Gadgetory

welcome to the hardware box news corner a new weekly segment where we'll be going through some of the bigger news topics we come across and giving some thoughts and opinions along the way you guys often ask us to cover or comment on various news stories so now we are I guess so I figured I'd kick things off with a look at the biggest game water of the week which was Kingdom Come deliverance probably not the most anticipated launch for a lot of you guys but it did develop a niche following among those interested in its take on medieval strictly no magical fantasy RPG it was also crowdfunded to the tune of 1.1 million pound so there was certainly a lot of demand for this sort of thing among those liked to crowdfund games I guess anyway the game came out earlier this week on February 13 and early opinions from critics and users seems to be mixed turning on positive sounds like the game is extremely buggy though and that's despite an enormous 23 gigabyte day one patch fixing a lot of the pre-launch issues it could take a couple of weeks for even game breaking bugs to be addressed so if you're thinking of playing the game it's probably best to wait until those glaring issues are fixed as for gameplay people who know the game is designed to be realistic are quite pleased with the results and the flexibility of the open-world though I've seen a couple of complaints about the restrictive save system and difficult lock-picking well it's not something Steve or I have played yet and we are exploring whether it's worth benchmarking we have heard the top visual quality settings are quite demanding on PC let us know your experiences with the game and what it's like to play it and you know whether it's worth a look on our test systems from a benchmarking perspective there's been a bit of mixed news on this next topic relating to invidious churring graphics cards that are rumored for launch next month initial reports suggested it would be just another line of consumer cards or perhaps a codename for a single card but the latest information claims is actually a cryptocurrency mining specific line or architecture there's basically no information to go at this stage aside from the discussion around the codename that references of course famous computer scientist Alan sure it's also made more confusing with all the discussion around Volta and potentially ampair as well again we don't know much about either of those architectures either or you know even where the ampere really is the replacement from Pascal and we suspect probably not in that case anyway better truing if this really is a cryptocurrency mining architecture a couple of things spring to mind firstly of course it's great news for gamers because you know provided it's actually popular among crypto - it might ease the demand for gaming GPUs and allow gamers to actually buy cards at half reasonable prices however it does have to make sense from - otherwise I'll just keep buying consumer GPUs so it needs to provide significantly more mining performance for the price while also offering resale value not 100% sure how that achieves something like that or whether you know we might see mining restricted cards for gaming at the same time but if the rumor is true it's nice to see in video actually working on fixing the mining issue and they might even be able to cash in a bit here I don't expect a lot of you guys to actually be running Intel's integrated graphics for gaming but I did think this story on their latest drivers was pretty interesting so if the 15 dot 65 dot 3.49 for for a driver and I think Intel could probably simplify their names here a little bit they've they've added an ability to auto configure game settings for the best performance on the integrated GPUs and that's similar to what we've seen already in NVIDIA GeForce experience so at the moment this feature is listed as a beta and it only works in 12 games which does include popular tiles like GTA 5 overwatch and dota 2 but it surprisingly misses out on games like 49 obviously this is a very early project for Intel and they're you know they're looking for feedback on how it works and what games to add so if you do have a integrated graphics chip that you game on probably worth giving it a look the I GPUs Intel are supporting with the feature anything 6th gen or newer and that includes the upcoming 8th gen core processes with Radeon rx Vega M graphics and that's probably why they've launched this order configuration features so you know those buying systems with the much much more powerful Vega integrated graphics can quickly configure game settings for the best performance on these chips personally I think configure games is all part of the fun of PC gaming there you know a lot of people just like having that quick and easy utility just launch games and play with a more console like experience that's fine as long as the tunity works well and doesn't suggest settings that will you know make you run at horrible quality or some 30 fps and I think with a bit of work and a few extra games added into the mix this could be quite good for those who like to game on integrated graphics earlier this week hopefully you saw our coverage of Raven Ridge and the new horizon 520 400g and risin 320 200 G will just shortly after those AP u.s. launch a couple of new ApS was spotted in an AZ rock M for CPU support list the risin 5 2400 GE and the rise in 320 200 G details are slim at this stage but it seems these ApS are low-power variants of the same silicon capping the TDP 235 watts instead of 65 watts and reducing base frequencies from 3.5 and 3.6 gigahertz on the CPU to just 3.2 gigahertz AMD hasn't officially announced these parts yet but they do make sense particularly for small form-factor builds that can't fit in massive coolers reducing the TDP to 35 watts and allowing a less capable smaller caller to do the job would be great in some use cases I do expect most of you guys building rise and AP systems will stick to the non e models for the most part though and we have also already seen this apu scale quite well at lower TDP s-- rise and mobile AP use are 12 to 25 watts and use basically the same chips though they do push CPU clock speeds down even further than these a parts rise and Mobile's game performance is still very good though so expect similar from these each series parts no word on an official launch date or pricing at this stage for them as though so keep an eye out you know in the couple of weeks Intel quietly pushed out the core i3 8130 you this week a new 15 watt laptop CPU for ultra portable devices like the 8th gen core i3 line on desktops which are basically quad core core i5s in the previous generation this new core i3 u series CPU is basically a dual core Core i5 from the previous gen it has two cores and four threads with the base clock of 2.2 gigahertz and a boost clock of 3.4 gigahertz it's not just a straight rebrand Jen parts though Intel has gone with a lower base clock than the old core i5 line but pushes the boost clock up a bit something like the core i5 7200 you used a 2.5 gigahertz pace and 3.1 gigahertz boost worth you know here we're looking at 2.2 Gertz base 3 point 4 gigahertz boost on the same core in thread count the core i3 8130 also packs for Meg of l3 cache up from 3 Meg and now supports ddr4 2400 up from ddr4 2133 and of course the integrated GPU is unchanged it's not the biggest news but it does allow 8th gen CPUs to filter down and cheaper ultraportable laptops most of the high-end stuff will still use them much faster quad-core CPUs their core i3 occupy you know an important place for those mid tier laptops and having current gen dual cause makes sense in that category moving on into a bit of phone SOC discussion for a brief moment this week a number of websites got their hands on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 for some early benchmarking with a Qualcomm reference design if you're not familiar with the smartphone SOC landscape this Snapdragon 845 is the upcoming high-end SOC from Qualcomm and that's set to replace the Snapdragon 835 that was widely used in flagship phones we should see the Snapdragon 845 in most top-end phone launches in 2018 if you're interested in a deep analysis of the performance there's no better site than an antique for that but I'll summarize their findings here CPU IPC appears to be improved by around 26% relative to the Snapdragon 835 which when paired with the higher clocks delivers you know around a 45 percent boost in floating-point performance and 31% in integer system benchmarks didn't show as large of a gain in a lot of tests but it's still impressive on the GPU front it looks like we get roughly 30% more performance from the new adrena at 6:30 with higher frames per watt which is always very important with smartphone form factors and then tech also found similar overall power consumption to the Snapdragon 835 in a very brief test so that should mean excellent battery life and much improved efficiency when considering the improved performance something to look out for in 2018 a couple of other interesting topics around today's video starting with the news the pirates have cracked Microsoft's Universal windows platform protection PC gamers will be familiar with you WP as it's the way Microsoft package and distribute their first party games exclusively through the Windows Store which is almost universally hated by gamers and one of the key reasons we avoid benchmarking with you WP games it basically sucks anyway so the you WP protection system has been cracked starting with zoo tycoon ultimate animal collection which obviously everyone was eagerly waiting to be cracked apparently the game was protected by five layers of DRM including arts and anti-tamper the Microsoft Store uwp systems and Xbox Live it's not clear whether this means all you WP games can now be cracked but at least one has and that usually means the flood gates have been opened we don't advocate for piracy here at all so please buy games and support developers if you want to play their stuff but it's always interesting when increasingly tough DRM is cracked these days speaking of you WP games we now have the full system requirements from Microsoft and res Xbox and PC game Co fees which is launching on March 20th rather than just giving basic minimum and recommended specs rare has delivered six full configurations that should deliver performance anywhere from five for TP @ 30fps to 4k 60fps depending on the listed hardware and quality levels those with Intel integrated iris pro 6200 graphics from the Broadwell era or iOS 540 from skylake should be able to run it at Omega 540 P and 30 fps in more modern terms this should mean is playable on rise mobile but not on Intel H in CPUs 720p 30fps requires an Intel Q 9450 or AMD phenom 2 and either a GT 10:30 or r7 450 in modern GPU terms 1080p 30 medium quality can be achieved with an i3 41 70 and a GTX 1050 TI rx 460 1080p 60 at medium that needs an AI 540 960 with the GTX 1060 rx 470 and then pushing up to 4k 30 with ultra they suggested gtx 1070 or Arc's Vega 56 and if you want 60fps you'll need a gtx 1080i or vegas for there's always a couple of strange things in the specification this particularly as they suggest a gtx 1064 1080p 60fps gaming and just medium settings but then apparently only gtx 1070 is required for 4k 30 at Ultra so a little bit odd there oh and the game asks for 60 gig of drive space so expect a fairly large install size final brief topic for this week a soos has launched the Zen book 13 UX 3 3 1 which is a 13-inch ultra portable with a core i5 8250 U and NVIDIA GeForce MX 150 graphics it's extremely rare to see discrete graphics in a 13-inch slim and light laptop but a soos has done it with this new Zen book so it's now available for about a thousand US dollars if anyone is interested that's it for this week's news corner I'll hopefully be back next week with a look at whatever pops up between now and then let us know what you think of doing a weekly news segment below and I'll catch you next time