Month: September 2019

I don’t think RGB fatigue is an official ailment, but if it ever becomes one, MSI’s upcoming Meg X570 Unify motherboard could be a potential cure. It is an “all black beast” based on AMD’s X570 chipset for Ryzen.

We only get a teaser shot of the motherboard, with MSI inviting users to “embrace the darkness.” It looks like a promising option for an all-black build, and dark-themed cases are easy to come by these days. At the same time, I could also envision this inside an all-white chassis for a sort of tuxedo look.

Aesthetics aside, the full specs are not yet known, though three reinforced PCI Express x16 slots are clearly visible. There also appears to be onboard power and reset buttons, alongside an LED debug (so there technically is some lighting).

There’s no mention of price or when the Meg X570 Unify will launch, only that it is coming soon. Presumably the dragon in the background is not included.

Some nifty updates are headed to the Oculus Quest, the best VR headset in terms of bang-for-buck. In addition to hand and finger tracking set to arrive next year by way of a firmware update, in the more immediate future, you will soon be able to plug the Quest into a PC and play titles developed for the higher-end Rift headset.

The magic will happen through Oculus Link, special software to enable playing Rift games on the Quest. Once it rolls out, Quest owners will be able to plug the headset into a gaming PC via USB-C and play Rift games—this essentially transforms the Quest into a PC VR headset.

“For developers, this means it’s now possible to build high-end PC games and experiences while taking advantage of the biggest possible market and connecting with new audiences as the Quest community grows. Oculus Link is truly the best of both worlds: the high-end gaming of Rift when connected to a PC, with the ease and portability of Quest on-the-go,” Oculus says.

That is an intriguing proposition for a $399 headset (and it puts the $399 Rift S in an awkward market position). Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says this should work with most USB-C cables, including the one that ships with the Quest, though Oculus also plans on releasing a “premium optical fiber cable to provide a best-in-class experience with maximum throughput and comfortable ergonomics” later this year.

Oculus Link will roll out in November.

Intel’s Memory and Storage Day event today in South Korea was mostly focused on enterprise and datacenter products, but they did announce an upcoming consumer SSD: The Intel SSD 665p. This is the successor to the Intel 660p, the first and most successful consumer SSD to use four bit per cell (QLC) NAND flash memory. The 665p isn’t a major update: it keeps the same Silicon Motion SM2263 4-channel controller but updates the NAND to Intel’s second-generation 96-layer 3D QLC NAND. This newer QLC keeps the same 1024Gb per-die capacity while shrinking overall die size, so we don’t expect any change to the range of drive capacities offered nor any major performance changes—but it may lower prices a bit.

Intel showed off the 665p with a live demo pitting the 1TB 660p against a 1TB 665p prototype with pre-production firmware, each installed in otherwise identical ASUS notebooks. Intel used a beta version of CrystalDiskMark 7 to illustrate the 665p’s performance: 40-50% improvement to sequential transfer speeds and about 30% faster random access speeds.

Caveats: given the short test duration and relatively empty state of the drives, these numbers are measurements only of the SLC cache performance. It’s not clear how much the worst-case write speeds to QLC have changed, and that’s where the 660p falls far behind TLC based SSDs. The sequential IO numbers Intel showed for the 660p are also well below what we’ve measured with the 660p on our own testbed using CDM 7, so the sequential IO improvement might be more along the lines of 20% rather than 40-50%. Our testing of the Intel 660p also showed that it can reach similar speeds of 1.7-1.8GB/s in sequential transfers with a high enough queue depth, so the 665p’s improvement here may amount to extending that performance down to queue depth 1. Either way, it looks like the 665p will be another drive that offers good enough performance for most use cases, but doesn’t really need all four PCIe lanes.

Nathan Kirsch over at Legit Reviews has shared his close-up photos of the 665p alongside the 660p, so we know that the PCB layout is essentially unchanged: a single-sided M.2 2280 drive that only needs to populate all four NAND package locations for the 2TB model.

Intel hasn’t shared the planned launch date for the 665p, but it should be no more than a few months away. Pricing should be comparable to the 660p, making it one of the cheapest consumer NVMe drives on the market.

Amazon has unveiled a new and upgraded version of its Eero mesh Wi-Fi router system, at a much cheaper price than its first model, and offering even easier setup.

The Eero base station is available right now in the US at the time of writing for just $99 / £99 / €99), while a three-pack containing the base station and two beacons for expanded coverage is priced at $249 / £249 / €279. A launch in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK is coming this November.

The new router was unveiled at Amazon’s product launch event at its Seattle, Washington headquarters,

Considering that the first Eero mesh Wi-Fi set cost a whopping $399 (about £300, AU$530), this is a dramatic price cut – and notably, it undercuts the Google Wifithree-pack by $10 in the US at the time of writing.

Wi-Fi enhanced by Alexa – starting with Eero

Like other Eero products before it, these come with dual-band radios as well as Eero’s ‘TrueMesh’ technology, which promises to eliminate dead spots in your Wi-Fi coverage. Better yet, a three-pack can now cover up to 5,000 square feet with Wi-Fi signal, a 66% improvement over the previous model.

Amazon is also introducing two new security services with these new routers, Eero Secure and Eero Secure+, designed to safeguard the devices that connect to your network. The company hasn’t yet revealed the specific features of each service at the time of writing, only that Secure+ offers on-the-go protections and control.

The company was much more excited to talk about how Alexa has been updated to offer voice-based Wi-Fi controls through Eero devices. Here are some of the commands you can expect:

“Alexa, pause the WiFi for dinner.”

“Alexa, turn on the guest WiFi.”

“Alexa, pause the Playstation WiFi.”

Amazon promises to make these Alexa features available to a number of routers from other manufacturers in the future, particularly Asus and TP-Link routers later this year, with support for Arris and Linksys devices coming early next year.

Now that it’s available for less than Google Wifi, Amazon just made Eero a much more interesting proposition for a vast majority of would-be customers, especially given the addition of voice control. Whether this will spark a Wi-Fi war between Amazon and Google is yet to be seen, but we’d be willing to bet on it.

These are the best wireless routers to date

The latest Oxygen OS 9.0.17 and 9.0.9 OTAs for the OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T include preparations for the full Android 10 upgrade — which could be as soon as late October.

While the reports out of China suggest that the Hydrogen OS variants will get Android 10 as soon as late October, there is still no official word on when the upgrade is set to extend globally. The Oxygen OS 9.0.17 and 9.0.9 updates were officially announced on the OnePlus forums with the changelog hinting at a not-too-distant release and almost confirming that we could see Android 10 on OnePlus 6 and 6Ts very soon.

The Oxygen OS OTAs are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, mainly offering fixes for things like the Screen Recorder crashing and calling functions when networks have been reset. The most notable inclusion is the system performance improvements made ahead of what OnePlus notes as “later versions.”

There is no doubt this is referring to Oxygen OS 10.0 — which is the OnePlus version of Android 10. At 113 MB, it really isn’t the biggest OTA file in recent times, but this is clearly an important bridge between Android Pie and Android 10. You can see the full changelog below.

Oxygen OS 9.0.17 / 9.0.9 Changelog

System Fixed the crash issue with Screen Recorder

Reactivated the calling function after the network has been reset

This update will improve the overall system performance to prepare for later versions

If you haven’t received the Oxygen OS 9.0.17 or 9.0.9 update on your OnePlus 6 or 6T, then be sure to head to Settings > System updates and refresh to see if the OTA download is waiting for you. Alternatively, you might want to use the fantastic Oxygen Updater app to get your phone prepped ahead of Android 10.