The Sennheiser brand today unveiled the HD 550, a Hi-fi headphone that balances revealing performance with effortlessly smooth tuning. Boasting sprawling stereo imaging and an ultra-light build, the HD 550 is an open invitation to unpack the lush layers of today's music and games for hours on end.

"Audiophiles looking for featherlight headphones with honest voicing and deep bass extension are in for a treat," said Klaus Hanselmann, Sennheiser Audiophile Product Manager. "While the HD 550's airy detail is obvious, customers will fall in love with its delightfully polite touch - perfect for listening for hours on end."

MSI today announced that its full 300-series motherboard lineup, which includes A320, B350 and X370 chipset-based motherboards, now support AMD's latest Zen 3 CPUs in the Ryzen 5000 series. The full support will be backed into BIOSes developed under the latest AMD AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.2.0.7 BIOS, which MSI expect to rollout for its 300-series motherboards from the middle of May this year.

This announcement from MSI builds upon AMD's own promises of research into adding support for more recent Ryzen architectures towards even the beginning steps in its AM4 ecosystem. In theory, users rocking older motherboards can now take advantage of AMD's latest developments in power, performance, and core density, deeply increasing - and confirming - the value proposition of AMD's AM4 platform. Alongside the announcement, MSI has also pledged to launch a fix for fTPM-based stuttering issues present in 400-series and 500-series AM4 motherboards towards June.

BIOSTAR, a leading brand of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices, today announced product support for the latest AMD Ryzen 5000G series Cezanne processors. AMD's next-generation Ryzen 5000G series desktop processors codenamed "Cezanne" are ready to invade the global market. The new 5000G series processors are based on Zen 3 architecture, AMD's Ryzen 5000 series of desktop APUs based on the Zen 3 CPU and Vega GPU microarchitectures succeeding the Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" series.

Extreme performance enabled for personal computing with up to 8 cores fueled by the world's most advanced 7 nm processor core technology, the AMD Ryzen 5000 G-series desktop processors with Radeon graphics deliver ultra-fast responsiveness and multi-threaded performance for any use case.

ASRock today unveiled the Thunderbolt 4 AIC, an add-on card that puts out two 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 4 ports in the USB-C form-factor, with DisplayPort 1.4 passthrough. The card works exclusively with ASRock's Intel 500-series chipset motherboards that have a special header needed by the card called "TBT_Header" (similar to the "TB_Header" on certain ASUS motherboards). In addition, the card needs a 9-pin USB 2.0 connection to one of the vacant headers on the motherboard.

The compact, yet full-height add-on card features a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 host interface, and is based on Intel JHL8540 "Maple Ridge" controller. It has two full-size DisplayPort 1.4 inputs, a pair of included DP cables lets you connect the card to your graphics card. The controller supports up to 5 devices in Thunderbolt daisy-chains. The DisplayPort passthrough supports resolutions of up to 5K @ 60 Hz. The card measures 8.4 cm in length, 10.41 cm in height, and is 1 slot thick. The company didn't reveal pricing.

MSI, the world leading gaming motherboard brand, will release optimized BIOS updates for AMD 500-Series and 400-Series motherboards. From now on, the BIOS based on AM4 Combo PI V2 1.2.0.2 for all MSI 500 and 400 series motherboards will be available for download until the end of April. Please refer to the following.

• Optimized compatibility for AMD 500-Series and 400-Series motherboards
• Improved USB device compatibility

MSI announced that it is bringing the PCI-SIG resizable base-address register (resizable BAR) support to a variety of older PC platforms, and not just the latest Intel 400-series and AMD 500-series. Among these are Intel 300-series, AMD 400-series, and AMD TRX40. This should come as a boon to those with 8th Gen and 9th Gen Core "Coffeee Lake" processors, such as the i9-9900K and i5-8400. Support is also being added to AMD X470 and AMD B450 chipset motherboards, however, this requires a compatible processor, and the latest beta UEFI firmware that supports them. Lastly, resizable-BAR support is making its way to the AMD TRX40 chipset (Socket sTRX4) Threadripper platform.

Resizable BAR is a feature that allows a processor to see the entire video memory of a discrete GPU as a single addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures. This has the potential to tangibly improve performance with certain games. Currently, AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series "Big Navi" GPUs; and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs support it. MSI is releasing UEFI firmware updates that add resizable-BAR support. Keep checking the "support" section of your motherboard's product page on the MSI website.

Intel at a January 11, 2021 online media event (which we live-blogged here) revealed more information about its 11th Generation Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processor family. These chips succeed the 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake-S," and are built on the same Socket LGA1200 package, retaining backwards compatibility with Intel 400-series chipset motherboards with firmware updates; and native support with the upcoming Intel 500-series chipset motherboards. Intel in its media event confirmed that the top Core i9-11900K is an 8-core/16-thread processor, which will deliver the highest PC gaming performance possible when it comes out.

In its media event, Intel revealed a side-by-side comparison of the i9-11900K with a machine powered by the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core processor, where it's shown offering a mostly mid-single-digit-percentage performance lead over the AMD chip. In the "Metro Exodus" benchmark prominently highlighted in the Intel event, the i9-11900K is shown offering an average frame-rate of 156.54 FPS compared to 147.43 FPS of the 5900X (a 6.17% gain). VideoCardz tweeted a leaked Intel presentation slide with many more game test results where Intel compared the two chips. Intel's play with marketing "Rocket Lake-S" to gamers and PC enthusiasts will hence ride on the back of gaming performance leadership, and future-proofing against the new wave of productivity apps that leverage AI deep-learning, as "Rocket Lake-S" features DLBoost VNNI extensions that accelerate deep-learning neural-net building, training, and AI inference performance.

MSI in a customer service response that's been machine translated and tweeted by harukaze5719, revealed that Intel's 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processors arrive "by the end of March." This is the first confirmation from someone in the know that "Rocket Lake-S" won't arrive before the very end of Q1-2021, and that one should realistically expect availability only from Q2.

The same CS response also confirms backwards compatibility of the processors with existing Socket LGA1200 motherboards based on the Intel 400-series chipset. It mentions that MSI will release UEFI firmware updates that enable "Rocket Lake-S" compatibility starting with boards based on the top Intel Z490 chipset, followed by other 400-series models. Intel is expected to unveil its 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processor and compatible 500-series chipset platform in mid-January, as part of a virtual event on the sidelines of the 2021 International CES (a virtual show).

In the run-up to its mid-January unveil of its 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processors and companion Intel 500-series chipsets, we get our first look at the three 500-series chipset models from Intel's stable for the DIY client market. This includes the top-tier Intel Z590, the mid-range B560, and the entry-level H510. Intel even made logos for the three chipsets, which could appear on the retail packaging and marketing materials of motherboards. While 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake-S" processors are expected to be backwards-compatible with existing 400-series chipset Socket LGA1200 motherboards; there are major advantages to choosing a 500-series motherboard.

To begin with, motherboards based on the Z590 chipset feature a fatter 8-lane DMI 3.0 chipset bus between the processor and the PCH, which doubles the chipset bus bandwidth to 64 Gbps per direction. 500-series chipset motherboards also feature one CPU-attached M.2 NVMe slot, which works with "Rocket Lake-S," as the processor puts out 28 PCIe lanes. 16 of these go toward the PEG interface, 8 toward the chipset bus, and four toward this dedicated NVMe slot. In related news, Chinese tech publication MyDrivers reports that Intel is staring at a motherboard chipset shortage going into Q1-2021, with availability of the entry-mid 400-series chipsets such as the H410 and B460 being scarce. This could impact motherboard pricing.

Intel's 11th Generation Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processor family could be formally unveiled in just a few weeks from now, with HotHardware reporting a 2021 International CES unveiling (virtual event), for both the processors and their companion Intel 500-series chipset motherboards. This would put the unveiling around mid-January for the virtual launch event.

Availability is a different story, with the report predicting that while the Intel 500-series chipset motherboards will be available from mid-January, the processors won't arrive until March. Older reports predicted a market availability of these processors to almost miss Q1, and spill over into Q2 (April-June). Since "Rocket Lake-S" is based on the current LGA1200 package, the Intel 500-series chipset motherboards are expected to support existing 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake-S" processors, along with out-of-the-box support for the 11th Gen.

AMD has announced they will be introducing Adaptive Undervolting tools for their precision Boost Overdrive software, available for the latest Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. This feature will be made available come launch of AGESA 1180 on 400-series and 500-series motherboards (estimated availability in early December), and will require a BIOS update to enable at the software level. According to AMD, this tool will dynamically calculate the precise amount of voltage required for a given task, analyzing internal sensors (such as workload, temperature, socket limits) and adapting voltage values on the fly at up to 1000 times a second.

This approach by AMD will bring a new age for CPU undervolting, which usually only allows for users to undervolt their CPU on the basis of the worst-case scenario: usually, the way undervolters work is by incrementally reducing the CPU's voltage and testing for stability via stress applications, gaming, or other specialized applications. This means that the CPU will have adequate juice so as not to fail in these scenarios - but of course, your CPU isn't always (in fact, it's almost never, depending on your specific use-case) using the full CPU processing power; this means that all other workloads where the CPU isn't under 100% utilization still have room for voltage reductions. With AMD's Adaptive Undervolting, this will now become possible.