After early performance numbers were spotted on Intel’s upcoming 6-Core Coffee Lake CPUs on the SiSoft Sandra benchmark database, new Coffee Lake benchmarks are now appearing in the GeekBench database.

While GeekBench results page shows the CPU as Kaby Lake, the specs show a 3.19GHz, 6-core/12-thread processor with 1.5MB of L2 and 12MB of L3. This is consistent with the specs from the previously leaked SiSoft Sandra benchmarks.

According to the benchmark page, the CPU scored 4619 single core score and 20828 multi-core score.

As expected, this puts single core performance higher than AMD Ryzen and multi-core score somewhere in line [...]

Last week, the GTA V modding community was in an major uproar after popular modding tool OpenIV was shut down by GTA V publishers Take-Two and Rockstar Games.

Shortly following the shutdown, the GTA V modding community voiced their feedback on GTA V through multiple outlets, chief among them GTA V’s review page on Steam which went from positive to mixed within a matter of hours with tens of thousands of recent reviews showing overwhelmingly negative.

Realizing the monumental screw-up that had occurred, Rockstar and Take-Two reversed their decision on banning mods and updated their online knowledge-base to say, “Rockstar Games believes in reasonable [...]

Synology has recently announced the release of Surveillance Station 8.1 Beta, a new upgrade to the Surveillance Station software included in their popular NAS systems.

The new update brings some much needed improvements and some new features to surveillance station including HTML5 support, a new home mode feature, intercom camera integration, GPU acceleration, remote recording archiving, and POS integration.

Those with a newer Synology NAS with support for Surveillance Station 8 can now download and test the beta. More information about the update as well as instructions on accessing the beta is available at the Synology website here.

PC World was recently given the opportunity to preview AMD’s upcoming Vega Frontier Edition graphics card ahead of its release date and revealed some interesting findings about the highly anticipated graphics card.

The first is that the AMD Vega FE is significantly faster than Nvidia’s Titan Xp in compute. This was tested using SPECViewPerf 12.1 and Cinebench R15 (OpenGL). In the Catia and Creo benchmark, the Vega FE performed 28% faster, Solidworks, the Vega FE performed 50% faster, and in Cinebench, the Vega FE performed 14% faster. Considering the Vega Frontier Edition is designed to be a workstation graphics card, this isn’t surprising as Nvidia [...]

Own an Skylake or Kaby Lake processor with Hyper-Threading? It may be a good time to update your system UEFI/BIOS and CPU microcode. A critical flaw in Intel’s implementation of Hyper-Threading was recently revealed by the Debian Linux mailing list.

The critical flaw, which exists on all Intel 6th Generation “Skylake” and 7th Generation “Kaby Lake” processors with Hyper-Threading may cause “unpredictable system behavior” under a specific set of circumstances.

According to the Intel’s official documentation:

Errata: SKZ7/SKW144/SKL150/SKX150/SKZ7/KBL095/KBW095 Short Loops Which Use AH/BH/CH/DH Registers May [...]

For retro gamers who loved Nintendo’s re-release of the NES Classic last year, Nintendo is back again, this time with a re-release of the SNES Classic. Earlier this morning Nintendo of America’s Twitter let this bombshell out!

Super Mario World, Earthbound, Star Fox 2 + 18 more games? Now you’re playing with super power! #SNESClassic launches 9/29. pic.twitter.com/BPPGjpskPT

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 26, 2017

According to Nintendo, the SNES Classic will retail on September 29th for a retail price of $79.99 and it includes such classic games like:

Gaming peripherals maker, Bloody Gaming, had a fairly sizable presence at E3 2017, so we stopped by to take a quick look at a few of their upcoming products.

Arriving at the booth, I was quickly directed to the Bloody B975 gaming keyboard, the newest Bloody gaming keyboard using LK (Light Strike) Libra optical infrared switches. For those unfamiliar, Light Strike switches are new infrared laser based switches which are superior in performance and durability over traditional mechanical switches. This is due to its lack of metal contact leaves and instead when the key is depressed, a plate blocks [...]

A mysterious “Genuine Intel CPU 0000” has appeared in SiSoft Sandra benchmark database, said to be likely an engineering sample of Intel’s upcoming Coffee Lake CPU.

The chip in question has six cores featuring a base clock of 3.1GHz and a turbo clock of 4.2GHz. It carries 256KB of L2 cache per core and 9MB of shared L3 cache. The chip reportedly has a die size of 149mm².

What tier this chip sits at is unknown, but considering the competitive pressure from AMD, it could very well slot into the consumer Intel Core i7-8700K. A quad-core variant will also be available but will be manufactured under a smaller, 126mm² die.

Coffee Lake will be [...]

According to DigiTimes, TSMC has won the bid to manufacture Qualcomm’s baseband chips on the 7nm node. The chip order is for the baseband processors only and not for application processors. Qualcomm is still making a decision between Samsung and TSMC for the production of its next-generation APs, and is waiting to see the second generation 7nm products from both companies before it makes a decision.

Both Samsung and TSMC will be switching from HKMG to EUV process technology at the 7nm node. Samsung announced that its 7nm Low Power Plus transistors made using EUV will be available in 2018, while TSMC said its 7nm EUV node will be ready by 2019.

TSMC lost [...]

We had the pleasure of hanging out with gaming peripherals maker Cougar recently at E3 2017 to check out some of their latest and greatest gaming keyboards.

The latest and what I think is the greatest is the Cougar Puri TKL. The Cougar Puri TKL is a compact, Tenkeyless keyboard for eSports gamers who want a smaller, more portable gaming keyboard to take on the go. The Cougar Puri TKL looked and felt high quality and Cougar displayed the keyboard with even more durable metal keycaps installed on the arrow keys and the gaming zone (WASD keys).

Cougar was also happy to report that they’re only using the highest [...]