Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware unbox news corner there has been a ton of news come out this week probably the biggest of which was the launch of AMD second gen Rison processor so if you haven't already seen our 32 minute long review of the Rison 720 700 X and Rison 520 600 X you should probably do so aside from Rison though there's been a lot of other interesting stories to emerge this week AMD and Asus have basically confirmed the nvidia geforce partner program is true intel accidentally revealed its eight core coffee-like processor new free sync to HD our monitor announcements and a couple of other goodies and before I get into it if you are a supporter of us on patreon there is a new behind the scenes video available for you guys right now that details how Steve and I built this set including some interesting footage of us putting it together so check that out at patreon.com slash Hardware unboxed let's get straight into the news aside from second gen rising the biggest story this week surrounds once again the NVIDIA GeForce Partner Program on cheap ap this has been a highly controversial topic since it was uncovered more than a month ago with lots of rumors and speculation surrounding invidious anti-competitive move to force companies into a lying their well-known gaming brands with NVIDIA GeForce while the original story from hard OCP was well source and it did seem accurate face value it's always hard to know exactly what to believe when OMS and other industry sources refused to discuss the issue this and a lack of other strong evidence is kind of live being a bit quiet on the topic is you know we did continue to look into it but luckily this week we're no longer relying on anonymous sources of rumors as AMD and the actions of one board partner have basically confirmed the GPP story to be true so let's start with the suits who this week announced that they will be launching a new brand for their Radeon graphics card called Ares this brand is replacing ROG for their AMD products which effectively makes ROG and NVIDIA exclusive brand as the GPB news suggested would happen the good news is a su sub brands like Strix Phoenix and jewel have transitioned over to the new Aries brand so Radeon cards that were once our og Strix are basically now going to be Ares Strix there's a lot of spinning this announcement as you'd expect with the SU saying the new brand underlines the strong working partnership between a soos and AMD that spans decades and there's no direct acknowledgement of the GPP but it's pretty clear what is driving this change and it's definitely frustrating that underhanded agreements have forced a soos into creating a new lesser-known brand for AMD's products AMD themselves have also addressed the GPP for the first time in a roundabout sort of way posting an article on the gamers choice and acknowledging that adding board partners will be launching new brands for Radeon cards in the coming weeks again AMD doesn't directly name in video all the GPP in this article but they do clearly attack some of invidious unsavory practices in fact there are some golden quotes in this article the main ones being these brands will share the same values of openness innovation and inclusivity that most gamers tacked to Hart the freedom to tell others in the industry that they won't be boxed into choosing proprietary solutions that come bundled with gamer taxes just to enjoy great experiences they should rightfully have access to later AMD mentions they won't penalize gamers with proprietary technology taxes a clear reference to gsync and that there are no anti gamer slash anti-competitive strings attached strong words there but definitely warranted I think in this situation an AMD corporate VP Scott herkiman who wrote this blog post on AMD's website also took to Twitter today following AMD's sales event in London in his tweet her Coleman says how many partners told me how our competition tries to use funding and allocation to restrict or block your ability to market and sell radeon based products in the manner you and your customers desire he also asks any others who have experienced similar issues to come reach out what happens with the GPP from here remains to be seen though I suspect there will be continued investigation into it not just by people like us but also various regulators will also see companies like MS and gigabyte who are heavily rumored to be GPP participants launch new Radeon graphics card brands in the coming weeks although some reports have suggested major companies like HP and Dell have refused to sign on we're also a way to go an nvidia to clarify there supposedly transparent geforce partner program for us all they've yet to do that and I'm not really sure whether they ever will this next topic concerns Intel and I think at this point we all know thanks to various rumors that eight core coffee-like processes and the Zed 390 chipset are coming at some point however this week for the first time Intel if somewhat officially revealed that an 8-core coffee-like s processor in other words an eight core CPU for the mainstream desktop platform does actually exist the revelation comes through documentation on intel's official technical documentation website several documents with spotted that show a coffee like s8 plus two product perhaps published ahead of time by accident the eight plus two in the product name refers to eight cpu cores along with two GPU cores the actual documents couldn't be accessed as they were protected by a login screen not the most surprising revelation but it is always nice to know a rumor product is actually a real product for those alike monitors this week both AOC and bank you have announced free sync to HDR monitors you might have forgotten by now because the announcement was so long ago but free sync to is AMD's newer monitors standard that's not just provides adaptive sync but also includes support for HDR and low latency gaming freezing to or more thoroughly validate monitors across a wide range of metrics as well ensuring precinct 2 monitors are of a high quality anyway we have seen one line of free sync two monitors in the past on samsung so these two new displays from AOC and Bank you are somewhat of a second wave the AOC monitor is the AG 322 QC for a 32 inch curved 1440p 144 Hertz v a panel with display HDR 400 certification as a contrast ratio of 2,000 to 1 400 nits of peak brightness and formula second response times thanks to free sync to certification it will support up to 90% of DCI p3 color gamut which is key for proper HDR support that the maximum brightness of 400 nits is a bit on the weak side for HDR content the AG 322 QC 4 will be available in Europe in June for 529 pounds or $5.99 euros BenQ appears to be using the same panel in its free sink to monitor the ex3 to 0-3 R so again it's a 30 1.5 inch curved 1440p 144 Hertz of V a panel it also supports 90% of DCI p3 and 400 nits peak brightness they are not sure if it packs display HDR certification there's no word on pricing or release date for bank use variant intel has announced threat detection technology at the annual RSA conference this week which does provide some interesting new security features I'm not going to cover everything that was announced as part of the overall TDT package but one particular aspect accelerated memory scanning or AMS is particularly interesting and could have significant implications for malware scanning performance basically AMS allows malware scanning to be offloaded to the integrated GPU in Intel 6th gen skylake processors or newer this frees up the CPU during memory scans and should reduce power consumption the main focus of AMS is scanning for in memory malware which is quite a high CPU usage task and in their testing with Windows Defender advanced threat protection software Intel saw a reduction from 20 percent to 2 percent CPU utilization after offloading this task to the GPU the goal here is to improve system responsiveness while running malware scanning software I think overall it does look pretty promising Coolermaster have got some fancy new liquid coolers the master liquid ml 120 R and the master liquid ml 240 R as the name suggests one has a 120 ml radiator while the other has a 240 ml radiator the key feature here is the crazy RGB Serpa both the CPU block and fans which of course can be hooked up to the light control headers on most motherboards the ML 120 R will cost 100 bucks while the ML 240 R will be 120 US dollars strong reports have emerged this week suggesting call of duty black ops 4 will have no single-player campaign we probably won't be missing out on much considering colleges single-player modes have never been that good but it's interesting they've decided to remove it in this particular version on another report has also suggested there will be a probe royale mode because of course every multiplayer game in 2018 needs to have battle royale mode final story for this week relates to a couple of phones Sony has launched the Xperia XZ 2 premium which packs a 5.7 inch 4k HDR display a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 and a dual sensor rear camera into a bezel heavy package Sony's been struggling in the smartphone world for a while now so I'm not sure whether this premium phone is enough to attract customers and I'd expect it to cost a fair bit on the cheaper front motorola has launched a range of budget handsets including the Moto G 6g 6 play g6 + e5 e 5 play and e 5 + most of these new phones include new 18:9 displays at 720p or 1080p class resolutions the e series of basic entry-level handsets with Snapdragon 400 series SOC is another basic hardware while the G Series gets more features up to a snapdragon 830 SOC and better cameras the e phones will cost under $200 while the G models will come in between 200 and 300 dollars it's been a big week for us here at hardware and box so that's it for news corner subscribe if you want this brief news summary in your subscription box every Friday and I'll catch you next week