Gadgetory

this week has been a surprisingly busy news week for hardware normally towards the end of the year generally we expect it to calm down a little bit especially that's here since it's been non-stop since May around Computex time but it's still going this week for news we've got some interesting updates on the rx 460 suddenly becoming a bit more relevant with some unlocking via BIOS functionality of course unofficial and there's AM the rise in which we covered another video some interesting SSDs from Corsair and more but before we get into that this coverage is brought to you by msi and their new core frozer L CPU cooler which you can see in our new case testing bench we've been using that lately for the new case reviews and you've probably seen it at this point but let's get straight into it so first off the most interesting item at least that I think is the rx 460 unlocking this was found by der bauer one of the overclockers he's sort of peers with build Zoid you're mostly all familiar with builds lloyd at this point from actually hardware overclocking there Bauer is one of his counterparts he's an overclocker he's found that you can unlock the rx for 60s from the native 896 cores to a 1024 core count and that of course includes an increase in TM use because you're probably unlocking a full block basically on the GPU so that goes from 56 TM used to 64 pretty good gain in terms of both core count and TM use and that actually will reflect in performance I'm not going to talk about how much just yet cuz I actually want to test it myself but we will be doing a guide this weekend hopefully on how to unlock an Rx 460 it currently only works for as far as we're aware the sapphire nitro 4 gigabyte card and asus strix 4 gigabyte card may work for other devices but as far as we know right now the bios unlocks the mods which you can apply just through normal flashing tools are only available for those two devices in particular but we'll have a guide on how to do that and then sometimes work performance with preliminary information on the gains do note one thing here the Andy relive drivers do impact some of the unlocks that have been applied in custom BIOS instil elsewhere so might impact these it's really hard to say now if MD is going to be validating BIOS going forward with their drivers that could pose a problem for things like this but it's too soon to tell right now very quickly I will mention that Andy Rison the Zen architecture update was streamed this week we have a separate video on it if you want to learn more about it go there and that is the eight core sixteen thread CPU three point four gigahertz they put it against an i7 sixty nine hundred K Broadwell II CPU from Intel and had mostly parity in terms of performance so that is covered in our other video including some caching discussion next topic this one is from a company that honestly I'd never heard of until I checked my email just before this video company called Zadok 511 is producing a new kit of the just more RGB stuff so it's ddr4 RGB memory and then the part that I thought was interesting enough to at least show was the RGB SSD and it's basically got sort of one's own I think with an isolating bar down the middle it lights up on either side of it and is controllable via software for both the DRAM and the SSD so you can actually control the colors to software doesn't require extra cables few interesting things here first of all Zadok 511 of course instantly I was like who the heck are they is this some fly-by-night company when looked it up using a quick who is their domain was registered in December of 2015 they're pretty new about a year old at this point and it is owned by a pacer which is actually known company in memory and is a Taiwanese company based in Taiwan they're run by a pacer and they're created about a year ago it's focused on modding now with that said the new devices are called the shield I've reached out and asked for price availability what controller was used what NAND was used all these things because they didn't tell us anything about it other than the fact that they have l ET's which i suppose all you need to know these days so I don't have that information just yet but worth pointing them out the memory we know clocks at twenty four hundred megahertz at the low end they go up to three thousand megahertz kits sold in fasces up to 64 gigabytes ddr4 not too exciting their SSD I know nothing about because they didn't tell us anything and then we know that the well that's not true there's one interesting thing about the SSD that's worth noting and that is it is a dual interface as is d though that's not you can use them jointly and get expanded throughput or anything crazy like that which would be interesting but it's just that you basically you get a USB type-c connector on it so three point one type C and then there's also the standard SATA 3 connector on theory with USB 3.1 type C you get a bit more throughput then on SATA 3 which is kind of a dying slash needs to die interface for SSDs but it depends on the controller and then and how much of that extra bandwidth actually be utilized so that's from Zadok I not gonna recommend that's so they pre-ordering that stuff but we might look at it and if we do then we figure out then if it's worth it does remind me a bit of a vexer though also an SSD news you may have seen on our website this week that one of our writers Eric Hamilton covered the SSD price increases that are expected so I very briefly mentioned this in an ask GN video and a couple folks comments and things like doesn't affect me because I just bought this SSD for this great price and obviously SSD prices are fine that's not really what's going on here what's going on is somewhere in the range of 2017 to 2018 you should expect an increase in both SSD prices and hard drive prices at least at the higher end and that's because of two things decide the manufacturing is increasing so much that obviously there's a supply shortage or can't keep up with demand and most of that's going to Mobile and then on the hard drive side there's just a lot of the factories are spinning down because the hard drives sort of are spinning down especially in consumer that's not the main point of breeding this topic up though the main point of bringing up the SSD prices because we already covered this in the article if you're curious to learn more about that and why it's going on main reason is because Corsairs also got a new SSD so I guess they're gonna have fierce competition from Zadok 511 I really need to watch their backs they're Corsairs SSD is a Bible of the fourth series you may remember therefore series from years ago Corsair sort of abandoned that market which being a memory manufacturer was an interesting move to say the least but it seems like they're trying to come back so to come back reviving the fourth series with the MP 500 m2 SSD and that is an nvme drive that lives on four PCIe lanes so that would put it theoretically with its files on controller I don't know what the NAND is right now but we know it's a fuzz on e7 controller that would theoretically put it in competition about where the samsung 960 Evo is right now and the advertised specifications is all I can go off of it we haven't tested it and so I you know grain of salt and all of that but the advertised specifications they've given us are three gigabytes per second sequential read 2.4 gigabytes per second sequential right and then the random transactions are rated for about 250,000 4k read and about 210,000 4k write IOPS so that's what we have for the Corsair drive right now the MB 500 and that will be using the Phi's on PS 5000 East 7 controller and undeclared going to be reaching out to them about that though a couple other things that notes the sort of smart suite of technology so that's things like smart flush and AEC and refresh and all these features alongside the existing files on control of garbage collection we're leveling and right up suffocation factors features which of course are the same on all drives but with probably some tuning on coarser side at least something to set them apart that's how these things work so that I don't have a have any more information on it but that's the the basics right now final news item this one's kind of on the industry side it's been interesting though so TSM C Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation is expanding its operations to include a new nearly 16 billion-dollar fabrication facility so it's a fifteen point seven billion dollar plant they already have outfits in a couple places in Taiwan in China and now they're adding this one and this will expand to support five nanometer and three nanometer production a couple things here first item of note the way that TSMC defines their process and their nodes doesn't necessary the same as the way Intel defines theirs for example so five and three nanometer may mean different things depending on which manufacturer you talk to with this one I don't know if they're going to be you v-- lithography or not it might not be but we'll we'll really have to wait and find out more technical information on that because there's not been a lot revealed just yet but five nanometer three nanometer production support for the new 16 billion dollar facility they are currently researching at least lightly two nanometer process and then there's a seven nanometer chip as I understand it now that actually exists and is being experimented on at TSMC so that's kind of news on the production front if you're not familiar with tsmc they're probably most known by our viewers for their Pascal 16 nanometer FinFET process and they also worked on the Snapdragon ten nanometer CPUs and the iPhone seven whatever they use a ten I think processor is with iPhone 7 uses so TSMC targeting production by 2020 to include five nanometer and three nanometer in their fabrication manufacturing seven nanometer under experimentation and ten nanometer process should be profitable by end of year 2017 so that's all we have for you for this week for the hardware news so ways it links in the description below for more information gamers next to scott net if you want to follow this stuff as it's published and patreon link a personal video to help us out directly subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you