Components

By Kevin Lee The Ryzen 2nd generation leaks just won’t stop. It’s only been four days since the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X made its rumored blip on the web, and now there are rumors of another chip that clocks up to 4.35 GHz. A forum user on the South Korean HWBattle boards posted one of…

By Darren Allan We knew as early as last August that Intel’s Coffee Lake processors would not run on older 200-series motherboards – and would only play nice with Intel’s new Z370 chipset – but now it has emerged that modders have managed to get the CPUs working with older mobos. The story here is…

By Darren Allan AMD wants to tempt gamers who play popular esports titles to buy one of its graphics cards, rather than an Nvidia model, by focusing on eking out faster frame rates for games like Overwatch, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) and Dota 2. AMD’s newest release of the Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition (version 18.3.1) benefits…

By Darren Allan If you’re excited about AMD’s incoming Ryzen 2nd Generation processors, then you will doubtless be interested to hear that a leak has spilled online showing the purported specs of the Ryzen 7 2700X. This high-end model is an 8-core CPU (with 16-threads), and according to the leak which comes from the 3DMark…

By Darren Allan In a fresh move to further shore up security, Microsoft is providing Intel’s Spectre fix for PCs with Skylake processors running Windows 10 – with further patches to be delivered for older generation CPUs in the future. Of course, Intel is already pushing out Spectre (and Meltdown) patches itself, with numerous processor…

By Darren Allan Previous speculation has pointed to Nvidia being set to launch its next-gen graphics cards later this month, but a new rumor is claiming that this won’t happen – and indeed we may not see a hard launch (i.e. products actually becoming available) until July, or possibly even later. This comes from Tom’s…

By Joe Osborne Not too long ago, Intel had released its Kaby Lake Refresh (henceforth Kaby Lake R), or 8th-generation processors for laptops and tablets. At the time, they were billed as an evolution of the previous, 7th-generation chips, bringing quad-core designs to the i5 line and therefore more power. However, these chips have also…

By Darren Allan Last week, Intel released overhauled Spectre fixes for all its newest CPUs – from Skylake onwards – and now the firm has pushed out fresh patches for many Broadwell and Haswell processors too (5th- and 4th-gen models). These are working Spectre patches that don’t cause the instability problems which the previous fixes…

By Darren Allan According to a new report on the GPU market, AMD has made good ground selling graphics cards at the expense of Nvidia, apparently making big gains from cryptocurrency miners. The most recent add-in graphics board report from Jon Peddie Research covers the final quarter of 2017, and finds AMD making a big,…

By Andrew Hayward When it comes to PC graphics cards, Nvidia’s varied selection of powerful GPUs is unmatched. From the wickedly powerful, 4K graphics-pumping GeForce GTX 1080 Ti to the entry-level GTX 1050 – and everything in between – Nvidia remains the gold standard. But, as gamers demand new levels of graphical fidelity and researchers…

By Darren Allan Rumor has it that Nvidia will launch its next generation of GeForce graphics cards at GTC 2018, the firm’s GPU Technology Conference, which kicks off on March 26, just a month from today. This comes from a ‘well-placed source’ in the GPU industry who spoke to TweakTown. The site believes the cards…

By Darren Allan Intel has pushed out a revamped Spectre patch which solves the previous issues that plagued the fix, but the bad news is it’s only been deployed for Skylake-powered PCs right now. The new patch has been cured of the previous stability issues which triggered multiple system reboots in some cases, and led…

By Matt Hanson If you’re looking for the best processors for cryptocurrency mining in 2018, then you’ve come to the right place, as we’ve listed the very best CPUs for mining a range of cryptocurrencies. While many people think that graphics cards are the most important component when it comes to mining, getting the right…

By Bill Thomas With the rise in popularity of SSDs, many people have started to write off traditional hard drives. That’s a mistake. The best hard drives offer huge amounts of storage at prices that SSDs just can’t match. If you have a giant library of music, video, or even photos, it’s a good idea…

By Matt Hanson There are two major assumptions these days about cryptocurrency mining that AMD wants to dispel. The first is the assumption that mining can only be done with any degree of success using a mining GPU. The second, more compelling, argument is that the current cryptocurrency mining craze is bad for PC gamers…