Month: October 2019

Yesterday we reported on rumored prices for Asus’ upcoming AMD TRX40 motherboards, with the TRX40 chipset targeting AMD’s upcoming 3rd-generation Ryzen Threadripper CPUs. Today we bring you a new rumor: a list of Gigabyte’s upcoming TRX40 boards, as spotted by Computerbase. Sadly, we don’t have pricing for the boards this time around.

The info (PDF) comes from a compatibility listing for Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen4 AIC Adaptor and lists the following motherboards:

TRX40 Aorus Xtreme

TRX40 Aorus Master

TRX 40 Aorus Pro Wi-Fi

TRX40 Designare

Aorus is one of Gigabyte’s sub-brands targeting eSports and other PC gaming. But it also taps into other audiences, as shown by its Designare series.

There’s also a document (PDF) with details on PCIe support. As seen below, they all will apparently work at PCIe 4.0 speed, which doesn’t come as a surprise given that AMD’s mainstream X570 motherboards (for today’s generation of AMD CPUs) already do PCIe 4.0 too.

This leak follows an subtle reveal from just over a week ago, where Gigabyte South Africa’s Twitter revealed an image of what we suspect is one of its TRX40 boards (pictured below).

AMD’s upcoming TRX40 platform is said to debut in November and serve as AMD’s HEDT (high-end desktop) segment. It will launch alongside the Ryzen Threadripper 3000-series, which will pack up to 32 CPU cores.

If there is one thing computer accessories are in desperate need of, it’s more RGB lighting, right? Maybe, maybe not, depending on your perspective. Either way, like a runaway freight train coming down the side of a steep mountain, there’s no stopping the RGB locomotive. Rather than try, Razer went the opposite direction and outfitted its new Firefly V2 mouse pad with more and shinier RGB lighting than the original version.

There are two parts to the lighting upgrades. Razer says the Firefly V2 uses brighter LEDs than the original Firefly, and there are also now 19 lighting zones around all four sides of the mat. That’s four more zones than before.

“It is now the brightest RGB mouse mat powered by Razer Chroma—the world’s largest RGB lighting ecosystem, which supports over 500 devices and integration with over 130 top PC games of today,” Razer says.

The Firefly V2 is also thinner this time around. It measures 3mm wide, compared to 3.5mm for the cloth and 4mm for the hard editions of the original Firefly. Overall dimensions are 355mm x 255mm x 3mm.

This time around, however, Razer is only offering a hard version. There’s no cloth variant, though from Razer’s vantage point, the micro-textured finish and surface coating “provides the right amount of friction and glide that caters to any play style.” For anyone who prefers a cloth mouse pad, Razer says to look into its Goliathus Chroma range.

Other features include a cable catch to keep your wired mouse’s tail out of the way, and an anti-slip rubber base.

We have not tested this Firefly V2 and so we can’t compare it with the best mouse pads for gaming. We have played with and like the Firefly Hyperflux, though part of the appeal with that one is the wireless charging capability. This one doesn’t have that feature. It’s also quite a bit cheaper, though.

Last year, Honor launched its very first smartwatch dubbed Honor Watch Magic in China. It seems like the company is now working on the next generation of smartwatch. Although the name of the upcoming smartwatch is still unknown, we expect it to be called Honor Watch Magic 2. Earlier today, the smartphone maker confirmed the launch timeline as well as shared a glimpse of the design. Here is what we know about the upcoming smartwatch as of now.

HONOR WATCH MAGIC 2: LAUNCH TIMELINE, AVAILABILITY

According to the recent report, Watch Magic 2 will see its official unveiling by the end of this year. Sadly, the exact date or month is still unknown. Looking at the previous trends, the wearable should first hit the Chinese market followed by India and Europe. Since this is early development, there is no word on the pricing as well.

Well, the smartphone maker will soon begin to tease the product across its social networking channels. The promotional material will follow the Halloween theme. As you can see from the image above, the brand is using the same theme for the marketing push. Furthermore, the teaser material gives us a glimpse of design. It seems like Honor Watch Magic 2 will follow the same design ideology as that of its predecessor. The watch will feature two crowns on the left side which will be used for controls.

When it comes to the software, we are expecting the wearable to run on the company’s own LiteOS. This is the same software which is found on the previous-gen Watch Magic and Huawei’s Watch GT 2. The smartwatch should also feature an AMOLED panel, week-long battery life and affordable price tag, just like its predecessor.

Apart from all these, we don’t have any other key information on the product as of now. On the contrary, we are expecting more information and promotion materials to come forward in the coming days.

Someone has posted data claiming to be 3DMark 11 benchmark results for the upcoming AMD Renoir APUs on Reddit. According to the Redditor, these are results that aren’t accessible by the general public because they’re set to “private.”

There are three results which seem to show Renoir APUs running on a ‘Celadon-RN’ motherboard. We suspect that Celadon could be the name of the platform for Renoir. Unfortunately, the results don’t reveal APU model names or core counts. We have no way of telling if the results are supposed to represent one, two or three different APUs. All things considered, we should take these mysterious results with a grain of salt.

In the first setup, the Renoir APU ran with a 1.7 GHz base clock with the iGPU (integrated graphics processing unit) clocked at 1.5 GHz. The second setup had the APU running slightly faster at 1.8 GHz; however, the iGPU’s speed wasn’t available. In the last setup, the APU operated at 2 GHz with its iGPU working at 1.1 GHz.

The use of DDR4-2666 RAM is what really surprised us. In August, Renoir was mentioned with LPDDR4X-4266 memory in a Linux driver patch. Intel’s upcoming Tiger Lake-U chips could adopt LPDDR5 memory. APUs strongly benefit from high-speed memory, so we’d love to see Renoir make use of faster formats.

Based on the results, the tested chips seem to have low base clocks, but this is normal considering this would be very early silicon. If these really were Renoir chips tested, AMD probably still has a lot of tweaking to do. Alternatively, the low clock speeds could be a sign that Renoir will come with higher core counts. The current generation of AMD APUs, Picasso, tops out at four cores.

Another thing that stands out with these alleged benchmarks is the iGPU clock speed. One of the setups had the iGPU at 1.5 GHz. Picasso APUs’ iGPU maxes out at 1.4 GHz. Renoir potentially surpassing Picasso at this early stage makes AMD’s next-generation APU look promising.

It seems that Xiaomi isn’t done with the Redmi Note 8 lineup just yet. As per a rumor from a few days ago, a Redmi Note 8T is in the works and a leaked live image suggested that it will be almost identical to the original Redmi Note 8 but will add NFC support. A newly surfaced NCC listing confirms that.

Since the vanilla Redmi Note 8 doesn’t have NFC support – as most Chinese market-oriented smartphones do – it would make sense for Xiaomi to release the 8T for the global market with proper NFC support. Now the NCC Certification in Taiwan confirms the NFC support and also adds 18W fast charging to the list of known specs. The compatible charger will support 5V/3A, 9V/2A and 12V/1.5A output.

The certification also suggests that the phone is inching closer to launch so we will probably see it out in the next couple of weeks or so.