There’s no doubt that most the news circulating right now will pertain to AMD’s new driver update – and it’s an impressive update, one which we’ll discuss below, but we wanted to revive the “gaming” & “pro” mode discussion.

In speaking with AMD about its “Gaming” and “Pro” toggle switch in the Vega drivers – something we previously demonstrated to be a UI-only switch – we learned that the company intends to do something more meaningful going forward. As of now, the toggle is nothing more than a psychological switch, limiting its usefulness to removing the WattMan button from the UI – not all that useful, in other words. Functionally pointless for Vega: FE as it launched, and symptomatic of a driver package which was either woefully incomplete or intended to encourage a placebo effect.

GamersNexus today received word from a manufacturer (that asked to remain unnamed) that AMD’s Threadripper CPUs will include Asetek retention kits in the retail packaging for the product, though a cooler itself will not be included; at least, not in the initial launch of Threadripper products. From what we’ve seen of AMD’s unveiled box, it’s clear that no cooler is included, but the Asetek retention kit will permit all Asetek-made CLCs to mount Threadripper at launch. This would include popular products like the NZXT Kraken series, EVGA CLC series, and about half of Corsair’s coolers (the other half being CoolIT-made). The H100iV2 and H115i are included in the list of Asetek-made Corsair coolers, for clarity.

This week's hardware news recap covers rumors of Corsair's partial acquisition, HBM2 production ramping, Threadripper preparation, and a few other miscellaneous topics. Core industry topics largely revolve around cooler prep for Threadripper this week, though HBM2 increasing production output (via Samsung) is also a critical item of note. Both nVidia and AMD now deploy HBM2 in their products, and other devices are beginning to eye use cases for HBM2 more heavily.

The video is embedded below. As usual, the show notes rest below that.

Every now and then, a content piece falls to the wayside and is archived indefinitely -- or just lost under a mountain of other content. That’s what happened with our AMD Ryzen pre-launch interview with Sam Naffziger, AMD Corporate Fellow, and Michael Clark, Chief Architect of Zen. We interviewed the two leading Zen architects at the Ryzen press event in February, had been placed under embargo for releasing the interview, and then we simply had too many other content pieces to make a push for this one.

The interview discusses topics of uOp cache on Ryzen CPUs, power optimizations, shadow tags, and victim cache. Parts of the interview have been transcribed below, though you’ll have to check the video for discussion on L1 writeback vs. writethrough cache designs and AMD’s shadow tags.

Ask GN returns for its 54th episode – we’ve gotten more consistent than ever – to discuss Noctua fan manufacturing locations (China & Taiwan), thermal pads vs. thermal paste usage on MOSFETs, Vega 10-bit support, and a couple other items.

A few of the items from this week peer into GN’s behind-the-scenes workings, as several viewers and readers have been curious about our staff, whether we keep products, or why we “waste” GPUs by using them for things other than mining.

As always, timestamps below the embed.