Gadgetory

welcome back to episode 20 of the hardware box news corner happy to say I'm feeling much better than last week so no need for Steve to fill in for me this time anyway there's a fair few interesting topics to get to in this one so let's head straight into it the first story is pretty damn funny if you ask me Apple's new MacBook Pros have been found to throttle significantly under full load with the weak cooler in their slim bodies getting completely overwhelmed by Intel's latest six core coffee-like processes for laptops Dave 2d first discovered that their model with the core I 989 50 HKS CPU inside actually ran below the rated base clock of 2.9 gigahertz in a premier Pro render in normal operating conditions when he put the laptop in a freezer the render completed in a significantly shorter amount of time pointing to serious thermal issues with the cooler and this issue is further corroborated by a notebook check who tested a MacBook Pro with the i7 8850 H inside and also found it ran significantly slower than other laptops with a similar processor inside in fact notebook checks said that the new model with the six core processor inside was only 13 percent faster than the old model with the quad core i7 7700 HQ inside at least in the Cinebench r15 test in most other laptops that you use these new coffee lag chips that margin is much closer to the 50 percent improvement in core count this is a pretty embarrassing situation for Apple it's quite surprising to me that Apple wouldn't bother to design a cooler that can appropriately handle these new CPUs but I guess we are talking about a company that also decided to remove all the useful ports from their professional-grade laptops not that long ago hopefully word gets around about these performance problems so that prospective buyers don't jump in thinking they're getting you know significantly improved performance only to find out that it's actually not that much better than the last gen MacBook Pro AMD has been touting this week that their graphics driver is the most stable in the industry apparently this comes from a white paper published by QA consultants who ran a single test on windows called crash that loops through a range of basic tests like changes in resolution sleeping waking up screen rotations and more QA consultants ran this test for 12 days straight on three consumer cards and three professional cards each from AMD and NVIDIA when tallying up the numbers of times the test failed on each system AMD passed 93% of all 432 attempts while in-video passed 82% of the attempts now it's all nice to say that AMD drivers are more stable but let's be honest here this research firm only used one specific tests within the sounds of it it's not exactly representative of actual games or pro software just based on the gaming rooms I've owned and used it's far more likely you'll get a driver crash in a game than when doing something like changing a resolution or modifying some color settings and the tests from QA consultants don't really tell us anything about how stable each vendors drivers are in games so this might be a good PR win for AMD but I don't think the report is really telling us anything useful about the stability of AMD and NVIDIA drivers in common usage scenarios samsung has announced the first LP ddr5 DRAM chips which will be coming to the next generation of smartphones and low-power pcs the basic things to note here is a 50% improvement in data rate compared to lpddr4 going from four point two six gigabit per second to six point four GB per second with power consumption expected to come in upwards of thirty percent lower all of desktop PC brewers will be a bit more excited about DDR 5 and we should be hearing a bit more about that later in the year LP DDR memory is super important for low-power devices including some laptops that prefer to use it over the full powered DDR equivalent for better power consumption these bursts lpddr4 chips from samsung sound like a decent step board for the technology and that's always nice to see I'm not sure how much you can read into this one but some astute viewers have spotted an interesting line in a recent MSI advertisement for their be 450 motherboards MSI claims that there be 450 boards sport and enhance land and digital power design for eight core and up CPUs some people are suggesting that in this video MSI have hinted that higher core count AMD processes but a m4 socket are coming simply by stating that there be 450 boards are designed for 8 core and up CPUs there have been a few rumors over the last year or so suggesting then two will come in greater than eight core variants for the standard a m4 platform which is probably why a lot of people are taking this as a hint that higher core can't see peas are coming often though these marketing videos are made by people who really don't have any idea about upcoming products from other companies like AMD so I wouldn't be reading too much into this it's possible AMD will release higher core cam processes with third gen Rison but I reckon this ad from her side just uses a bit of mayo to talk up their new be 450 designs IOC has launched a new budget 32 inch gaming monitor that could be attractive to people that just want a basic feature set in this size for 250 euros so around 250 bucks if the monitor comes to the US the AOC q30 279 vwf t hate and yep that's the name they've gone with will give you a 30 1.5 inch 1440p IPS display with a maximum refresh rate of 75 Hertz and freesync you also get a 1200 to 1 contrast ratio 215 it's of brightness and 5 millisecond grader gray response times those specs won't blow you away but it's a pretty good collection for just 250 bucks or so though I would like to know what the refresh rate minimum is to see whether it supports low framerate compensation no word on when the monitor will hit store shelves Corsair have released a new Hydra series closed-loop liquid cooler the H 100 I Pro it's a 240 millimeter radiated with two 120 ml ml fans plus of course there's RGB on the CPU block the H 100 I Pro joins the other Pro Series cools the H 115 I Pro and the H 150 I Pro in offering quieter operation and a better design than the older non pro models the age 100 I Pro is now on sale for 120 us so about 10 dollars cheaper than you can currently purchase the H 115 I Pro 4 and it's a similar price to the H 100 IV to that it's replacing gigabyte has launched their first Oris power supplies the P 850 W and P 750 W which in what will be a huge surprise to everyone pack 850 watt and 750 watt capacities respectively both are 80 plus gold certified included 135 millimeter fan and a fully modular they also come with a 10 year warranty and should be available soon although pricing isn't known just yet Intel and micro I set to end their partnership on 3d xpoint memory in 2019 the companies collaborated on the new technology for first generation products and are expected to continue that partnership for second generation products scheduled for completion in the first half of 2019 but for the third generation each company will go their separate ways and further develop the text to meet the needs of each company's customers if you're not familiar with 3d xpoint is the memory technology branded as obtained by Intel and quantex by micron although micron hasn't released their products yet the memory is manufactured at the Intel micron Flash technologies fab in Utah and both Intel and micron take a 50% share of the memory produced there while Intel and micron won't be collaborating on third Gen X point it will still be manufactured in the IMF t fab final news topic of the week Ubisoft has revealed in their latest financials that PC games have actually outsold Xbox games for q1 of the company's fiscal 2018 year PC games made up 24% of total games sales compared to 22% for Xbox one last year Xbox one had a slight lead of 22 to 21% and of course PlayStation 4 remains - the most popular platform by far with 1.6 times the sales of PC historically both consoles have always been more popular than PC and publishers have often complained about low sales on PC compared to other systems but in the case of Ubisoft PC is now their second largest platform having grown in the last year which is great news for the PC gaming ecosystem that's it for this week's news corner if you like this segment consider subscribing to get it in your sub box every Friday and make sure to hit that Bell icon because sometimes YouTube can't be bothered to function correctly and actually show our videos to you also we have a discord trap for our patreon members so check that out now I'll catch you next time