This week's news recap includes some details on EVGA’s bricked RTX 3090 cards thanks to an interview with PCWorld (thanks, Gordon). There’s also some news with Windows 11, as Microsoft is set to start rolling out the new OS this October. Interestingly, Microsoft will not block unsupported machines from manually installing Windows 11, but there will be some serious caveats associated with that move. 

There’s more, so find the article and video embed below, as usual. 

Hardware news has been busy the last few days. AMD has updates on its Zen 4, 3D V-Cache, and RDNA3 timelines, alongside updates to financials. Beyond AMD's news, but somewhat adjacent, Sony's PlayStation 5 now formally supports add-on SSDs of a certain class. We'll also go over Intel's Alder Lake updates, critical for end of year and early 2022 as Intel lines-up to compete with AMD on DDR5 platforms.

Show notes are below the video embed.

Hardware news starts in 2021 with some concluding storylines from 2020, but there are also a few new items -- mostly end-of-year stuff -- that popped-up to be covered this week. Among those, Steam has released its list of most played (by peak concurrent players) and highest grossing (revenue) PC games for 2020. We'll also be talking about Class Action complaints emerging surrounding CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077, thus far related to securities law, then PlayStation 5 sales volume, NVIDIA RTX 3050 Ti and 3050/3060 leaks from Lenovo, and more.

As always, the video embed and show notes both follow. We'll have an additional embedded video from our Disappointment PC 2020 video. You should watch at least the first 5 minutes of it for the special intro we made -- it was a huge amount of work.

Another week in hardware news has come and gone, capped by a dense information dump at Intel’s Architecture Day 2020 towards the end of the week. The presentation yielded new information on the rumored Alder Lake-S, Intel’s Xe Graphics, Tiger Lake, and Intel’s news manufacturing technology, SuperFin.

We’re also covering some interesting news on Nvidia teasing Ampere gaming GPUs, further fueled by what appears to be another leak -- this time on behalf of Micron and its upcoming GDDR6X memory, which is apparently slated to be equipped on the unconfirmed RTX 3090.

For the latest at GN, check out our latest piece discussing Intel’s less than fortunate position, according to conversations we’ve had with motherboard makers. We also take on the misconception that Ryzen is smoother. HW News article and video embed follow below. 

While the week started off rather slowly, the news crescendoed towards the end of the week, capped by Sony’s Future of Gaming event where we finally caught a glimpse of the elusive PlayStation 5 console. Also interesting is the fate of Kaby Lake-G, held in limbo while Intel and AMD decide who should deliver driver support. 

Some lesser stories include news on TSMC -- on fronts both manufacturing and geopolitical. There’s finally also a speculative execution attack that doesn’t come with Intel’s name attached to it. We also have Intel’s Lakefield CPUs, which may be Intel’s most interesting CPU line in years. There’s also news of a particular ISP throttling entire neighborhoods to deal with heavy internet traffic. 

This past week at GN, we revisited AMD’s Ryzen 7 1700 for 2020, as well as getting back to case reviews with Cooler Master’s TD500 Mesh case. We also detailed our experiences, to date, with Thermaltake’s marketing and engineering. 

Follow below for the video embed and article.

We've decided, clearly, to cancel the China leg of our upcoming factory tour series as a result of the Coronavirus, which is a word that YouTube is currently demonetizing for being "controversial" (working around that one is fun). That said, it has enabled us to extend our Taiwan trip, and we've found new factories we didn't know even existed. More on that in the news video, if interested, but rest assured that we'll be safe in Taiwan as it has very few cases and, despite being a neighbor to China, seems to have things under control. We're greatly looking forward to visiting power supply factories, supply chain factories, raw metal factories, and more in Taiwan in March.

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.

EA's Origin launcher has recently gained attention for hosting Apex Legends, one of the present top Battle Royale shooters, but is getting renewed focus as being an easy attack vector for malware. Fortunately, an update has already resolved this issue, and so the pertinent action would be to update Origin (especially if you haven't opened it in a while). Further news this week features the GTX 1650's rumored specs and price, due out allegedly on April 23. We also follow-up on Sony PlayStation 5 news, now officially confirmed to be working with a new AMD Ryzen APU and customized Navi GPU solution.

Show notes below the embedded video, for those preferring reading.

Our leading story for this week is AMD's semi-custom Gonzalo APU for consoles, getting finalized now, although we also share some of that lead-story limelight with Der8auer. Der8auer, the world's favorite delidder and second favorite overclocker (we won't say who's first) has handily beaten our high score in the 3DMark Hall of Fame, and we now must respond to his challenge. 

Plenty of other news for the week, too, like Intel's new Optane SSDs, IDC and Gartner reporting on CPU shortages, and the Spoiler exploit.