News this week will talk about rumored AMD RX 6600 & 6600 XT video cards (and a 6500 series card), alongside rumors of the NVIDIA RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti GPUs. We'll also be covering PlasticARM, an interesting project investigating the utility of plastic rather than silicon for semiconductors, and we'll recap Cooler Master's latest round-up of announcements, like the HAF 500 case.

There's other news, of course, as you’ll find the article and video embed below. If you haven’t already, check out our new GN Explosion & Repair poster, of which part of the proceeds are benefiting the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Fight to Repair organizations -- both of which are focused on the right to repair.

This week, news is headlined by CPU market share updates for the first quarter of 2021, where we can see AMD struggling with supply constraints relative to Intel. We also have more PS5 news this week, as Sony isn’t expecting any supply improvements this year at all. Furthermore, we have Samsung’s new CXL-based DDR5 module, Phison commenting on SSD and controller shortages, and more Chia cryptocurrency news. 

At GN, we recently compared two high-end AIO coolers in our 6-Fan EK AIO Elite D-RGB 360 Review vs. Lian Li Galahad review. We also listed some of the best software users can get for gaming PCs, and we also finally decided to give up on NZXT’s promise to do the right thing with its H1 PCIe riser replacement.

News and video embed below, as usual.

This week, we have headlining news regarding AMD research that outlines some security implications regarding Predictive Store Forwarding on Zen 3 CPUs. For the time being, it mostly seems to be a non-issue, unlike the Spectre variants that have hit Intel CPUs hard. Also in AMD news is another patent filed that expands on AMD’s research into GPU chiplets, and is seemingly an improvement over the previous patent we saw earlier this year.

There’s also news regarding a massive haul of smuggled GPUs that were seized in Hong Kong, some discussion on Lenovo using AMD’s PSB feature on its servers and workstations, some commentary on a potential X570S chipset, and more. 

At GN, we recently benchmarked Intel’s UHD 750 and UHD 630 IGPs and compared them to the low-end Nvidia GT 1030. We also reviewed the Arctic Freezer 50 CPU cooler, and detailed some of its pressure and assembly weaknesses. 

Video embed and article follow below, as usual.

It’s been a busy week, as we have news on several fronts in the industry. There’s news of Steam's hardware survey, the discovery of several GeForce RTX 3090 models making use of a blower-style cooler disappearing from market, and Nintendo Switch 2 rumors.

We also have some news on Intel being handed a massive $2.18 billion bill for patent infringement, TSMC’s 3nm still on track for risk production this year, and reports of Texas semiconductor fabs still idling.  

At GN, we recently dug into the best PC cases of 2021 so far and tore down the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black. We also covered AMD’s announcement of its RX 6700XT, so be sure to check that out.

This week, we have a lot of general industry news pertaining to the supply and manufacturing of semiconductors. There’s news on how the drought in Taiwan is affecting chipmakers, Europe looking to establish a certain amount of semiconductor self-reliance, and some discussion on interconnects limiting chip scaling. 

We also have news on the AMD RX 6700 XT, Fry’s Electronics ceasing operations, HP acquiring HyperX, and more. At GN, we recently reviewed Nvidia’s RTX 3060, Fractal’s Meshify 2 case, and revisited the GTX 960 in 2021.

As always, video embed and article follow below.

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.

We’re reviewing the NVIDIA RTX 3080 FE today, where new testing methods for pressure analysis, acoustics, and game benchmarks are all in place. We also have a separate upcoming piece involving Schlieren photography of the RTX 3080 FE card, but we can show a short clip of that here as a preview. More on that soon. These cards are so complex -- especially thermally -- that the hardest part was figuring out how to segment the content in a way that’s usable and also possible to complete. Today, our focus is on rasterized games, hybrid rendered games, and path-traced games, alongside basic thermals, acoustics, pressure, power, and coldplate flatness. We have a separate piece going up today for a tear-down of the RTX 3080 (but a quick note that we finished all testing prior to the tear-down, as always). We’ll have more on PCIe generation results, but rest assured that our benchmarks use the best-performing bench, and more thermals.

Note: This is a transcript from our video review of the NVIDIA RTX 3080 Founders Edition card. You can watch that here (or embedded below). We also have a tear-down video coming up.

If you would like to learn about our new GPU testing methodology, we have a video on the channel here.

The AMD RX 5600 XT Jebaited Edition video cards launched yesterday, and the company created a mess by completely changing what the video card was meant to do before launch. Basically, it initially shipped as more of a 1660 Super competitor, but ended up being overhauled to become a 2060 competitor. This is overall a good thing from a price competition standpoint, but a horrible mess for buyers and manufacturers of the cards. The update came in the form of a VBIOS flash that can increase performance upwards of 11%, but not all the shipped cards have the VBIOS applied, meaning customers will be buying cards that perform worse than what reviews show. Worse still, some cards will never have that VBIOS available, with some partners splitting their 5600 XT into two SKUs. It’d sort of be like if the 1660 and 1660 Super were sold under a single name, but with two completely different performance classes. In today’s content, we’re going to help you flash 5600 XT cards to unlock the full performance, assuming your card has made such a VBIOS available. This will also apply to other AMD video cards.

In this hardware news episode, we're announcing our charity drive to support Australian wildlife affected by bushfires, including a special charity auction modmat, and we're also covering notable topics in the industry. Cyberpunk 2077 gets coverage, X670 / 600-series chipsets for AMD Ryzen 4000 CPUs are up for discussion, big Navi rumors are debunked, Microsoft is going carbon negative, and more.

Show notes continue after the video.