Components

By Kevin Lee AMD has announced a new lineup of graphics cards and, before you start shouting “Vega is finally here,” you should know it’s a new set of Polaris GPUs. At the top of the new Polaris 500 family is the AMD Radeon RX 580, featuring 32 compute units and and 8GB of GDDR5…

By Kevin Lee The Windows 10 Creators Update is still a day away from roll-out, but Surface Dial owners are getting something a little special today. Microsoft has announced Surface Dial support has been added to a slew of new programs: CorelDRAW, Autodesk’s SketchBook, Silicon Bender’s Sketchable, and Algoriddim’s djay Pro. The Surface Dial integration…

By Matt Hanson AMD’s new line of processors, Ryzen, have been criticised over their uneven performance in Windows 10 – but now AMD claims it has come up with a solution. In a Community Update blog post, AMD has announced that it has created its very own balanced Windows 10 power plan that can boost…

By Darren Allan Western Digital has launched its first ever portable SSD, a neat and compact device which promises a ‘blazing’ turn of speed, according to the firm. The WD My Passport SSD comes in capacities of 256GB, 512GB and 1TB, and it’s certainly no slouch, offering read speeds of up to 515MB/s (which makes…

By Darren Allan Nvidia has just unleashed a new top-of-the-line graphics card, the Titan Xp, which outpaces the original Titan X and the more recent Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti. Essentially, this is the same Pascal-based card as the Titan X, except considerably juiced up with a faster clock speed, more cores, and faster memory. The…

By Darren Allan Faster DDR5 system memory is now in the pipeline, with the new standard expected to be officially introduced next year, to be followed by memory sticks which will offer a major boost in terms of performance compared to current DDR4 RAM. Announced by JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council), swift progress is…

By Darren Allan Intel launched its Optane Memory – which acts as a small turbocharging cache for a traditional hard disk for an SSD-like speed boost – earlier this week, but a caveat we were unaware of has emerged: the product won’t work with low-end Kaby Lake processors. As we reported previously, the base requirements…

By Darren Allan Increasingly of late, we’ve been hearing about how various pieces of hardware can be hacked in improbable sounding ways – like your monitor, for example – and here’s another: your scanner could potentially be compromised via a smart bulb. Yes, you read that correctly. There are caveats here, as you might expect,…

By Darren Allan Asus has just pushed out UEFI BIOS updates that allow compatible motherboards to make full use of Intel’s new Optane memory for turbocharging a traditional spinning hard drive. As we saw yesterday, Intel launched low-capacity Optane modules in 16GB or 32GB flavors, which use the motherboard’s M.2 slot, and act as a…

By Joe Osborne Hard drives are getting a much deserved kick in the pants with Intel’s new Optane Memory. The processor maker claims its newest technology will give old-school spinning drives solid-state drive-like (SSD) speeds today and eventually transform computer storage forever. Intel Optane Memory might sound like RAM, but it’s actually a specialized storage…

By Joe Osborne Over the past few years, monitors have grown to become practically luxury computing items. Well, for those who have been holding out for a high-tech screen for their desktop need hold out no longer, for this deal on a 23-inch Dell monitor with wireless device charging will end their long wait. Pair…

By Rod Lawton,Ian Osborne Update: We’ve updated this guide with the excellent Canon Pixma TS8050 all-in-one printer/scanner combo, and the new Brother MFC-J5330DW. Plus, if you’re urging for a new printer for the office, check out our best business printers guide. What’s the best printer to buy? All-purpose printers are a booming market, and you’re…

By Darren Allan A 32-core (64-thread) monster CPU from Intel, apparently the Skylake ‘Purley’ flagship, is the subject of the latest leak to emerge in the processor world. Details of the chip were spilled via a Geekbench performance benchmark (as spotted by Wccftech.com), and this is allegedly likely to be the Xeon E5 2699 v5.…

By Joe Osborne ARM, the name behind the processors within much of our smartphones and tablets, is preparing for the imminent artificial intelligence (AI) revolution with a brand-new chip design. The firm calls it DynamIQ – pronounced “dynamic” – an extension of its existing big.LITTLE architecture. For those who are unfamiliar, big.LITTLE is a processor…

By Darren Allan Intel has revealed its first Optane SSD which uses the much-talked-about 3D XPoint technology that took the company a decade to hone. The Optane DC P4800X is a 375GB solid-state drive in the form of a PCIe card, and it’s aimed at heavyweight data centre usage, promising very low latency and high…