Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed yes we did skip news corner last week but we are back this week with all the news goodness from the past week I'm still little sick from the awful travel flu I got last week so I'm not gonna waste any more time let's get right into it so a story emerged earlier this week suggesting asrock mostly known for their motherboards we'll be entering the graphics card market specifically asrock will be partnering with AMD for Radeon graphics cards and we'll use the asrock name entering the market as soon as April at least this was the story from the unreliable digi x however the guys over at Tom's Hardware who are a bit more reliable in their reporting than digi times looked into this story and uncovered a slightly different perspective while they did confirm as ROC is looking into graphics products they suggested it will be ready on based MXM cards rather than actual desktop dedicated cards Tom sources say the likelihood of as rock making desktop cards is slim while it seems fairly likely they will enter the MXM market it seems as ROC is interested in MXM cards for their small form-factor motherboards that support MXM such as you know the h1 10s t XM XM for example which in turn get used in as rocks mini pcs and while there are lots of Nvidia MXM manufacturers there aren't as many partners creating AMD MXM cards so perhaps they chose to create only AMD MXM cards to ensure enough availability for their own products definitely not as exciting of a story as it first appeared but that tends to be the case with a lot of these rumours models have been able to successfully use Intel's coffee-like CPUs on motherboards with 100 and 200 series chipsets despite Intel claiming these boards are unsupported coffee lake is only supposed to work on 300 series motherboards but a group of models on the wind raid forums have fully detailed how to use coffee lake with older boards that used the same LGA 11 51 saket the trick involves modifying the motherboard bias to include coffee lake cpu microcode and the IGP UEFI GOP driver and most importantly you need to adjust the management engine firmware once these changes are made there is a chance the motherboard will now support coffee like CPUs there are a few caches firstly the mods have only worked on asrock motherboards so far motherboard some other brands have been tested but the PCIe interface hasn't worked out too well also the only CPU that has been confirmed to work fully is the quad core Core i3 8100 though it is speculated other quad core chips may work too it may be a bit tricky to get 6 core coffee like CPUs working on these older motherboards two different power requirements with this discovery anything is possible probably not something many of you actually try but you know it's interesting nonetheless also in Intel news today intel unveiled the octane SSD 800 P in both 58 gig and 118 key capacities yep 58 and a hundred and eighteen gig while not the first obtain SSDs on the market we saw the SSD 900p with the PCI Express interface in October last year the 800 P is the first 3d xpoint drive from Intel to use the more consumer-friendly m dot 2 2280 form factor bizarrely the SSD 800 per use is just a pcie 3.0 x 2 interface rather than x 4 like with many other drives however that doesn't seem to have limited performance too much looking at a couple of reviews from a non tech and PC perspective it seems the SSD 800 ppm is very strong performance during low queue depth random workloads along with good pair efficiency during these tasks however there are some pretty significant downsides at $130 and $200 for the 58 and 118 gig models respectively the 800 P is extremely expensive with a cost per gigabyte higher than the more powerful 900p you could get a 250 gig Samsung 960 Evo for less than the price of the 58 gig 800 P which makes their hundred P a poor option for most buyers its seems these updated drives are a bit more of just an interesting technology than a genuine option for buyers at the moment so hopefully that changes in time the next topic involves AMD's project re sx r e sx re sex anyway the company unveiled this is part of their eighteen point three point one Radeon driver release re SX is short for Radeon eSports experience which aims to optimize some of the most popular eSports type games for Radeon GPUs according to AMD this means both driver level tweaks and fixes within the games themselves all aimed at improving performance on average and in the crucial 90th percentile or 1% lows and we called Moran here AMD also tout click to response improvements the tiles AMD's show in their chart are pub G overwatch and dota 2 with pub G getting the largest performance improvements which is definitely for the best you'd have to say that said Amy's performance numbers are relative to the older 17 12.1 driver not the version directly before 18 . 3.1 so it's hard to say how many of these changes can be attributed specifically to this new driver also as PC perspective notes there are no firm plans to continue targeting these games for optimization project re SX could just be a one-off with a fancy name next up we have the Rison road map bleak for now through to 2020 which doesn't exactly give a ton of information but does reveal some supposed code names at the top of the chart we have thread Ripper which after the second gen parts come out later this year will be followed up with Castle Peak in 2019 and the imaginatively named and presumably pending a cool new codename ng h EDT or i assume next gen high hand desktop that's scheduled for 2024 the main am for cpu line we have pinnacle ridge or rising 2 followed by a Matisse with Zen 2 and Vermeer in 2020 and on the APU front we have Picasso and Renoir coming in 2019 and 2020 respectively following on from the Raven Ridge launch this year another slide showed names for Amy's upcoming rise in to process is none of which will surprise anyone aside from there being fewer models than last year and we should learn more about rising - very shortly so stay tuned for that one in gaming news we have two game announcements this week the first is for call of duty black ops 4 yes that is iiiiii and not ivy or for anything that actually makes sense so just an outrageous naming choice habit apparently it is coming out on October 12 and I'm sure a handful of people will play it hopefully it is a bit better than some of the recent releases but I definitely won't be holding my breath for anything quality when it comes to the Call of Duty series these days Ubisoft also teased the division 2 this week with a logo and a statement saying massive entertainment and a bunch of other studios are working on the title again no launch date here no trailer and we'll be getting more information at e3 apparently this is how companies announce games these days a lot of drip-feeding so you just have to wait for more news on the division to Microsoft are officially out of ideas for what to call their annual major update to Windows this year we are getting these spring creators update yes that's right these spring creators update last year we got the fall creators update and before that the just creators update these are terrible names and Microsoft should feel bad about them I'm not sure why Microsoft doesn't just give these updates a version number like the good old days the spring creators update would then become Windows 10.5 and everyone would know exactly what the situation is instead we have to put up with rubbish like spring creators update but anyway that should be coming out shortly for those of you that follow Windows 10 updates final topic for this week we're going to look at the latest steam hardware and software survey numbers for February 2018 which were just released can't say a whole lot has been happening in the hardware market in the past month particularly as GPU and memory prices are keeping people from making any upgrades but there have been some small changes in the GPU space AMD has gained a small amount of ground moving from 8.2 to point nine percent of the market at the expense of Nvidia not that a video would care to much with more than 85 percent of the entire steam user base you can quite clearly see that large increase in market share - when a huge number of Chinese users flock to steam last year AMD also called back a single percentage point in CPU usage up from eight point one to nine point one percent again until are probably not too concerned with more than ten times the market share at the moment Windows 10 also gained Josh I have three percentage points that there's still a lot of work to clawback what Windows 10 once had before the influx of mostly Windows 7 using Chinese gamers the GTX 1060 remains the most popular GPU on Steam followed by the gtx 750ti and the gtx 960 it's also interesting to see that more than three-quarters of all Steam gamers use a 1080p display the second most popular is 1366 by 768 and then 1440p with a measly 3.4 percent anyway that's it for this news corner time for me to go back a rest recover from this flu and get back to benchmarking next week so I'll catch you then