Our Ask GN series was put on hold during the onslaught of Ryzen 2, Hades Canyon, and X470 coverage of late. We're back in force, though, with two back-to-back episodes. The second will go live tomorrow, the first tonight. For this week's episode, we're talking B450 motherboard expectations (and Computex), realistic ways the GPU market might make a comeback, review sampling, HPET benchmarks, and more.

Separately, please note that we are planning a livestream for 5/1 at 7PM EST. The stream will be hosted on our YouTube channel. We will be attempting to overclock Hades Canyon further than our current record of 4.7GHz. We're hoping to push closer to 5GHz, but power may become a limitation at some point. We've already posted preliminary results over here. Be sure to tune in for the livestream! It'll be a fun one.

Some controversy bubbled-up recently when reddit, as it does, found its newest offense at which it could express collective rage. That offense was AMD’s CPU warranty, which had previously indicated that any cooler aside from included stock coolers would violate the warranty – not that they’d be able to prove it, if we’re being honest.

We reached-out to AMD for comment when this story went public, and received a response today that AMD had updated its warranty terms for clarity. The original language was meant to prevent warranty replacements for scenarios where the CPU had been damaged by an out-of-spec cooler (think: something like an LN2 pot, or the jury-rigging we do at GN). It was not meant to block warranty replacements for issues unrelated to coolers.

This week's hardware news recap primarily focuses on some GN-exclusive items pertaining to AMD's plans with system memory in the future, mostly looking toward DDR5 for CPUs and HBM integration with CPUs, creating "near memory" for future products. All of this, of course, is before the major Ryzen 2 review publication timelines on Thursday this week, 9AM Eastern, when you'll find still more CPU news to look over. Be sure to check back for that.

In the meantime, today's news covers memory stories, laptop updates, AMD staff changes, Spectre patches, and more.

AMD’s impending Ryzen 2 CPUs – not to be confused with Zen 2, the architecture – will launch on April 19, 9AM EST, and are preempted by yet another “unboxing embargo.” We’re not technically covered under these embargoes, as we’ve sourced parts externally and are operating independently for this launch. That said, as we’ve stated in a few places, we have decided to respect the embargo (although are under no obligation to do so) out of respect for our peers. This is also being done out of trust that AMD has rectified its preferential media treatment exhibited for Threadripper, as we were told the company would do.

Still, we wanted to share some preconditions we’re considering for test cases in our Ryzen 2 CPU reviews. Some of that will be covered here today, with most of the data being held for the April 19 embargo lift. We have been testing and iterating on tests for a few weeks now, updating EFI as new versions push and collecting historical data along the way.

The core specs – those regurgitated all over the internet, undoubtedly – will follow below.

The CPUs discussed today include (Amazon pre-order links below, although we never recommend pre-ordering PC hardware):

• AMD R7 2700X
• AMD R7 2700
• AMD R5 2600X
• AMD R5 2600

The past week of hardware news primarily centers around nVidia and AMD, both of whom are launching new GPUs under similar names to existing lines. This struck a chord with us, because the new GT 1030 silently launched by nVidia follows the exact same patterns AMD has taken with its rebranded RX 460s as “RX 560s,” despite having significant hardware changes underneath.

To be very clear, we strongly disagree with creating a new, worse product under the same product name and badging as previously. It is entirely irrelevant how close that product is in performance to the original - it’s not the same product, and that’s all that matters. It deserves a different name.

We spend most of the news video ranting about GPU naming by both companies, but also include a couple of other industry topics. Find the show notes below, or check the video for the more detailed story.

Find the show notes below, or watch the video: