Hardware

In this hardware news episode, we're announcing our charity drive to support Australian wildlife affected by bushfires, including a special charity auction modmat, and we're also covering notable topics in the industry. Cyberpunk 2077 gets coverage, X670 / 600-series chipsets for AMD Ryzen 4000 CPUs are up for discussion, big Navi rumors are debunked, Microsoft is going carbon negative, and more.

Show notes continue after the video.

This is just a quick hardware news recap before we get buried by CES 2020. We wanted to get a few of the industry stories covered before product-centric coverage takes over for the week (which you'll mostly find on our YouTube channel). For this week, the main story is combination of both Samsung's power outage and other stories of increasing DRAM and SSD prices in 2020. We'll also talk about over-reaching expectations for both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

For this hardware news recap, we're starting out with an update of our recent charity PC build we did for Cat Angels, a local-to-us cat shelter, then moving on to the Ampere Computing 80-core CPU. Other news topics include the LGA1200 socket and Z490, demand for GDDR6 potentially inflating video card prices for 2020, an auction for a Nintendo "PlayStation," and NVIDIA insists that it's better than consoles. Show notes continue after the video embed.

Hardware news is still rolling into the holidays, as one might expect, because this industry doesn't let its occupants sleep. We're also leading into CES 2020, which means leaks abound. Coverage today includes a few rumor topics -- the RX 5600 XT and Intel Z490, mainly -- with some other industry topics mixed-in. Kioxia (Toshiba) is developing new NAND, motherboard makers can't get rid of X299 fast enough, and Microsoft is talking about its Xbox Series X. Again.

We're always sort of surprised when hardware news steamrolls right through major holidays. It doesn't slow down. As we approach end of year, Microsoft dropped a major bombshell with its Xbox Series X console announcement, Intel has committed to making more 22nm CPUs, Plundervolt threatens CPU security, and more.

As always, show notes continue after the embedded video.

There's nothing quite as validating as finding out that your hobby is featured in a political misspending and wire fraud case and, for many hardware enthusiasts, that day came when a US politician was found guilty of illegally spending campaign money on over $1300 of Steam games. In the meantime, though, we've got news on AMD RX 5500 XT listings in China, AMD CPU marketshare growth via Steam Hardware Survey, NVIDIA saying that more FPS = more kills, and more.

We filmed this hardware news episode before Thanksgiving, but ended up holding it and adding to it once we saw some of the hardware sales that went live (we didn’t want to film a dedicated hardware sales video). There have been plenty of hardware sales guides on the site, as you’ve likely seen, but now it’s time to re-focus on the news. The headliner is Apple joining the fight against SoftBank with Intel, both alleging the behavior of a patent troll.

Show notes will continue after the embedded video.

After a slight lapse in news coverage due to a crowded content schedule, we’re back this week with highlights from the last couple of weeks. The news beat has been somewhat sluggish as we settle into the fourth quarter and move ever closer to the unrepentant shopping season. The crowning news item is the arrival of AMD’s remaining 2019 CPUs, including the highly-anticipated 16C/32T Ryzen 9 3950X.

There’s also fresh news on AMD’s continued encroachment on Intel’s x86 market share, Seagate keeping HDD development alive, and Samsung ending its custom CPU designs. Elsewhere within GN, we’ve recently — and exhaustively — detailed CPU and GPU recommendations for Red Dead Redemption 2, as well as pursuing a 6GHz overclock on our i9-9900KS.

This week’s hardware news talks about NVIDIA’s reported revival of the RTX 2070, Intel’s ongoing 14nm shortage issues, AMD and Intel earnings reports, and more. Among the hardware items, GN also discusses its new ongoing partnership with the Eden Reforestation Projects to contribute 10 trees planted for each item sold via the GN store through November.

Show notes after the embedded video.

Inspired by megastore compatriot Walmart, it seems Aldi now wants to sell a gaming PC to you alongside your groceries. Assuredly similar in spec, this week's news round-up also talks about the Archer 2 Supercomputer, which is probably equivalent to a few hundred thousand Aldi gaming computers. The Archer 2 will leverage about 748,000 cores built atop the Epyc processor lineup from AMD. More mainstream desktop-oriented news includes Intel's i3 chips potentially becoming more similar to i7s going forward, and PCIe Gen6 looking toward 2021.

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