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 past week has been busy, with the main coverage being AMD's Zen 3 CPUs (5000 series, like the 5950X, 5900X, 5600X, and 5800X), which we covered in a news piece previously. Following that, for this news recap, we've been updated on the MSI "scalping" story, RTX 3080 and 3090 inventory numbers for a European retailer, and how EVGA is still getting through day-one orders for the RTX 3080. Additional stories include Intel's quasi-announcement of Rocket Lake's timelines, NVIDIA's A6000 and A40 GPU specs, and Razer's cringe-worthy credit card.

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.

Another big week in hardware and technology news. It looks like the perpetually delayed Atari VCS is finally set to ship later this fall, hopefully. We also have news of Huawei’s Kunpeng 920 CPU, talk about Volta and Turing encoders shipping with the GTX 1650, news of Apple also ditching AMD, and more. 

At GN, we recently went over the basics of overclocking the Ryzen 5 3600 XT, Infinity Fabric, and memory. We also have extensive review coverage of AMD’s new XT series of CPUs: The Ryzen 3900X, the Ryzen 7 3800XT, and the Ryzen 5 3600XT. We further introduced our new GN PC Component shirt, and you can get one here. The GN store continues to be the best way to support our work. 

News follows below, with the article and video embed.

This week, our news is headlined with surprise supercomputer wins, from Fujitsu’s “Fugaku” dethroning Summit for the new No.1 spot, to Nvidia’s “Selene” that uses AMD CPUs, interestingly enough. Equally newsworthy is Apple confirming its transition from Intel to Arm, in the form of “Apple Silicon,” which leaves more questions than answers right now, but the move will have big implications for the CPU landscape. Speaking of Arm, the server space is set to heat up even more with Ampere’s new Altra Max product stack.

We also have news of a massive air cooler aimed at GPUs from Raijintek, which is a bit different.

On the GN YouTube channel, we took apart the EK AIO D-RGB CPU cooler and compared it to some nearby competition (Arctic Liquid Freezer II and NZXT Kraken series, for example). We also recently overclocked the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X on LN2 for a live stream to answer the all important question of whether it can run Crysis. Separately, you'll likely also find our graphite thermal pad vs. thermal paste content interesting. We also have a new poster over at the GN store -- grab one here.

Another busy week in hardware news, as we’ve got pretty substantial news from both AMD and Intel. We’re also updating the Nvidia Founder’s Edition cooler rumor we addressed last week with fresh information out of Igor’s Lab. There’s also news from Corsair, Alphacool, an update on the WD class action suit, and more.

At GN, we recently took a look at the EK AIO 360 and 240 D-RGB coolers, as well as taking ASUS’ APE “overclocking” feature for a test drive with the i5-10400. As usual, the video and article follow below.

Right after we said that an AMD R3 CPU is “enough for gaming,” stealing the old Intel mantra from many generations ago, Intel decided to launch its 10-series CPUs. Intel calls this “10th Gen,” but in reality, it’s the nth Gen of a long-standing architecture. We’ve lost count at this point, but either way, it’s the 10-series of processors. The i5-10600K is the one we’re reviewing here, and it’s actually repositioned to resurrect that old “an i5 is enough for gaming” phrasing from the days of the i5-4690K and i5-6600K. This, we think, is the more interesting CPU as compared to Intel’s i9-10900K that we reviewed in the previous video, but both have points of intrigue. The biggest one is core-to-core deltas in thermals now that Intel is sanding the die down, something we showed previously in our i9-10900K delid. Today, we’re reviewing the i5-10600K.

NOTE: THIS IS A DELAYED PUBLICATION OF OUR 10600K REVIEW FROM YouTube. If you already saw this on YouTube, it's the same thing, just the written format. We have not changed anything, so new information we've uncovered about the 10600K isn't included post-launch and you'll need to check our channel for follow-up coverage, like our in-depth tuning piece on the 10600K.

It’s difficult to differentiate motherboards, at least from a marketing perspective. There are definitely better and worse boards, and you can check any of the roundups or reviews Buildzoid has produced for this channel for explanations as to why, but “better” doesn’t mean “higher FPS in games” here. Using higher-quality or more expensive components doesn’t always translate directly into running Fortnite at a higher framerate, which makes it harder to communicate to consumers why they should spend $200 on board X instead of $100 on board Y if both can run the same CPUs. This has led to motherboard manufacturers playing games with numbers for boost duration, voltages, BCLK, and other settings in order to differentiate their boards from the competition with tangible performance increases.

We’ve talked about Intel turbo and “Multi-Core Enhancement” many, many times in the past. This serves as a companion piece to the most recent of these, our “Intel i9-10900K ‘High’ Power Consumption Explained” video. To reiterate, Intel’s specification defines turbo limits--the multipliers for boosting on one core, two cores, etc, all the way up to an all-core turbo boost. Here are some examples from Coffee Lake’s launch (8700K) and before:

With the new influx of CPUs from AMD and Intel, and more rumored on the horizon, we wanted to round-up all of our recent testing into one concise piece for people looking for recommendations on the best CPU for different tasks. We’ve published several hours’ worth of content in the form of reviews, tuning, and follow-up coverage, so if you want the full details and depth for anything check those pieces. We’ll be focusing more on firm recommendations for each category in this video and less on the deeper details, with our categories including: Best gaming CPU, best budget gaming CPU, best small business or hobbyist production CPU, best workstation CPU, best overall, most fun to overclock, and most disappointing.