Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware on box news core it's been a relatively slow news week this week a lot of that is down to Mobile World Congress which kicked off earlier this week in Barcelona if you're interested in mobile tech and phone so I'm sure there's been a lot of interesting stuff hubris far as PC hardware is concerned most interesting developments are a bit on pause until MWC is over first topic I want to cover is just a brief note on ambe's rise in mobile driver release this is something AMD we promised would happen at CES and they've just managed to slip it in at the end of February through the release of Radeon Software 19 2.3 aside from a set of improvements for owners of desktop cards and other discreet GPUs these are the first generic drivers to support rise in mobile ap use which is a major milestone for the platform the lack of drivers prior to now something a lot of users have complained about continually since the launch which was more than a year ago now anyway a number of you guys have asked us to cover this I've been testing the drivers myself on an original rise in mobile laptop and I'll have more to share on that tomorrow but if you do own a rise in mobile laptop please go and download these generic drivers and try them out for yourselves this should work on any rise in mobile laptop which is great to see the USB implementers forum will make us be naming even more confusing and ridiculous later this year with the introduction of USB 3.2 apparently the whole USB 3.0 USB 3.1 gen2 on gen 2 thing wasn't already terrible enough because we're said to get a higher tier providing faster speeds called USB 3.2 Gen 2 by 2 yep that's the actual name they chose the big update here is a jump in total bandwidth to 20 gigabits per second up from 10 gigabits per second with USB 3.1 gen2 you'll need a USB type-c cable for these speeds but it sounds as though there would be any change to connectors or cables to support this new mode and the reason it's called USB 3.2 gen 2 by 2 is it uses two USB C channels so to 10 gigabits per second channels for a total of 20 gigabits per second USB 3.2 will also absorb the older branding of USB 3.1 CSP 3.1 Gen 1 becomes USB 3.2 gen one supporting five gigabits per second of bandwidth USB 3.1 gen2 becomes USB 3.2 gen 2 and supporting 10 gigabits per second of bandwidth but because some older products will still be branded as USB 3.1 or even USB 3.0 all sorts of confusion comes into play is USB 3.2 gen 1 faster than USB 3.0 well technically no they are the same but it sounds like it based on the name surely the best option would have been calling the five gigabit per second spec USB 3.0 the tengu bit per second spec USB 3.1 and then the new 20 gigabit per second spec USB 3.2 that would have been nice and simple easy to understand but instead the USB implementers forum wanted to absorb the old brands into a new spec and that's what's going to create a pretty huge mess in the market we should start to see the first USB 3.2 devices this year presumably supporting Gen 2 by 2 although there's no word on exactly where they will crop up considering the first devices will require a discrete USB 3.2 controller but probably looking at enthused is great motherboards first followed by peripherals down the line probably in 2020 one of the cool non-phone things announced at MWC were the first 1 terabyte micro SD cards for both SanDisk ok Western Digital and micron it's pretty remarkable that we now have a full 1 terabyte of storage available in a chip that's as small as a micro SD card I know these sorts of things do keep increasing in capacity it wasn't too long ago that we got the first 512 geek mark o/s days but compared to traditional necessities there's something special about the tiny nasaw I co SD both cards using 96 layer 3d NAND flash from their respective companies micron confirms their card is using ql scene and while Western Digital doesn't specify these are micro SDXC cards so they are compatible with all micro SDXC card readers and both come certified with a lot of SD relevant badges such as v 30 video class speeds meaning right speeds are at least 30 megabytes per second along with a 2 app performance class beats indicating at least 4k and 2k random read and write ions respectively microns card is ready for a hundred megabytes of sequential reads per second and 95 megabytes per second of sequential writes while Western Digital scarred is good for 160 to 170 megabytes per second reads and writes which exceeds what the uhs-1 bus can achieve although other interfaces can harness that performance obviously these cards aren't as fast as an SSD you might put in your PC that's really not the point of a microSD card as we're pricing yeah they're not going to come cheap $450 for the SanDisk option when it goes on sale in April compared to $200 for the 512 gig card micron hasn't specified a price though they say their card will be available in q2 yet another intel f-series process has been spotted in a product listing this time the Pentium Gold G 5600 F like other F morals this appears to just be AG 5600 without a functional ID GPU so we're still looking at two cores and four threads clocked up to 3.9 gigahertz in a 54 watt package this is a pretty interesting product for Intel to release the G 56 hundreds main target market is entry-level systems which don't always come with a discrete GPU so the integrated GPU tends to be a lot more useful than in a high-end ship like the 9900 K that people typically pair with the graphics card but with the G 5600 F Intel is targeting super low-end gaming roots that also included a screen ship hue which is a little strange given the G 5600 isn't particularly great for all but the lowest end gaming to make matters more unusual it's expected this trip will cost just as much as the regulatory 5600 that comes with an eye GPU we don't have an official confirmation on the price but so far all of Intel's F model CPUs have been priced in line with the non F models so you'd have to wonder why you'd buy one without 9 GPU if you could have one with an IDE GPU especially for a budget part certainly will be interesting to see how that one plays out digi times have posted what they believe are the release dates for the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 and GTX 1650 considering the source here is digi times I reckon we probably need to take this one with a massive grain of salt but this news has been doing the round so it may as well cover it here anyway their information says the GTX 1660 will be released on March 15th followed by the GTX 1650 on April 30th count rumours also suggest 1660 uses a tu1 1/6 GPU with 1280 CUDA cores and six gigabytes of memory while the GTX 1650 instead opts for a two one one seven GPU we really don't have any information to share on this one but I think it's safe to assume Nvidia does have a few more cheering GPUs in the works and those I expect will be released pretty soon it's pretty hot here right now in other news corner in 38 degrees Celsius heat so I'm just gonna rapid fire the rest of these topics and get out of here really there hasn't been many other topics to cover so one interesting tidbit is named bees new free sync a waiter's demo aim buddy did send this out to us but I really haven't had any time to check it out it's mostly designed for PC stores anywhere rather than for users to play with although I did suggest Amy's that they might like to make it available to the public in any case what we've seen with free sync and free sync to HDR can do you know already seen that in the past so not that exciting for us to be honest in more storage news micron has released new 1300 SSD but interval REM systems using new 96 layer 3 dean and however it's using TLC rather than qlc so performance should be a little better although it's capped by its silo space anyway the drives will be available in up to 1 terabytes and an MDOT true form factor and 2 terabytes in a 2.5 inch drive although no pricing list given Nvidia has also partnered with OBS to optimize the popular streaming and encoding up for their GPUs specifically their nuturing cards the idea is to improve image quality and lessen the framerate impact compared to in videos older NV ink implementation in the app I'm hoping to check this one out at some point but the backlog is quite massive right now and that's it for this week's news corner definitely a shorter than usual episode hopefully there are more interesting topics to talk about next week once MWC is over I wasn't going to go uncover the new phones the folding FERS all that sort of thing there's plenty sources that you can check out all the information about that stuff in subscribe to get the segment in your inbox every week consider supporting us on patreon to get access to exclusive discs or community and I'll catch you in the next one you