Intel's upcoming Alder Lake processor family is set to bring a mixture of big and little cores, combined into one package designed for the hybrid way of computing. Alongside the CPU cores, Intel is also etching integrated graphics into the Alder Lake silicon. However, according to Komachi (@KOMACHI_ENSAKA), there will be Alder Lake SKUs that don't feature a working integrated GPU. Just like we witnessed Intel produce "F" models for its past few generations of Core processors, we could see a re-appearance of the F SKUs with Alder Lake as well. In the leaked listing, Komachi notes the appearance of Intel Core i5-12600KF, Core i7-12700KF, and Core i9-12900KF.

All of the listed models are overclockable SKUs, just with their integrated graphics disabled. Just like the previous generation, Intel decided to introduce this SKU, giving customers a few benefits with the non-functional iGPU. As there is no GPU to produce heat, overclocking efforts could be much better on the "F" SKUs. In addition to that, these SKUs could be a bit cheaper compared to the regular models, saving the buyers some spare cash if they are going to purchase a 3rd party dedicated GPU anyway.

CPU-Z, the software of choice for monitoring the CPU and its attributes, has yesterday been updated to version 1.97, which brings much-needed and interesting features. For starters, the new version adds support to detect Intel Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, and Core i5-12600K "Alder Lake" CPUs and the Intel Z6xx chipset platform. Those specific SKUs are the top of the line in their respective categories, and it is only logical that support for the new generation starts there.

Next up, the software now supports detection of the latest DDR5 DRAM technology, which can now also be detected along with the new XMP 3.0 profile format. Last but not least, the software is adding detection for AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT GPU as well.

To download the latest update, head over to our downloads section. If you wanna get pinged automagically when a new version is released, select the yellow "Get Notified" button on that same page.

The discrete GPU market has been a duopoly for quite some time, and when Intel announced that the company is rebooting plans for its discrete GPU lineup, another player was about to break that duopoly. Today, that has been changed forever and Intel has officially become the third manufacturer of discrete GPUs, as we can see on the online listing. On BestBuy, CyberPowerPC has listed "Gamer Xtreme Gaming Desktop" powered exclusively by Intel components. When it comes to the CPU choice, Intel's 6C/12T Core i5-11400F CPU model is present without iGPU. Now comes the interesting part. The GPU powering the system is Intel Iris Xe discrete graphics card, which is a DG1 GPU based on Xe-LP SKU.

This model features 80 EUs, resulting in 640 shading units. While this is not any gaming beast, casual 1080p gaming should be just fine on this configuration. The system is listed for 750 US Dollars, and it is sold out, as of the time of writing this. While the performance of this configuration may not be something monumental, it is an important step towards Intel's inclusion in the discrete GPU market. By using OEMs, the GPU will reach a very large market without any major problems. We are waiting to see the first reviews of the system, which will surely take a good look at the card and examine its performance.

With the launch of its 500 series chipsets, Intel has officially laid the groundwork for the launch of its Rocket Lake-S CPU lineup. And with the new platform, there are some new features to be expected. The surprising news today is that Intel has enabled memory overclocking on a non-Z chipset like the upcoming H570 and B560 chipsets designed for mid-range motherboards that provide a budget option compared to the Z series that is designed for overclocking. The H570 and B560 chipsets now only lack the support for CPU overclocking, however, with Intel's history of limiting any overclocking exclusively to Z chipsets, this represents good progress nonetheless. However, for any frequencies above 2666 MHz, you need to use a Core i5 processor and above. The Core i3 and Celeron models are not going to support any higher speeds than 2666 MHz.

Since AMD announced its next-generation Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors based on Zen 3 core, everyone has been wondering how the new processors perform. For a detailed review and performance numbers, you should wait for official reviews. However, today we have the scores of Ryzen 5 5600X CPU. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker @TUM_APISAK, the Ryzen 5 5600X performance numbers in the SiSoftware Sandra benchmark suite have been leaked. When digging under the hood, the new Ryzen CPU contains six of Zen 3 cores with 12 threads, paired with as much as 32 MB of level three (L3) cache. These cores are running at 3.7 GHz base frequency, while the boost speeds are reaching 4.6 GHz.

In the test results, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU has scored Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media scores of 255.22 GOPS and 904.38 Mpix/s. These scores are not much on their own until we compare them to some of the Intel offerings. When compared to the Intel Core i5-10600K CPU, which is likely its targeted competing category, it scores 224.07 GOPS and 662.33 Mpix/s for Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media tests respectively. This puts the AMD CPU ahead 13.9% and 36.5% in these tests, indicating the possibility of Zen 3. Another important note here is the thermal headroom both of these CPUs run. While the Intel model is constrained withing 125 W TDP, the AMD model runs at just 65 W TDP. This could be an indication of the efficiency that these new processors harness.

The idea of working and learning from home, which at one point felt temporary, has for many of us started to feel more permanent. Even as some people in cities around the world return to work and schools in person, many others have found themselves reorganizing homes to create makeshift offices and classrooms. Whether your commute is across the house or across town, the PC continues to play an integral role in keeping all of us connected to our work, school, and lives - and each person in the household needs one.

As we continue to expand our Surface family of devices with the new Surface Laptop Go and updates to Surface Pro X, our goal is to design a Surface for every person, work style and location. To give every person in your household or organization a laptop that's not just something you need to use, but something you want to use. A virtual office you want to be in, a virtual classroom that engages you to learn, a place you can play your favorite game or watch a movie - with a bright vibrant screen, a fluid and comfortable keyboard, high quality cameras and mics, and the versatility of touch screens.

For years, MacBooks have been the de facto standard for digital DJ setups. Apple's recent product iterations, however, have left much to be desired in terms of professional connectivity - using industry standard DJ equipment with a MacBook requires the purchase of expensive and impractical adapters or hubs. XMG responds to the DJ community's growing demand for a functional, reliable alternative by releasing the DJ 15 - the first ever laptop designed, optimised and tested specifically to meet the needs of professional DJs. Weighing in at a mere 1.6 kg, this machine features a 15" non-glare Full HD IPS display and a wide array of standard ports. An entirely bloatware-free Windows 10 Pro installation, perfectly tuned to the DJ 15's hardware components, ensures ultra-low, stable DPC latency out of the box, even running off battery with WiFi and Bluetooth activated. On top of that, XMG offers unique and highly specialised support - by DJs, for DJs.

It seems that today Intel lifted an embargo on the preview of its reviewer kit, and thanks to a few websites we have pictures of what the packaging looks like. And it is one fancy packaging for sure with lots of plastic this time around. Intel has decided to switch up its packaging game and now it is very different. Now Intel seems to target aesthetics very similar to AMD Threadripper packaging, with a plastic window that reveals the CPU box that has big words distinguishing whatever the model in question is a Core i5 or Core i9.

The reviewers have gotten two CPU models - Core i9-10900K and Core i5-10600K which are pictured below. Just as a reminder, reviews of these CPUs should go live on May 20th. If you want to get a Z490 motherboard for one of these CPUs, you can pre-order motherboard from your favorite vendor starting from today.More pictures follow.

Historically, Intel has separated its processors and chipsets that accompany them to overclockable and non-overclockable ones. That means that only the "K" CPUs can be overclocked. With the latest generation, only some parts of the lineup are K CPUs, like the Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10600K, etc. Those processors could only be overclocked one put in motherboards based on "Z" chipset, like Z390 and Z490. However, it seems like ASRock has developed a new technology that will overclock non-K CPUs on non-Z motherboards, which is quite impressive.

Called the Base Frequency Boost (BFB) technology, it will allow for overclocking the non-K processors on chipsets like B460 and H470. How will that work you might wonder? Well, ASRock will take the TDP of the CPUs and make it run in the PL1 mode, which increases the processor TDP form 65 W and turns it into a 125 W TDP beast. This will, of course, be user selective and case dependent, meaning that if your cooling system can not handle that much heat coming out from the overclocked processors, it is unlikely that they will reach the peak clocks ASRock can target. You can check out the slide below:

Microsoft's flight simulator, an upcoming game designed to bring real-life scenarios of flying an airplane, just got a list of system requirements needed to run a game. To play with Flight Simulator, you would at least need to have a quad-core CPU like AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-4460 equipped system, along with 8 GB of RAM. For graphics, you would need a GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM, where the requirement is either AMD Radeon RX 570 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 GPU. Another interesting observation is the requirement of 150 GB of drive space, meaning that this game will be pretty big. Internet connection needs to be 5 Mbps at minimum, and as you up the resolution and graphics, you would need a faster connection. You can check out the entire table below.

The need for incrementally faster connection comes out of one reason - adaptive streaming. The game looks stunning, and if you wish to play at the highest quality, parts of the game will be rendered in the cloud. Microsoft is using its Azure infrastructure to help and render parts of the game and stream it down to your PC. This ensures that your PC is capable of playing the game and Microsoft is showing how they can tap the power of cloud for uses like this.

GDP, a company specializing in the creation of tiny laptops designed for gaming, has just announced the latest addition to its family of tiny notebooks - the GDP Win Max gaming laptop. This model is an 8-inch gaming laptop packing a lot for its size. On the outside, this laptop is equipped with joysticks on both sides, so there is even an option to directly play games using these joysticks instead of the built-in keyboard. The display of the device is an IPS screen that features a 1280×800 resolution, resulting in a 16:10 aspect ratio of the display. What's more important, however, is what is under the hood of the small body.

It is powered by Intel's latest Ice Lake CPU - the Intel Core i5-1035G7. Being a 4 core/ 8 threaded CPU with Gen11 Iris Plus 940 graphics it is accompanied by 16 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 512 GB SSD. GDP has provided some of the benchmark results of this configuration which you can check out below, however, please take these with a grain of salt. As far as I/O goes, this small laptop is rather well equipped with plenty of ports. There is one Thunderbolt 3 port to connect to external GPU is it is needed. There is one USB Type-C 3.1 Gen2 port and two USB Type-A 3.1 Gen1 ports for the connection of external peripherals. If you wish to connect the laptop to the outside screen, there are options of HDMI, USB Type-C or Thunderbolt 3 ports for connection. A welcome addition to I/O is the inclusion of the RJ45 connector, meaning that if you have access to ethernet you can easily plug it into this laptop.

Intel has been experimenting with a concept of mixing various types of cores in a single package with a design called Lakefield. With this processor, you would get a package of relatively small dimensions that are 12-by-12-by-1 millimeters withing very low TDP. Thanks to the Twitter user InstLatX64 (@InstLatX64) we have some GeekBench 5 results of the new Lakefield chip. The CPU in question is the Core i5-L15G7, a 5 core CPU without HyperThreading. The 5C/5T would be a weird configuration if only Lakefield wasn't meant for such configs. There are one "big" Sunny Cove core and four "small" Tremont cores built on the 10 nm manufacturing process. This is the so-called compute die, where only the CPU cores are present. The base dies containing other stuff like I/O controllers and PHYs, memory etc. is made on a low-cost node like 22 nm, where performance isn't the primary target. The whole chip is targeting the 5-7 W TDP range.

In the GeekBench 5 result we got, the Core i5-L15G7 is a processor that has a base frequency of 1.4 GHz, while in the test it reached as high as 2.95 GHz speeds. This is presumably for the big Sunny Cove cores, as Tremont cores are supposed to be slower. The cache configuration reportedly puts 1.5 MB of L2$ and 4 MB of L3$ for the CPUs. If we take a look at performance numbers, the chip scores 725 points in single-core tests, while the multi-core result is 1566 points. We don't know what is the targeted market and what it competes with, however, if compared to some offerings from Snapdragon, like the Snapdragon 835, it offers double the single-threaded performance with a similar multi-core score. If this is meant to compete with the more powerful Snapdragon offerings like the 8cx model, comparing the two results in Intel's fail. While the two have similar single-core performance, the Snapdragon 8cx leads by as much as 76.9% in a multi-core scenario, giving this chip a heavy blow.

The leading global motherboard & graphics card manufacturer, ASRock, a pleasure to launch brand new compact Mini PC - Mars Series. Supports up to Intel Core i5 Quad-Core processor, 32 GB DDR4-2666 MHz, PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD, 2.5-inch hard drive, and wireless connectivity; all implies into 0.7-liter chassis with 26 mm height.

ASRock Mars offers abundant USB devices connectivity, features a total of 7 USB ports, including one Type-C port; In addition, the native SD card reader and dual display outputs to provide more productive and convenience.

ZOTAC Technology, a global manufacturer of innovation, is excited to present exclusive unveiling of the newest innovation from ZOTAC and ZOTAC GAMING at CES 2019. Awaiting in ZOTAC's suite at Caesars Palace will be live demonstrations of the latest gaming and computing hardware, including the very first ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX liquid-cooling ready graphics card, a line-up of next-gen ZBOX Mini PCs, the MEK MINI Gaming PC, and much more.

THE SMALL AND STRONG GAMING PC

In the limelight at CES will be MEK MINI, the diminutive addition to the ZOTAC GAMING MEK Gaming PC series that challenges to be one of the world's smallest desktop gaming system with desktop-class performance. Alongside will be unique editions of MEK MINI with a splash of color that will debut exclusive to CES.

Intel's Next Unit of Computing (NUC) systems have always offered a great deal of performance in a tiny form factor. Their current lineup which consists of Hades Canyon features Intel's 8th generation of processors and depending on model can also feature an AMD Radeon RX VEGA M graphics processor, that said, the vast majority of units utilize Intel's integrated graphics. The most potent these configuration is Intel's 100W 4c/8t i7-8809G with Radeon RX Vega M GH graphics. It delivers exceptional performance for the size, allowing users to play AAA games at high settings with stable frame rates.

Thanks to a member of the PC EVA forums we now have access to what appears to be a leaked Intel roadmap showcasing their Ghost Canyon X NUC systems. Set to debut in 2019/2020 Intel will be pushing multiple new CPUs for these systems including a 45W 8c/16t i9-9xxxH, 45W 6c/12t i7-9xxxH, and 45W 4c/8t i5-9xxxH. All three feature UHD graphics by Intel, however, what is most interesting there provisions for a single PCIe X16 slot. Now, in reality, the inclusion of a proper PCIe slot is unlikely, I would speculate due to the size that it is, in fact, an MXM slot which limits options to discrete mobile graphics processors which tend to be far more expensive for consumers. Still, more information is required before making any serious judgments one way or the other at this time.

Apple today announced a slew of updates to there product lines including an all-new MacBook Air and Mac Mini. Starting with the MacBook Air, Apple has finally given the system a proper upgrade bringing it back to relevance after years of stagnation. These upgrades include a 13.3-inch Retina display, Intel's 8th generation Core i5 processor with UHD Graphics 617, up to 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 and SSDs with capacities up to 1.5 TB. In terms of design, the shell is made of 100% recycled aluminum with the entire system weighing in at just 2.75 lbs compared to the outgoing models 2.96 lbs.

On top of the various hardware improvements, Apple has also included their Touch ID fingerprint sensor which is paired with their T2 chip for a secure login much the same as the current MacBook Pro. These two inclusions, along with the T2 chips ability to deliver on-the-fly data encryption makes the MacBook Air one of the most secure notebooks on the market according to Apple. However, one thing missing here is the Touch Bar, which will likely make more than a few users happy. The keyboard also gets upgraded to the same third generation with butterfly mechanism used on the MacBook Pro lineup.

Axiomtek, one of the world's leading design and manufacturing companies of innovative, high performance and reliable PC-based industrial computer products, is proud to announce the launch of the eBOX560-512-FL, an embedded system powered by Intel Core i5-7300U or Celeron 3965U processors. The ultra-compact computer is packed with features in its small IP40 aluminum and steel enclosure. It offers scalable computing performance; rich graphical capabilities that support dual independent display of up to 4K resolution; flexible communication options; and thoughtful design that offers versatility and values for Industrial Internet of Things use. The system is made for smart factory automation, digital signage and smart retail applications or any applications that require a good balance of a high performance industrial-grade computer and a good price point - with space-serving design and rich features.

The eBOX560-512-FL comes with many communications options such as four USB 3.0 ports, two RS-232/422/485 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, one PCI Express Mini Card slot and two antenna. This tiny embedded PC offers two HDMI ports, a lockable 12 VDC power input with power protection feature and a user-friendly AT/ATX DIP switch for adjustments between automatic and manual operation control. The eBOX560-512-FL has 2.5" SATA HDD and one mSATA for data storage, and one 260-pin DDR4-2133 SO-DIMM socket with up to 16 GB system memory. It is compatible with Windows 10 IoT and supports Axiomtek's exclusive AXView 2.0 software for smart device monitoring and remote management for IoT applications. For flexible mounting options, this fanless rugged embedded platform is compatible with a wall mount, a VESA mount and a DIN-rail mount.

Kontron, a leading global provider of Embedded Computing Technology (ECT), introduces a new member of its high-end industrial computer platforms for control cabinet environments - the Kontron KBox C-102-4. The new model allows the integration of up to four PCIe expansions slots and is thus ideally suited for users requiring a large number of additional interfaces, industrial I/Os, or fieldbuses.

The KBox C-102 series is now available in four alternative design variants: the compact KBox C-102-0 without additional expansion slots, the KBox C-102-1 and KBox C-102-2 with one or two PCI(e) expansion slots respectively, and the new KBox C-102-4 with four PCI(e) expansion slots. The industrial computers are used mainly for control, visualization, and inspection in the production process.

In what could be a decisive response from Intel towards AMD's recent Ryzen success and core count democratization, reports are making the rounds that Intel is preparing for a shakedown of sorts of its i7 and i5 CPU line-up under the upcoming Coffee Lake architecture. We recently saw (and continue to see) AMD deliver much more interesting propositions than Intel in a pure power/performance/core ratio. And Intel seems to know that its lineup is in dire need of revision, if it wants to stop its market dominant position from bleeding too much.

A report from Canard PC claims that Intel will thoroughly revise its CPU lineup for the Coffee Lake architecture, with an i7-8700K six-core, 12-thread processor being the top offering. This 8700K is reported to deliver its 12 threads at a 3.7 GHz base clock, and a 95 W TDP. These are comparable to AMD's Ryzen 5 1600X processor, which ships with the same six cores and 12 threads under the same TDP, though it has 100 MHz less in base clock speed. However, AMD's Ryzen 5 1600X does retail for about $249 - and you can go even lower to Ryzen 5 1600's $219 - which probably won't happen with Intel's top of the line i7 offering. A slight mention towards the Ryzen 7's 95 W TDP - the same as this reported i7 8700K - even though it has 2 more physical cores, and 4 extra threads.