Gadgetory

this week's Hardware news recap looks at things like all the various 1070 TI's that have been pictured Newegg getting sued Wolfenstein - and it's Vegas support kind of an interesting story of although a brief one and we've also got a new a couple of products on the market to talk about cases chairs Seagate financial results things like that and the big one though is the 1070 TI overclocking story before we get into that this content is brought to you by the Thermaltake flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a 360 millimeter radiator +3 120 fans that are RGB illuminated if then we'll take it ring fans at that this is a 4.5 done a stacked pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below so this point several the 1070 TI cards have been pictured or allegedly pictured anyway and it really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that they all looked the same as the 10 seventies in the 10 80s it's the same card more or less just with some changes to the GPU so the coolers are gonna be the same the product stack for the most part will kind of be the same but it's getting shuffled around in a few ways one of them is the naming so you'll probably notice as the cards start getting their official names either officially or unofficially posted online you'll probably notice that anything that carries any type of pre overclocked moniker anything that would be synonymous with a pre overclocked or could lead a consumer to believe that a card is pre overclocked those names will almost certainly be stripped from the titles of the 1070 ti cards as opposed to for example if you sold a 1070 card that was named 1070 gaming OC it's our understanding that the 1070 T is in that same instance would just be named 1070 TI gaming no OC and that is an Nvidia mandate we'll call it from what we understand now now there's always time for these things to change but that's kind of what it sounds like is going on as for why the monikers and the names are changing like that it's obviously to reflect the overclocking Changez so from what we know today it sounds like the 1070 TI is not going to be permitted to be pre overclocked by any of the AIB partners we're not clear on a fee consumers will be able to overclock the card the story has been around for a little bit now you've probably heard it we haven't really spoken to it yet because we're just waiting on more information to come from direct sources in the industry and we finally got it and basically what we do know is that the out-of-the-box clocks not to be confused with out-of-the-box thermals out-of-the-box clocks should be more or less set to whatever Nvidia says they're set to and then everything else is up to users and it sounds like overclocked and we user standpoint will either require workaround software or potentially something like registry mods or the BIOS mods things like that we don't have any reason to believe that the BIOS or power-play tables or workaround software would not work so it's possible or fairly possible that you'll be able to overclock as a consumer it might not be as simple as going to a normal application like afterburner or precision and doing it but we'll see we're gonna look into it there should be some leeway there it's just it's gonna be a question of how difficult is it to do hopefully it's not something like with Vega where the V bios gets locked down as well I don't suspect that should happen but we'll find out soon enough as for the story though they've been plenty of 1070 TI is pictured EVGA s had plenty of they're shown I think on video cards with a Z and I think ACS has had some of theirs shown and maybe a couple of others but they they all look the same because they are the coolers are the same is just going to come down to the GPU which is basically going to be 10 80s that failed validation or bend down 1080 is to fill a certain market segment we'll have more thoughts on that when the time comes but as for now these are all more or less either direct sources or rumors in the industry but I think it's pretty safe to say at this point that based on everything that has been posted in the past week the 1070 TI is going to exist it's just a question of what capacity will the overclocking exist in as well next story though new egg getting sued so Digital Trends reported on this a few days ago the report stated that for South Korean banks have grouped up to file a lawsuit against new AG the u.s. california-based retailer although they are owned by a Chinese parent organization now the Hansa new century information technology company limited but still us-based so they've been sued by a group of banks in South Korea who alleged that the retailer worked with a South Korean hardware manufacturer to conspire about fraudulent orders for PC hardware the bank's accused new egg and ASI of collaborating with Monte Wall a company that's listed 3 billion dollars in funding from South Korean banks and one which the bank's alleged artificially inflated its prices for orders to new Aegon asi by intentionally selling overpriced hardware to the companies the CEO of Monte Wall was sentenced previously to a now reduced 15-year prison term in 2013 for defaulting on billions of dollars in loans and the banks are now chasing down new egg and ASI for allegedly enabling this and working with the company on its fundraising the lawsuit states quote no such business would have bought the products at such an inflated price unless it intended to create the illusion of extensive profitable high value commerce between it and its supplier for the purpose of defrauding lenders into supporting the transactions and this was basically saying or suggesting that new egg and si were getting kickbacks for enabling Monte Walz pricing or sales of hardware as they solicited loans from banks so we'll see how that one goes out this kind of thing pops up a lot and either it goes nowhere or they settle and we'll see if we hear about it again but next news item both unsigned - so what one sign - the new Colossus received official recommended and required specifications today along with an interesting statement that pointed towards better Vega implementation in the game which is using the Vulcan API so Bethesda notes that it's Vulcan integration will reportedly quote utilize the power of Andy's Vega graphics chips in ways that were not possible before and we're planning to benchmark this when it comes out within a couple days from posting of this video they goes done fairly well with doom as have all the AMD video cards the most part so it makes sense to see similar performance hierarchies with this game as it's also using Vulcan it's just a question of how its implemented the bigger question is what is meant by Vega specifically being highlighted as being leveraged in ways we haven't seen before so we'll look into that one the time comments but that is the teaser that we have for now as with aspects Bethesda recommends an i7 4770k the CPU and a gtx 1066 gigabyte or RX 474 gigabyte pretty big disparity there for the GPU and that disparity should I mean not that you can drive a lot from specs and recommendations but should more or less point towards the difference that we'll see from Vulcan but we'll see as four minimums it's an i7 3770 or FX 8350 with the gtx 770 or r9 290 for the GPUs next news item is a good opportunity to talk about clone cases and OMS in the case industry as many of you know a lot of the industry is based on suppliers and OEMs and rebranding and the manufacturers that we all know buy products that exist theoretically improve them to some extent and stick the brand on it apply a warranty apply some support maybe some software and then you have your product with all the extra bells and whistles and markup that's kind our works well the case side of things you basically you have companies like Jones bow that create a product sell it to companies like Roseville and the one that made the an ADIZ crystal those are the companies that buy from people like Jones bow take an existing case in its entirety brand it and sell it with a different fan count so that's one side of it another side of it is reusing existing tooling it's not uncommon for example for a company like Coursera to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars upwards of half a million in some cases to develop tooling for a complex expensive flagship what you would call a halo product case and then pull some of that R&D and tooling down into the product stack later on and try to recoup ROI on that investment that's not abnormal for a business to do and as long as it's done in a way that differentiates the product stack without making original purchasers feel like they should have just waited then all is fair and well because you end up with a more diverse product arrangement and with complex cool things that were expensive to make that wouldn't otherwise be brought to market at affordable prices so that makes sense what the sort of third side of it is is you have tooling that is used by manufacturers for avian exclusivity window and eventually gets released and everyone starts using it so we see this with in the past as has done this where they om cases for people like cyber power or aiwei power and then later maybe six months down the line it gets released to consumers char Coons new case is the am-5 silent case which am-5 a really great name they're just trying to piggyback off of Rison but am-5 silent case so this one uses noise damping material and a colorized front panel here's why this case is pointless if you've seen the antic p8 which we reviewed you will notice that its interior is identical to the shark and five silent K's not only is the interior identical the exterior is functionally identical the ventilation and hole placements in the same spot all that's changed this is the front panel coloration so that ventilation is all going to be the same depending what fans they use the cooling performance should be roughly equivalent and you look a little bit further you've got the Silverstone R l05 from several years ago at CES and that one is also the same it's the same tool and I think that's one of the older instances we could find of this tool in existing and later came down to the p8 the char Coon tg5 also uses this with a different front panel but it's got the same interior chassis and we can show all that so that's the same as the a m5 and finally this is all also the same as the arrow cool project 7 c12 the fare to arrow cool there's at least has a different front panel it will have significantly different thermal results that has during fans as different LEDs that's an example of a company taking a tooling that exists and building upon it to make it unique so that they can actually offer something new but all these other ones it's the same case basically but either way they've got a new case on the market next up Seagate technologies reported financial results for the quarter ending September 29th 2017 for its first quarter of 2018 Seagate reported 2.6 billion in revenue with gross margin at 28% and net income at 181 million diluted earnings per share land at 62 cents for reference last year's financial results for quarter 1 2017 reported a 167 million net income and a 55 cent diluted earnings per share the company's year-over-year revenue continues to decline in the face of flash popularity rising though there's obviously still place for hard drives it's just becoming more limited Seagate's first quarter 2018 cash flow was around 237 million from operations with 350 million return to shareholders and dividends and share repurchases NZXT in addition to the forthcoming H series cases is rolling out a new grid fan controller and the grid plus version 3 as the name implies is the company's third iteration of the digital fan controller the new controller offers the ability to manage six different fans and can automatically detect the difference between three pin and four pin and fans furthermore the grid plus version 3 can monitor noise levels and adapt fan speed to performance or silence or a mixture of both it also offers a 0 DB mode for silent operation and the controller meshes with mzx ease cam monitoring software in the new h-series cases NZXT also has its own gaming chair that's the same as every other gaming chair on the market so that's pretty boring but they're working with verdaguer for this one it's the SL 2000 its rebranded in purple and black and says NZXT on it and so this is something that's kind of bothered me for last two years going to all the trade shows more and more people just like four years ago everyone started doing the mobile products those all died fortunately and a little bit after that everyone started doing keyboards and mice some kept doing it because the margins are absurd compared to what they normally make and some stop and over the last two years everyone started making chairs so verdaguer came into the market along with dxracer and a couple of other more dedicated chair companies and then you look at the chairs that are offered by Thermaltake corsair NZXT HyperX and there's at least one more major manufacturer that does this too but definitely thorn will take NZXT corsair HyperX and a couple of the others we've seen that shows you look at their chairs they're all using the same supplier for like the armrests are the same they've got the same four-point pivot the base is the same the wheels are the same except for the instance of Corsair who use rollerblade wheels for theirs and you end up with very many differences which kind of goes back to the case are you then we're like if you're gonna use a supplier that's the same as your competitor at least do something new and cool other than change the color so NZXT is working with verdaguer to rebrand a chair just like everyone else has worked with whomever Verde gear supplier is or verdaguer directly to silently rebrand chairs and sell them as their own at least times exe owns that it's a verdict your chair that will give them that but yeah they're all the same just get the one that's the cheapest if you really want one of those to begin with that's no stick with the grid version three in the eight series cases NZXT next one cherry cherry is targeting the DIY market now and they're going after the hardcore keyboard or typist enthusiast Cherry's got a new offering that allows buyers to purchase their switches loosely either in developer kits or individually and the switch is being offered our MX red blue black brown green clear silent black silent red and the speed switches which are those gray ones that Corsair has used there's a small caveat here cherry only offers the switches without mounting pins through such retailers and will exclusively sell the switches with a direct mount for the PCB but either way pretty cool if you're into that kind of thing into the idea of building your own keyboard and relatedly Corsair is now offering its own keyboard key cap kits and those are compatible with a wide range of the Corsair keyboards using Cherry brand switches the new key caps are PBT double shots double shot meaning there are actually two molds PBT is widely considered more durable than ABS and a double shot process is intended to help resist fading and legibility over time which is a common complaint with the etched key caps Corsair is offering the key caps in both black and white with a two-year warranty and they should cost fifty dollars for a key cap kit that's all for this week's hardware news as always you can subscribe for more go to patreon.com slash gamers Nexus tops out directly or just go to the store store that gamers Nexus dotnet we've fixed the ipv6 cert issue that some of you told us about so they can that but definitely subscribe for more because you're gonna want to see the next time I complain about all the copies in the industry I'll see you all next time and at 62 cents for reference last year's financial resorts resorts