Gadgetory

welcome to another hardware news recap this week we're talking about Intel's unveiling of their discrete GPU which is still probably several years away but they have a prototype that they just showed off at an I Tripoli conference also be talking about some Intel accidentally leaked CPUs on Newegg oops that include the G 4900 series G 4900 G 4920 we've got some news on AMD components on a Windows upgrade and on a cryptocurrency security vulnerability in one of the popular wallets for any of you who use those we've got a couple of other things as well before we get into that this video is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club makers of the new five-dollar shower shave starter set the kit includes the Dollar Shave Club executive razor bearing the hips of any high quality tool and also includes reloadable cartridges the five dollar kit includes everything you see on the screen now like the body wash and shave butter and can be refilled for a few dollars a month this deal is available for $5 exclusively using our link below or dollarshaveclub.com slash gamers Nexus let's start out with some GN site news we published a pub G graphics analysis and frame rate benchmark for the Xbox one act so even though this is a console we think a lot of you would be interested in this because it specifically uses some new software that we developed for frame rate analysis that we can apply towards PC in the future and we also do some technical explanations as to different types of graphics anomalies that we saw like for example when the normal maps were glitching out at glancing angle is underneath the parachute or when we talked about static versus dynamic particle mass replacement on some of the fences and how they're scaling was wrong so it may interest some of you if only from a graphical technical graphical standpoint but we are moving some of this technology towards our PC benchmarking in the future at some point so check that out it's on the channel if you're interested starting us out Intel published some slides at an I Triple E conference it was the I Triple E solid-state circuits conference and this primarily highlighted a prototype 14 nanometer discrete GPU that the company is working on for the distant future this model uses a multi chip approach to graphics process saying it's a prototype for now which means that you can't derive anything from it we don't know if it's gonna be low end or high end consumer or AI we have no idea at this time but it is a functional prototype and it's the first thing that Intel's shown in the discrete GPU region since they hired Roger Kaduri and actually since many years before that so this is probably not a product that could already had much hand in at all because he is a recent hire and it takes a long time to make these things but we do suspect to see more of his influence going forward as Intel continues to work on its discrete GPU division which he is now a part of of no Intel's i Tripoli slide shows a complete graphic system as they call it has a 14 nanometer silicon component which contains a low-power GPU a system agent component and a configuration and debug path this is mounted to an FPGA board which then communicates via PCIe to the host and the test chip is sized at just 8 millimeters by 8 millimeters making it clear again that this is a very simple prototype it also totals 1.5 4 billion transistors in that area so we can't really drive much from it other than they're showing off some of the basic capabilities the GPU voltage is regulated through an integrated voltage regulator similar to the fiber of Intel CPU architectures for the prototype frequency is operating at 50 megahertz or 0.51 volts or 400 megahertz for 1.2 volts one of the main focal points for Intel's of presentation was on faster turbo 2 under Bo transitions which will theoretically aid and limiting power consumption and then we'll have more on this later probably a couple years it'll be a while before this makes it any kind of market but they've got a prototype so that's kind of exciting to see another vendor get into the GPU space we'll see what part of the space they compete and ultimately but it'd be nice to see more choice at least in consumer although they're probably targeting something like AI and enterprise first on the topic of Intel this is a quick one a few new coffee like s cpu SKUs were accidentally posted early to new egg including an unintentional reveal of the forthcoming G Series Pentium CPUs these include the G 900 ng 920 which were previously mentioned but not detailed these are the radically based on new eggs listings priced at around fifty two dollars for the G forty nine hundred and sixty six dollars to the G 4920 we know the G 4900 will be a two core two thread CPU with two megabytes of l3 cache and the G 4920 will run the same specs though presumably with a different frequency there are rumors out there for the frequencies but nothing's been confirmed yet and meanwhile the i5 8,500 and I 580 609 k sea views were also posted early both of which will run six core six thread configurations with nine megabytes of l3 cache one more Intel adjacent story before moving on to AMD components this is about gigabytes z 370 ultra gaming motherboard it's a board that we've lamented since we got it it's it's really it was okay but it was never a very good at over clogger it had some other issues I had coil line issues that were more noticeable than on other platforms so since the launch of z3 70 gigabytes been working on revising that board and now they have an ultra gaming 2.0 coming out so this is a completely new version it's not just a revision of the existing ultra gaming it's actually ultra gaming 2.0 and the changes include primarily an increase in the phase count that going from seven total phases to eleven with the new version and they're also improving a couple of other things so for example a few of the additional changes include an extra m dot 2 heatsink towards the top and more importantly better chokes that should be useful for theoretically reducing coil whine that we observed in the earlier model price will land at around $160 not a huge change in price and the name is officially Ultra gaming 2.0 if you're looking for it these changes should help address some of our initial concerns although the heat sinks on the VRMs really aren't any better than previously but the rest the concerns are at least getting something of a look in liquid cooling news EK has announced a socket TR for monoblock compatible with two msi x 399 motherboards these include the gaming a pro carbon AC and the sli plus boards the co plate covers the entire thread refer i HS and cools the VRMs also and from pictures it appears that the fin area does completely cover the cpu dies this so this was a bit of a misstep from ek previously where the first thread refer block didn't have enough microphones to cover even the the die surface area on the CPU so they provides that this mono block covers more of the surface area of the CPU it covers the entire die area and it should cool better overall also of note it does look like the block contains a removable RGB LED strip if that's something you're into and it's compatible with Emma size mystic light software and then pricing it's looking like one hundred twenty six euros or about 140 USD this one's short and is from Microsoft there's a new power mode and Windows at least four windows insiders using Windows 10 Pro 4 workstations and that mode is called ultimate performance mode it'll soon be available for those on the windows insider path and it's designed to quotes eliminate micro latency is associated with fine-grained power management techniques this is specific to the workstation and Enterprise editions of Windows 10 for now and we don't know if it'll come out for desktop or if it's even necessary but if it does well straightly benchmark it for purposes of our benchmarks if you're curious we typically use the high performance power plan unless we specifically state otherwise for some other reason like testing power saving or something like that but for high performance you do want the high performance power plan however it does obviously use a bit more power than would typically be necessary for low load scenarios for workstation users though now you'll have another one and workstations don't really care as much about power anyway this one is some security news our colleagues over at Tech Age have discovered a security vulnerability in the Jack's cryptocurrency wallet which they've detailed fully in their article at Tech age comm the article goes on to demonstrate that the Jack's wallet creates a cache folder on the host system which can then be copied and pasted to any other computer with the jacks wallet software without requiring any sort of password at all this cache folder can then be copied to the new location used to access the currency stored in the wallet and then the attacker could send that currency to a different wallet there's an optional four-digit pin code as well that they don't require you to turn on but you can do it through software options and from what we understand it's by passable through other security exploits and either way four digits gives you about 10,000 combinations to attempt to crack anyway even if you weren't using exploits to circumvent the code as tech gage shows in their video it would be trivial for a user with access to the PC it's a copy this cash holder and send its currency to another wallet one instance of such an exploit might be a PC repair technician who has physical access to the PC and therefore can grab the folder and access it later alternatively something like meltdown or Spectre would make sense here as they can use side-channel attacks again access to memory and can be executed via hijacked ad network JavaScript without ever requiring physical access to the computer just remote access tech gauge details that exploit further in their own content which we've linked in our show notes for this episode found below in the description also know our other colleagues at Hardware unboxed posted a video talking about Intel scalability under different thermal conditions this is close to home for us because we run all of those case thermal benchmarks where we can show throttling in some instances and in Hardware unbox testing they look at the stock Intel cooler with a couple of other coolers to see how turbo is affected under various thermal circumstances and for that again you can find a link in our show notes below for another security news item relating back to kind of the meltdown inspector stuff from a moment ago Intel's expanding its bug bounty program as a consequence of the meltdown and spectre exploits it's an invitation-only program that was launched in March 2017 only a few months before they were notified of meltdown now the program is open to all security researchers and bounties are being raised across the board up to $100,000 in some areas and up to $250,000 in other areas with a temporary program specifically focused on side-channel vulnerabilities like meltdown inspector the intent is to encourage quote coordinated disclosure or in other words make sure Intel is the first to know as rough as the past few months have been it looks like Intel knows that they dodged a bullet by having Google project 0 discover this and report vulnerabilities to them first and finally following EA's Star Wars Battlefront 2 debacle which came between EAS battlefront 1 and visceral games shutdown debacles the rumor circulating now is that Lucasfilm and Disney are looking for a new studio to develop these Star Wars license the source for the specified rumor is an article from Cinna links which cites Ubisoft and Activision as possible contenders but doesn't offer much else in the way of concrete statements regardless ea stock prices have continued to rise higher than ever before with the reintroduction of microtransactions to battlefront 2 so it's clear just how far speaking with here while it goes when it comes to EA a battlefront 2 they did note performed exceptionally poor League versus the expectations given the whole microtransaction fracas of sorts from last year but they've reintroduced them so that's what EA thinks of us all but either way it's possible that the license may be taken away from them so we'll keep an eye on that it's all just rumor right now but that's it for this one as always you can check the link in the description below to the article containing show notes for this new episode which will have sources and things like that if you'd like to read further on any specific topic including those items from our colleagues at various websites so subscribe for more as always to catch next week's episode go to store that gamers Nexus net to pick up a shirt like this one or one of our Jeon mugs that we just restocked get out of here thank you for watching I'll see you all next time