Desktop

While a US$9.99 monthly Photoshop subscription is almost nothing for a professional studio spending thousands on expensive camera gear, a lot of people only do photography as a hobby and don't want to pay a monthly fee for editing software they may use every few weeks. Fortunately, there are free options out there that are very capable of editing both the shots you took on your morning walk and your landscape shots from your most recent camping trip.

AMD announced the arrival of desktop Ryzen 7000 processors based on the Zen 4 architecture at Computex 2022. Ryzen 7000 is supported by new X670E/X670, B650, and A620 chipsets. The X670 series is daisy-chained to maximize I/O. It is being learnt that the low-end A620 chipset will launch alongside upcoming Rembrandt APUs later this year.

Building a custom rig can be a rewarding and fulfilling experience; however, as Gigabyte asserts, it can get frustrating, especially when it comes to fitting things (mostly cables) around other things. The OEM has launched the new AORUS Project Stealth, a PC that requires assembly rather than building, as a new solution to these potential issues.

A noted leaker has offered their take on the potential clock rates for key SKUs in the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7000 “Raphael” series. The commenter has been quite optimistic with some of the clock rate estimates, with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X potentially offering a higher boost rate than Alder Lake’s i9-12900KS Turbo Max 3.0 speed of 5.3 GHz.

Yesterday, SK hynix has finally unleashed its first Gen 4.0 SSD with a 176-NAND layer, namely the Platinum P41. As unveiled back in early January, it is available in 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB versions. The prices start at US$104.99 and go up to US$259.98, but the stock seems depleted already.

The IFA tech trade show is now set to return to an in-person format set in its traditional Berlin venue in 2022. The conference will take place at the start of September of this year. Its organizers are celebrating this announcement with early-bird prices on its tickets, although they are for only one of five of the event's scheduled days.

The new Neptune series is advertised as the world's first mini PC lineup with AMD RDNA2 dGPUs. MINISFORUM is planning to first release a Ryzen 9 5900HX + Radeon RX 6650M model, followed by Ryzen 9 6900HX and Intel Alder Lake variants with the same dGPU.

With the first 2 nm chips planned for a 2025 release, TSMC could theoretically ready the 1.4 nm nodes by 2028. Samsung will most likely come up with a similar node around the same time, while Intel will try to get ahead of the game with the 20A and 18A nodes in 2025.

Hitman 3 is set to receive its DLSS and ray-tracing update shortly. The free update will add ray-traced shadows and reflections to the game, alongside DLSS 2.0 and FSR 1.0 upscaling. AMD's new FSR 2.0 won't be part of the package, at least initially.

YouTuber Teaserplay outed a stunning concept trailer for what GTA: San Andreas could look like if it was built on Unreal Engine 5. The trailer leverages a range of UE5 features, including MetaHuman, Lumen, and Nanite. The trailer offers a glimpse of the kind of visuals to expect in GTA 6

The high-end X670 Extreme chipset is supposed to be featured on the most expensive AM5 motherboards, and AMD is apparently forcing PCIe 5.0-only support for GPU and storage on these models. The X670 models, on the other hand, could feature either PCie 4.0 or PCIe 5.0, while the budget B650 solutions would be limited to PCIe 4.0.

Nvidia is said to be working on a new low-end desktop graphics card called the GeForce GTX 1630. It is said to be a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti successor and aims to compete with AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT and Radeon 6400. Update 19/05/2022: The full GeForce GTX 1630 spec sheet has been revealed.

A supposed AMD Ryzen 7000 “Raphael” price list has surfaced on Weibo, which also offers some scant details about the SKU designations and even core/thread count for the top-end part. Apparently, the Ryzen 9 7950X will have 24 cores, cost well over the equivalent of US$900, and it will be ready to bring Zen 4 power to Intel Raptor Lake’s doorstep.

US$299 gets you a Ryzen 5 3550H with Vega 8 iGPU plus 256 GB of SSD storage, but no RAM. For US100 more you can also get 16 GB of RAM and up the storage to 512 GB, however. Manjaro Linux is also streamlined to work on budget solutions.

Acer has revealed the ConceptD 500, a stylish desktop PC packed with powerful components. Launching in September, the ConceptD will be available with a choice of NVIDIA GPUs, up to a 12th Gen Intel Core i9 processor and 128 GB of DDR4 RAM.

Acer has showcased the ConceptD 100, a small desktop PC that ships with either an NVIDIA T400 or NVIDIA T1000 GPU. Also, the 137.4 x 373 x 359 mm contains an Intel Alder Lake processor and up to 128 GB of RAM.

The Acer Veriton Vero has just been unveiled. Its key specs include a 24-inch FHD screen, 12th-generation Intel Alder Lake processors, an Nvidia GeForce MX 550, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB storage and a 5 MP webcam. Prices start at US$799 in North American and €919 in EMEA.

According to reports, NVIDIA has settled on the AD102-300 die for the RTX 4090, the company's next flagship desktop graphics card. Supposedly, the RTX 4090 will deliver 126 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), a few short of the AD102's die maximum offering. The RTX 4090 could only operate within a 450 W TGP though, contrary to earlier rumours.

Industry insider @kopite7kimi has revealed that Nvidia could unveil the RTX 4000 series of graphics cards in the early days of Q3, 2022. They could likely be announced in July and hit shelves in the following weeks.

The Solar Generator 2000 Pro is the latest outdoors/backup generator from Jackery that can charge using solar panels. In fact, the OEM asserts that it can re-charge to 100% in this way in just 2.5 hours - so long as enough new same-brand panels are hooked up to the portable power station. It is also rated to charge from the mains in 2 hours to sustain a range of devices, even household appliances, in turn.

Some of Intel’s Alder Lake-HX mobile processors have appeared on UserBenchmark, delivering powerful performances that rival the previous generation’s fastest desktop parts. The Intel Core i7-12650HX is the pick of the bunch at the moment, achieving an average bench of 104%, which was higher than the benches of its i9 relatives.

A reputable industry insider has leaked two-year-old screenshots of a yet-to-be-released Silent Hill game. Konami indirectly confirmed the legitimacy of the said screenshots by issuing a copyright strike. The game will also send players SMS messages as a part of the charade.

The official Dead Space Twitter handle has confirmed that the game will be launched on January 27, 2023. Development seems to be going on in full swing, with the developers showcasing the progress in a livestream.

The OpenBenchmarking database entries show an 8-core Ryzen 7000X model that can boost to 5.21 GHz, while MLID reports 28-37% Zen 4 single-core performance increase with even higher multi-thread gains over existing Zen 3 models.

Namco Bandai's earnings report states that Elden Ring sold over 13.4 million copies by March 2022, just a month after its release. That figure is over three times of the company's projected sales figure of 4 million

AMD launched the RX 6750 XT and the RX 6650 XT today targeting 1440p and 1080p gamers, respectively. The RX 6750 XT looks to take on the Nvidia RTX 3070 while the RX 6650 XT aims for the RTX 3060 12 GB. Both cards offer higher Game and boost clocks and faster memory over their original variants along with increases in TBP and MSRP.

AMD, today, unveiled refreshes to its RDNA 2 desktop GPU lineup. The Radeon RX 6950 XT is a refreshed Navi 21 XTX GPU with a slight bump to Game and boost clocks, increased memory speeds, support for FSR 2.0, and a 335 W TBP. The RX 6950 XT will retail for about US$100 higher than the original RX 6900 XT at US$1,099 MSRP.

Windows 11 has been officially available for half a year now. Many PC users worldwide do not need to do much to acquire this upgrade; however, for those somehow in more difficulty, physical copies have recently been spotted as another options. Therefore, anyone who has ever wanted the latest stable version of Microsoft's omnipresent OS in a box can spend their money on one now.

NiceHash recently announced that its QuickMiner software was now capable of fully unlocking the hashrate on most Ampere LHR cards, barring the RTX 3080 12GB and the RTX 3050. This means that LHR-limited Ampere cards like the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti can reach their full mining potential.

AMD's shiny new Ryzen 7000 Raphael series of CPUs will be launched in September 2022, according to a report from Digitimes. The Zen 4 based processors already entered mass production earlier this year, so that timeline seems plausible. AMD is expected to shed more light on it at Computex 2022.

Youtuber Ivan Novozhilov recently shared WIP footage of 2Unreal4Underground, a complete fan remake of Need For Speed Underground 2. The Unreal 4-powered remake is a massive step up in visual quality from the sixth-gen classic. Beyond visuals, Novozhilov's remake will also attempt to tweak and enhance gameplay elements.

Smart Access Storage would first be featured on select laptops like Corsair's upcoming Voyager lineup. The technology may later on be introduced to desktop PCs with the launch of the Zen 4 AM5 platform. More details should be provided at Computex this June.

Canalys' latest report on the PC market concludes that its shipments dropped during the first quarter of 2021 (1Q2021), albeit only by about 3%. When broken down by type, the research suggests that Chromebooks were responsible for this contraction. Then again, there were some positive signs, such as tablet sales that took off in Asia-Pacific during the quarter.

Twitter user Kepler_L2 reports that AMD's upcoming RDNA3-based Navi 31 high-end GPUs appear to offer PCIe 5.0 X16 support according to the latest AMD’s GFX11 architecture patches for Linux. Nvidia's Ada Lovelace next gen GPUs could get the same treatment, but rumor has it that these might launch at a later date.

Despite Intel's latest reports on the steady advancements with the proprietary 7 nm production nodes, industry sources close to DigiTimes claim that Intel might change the Meteor Lake blueprints to be produced exclusively on the TSMC N5 nodes in order to avoid delays and ensure competitive performance in the battle against Apple's upcoming M processors.

Qualcomm touts its latest additions to the Networking Pro series of components as the go-to solutions to complete the next generation of routers, gateways, access points and so on. This is because they are the first of their line to support Wi-Fi 7. They are available in tri- and quad-band variants, and are pitched at OEMs planning their next premium consumer- to enterprise-grade wireless equipment.

XPG pitches its latest Atom 50 M.2 2280 SSDs at those planning PC builds for their creative or professional output; then again, the ADATA brand also hints one might be ideal as new backups for their PlayStation 5 (PS5) storage. The drives are rated for NVMe 1.4 and PCIe Gen4 x4 for potentially blazing maximum read and write speeds, and come with a 5-year warranty in their new markets.

The latest all-in-one desktop system from Lenovo features a 4K LCD screen than can be easily reoriented in portrait or landscape mode, a JBL sound system and powerful specs such as the latest AMD Ryzen 6000H APUs coupled with LPDDR5 RAM and NVMe SSD storage, plus up to a Radeon RX 6600M dGPU.

As expected, the Ryzen 7000X desktop processors will launch in Q3-Q4 this year with a 65+ W TDP and support for DDR5 / PCIe 5.0. However, it looks like the mobile sector is in for a big shake-up. AMD mentions the launch of 55+ W TDP Dragon Range models for extreme gaming laptops with the most cores on the market, plus the Phoenix models with 35-45 W TDPs for thin and light laptops, both scheduled for an early 2023 release.

According to new rumours, AMD's Navi 31 GPU will not launch with 120 Compute Units (CUs) and 15,360 Stream Processors. Instead, AMD's next flagship GPU is now rumoured to offer 96 CUs and 12,288 Stream Processors. There are changes for other Navi 3x GPUs too.

The unofficial Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time PC port recently received support for a 60 FPS framerate update, significantly improving the gameplay experience from the N64 original. The port doesn't use reverse-engineered source code, unlike Super Mario 64, making it less likely to run afoul of legal challenges.

In an interview with CNBC, Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger stated that he expects the global silicon shortage will end by 2024. While a clear timeframe is welcome, this means that upcoming graphics cards from NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD could all remain stuck at extremely high prices due to supply shortages.

The Mac Studio configuration with the Apple M1 Max SoC in particular seems to be plagued by an irritating high-pitched noise, which may be caused by the cooling fan that is built into Apple's latest desktop computer.

Popular YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead has obtained new information about AMD's high-end Navi 31 GPU, which will be featured in flagship RDNA 3 graphics cards and hit shelves in Q4, 2022. Graphics cards using the mid-range Navi 32 GPUs, however, will not be launched until H1, 2023.