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News and rumor website VideoCardz has reported the existence of the RTX 2060, some of its specifications, and that it will launch soon. With 1920 CUDA cores, the new midrange card could be up to 50% faster than the previous 1060 6 GB. Whether or not the RTX 2060 will support ray tracing and, if so, how fast ray tracing performance will be are both unknown.

AMD will unveil its new version of the Adrenalin drivers for Radeon gaming cards on December 13. The software is thought not to target performance directly, and focus on a variety of novel or improved features instead. For example, it will add a 'tutorial' for Radeon Settings.

With the new Sound BlasterX AE-9, Creative Labs shows that it still values the audiophile community, even though it took the company 6 years to release a new version. The new card comes with replaceable operational amplifiers for increased control over sound tuning, and an external DAC to further filter out the interferences.

Tech enthusiasts were intrigued by a contest hosted by a South Korean sales agency, the object of which was to guess the Cinebench scores for the as of yet unreleased Ryzen 3600X and 3700X. However, the contest has now been cancelled after AMD was notified about it and the company presumably had a hand in shutting it down.

Those who love Facebook's Stories feature can finally enjoy it in their Groups as well. Group Stories has been tested starting earlier this year, and now this feature is finally available for Facebook users all around the world on iOS, Android, or desktop.

The Navi 10 is AMD's upcoming 7nm-based architecture for its next-gen GPUs. A post on the Chiphell forum now alleges that it could compete with NVIDIA's RTX 2080 in certain configurations. This contravenes earlier leaks pitting the flagship Navi card up against the 2070.

Sales of laptops, traditional PCs, and mobile workstations are expected to remain relatively flat for the next few years. Even so, the fast decline of traditional slate tablets will allow laptops and PCs to regain lost market share. Detachable tablets will continue to grow and eat up sales of slate tablets.

The Kingpin series is a super-high-end, super-powered line of premium GPUs designed by EVGA. Given this reputation, IT correspondents speculate that the next generation of these cards will be based on the RTX 2080 Ti. The existence of this new card has been leaked on Instagram.

Microsoft Edge is changing. 2019 may mark its transformation into a cross-platform and Chromium-based browser, according to a blog post by Joe Belfiore, the Corporate Vice President of the Essential Products Group at Microsoft and a post on GitHub by the Microsoft Edge Team. Expect to see the new Microsoft Edge on Windows 7, 8, 10 and even macOS soon.

Videocardz has claimed that ZOTAC had accidentally posted a link for a new version of its GTX 1070-based Amp Extreme card - one with GDDR5X rather than the more usual GDDR5. However, this card has 8GB of this memory, as before, with the same number of CUDA cores. Then again, its TDP had increased.

Intel is planning to release refreshed NUC kits in 2019. A couple of leaked slides reveal that there will be a premium lineup (Ghost Canyon X) with 45 W CPUs that can get up to 8 cores and 16 threads, plus three more affordable family (Frost Canyon X) with 25 W CPUs that can get up to 6 cores and 12 threads. These new kits will be available towards the end of 2019.

AdoredTV is back with yet another juicy leak, this time regarding AMD's upcoming 7 nm Navi gaming GPU lineup that is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2019. If the information is right, it looks like AMD is going for aggressive price points in the mid-range GPU market, making the upcoming Radeon RX 3080 / 3070 / 3060 models a very tempting alternative to Nvidia's RTX 2070 and GTX 1070 / 1060 cards.

AdoredTV is well known for his previous leaks on AMD's upcoming Rome server CPU and Nvidia's current gen Turing GPUs. It's not entirely surprising that he has come across some information which he once again recommends we take with a grain of salt.

AMD CEO Lisa Su already expressed the intent to bring back high-end GPUs into the game in the Q3 financial report from last month, and now Su is reiterating these plans, saying that AMD is ready to dominate all GPU sectors once again. Navi would be AMD's answer to Nvidia's mid-range RTX 2070 cards, while Arcturus (expected in late 2019) would take on the RTX 2080 Ti and beyond.

The latest ray trace-supporting and Turing-powered card, the Titan RTX, was launched at today's (December 3, 2018) Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. With its 24GB in GDDR6 memory, 576 multi-precision Tensor Cores and 72 RT Cores, it is clearly aimed at deep-learning professionals.

Scott Johnson, the Google manager in charge of the app Hangouts, has taken to Twitter in order to refute a report that the same app is to shut down shortly. Instead, Johnson asserts, its functions are to be split across two new services: Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meets. Those who still use "Hangouts Classic" will be "upgraded" to these new apps as they roll out.

AMD might not be doing that great on the stock market, but the data provided by Germany's largest e-tailer shows that this brand is actually doing great. In November, Mindfactory has sold two AMD processors for each Intel processor. The best seller was the Ryzen 5 2600, followed by the 2700X and the 2600X.

Apple is facing a lawsuit pressed by 3 plaintiffs in the United States. It concerns a claim that the company has breached Californian advertising and representation laws in selling Macbook and iMacs. These plaintiffs assert that Apple's allusions to longevity and robustness when marketing its devices are contrary to their experiences of reduced or impaired functionality in their devices.

A slide from Gigabyte's internal presentation has leaked and it shows that the AMD X570 chipset will be launching at next year's Computex. The X570 chipset will support the Ryzen 3 CPUs and also bring support for PCI Express Gen 4. The presentation also indicated information about Intel's next HEDT CPU, Glacier Falls, and new Intel chipsets — the B365 and H310C. It also mentions 'KF' variants of the 9th gen CPUs such as the Core i9-9900KF, Core i7-9700KF, and a few non-K variants such as the Core i5-9400F and the Core i3-8100F.

3DMark's long awaited ray tracing benchmark Port Royal is finally coming out in January of next year. After Battlefield V, it will be the world's second ray tracing compatible application that focuses on gaming and the world's first dedicated ray tracing benchmark for gamers.

Anthem is now very close to its final release, as the developers just announced the Alpha test scheduled for December 8-9. Unfortunately, spots for the test are limited and those who do not get selected for this test could still participate in the beta test that is scheduled for early February, if they pre-order the game.

Intel has announced that it will introduce a new medium called Universal Windows Drivers (UWD) to update the integrated graphics the company supplies to current Microsoft OS-running hardware. The institution of UWD will mean that all other methods to install updates for these graphics drivers may become invalid.

It was discovered recently that AMD's Athlon 200GE processor, which is regarded as a great budget option, can actually be overclocked despite being officially a locked part. Overclocking enthusiasts discovered that MSI, perhaps by accident, allows the 200GE to be overclocked on its B350M Gaming Pro motherboard.

Even though the crypto market is at it its lowest this year, getting some cryptocurrency as passive income never hurt anyone. Asus and Quantumcloud joined forces in order to make it easier for Asus GPU owners to mine cryptocurrencies when the graphics cards are mostly idle. At current prices, the profits are pretty minimal, but no one knows when the next big swing would hit the crypto world and turn those modest profits into small fortunes.

Fresh details about Microsoft's first store in the UK have emerged online. Published on the City of Westminster's planning portal, Microsoft has confirmed the size of its London store's retail floor space and offered more details about its layout.

Jon Peddie Research informs that the GPU market is doing relatively well, even though the AIB GPU sales saw a significant decline. The overall GPU sales (including iGPUs and mobility GPUs) were up 10.64% compared to Q2 2018, and Intel is still dominating the iGPU/embedded GPU maret with an increase of ~13%.

Fluent design updates for the start menu, clock synchronization added, microphone notification area refinements and more are rolling out to the Insider Preview Fast ring in the latest 19H1 build. Build 18290 is available to download now from Windows Update.

DigiTimes reports that Intel will be holding a conference for discrete GPUs in December, specifically about Arctic Sound. Raja Koduri will be presenting in the conference but went on the record to explicitly state that it is an "architecture day, not a DGPU day."

Among the Windows 10 October update's many bugs, Apple's iCloud stopped working and could not be installed on the build. Microsoft and Apple had announced that they would collaborate to resolve this bug. With iCloud's newest update, it appears that this has been achieved.

A recent entry in SiSoftware's SANDRA database lists AMD's upcoming "Rome" EPYC CPU with double the L3 cache as prior Zen CPUs. Detailed as "16 x 16 MB L3," this would put total L3 cache for Rome at 256 MB across its 64 cores, utterly trouncing Intel's forthcoming Cascade Lake CPUs. However, this is still a rumor and should be treated as such.

Initially meant to get a US$500 MSRP, AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 GPU had to go through serious supply problems that jacked the retail prices to almost US$800. Fast forward one year later, the card supply is almost too high now, and thanks to AMD's price slashes plus the Cyber Monday deals from Newegg, the RX Vega 64 can be ordered for US$400 along with three free games.

According to a Taiwanese forum thread that claims to have information from an inside partner meeting, Intel may be developing a 10-core consumer-grade CPU in the Comet Lake-S family. The CPU would be built on the 14 nm process and may use a dual-ring bus design, implying that the CPU will split cores between two dies.

ASRock has released its Phantom Gaming 6 motherboard. It supports X399 Threadripper CPUs, up to 128GB of 3400MHz OC DDR4 RAM, Phantom Gaming 2.5G and Intel Gigabit LAN. It also has 7.1 channel audio, 3 PCI-e 3.0 x16 slots, 3 M.2 slots and, of course, RGB.

Blizzard should just officially acknowledge the fact that Diablo 4 is in the works in order to appease the enraged fans. Kotaku's sources claim that Diablo 4 has been in the works since late 2013 and the game changed direction in 2016. In its early stages, Diablo 4 looked like Dark Souls, but the vision changed to a more traditional isometric ARPG with dark art style.

Dell has lined up a wide array of devices as part of its Black Friday deals. Many of the selected laptops are being offered in limited quantities with savings ranging from an enticing 10% off right up to a whopping 50% off a Vostro 15 500 with 1 TB HDD (US$509.00). Dell is also offering discounts on desktops, monitors, servers, peripherals, and hardware upgrades.

It's that time of the year that sees significant discounts in PC hardware. We've chanced upon a few Intel and AMD CPUs that are being discounted heavily for Black Friday through Cyber Monday so this is probably a good time if you've been on the fence about upgrading your existing CPU. While most CPUs across budgets are seeing reduced prices, the following CPUs are seeing some of the highest discounts available.

The compute-oriented DGX-2 server launched in early 2018 is getting an upgrade consisting of more powerful Xeon CPUs and higher-clocked Tesla V100 GPUs. The Tesla V100 cards come with a total of 512 GB of HBM2 memory and are interconnected through special NVLinks, allowing them to act as a single GPU with a massive throughput of 2.1 PetaFLOPS.

Microsoft has announced that only Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2) code-signing will be used to update legacy versions of Windows (namely Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1). Machines that only support SHA-1 will be considered too vulnerable, and will be prevented from updating by next April.

The latest Command Center software by Alienware finally brings CPU, GPU, and memory overclocking capabilities to the "current-gen platforms with compatible components," so those using older Alienware hardware might not be able to fully enjoy these benefits. However, even XPS users can install this piece of code and use some of its features.

The recent 'crypto crash' may have resulted in a large-scale dumping of slightly older cards onto sites like eBay. Consequently, this may drive down the prices others with the same GPUs (e.g. gamers) can ask for their listings. In addition, this is the season to grab cash for upgrades.

It looks like some media outlets have a bone to pick with Nvidia, blowing things out of proportion where it really is not the case. Yes, there are faulty RTX 2080 Ti cards out there and Nvidia admitted some cards did not go through the QA process, but the cards are out of stock now not because Nvidia was forced to delist them for too many manufacturing faults. The green team simply did not expect the demand for these cards to be so great.