The past week has been filled with RTX 3000-series coverage on the YouTube channel, including a world record-setting livestream with liquid nitrogen. Now, though, it's time to go through the hardware news over the past 10 days or so. We'll be talking about the recent Bethesda/Microsoft acquisition, NVIDIA attempting to buy ARM (and, unrelatedly, change SLI support), and 5nm capacity at TSMC. Show notes to follow, along with the embedded video.

It’s been another busy week in hardware news as we move closer towards an official GPU launch (RTX 3000). As an update, NVIDIA has moved the review embargo lift (and we're able to tell you about it) from Monday the 14th to Wednesday the 16th. RTX 3080 reviews will go live on Wednesday. The date was moved because of global shipping delays causing some other regions (outside North America) to receive cards late for reviewers; in effort to keep it fair between reviewers around the world, NVIDIA pushed its review embargo date back. On a similar note, AMD finally decided to let us know when we’ll see “Big Navi” (RDNA 2) and Zen 3. There’s also a bit of speculation on possible price changes for AMD’s upcoming GPUs, in light of Nvidia’s emerging RTX 3000 series. 

Elsewhere, Microsoft finally ended its game of chicken with Sony by revealing prices for its upcoming consoles, so the ball is firmly in Sony’s court. We also have some hardware specs on the now-confirmed Xbox Series S that will launch alongside the Xbox Series X.

Rounding-out the news for this week, there’s some interesting research being done on the possibility of embedded liquid cooling, some news surrounding Western Digital’s “5400 RPM-class” designation, and the return of Cryorig. As usual, the news article and video embed follow below.

This week’s news was mainly anchored by Nvidia’s GeForce event, where the RTX 3000-series of graphics cards were officially unveiled. Intel also made some waves this past week with its own Tiger Lake CPU announcement, and both Intel and Nvidia have undertaken some rebranding efforts. Additionally, we’ve rounded up some new information regarding Nvidia’s RTX 3000-series announcement that focuses on some finer details for this generation. 

We also have some news regarding what may be some interesting PC specific optimizations for the new Marvel Avengers game, the latest Steam Hardware survey, a $4000 SSD, and more. At GN, we recently covered the NVIDIA RTX 30-series cooler common questions and custom cards coming out. Also, we just received new stock for our GN Tear-Down Toolkit over at the GN Store. 

News article and video embed follow below, as usual.

After months of persistent leaks, rumors, and speculation, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3000 GPUs were announced officially today. We now have first-party information from NVIDIA discussing the RTX 3000-series specifications. 

This includes news on the cooler design, as well as a bit of information on power and PCB design. We also have some hard specs on the initial SKUs that were announced -- which are the NVIDIA RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070. There’s also some somewhat useful (if early) performance charts to go over, gaming news, and more. We’ve already published a video on this announcement on our channel, embedded below, but this written version accompanies it for supplemental information and an article recap.

This 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.