Hardware news this week focuses once again on process improvement and Ryzen 3000 discussion, although there's also a CLC recall that affects about 1% of Corsair Platinum owners (due to a leak). We also talk about the Epic Games' response to conspiracies surrounding Tencent and 'spyware.'

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Hardware news is busy this week, as it always is, but we also have some news of our own. Part of GN's team will be in Taiwan and China over the next few weeks, with the rest at home base taking care of testing. For the Taiwan and China trip, we'll be visiting numerous factories for tour videos, walkthroughs, and showcases of how products are made at a lower-level. We have several excursions to tech landmarks also planned, so you'll want to check back regularly as we make this special trip. Check our YT channel daily for uploads. The trip to Asia will likely start its broadcast around 3/6 for us.

The Verge misstepped last week and ended up at the receiving end of our thoughts on the matter, but after a response by The Verge, we're back for one final response. Beyond that, normal hardware news ensues: We're looking at MIT's exciting research into the CPU space, like with advancements in diamond as potential processor material, and also looking at TSMC's moves to implement 7nm EUV.

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Recapping hardware news for the past week (not counting the major Vega launch), major items include AMD's marketshare increase, NVIDIA's loss of Softbank's large investment, Intel's Itanium getting retired, and Thermaltake's new legal battle with Mayhems. Thermaltake is seeking to expand its coolant line with "Pastel" coolants, something to which Mayhems holds a UK-based trademark and years of prior products.

Show notes below the video embed.

The Intel Xeon W-3175X CPU is a 28-core, fully unlocked CPU capable of overclocking, a rarity among Xeon parts. The CPU’s final price ended up at $3000, with motherboards TBD. As of launch day – that’s today – the CPU and motherboards will be going out to system integrator partners first, with DIY channels to follow at a yet-to-be-determined date. This makes reviewing the 3175X difficult, seeing as we don’t yet know pricing of the rest of the parts in the ecosystem (like the X599 motherboards), and seeing as availability will be scarce for the DIY market. Still, the 3175X is first a production CPU and second an enthusiast CPU, so we set forth with overclocking, Adobe Premiere renders, Blender tests, Photoshop benchmarking, gaming, and power consumption tests.

For this hardware news episode, we compiled more information ascertained at CES, whereupon we tried to validate or invalidate swirling rumors about Ryzen 3000, GTX 1660 parts, and Ice Lake. The show gave us a good opportunity, as always, to talk with people in the know and learn more about the goings-on in the industry. There was plenty of "normal" news, too, like DRAM price declines, surges in AMD notebook interest, and more.

The show notes are below the video. This time, we have a few stories in the notes below that didn't make the cut for the video.

CES posed the unique opportunity to speak with engineers at various board manufacturers and system integrators, allowing us to get first-hand information as to AMD’s plans for the X570 chipset launch. We already spoke of the basics of X570 in our initial AMD CES news coverage, primarily talking about the launch timing challenges and PCIe 4.0 considerations, but can now expand on our coverage with new information about the upcoming Ryzen 3000-series chipset for Zen2 architecture desktop CPUs.

Thus far, the information we have obtained regarding Ryzen 3000 points toward a likely June launch month, probably right around Computex, with multiple manufacturers confirming the target. AMD is officially stating “mid-year” launch, allowing some leniency for changes in scheduling, but either way, Ryzen 3000 will launch in about 5 months.

The biggest point of consideration for launch has been whether AMD wants to align its new CPUs with an X570 release, which is presently the bigger hold-up of the two. It seems likely that AMD would want to launch both X570 motherboards and Ryzen 3000 CPUs simultaneously, despite the fact that the new CPUs will work with existing motherboards provided they’ve received a BIOS update.

CES is next week, beginning roughly on Monday (with some Sunday press conferences), and so it's next week that will really be abuzz with hardware news. That'll be true to the extent that most of our coverage will be news, not reviews (some exceptions), and so we'd encourage checking back regularly to stay updated on 2019's biggest planned product launches. Most of our news coverage will go up on the YouTube channel, but we are still working on revamping the site here to improve our ability to post news quickly and in written format.

Anyway, the past two weeks still deserve some catching-up. Of major note, NVIDIA is dealing with a class action complaint, Intel is dropping its IGP for some SKUs, and OLED gaming monitors are coming.

We’re revisiting the Intel i7-7700K today, following its not-so-distant launch of January of 2017 for about $340 USD. The 7700K was shortly followed by the i7-8700K, still selling well, which later in the same year but with an additional two cores and four threads. That was a big gain, and one which stacked atop the 7700K’s already relatively high overclocking potential and regular 4.9 to 5GHz OCs. This revisit looks at how the 7700K compares to modern Coffee Lake 8000 and 9000 CPUs (like the 9700K), alongside modern Ryzen CPUs from the Zen+ generation.

For a quick reminder of 7700K specs versus “modern” CPUs – or, at least, as much more “modern” as a 1-year-later launch is – remember that the 7700K was the last of the 4C/8T parts in the i7 line, still using hyper-threading to hit 8T. The 8700K was the next launch in the family, releasing at 6C/12T and changing the lineup substantially at a similar price-point, albeit slightly higher. The 9900K was the next remarkable launch but exited the price category and became more of a low-end HEDT CPU. The 9700K is the truer follow-up to the 7700K, but oddly regresses to an 8T configuration from the 8700K’s 12T configuration, except it instead uses 8 physical cores for all 8 threads, rather than 6 physical cores. Separately, the 7700K critically operated with 8MB of total cache, as opposed to 12MB on the 9700K. The price also changed, with the 7700K closer to $340 and the 9700K at $400 to $430, depending. Even taking the $400 mark, that’s more than adjustment for inflation.

We’re revisiting the 7700K today, looking at whether buyers truly got the short straw with the subsequent and uncharacteristically rapid release of the 8700K. Note also, however, that the 8700K didn’t really properly release at end of 2017. That was more of a paper launch, with few products actually available at launch. Regardless, the feeling is the same for the 7700K buyer.

Intel’s new i7-9700K is available for about $400 to $430, which lands it between the 9900K – priced at around $550, on a good day – and the 8700K’s $370 price-point. We got ours for $400, looking to test the new 8C/8T CPU versus the not-that-old 8700K and the hyperthreaded 9900K of similar spec. Intel made a big move away from 4C/8T CPUs and the incumbent pricing structure, with the 9700K acting as the first K-SKU i7 to lack hyperthreading in some time.

The elimination of hyperthreading primarily calls into question whether hyperthreading is even “worth it” once running on an 8C, high-frequency CPU. The trouble is that this is no longer a linear move. In years past, a move from 4C/8T to 8C/8T would be easier to discuss, but Intel has moved from a 6C/12T 8700K part of a lower price – in the $350-$370 range, on average – to an 8C/8T 9700K at a higher price. Two more physical cores come at the cost of four additional threads, which can post benefit in some thread-bound workloads – we’ll look at those in this content.