This week, we have big news from Asus – some good, and some less than good. First, Asus is prototyping an interesting DDR5 to DDR4 converter card that may very well find its way to the market, given the current price and component climate for memory. Additionally, Asus has admitted that a certain number of its Z690 Hero motherboards have a serious fault, one that could lead to a fire, and has recalled affected models. 

There’s also news from Samsung and Intel showing off the first PCIe 5.0 SSD ahead of CES 2022, and we have fresh information regarding the anticipated RTX 3090 Ti. Elsewhere, Intel is looking to disable AVX-512 from Alder Lake, and will likely forgo AVX-512 support on client CPUs in the future. 

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

This week, we can finally look forward to official news on the long-brewing Windows 10 update, code named Sun Valley, as Microsoft has officially named an event where it will disclose major changes coming to Windows. We also have major news in the form of TSMC’s Technology Symposium 2021, and a new lawsuit against Dell, targeting alleged false advertising for its Alienware Area-51M R1 laptop. 

In other news, there’s Atari announcing that it will bring its VCS console to public retail markets, Dell’s eGPU hardware being discontinued, the Steam Hardware and Software Survey for May 2021, and more. 

At GN, we’ve focused on Computex 2021 coverage, which includes Intel’s new products, AMD’s 3D V-Cache and FidelityFX SuperResolution, and more. We’ve also started digging into RTX 3080 Ti coverage, which so far includes a proper review and our usual teardown.

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.

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.

After months of persistent leaks, rumors, and speculation, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3000 GPUs were announced officially today. We now have first-party information from NVIDIA discussing the RTX 3000-series specifications. 

This includes news on the cooler design, as well as a bit of information on power and PCB design. We also have some hard specs on the initial SKUs that were announced -- which are the NVIDIA RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070. There’s also some somewhat useful (if early) performance charts to go over, gaming news, and more. We’ve already published a video on this announcement on our channel, embedded below, but this written version accompanies it for supplemental information and an article recap.

As we move ever closer towards Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce event -- scheduled for September 1st -- we’re seeing this week’s news recap highlight images of the emergent 12-pin PSU connector. The new 12-pin connector is something GN independently confirmed a few weeks ago, but it seems some legitimate images of the new connector have made their way online, including a tease from Nvidia itself. Alongside the new PSU connector, Nvidia also showed off its new cooler design for GeForce Ampere cards as well.

Aside from Nvidia and Ampere related news, TSMC detailed its future roadmap for upcoming process technologies during its Technology Symposium. And speaking of PSUs, it looks as if MSI is ready to enter that market with its first product. Elsewhere, we have a somewhat vague tease from ASUS, an IPO filing from Corsair, and some brief highlights on the GPU market from JPR.

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.

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.

This week saw the leak-not-a-leak unveil of Crysis: Remastered, a launch for Minecraft RTX Beta and NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0, and AMD's 2nd Gen Epyc 7Fx2 CPUs. Additional stories include rumors about AMD's alleged Ryzen 3 3100 and 3100X CPUs (not to be confused with Ryzen 3000 or Zen 3), rumors about Sony Playstation 5 manufacturing concerns regarding price, Zoom account vulnerabilities, Folding at Home hitting 2.4 exaFLOPS, and coverage of the SMR hard drive issues.

Metro: Exodus is the next title to include NVIDIA RTX technology, leveraging Microsoft’s DXR. We already looked at the RTX implementation from a qualitative standpoint (in video), talking about the pros and cons of global illumination via RTX, and now we’re back to benchmark the performance from a quantitative standpoint.

The Metro series has long been used as a benchmarking standard. As always, with a built-in benchmark, one of the most important things to look at is the accuracy of that benchmark as it pertains to the “real” game. Being inconsistent with in-game performance doesn’t necessarily invalidate a benchmark’s usefulness, though, it’s just that the light in which that benchmark is viewed must be kept in mind. Without accuracy to in-game performance, the benchmark tools mostly become synthetic benchmarks: They’re good for relative performance measurements between cards, but not necessarily absolute performance. That’s completely fine, too, as that’s mostly what we look for in reviews. The only (really) important thing is that performance scaling is consistent between cards in both pre-built benchmarks and in-game benchmarks.