Hardware Asylum CES 2025 Coverage
I would like to thank Yeyian Gaming for helping sponsor Hardware Asylum during CES 2025. The Consumer Electronics Show starts Jan 9th and runs through Jan 12th.
Yeyian Gaming offers an wide range of solutions for the PC gamer including pre-built PCs to fully customized gaming computers with an online configurator. Their builds feature the latest in computer hardware including Intel Ultra, AMD Ryzen 9 and the latest in Nvidia RTX.
Be sure to check them out at https://us.yeyiangaming.com and the Venetian Tower if you'll be attending CES 2025.
Tech News
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ASRock Z370 Taichi Build Makes 5Ghz OC Simple – Intel Optane Adds Instant Startup
Dare I say... Optane
We also have to consider that 5Ghz overclock AND Optane are in the same paragraph and if that is Fake News.
I think not and ASRock gives us a reason why.
Our combination of the ASRock Z370 Taichi, 8th Gen Intel chip and Intel optane provided for the fastest and most powerfull build to date! Not only do we demonstrate how to hit and use a solid 5GHz in two easy steps, but also, our video demonstration validates the fastest system startup and shut down we have seen yet in a PC. It also validates our 5GHz clock speed.
There is a ripple in the PC world where folks seem to think faster is better. Thing is, they are not wrong but I have to wonder if shutdown speed is really something people are concerned with and if they are maybe they should consider closing their apps before shutting down the PC.
#justsayin
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Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium Edition Review @ Vortez
AIO or All in One cooling solutions combine the maintenance free operation of air cooling with the capacity of water. Granted there isn't much water in these coolers but every little bit counts. Of course, the one thing people often forget is that while you do get better thermals with an AIO the real benefit is your ability to direct the exhaust heat where ever you want.
The latest all-in-one CPU cooler that we’re looking at today is the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium Edition. The name is quite a mouthful, granted, but it explains everything you need to know about the product in one fowl swoop. The RGB CPU cooler arrives in 3 different flavours, depending on the size of the radiator that you choose; 240mm (2x 120mm), 280mm (2x 140mm) or 360mm (3x 120mm).
Thermaltake has fully embraced RGB lighting and has gone to great lengths to include it into everything they sell, including AIO coolers made by asetek and branded with their own RGB LED lighting effects and Riing fans.
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PowerColor Red Devil Vega 56 8GB review
One of the reoccurring themes on the Hardware Asylum Podcast is the PowerColor Red Devil. It may not be one of the fastest cards on the market but it does have one of the best back stories of any high-end graphics card brand. I got to review one of the RX cards this last year and despite being light on mainstream features it had the performance you would expect.
Finally, the first custom Vega boards have hit the market. In this review, we take a devilish PowerColor Radeon RX Vega 56 with 8GB graphics memory for a spin. The 56 is a more affordable graphics card in the Vega range, and might actually be the better proposition value for money wise.
Vega is a GPU that I haven't paid much attention to, in fact it isn't something many other sites were able to review either which makes me wonder if it really is all "that" or just more AMD hype to sell more cards.
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AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition Overview @ TechPowerUp
Regular driver updates are important to ensure smooth gameplay and that the latest features are supported. Very rarely will drivers increase performance but I have seen instances where the driver devs reorder some stuff to give you a few more FPS in certain instances.
AMD has recently released a driver update called "The Adrenalin Edition" which brings with it some pretty cool stuff. That is assuming you are on Team Red.
The next version of AMD's Radeon Software Graphics Drivers, Adrenalin Edition, has been released today, and it aims to more than just a customizable overlay. One of the many exciting new features is AMD Link, an iOS/Android app that makes the most of a second screen experience. This is a driver release that merits the time to go through in detail.
I do like how you can link it to your smart device and I suspect more of that will be happening in the future.
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NVIDIA TITAN V Transforms the PC into AI Supercomputer
Volta-Powered GPU Delivers 110 Teraflops of Deep Learning Horsepower — 9x Its Predecessor — to Researchers and Scientists
LONG BEACH, Calif., Dec. 07, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems -- NVIDIA today introduced TITAN V, the world’s most powerful GPU for the PC, driven by the world’s most advanced GPU architecture, NVIDIA Volta.
Announced by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the annual NIPS conference, TITAN V excels at computational processing for scientific simulation. Its 21.1 billion transistors deliver 110 teraflops of raw horsepower, 9x that of its predecessor, and extreme energy efficiency.
“Our vision for Volta was to push the outer limits of high performance computing and AI. We broke new ground with its new processor architecture, instructions, numerical formats, memory architecture and processor links,” said Huang. “With TITAN V, we are putting Volta into the hands of researchers and scientists all over the world. I can’t wait to see their breakthrough discoveries.”
NVIDIA Supercomputing GPU Architecture, Now for the PC
TITAN V’s Volta architecture features a major redesign of the streaming multiprocessor that is at the center of the GPU. It doubles the energy efficiency of the previous generation Pascal™ design, enabling dramatic boosts in performance in the same power envelope.New Tensor Cores designed specifically for deep learning deliver up to 9x higher peak teraflops. With independent parallel integer and floating-point data paths, Volta is also much more efficient on workloads with a mix of computation and addressing calculations. Its new combined L1 data cache and shared memory unit significantly improve performance while also simplifying programming.
Fabricated on a new TSMC 12-nanometer FFN high-performance manufacturing process customized for NVIDIA, TITAN V also incorporates Volta’s highly tuned 12GB HBM2 memory subsystem for advanced memory bandwidth utilization.
Free AI Software on NVIDIA GPU Cloud
TITAN V’s incredible power is ideal for developers who want to use their PCs to do work in AI, deep learning and high performance computing.Users of TITAN V can gain immediate access to the latest GPU-optimized AI, deep learning and HPC software by signing up at no charge for an NVIDIA GPU Cloud account. This container registry includes NVIDIA-optimized deep learning frameworks, third-party managed HPC applications, NVIDIA HPC visualization tools and the NVIDIA TensorRT™ inferencing optimizer.
Immediate Availability
TITAN V is available to purchase today for $2,999 from the NVIDIA store in participating countries. -
Introducing the EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti FTW ULTRA SILENT
December 6th, 2017 – Take on today’s most challenging, graphics-intensive games without missing a beat. The EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti delivers the incredible speed and power of NVIDIA Pascal – the most advanced gaming GPU architecture ever created. This is the ultimate gaming platform.
Featuring an all-new 2.5 slot cooler and ultra silent fan profile, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti FTW ULTRA SILENT gives you the best of both worlds – Cool, silent running and game-changing performance! The larger heatsink efficiently removes more heat, which allows your fans to run at a lower and quieter speed. Alternatively, the improved cooling gives you more headroom to overclock and improve performance without worrying about heat.
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Magnesium batteries could be a thing
When I was a kid the hottest thing you could get for your bike were "Mag Wheels". They only had 5 spokes and looks pretty darn cool and have largely been replaced by plastic versions that look similar. Magnesium wheels or "Mags" were also hot on cars too though they quickly fell out of popularity due to safety and price concerns. You see, Magnesium burns and becomes brittle over time due to how they were cast.
Well, it would seem there are other uses for Magnesium and some researchers are looking to it as a safer and more powerful alternative to lithium.
It's still early days for the promise of safer, energy-dense solid-state rechargeable batteries. However, a team of scientists at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research have just discovered a fast magnesium-ion solid-state conductor that will go a long way towards making non-flammable batteries with more capacity.
I find it interesting that it took "this" (I'm holding up a unit of measure) long for researchers to discover their fast magnesium-ion solid-state conductor and figure out how to turn it into a battery. Then again that was the premise of Iron Man 2 and just look what Tony Stark was able to accomplish.
Of course, all joking aside, safer batteries are a good thing for everyone and will help pave the way to our electrical future.
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Nvidia is Getting Hit Hard with the Crypto Sell Off
This is some pretty crazy news and shows the power of analysts in the industry. One person says "sell" and EVERYONE sells, One person says "buy" and the stock explodes. It must be nice to have that kind of power over the market.
Shares of Nvidia are down 5.30% to $199.71 on Wednesday, as the tech sector at large sells off.
The slide on Wednesday continues Nvidia's fall from the previous day, which came after Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh called an end to the crypto boom for Nvidia and other graphics chip makers. Nvidia's graphics cards are often used by cryptocurrency "miners" to try and speed up their systems, and the company has seen increased demand as cryptocurrencies skyrocket in value.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have hit several major milestones this week, including bitcoin's crossing of $10,000 per coin for the first time ever on Tuesday.As some of you who follow tech stocks may have noticed NVDA was on fire this summer rising up to an all time high and then kept going. Some of that was fueled by the power of Pascal. Pascal is the new GPU architecture that delivers more gaming power per watt than any other GPU in existence.
The reduced power demand appealed to gamers for its smoother gameplay, higher framerates and powerful overclocking. (even though the overclocking was actually just Turbo Boost adjusting clocks to where they "should" have been) Cryptominers were looking to maximize profits by reducing their power consumption and thermal demands and started buying up every GPU they could find.
Shortages created demand which pushed stocks up and made NVDA a very rich company. It will be interesting if the stock will rebound of if this tiny blimp will be their 5 minutes of fame.
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PATRIOT Launches New VIPER LED Series DDR4 Performance Memory
Glamorous LED lighted memory modules offering extreme performance, available in 16GB kits at speeds up to 3600Mhz
Fremont, California - Nov.20th 2017. PATRIOT, a global leader in performance memory, SSDs, gaming peripherals and flash storage solutions today announced its new VIPER LED Series Performance DDR4 Memory. A remarkable LED-lit top decorative lighting and stylish aluminum heat shield design, VIPER LED Series DDR4 Memory is optimized for maximum performance on the Intel 100/200/300 series and AMD 300 series motherboards. VIPER LED Series available in both red and white LED model which light up gaming rig with bright integrated lighting designed to make the gaming rig look as good as it performs.
The modern gaming PC is exposed with many featuring large windows and tempered glass side panels. A perfect complement to these systems is a well-placed lighting scheme which includes LED lights on all of the major components. VIPER LED Series DDR4 Memory is available in both red and white LED lighting configurations with a decorative style and fantastic brightness.
“We have set out to complement a user’s gaming PC by creating a decorative memory kit with LED-Lit top lighting and a stylish aluminum heat spreader. From now on, performance lighted memory will be an important part of any gaming system.” said Roger Shinmoto, PATRIOT’s Vice President of Product Development.
In addition, every single module of VIPER LED Series DDR4 Memory is built on a 10-layer PCB, This ensures good signal integrity for stable gaming and overclocking performance. The chips and ICs featured in VIPER LED Series DDR4 Memory are under a strict quality control and sorted to maintain rock-solid reliability and excellent overclocking on Intel 100/200/300 series and AMD 300 series motherboards.
Heat dissipation is one of most significant factors when running a high-performance system. Whether the aluminum material itself or the way how heat spreader designed, VIPER LED Series DDR4 Memory is designed to offer excellent heat dissipation and stable performance. Furthermore, each kit is fully compatible with the latest XMP 2.0 (Extreme Memory Profile), which allows users to easily set their memory speed and timings to get the highest possible performance and working stability.
PATRIOT VIPER LED Series DDR4 Memory is launching with a variety of capacities and frequency to provide users with several options when upgrading or building a new system. PATRIOT VIPER LED Series DDR4 Memory is designed to maximize the performance of every gaming system, available in both 16GB(2x8GB) and 8G(2x4G) capacities with frequencies starting at 2,400MHz to extreme performance speed at 3,600MHz. All VIPER LED memory modules are backed by PATRIOT’s limited lifetime warranty.
VIPER LED Series DDR4 Memory features highlight:
- Series: Viper LED (White and Red LED)
- Edition: Black sides with Silver Viper logo and pattern
- Compatibility: Tested on Intel 100/200/300 series and AMD 300 series motherboards for reliably fast performance
- Feature Overclock: XMP 2.0 support for automatic overclocking
- Aluminum heat spreader with unique and specific design element
- Limited lifetime warranty
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Corsair HS50 Review @ Vortez
It must have been Corsair HS50 launch day or sumpin'. Here is another review from Vortez with a more realistic quote this time.
Low cost headsets are often end up compromising on either comfort, audio quality or its construction. With that in mind, it makes sense that Corsair set their engineers to task to deliver a low-cost no-compromise gaming headset; enter the HS50.
I'm all for cheap headsets but cheap for the sake of being cheap is kinda... cheap. Then again we are a price driven society after all where quality and price are often blurred by brand and exclusivity.
Or, you know maybe I'm just upset that Corsair is exploiting their market segment.
