Hardware news this week has been busy, once again, slotting right in between silicon product releases. Our AMD Ryzen 5000 coverage is mostly done, but we're now ramping into RX 6000 GPU coverage. While preparing work for the RX 6800 XT (and subsequent) GPU launches, we opened a dialogue with NVIDIA to ask about a potential PCIe resizable BAR implementation as a counter to AMD's SAM. That's our leading story for this one, followed-up by some coverage of the Zen 3 delidding work done recently, Intel's add-in GPU for servers, and more.

This past week was slammed for us. We posted reviews of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, Ryzen 9 5900X, and Ryzen 9 5900X, all available on our YouTube channel. In the time since, we’ve been working on Ryzen memory benchmarks, including an upcoming piece featuring Wendell of Level1Techs and Buildzoid of AHOC. That piece will focus on ranks, channels, and Zen 3’s newly exaggerated behaviors with regard to interleaving and scaling. More on that soon. For hardware news this week, the big story is a GN-exclusive about NVIDIA MSRP targets and BOM cost suggestions for an RTX 2060-style replacement.

Hardware news this week leads into a major launch sequence from AMD. We've been busy covering GPUs for about a month now, but that'll soon switch over to AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU coverage as the 5950X, 5900X, 5800X, and 5600X come to market. More on that in a few days. For now, we'll be covering Intel's Xe GPU progress updates, AMD RX 6000 partner GPU timeline expectations, some additional Rocket Lake-S details, a Corsair water block launch, and more.

The show notes follow the video embed, as always.

This hardware news episode was filmed prior to the AMD news update, which we covered in full depth on the YouTube channel over here: AMD RX 6900 XT, 6800 XT, & 6800 Specs. We won't be going back over that announcement in this content, so you can check out the full RX 6000 details in that fully dedicated piece with additional AMD Q&A. In this one, we'll be talking RTX models being canceled or pushed back, AMD supercomputer pushes, Intel selling off part of its business, and more.

At GN, we’re slowly emerging from our RTX 30-series coma, where we’ve pushed our testing and coverage perhaps as far as we ever have. We’re getting ready to slow down for a week or so to revamp and improve processes internally and get ready to do it all again with Zen 3, RDNA2, and the RTX 3070.

As ever, there’s plenty to cover outside of our reviews and testing. This week, we have news regarding NVIDIA delaying the RTX 3070 launch window to the end of October in an effort to avoid the previous RTX 3080 and 3090 catastrophe. There’s also a credible rumor suggesting that Zen 3 will come in under the Ryzen 5000-series banner, which would probably be for the best, given how convoluted CPU naming is getting. 

Elsewhere, we discuss Intel’s Omni-Path being resurrected under the new Cornelis Networks, leaked Windows XP source code, an interesting new HPE-Cray built supercomputer, and more. Check out the article and video embed below.  

Even with Nvidia's RTX 30-series launches the past couple of weeks, it has still been busy on fronts outside of new GPUs. We’ve been exhaustively testing the various aspects of the RTX 3080 and 3090 and have been diving into enthusiast overclocking.

Outside of that, we’ve got plenty of hardware and industry news to cover, offering some additional reporting and analysis on Nvidia’s botched launches and Microsoft's titanic ZeniMax/Bethesda buyout. We also have some news regarding Nvidia’s use of Micron’s GDDR6X memory and why it opted to keep clock rates modest -- for now. 

We also have some information on AMD’s new Ryzen and Athlon 3000 C-series CPUs, Intel still shipping secret products to Huawei (with a license), Western Digital forming new business units internally, and the arrival of Amazon’s new Luna game streaming service. News article and video embed follow below, as usual.

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.

AMD today announced its A520 chipset, following-up the previous B550 and X570 launches, and excluding the B550A chipset (which was a rebranded B450 chipset). The A520 chipset is nearly identical to the A320 chipset from 2017, except some items move to PCIe Gen 3 from PCIe Gen 2. We’ll recap the chipset differences again here today, although if you want full comparative details between X570, B550, the 400-series, and the 300-series, we’ll refer you to our recent AMD Chispet Differences content here. For this one, we’re focusing on just the A520 chipset.

Hardware news this week has been hopping. First off, for GN, we’ve published a lot of content on YouTube in the past week: We revisited Google Stadia for latency, revisited the FX-8370 CPU, and talked about the AMD Phenom II 1090T in 2020. We’re trying to figure out how to unbury ourselves from a constant production cadence to get some time for publishing the article versions of these again, which mostly involves some optimization on the staffing side.

For this week, news includes a quick notice on an upcoming stream competition of GN Steve vs. JayzTwoCents, hosted by LinusTechTips. In actual hardware news, the RTX 3000 series (“3080,” for now) has some early plans for an announcement date, the RTX 2070 Super isn’t dead yet, AMD & NVIDIA marketshare gets discussed, Arm’s co-founder doesn’t seem to be in favor of an NVIDIA acquisition, and more.