Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware on box news corner feels like I'm making a lot of these news corner episodes lately but I guess it's been oh I'm used to cover particularly from AMD this week where they details n2 and Vega 20 on 7 animators this video it won't be covering those AMD announcements I already touched on them in a separate video a couple of weeks ago instead this news corner is tackling all the other fun stories from the week so earlier this week actually before AMD's next horizon event intel announced at least some aspects of their upcoming cascade like AP platform with AP essentially standing for advanced performance this lineup will sit alongside the already announced cascade like SP and offer a few interesting new features at this point in the launch cycle Intel isn't giving a lot of details on cascade Lake ap the CPU line is still scheduled for 2019 however what we do know is Intel will be providing 48 cores on a single cascade Lake chip up from the 28 core maximum of Intel's current lineup Intel is achieving this through a multi die approach cascade Lake ap will have what is expected to be 228 core dies on a single package with each die having 24 cores enabled the dies are then connected by UPI so the chip is essentially two CPUs glued together this means that what Intel used to provide in a two socket configuration can now be integrated into the one socket two socket systems can now be configured with up to 96 cores which is a big leaf Intel server platform interestingly though they're not using email for connecting their multi dice CPU instead of going for UPI for whatever reason there's no word on other features for cascade Lake ap though presumably the new CPU will require an entirely new socket until did provide a few basic performance numbers but the comparisons they're making aren't super great so I'm not going to bother going into them in detail it's pretty telling that in tog decided to deliberately announce cascade Lake ap before AMD's announcement of epic room because now that we know what AMD will be providing with their 2019 server processors Intel's 48 core CPU C rather weak in comparison AMD delivering up to 64 calls on the one chip with a unique IO die and triplet design with large architectural advances and use of TSM CS more efficient seven nanometer process Intel still stuck on 14 nanometers have basically just slapped two enormous dies on the one package and called it a day while we don't know how a.m. these epic processes or cascade like ap will stack up in terms of pricing it will be very interesting to see how it pans out particularly as epic appears to be a design better suited to cost-effective manufacturing and yields performance will also be quite interesting so I'm keen to see how that pans out of course cascade Lake ap and epic roam our server products so they're perhaps not as important to you guys but usually these products give interesting insights into where each company is going with future high performance desktop lines Intel also announced an architecture event for December 11th although there are absolutely zero details in what Intel might be disclosing at that event whether it's under embargo or really want audience it's targeting hopefully it's a bit of a preview for what the company has coming on 10 nanometers but really who knows at this points it also seems like a bit of an odd point to have an architecture event in Intel's product cycle but maybe they have something interesting to show normally we don't cover driver releases in news corner but this week's new driver launch from Nvidia is a bit of an interesting one because it addresses several issues with the company's GeForce r-tx 20 series graphics cards if you've been following the story of failed RTX cards games Nexus discovered in a video I think it was maybe yesterday that some cards with reported failures like crashes or blue screens were more related to driver bugs than actual Hardware issues specifically there appeared to be an issue with our TX cards hooked up to some specific g-sync displays in some conditions and other issues with multi-monitor setups if you haven't seen tech jesuses first couple of videos on it go over and give them a watch anyway Americans Steve mentioned there would be a driver update coming soon to address some of these issues and well it's here today in the form of version 4 16.8 e1 of course the driver also provides game ready optimizations for battlefield 5 but the big improvements come in these fixes for RTX cards the key changes are listed in changelog the driver fixes a blue screen crash that may occur when exiting games when using a g-sync monitor with a non g-sync monitor it also fixed very high idle power draw for multi-monitor setups stuttering when playing back HEV see videos has been addressed and there's a collection of game fixes and optimizations including for shadow of the Tomb Raider which was one of the problematic titles on our TX cards seems like a very important driver update for RTX owners so get on it if you do happen to own one of those cards oh and AMD also has new drivers for battlefield 5 in case anyone was wondering the update provides up to 9 percent faster performance in the title compared to version 18 10.2 probably worth getting though if you are playing battlefield 5 and just on battlefield 5 isn't it a little bit ridiculous how this launch is playing out those with an Origin premiere subscription can play the game now but those who pre-ordered the game's deluxe version with early access have to wait until November 15th to play and then finally we get the full launch on November 20th it seems a bit ridiculous for a competitive multiplayer title that some people could play well I guess pay to play the game a week and a half early I don't mind the whole deluxe version gets to play early thing for some games it's a decent way to add I guess a bit of value to the deluxe versions but a week and a half early for a subscription service seems a bit much AAA moving on we're starting to see the first impact of the United States government's tariffs on goods manufactured in China see Sonic is set to raise the price of their power supplies in the United States to reflect the increased cost of importing the Chinese made products into the country a set of new prices will go into effect on December 1st with prices increasing by $5 to $20 depending on the product for most products this means around a 10 percent markup which is in line with the current tariff rates these prices are poor the MSRP so it might take a little while for the pricing to filter through to the retailers depending on their current stock levels and their actual cost of purchasing the goods but those who buy a subsonic power supply before December 1st should only encounter their current price rather than the increased new pricing it will be interesting to see whether this impacts other brands that see sonic manufactures for like Corsair and NZ although not all power supplies from these brands are from C Sonic you'd expect that if those PS use are made in China at the same see Sonic facilities that they too will see price increases in the coming weeks according to DRAM exchange DRAM pricing is already dropping and that's set to continue into 2019 pricing for for gigabyte DRAM modules has dropped by 10.1% quarter-on-quarter from an average of $34 52:31 dollars u.s. while a gigabyte modules have decreased from 68 dollars to 61 dollars on average which is a ten point three percent drop and that's great news for one of the components that has been consistently at a high price for the last few years while GPU prices have come down since early 2018 DRAM prices have been horrendous for a while now but as DRAM exchange says we're just starting to see an oversupply of DRAM in the market despite manufacturers trying to artificially limit supply so they are forecasting a continual decline in pricing throughout 2019 potentially up to a 20% drop year-on-year hopefully this report is actually accurate because sometimes we hear about price drops only for it not to eventuate there's still plenty of time for the big three manufacturers to correct courts and restrict supply once again but maybe those investigations into RAM pricing actually did something from once a couple of quicker topics to round this one out Corsair are now selling a pre-built PC known as the Vengeance 51 80 it's actually a bit surprising it's taken core save this long to launch a full PC considering they sell almost every component needed to build a system so basically you're getting 16 gigabytes of Vengeance memory a 480 gigabyte force MP 300 SSD a crystal to a DX RGB case a CX 750 power supply and h100 I Pro liquid cooler all from Corsair and you also get a k55 RGB keyboard and a harpoon RGB mouse in the box also from Corsair for the components Corsair doesn't manufacture the system has a B 360 motherboard and GeForce r-tx 2080 graphics card from MSI an Intel Core i7 8700 CPU and a 2 terabyte hard drive all up the system costs 24 hundred US dollars which is about 300 dollars more than building an equivalent PC yourself that's not too bad of a markup for a prebuilt these days final topic for the week mark has been having a bit of a rough time lately with their software the windows 10 1809 update is still delayed thanks to continued issues with bugs and just today the company was having issues with their activation server apparently a whole bunch of people were reporting that their copies of Windows 10 Pro became deactivated with Windows prompting users to install Windows 10 home instead these shoes appeared to come from those who upgraded to Windows 10 through Microsoft's free upgrade path in 2015 the good news is the problem appears to be resolved now if your copy of Windows was deactivated all you need to do is run the activation troubleshooter and that can be found in the update and security part of the Windows settings menu and after running that utility it should correct itself of course you'll still need to have a genuine copy of Windows this won't magically activate pirated copies that's it for this week's news corner as always you can subscribe to get this segment in your inbox every way consider supporting us on patreon to get access to exclusive discord chat and monthly live streams now I'll catch you in the next one you