Hardware
HW News: Intel & NVIDIA Working Together, $5B 10nm Investment
By Ryan Greenberg & Steve Burke
“Intel & NVIDIA working together” will surely raise eyebrows, but this isn’t similar to how AMD and Intel recently worked to make Hades Canyon. Rather than work together on a product, the two companies sent high-ranking researchers and engineers to meet with the US Government, alongside numerous other AI and machine learning organizations. Intel and nVidia are the most relevant to our line of work, and the representatives at each organization worked to educate government officials on the needs of AI and machine learning development.
In addition to this news, Intel also is working on a $5B expansion for 10nm production, covered further down, and the company’s new Coffee Lake Pentium CPUs have been rumored and assigned specs.
Show notes below the video, if you prefer to read.
Ask GN 71: Can Undervolting Hurt GPUs & CPUs? OC Damage
By Steve Burke
This newest episode of Ask GN furthers out latest video discussion where we demonstrated how to kill a motherboard VRM with zealous overclocking, found here. The continuation of this discussion (in Ask GN) starts with questions positing whether it's possible to damage GPU or CPU components from overdone undervolting, and then follows-up by asking about whether overclocking just memory (on a GPU) can somehow "hurt" the memory.
In addition to this, we take questions on GPU heatsink damage, liquid metal ongoing maintenance and nail polish/electrical tape application for SMD protection, personal triumphs/failures in hardware, and case airflow. Floatplane is also briefly mentioned.
More below.
New PC Case Costs $950: Singularity Spectre
By Eric Hamilton
Singularity Computers, best known for their exorbitant, high-end custom PC builds, have steadily been expanding their brand into the landscape of PC hardware, with their latest foray being cases. Under a new subsidiary, Singularity Cases, Singularity is set to release their inaugural case: Spectre.
HW News: Intel Discrete GPU Prototype, G4920 CPU, & TR4 Monoblock
By Steve Burke & Patrick Lathan
The past week has been abnormally packed with hardware news, with several heavy-hitter items from Intel and AMD partners alike. The headlining story highlights Intel's prototype dGPU unveil -- something that we won't see more of for years, if at all -- and talks Intel's initial plans for its dGPU component. This comes shortly after Intel's very public hiring of former RTG Chief Raja Koduri, who recently set to work on Intel's new dGPU division. It is likely that the prototype discussed has been in the works for a while, but Koduri's work will no doubt be visible in the coming years.
Other news items include the accidental publication of Intel Celeron CPUs by Newegg, including a new G49X0 series (G4920, G4900), and the non-K alternatives of the 8500 and 8600 i5 CPUs. For AMD, we saw news reports about an upcoming EKWB Threadripper Monoblock for MSI motherboards, which should be useful in full loop scenarios where the VRM thermals must be controlled. Several other news items are also present in this round-up. Find the show notes below.
Ask GN 70: GN’s Turing Hints, Best CPU Coolers
By Steve Burke
The latest Ask GN brings us to episode #70. We’ve been running this series for a few years now, but the questions remain top-notch. For this past week, viewers asked about nVidia’s “Ampere” and “Turing” architectures – or the rumored ones, anyway – and what we know of the naming. For other core component questions, Raven Ridge received a quick note on out-of-box motherboard support and BIOS flashing.
Non-core questions pertained to cooling, like the “best” CLCs when normalizing for fans, or hybrid-cooled graphics VRM and VRAM temperatures. Mousepad engineering got something of an interesting sideshoot, for which we recruited engineers at Logitech for insight on mouse sensor interaction with surfaces.
More at the video below, or find our Patreon special here.
Worth Checking Out: HUB's CPU Thermal Throttling Tests
By Steve BurkeOur colleagues at Hardware Unboxed have posted a set of Intel thermal tests on the new 8th Generation CPUs, looking into thermal throttling and boost behavior under thermal load. This is similar to much of our work in case and cooler reviews, where we often demonstrate over-time plots of long burn-ins (30-120 minutes), useful for determining where a CPU may taper-off in clock speed. In Hardware Unboxed's testing, additional benchmarks were performed on the Intel stock cooler and two aftermarket coolers, used in a multitude of CPU benchmarks.
For our audience that has liked our thermal discussion pieces (which is most of them, these days), we think HUB's work is worth seeing. It's a good demonstration of where and when thermal throttling might occur on a CPU, and helps to address the question of less-than-ideal thermal conditions for CPU benchmarking.
Invalid "4.6GHz" Overclocks on APUs: Entering Sleep (S3) Tricks Timer
By Steve BurkeAs we await arrival of our APUs today, we’ve seen a few news stories reporting “4.56GHz” overclocks (or similarly high clocks) on AMD’s new Ryzen+Vega amalgamation. Seemingly, this significantly higher overclock is achievable merely by entering S3 (sleep) in Windows, and is even easily validated with higher benchmark scores.
In reality, we believe this is the Windows timer bugging out, which has existed on previous platforms and CPUs. The bug is easy to replicate because it only requires entering S3 state – another commonly problematic Windows setting, based on a previous life of lab testing – and waking from S3 causes artificially high clock reports.
Ask GN 69: Mining on Radeon SSG? Ampere, GDDR6, & Boost
By Steve BurkeOur latest Ask GN episode talks methodology and benchmarking challenges with GPU boost, GDDR6 availability, "mining" on AMD's Radeon SSG, and more. This is also our first episode that comes with a new accompaniment, released in the form of a Patreon-only Ask GN. The separate video is visible to Patreon backers, and answers a couple extra questions that were submitted via the Patreon Discord.
As usual, timestamps are provided below the embedded video. The major focus is on some quick GDDR6 news, then some discussion on GPU benchmarking approaches.
Find out more below:
HW News: Scam PSUs, 2400G Price & Specs, HDD Reliability
By Steve Burke & Patrick LathanThis hardware news round-up covers the past week in PC hardware, including information on AMD's Ryzen+Vega amalgam, CPU "shortage" sensationalism, Newegg commission changes, and more. As usual, our HW News series is written as a video, but we publish show notes alongside the video. We'll leave those below the embed.
The big news for the week was AMD's 2400G & 2200G APUs, which are due out on Monday of next week. The higher-end APU will be priced around $170, and will primarily compete with low-end CPU+GPU combinations (e.g. GT 1030 and low-end R3). Of course, the APUs also carve an interesting niche in a market with limited dGPU supply. Strategically, this is a good launch window for AMD APUs.
HW News: GDDR6 Mass Production, MSFT Telemetry, & AMD Newhires
By Steve Burke, Patrick Lathan, & Eric HamiltonThis week's hardware news recap teases some of our upcoming content pieces, including a potential test on Dragonball FighterZ, along with pending-publication interviews of key Spectre & Meltdown researchers. In addition to that, as usual, we discuss major hardware news for the past few days. The headline item is the most notable, and pertains to Samsung's GDDR6 memory entering mass production, nearing readiness for deployment in future products. This will almost certainly include GPU products, alongside the expected mobile device deployments. We also talk AMD's new-hires and RTG restructure, its retiring of the implicit primitive discard accelerator for Vega, and SilverStone's new low-profile air cooler.
Show notes are below the embedded video.
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