Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware box a news corner we are back from Computex hopefully you've already caught up with steve's unboxing boxes episode yesterday and today we're back into the usual schedule of news corner you'll also notice the set behind me is pretty much back to normal if you want to see the behind-the-scenes process to get that all done check out our boxing boxes series exclusive to our patreon members even though Computex has just happened where we saw a ton of announcements there has still been some interesting new stories to emerge this week including a ton of AMD related stuff so let's get into it as part of apple's quite funny cheese grater presentation at WWDC earlier this week where we got such gems as a $1,000 monitor stand AMD announced new professional-grade graphics cards in the form of the Radeon Pro Vega 2 and Radeon Pro Vega 2 juror as we've said countless times we don't really cover professional GPUs all that much but this launch does have something a bit special about it we'll start with the pro Vega 2 though as expected we're getting a 7 nanometre Vega 20 GPU inside but unlike with the consumer-focused Radeon 7 the pro Vega 2 delivers a fully unlocked cheep you with 4096 stream processors clocked at 17 20 megahertz providing around 14.1 teraflops of compute performance higher than the 13.4 teraflops you get with the Radeon 700 of importance to creators is the increase in HBM to vram from 16 gigabytes to 32 gigabytes which makes it a bit of a beast for some professional workloads of great interest is the pro Vega 2 duo which is the first dual GPU graphics card from aim being quite some time it's basically two pro Vega two GPUs on the one board with an infinity fabric link between the two providing 84 gigabytes per second data transfers for better interoperability and memory access with the same stream process account and the same boost clock as the pro Vega to the jury delivers up to 20 8.2 teraflops of performance from a single board the board itself does look a little strange AMD has included a standard PCI year 16 times but in addition to that is an all-new PCIe connector that supports up to 475 watts of power delivery this means there is no external power connect on the board it all runs through the motherboard an interesting solution that no doubt is all about apples proprietary internal design for the mac pro while the single GPU version of this card should be available to the general public at some point the Radeon pro Vega - duro is exclusive to the Mac Pro AMD and apple of work together closely for many years now on projects like this and with Apple placing a big emphasis on compactness and sleek form factors it's not too surprising the company is still on board with dual GPU graphics cards if Andy did offer this car to others it probably would sell I guess a few units here and there but among system builders do GPU cards are well out of favor how much will it cost to buy a Vega 2 duo well that's still unclear the Mac Pro starts at a whopping six thousand US dollars but you're not getting a dual GPU solution at that price it's even hard to guess what price sounds right $20,000 $30,000 I really don't know what I do know is some Mac Pro configurations even come with 4 GPU so likely two of these Vega 2 duo cards so that's some pretty serious compute capabilities and another interesting partnership AMD will be licensing out some radeon GPU IP to Samsung for using their mobile GPUs Ami's press release on the matter specifically references licensing custom graphics IP based on the recently announced highly scalable rDNA graphics architecture Samsung will of course pay license fees and royalties for the privilege as an antique notes Samsung has been working on their own mobile GPU for around seven years now that GPU has only featured in test chips Samsung's own Exynos CPUs have typically used third-party GPS but this new deal could signify the start of Samsung using an R DNA based GPU or at least a partially rDNA GPU for their mobile chips knowing how long it takes to develop a GPU it's unclear how long Samsung has been working with AMD to utilize our DNA or how long it'll take for that tech to come in to their actual GPU products it's also possible that Samsung is merely licensing IP so that their own GPU tech is not going to get them in paint trouble with AMD it's an interesting deal and I'll be crucially following how and where our DNA makes the transition to smartphone class SOC s this last amb story is a bit of a brief one and a note to those who have followed our Computex coverage over the last few weeks for our Q&A series we did get a few questions from you guys asking about PCIe 4.0 back porting to older am4 motherboards like x4 70 at the time we had heard that gigabyte were claiming their older boards would be updated to support PCIe 4.0 but we cut that question in answer at the last minute due to new information that new information comes directly from AMD who say that no old am4 motherboards will support PCI 4.0 the only boards with support will be X 570 at this stage x4 70 B 450 X 370 and so on will only support up to pcie 3.0 pju 4.0 uses the same wiring design as pcie 3.0 but has stricter signaling requirements it is theoretically possible that a well-designed x4 70 board could simply be updated to support peace to a 4.0 while crappier x4 70 boards may not be good enough to support the tech it sounds that AMD doesn't want to risk any confusion between boards that can support it and those that can't Sue's requiring motherboard manufacturers to keep their older boards on pcie 3.0 this means that while gigabyte does have an early BIOS allowing PCIe 4.0 support on some non x5 70 products that feature will be rolled back and disabled in final BIOS revisions for Rison 3000 CPUs if you want PC a 4.0 you'll need to purchase an x5 70 motherboard Microsoft has added better variable refresh rate support to Windows 10 in the latest version rolling out to users now version 1983 this support comes in the form of a toggle in the graphics setting menu under the variable refresh rate header you can choose to optimize games for variable refresh rate while this option does sound somewhat interesting the reality is this toggle is largely just for Microsoft Store titles one of the things Microsoft kind of stuffed up with the universal Windows platform for gamers among other things was not supporting adaptive sync technologies to begin with and when they did introduce it game to is needed to specifically enable the tech in their titles this switch basically overrides the developer switch and allows variable refresh rate support in all you WP games it doesn't really affect anything else because games released outside of the Microsoft Store of always supported variable refresh rate technology without any significant issues so if you do see the toggle appear in the settings after an update well you know what it does and then take a reporting that Intel CPU product line is set to become even more confusing later this year we already know the company will be shipping ten enemy to I select CPUs at TDP is between nine and twenty eight watts so your typical use series range but joining them will allegedly be another you series lineup built on 14 nanometer process tech codenamed comet Lake an antic heard about this new line when speaking to a partner about many pcs this unnamed partner is planning to upgrade their u series powered mini pcs to comment Lake later this year in November the partner clarified these would be fifteen what parts used and specifically comment Lake not ice Lake or another line the possible plan here and I'm just speculating here is to offer ice lag at the high end for ultra portables and similar premium systems then comment Lake for more mid-range and entry-level devices however Intel really aren't talking much about specific temperature and skews at this point so we'll have to wait until later in the year to find out more III is kicking off next week where we are set to hear a whole lot about new games potentially new consoles and of course the most interesting thing for us new AMD cpus and gpus a lot of game news has emerged over the last few days but i did want to highlight something that might be of interest to you guys and that's the fact that destiny 2 is coming to steam and will be available as a free to play title the free version which will be rebranded as destiny to new light comes with all year 1 content if you want to access any of the expansions beyond that of course you have to fork over some cash as well as the move to steam we'll also be getting cross sales for all console platforms including Xbox ps4 and stadia and there's also a standalone expansion coming later this year called shadow tape so pretty interesting things happening on the destiny to front there final topic I wanted to cover is Google stadia not so normally in our wheelhouse but just want to run through the details and get your opinion on it pretty interested what our PC gaming community thinks of this one so stadia is Google's new streaming platform or game streaming platform it is coming to 14 regions in November with 31 day one titles including Ubisoft games like the division 2 and Ghost Recon breakpoint 2 case upcoming Borderlands 3 and deep service Metro Exodus unfortunately Australia isn't supported region at launch but you guys in the US will get to enjoy if you do live there but the pricing structure seems a bit strange you'll need to fork over a hundred and twenty nine dollars for a stadia controller and chromecast ultra bundle to begin with from there you can either opt to be a pro subscriber which costs $10 a month and gives access to 4k 60fps HDR streams or you can remain a free subscriber for 1080p 60fps gaming but the subscription does not come with any games instead you'll need to buy games just like with any other console so it's not providing a Netflix like service like I think some people were expecting and hoping for the initial one $29 bundle though does include a copy of destiny two and three months of stay to your pro in terms of internet connections you'll need 35 megabits per second for 4k around 20 megabits for 1080p and 10 megabits for 720p and if you're stuck with a slower connection than that you won't get 60fps having tried game streaming services and being universally unimpressed with what they offer compared to PC gaming or even consoles stadia doesn't sound all that revolutionary to me you still have to buy games you still have to fork out money upfront and if you want the top quality which on paper should be better than some in-home consoles you'll also need a subscription there's also not much exclusive content and the game selection at launch is limited so I'm not really sure what the hook is here that will get people invested or interested definitely want to get your thoughts on it chuck them in the comments below whether you're interested in stadia and a planning on checking it out anyway that's it for this week's news corner as always you can subscribe it to get this segment in your inbox every Friday or there abouts stay tuned for more AMD announcements early next week as a three kicks off plus some other good stuff that is on the way consider supporting us on patreon we always really appreciate your guys support and I'll catch you in the next one