Tech News

  • Funky Kit Review - Acer MA200 1TB NVMe M.2 2230 PCIe 4.0 SSD

    I bet you didn't know that Acer made SSDs??

    Well, you would be right.  happy smile.  Acer buys their accessory components just like everyone else however, they partner with companies to ensure that the SSDs (and other components) meet their quality standards.

    As it turns out, you can buy some of them off the open market.

    The Acer MA200 M.2 2230 1TB SSD is one of the best options if you want a SSD that fits handheld gaming consoles and small laptops. It's fast, compatible with multiple devices, uses high-quality components and TLC NAND, and you also get a five-year warranty.

    I picked up a 2TB desktop drives during CES 2024, and while it is currently untested and chilling in the Ollama AI Test Platform, I can say it is super-fast and works as expected.  Full review coming soon.

  • NVIDIA AI Foundry Builds Custom Llama 3.1 Generative AI Models for the World’s Enterprises

    SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 23, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NVIDIA today announced a new NVIDIA AI Foundry service and NVIDIA NIM™ inference microservices to supercharge generative AI for the world’s enterprises with the Llama 3.1 collection of openly available models, also introduced today.

    With NVIDIA AI Foundry, enterprises and nations can now create custom “supermodels” for their domain-specific industry use cases using Llama 3.1 and NVIDIA software, computing and expertise. Enterprises can train these supermodels with proprietary data as well as synthetic data generated from Llama 3.1 405B and the NVIDIA Nemotron™ Reward model.

    • Enterprises and Nations Can Now Build ‘Supermodels’ With NVIDIA AI Foundry Using Their Own Data Paired With Llama 3.1 405B and NVIDIA Nemotron Models
    • NVIDIA AI Foundry Offers Comprehensive Generative AI Model Service Spanning Curation, Synthetic Data Generation, Fine-Tuning, Retrieval, Guardrails and Evaluation to Deploy Custom Llama 3.1 NVIDIA NIM Microservices With New NVIDIA NeMo Retriever Microservices for Accurate Responses
    • Accenture First to Use New Service to Build Custom Llama 3.1 Models for Clients; Aramco, AT&T, Uber and Other Industry Leaders Among First to Access New Llama NVIDIA NIM Microservices

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    NVIDIA AI Foundry is powered by the NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud AI platform, which is co-engineered with the world’s leading public clouds, to give enterprises significant compute resources that easily scale as AI demands change.

    The new offerings come at a time when enterprises, as well as nations developing sovereign AI strategies, want to build custom large language models with domain-specific knowledge for generative AI applications that reflect their unique business or culture.

    “Meta’s openly available Llama 3.1 models mark a pivotal moment for the adoption of generative AI within the world’s enterprises,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Llama 3.1 opens the floodgates for every enterprise and industry to build state-of-the-art generative AI applications. NVIDIA AI Foundry has integrated Llama 3.1 throughout and is ready to help enterprises build and deploy custom Llama supermodels.”

    “The new Llama 3.1 models are a super-important step for open source AI,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta. “With NVIDIA AI Foundry, companies can easily create and customize the state-of-the-art AI services people want and deploy them with NVIDIA NIM. I’m excited to get this in people’s hands.”

    To supercharge enterprise deployments of Llama 3.1 models for production AI, NVIDIA NIM inference microservices for Llama 3.1 models are now available for download from ai.nvidia.com. NIM microservices are the fastest way to deploy Llama 3.1 models in production and power up to 2.5x higher throughput than running inference without NIM.

    Enterprises can pair Llama 3.1 NIM microservices with new NVIDIA NeMo Retriever NIM microservices to create state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines for AI copilots, assistants and digital human avatars.

    Accenture Pioneers Custom Llama Supermodels for Enterprises With AI Foundry
    Global professional services firm Accenture is first to adopt NVIDIA AI Foundry to build custom Llama 3.1 models using the Accenture AI Refinery™ framework, both for its own use as well as for clients seeking to deploy generative AI applications that reflect their culture, languages and industries.

    “The world’s leading enterprises see how generative AI is transforming every industry and are eager to deploy applications powered by custom models,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture. “Accenture has been working with NVIDIA NIM inference microservices for our internal AI applications, and now, using NVIDIA AI Foundry, we can help clients quickly create and deploy custom Llama 3.1 models to power transformative AI applications for their own business priorities.”

    NVIDIA AI Foundry provides an end-to-end service for quickly building custom supermodels. It combines NVIDIA software, infrastructure and expertise with open community models, technology and support from the NVIDIA AI ecosystem.

    With NVIDIA AI Foundry, enterprises can create custom models using Llama 3.1 models and the NVIDIA NeMo platform — including the NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B Reward model, ranked first on the Hugging Face RewardBench.

    Once custom models are created, enterprises can create NVIDIA NIM inference microservices to run them in production using their preferred MLOps and AIOps platforms on their preferred cloud platforms and NVIDIA-Certified Systems™ from global server manufacturers.

    NVIDIA AI Enterprise experts and global system integrator partners work with AI Foundry customers to accelerate the entire process, from development to deployment.

    NVIDIA Nemotron Powers Advanced Model Customization
    Enterprises that need additional training data for creating a domain-specific model can use Llama 3.1 405B and Nemotron-4 340B together to generate synthetic data to boost model accuracy when creating custom Llama supermodels.

    Customers that have their own training data can customize Llama 3.1 models with NVIDIA NeMo for domain-adaptive pretraining, or DAPT, to further increase model accuracy.

    NVIDIA and Meta have also teamed to provide a distillation recipe for Llama 3.1 that developers can use to build smaller custom Llama 3.1 models for generative AI applications. This enables enterprises to run Llama-powered AI applications on a broader range of accelerated infrastructure, such as AI workstations and laptops.

    Industry-Leading Enterprises Supercharge AI With NVIDIA and Llama
    Companies across healthcare, energy, financial services, retail, transportation and telecommunications are already working with NVIDIA NIM microservices for Llama. Among the first to access the new NIM microservices for Llama 3.1 are Aramco, AT&T and Uber.

    Trained on over 16,000 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and optimized for NVIDIA accelerated computing and software — in the data center, in the cloud and locally on workstations with NVIDIA RTX™ GPUs or PCs with GeForce RTX GPUs — the Llama 3.1 collection of multilingual LLMs is a collection of generative AI models in 8B-, 70B- and 405B-parameter sizes.

    New NeMo Retriever RAG Microservices Boost Accuracy and Performance
    Using new NVIDIA NeMo Retriever NIM inference microservices for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), organizations can enhance response accuracy when deploying customized Llama supermodels and Llama NIM microservices in production.

    Combined with NVIDIA NIM inference microservices for Llama 3.1 405B, NeMo Retriever NIM microservices deliver the highest open and commercial text Q&A retrieval accuracy for RAG pipelines.

    Enterprise Ecosystem Ready to Power Llama 3.1 and NeMo Retriever NIM Deployments
    Hundreds of NVIDIA NIM partners providing enterprise, data and infrastructure platforms can now integrate the new microservices in their AI solutions to supercharge generative AI for the NVIDIA community of more than 5 million developers and 19,000 startups.

    Production support for Llama 3.1 NIM and NeMo Retriever NIM microservices is available through NVIDIA AI Enterprise. Members of the NVIDIA Developer Program will soon be able to access NIM microservices for free for research, development and testing on their preferred infrastructure.

  • COLORFUL Announces the Launch of the CVN Z790D5 ARK FROZEN Motherboard

    Shenzhen, China, July 25th, 2024 - Colorful Technology Company Limited, a leading brand in gaming PC components, gaming laptops, and HiFi audio products, is proud to announce the CVN Z790D5 ARK FROZEN motherboard for the 14th Gen, 13th Gen, and 12th Gen Intel Core processors. The motherboard supports DDR5 memory and comes with four PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots for high-speed NVMe SSDs.

    The design of the CVN Z790D5 ARK FROZEN is inspired by the powerful CVN-class battleships. The motherboard features a titanium gray color from the heat sinks to the PCB finish. The motherboard features a 14+1+1 digital power phase design with 90A high-spec DrMOS VRMs with tantalum polymer capacitor to support high-end Intel Core i9 processors with ease.

    The CVN Z790D5 ARK FROZEN motherboard comes with a 2.5 GbE ethernet port and Wi-Fi 6E with Bluetooth 5.3. The motherboard has single PCIe 5.0 X16 slot that’s backward compatible with PCIe 4.0 devices such as the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards. There’s also a bottom PCIe 4.0x4 slot for add-in devices such as RAID controllers, capture cards, and others.

    4X PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD Slots

    Enjoy high-capacity, high-speed storage configurations with four PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots available for PCIe Gen4 M.2 solid-state drives.

    Alloy Reinforced Memory Slots

    CVN 790D5 ARK FROZEN features alloy reinforced memory slots for aesthetics and durability. Furthermore, the 8-layer PCB and thickened gold-plated contact ensure stable and fast data transmission allowing the motherboard to support higher memory overclocks of up to DDR5-7800MHz. The motherboard supports 48GB memory modules, supporting a total memory capacity of 192GB.

    Extensive Connectivity with 30W PD Fast Charging

    The CVN 790D5 ARK FROZEN motherboard sports plenty of connectivity options on its rear I/O including 4x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.2 Gen1, three USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports, and 1x USB 3.2 Gen2x2 type-C port. The front panel I/O header features USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C that supports 30W PD fast charging.

  • Thermaltake Unveils Amazon Prime Day 2024 Deals on Top-Tier Gaming Products

    Enjoy Up to 43% off on Select Premium Thermaltake Gaming Products, with Discounts on 30 Products across Gaming PCs, Cases, Coolers, and PSUs

    Walnut, California - July 16th, 2024 — Thermaltake USA, the leading PC Cases, Cooling, Power, and Memory Solutions brand, is excited to announce its special deals and Amazon Prime Day 2024 promotions. Celebrated as a two-day shopping extravaganza for Prime members on July 16th and 17th, Amazon Prime Day presents an exclusive opportunity for Thermaltake USA to offer an array of its most sought-after gaming components at exceptional prices.

    Thermaltake features over 30 top-rated PC products with discounts of up to 40%. 6 pre-built gaming PC models, equipped with the latest NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4000 series graphics cards and powered by INTEL® Core™ and AMD Ryzen™ processors, are available with up to $200 savings on select models. Additionally, Prime members can enjoy up to 25% off on popular PC cases, including the S200 and P3 Pro. Thermaltake's renowned cooling products, such as the ToughAir 510 and UX200 SE series, are available at a 33% discount, while the TH360 V2 AIO liquid cooler is offered at 23% off. The ToughPower GF A3 850W PSU is on sale with a 29% discount for those looking to upgrade their power supply units. Gamers, PC builders, and enthusiasts seeking high-quality components to enhance their gaming systems should seize this once-a-year opportunity to elevate their setups with Thermaltake's premier products.

    "Amazon Prime Day stands as a pinnacle event for tech aficionados and gamers alike," remarked Michael Guo, VP of Sales and Marketing at Thermaltake USA. "We are delighted to extend exclusive offers on our premier gaming products, encompassing gaming PCs, cases, coolers, and PSUs. Our products are meticulously engineered to deliver unparalleled performance and dependability. We are delighted to express our gratitude to the gaming community by offering these extraordinary Prime Day discounts," he added.

    Amazon Prime Day offers an array of exclusive deals on Thermaltake's top-tier PC gaming products. 

    To learn more about Thermaltake Amazon Prime Day Deals (7/16-7/17/2024), click here

  • YEYIAN GAMING Announces Exclusive Deals to Celebrate Amazon Prime Day 2024

    SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA — July 16, 2024 — YEYIAN GAMING, a global leader in innovative pre-built gaming PCs, peripherals, and computer components, proudly announces exclusive Amazon Prime Day 2024 deals. This highly anticipated online sales event, running from July 16th to 17th, offers Amazon Prime members exceptional discounts on YEYIAN’s top-tier gaming products.

    The promotion highlights six pre-built gaming PCs, including the popular Phoenix 49KFC-47Y1U Gaming PC, powered by the latest INTEL® Core™ processors and NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4000/4000 Super series graphics cards, featuring a $300 discount. Also included are the Tanto 24F0B-4602U, Yumi 560XB-4601U, and Phoenix 49KFC-47S1U Gaming PCs.

    Additionally, the YEYIAN Avance 27” QHD 180Hz frameless gaming monitor is available for $169.99, fully supporting AMD FreeSync™ and G-Sync™, alongside the $59.49 YEYIAN Raiden 80+ Gold 650W power supply units.

    "YEYIAN Gaming is thrilled to collaborate with Amazon for Prime Day 2024, bringing our top-tier gaming products to an even wider audience," said Frank Lee, Vice President of YEYIAN Gaming USA. "This exclusive partnership allows us to offer unbeatable deals on our cutting-edge gaming PCs and peripherals, ensuring that gamers and tech enthusiasts can access the best in gaming technology at incredible prices. We are eager to see the positive impact these offers will have on our community with Prime membership during this exciting event." 

    YEYIAN Gaming Amazon Prime Day Deals (7/16 ~ 7/17)

    The YEYIAN Shield Warranty Program ensures comprehensive customer support for all YEYIAN Gaming products. For more details on the YEYIAN Shield Warranty Program, please visit: us.yeyiangaming.com

    To learn more about YEYIAN's Amazon Prime Day Deals, please visit: Yeyian Amazon Store

  • Turtle Beach Vulcan II TKL Pro Mechanical Keyboard Review @ APH Networks

    The world of mechanical keyboards has been getting rather polarized with certain companies just offering a mechanical option while others are allowing users to customize just about everything.  Of course, there is a cost barrier associated with each option and makes you wonder where you should go and what the benefits are.

    Well, if you are the type who lies awake at night wondering if you should get the red or black with O-rings then you might want to shield your eyes and look away cause Turtle Beach if offering a Pro keyboard with a laptop feel with Hall Effect switches.

    Yes, you read that correctly, Hall Effect!!!

    The Turtle Beach Vulcan II TKL Pro is a slim tenkeyless mechanical keyboard that offers control and customization in every single keystroke. 

    I'm not sure if I hyped this up enough or, over hyped it but, I'm not really a fan of the design or color but, if you know then you know.

  • be quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 White Computer Case Review @ APH Networks

    I have reviewed a number of extremely large computer cases and while I find them to be a pointless waste of material there are some mentally unstable computer enthusiasts feel they are the cats meow.

    APH Networks has a review up of the beQuiet! Dark Base Pro 901 in White.  This is a case I reviewed about a year ago and during CES 2024 we got our first glimpse of the White edition.  Overall, the chassis is identical and will likely get the unstable boyz all juicy for their wannabe white-out mods.

    The be quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 White computer case remains on top for its quantity of features and quality of build.

    The one good thing I can say about the Dark Base Pro 901 is that the removable motherboard tray makes for an excellent test bench, and might be one of the primary reasons you buy one. happy smile

  • KLEVV Introduces the All-New Fit V DDR5 Gaming/Overclocking Memory

    June 27 , 2024, Hong Kong - KLEVV, the premier consumer memory and storage brand introduced by Essencore, is excited to unveil the brand-new FIT V DDR5 gaming memory with a sleek, ultra-low-profile design.

    GAME CHANGING NEW LOW PROFILE DESIGN
    KLEVV's FIT V DDR5 gaming memory modules are available in 16GB(16GBx1) and 32GB(16GBx2) kits, with diverse clock speeds of 5600MT/s, 6000MT/s, and 6400MT/s. Meticulously crafted for gamers, content creators, and casual users on a budget, these modules offer cutting-edge features and top-tier performance at an attractive price. They boast a streamlined, ultra-low-profile 33mm form factor, made possible by an innovative aluminum heat spreader with a contemporary minimalist aesthetic, finished in an eye-catching white hue. This design significantly boosts performance and enhances the visual appeal of any build.

    SUPERCHARGED WITH NEXT-GEN TECHNOLOGY
    The FIT V DDR5 gaming memory modules offer cutting-edge features at an attractive price. Superior KLEVV memory technology, including a built-in PMIC, ensures consistent performance with efficient power delivery and dependability. KLEVV's signature multilayer PCB design improves signal strength and robustness. The FIT V DDR5 modules also incorporate a precision thermal sensor for optimal performance calibration and on-die ECC for effective error correction, ensuring peak functionality and reliability. The FIT V DDR5 gaming memory readily supports INTEL XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO technology to extract maximum performance.

    APPROVED BY LEADING MOTHERBOARD BRANDS
    KLEVV takes pride in the exceptional quality of its products, achieved through superior hardware and engineering expertise. This commitment ensures that the FIT V DDR5 gaming memory modules excel in the QVL tests conducted by globally renowned, top-tier motherboard brands. Whether for the latest AAA games, unparalleled productivity in content creation, or casual use, the FIT V DDR5 gaming memory modules are ready to deliver blazing-fast performance.

    WARRANTY AND AVAILABILITY
    The KLEVV FIT V DDR5 gaming memory comes with a lifetime peace of mind warranty and will be available from  July 2024. KLEVV products are distributed by Integral Memory plc in the United Kingdom/ France/ Spain/ Germany. Consumers may visit Amazon sites for online purchases.

  • Noctua releases its NH-D15 G2 next-gen flagship model CPU cooler and NF-A14x25r G2 fans

    Noctua today released its long-awaited NH-D15 G2 next-gen flagship model CPU cooler and NF-A14x25r G2 round-frame 140mm fans. Continuing the legacy of the iconic NH-D15 and its NF-A15 fans, the new G2 products come packed with Noctua’s latest technologies and have been carefully refined in all respects to provide even better quiet cooling performance than their award-winning predecessors.

    “Our G2 products have been years in the making and it feels amazing to finally be able to offer the first of them to our customers”, says Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). “We faced various challenges in both design and manufacturing, but we’ve cut no corners and gone the extra mile to make sure that the G2’s will be worthy successors to some of our most iconic models. When you have them in your hands, I’m confident that you’ll be able to sense some of the dedication and perseverance that went into creating these fans and coolers.”

    These fans were shown during Computex and aim to redefine focal flow fan designs.  For more information check out the link below.

  • AMD FidelityFX FSR 3.1 Review - Frame Generation for Everyone @ TechPowerUp

    As GPUs get more powerful there becomes an increasingly larger cache unused potential.  NVIDIA used this to start manipulating the visual output.  First it was the generation of 3D images which later became Frame Generation, Upscaling and DLSS.  Granted some of those tasks were dedicated to specific sections of the chip, or could be considered a completely separate processor (similar to early PhysX)

    One of the biggest contributors to overall Frame Per Second (FPS) performance is Upscaling.  This is the process of taking a smaller image and making it larger with extra points for when the upscaled image looks better than the source.  Combine that with Frame Generation and you can make a substandard POS computer have playable framerates without a major hit in image quality.

    AMD's new FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 update (FSR 3.1) features improvements to upscaling quality and Frame Generation. It is now possible to run FSR Frame Generation without any upscaling, or combine it with DLSS, which finally gives GeForce 30 gamers a framegen option.

    I'm not sure if the provided "quote" is correct but, the article seems to clear things up and even provides examples.