Ask GN is a little bit more personable than our usual reporting, given the nature of the Q&A style of content. Taking that as an opportunity to update everyone on our server migration, we’ve finally moved; it was a success. The new server has been operational for a few days now, and it’s faster, more stable (seriously – 0 downtime, whereas the other began crashing every few hours), and will soon™ be home to an updated front-end for the website. We will be rolling-out small changes over the next few weeks, and those will eventually lead to a full refresh.

Anyway, Ask GN was the original topic. We’re on episode 36, and this week addresses questions of DirectX 12 scalability, GameWorks & GPUOpen efforts, electrostatic discharge and management of ESD, and more.

Episode below:

Leading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, arguably America's most worshiped holidays, we're launching our next installment of Ask GN: Episode 35, which talks CPU socket technology, GPU silicon manufacturing (and what happens to failed chips), synthetic benchmarking and its variance, and super-sampled versus native resolution 4K gaming.

As we've expanded the Ask GN series, we've started advancing its collection and distribution of information. A few of the questions from this week's episode were passed through our contacts at AMD and nVidia, and next week is shaping up to hold similar Q&A as passed through manufacturing contacts. We're also working with some game developers to better answer a couple of CPU threading questions, as it seems a good opportunity for everyone to learn -- GN staff included.

Here's the latest episode:

This week's news recap segment features updates from the Super Computing conference 2016, including updates to AMD's GPUOpen and Boltzmann initiatives (ROCm, HIP), an Intel Xeon refresh, and Intel's investment in self-driving cars. Outside of SC16, we also have news pertaining to Lian-Li's (finally) shipping PC-O10 case and Thermalright's AXP-100H Muscle cooler.

The only rumor in this news segment is that of AMD's Summit Ridge naming scheme, which Chip Hell suggested will be branded with numerical 3-5-7 suffixes, similar to Intel's CPU branding. Beyond an allegedly leaked slide, there's no way to validate this rumor -- so take it for what it's worth. It's likely that we'll find out more about Zen at the time of CES, or shortly thereafter. That tends to be when Intel and AMD make some CPU / architecture announcements.

Video below:

The prototype of Lian Li’s PC-O10 was covered in our Computex 2016 content, and then seemingly vanished. Until now.

The PC-O10 features a binal design composed of two chambers aimed at isolating heat generating components, comparable in form to other models like the PC-O8 and PC-O9. The PC-O10 exhibits a striking resemblance to the PC-Q37, so much so that the *-O10 appears to be a larger, more rectangular version aimed at accommodating the ATX form factor motherboard. Motherboard support is broad, with Micro-ATX, ATX, and E-ATX all being able to fit in the chassis.

This episode of Ask GN addresses reader and viewer questions relating to boost technologies for GPUs (DPM states and GPU Boost), "game mode" for monitors, and a couple questions related to CPU benchmarking. We talk loose plans for Zen tests and scalability of the 2500/2600K Sandy Bridge CPUs in the modern era. Even Nehalem got a few mentions.

Monitor "game modes" presented a topic with which we're not intimately familiar, but some research did grant us enough information to hopefully answer the question in a helpful fashion. The rest, like the boosting functionality on GPUs, is stuff that we've discussed on-and-off in review articles for several months -- it's just now laid-out in a quick Ask GN video.