Tech News November 11, 2018

Hello everyone and welcome to another installment of PC tech news. My name is Will and I will be taking you through some of the top news stories from the last few days. Much of what is out there in the news world is from AMD currently though there is still a small amount of news from Intel and nVidia. So, without further delay, let’s take a look at the news.

First up is AMD and their next GPU releases. It looks like AMD has finalized their first Navi design and will be calling it the Navi 12 line. The GPU has a reported 40 compute units and if the ratio of stream processors within the compute unit remains the same as current/past GPUs, then the new GPUs will come with 64 compute units and a total of 2560 stream processors. This will be the most likely upgrade path from Polaris and will probably be featured in the Radeon 600-series graphics cards.

The expectation was that this line of graphics cards would be given the Navi 10 codename but AMD has decided they will not go with that codename. Instead, we will get Navi 12. The thought is that AMD just is not ready to roll out Navi 10 but that may be a good thing since Navi 12 appears to just be a continuation of the mainstream upgrade path that Polaris has followed.

Navi will be a new microarchitecture different from previous GPUs and given the rumored stream processors, compute units, and core counts, the new cards should slot in somewhere near the AMD RX Vega 56 cards depending on the core clock speeds but should retail for much cheaper. There is no concrete timeline currently for release but it is estimated that the new cards will release somewhere in 1^st quarter 2019.

There is minimal news on the nVidia front. News is so scarce from nVidia that basically there is nothing more than nVidia’s Fiscal 2019 Q3 earnings and new drivers being released for Battlefield V, game ready drivers. So, without boring you all, nVidia’s overall GPU revenue grew by 40% along with total revenue basically showing that the cryptocurrency boom and subsequent crash did not really hurt nVidia. As for the new game ready drivers from nVidia, there were fixes for multi-monitor ide power draws that were reduced on Turing-based GeForce RTX setups along with COD: Black Ops 4, ARK Survival, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider receiving stability improvements and fixes to a few issues in Witcher III, Monster Hunter World, and Far Cry 5.

So, finally, we have the Intel news. Nothing major here as well. However, with the debacle of the 9900K release and the TDP being far exceeded on most users’ chips, my guys over at Hardware Unboxed revisited their test results and adjusted for the TDP actually being what Intel intended, which was 95-watt TDP. In short, motherboard makers are currently being blamed for running the 9900K above Intel’s specifications but is it really just Intel cheating their recommended specs and pushing board partners to run at the default clock multiplier table and not at the official recommended specifications?

The guys over at Hardware Unboxed ran a package of benchmark tests to figure out exactly what was going on with the processor at its recommended TDP of 95-watts. They ran 7 gaming benchmarks and 12 different productivity benchmarks or variants. The guys concluded that if you are a gamer, the TDP isn’t really an issue as most gamers will be overclocking the CPU and requiring a higher TDP anyway. However, for content creators and the like, running the CPU out of spec will increase temperatures by around 20 degrees Celsius and total system power consumption increase of around 40%. If you were to run the 9900K at spec, you would get AMD Ryzen 7 2700X performance while saving around 10% on power consumption.

So, that’s it for today. I hope you have enjoyed this article. Please stop by in the future for more content. I will have a few other articles up in the next few days so definitely be sure to stop back by. Don’t forget to leave a comment below, vote in the poll, and I hope to see you next time. Have a great day!