Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap we have some follow-ups on CTS labs for this week as well as Intel meltdown inspector patch performance updates a 2600 x AMD rise in 2003 cpu that's been listed on Amazon accidentally and some other information on asrock being a GPU vendor asus and the rog x4 70 motherboard samsung power outages killing 30% of thief flash supply for the month things like that before that this video is brought to you by EVGA and the X 299 dark motherboard for the Intel high-end desktop CPUs the X 299 dark is one of the only motherboards on the market with proper vrm cooling we've tested this and found a significant performance increase over those without active cooling on the prm's this board was used in our recent attempt to set a top 10 record in fire strike and you can learn more about the x-29 dark at the link in the description below we're a brief update on cts labs and their security research which alleged severe flaws in the AMD zen architecture if you're not up to speed on this story we have a video on it on the channel already but to recap it briefly cts labs is a new security company that put out some content that said these are a bunch of security vulnerabilities we believe we've found in the sound architecture and they gave Andy about 24 hours notice they gave some journalists as we understand its earlier notice and also there was another company Viceroy research that put out a 30 page insane tirade like the ramblings of a lunatic if you see our first video that really drew a lot of criticism for all of this so as we said in the original content the exploits appear to be rooted in legitimacy however the presentation of those exploits we think as an opinion is highly unprofessional so either way we needed to dig more into it we sent a bunch of questions over to their PR company which did finally respond by the way and some of those questions were not really answered there kind of skirted around but one of the questions that we can we can kind of put up the whole list of questions on the screen if you want to see it and you just pause and read them but one of the questions was about nine wells capital with which CTS labs CFO yaran luke Silberman has held a position in the past we asked what the relationship was between nine wells capital which is a hedge fund firm and CTS labs and the company provided this statement quote nine well is a lawn oriented financial partnership that was managed by our CFO he no longer actively manages that partnership nine Wells has no financial position in AMD Intel or any other semiconductor company and that's a start we still need some clarity on this because some really simple digging reveals an SEC filing recently that lists here in Luke Silverman as the president of nine Wells capital as recently as March 8 2018 so perhaps that document is outdated or we're missing something but we need some clarity on that point because right now we're a bit confused on how those two things can be simultaneously true we can't make any links right now but we've asked for that clarity Luke Silberman was also listed on the CTS labs website as the managing director of nine Wells Capital very recently too so not really sure what to make of that regarding Viceroy we asked this question what is cts Labs affiliation with Viceroy Research did Viceroy Commission CTS labs for this report and have the two companies had any previous connections or affiliation the last part being the most important and thus ignored the response was as follows Viceroy is not a client of CTS we did not send Viceroy our report for any additional questions please ask Viceroy so unfortunately the side steps a lot of those questions like the question about the affiliation between the two companies there's some kind of there's so here's the story Viceroy research the president of it said in a an interview with Reuters I believe that they received a leak of the CTS labs document or a tip of the document prior to the documents publication this is how Viceroy research had a 30-page tirade available within hours of the CTS labs report going public because otherwise just physically impossible to do so the question that I have that is still not answered is what connection is there between the two companies because CTS Labs is a small new company and somehow there's a leak that goes out to viceroy research and yet they claim they did not send viceroy their report so perhaps that's true and will certainly allow for that to be true until there's evidence otherwise either way though that's kind of what we have for now our most important questions were unfortunately avoided or ignored or not addressed plainly right now we've followed up again but some of those included for example they'll back to Viceroy briefly Viceroy after they got that document by the way so they stated on record that they took a sizable short position on handi so a little bit weird but anyway we also asked the following does CTS Labs or do any of its employees currently hold the position on Andy in the stock market we later followed up and said currently or in the past couple of weeks CTS Labs did not respond to this question and further Ian Contras of an attack and David Cantor of real-world tech with whom we've worked previously recently asked CTS Labs a series of questions on a phone call including what their affiliation is with Viceroy research and CTS labs immediately concluded the call upon that question being asked given the avoidance of answering our hardest questions and skirting answers to a few that were sort of addressed we remain skeptical of the motives of CTS labs or in the very least of the professionalism of what they're trying to achieve because it is possible that there is no link here it is possible that there's no financial motive there is no evidence to suggest a hard motive outside of a lot of big red flags but nothing that is concrete evidence so we we'll allow for the possibility that CTS labs is attempting to publish security findings that they believe are in good faith however the professionalism and the mode of publishing that data is suspect or in the very least unprofessional and here's another thing in that an attack call which is it's like 30,000 words it's published on their website a lot of CTS labs defenses and defenses to other media were that we're new we don't really know what we're doing this is the first time you publish something and basically asking for slack but the entire company background page and all the management profiles brag about how these people have ten plus years of experience in security research each so they've made some pretty big mistakes for a new company that claims to have jointly many at least a couple of decades of experience while still somehow simultaneously being new to the industry so that's quite some dichotomy there but that's the update we don't really have much it's possible that there's no link to possible there's no financial motive that doesn't change the fact that this all looks very strange anyway next one is on Andy in the r5 2,600 X so this was listed accidentally on Amazon not much to say here other than listing on Amazon Germany accidentally revealed the price and the release date of the AMD r5 2600 X the processor was priced at 250 euro with tax just over three hundred US dollars but pricing is different in different regions and it was scheduled to become available for purchase on April 19th which it seems accurate will say some extremely basic specs were also revealed on the product page including frequency base as 3.6 gigahertz and boost at 4.25 gigahertz not sure if that's what XF are are acts of far too but X of r2 pushes it a bit further if so or if not and it's based on 12 nanometer process so that's all we have for that one next one Intel meltdown inspector patch performance updates also in the news this is about a week or two prior to the CTS lab store taking over the news cycle we had a call with Intel a briefing on their own meltdown inspector updates we've been following this for a while one of their earlier micro code updates resulted in unexpected reboots and shutdowns on some platforms so those were all fixed recently now there's an update that applies that these security updates a path across the past five years of Intel CPUs I believe it's 100 percent of them in the last five years that have been made these pertain to meltdown inspector and should harden security without sacrificing too much performance on the front of performance our understanding right now from some research is that it looks at from talking with Intel is that it looks like CPUs that are made within the last couple of generations eighth seventh and sixth generation some fifth although that's not that popular should have the lowest performance impact from these micro code updates often in single digit percentages depending on how and what you're measuring the older generation systems will experience heavier performance impact this is particularly true with responsiveness in cysmart testing and further older systems with an SSD will have more significant performance loss than older systems with a hard drive because your bottlenecks change so as far as numbers what we've been given from Intel and we have not yet independently validated so keep that in mind we'll look at it eventually hopefully but what we've been given for now is sis mark measurements that show on average 6th 7th and 8th gen performance loss decay in between or retaining 88% of the maximum performance pre patch so you've got a bit of a drop there 12 percentage points off of baseline 100 or as low as 76% of baseline 100% in responsiveness which is a metric provided by sis mark and older systems again with SSDs have bigger hits than than the newer stuff but for gain performance it looks like the newest micro code update shouldn't really have an impact on gaming this coincides with what we found previously for Microsoft's own Windows updates and will kans all this more once there are a couple more patches but they're still pushing stuff so we're just kind of waiting for a good point when everything's stable and it's not getting updated every week next one is on Nvidia's real time rate rates and announcements that they're making at GDC Game Developers Conference not to be confused with GTC the week following nvidia has been talking about real time ray tracing for a long time now in fact I remember covering a story from an videos Tony Tomasi who actually also presented this one in I don't know many years ago and he predicted that by 2015 we would have real time ray tracing in games so not too far off the mark but and vidi has been talking about it a while and they have another announcement on the advancement of real time ray tracing the company has announced its new Nvidia RT X it's called at GDC which is a ray tracing technology option for game engines RT x was demonstrated as running on Volta architecture GPUs and integrates primarily with a new Microsoft DirectX 12 ray tracing API alternatively or in addition to this RT X can be accessed via game works libraries for developers who opted in an Nvidia announced that for a games epic games remedy entertainment and unity the engine maker have already begun working with RT X a new game works SDK is also upcoming and that adds support for Volta architectures and may be more interesting to you all quote future generation GPU architectures and will enable ray-traced area shadows raytrace glossy reflections and rage race ambient occlusion these are all as we understand it basically what they sound like ray traced area shadows should be shadows that are generated based on ray tracing and so forth so that's that's brief overview we'll look into this more as software comes out that we have to actually test and play around with but that's their news Asus has an AR o GX 470 board that was leaked I believe via video cards so a picture of the asus rog x4 70 - eff Strix motherboard was sent anonymously - video cards comm techpowerup translates the Chinese care between the CPU socket and the memory slots as players indicating that it's a gaming motherboard if the vrm heatsink and i/o cover didn't already tip you off and no explanation was offered for the word hybrid or the other characters on the board that's all we really know now it's one of these six known a CSX 470 boards the other isn't listed by video cards are the prime export Sony Pro the ROG Strix x4 70 I gaming and the crosshair 7 hero following up the crosshair 6 hero along with a tough export Sony Plus gaming this one's also really quick as ROC has confirmed officially that they will be making GPUs or rather video cards and those video cards will be using AMD GPUs exclusively for now that's really a whole I know they put out a teaser trailer they showed a dual axial card with an 8 pin power header perspex that's all we have they used words like unpredictable and mysterious which are of course two attributes you want in your video card but that's all we know so as rocks getting into GPUs with AMD the brand will be called phantom gaming and we'll keep an eye on it but nothing concrete yet other than a firm confirmation from asrock that this is indeed happening next one is Samsung's power outage that killed flash supply Samsung's a massive peon take fab which we mentioned in hardware news a couple weeks ago in the context of a second fab opening experienced a 30 minute power outage on March 9th reports have since come out stating that 60,000 waivers were damaged due to the outage which translates to 3.5% of global and wafer production according to Tom's Hardware we've been keeping track of Nan prices on dram exchange but they don't appear to have been affected yet anyway Logitech G has announced a new g5 60 gaming speaker and g5 13 mechanical keyboard both with the Logitech G light sync feature to synchronize RGB LEDs to gameplay Logitech says that both are intended to complement the popular g502 Mouse we're most interested in the g5 13 keyboard which will offer a choice of Roemer G tactile and rubber G linear switches the linear switches are new and should be similar to Cherry while the tactile ones that have been out a while are similar to damped Browns if you were to put a rubber o-ring on them unlike the cherry switches that Logitech and others used typically Romer G's are designed to not let light spill out the sides of the stems and other than that according to Logitech the switches actuate up to 25% faster than the leading competitors so they say at a distance of 1.5 millimeters combined with a low force 45 gram actuation as for the speakers those have lighting zones so you can use software to interact with RGB LEDs so that the speakers light in different areas based on what is being shown on screen it's part of an ambient lighting initiative that should be theoretically a bit cheaper the products MSRP $200 for the speakers $150 for the keyboard the speakers are two speakers and a subwoofer also an audio news SteelSeries seems to be trying out a new line of flagship gaming headsets in the new arctic pro series the new headsets are largely similar to one another in aesthetics and use what they call premium it flourishes like steel and aluminum but deviates slightly in configuration in total the new lineup is comprised of three models the arctas pro the arctas pro and game DAC and the arctas pro wireless the arcanist pro sits at the bottom run and is your classic PC headset and then it goes up from there pricing is a hundred and eighty dollars to the pro 250 for the pro with DAC and 330 for the pro Wireless and then finally Corsair appears to be continuing its revival of one of their most popular case series after the recent launch of the 500d obsidian case of course there's a newest member appears to be the obsidian 1000d ostensibly a successor to the 900 d the new monolithic case will be a super tower capable of housing 2 separately derived systems leaked specs include support for two 480 millimeter radiators one 420 radiator one 240 radiator 8 120 millimeter fans in the front two 120 or 140 millimeter fans in the rear and 3 140 s in the top with six two and a half pays five three and a half bays and an integrated commander pro lighting system the styling of the case employs aluminum steel and curves a tempered glass on hinges much like the new 500 d the alleged price on this one hundred dollars but this is of course still elique so things could change that's it for this week has always subscribed for more go to patreon.com/scishow stop that directly we're going to store it on cameras an access net to pick up one of our mod mats like this one which we'll be shipping within the next couple of weeks thanks for watching I'll see you all next time