HW News - RAM & SSD Prices Falling, RTX 3090 Alleged Photos, TSMC Makes One Billion 7nm Chips
By Eric HamiltonThis week’s news was highlighted by Hot Chips 32 (2020), which brought plenty of information that we’ll disaggregate below. Another point of interest is AMD launching its budget A520 chipset, but we already have a video and article dedicated to that topic, so we'd point you to that for more information (it’s linked below). Also of importance is Nvidia’s second quarter earnings, DRAM and NAND prices seemingly on the decline, and Internet Explorer being put out to pasture.
Recently at GN, we took a look at the CPU that almost killed AMD, reviewed one of the worst cases we’ve ever seen, and took a look at AMD’s A520 chipset. We also posted a fun and simple science expeirment demonstrating how not to install AIO liquid coolers. The news article and video embed are below, as usual.
Abkoncore Ramesses 780 Case Review: 12 Fans, No Airflow
By Patrick LathanThe Abkoncore Ramesses 780 is a case that our friend Brian from BPS Customs discovered back in mid-2019. He dubbed it “the most interesting case I’ll never build in,” and with encouragement from our benevolent community he then decided to dump it on us. At first glance, the 780 is a full-tower that seems visually inspired by the In Win 303, with the most unique feature being the twelve preinstalled 120mm ARGB fans. We say visually inspired because the 780 lacks most, if not all, of the functional features that merited our Editor’s Choice and Quality Build awards in our 2016 review of In Win’s case, which admittedly has flaws of its own to begin with. Let’s not mince words: the Ramesses 780 is a bad case, and it was specifically sent to us because everyone knew we would say so. That makes it hard to decide where to begin, so we’ll treat this like a normal review and start with the build process.
AMD A520 Chipset Specs Comparison vs. B550, A320, X570, & More
By Steve BurkeAMD today announced its A520 chipset, following-up the previous B550 and X570 launches, and excluding the B550A chipset (which was a rebranded B450 chipset). The A520 chipset is nearly identical to the A320 chipset from 2017, except some items move to PCIe Gen 3 from PCIe Gen 2. We’ll recap the chipset differences again here today, although if you want full comparative details between X570, B550, the 400-series, and the 300-series, we’ll refer you to our recent AMD Chispet Differences content here. For this one, we’re focusing on just the A520 chipset.
HW News - Sony PS5 & Liquid Metal, RTX 3090 Using GDDR6X, Fortnite's War on Apple & Google
By Eric HamiltonAnother week in hardware news has come and gone, capped by a dense information dump at Intel’s Architecture Day 2020 towards the end of the week. The presentation yielded new information on the rumored Alder Lake-S, Intel’s Xe Graphics, Tiger Lake, and Intel’s news manufacturing technology, SuperFin.
We’re also covering some interesting news on Nvidia teasing Ampere gaming GPUs, further fueled by what appears to be another leak -- this time on behalf of Micron and its upcoming GDDR6X memory, which is apparently slated to be equipped on the unconfirmed RTX 3090.
For the latest at GN, check out our latest piece discussing Intel’s less than fortunate position, according to conversations we’ve had with motherboard makers. We also take on the misconception that Ryzen is smoother. HW News article and video embed follow below.
HW News - RTX 3000 Dates, AMD x86 Market Growth, Major Intel Leaks
By Eric HamiltonHardware news this week has been hopping. First off, for GN, we’ve published a lot of content on YouTube in the past week: We revisited Google Stadia for latency, revisited the FX-8370 CPU, and talked about the AMD Phenom II 1090T in 2020. We’re trying to figure out how to unbury ourselves from a constant production cadence to get some time for publishing the article versions of these again, which mostly involves some optimization on the staffing side.
For this week, news includes a quick notice on an upcoming stream competition of GN Steve vs. JayzTwoCents, hosted by LinusTechTips. In actual hardware news, the RTX 3000 series (“3080,” for now) has some early plans for an announcement date, the RTX 2070 Super isn’t dead yet, AMD & NVIDIA marketshare gets discussed, Arm’s co-founder doesn’t seem to be in favor of an NVIDIA acquisition, and more.
HW News - NZXT BLD Responds to GN, Intel Facing Staff & Legal Issues Around 7nm, NVIDIA & ARM
By Eric HamiltonLast week, Intel dropped the bombshell that its 7nm process would be delayed. As such, much of the news discussion this week centers on that news and its various repercussions. As is evident below, the first half of our news this week will be dedicated to the Intel news show. As it relates to Intel’s 7nm delay, Intel may be dealing with a potential lawsuit, has already reshuffled its leadership and internal organization, and is reportedly preparing to do more business with TSMC.
We also have news regarding NZXT revising its BLD warranty (finally) regarding users enabling XMP with their memory, which was ridiculous to begin with. There’s also AMD’s Q220 earnings report, and more.
Within GN, we recently took a look at a cringy waifu computer case from AliExpress, and we also compared a $1 thermal pad to a $10 thermal pad. Overall, GN has been experiencing a bit of down time as we’ve been revising some of our methodology and implementing new test tools. We posted a major piece exposing MSI’s shady and (what we believe to be) unethical review practices, too, and that’s worth watching. The improvements from these efforts should show up within the next couple weeks, so stay tuned.
News article and video embed are below.
HW News - Intel 7nm Delays Through 2022+, NVIDIA Ampere Discussion & ARM Interest
By Eric HamiltonThis week’s news is anchored by yet more manufacturing woes from Intel, this time at 7nm. Intel has had to delay its 7nm products due to less than great yields, although the exact problem causing poor yields wasn’t disclosed. Joining Intel in manufacturing trouble is Samsung, as the company is reportedly struggling to improve its 5nm yields.
We also have leaks that NVIDIA is internally working on Ampere launch timelines now, which would point toward early rumors that the cards would see an August/September launch window. Igor of Igor’s Lab may be on the mark with that one. Finally, we have some smaller AMD and Cooler Master news to go over, as well as ARM interest by Nvidia.
News article and video embed are below, as usual.
Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Case Review vs. Lian Li O11 XL (& Radiator Compatibility)
By Patrick LathanThe Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 is a case that we last saw at CES 2020, back in January. It’s a giant liquid cooling-focused enclosure built on the existing P600S chassis and, as such, it differs from our usual case reviews in much the same way that the O11 Dynamic XL review did. Incidentally, the Phanteks reviewer’s guide suggests that this case is intended to directly compete with the XL, as well as Fractal’s Define 7 XL, be quiet!’s Dark Base Pro 900, and Corsair’s Obsidian Series 1000D. Today, we’ll be discussing the airflow and some unusual features of the Enthoo Pro 2, including our first hands-on testing of Phanteks’ self-dubbed “High Performance Fabric.”
HW News - NVIDIA RTX 3080 12-pin Cable Detailed, DDR5 Spec Finalized, Intel i9-10850K
By Eric Hamilton & John TobinWhile the week started off rather slowly, hardware news picked up towards the end of the week. As such, we have plenty to cover, including a GN exclusive, in which we’re able to confirm the rumored 12-pin PSU connectors for Nvidia’s Ampere. The father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, is also back in the news, this time with a rant over AVX-512. We also go over the finalized DDR5 spec, which will set the stage for industry adoption in 2021.
Elsewhere, we have a bit more news on Apple Silicon as it relates to manufacturing, a fresh Alder Lake rumor, Skylake-X Refresh reaching EOL, and a bit more. As always, the news article and video embed follow below.
Best PC Airflow Cases for 2020 So Far: $60 Budget to $200 High-End
By Patrick Lathan & Steve Burke Published July 17, 2020 at 9:00 amToday is a round-up of the best airflow-focused cases currently out, which can also be tuned to be good acoustic performers by nature of unrestricted intakes. Over all the years that we’ve been doing case reviews, we’ve advocated for high airflow designs. That generally implies lots of mesh and lots of fans, like the classic Cooler Master HAF cases that adopted “high airflow” as a brand name. As those cases aged and optical drives fell out of favor, front panel designs became increasingly clean and minimalistic, and therefore increasingly closed-off. Now the tide has turned again, and in 2020, we have more airflow cases than we know what to do with. Today, we’ll be covering some of our top choices--this isn’t our yearly best-and-worst cases roundup, it’s just a selection of airflow-focused cases with good value. We have almost 300 rows of test data multiplied across about 7 sheets, so although we’ll be limiting ourselves to cases we’ve reviewed, that’s still a big list. As always, let us know if there’s another case we should check out in the comments below.
More...
We moderate comments on a ~24~48 hour cycle. There will be some delay after submitting a comment.