Desktop

Snap Camera is a freshly-launched desktop app that adds Snapchat Lenses to webcam feeds for vlogging or Twitch streams. Like all similar things Snap, it relies on facial mapping to super-impose a range of effects on a video's subject. Snap Camera is available for download now

The Santa Clara giant reported the best quarter in its entire 50-year history, even though the company was not able to meet the outstanding market demand. The 14 nm shortages will continue throughout the rest of the year and Intel expects this situation to worsen, as it is slowly shifting focus to the 10 nm node.

Western Digital just announced the largest mechanical hard drive in the industry, a 15TB helium-sealed monster. Designed for data centers and cloud storage services, the 15TB HDD is intended for enterprise customers in need of densely compacted, reliable storage. Pricing and availability haven't been announced, but don't expect the drives to come cheap.

As online streaming becomes more popular, the need for specific hardware is also rising. Twitch partner Streamlabs and Intel have joined forces with mini PC OEMs like Shuttle, SimplyNUC, Zotac and Acer to bring streaming-ready systems for aspiring influencers and pro gamers. First streaming-ready concept system will be showcased by Acer at TwitchCon this weekend.

The Core XE variants of this year's Intel chipset lineup have been announced, but are not available yet. The top flight of this series, the i9-9980XE, is the subject of an apparent leak. It consists of a 3DMark Time Spy score for the processor.

Inside sources claim that AMD's Navi GPUs are performing better than expected and could be launched in the first half of 2019 rather than the second. Previously rumored to be slower than the GTX 1080 from Nvidia, it looks like the red team managed to tune a few things and boost the overall performance. MSRPs are rumored to be in the US$250 zone.

Rockstar Games has announced the Companion App for its upcoming release, Red Dead Redemption 2. This app connects an Android or iOS device to the console in question, and allows the player to view maps, stats and progress on their phone or tablet while gaming.

The 10 nm process gave Intel quite a bit of a headache in the past few years. It was supposed to arrive in 2017 initially, but the fabrication process had to be delayed because of design problems, and it looks like Intel may not be able to launch the 10 nm CPUs come 2H 2019 in large amounts either.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 is still competitive at the sub-US$400 price bracket. It was originally released with 6GB of GDDR5 memory. A change to its product page on its maker's website now suggests that there are GDDR5X versions of the card.

The second installment of Red Dead Redemption has been announced as launching soon. However, this news is not great for PC gamers, as the game is thought to be only available for consoles. A recent listing by an e-tailer appears to have given some hopes that this may be wrong, then snatched it away again.

The newest Windows 10 update (1809, or October update) has been plagued with teething issues. Most recently, some users have documented one of them on Reddit. This bug results in the failure to bring up dialogs that prevent the loss of data through conflicts or duplication during transfer.

OnePlus had announced some time ago that its next product launch would take place in New York on October 30th. However, Apple has just taken that same date to release the new Macs and iPad Pro. The Chinese company has responded by moving its own event up by one day.

The new device-as-a-service program from HP is limited to select customers for the time being and it targets creative professionals like photographers, video editors, graphic designers, and CG artists. Each professional group gets a specific hardware bundle with included accessories and a monthly "rent," plus access to the 24/7 Concierge program for streamlined setup.

Intel may be implementing in-silicon solutions against Spectre and meltdown attacks, but not all threat variants can be identified this way. MIT's DAWG solution can detect all variants plus similar speculative attacks, and it can easily be integrated in operating systems without serious performance hits.

As previously announced, the Ubuntu 18.10 release comes with the GNOME 3.30 desktop and Yaru — the new default theme that has been developed by the community. The new kernel and updated graphics libraries now support the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B/B+, the AMD Vega M-powered Kaby Lake G series, as well as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845.

Windows 10 19H1, an update already being tested out by some users, is now expected to contain new adaptations to the Spectre-patch problem. These fixes for the more severe Spectre variant 2 vulnerability can reduce performance by up to 30%. The solution is known as the Retpoline kernel.

In a first-ever move, Frank Azor has just disclosed data related to the Dell and Alienware's gaming business and it is more than good. According to him, the gaming business that involves these two iconic brands is worth US$3 billion, which makes them the leaders of the market by a very large margin.

The Ryzen 2000 series still delivered decent performance gains over the original Ryzen models, even if the shrinking process was minimal. With the jump from 12 nm to 7 nm, the IPC boost is expected to be almost 5 times greater, at least in "scientific tasks." If multimedia and gaming loads get the same boost, this could be huge for AMD.

The music streaming service Spotify has finally pushed an update for the app used on Android smartwatches. This version takes on the functions users formerly had to turn to 3rd-party solutions for. For example, the new Spotify for Wear OS has an actual set of music controls, and also syncs speakers with them.

The first desktop and laptop DDR5 RAM modules are now expected to be released at some point in 2020, as JEDEC has not yet finalized the hardware specs for the DDR5 standard. What we know for sure about the DDR5 RAM is that it will feature at least double the bandwidth, 4800 MT/s and later on 6400 MT/s speeds, plus independent 40-bit channels per module.

Intel is splitting its manufacturing segment into 3 new categories, each of which will be managed by a different staff member. These new divisions will handle various aspects of the chip-making side of the Intel business. They will also be directed by an executive who came to the company from Qualcomm.

The new Intel 9th generation Core processors will support up to 128 GB DDR4 RAM as revealed by a footnote in one of HP's announcements, which was later confirmed by Anandtech. This is made possible due to the availability of double height double capacity modules from Zadak and G.Skill and Samsung's 16 GB DDR4 chips.

Gigabyte had released a promotional Halloween-season banner including the words "AORUS RTX 2070 Ti/2070 Graphics card". This was enough for some to run with the rumor that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 was getting its own Ti variant. However, Gigabyte has taken to Reddit to squash this speculation once and for all.

HardOCP released the RTX 2070 review 2 full days before the NDA lift and it looks like last week's leaks are now confirmed. The factory overclocked RTX 2070 models are slightly faster than the GTX 1080, with the stock RTX 2070 most likely on par with the previous gen Pascal GPUs. On the other hand, the price for the overclocked RTX 2070 models might be a bit too spicy.

Thanks to the new STIM material, the i5-9600K offers excellent overclocking potential, reaching 5.2 GHz on all cores using a high-end air cooler. The temperatures were a bit over 90C, so a water-cooling solution might be more appropriate, still it is quite impressive how the STIM material helps with the overclocking procedure. The OC-ed processor performed similar to a stock i7-8700.

The Force Series™ MP510 is Corsair's latest NVMe M.2 SSD with 3rd-generation x4 PCIe. Even its lowest storage configuration achieves over 3,000 MB in sequential read. Its 960GB model also has this level of write speed. The MP150 line may also start at about US$66.

An entry for the upcoming AMD Polaris 30-based Radeon RX 590 has been spotted on 3DMark by noted leakster TUM_APISAK. The new RX 590 is shown to sport higher clocks and is said to be using the same GDDR5 memory subsystem as the current Polaris 20 cards. Overall, the leaked benchmark shows conservative performance improvements over the RX 580.

The GPU market is often rife with counterfeit cards. These products are often sold as having more memory than they actually do, or as having newer NVIDIA chips that are in fact reflashed older ones - or both. TechPowerUp has upgraded its diagnostics app GPU-Z in order to detect these techniques and report affected cards as fakes.

Google has admitted that its social media app, Google+, has been hacked. This data theft has affected approximately half a million profiles. The users in question may have had many points of important user data extracted from their Google accounts.

The memory found in typical RAM and storage components - DRAM and NAND respectively - may drop in price, particularly as we move into 2019. This is based on new research by DRAMeXchange. This group claims that prices for this technology has not grown in 2018 Q3 as it normally does.

Following severe backlash over what has been described as "incompetent" benchmarking, Principled Technologies retested their AMD CPUs with creator mode. In their new results, the 2700X narrowed the gap between the 9900k down to about 15-20% on average, whereas previously the 9900k was sometimes 60% faster than the 2700X. Intel stated that these new results prove that the 9900k is still the "world's best gaming processor."

The high-end Turing GPUs do not seem to be a great upgrade choice for the time being, but what about the upper-mid-range RTX 2070 model? According to the latest leaked Time Spy results, the RTX 2070 GPU is indeed faster than the GTX 1080, however, the tested sample was already factory-overclocked, so the actual performance difference between a stock RTX 2070 and a stock GTX 1080 might be negligible.

The industry is one month into a shortage of 14nm CPUs from Intel, and according to HP CEO Dion Weisler and Lenovo COO Gianfranco Lanci this will continue for another 6 months. They have recommended AMD as an alternative thanks to their "good performance" and "fantastic portfolio."

New rumors emanating from Microsoft suggest that the Office software team want to take over Cortana's functions and place in the Windows OS. This would mean that Office could strongly inform its development in the future, converting the flagging virtual assistant into more of a productivity helpmeet - much like a certain animated paperclip.

Each headset has been designed to better fit users with glasses by easing the pressure around the temple. The higher-end Elite Atlas model includes a host of additional features that both mainstream and hardcore gamers can appreciate.

Both IDC and Gartner revealed that Lenovo dominated the global PC market in the third quarter of the year, shipping around 16 million desktops, notebooks, and workstations out of a total of 67.4 million (according to IDC), and 67.2 million (Gartner) units sold worldwide during the given period.

After scathing criticism coming from GamersNexus's Steve Burke and Hardware Unboxed's Steve Walton, Principled Technologies has made statements and defended its i9 9900k performance study. The company said "we are confident in our test methodology and results" following an interview conducted by GamersNexus.

Right after the official launch of the 9th gen CPU lineup, Intel hired professional overclockers to demonstrate the potential of the new Core i9-9900K processors. Using liquid nitrogen, the 8-core CPU was pushed to 6.9 GHz (7.1 GHz unstable), but performance gains do not look that impressive. The CPU can easily be pushed to 5.3 GHz using watercoolers, though.

The Radeon RX 570/580 successors are rumored to feature 12 nm Polaris 30 cores with increased frequencies, but same 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM. Performance-wise, these new models will most likely not be faster than the Vega 56/64 cards and will go head to head with Nvidia's GTX 1060/1070 chips.

When Intel commissioned Principled Technologies to benchmark its as of yet unreleased i9 9900k CPU, many voices in the tech press spoke out against such a practice, such as Steve Walton, saying it "undermines what we do." Now, more reliable figures have come out, and it seems like Principled Technologies did not run an unbiased test.

The new mainstream Core and Core-X HEDT processors represent Intel's retaliation against AMD's Ryzen 2000-series and Threadripper 2000 HEDT lineups. Looking at the MSRPs, it seems like Intel does not want to outprice AMD, while the core configuration suggests lower overall performance, at least for the HEDT models.

On the heels on Intel unveiling its new desktop CPU lineup, Asus has announced an upgrade to its ROG GL12 gaming desktop. The new ROG GL12CX is now available with the latest Intel Core i9-9900K on the Intel Z390 platform and can be configured with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU. The ROG GL12CX is now up for pre-order and is expected to ship this November.

First teased at Computex 2018 but without a firm price or launch window, the mid-sized Trident X desktop is now ready to ship just in time for the all-important Holiday shopping season. MSI is going all out in terms of CPU and GPU horsepower for a generational leap in performance over the last generation Trident 3.

AMD has announced that its 12- and 24-core Ryzen 2 Threadripper chips will be available on October 29. The new chips are counterparts to the more expensive 16- and 32-core chips in the Threadripper lineup and will appeal to enthusiasts looking for a balance between performance and price.

An internal service document recently leaked from within Apple states that no-one but company staff and Authorized Apple Service Providers (AASPs) can repair or replace most MacBook 2018 and iMac Pro components without the devices becoming inoperable. However, iFixit has claimed to have done so with a MacBook Pro - and nothing happened.