Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware unbox news cornets an absolute scorcher here in Melbourne today with forecast to reach a maximum temperature of 44 degrees Celsius so that's a hundred and eleven Fahrenheit for our American friends and the studio where I film videos is the only room in my house that doesn't have air conditioning so it's bloody hot in here right now so I'm going to keep this one as short as possible and yeah let's get right into it so the main story from this week concerns invidious upcoming line of GeForce GTX churring graphics cards seems like nvidia is having a hard time keeping this one under wraps at this point we've seen some leaked photographs specifications pricing and even launch dates so at this point it's pre safe to say a new mid-range to entry-level line of GPUs is coming from Nvidia pretty soon so let's take a look at what the leaked information is currently saying all these new products fall under gtx turing branding so these are graphics cards without the ray-tracing intensive course found in invidious r-tx cards that seems like a pretty simple and obvious thing to cut when attempting to reduce the price of cards for the budget range the gtx 1660 Ti is the highest end card apparently built using 12 nanometer tu1 1:6 silicon so these are not simply rebranded Pascal cards these are new GPUs and are they are indeed using new silicon that features and videos cheering compute units again this is key to note because for any number number of CUDA cores at ring based GPU 2 of is more performance than a Pascal based GPU thanks to its dedicated integer pipeline these 16 6 DTI allegedly has 1536 CUDA cores that's lower than the 1920 CUDA cores in the RT X 2060 this is another move that makes sense and video wouldn't want to simply make a cheaper version of the RT X 2060 without our text functionality because gamers would just buy that over the RT X enabled version putting price on ray tracing would be a bad move in sales if the 2060 would probably tank overnight I think a lot of people were hoping Nvidia would release a 2060 without ray tracing at a lower price but these rumors suggest that won't happen in any case the GTX 16-6 DTI also has six gigabytes of gddr5 it bus no word on clock speeds there was also a geforce gtx 1660 also using the tu1 1:6 GPU but with a cut-down 1280 CUDA cores the 1616 non TI uses gddr5 memory either 6 gigabytes or 3 gigabytes depending on the model again no word on clock speeds for this device it's hard to say exactly how the GPUs will perform but judging from the coup de coeur count and increased performance of the chewing SM the 1660 ti should be a decent amount faster than the gtx 1066 gigabyte probably up there around gtx 1070 level and then the 1660 should also be a bit faster than the 1066 gigabyte depending on clock speeds information from hard OCP suggests the gtx 1660 TI will launch on February 15th at 279 US dollars while the GTX 1660 will come a few weeks later in early March at 229 US dollars how does if he also suggests there is a gtx 1650 on the way in late March for 179 dollars a new card that hasn't been spoken about in detail yet so we don't know any specifications at this point while a lot of this information still falls into the rumor category we have been able to confirm several aspects with that industry sources the timeline hard OCP is suggesting for the launchers is spot-on with what we're hearing with the gtx 1660 TI to come first in mid february the naming scheme as well seems locked in as gtx 1660 which honestly isn't a good name in my opinion but whatever the gtx 660ti should probably be called the gtx 2050 TI and the gtx 1660 the gtx 2050 but gtx 1660 seems to be locked in at this point we've also heard that the 1660 Ti isn't simply an RT X 2060 with that ray tracing so while we haven't seen any firm specifications this does adds support for the 1660 Ti using a t1 1:6 GPU with fewer cuda cores than the 2060 and we've heard it isn't a Pascal refreshed rather it's using new silicon we haven't heard anything about pricing but overall it looks like the bulk of this room is attending towards being the second rumor for today is a pretty simple one to go over some people discovered alleged Radeon Navi GPUs in a Mac OS update file in a file named AMD Radeon 6000 HW services K X references to Nabi 1690 12 Navi 10 and Navi 9 were spotted it has been speculated these could refer to different Naveed VPS with different compute unit counts or something else entirely however what's actually going on here is that these aren't references to Navi 16 or Navi 12 in the code dump the numbers are just separators and other parameters used in C++ they are not related to the previous string so in actual fact these aren't references to separate Navi GPUs the file does indeed mention Navi but not any specific GPUs unfortunately moving on to some non room a news we have the colourful GeForce r-tx 2080 ti advanced water-cooled board this is a version of the 2080 try being sold without a cooler for those that plan on adding a water block for custom cooling later for enthusiasts this is a pretty neat idea you get a card that ships without a cooler saving you the hassle of removing the cooler any risk of damaging the card in the process and perhaps you'll save a few dollars if the card is cheaper than other models there right now we don't really know the price however selling a card that doesn't work straight out of the box is a pretty bold move if the card is the cheapest 20/80 TI on the market for example this could tempt novice builders into buying it thinking it will just work as is and that it could end in disaster anyway the PCB used t appears to be the standard founders edition design so it should be compatible with a lot of aftermarket water blocks for the 2080 ti it's a fairly standard looking 2080 TI just without the cool attached a niche product for sure but something that may tempt some builders Anandtech have reviewed the first double-height ddr4 modules on the market these new modules provide 32 gigabytes of ddr4 on a single stick achieving this through basically just adding more DRAM dies on to the wine board to fit in all these extra dies the height of the modules has to be increased hence the name double-height the benefit to these modules is of course increased memory density in particular systems that have only two DIMM slots have the ability to now support 64 gig of ram through to 32 gig sticks rather than the old limit of 32 gig through to 16 gig sticks however there are a few catches the memory has to be qualified for motherboards on a per board basis so they won't just work with every board currently they're only work with three isuzu ROG boards the extra height can also cause issues for some calls particularly air coolers they expand out over the memory slots so liquid cooling is recommended here the good news is an antique found no performance differences from the new module design and power consumption per gigabyte was in line with other sticks naturally each stick consumes more power in general as there are double the components but there were no real differences between using these sticks compared to 216 gig sticks for example pricing for 2 times 32 gigabyte kits expected to be roughly in line with 4 times 16 gigabyte kits so yeah no real premium for those 32 gig modules Samsung has launched a new SSD the 970 Evo plus like the existing 970 Evo this is a PCIe nvme SSD in an MDOT two form factor using Samsung's TLC net the difference between the 970 Evo and 970 Evo plus is the amount of layers for the TLC net the older Evo uses 4th gen vena and with 64 layers while the new Evo plus is using 5th gen stuff with 96 layers they've also been some control upgrades these drives come in at essentially the same price as the 970 Evo they replace 90 bucks for the 250 gig model 130 bucks for the 500 gig and 250 dollars for one turbine the 970 vote is also slightly faster across the board from the reviews I've looked at so it's basically a minor upgrade in performance for the same price and it's still one of the fastest consumer nvme drives on the market in other Samsung related news the company will begin mass producing a 15.6 inch 4k OLED display for laptops next month at CES we did hear from a number of vendors that were planning to release 15-inch laptops with all their displays and I suspect most of those will be using this very Samsung OLED panel when it's ready later in the year for specs we're looking at a 4k resolution up to 600 nits of brightness are 120,000 to 1 contrast ratio 100% DCI p3 coverage and display hgr true black certification there's no word on refresh rate but it expects 60 Hertz here there's no doubting that OLED is a very attractive display technology thanks to its excellent color reproduction black levels viewing angles and overall size and cost slimmer bezels and thinner devices the main concern for using old LEDs as monitors is burning so it'll be interesting to see how this panel copes with that lingering issue of all Ed's phone topic for this week we have the as rocker Radeon 17 gaming which looks well exactly the same as a meze reference design except with a few asrock stickers on the fans so yeah it seems like this is what board partners we're doing for their Radeon 7 or ins I wouldn't be expecting any custom designs and who knows maybe AMD's new triple fan cooler doesn't need replacing with something better anyway so that's it for this week's news corner it's well probably close to a billion degrees in his I'm gonna get out here have some water cooled down the good news is my office where I edit this video has air concert I won't be sweating in there as much as always you can subscribe to get news corner in your inbox usually every Friday consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our awesome discord community I'll catch you in the next one