This round of HW News comes as an all digital CES 2021 comes to a close, so we’re focusing mostly on non-CES news here. We say mostly, because a couple of stories do have a bit of overlap as it relates to what was announced at CES 2021.

At any rate, most notably we have more confirmed price adjustments regarding graphics cards, with EVGA, Zotac, and MSI all joining Asus in raising prices due to expired tariff exemptions. There’s interesting news in Qualcomm acquiring Nuvia, and what it could mean long-term for Qualcomm’s CPU design ambitions. We also have news on TSMC possibly already receiving orders from Intel for non-CPU products, and how TSMC may be making some of Intel’s Core i3-series chips this year.

There’s more of course, so hit the article and video embed below.

It’s been something of a busy week in hardware and enthusiast related news this past week, even with Apple’s iPhone event and Amazon’s glutenous Amazon Prime Day sales seemingly dictating part of the news cycle. Still, we’ve got a few stories worth talking about, and as ever, we’ve been busy with other coverage here at GN.

It looks like EVGA is among the first vendors to attempt to address the power limit issue for overclockers looking to push the RTX 3080 ever further, as the company has released a new beta VBIOS that raises the power target. Additionally, there are the usual rumblings in the memory market about price drops, a China-designed 7-nm class chip, an interesting vector supercomputer headed for Japan, and Gundam parts branded by ASUS.

At GN, we’ve been continuing our RTX 30-series coverage with a review and teardown of the ASUS RTX 3080 TUF OC, and we looked at Nvidia’s Reflex suite, including its Latency Analyzer and Reflex Low Latency Mode.

As usual, find the news recap and video embed below.

The past week has been filled with RTX 3000-series coverage on the YouTube channel, including a world record-setting livestream with liquid nitrogen. Now, though, it's time to go through the hardware news over the past 10 days or so. We'll be talking about the recent Bethesda/Microsoft acquisition, NVIDIA attempting to buy ARM (and, unrelatedly, change SLI support), and 5nm capacity at TSMC. Show notes to follow, along with the embedded video.

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.

This week’s news was highlighted by Hot Chips 32 (2020), which brought plenty of information that we’ll disaggregate below. Another point of interest is AMD launching its budget A520 chipset, but we already have a video and article dedicated to that topic, so we'd point you to that for more information (it’s linked below). Also of importance is Nvidia’s second quarter earnings, DRAM and NAND prices seemingly on the decline, and Internet Explorer being put out to pasture.

Recently at GN, we took a look at the CPU that almost killed AMD, reviewed one of the worst cases we’ve ever seen, and took a look at AMD’s A520 chipset. We also posted a fun and simple science expeirment demonstrating how not to install AIO liquid coolers. The news article and video embed are below, as usual.

Hardware news headlines with AMD's delay of the 3950X and the 7nm shortage that TSMC is experiencing. The shortage, it seems, is one of those "good problems" to have -- TSMC's 7nm process is so popular that it's struggling to keep up with demand, and so the fab is working to increase wafer output. Separately, news talks issues with iCUE software causing impact to FPS, somewhat unsurprisingly, in coincidental timing with the 465X iCUE launch.

Show notes continue below the embedded video.

This week's hardware news was filmed prior to our trip to Vancouver for LTX, which we're covering in a lot of content pieces coming up. HW News discusses CCX overclocking, 3nm and 5nm process progress, DRAM revenue dropping hard, and industry topics like Origin's sale to Corsair. We also talk about 5.2GHz 3900X overclocking results, but that'll be in the video only for this one. The rest is in the written section below, as always.

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.'

Show notes continue below the video embed.

News for this week primarily focused on the industry, as opposed to products, and so highlighted AMD earnings, Microsoft earnings, and NVIDIA earnings. There are interesting stories within each of these topics: For Microsoft, the company indirectly blamed Intel's CPU shortage as impacting its growth projections for Windows 10; for NVIDIA, GPU sales slow-downs are still impacting the bottom line, and the company has adjusted its revenue projections accordingly; for AMD, the company saw an uptick for 4Q18, but is facing a slow quarter for 1Q19.

Beyond these stories, areas of interest include an AI white-hat hacking machine (named "Mayhem," a water-cooled supercomputer), Intel expansions and investments, and Intel's sort-of-new CEO.

Show notes below the embedded video, as always.

Hardware news coverage largely focuses on silicon fabrication this week, with TSMC boasting revenue growth from 7nm production, Intel planning its own 7nm and EUV renovations in US facilities, and other manufacturers getting on-board the 7nm and EUV production train. Beyond this news, we cover a class action lawsuit against AMD for Bulldozer, Samsung's new 970 SSDs, and Backblaze's hard drive reliability report. Note further that GN is in the news, as we're planning a liquid nitrogen (LN2) overclocking livestream for Sunday, 1/27 at 1PM EST. We will have a special guest present.

Show notes below the embedded video, as always.