Gadgetory

welcome back to the heartburn box news corner this week I can't say there's been too much big groundbreaking news but they are still a range of smaller topics that I'll walk you through some of which are pretty interesting so let's get into them the first topic for this week concerns price drops for AMD's second gen rising desktop processors this is a story that did the rounds a few days ago but probably exaggerated the situation in most instances the basic new T is some places found AMD's main for rise in CPUs sitting well below there MSRP at retailers like Newegg and Amazon horizon 520 600 was sitting at 165 dollars down from $200 the rise in 520 600 XY 185 dollars down from 230 dollars horizon seven twenty seven hundred $220 down from 300 bucks and the rise in seven 2700 X was $290 down from 330 dollars now at face value this seems like a price drop across the board however this isn't a situation where there has been an official price cut in the last few days in fact three of these CPUs have been at this price for months now looking at PC part picker we can see the horizon 520 600 has been around that 160 to 170 dollar mark since last year with a brief period at the end of last year dropping it down to 150 dollars the 2600 X has been dropping slowly but it has been 185 dollars for about three weeks now similar situation with the rise in 720 700 X and it's $290 price perhaps the biggest moved was the rise in 720 700 coming down to just 220 dots although it seems that deal was very short-lived as today it's back up at $240 which is $10 cheaper than the price it has been out since February however since February there have actually been three times the CPU could be found for $230 so when you put that into perspective this latest price drop just seems to be another flash sale similar to those past deals and to be honest as Steve said in his latest top 5 best CPUs video if you're after an 8 core rise in CPU the 160 dollar rise in 717 from the previous generation is a much better buy it's $80 cheaper and only a little slower which is hard to go past something when it's priced like that so yeah it would be nice if we could say that AMD has cut the prices on their rice and desktop CPUs in preparation for 3rd gen rise and later this year but so far what we've actually been getting is just a nice gradual reduction in the price since the start of 2019 with a few flash sales thrown into the mix where we'll see official price cuts is much closer to third gen rice since release next up we have news surrounding the ominously named Operation shadow hammer a supply chain attack that used the asou live update tool to install malicious software on a su species for those that haven't used the new sous PC before their live update software is basically the utility that allows you to download driver and app updates for your system similar to the u tourism other vendors it's also preloaded on almost every issue spacey operation shadow hammer took place between June and November 2018 according to data from Kaspersky Lab what happened is that the update server hosting downloads for the live update tool was compromised the attack has uploaded a malicious version of the live update tool to the update servers which was signed using a legitimate asou certificate the use of this certificate made it hard to spot that the live update tool was loaded with a Trojan from their owners of a su species downloaded the backdoor live update tool presumably to update an older version of this tool Kaspersky noted that 57,000 users of their software downloaded this backdoor version which could indicate a massive install base in the general population once the malicious tool was installed it went about targeting a specific group of users identified by the MAC addresses of their network adapters it's not quite sure what's going on there seems pretty spooky a soos was notified of the issue On January 31 2019 so they've had some time to deal with it but it isn't clear from kaspersky report if they've fixed the problem yet the use of a compromised certificate is particularly worrying you'd hope that invalidate that immediately and then go about checking and recertifying their software pretty big news in the security world and not good for a soos moving into some game News Now anthem has received an update that introduces DLS s support anthem was one of the game's on invidious originalist that was supposed to get D LSS and well now you can use it as expected nvidia touting up to a 40% performance improvement with DSS enabled although for a quality loss like we've shown in our video coverage so far like with other dl SS games you can only use the LSS at some resolution and GPU combinations if your game at 4k d LSS will be available on all our TX cards but that 1440p you can only use the LSS with the 20/80 2070 and 2060 so no 28 ET i support a 1080p DSS is not available at all we've had a few requests to look into D LSS and anthem but it's really not something I'm going to dive into I feel I've covered most of the key aspects of DSS in our videos on battlefield 5 and Metro Exodus again we still feel that resolution scaling is a more versatile and often better solution to gaining performance than the OSS and it's available on old GPUs not just interviews RTX cards at some resolutions the other gaming story is that hitman 2 has received an update introducing a direct x12 code path it was a little unusual to see hitman to launch with just dx11 support given that the original hitman also @dx 12 but now both games do support DX 12 we haven't tested performance ourselves yet but we've heard varying reports on the dx12 mode some people saying in CPU limited scenarios their performance is better using DX 12 other people have seen slight improvements with AMD cards and others haven't seen many improvements at all there's the possibility that like with hitman 1 DX 2 our performance will get better over time in hitman two in other benchmarking news Cinebench r20 is now available as a standalone downloader from the max on website when the tool originally launched it was exclusive to the Microsoft Store but this caused concern among the benchmarking community is that you know it could be updated any time automatically which could make it hard to maintain consistent numbers from the same version of the app also using the Microsoft Store sucks so in good news it's now available to download as a portable version moving into Steve's least favorite section of news corner we have some monitor news concerning the asou SPRO @pq 22 you see this is a pro out monitor it isn't designed for gaming which tends to be most of our monitor focus however this particular unit is interesting because it's one of the few OLED monitors on the market this display was first shown off at CES 2018 so a typical of suits fashion it's taken over a year for this thing to hit the market it's a 22 inch 4k OLED using a panel from Jay oullette a joint venture between several companies including Sony and Panasonic 22 inches is a bit small for most modern displays but at 4k T does have a high pixel density and the design is portable with the ability to be folded up into a neat package the key thing for content creators though is the color and HDR support because it's all red we have purple local dimming peak brightness isn't amazing at just three hundred and thirty minutes but at least the local dimming capabilities are the best it can possibly be on top of that there's 99% DCI p3 coverage a true 10 bit support and factory calibration to a Delta II of less than two this monitor won't be for everyone though because it comes at a massive price tag of 4700 British pounds which puts its us price tag in the $5,000 range now you can get a very good OLED TV for 5000 bucks so a sous would be hoping this monitor is offering something that say a high-end 55 inch LG OLED does not the portability and size could be that but again it's a pretty huge price to pay galux has introduced an MDOT 2 SSD with a massive heat spreader on it that includes a heat pipe where does this heat pipe go well just onto the surface of the heat spreader for some bizarre reason and look at the size of this thing an SSD really does not require this sort of cooling yet well galux has done it anyway in terms of hardware it's a fast drive with sequential speeds in the 2.5 to 3.5 gigabytes per second range and ran a performance of at least 400 K I ops which I guess increases with each capacity jump and they will be available in 512 gig one terabyte and two terabyte capacities final topic for this week Intel is reading a collection of new 9th June desktop processors that will pack a new stepping a seuss gigabyte and asrock of all made statements were waving to motherboard BIOS updates for their 300 series boards that will introduce support for CPUs with new Bing these chips are set to launch in the second quarter of 2019 gigabyte in particular says the stepping will be labeled r0 as opposed to p0 for existing nitrogen CPUs and use 0 for 8th gen however is still unclear what the differences these new chips will actually provide whether it's fixing errors or enabling new features until isn't saying anything about this at this stage we which I guess shouldn't come as a surprise so we'll just have to wait that's it for this week's news corner subscribe to get the segment in inbox every week because they're supporting us on patreon I'll catch you in the next one