The upcoming EVGA Z390 DARK is designed from the ground up to be the world's best overclocking motherboard. Need proof? The EVGA Z390 DARK was recently used by Finland Overclocker, Juhani Luumi AKA LUUMI to set a brand new CINEBENCH 8-Core CPU World Record. Armed with an Intel Core i9-9900K, and EVGA Z390 DARK Motherboard and Liquid Nitrogen Cooling, LUUMI was able to clock his CPU to nearly 7GHz and achieve a score of 3142 cb. A new CINEBENCH 8-Core CPU World Record!

Sony's announcement of the Playstation team skipping E3 2019 took everyone by surprise aside from a few on Reddit who had paid attention to a thread created the day before. Reddit user RuthenicCookie seemed to know a lot more about Sony's plans for their popular game console for the next few years, as well as game titles supporting this current console generation and the next. Amidst a lot of the tasty rumor bits that should interest console gamers, something more relevant to us directly is the mention of the Playstation 5 to continue using AMD for processing power.

This is a logical move to just about everyone familiar with the industry, and Sony needed to up the CPU horsepower in particular to compete with the XBOX One X and offer a true 4K/60 FPS solution for gaming without framerate drops galore. As such, said redditor shared information saying that the current plans involve an 8-core Ryzen-based processor and an estimated console price point of $500. Sony may well share a teaser about the console next year, with retail availability expected in the holiday season 2020 (two years from now, thus). As such, developer kits are likely already ready meaning the specs are finalized as well. This may mean we will see either the first or second gen Ryzen APUs, and not Ryzen 2 as many may have hoped. No word yet on what Microsoft is cooking in their side of the kitchen, but incremental console updates means we may see a Ryzen 2-powered console sooner than later as well.

The folks at hardwareluxx managed to get some quality alone time with AMD's Ryzen demonstration boot at CES 2017, and it has to be said they used their time well. They managed to bring up Windows' System page, as well as its Device Manager, which seemingly confirmed that the Ryzen sample at use, though an engineering sample it was, was set at 3.6 GHz base clock with the capability to boost up to 3.9 GHz on a whim - up 200 MHz from the base clock speed of the sample used at AMD's New Horizon Event, where even at those speeds, the chip was shown beating an 8 core, 16 thread i7 6900K. You can see those clocks at the below screenshot, where "1D3601A2M88F3_39/36_N" (the code for the engineering sample Ryzen chip) makes it clear this is an F3 stepping processor, with the 39 referring to the boost clock, and the 36 referring to its base clock.

This goes right into AMD's claims of 3.4 GHz being the lowest frequency a Ryzen consumer processor would carry. It seems AMD is quickly galloping towards the finish line here, and as Lisa Su said at the New Horizon presentation, Ryzen chips can only improve until their promised launch, with an already rumored F4 stepping of the processor carrying a rounded-up, 4 GHz boost clock.

Another day, another Intel leak and a few surprises as well. During the last few days we covered Intel's desktop roadmap for the next twelve months, bringing you news and insights on Intel's plans for the aforementioned time interval. Today we bring you news on what's to follow in the second half of 2014, specifically, on Intel's Premium Desktop plans for the interval, namely Haswell-E, DDR4 and the X99 PCH.

Haswell-E will be Intel's last and best offering using the 22 nm fabrication process, it will come in two versions, core count wise, 8 core part(s) as well as 6 core part(s) with hyper-threading enabled, therefore, boasting no less that 16 execution threads for the 8 core chips and 12 execution threads for the 6 core version(s). Judging by that alone, Haswell-E should constitute a far superior upgrade over Ivy Bridge-E, compared to what the latter will be in relation to Sandy Bridge-E, Haswell-E offering two additional physical cores that translate into four additional execution threads. The new chips will boast 2.5 MB of L3 Cache per core, summing up to 20 MB total L3 cache for the 8 core parts. TDP will remain in the same neighborhood it was in the case of its predecessors, around 130-140 W.

EVGA kicked off its limited edition GeForce GTX 560 448 cores graphics card lineup with a bang, with models boasting of two of its top-end brand markers, Classified and FTW. The EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Classified (model: 012-P3-2068-KR) features a premium design that makes use of a dual-fan cooler by EVGA, and high clock speeds of 792 MHz core, 1584 MHz CUDA cores, and 975 MHz (3.90 GHz effective) memory. Its display outputs include two DVI and a mini-HDMI.

The next card is the EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW (model: 012-P3-2066-KR). It makes use of a more cost-effective non-reference card design that has been used on the EVGA GTX 570 HD, but features the same exact clock speeds out of the box as the Classified (792/1584/975 MHz). Its display outputs include two DVI, and one each of HDMI and DisplayPort, both standard sized. Both cards are 3-way SLI capable. The EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Classified is priced at US $299.99, while the EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW goes for $289.99.

The latest Sandy Bridge-E 6 core processors have just been released, to excellent reviews. However, the architecture is designed for 8 cores, so these current i7-3960X & i7-3930K processors actually contain those 8 cores, but with two turned off in order to enable them to fit within a manageable 130 W power envelope. Hence there's quite a bit more potential to be released and soon. Therefore, anyone looking to invest in the premium-priced SB-E platform right now, should note that these processors are at the initial C1 stepping and have the VT-d hardware virtualization issue and PCI-E 3.0 compatibility uncertainty. The VT-d problem will be a real show stopper where hardware acceleration of a virtual machine is a must, so it shouldn't be ignored.

VR-ZONE brings us news that the fully unlocked SB-E 8 core chips will be released as the long awaited Xeon E5 family of processors, which will be built on the C2 stepping, solving the above issues. However, being 8 core, these will be very power hungry indeed, consuming around 150 W at just 3 GHz with all 8 cores active and 20 MB of L3 cache. At 2.5 GHz though, the new processors are expected to fit within the 95 W power envelope.

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2011, AMD made its revival of the FX brand identifier official. The company steered clear of actually launching anything, but reran the audience through the AMD Bulldozer architecture, something AMD first did way back in August 2010 (yeah, it's been that long!). Knowing the audience needed a lot more than just that, AMD ran live demos of gaming PCs running the new FX series processors, again, without giving away any performance figures.

AMD first showed the final box art design. The box of the eight-core FX Black Edition processor is a classy metal canister, while the quad-core FX chip is housed in a more common-looking paperboard box, the design of which matches the one revealed in a box-art exposé back in March. The gaming rigs shown run the eight-core FX processor on an ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard, with Radeon HD 6900 series graphics, with an Eyefinity display setup.

Following the news which we covered here, Hexus.net has got hold of a slide which officially details Intel's new 8-core Enterprise Xeon processor. Codenamed Nehalem EX, it will feature 8 processing cores, with 2 threads per core, totaling 16 threads and as had been previously said, a transistor count of 2.3 Billion. This information was obtained as part of a pre-ISSCC conference call, but more information is expected to be officially announced at the start of the ISSCC on 8th February.