Gadgetory

welcome back to another hardware news recap for the last week despite being a holiday week there's still a lot of news to cover including some stuff on briefly ice Lake and whiskey Lake from Intel and there's also allegedly a GTX 1060 5 gigabyte card now for the fourth variant of GTX 1060 s awesome news on the Asus 1080i Strix PCB changes that have been discussed and videos a ban of geforce cards and data centers and then some AMD news as well before that this coverage is brought to you by Silicon Lottery comm Silicon lottery offers deleting services and also pre bins CPUs this includes determining what sort of clocks the CPU can achieve at different voltages and then they provide you the option to buy those different bins of CPUs if you're in search of something specific to learn more check out silicon Madhuri comm or click on the link in the description below preceding our first news item just a quick update we have a five-dollar patreon tier that gives you behind-the-scenes vlogs that we started doing the last couple weeks so the second one of those just went live on the side channel all of the patreon backers at 5 dollars and up can see it you can just go to patreon.com/scishow Cameron's Nexus login and you'll find the link there so that's stated oh and I should also notice note that a snowflake starting at briefly with this Corsair ornaments of course they are sent a shiny tree ornament with their logo and RGB everything and it was wrapped in an RGB ribbon I guess it was all everything was RGB from Corsair this here so first news item pertains to memory prices over the last no it feels like a year or two at this point we've been talking about how memory prices are making it really a lot more expensive than it ever has needed to be to get into PC gaming to the point where we're seeing prices that are up a hundred and twenty percent from what they were roughly a year ago and that's been bad news for PC gaming PC building the newest information out of that front though is that China's National Development and Reform Commission or NDRC is reportedly looking into the possibility of DRAM price-fixing between the major memory and flash suppliers with specific interest from the pricing supervision department of that commission so an official from the regulatory bodies hold the China Daily which is a state-run paper quote we have noticed the price surge and will pay more attention to future problems that may be caused by quote price-fixing in the sector and quote on that one so this follows Samsung's plans to again allegedly increase their supply by 20% from earlier this year just a couple months ago and that still would have failed to meet rising demand the NDRC told the China Daily that the company has paid attention to DRAM pricing and and pricing over the last 18 months and that the memory suppliers are now under the eye of the NDRC in fact Samsung has reportedly already had conversations at the NDRC and that's according to the Secretary General of Mobile China Alliance at this time there's been no actions taken against any of the four major memory suppliers that would include SK Hynix microns Achieva and Samsung but it's something that the Chinese government regulatory body is looking into so we'll keep an eye on that one and see if it goes anywhere one more thing though this isn't the first time that the memory industry has been looked into for price-fixing in fact the first time they were looked at for price fixing there was actual collusion found on fixing the prices of memory so we'll see if they've learned anything Nvidia is reportedly readying a GTX 1060 5 gigabyte model this if it comes to be and it looks like it is legitimate at this point will be the 4th GTX 1060 that Nvidia has created however it's not targeted for DIY PC builders so basically any of us and it is also not really targeted at markets outside of Asia so this is something that is from what we've read thus far from XP review a Chinese language news outlet it looks like this gtx 760 5 gigabyte card is meant for internet cafes pc Bains things like that in china or potentially and other Asian markets the card is a little bit different than just the vram so it also will have a slightly reduced memory bus width it's going to be 160 bits rather than 192 which goes hand-in-hand with five gigabytes it's still 1280 CUDA cores whereas the 10 63 gigabyte was 1152 CUDA cores and the other 1060 if you're wondering was the 1066 gigabyte with faster memory so some of those cards are starting to kind of pop up online already but that's that's what it looks like they're doing now if you want to think about why this might be the case there's obviously a huge market in China and Asia for this type of device but is it a market that exceeds or it doesn't exceed what is already provided by the 1066 and three gigabyte cards I don't know maybe there's that much demand but this is the kind of thing that you'd potentially make if you have if the extra 1 gigabyte difference has enough cost savings to really be worth it but three gigabytes is like going too far it's really weird it's this this is like extreme product segmentation they're doing to be fair not targeted at PC enthusiasts but still it's it's interesting we'll see what happens maybe it's some kind of silicon bending thing or they've just got a bin of chips that have partly defective memory controllers or something like that next news item though so hardware info is one of the best tools for measuring really anything in your computer sensors all that stuff hardware info 64 it's a free software utility we use it for logging a lot of thermal and voltage numbers and it's been historically pretty accurate and reliable even before products launch which is something that can't always be said about a lot of other monitoring solutions on the market so hardware info is the latest 5.7 update has resolved a couple of things and has added some interesting items one of them is that it's added support for ice Lake and whiskey Lake which we'll come back to in a moment and it's also resolved some of Vegas thermal monitoring bugs that popped up with the latest Radeon adrenaline drivers that 17.11.2013 support and it's also adding correct t.j.maxx reporting for Zeppelin dies which will be nice as well a t.j.maxx being the maximum temperature junction temperature before CPU thermal event that's typically thermal shutdown or thermal throttling depending on how your motherboard is configured the 400 series chipsets port is not yet added despite some news posts it is going to be added for the next release though so it's on the way and this will become relevant toward the beginning of second quarter 2018 and the first quarter somewhere in there as for isolation whisky lake support these are looking to be relevant in 2018 and after these you can expect that after ice Lake comes water lake which is what you get when you add Intel's Tim to ice lake and after whiskey Lake I think is coming Gatorade Lake so keep an eye out for those there's will be very important processor launches in 2032 the next one Titan V support was added as well Tom's Hardware further notice that hardware info 64 added Intel's multi-core turbo bins so this is something that you could previously find in PTU their power thermal testing utility or other developer tools but now it's being exposed through a more consumer available software solution and that will give you a table like we had the chart on our 8700 k coverage where you can see the bins for what frequency you can expect to operate at for how many cores or threads are engaged and that can be fetched directly through hard rainbow we were pointed toward this next news item from a couple of people in the Twitter and patreon communities so several of people contacted us over an EK water blocks message about the asus 1080i Strix card that received critical acclaim from our outlet this year they use card has undergone a PCB change that requires EK water blocks to rework their cooler design and that's if the company wishes to continue the support of this PCB this kind of feeds back to where we try to bring some level-headedness to the situation first of all not to be deal but secondly whenever any kind of change happens to a product you'll get a sort of discussion that makes it sound as if it's an evil change or something where they're trying to take something away from you in all likelihood and this is very common for PCBs to be reworked without a major announcement in all likelihood Asus probably had a supply-side change maybe some component they were sourcing is no longer available because some other factor in the market spun up and started taking them or that company might have stopped making that particular component or it could just be they found that there's a better way to make whatever it is they reworked we're not sure what that is just yet but either way it's PCB change it's not a cooler change or anything like that and apparently it was enough where eks blocks are not compatible with the ten atti in its new form so ek is warning that models made after mid November are affected they have a list of serial numbers that are affected you can check your card to make sure it is or is not and this is we're not sure yet if EK is going to use this to step away from the line or if they're going to continue making stuff for the 1080i Strix and just modify it to fit the new one we contacted to Asus about this and haven't yet heard back it's probably because everyone's out of office for the holidays and we also talked to build Zoid about it who is aware of the change but didn't have any further information about it at this time so that's all we know about that one basically this kind of feeds into why when media outlets or when users ask a company hey what MOSFETs are on there they won't answer is the same thing logitech or Mouse companies do what sent or what what switches are you using they won't answer the reason for that is not because they're necessarily trying to hide something but because their supply could change and they don't want to be held to that statement later if supply changes because you're not just gonna kill the whole product line and start a new one that would make much sense for something where you can source a similar switch with the same spec and things like that just from a different supplier so we're not sure what the change was though it could be more extreme than that or it might be nothing but we'll wait for a comment from Asus on NVIDIA Ben's geforce in data centers so there's nothing there's nothing alleged or reported about this it just is this is what happened what's happening and videos new end-user License Agreement has been updated to contain the following quote no data center deployment period pretty cut-and-dry there it also says the software is not licensed for data center deployments this is referring to the driver package except that blockchain processing in a data center is permitted so this protects cryptocurrency miners operating in data center environments with a lot of geforce cards interestingly but it impacts potentially enterprise clients although those are mostly going to be on Tesla's anyway or more likely universities academics and researchers who might not have the budget or the need to go something like a Tesla or a Quadro card where you have professional level certifications and guarantees which have different liability protections attached to them it's more likely going to affect those universities economics people like that so this is basically dictating how the cards can be used but to a point where they're allowing it for cryptocurrency mining it's almost like they said well we can't Institute this change for cryptocurrency miners that's not fair they bought a lot of cards but universities yeah they can afford Tesla's and Quadros is it's basically it's trying to force the market into adopting the higher to your cards that are more intended for these use cases now whether this is a valid move from a support standpoint things like that legal standpoint I'm not really sure at this time but it's definitely further market segmentation it is going to affect independent or university or academic researchers the most and they're not going to be able to leverage geforce cards in the same way if they want to continue receiving nvidia support so that's kind of the situation those people and however there they say screw all of this Cancer Research let's start mining coins then they're apparently protected so it's a very odd thing that anybody has carved out here they they almost could have had a support leg to stand on with just a blanket ban of geforce cards in a data center environment maybe but if it's like blanket ban but those cryptocurrency miners are fine kind of taken away the support leg a little bit of a weird decision there I it it has not been received well a high and I don't know that it's a great decision in general the next one here so this is the Andes 400 series chipset news and E 400 series chips that was spotted on the PCI si G integrators devices list and this just means that we know a little bit more about how the chipset is connecting to the CPU and its other changes that are accompanied by that those include a change the general-purpose PCIe lanes so Andy is moving away from eight lanes PCIe gen to towards eight lanes PCIe gen3 the general purpose lanes are this exists on Intel's well they can be assigned to pretty much whatever the motherboard maker wants to use them for you can assign them to a PCIe device maybe a by four device you can assign them to m dot two it's a Gigabit Ethernet to USB to a whole bunch of SATA or YouTube ports things like that so that's been changed just up to Gen 3 which will give them a bit more bandwidth to work with so you can use fewer lanes to accomplish the same goal with an M 2 device or you can run 32 you can run faster and about two devices on it as well this is going to be on the next-generation rise and launch it's going to be a plus generation we are calling it rising plus right now we're not sure what I am DS gonna call it it may end up being called risin to however don't confuse that with Zen 2 architecture which isn't releasing for some time so could potentially be confusing there we are calling it rising plus for that reason and finally opera implemented mining protections in there my browser opera is one of the older web browsers and one of the best ones so back when I used opera when you paid 10 or 20 dollars for it you bought it on the disk and now it's free of course but opera has a no coin a web mining extension that prevents mining from web sites like for example we recently saw the hardware bought forums do mining when you visit the site this is something that sites are doing now instead of ads so operas got a tool in there to prevent that if you're worried about that sales for this week the logitech c920 was $50 marked down from the usual 100 ish price point for the web cam this is the web cam we've used for some interviews in the past and there's also an AOC C 408 vu 8 monitor which is a 40 inch 4k curved display 10-bit color 5 millisecond Grady gray that's been on sale in multiple occasions for $600 as well those are all worth looking into if you want to look into any of them and click the links for them in the description below or as always you can subscribe for more you can help us out directly on patreon.com slash gamers Nexus to get our behind-the-scenes videos or you can go to store that gamers nexus net to pick my shirt like this one or one of our mod mats thank you for watching I'll see you all next time