This week's news talks about the Beast Canyon NUC, Noctua's NH-P1 cooler, Xbox consoles getting AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and other topics, like a potential SiFive buyout by Intel.

At GN, we’ve been busy reviewing Nvidia’s latest additions to its RTX 30-series. If you haven’t already, check out our RTX 3080 Ti review and RTX 3070 Ti review.

It’s been another busy week in hardware news as we move closer towards an official GPU launch (RTX 3000). As an update, NVIDIA has moved the review embargo lift (and we're able to tell you about it) from Monday the 14th to Wednesday the 16th. RTX 3080 reviews will go live on Wednesday. The date was moved because of global shipping delays causing some other regions (outside North America) to receive cards late for reviewers; in effort to keep it fair between reviewers around the world, NVIDIA pushed its review embargo date back. On a similar note, AMD finally decided to let us know when we’ll see “Big Navi” (RDNA 2) and Zen 3. There’s also a bit of speculation on possible price changes for AMD’s upcoming GPUs, in light of Nvidia’s emerging RTX 3000 series. 

Elsewhere, Microsoft finally ended its game of chicken with Sony by revealing prices for its upcoming consoles, so the ball is firmly in Sony’s court. We also have some hardware specs on the now-confirmed Xbox Series S that will launch alongside the Xbox Series X.

Rounding-out the news for this week, there’s some interesting research being done on the possibility of embedded liquid cooling, some news surrounding Western Digital’s “5400 RPM-class” designation, and the return of Cryorig. As usual, the news article and video embed follow below.

Hardware news is still rolling into the holidays, as one might expect, because this industry doesn't let its occupants sleep. We're also leading into CES 2020, which means leaks abound. Coverage today includes a few rumor topics -- the RX 5600 XT and Intel Z490, mainly -- with some other industry topics mixed-in. Kioxia (Toshiba) is developing new NAND, motherboard makers can't get rid of X299 fast enough, and Microsoft is talking about its Xbox Series X. Again.

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.

Most of last week's hardware news revolved around AMD and its Navi and Ryzen product disclosures from the tech day, but plenty still happened during E3 week: Microsoft, for instance, announced its Scarlett console and rediscovered virtual memory, Comcast was caught violating the Consumer Protection Act over 445,000 times, USB 4.0 got lightly detailed for a 2020 launch, and more.

Show notes after the video embed.

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.

Elgato’s 4K60 Pro capture card is an internal PCIe x4 capture card capable of handling resolutions up to 3840x2160 at 60 frames per second, as the name implies. It launched in November with an MSRP of $400, and has remained around that price since.

The Amazon reviews for the 4K60 Pro are almost worthless, because Amazon considers the 4K60 Pro and Elgato’s 1080p-capable HD60 Pro to be varieties of the same product and groups their reviews together. There are only twenty-something reviews of the 4K60 compared to nearly two thousand for the HD60, so that may skew the results slightly. Of the three single-star reviews that are actually for the 4K60, one is from a gentleman who was expecting a seven-inch-long PCIe card to work in a laptop. As of this writing, nobody at all has reviewed it on Newegg, and it’s on sale for $12 off in both locations.

It doesn’t seem like these are flying off the shelves, which probably speaks more to the current demand for 4K 60FPS streaming than the product itself--it’s the cheapest of a very small number of 4K60-capable capture cards, and there’s not any consumer-level competition to speak of. $400 may seem like a lot, but the existing alternatives are much more expensive, like the Magewell Pro Capture HDMI 4K Plus, which (besides having an awful name) costs around $800-$900. The Magewell does have a heatsink and a fan, though, which the 4K60 Pro does not--more on that later.

This Elgato 4K60 Pro review looks at the capture card’s quality and capabilities for both console and PC capture, and also walks through some thermal and temperature measurements taken with thermocouples.

Sea of Thieves, the multiplayer-adventure-survival-pirate simulator from Rare, has finally been released after months of betas and stress tests. Judging by the difficulty they’ve had keeping the servers up after all that preparation, it seems like it’s been pretty popular. This comparison looks at Sea of Thieves Xbox One X vs. PC graphics quality, equalized graphics settings, and framerate/frametime performance on the Xbox.

SoT is also one of the first really big multiplayer titles to be added to the “Xbox Play Anywhere Program.” That means that it’s playable on both Xbox One and Windows 10 with a single purchase (yes, it’s a Windows 10 exclusive DX11 game). Also, Xbox and PC players are free to encounter each other ingame or even party up together, with the only obvious downside being forced to interact with the Windows 10 store and Xbox app. Together, these two aspects make a PC vs Xbox a very interesting comparison, since any player that owns a PC and an Xbox could easily switch.

Final Fantasy XV recently released on PC, and given the attention we drew to the benchmark’s LOD and HairWorks issues, it’s only fair that we take a look at the finished product. Prior to the PC release, the best playable version of the game was the cracked Origin preload the Xbox One X version, so our baseline for this graphics comparison is the Xbox at 4K using the “high” preset.

To match our PC settings to the Xbox version, we first selected the default choice for every option, which got us 90% of the way there. That includes “Average” settings for Model LOD, Anisotropic Filtering, Lighting, Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and Filtering. Assets (high-quality asset pack), Geomapping (ground tessellation), and all NVIDIA features were turned off, anti-aliasing was set to TAA, and motion blur was turned on. Although this wasn’t a performance test, we limited framerate to the Xbox’s cap of 30FPS for good measure, and set resolution scaling to 100% (since dynamic resolution isn’t available on PC). This is a pretty close approximation of what the Xbox is capable of, and it’s an encouraging sight--the Xbox’s “High” is the PC’s “Average” in almost every category.