, higher core counts, larger cache sizes, and support for PCIe 4.0. The Ryzen 3000-series will go on sale starting July 7.

The Intel i9-9900K is widely regarded as one of the best desktop CPUs out there. Ahead of Computex 2019, its maker has released a new version of this SoC. It is exactly like the base 9900K, except it runs at 5.0GHz on all 8 cores rather than just 1.

A member of the upcoming Matisse family of Ryzen 3000 processors from AMD has been spotted on Geekbench, and the seemingly entry-level sample has delivered scores that will have Intel concerned. The apparent price-performance ratio of the Zen 2 chip appears to be impressively high, if it is actually the SKU that many have speculated it is.

MSI has removed support for Bristol Ridge CPUs in the BIOS latest update to select A320 motherboards. Many other OEMs are expected to cut down legacy socket AM4 CPU support on low-end motherboards as they find it increasingly difficult to accommodate the ever expanding size of the microcode for backward compatibility as newer generations of processors are released.

ASUS is currently holding a "30 Years Together" event to celebrate 3 decades as a hardware and peripherals OEM. It involves competitions in which contestants can enter a PC-centric quiz or tell their own ASUS/ROG ownership story to gain points. The prizes to be won include laptops, cutting-edge graphics cards and accessories.

New specifications for AMD’s Navi-based RX 3080 graphics card have apparently been leaked. It’s believed the RX 3080 will offer eight shader engines and 2,560 stream processors. It seems Nvidia is not too keen on AMD’s rumored naming scheme and has filed to trademark the numbers 3080, 4080, and 5080 with the European Union Intellectual Property Office.

Due to their small footprint, the new Intel NUC 8 Mainstream-G mini PCs have a limited number of upgradeable components. These models integrate Intel's 15 W i7-8565U and i5-8265U quad-core CPUs, but the 8 GB of LPDDR3-1866 RAM and the Radeon RX 540X GPU are soldered. There are variants with Intel Optane Memory, SSD + HDD storage combos, plus kits that come without any storage or OS.

Chuwi has increased its product line with the launch of the Chuwi GT Box mini PC. The company claims the GT Box is an affordable successor to the HiGame PC that did so well on the crowdfunding website Indiegogo. This little machine sports a veteran i3 processor, 8 GB RAM, a 256 GB SSD, and it comes in a lightweight metal case.

Controversial security researcher SandboxEscaper revealed three zero-day exploits that are still not patched in the latest May update for Windows 10. The researcher details how attackers can gain complete access of a Windows 10 system through flaws in the Windows Error Reporting service, the Windows Task Scheduler and Internet Explorer 11, and promised to unveil two more exploits soon.

Ever fancied having a small home server? Well now you can with the NODE Mini Server V2. Caution: soldering skills required.

The Dell XPS Tower with Intel Core i7-8700 processor and 16 GB RAM is currently advertised at the company’s website for US$999.99. However, if you input a handy coupon you can knock that price down to a much more affordable US$699.99 with free shipping. The XPS Tower offers a multitude of configuration options.

Leaked information in regard to two of the upcoming heralded AMD Navi-based graphics cards has revealed a disquieting surprise. Many believed the graphics solutions from the red team would drastically undercut Nvidia products while offering almost similar performance, but this new supposed pricing scheme contradicts that belief.

Graphics card specialist Manli has not skimped on the hyperbole in unveiling the Superior Ultimate Editions of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 Gallardo desktop graphics cards. The triple cooler boards offer the power, performance, and pizzazz that any demanding gamer would require from a high-end ray-tracing capable graphics solution.

Intel used to be the biggest semiconductor maker up until 2017, when Samsung began ramping up the DRAM and NAND memory chip production. Now that memory chip demand is bottoming out and Intel is almost out of the woods with the CPU shortages, Samsung drops to second position again, but things could change by Q4 2019 when the DDR5 memory standard is expected to hit the market.