Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware box news corner coming at you again on this wonderful Friday evening or I guess it will be the morning in some parts of the world behind now you've all checked out Steve's big review of the Radeon 7 it's pretty interesting in my opinion but ultimately I guess it's a bit of a disappointing product though we should have a bit more on this card in a few days once we get a fresh set of drivers so yeah stay tuned for a bit more content on that today though it's all about the news so let's kick things off with a look at Radeon 7 availability so along with the review MDA expiring yesterday February 7th was also the day the Radeon 7 was supposed to go on sale for the general public previous AMD GPU launches especially at the high end have been plagued with extremely low availability and it seems like this is the case once again while the Radeon 7 did hit retailers stock was sold out almost immediately for more reports Newegg still lists models from all the major board partners all of which are the same so there's really no reason to choose one over another however every model is now out of stock as we mentioned in our review we heard availability would be worse than the notoriously hard to find our TX 28 ETI and it seems this has panned out if you want a Radeon 7 right now there's not even an option to pay an exorbitant premium to get one now instead they are simply out of stock in a statement to the tech report a.m. be said demand for the Radeon 7 is strong and they are working with partners to restock throughout the next few days they also said that ongoing supply for the Radeon 7 is expected to arrive on a weekly basis to meet man so this could be one of those cases where Andy assesses the initial market with a very limited early run before deciding on how many to produce going forward that said with most reviews having a lukewarm reaction to AMD's new flagship gaming GPU I'm not sure where the demand will continue to be strong in the next few weeks within videos ITX 2080 offering better value at the same price point right now speaking of Nvidia more information is emerging writing to the GeForce GTX 1660 TI which as earlier rumours suggested is supposed to launch next week on February 15th it appears as if a number of overseas retailers have published board partner models a little earlier than they were supposed to revealing a few extra tidbits about the upcoming GPU the listings are for the msi gtx 1660 TI gaming x and armor OC models as well as the pallet gtx 1660 TI storm x OC and non OSI models video cards took a snapshot of the very low resolution pictures of the cards provided with the listings which look like standard board partner GPUs I guess the interesting information comes in clock speeds we've already heard the 1660 T I will have 1536 CUDA cores but these listings seem to confirm a bit more the palette storm X nan-oh C model in particular has revealed the stock core frequencies of 1500 megahertz base and 1770 megahertz boost it also suggests the card six gigabytes of gddr5 gigabits per second rather than 14 gigabits per second like the RT x 2060 those specs well they're probably not all that useful right now because we still don't know how the card performs and we won't know until reviews go live but considering this information comes from several retailer listings it is likely to be accurate of course with any early information do take it with a grain of salt this next story has been generating a bit of discussion around the PC community this week not something I would normally talk about but well I guess let's do it anyway Softbank has sold off its entire stake in video the company previously held a four point nine percent stake which were insulting that of the company called three point six billion dollars this hasn't been a sudden decision from Softbank rumours from December last year suggested the company was looking at selling their stake due to envious declining stock price apparently soft banks still made a profit overall due to buying and video stock when it was even lower than it is right now but as NVIDIA keeps declining that probably couldn't hold on to it much longer and basically this is just continuing in videos horror run over the last few months 3d mark has added support for DL SS to their portroyal ray tracing benchmark this is something I find a little bizarre to be honest I have nothing against DL SS in general I think it's a very interesting idea I don't think the benefits are quite at the level Nvidia claims over time it could become quite useful and of course we're still waiting on more games to support DSS so we can investigate it further but I don't think a benchmark tool should integrate a technology that's exclusive to one GPU vendor I think the whole point of a benchmark tool is that it's not supposed to be optimized for one company's products or another answers just supposed to offer an accurate reflection of how typical industry standard code will perform across a variety of hardware the portroyal benchmark uses the vendor agnostic DirectX ray tracing API and that works with both Nvidia and AMD hardware though within videos dedicated RT cores it naturally runs all a better on their GPS right now but deal SS it's not something that works with AMD GPUs and presumably won't work in the future you wouldn't expect a third-party benchmark tool to add in a whole bunch of gameworks features that either work poorly on non nvidia hardware or just simply don't work and also I also wouldn't have expected a feature like do SS to be added hit but I guess it has and that hence my surprise that will be here I think it's a bit problematic because there's no guarantee that every game that supports ray tracing will also support deal SS as ray-tracing gathers wider adoption some developers may choose to implement the XR without any specific libraries from AMD or Nvidia forgoing the LSS or other techniques so to have this third-party benchmark that includes an Nvidia specific optimization that will only apply in a handful of games doesn't really sit right with me but if you are interested I guess you can now download that update and test that DL SS for yourself anyway moving on we have a trio of new monitor launches over the last week first up we have the Phillips brilliance for $9.99 H which is a 49 inch super ultra wide monitor with a 50 120 by 1440 resolution aka double-wide 1440p it's on a gaming focused monitor so it tops out at a 60 Hertz refresh rate but it does use a VA panel and it comes with a display HDR 400 certification though doesn't include local dimming it's also factory calibrated to adultery of below 2.0 and pricing is expected to be around eleven hundred US dollars then we have the LG 32 UL 750 - w this is a 32 inch flat V a panel and a 4k resolution with the 60 Hertz refresh rate free sync and display HDR 600 certification there's no word on local doing but I expect this isn't a feature although the panel is good for 95 percent DCI p3 coverage and 600 nits of peak brightness it too is factory calibrated it can work over USB C and should be priced around 750 US dollars and the third monitor is the AOC CQ 32 g1 and that's a new addition to their cheap one gaming line this is a fairly standard display 32 inches code VA at 1440p with the 144 Hertz refresh rate and free sync and I suspect was using a similar panel to most others that pack these sorts of specs it comes in at 395 dollars in the US which is a reasonable prices not necessarily the cheapest but it's not a bad deal either into the quicker topics now that crazy gigabyte Z 390 horas extreme water force motherboard that we looked at a news corner I think it was a couple of weeks ago now that has an official price and it's a crazily high price if you want this said 390 board which comes with a massive water block that covers the CPU socket v RMS and more you'll have to fork out nine hundred dots yes nine hundred us and toys at least for that price you also get a ton of RGB LEDs EA shares have tanked after a poor financial report reveal disappointing sales of battlefield 5 along with falling revenue in their mobile division and what will please many gamers the most hated company in gaming said battlefield 5 missed their targets by 1 million copies it still sold 7.3 million overall but that wasn't enough and it also didn't bring in as many origin premiere subscribers as they had hoped lackluster sales are probably related to lackluster reception at launch with battlefield 5 with many people complaining about the game launching in an unfinished state with too many missing pieces of content EA stock took a dive after the report was released although it has since recovered slightly unfortunately for those praying for EAS demise the success of recent release apex legends along with the impending release of and then we'll actually see the company's fortunes rise over the next month or so final topic for this week it has been discovered that there are two variants of Intel's Core i5 9400 and core i5 9400 f1 variant which uses the p0 stepping is based on intel's eight core die and uses solder thermal interface material or s Tim as the 9400 is a six core CPU that variant does have two cores disabled and of course the F model also CI GPU disables the other variant with u zero stepping uses Intel six core die and comes with a regular thermal paste and with no cause disabled Intel did confirm to Tom's Hardware that over time the company will transition to solar using the p0 vary with solder but initially some models will come with thermal paste depending on the location of manufacturing and that's it for this week's news con as always you can subscribe to get the segment usually every Friday consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our discord community and I'll catch you in the next one