MSI recently announced that they will be launching a new addition to their Aegis PC line dubbed the Aegis Ti. The new PC will be the company’s flagship desktop gaming PC. The Aegis Ti is a black mid-tower sporting vibrant RGB LEDs on its front panel.

Let’s get to the specs: the Aegis Ti comes with either an i5-6600K or i7-6700K CPU, a Z170 motherboard, up to 2 GTX 1080s in SLI, and an 850W 80 Plus Platinum PSU. For networking, you get a Killer LAN E2400 network adapter coupled with a Killer WiFi 1435 AC wireless card and Bluetooth 4.1. The Aegis Ti can support up to 64GB of DDR4 2400MHz RAM.

Phanteks has become known for making PC cases, fans, and CPU coolers. The company recently introduced their first custom GPU waterblock, the PH-GB1080-X, designed to fit the Founders Edition GTX 1080. AIB partners using the same reference PCB as the FE 1080 will also support the PH-GB1080-X mounting. In theory, that includes the EVGA SC models and MSI's lower SKUs, but check with Phanteks for official support.

The new waterblock features a silver design with matte black accents. The waterblock also has RGB lighting, all the rage right now. The three RGB lights on the waterblock plug into a proprietary power adapter

Sapphire, a Hong Kong technology company, has been making Radeon video cards for the better part of a decade. Leaked details about Sapphire’s RX 470 Platinum Edition and RX 460 have been reported by Videocardz.com, whose track record on reporting similar leaks has been generally reliable.

The leaked Sapphire RX 470 Platinum Edition photos show a cooler that looks almost identical to AMD’s RX 480 reference design. The RX 470 Platinum Edition has a silver-colored reference blower cooler and includes a custom backplate. One last difference is Sapphire’s name branding, which is printed in white on the side of the RX 470 Platinum instead of AMD’s red Radeon logo. You can read our thoughts on the RX 480 reference cooler in our review here.

Intel and AMD dominated the entire CPU market in the 90s and early 2000s, but ARM-based SOCs have taken a large chunk of their business. The ARM architecture and RISC instruction set is used in almost every phone today and can be found in Chromebooks, tablets, TVs, and servers.

ARM is a unique company as it licenses its patents to technology companies to use for a fee; in turn, ARM often receives royalties from these deals. The company actually doesn’t make any physical CPUs like Intel and AMD, so almost all of its money comes from patent deals with other companies to take its designs and create SOCs, which are then put into tablets, phones, or other products.

New video cards are coming out furiously and bringing with them new manufacturing processes and better price-to-performance ratios.

One of newest memory technologies on the market is HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), introduced on the R9 Fury X. HBM stacks 4 memory dies atop an interposer (packaged on the substrate) to get higher density modules, while also bringing down power consumption and reducing physical transaction distance. HBM is not located on the GPU die itself, but is on the GPU package – much closer than PCB-bound GDDR5/5X memory modules.