Gadgetory

welcome back to the harem box news corn at the last news corner before what will be a huge week of reviews testing and more so if you're not already subscribed probably should hit that button now so you don't miss anything the second it goes live especially after Jen Rhys interview that Steve has been slaving over anyway still some interesting news to get through in the meantime the major story to emerge well I guess right now is that a and B have cut the prices of their upcoming navi GPUs yep that's right one day before these cards officially hit the market ambi has dropped pricing to levels they feel are going to be more competitive in their official statement OMB says that as you have seen competition is heating up in the GPU market we embrace competition which drives innovation to the benefit of gamers in that spirit we are updating the pricing of our Radeon rx 5700 series graphics cards the new pricing sees the Radeon rx 5700 XT priced at 399 u.s. dollars down from 449 while the Radeon rx 5700 is now priced at 349 USD down from 379 those of you interested in the 50th anniversary edition of the 5700 XT will also see a price cut from $4.99 to 449 for this special edition card with a slight factory overclock this does seem like a response to individuals new super cards in particular the GeForce r-tx 2070 super and RT X 2060 super which occupies slightly higher price points of $4.99 and 399 dollars respectively AMD's initial information from the product unveiling has focused on comparing the rx 5700 series to the older non-supe GPUs but with new GPUs on the market AMD needs to tweak things up a bit unfortunately it's annoying that we can't talk about performance for navi just yet because we really can't tell you whether these price cuts take AMD from an uncompetitive position to competitive or whether it makes them even more competitive or whether the price cards still aren't enough for that you'll have to wait until a review goes live in the next few days and yeah I think it's going to be a really interesting story what's great those and the isn't going to sit around and keep pricing static they want to be aggressive and competitive in the mid-range and that's only going to benefit consumers who are after a new graphics card in this highly popular market segment definitely exciting times ahead and it's great to see some competition here to sort of avoid that whole price-fixing scenario I think some YouTube creators at the moment are going on about the situation of price fixing in the GPU market but with this sort of competition happening and these sort of price cuts I don't think that's going to be a big issue for much longer in other news a power outage at a Japanese NAND factory operated by Toshiba memory and Western Digital suffered an unexpected power outage which had huge implications for the factories NAND output the 13 minute power outage on June 15 impacted not only wafers but the production machinery in the factory which has meant that as of today the factory's production is partially halted and won't resume until mid July Western Digital states that the power outage impacted six exabytes of NAND production with one exabyte of course being 1 million terabytes so an absolutely massive impact to output potentially around half of the NAND the factory would produce within the quarter Toshiba doesn't state how much of an impact was made to their NAND production but if that is taken into account the overall impact could be higher than just 6 exabytes this level of outage will have wide implications for the NAND market it will no doubt have financial implications for Toshiba and Western Digital not just from the lost NAND output but also from clients losing confidence considering that this enormous factory alone produces a significant amount of the world's NAND this will impact NAND pricing in the short term at least later this year when contract pricing is adjusted it's an interesting time ahead for the nan market given pricing right now is basically at an all-time low hopefully the impact isn't too severe and we can enjoy cheap SSDs for PC building into the future AMD has launched a new highly affordable workstation class GPU the Radeon Pro WX 3200 for just $1.99 u.s. dollars the WX 3200 comes with certified professional grade drivers for use with CAD another creative software and with a single slot low profile design it should be an easy addition to a wide variety of workstation form factors the GPU itself is Polaris based with 640 stream processes so nothing to get excited about the desktop consumer GPU equivalent is around the rx 550 mark providing 1.66 teraflops of performance the WX 3200 also provides four gigabytes of gddr5 memory and in great news for workstation users there's four mini DisplayPort outputs each capable of driving a 4k display the main reason you buy something like this is if you need proper 10-bit color support or certification for a variety of software and it just slot into an existing machine it only draws about 50 watts of power through the motherboard so it doesn't require any PCIe power which again makes it a great option for many existing workstations this story popped up in my feed earlier this week suggesting that Nvidia with using Samsung's Korea fab to produce cheering GPUs on 11 nanometers the reasoning behind this was that new super GPUs have Korea marked on them but as the updated article points out Nvidia merely packages Summoner GPUs in Korea it's not an indication that they were made at an entirely different fab on a different node so a bit of fake news on that story AMD has launched a new bundle that encompasses a significant portion of their lineup the bundle isn't for a specific game rather it's for Microsoft's Xbox game pass which recently launched on PC and provides access to a number of exclusive and third-party titles for a monthly subscription fee with this bundle ami is offering three months of Xbox game pass for free allowing you to play games like Forza horizon 4 and gears 5 when it launches later this year the hardware included in this deal is well it's pretty much everything on the GPU side if you purchase a Radeon RX 5 60 or above you will be eligible and this includes Vega cards Radeon 7 and the upcoming rx 5700 series and then it's also available for those that buy horizon 5 2400 G CPU or above including Rison 5 7 & 9 in the 3000 series so Zen 2 parts are included however vouchers can't be stacked so you don't get 6 months for free if you purchase a CPU and a GPU for example the bundle is running from now until March 10 2020 so a pretty long bundle here alternatively it will end when AMD runs out of vouchers but given this seems to be part of their long-running partnership with Microsoft I'd that will happen anytime soon it's also a neat way to draw attention to the xbox game pass for PC which itself is a pretty good deal if you can get around using the Microsoft Store this week's monitor news is focused on AOC they've recently announced a new professional-grade 4k monitor there's also quite affordable in the u 2790 pqu it's a 27 inch 4k IPS panel with 5 millisecond response times 10-bit color support not clear if it's a true 10 bit panel though and wide color gamut although the specific gamut hasn't been specified the cool thing here is it will be available in July for just 300 British pounds which for those in the US will be under 350 US dollars a great deal for a 4k panel with those sort of specs on the gaming front AAC's new high refresh Aegon monitors and now available in both 24 inch and 27 inch sizes the AG 251 FZ 2 and AG 271 F said to provide a 1080p resolution with a TN panel and 0.5 millisecond response times there's free sync support 400 nits of brightness and all the usual features pricing is three hundred and thirty dollars for the 24 inch model and $380 for the 27 inch will be interesting to see how they perform intel's new entry-level knocks are now available and they have an interesting combination of hardware inside the compact systems with a rather terrible product name of Intel nook eight mainstream G include an Intel quad-core whiskey like CPU alongside an AMD Radeon 540 X GPU with eight gigabytes have sold at Ram storage options vary depending on the configuration with bare-bones models available the partnership between Intel for CPU and AMD for graphics II is interesting but it's not the first time that's happened unfortunately neither component will be super powerful the whiskey Lake CPUs are just 15 watt quad core models like the core i5 80 265 U or the core i7 85 65 you why the Radeon 540 X is faster than Intel integrated graphics but it's not a significant performance based or anything pricing for these units is also a bit weird with an antique finding these units in a non bare-bones configuration retailing between seven hundred and seventy two dollars and 1075 dollars which seems mighty expensive given the hardware you were getting it also seems expensive in comparison to Intel's exist Nux like been Kenyan anyway for those that are interested in nukes these are now an option that's available to you and that's it for this week's news corner as always you can subscribe to get this segment in your inbox every week although you'll probably want to be subscribed anyway for our reviews going live in a massive week coming up consider supporting us on patreon as well we always appreciate it I'll catch you in the next one