Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and we are here to recap last week's hardware news we're starting off with an asrock and msi bios update which allows some Z 170 boards to overclock intel i3 cpus and if you know anything about the sky lake i3 skews none of them have AK identifiers and that is intel's way of saying it is unlocked for overclocking so the i3 is not natively an overclocking chip it is not natively and officially supported with the MSI and asrock BIOS updates you can sort of patch the firmware on existing boards including the x power gaming te the gaming m9 gaming m7 and m5 and g 45 from msi and a number of the x the extreme series boards from asrock the extreme seven and so on and you can unlock those to allow overclocking of Intel i3 cpus the sky li quans there's no guarantee that this will continue to work going forward or if they'll be blocked or not but it works for now so if you do have one of those e170 boards from asrock or msi you have an i3 cpu it may be worth investigating and seeing if you can actually overclock them or not and how far you can get the next news item pertains to the Samsung and NVIDIA patent lawsuits that upon going from both companies so they've taken turns exchanging blows with one another over various patents and other issues and this sort of retaliatory lawsuit that nvidia filed recently alleges that samson is infringing on Nvidia's patents in their mobile devices and they have bundled qualcomm into that sort of mess of company suing each other so qualcomm is a mobile device manufacturer they make chips for CPUs and GPUs for phones and Samsung is obviously a phone and tablet and manufacturer of many things so and video was suing them Samsung over this patent allegation the original ruling overturned this suit nvidia appealed it went to a higher judge they overturned it and said not only was it over the first time but the patent one of the patents was invalidated this particular one but another nvidia patent wasn't validated in the process so a bit of attrition I guess you could say in that process and now nvidia is appealing again it will go to another court at some point in the future and we'll see if it actually goes anywhere or if it just sits in the court system forever so no concern for samson right now basically as it stands the next news item is a pretty big one this is about micron micron is a manufacturer of flash nand for ssds so a lot of the big player manufacturers and SSD brands will source some of their supply from micron and intel is included in this Intel actually owns micron and their flash supply comes from micron so that's used in a lot of the intel ssds including the PCIe new SSDs so micron is buying a company called in Otara and that is for 3.2 billion dollars which buys out the remaining sixty-seven percent stake in this company and this is a partnership micron has had with in Otara for about seven years now they've decided to officially by the company and now we'll be able to purchase their DRAM at cost and yet better access to some of the memory devices that micron does not already make in the house so that gives a micron direct access the DRAM it should help lower their bill of materials or bo em and that will feed into the SSD manufacturers as well hopefully like intel and may cause some price drops next news item is and these four gigabyte card so the r9 390 is an eight gigabyte video card and that is that's available everywhere in China as of recently the last week or so the r9 390 began shipping for with 4 gigabytes for slightly cheaper price so that hasn't come to the US yet if it does would expect a lower price because the vram is cheaper if you have less of it so that is something to look out for it something I really get excited about because the 390 is already fairly cheap 300 300 otters maybe and with 4 gigabytes unless it drops a substantial amount from the cost which I don't think it will it's it's not too worth getting hyped about but it is certainly a newsworthy item that there will be a 4 gigabyte 390 model out there now the last item for the week for last week's roundup is the HTC vive so this is a device that we've talked about a few times on the channel and on the website and great depth actually talking about the engineering and how the vive works and the vibe just a quick recap is a virtual reality solution it is basically designed and engineered by valve and the HTC is using their production facilities to to manufacture it and ship it more quickly so it is the HTC vive or the valve I've or steam VR whatever you want to call it that uses lighthouses which go in the corners of the room and those use IR and laser scanning the track your position the some diodes that are on the headset so the diodes receive the light and transmit your location of the room so that is the HTC vive and the news item is that its consumer release has been pushed back to april twenty sixteen but pre-orders will open in February so that's just after CES speaking of CES we will be there as always and HTC vive will have their development kit available on site for preview and we're hoping to get a look at that and of course we'll let you all know if that happens so that's it for last week's news recapped we're going to take a bit slower this week for obvious holiday reasons but we do have some major content coming up through the next couple of days as always and then CES is after that so big stuff coming from there for sure that's all for this time hit the patreon link in the length of description below if you want to support us directly thank you for watching and I'll see you all next time