Gadgetory

welcome back to the hard Rome boxed news corner in this special CES edition again we're not actually at CES in Las Vegas because neither Steve are over I guess really all that keen on flying to the US for a massive crowded trade show but that hasn't stopped us from covering some of the bigger releases to come out so far in today's episode of news corner we'll be running through what we think are some of the more exciting announcements and releases so far and a quick summary and then later in the week we'll probably have another episode talking about everything else it has been showing off throughout the show and of course Amy's keynote is yet to come and we'll have a special video for that as well first up there there is something I wanted to address quickly we've had loads of comments asking us where our g-force r-tx 2060 review is you might have seen our video talking about the announcement yesterday but shortly after that video went live the NBA for reviews lifted and ours wasn't among them Steve called me this morning and well I think it's safe to say he was absolutely furious at the situation it seems like NVIDIA has screwed us big time on this one we're not sure why we're currently following up with them to see what the deal is here and we'll have more to talk about this issue probably in a video tomorrow as for our review at this stage expected around or after the actual launch where we'll look at board partner cards potentially in a big GPU comparison like we were hoping to get up around the actual NBA date for reviews but so if I haven't been able to do so we've you know we'd love to be talking about the RX 2060 yourself instead of talking about how Nvidia is handled is launched with us but unfortunately we don't have a card right now so more to come on this alright some of the real news topics first up we have a bunch of announcements out of Intel's keynote address a number of the announcements centered around Intel's data center 5g and automotive products which we won't be covering here but we did still get some juicy information about upcoming 10 nanometer products the first consumer 10 nanometer product from Intel will be ice Lake which is expected to launch in volume in holiday 2019 which basically refers to the fourth quarter of the year ice Lake will initially consist of 15 watt notebook processors in Intel's new series with no word on any future product lineup so if you're waiting for 10 animated desktop CPUs from Intel that will be sometime later ice Lake you series base design consists of four sunny Cove CPU cores with eight threads in addition to gt2 Gen eleven graphics while the CPU core count isn't improving at least for this initial design over what Intel is already providing with 8th gen you serious parts the improvement to the GPU site is massive gt2 graphics goes from 24 execution units up to 64 execution units with Intel saying this is their first standard GPU to pack more than 1 teraflop of compute performance to get this extra graphics performance more die space than usual is being allocated to the GPU clock speeds haven't been divulged this early so we have I guess no real indication of how the CPU will perform that's not surprising considering the launch is still quite far away that said Intel did say that memory bandwidth has been increased up to around the 50 gigabytes per second mark to accommodate the new GPU so we're looking at a relatively fast lpddr4 X implementation there's also built-in Thunderbolt 3 Wi-Fi 6 which is previously known as Aero 2.11 a X and 4th gen image processing units on top of this Intel have optimized power consumption and are expecting to see laptop designs with over 25 hours of battery life metric which I guess is always a bit meaningless without an actual benchmark comparison the other big announcement from CES was Lakefield Intel's new low-power SOC designers built using their father Oz 3d packaging technology Lakefield is a combination of a single big sunny Cove CPU core with 4 smaller awesome cause on 10 nanometers with an overall package size of just 12 square millimetres Lakefield has several layers in the stack including D Ram at the top the CPU cores in the middle and the i/o in the interposed beneath this allows for a tiny board design which until showed off as around the same size as five u.s. quarters they expect Lakefield to be utilized in 11 inch or smaller form factors Intel also briefly announced six new desktop ninth gen CPUs those are the i9 1900 KF i7 9700 KF I 596 hundra KF i 590 400 i 590 400 f and i 390 350 k f5 of the new parts are f-series models so they don't include integrated graphics but other than that there are no spec differences compared to the non f models so for example the 9900 KF has exactly the same core count and clock speeds as the 9900 k just has no i GPU the more interesting of the new SKUs are the 6 core 6 thread core i5 90 490 400f these CPUs are clocked marginally higher than the core i5 8400 with a hundred megahertz boosts to the base and boost clocks now coming in at 2.9 gigahertz and 4.1 gigahertz respectively the i5 9400 has a volume price of 182 dollars the core i3 9350 KF is basically an 80 350 K except it now has turbo functionality with the top clock of 4.6 gigahertz it's still a quad core with that hyper threading though we can also expect knife generation mobile CPUs in q2 again no further details but this is probably going to be a series of new eighth series SKUs those really the main announcements from Intel at CES in the consumer side it's pretty unusual for Intel to come out and talk about future products it's early they've typically not given road map updates but there seems to have been a bit of an internal shift in how they want to approach these launches it's good to see 10 nanometers on track for the end of 2019 as well which fits in with their usual launch time for new products I was going to spend a bit of time in this next section looking over the new GeForce artex laptop announcements but really they're not very exciting lots of very similar designs as we've seen in the past just with ID CX GPUs inside it definitely is cool to see laptops get a bump in power with the same sort of form factors especially with the introduction of the RT X 2080 but yeah not a lot of exciting products I do want to point out two designs though that I thought were a bit unusual the first is the Acer predator triton 900 a 2 in 1 laptop that was first shown as a concept at Aoife in 2018 well it's apparently as coming as a real product now for about 4000 toughness I don't really know why you'd want a two-in-one gaming laptop because this thing is certainly much heavier than your typical two-in-one altra portable but if you do find a use case for something like this Acer we'll give you a 17 inch 4k IPS 2 the flips around to a tablet like configuration internally it packs an Intel eighth generation Christ seven processor and one of invidious new laptop RTX 2080s the other one perhaps isn't a laptop it's the rog mothership i guess would you cast this as a tablet or as a portable desktop pc not really sure about that one anyway it's basically designed like Microsoft Surface pro except it's way bigger with a 17 inch 1080p 144 Hertz display and way heavier and way thicker it's also way more powerful with an RT X 2080 inside and a crown 989 50 HK CPU it looks completely ridiculous but hey it's an interesting new product that will be available in q1 though there's no price for it right now HP has finally launched the first of invidious big format gaming displays the omen X Imperium so this is a completely ridiculous gaming display that is basically just a TV I'm not really sure how many people will actually be using something so massive as a monitor but for those that like to pair I guess a powerful PC with their TV in their living room this could be for you it's a 65 inch amv a 4k panel with a 120 Hertz refresh rate that can be overclocked up to 144 Hertz it's also giving you proper HDR with up to 1000 nits of peak brightness and a 384 zone F Ald backlight plus there's 95% DCI p3 color space support and a 120 watt sound bar is bundled with the TV as well the real kicker here though is the price tag $5,000 with the release date of late February while you are getting I guess 144 Hertz TV with HDR and gsync this is an extremely high price tag for example LG's 65 inch c8 OLED is about $3,000 and it's an excellent TV for HDR The Omen X Imperium would have to be bloody amazing to justify its price tag considering what sort of older TVs you can buy for this price on a more reasonable note a soos announced three new ROG Strix free sync to HDR monitors at CES the smallest of the bunch is the 32 inch XG 32 vqr and that's a 1440p 144 Hertz VI panel with the max of 415 it's of brightness and 94% DCI p3 coverage this monitor qualifies for display hgr 400 then we have the 49 inch XG 49 VQ a 38 40 by 1080 monitor also at 144 Hertz also with the 415 it max brightness and also with display HDR 400 and finally there's the XG 4/3 8q a 43 inch 4k monitor with a 600 nits maximum brightness 120 Hertz refresh rate and display h gr 600 the first 2 monitors are coming in January while the 43 inch 4k display set for release in the spring of 2019 presumably that means the u.s. springtime so quarter 2 of 2019 all of these panels sound pretty decent but I'd be pretty wary of the HDR support particularly for the 2 with display HDR 400 certification given there's no word on local dimming RAZR are set to enter the monitor market later this year with the razer Raptor 27 a much more simple name than most other OEMs choose to use this display is a 27-inch 1440p IPS panel at 144 Hertz with 95% DCI p3 coverage and free sync support it has that signature Razer designs unlike other monitors on the market but it's said to be quite expensive at $700 when it launches later this year considering you can get 27-inch 1440p 144 hertz IPS monitors around the $400 mark I think Razer will struggle to move a lot of units among price conscious shoppers oddly they're also marketing it towards eSports even though most eSports gamers prefer fast TN panels at 1080p not necessarily 1440p IPS displays they also talked about a prototype 15.6 inch 1080p display for laptops with a 240 Hertz refresh rate so that would be interesting for future gaming laptops there's also a 15.6 inch 4k OLED laptop display that they are experimenting with perhaps for a future version of the blade 15 all right so two more quick announcements we have the asus rog matrix geforce artex 2080 TI which is a new card that includes what a soos is calling an infinity loop cooler basically this is an entire all-in-one liquid cooler built into the shroud of the GPU delivering performance equivalent to a 240 millimeter a IO if you look at this particular shot of the card you can see the radiator peeking out above the dual eight pm our connectors presumably there is a pump block beneath the radiator and then you get the triple fan setup on the top all up the card is a triple slot design and it's set to cost a whopping $1600 it will be interesting to see what its cooling performance is like with the radiator design as opposed to the usual sort of heatsink you get with these cards final topic for the week Corsair has announced a new LED technology that they've been developing in partnership with Primax the new LEDs are called cap Alex LEDs and they're set to provide a number of benefits over traditional SMD LEDs the volume is much smaller at 0.2 cubic millimeters rather than 2.8 cubic millimeters so you can fit more in a certain area and that will increase the LED resolution behind a diffuser these new cap Alex LEDs also up to 60 percent brighter up to 60% more efficient and have up to a 40% lower power draw with longer lifespans than SMD LEDs so it'd be cool to see these being used across courses new LED illuminated products and that's it for this first CES news Korn episode we'll have more news coming throughout the week as it trickles in consider subscribing to Hardware unboxed and supporting us through patreon waking you access to exclusive discord chat and monthly live streams our catch you in the next one you