MSI recently announced the Vortex G25, a small yet powerful gaming PC.

The MSI Vortex G25 is absolutely tiny. It’s slim build is almost reminiscent of a blade server. When stood up vertically, it takes up less space than a gaming console. It’s so compact, in fact, that it can be mounted on a VESA monitor mount. At just 5.51lbs, it won’t rip your monitor apart, either.

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Players Unknown Battlegrounds (PUGB for short) was hit with a massive number of negative reviews after inserting in-game ads on its Chinese servers.

The reviews started flowing after players on the Chinese servers began seeing advertisements in-game promoting a VPN service. The Chinese players, already unsatisfied with the game’s server performance in China, voiced their disdain by down voting the game in doves. Flooding a game with negative reviews, know as “review bombing” has become a popular way for players to voice their dissatisfaction.

Surprisingly, the negative reviews from the Chinese players triggered a wave of international [...]

Popular messaging app WeChat recently updated its privacy policy to let users know that it logs and shares private user information with the Chinese Government. While the latest update to WeChat’s privacy policy is no surprise, it does explicitly confirm what we’ve all assumed to be true all along.

The scope of data collection covers anything WeChat collects including identity information, credit card information, chat history, phone numbers, biometric information (voice, fingerprint, etc) and more. It would be safe to assume that all versions of WeChat is subjected to the same level of scrutiny.

WeChat’s new privacy policy complies with [...]

Der8auer, the German overclocker who’s become quite famous for delidding CPUs, has recently published a video not only de-lidding the AMD Threadripper 1950X, but he also removed the dies to learn more about what lies inside.

As the AMD Threadripper 1950X has 16 cores/32 threads, it was originally assumed to only have two 8-core Ryzen dies. Interestingly, Der8auer discovered that there are not two, but four dies under the heatspreader in a previous video. Further, each of the four dies are confirmed to be 8-core Ryzen dies by removing all the dies. This means that half the dies are disabled and are essentially just there as placeholders. Currently, it’s [...]

The Next Generation

When Eero launched last year, it helped drive a revolutionary shift in the WiFi router market. Unlike the traditional WiFi router which was complicated to configure and manage for the average user, Eero wanted to create something that was easy to setup, easy to manage and could provide reliable whole home WiFi coverage no matter the size of the home. For the most part, Eero achieved its goal.

Now that it’s a bit more than year later, Eero has revealed the 2nd Generation Eero. Rather than a major redesign, the 2nd Generation Eero focuses on improving on the first generation product while simultaneously launching lower powered wall mounted [...]

DRAM and NAND prices have soared over the past year due to shortages and it looks like VRAM prices are following a similar trajectory as well. According to a recent article by Digitimes, VRAM price quotes have soared by 30.8% in August, leaping from $6.50 per package in July to $8.50 per package.

The price increase is due to RAM leading RAM manufacturers shifting production focus to memory for servers and smartphones. Samsung, which accounts for 55% of the worldwide VRAM supply, has more than doubled its server DRAM production from 12% to 27%. SK Hynix and Micron which account for the rest of the world’s VRAM production has significantly increased production [...]

Microsoft has recently slotted yet another addition to its already populated Windows lineup. The Windows 10 Pro Workstation edition brings some trickled down features from the enterprise edition, namely resilient file system support, persistent memory, faster file sharing, and support for server grade hardware.

Resilient file system (ReFS) uses a host of techniques to make data more fault tolerant. It can automatically perform auto correction using mirrored storage space and integrity streams. It’s also optimized for handling large data volumes.

Persistent memory uses non-volatile memory modules (NVDIMM-N) to store data and is designed for applications [...]

Dell announced a massive refresh of its Precision line of workstations at SIGGRAPH 2017, marking the first refresh of the Precision lineup in five years.

Since it’s the 20 year anniversary for Dell’s workstation business, it’s only fitting to talk about Dell’s first workstation and to see how far they’ve come in the 20 years. Dell’s first workstation was the WorkStation 400, which came in a beige box packed with either one or two Intel Penium II processors running at either 266 MHz, 300 MHz or 333 MHz. The system took as much as 512 MB of RAM and ran Windows NT. In 1997, this was absolutely cutting edge [...]

AMD’s SIGGRAPH 2017 Capsaicin event had quite a few reveals today, but nothing quite as impressive as Inventec’s new Project 47 supercomputer powered by AMD.

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The new Project 47 supercomputer is easily one of the more beautiful server racks we’ve ever seen, but what’s even [...]

Our favorite overclocker, der8auer is back again with a new video, this time de-lidding AMD’s new Ryzen Threadripper CPU.

According to the video, we can see that AMD is once again using proper solder to interface the CPU dies and the integrated heatspreader rather than the cheap thermal interface material Intel has been using on their mainstream and HEDT CPUs. This should be exciting for overclockers as they won’t need to remove the IHS on Ryzen Threadripper for overclocking.

Interestingly enough, the video also reveals another surprise. Underneath the massive headspreader is actually a four die configuration, similar to the die configuration of [...]