AMD is expected to manufacture its reference-design Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 graphics cards only "through early 2021," according to a tweet by Scott Herkelman, Corporate VP and GM for the AMD Radeon brand, in response to a question by Daniel Rohrpasser. The "MBA" (made by AMD) reference-design cards will undergo production runs only until early 2021, beyond which the company will rely entirely on sales of custom-design boards by its add-in-board (AIB) partners to sell the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT.

Launch of custom-design RX 6800 series cards are closely following that of the MBA cards, which opened to sales on November 18. Most AMD AIB partners have already announced their custom-design RX 6800 series products. This isn't particularly unusual, as AMD tends to produce MBA cards only for the initial few months following a new GPU launch, beyond which custom-design cards are expected to take over sales. The MBA cards are sold through AIB partners, with negligible modifications such as brand stickers.

The global leading motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, announces its AMD B450 motherboards series will support next generation AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processors via BIOS update. The latest AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors come with a full suite of latest technologies designed to boost your PC's processing power. Update to the latest BIOS and get ready for the ultimate performance as well as latest technologies with AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors!

TEAMGROUP announced the T-FORCE ZEUS DDR4 U-DIMM Gaming Memory and SO-DIMM DDR4 Gaming Laptop Memory. Both possess a visually-striking design and are constructed with carefully selected, high-quality ICs. Each stick has up to 32 GB of memory and multiple frequency options, allowing you to maintain blazing speeds for your conquering foes.

The T-FORCE ZEUS DDR4 U-DIMM Gaming Memory features T-FORCE's iconic logo and a fierce thunderbolt design, symbolizing the awesome power of Zeus backing up the player. Built with a high-end integrated circuit, this memory module comes with up to 32 GB of RAM and frequency options ranging from DDR4 2666 to DDR4 3200. Say goodbye to complicated BIOS configuration as it supports overclock profiles, allowing you to switch speeds at a press of a button. You can also upgrade easily regardless of whether you use Intel or AMD processors.

AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card debuted yesterday and in the overall test results, we saw that it runs just a few percent behind NVIDIA's direct competitor - GeForce RTX 3080. However, when it comes to overclocking and world records, the card has just set one. Popular extreme overclocker Alva Jonathan aka "LUCKY_NOOB", has managed to overclock the Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU and set a new world record with the card. Paired with LN2 cooled Ryzen 9 5950X clocked at 5.4 GHz, the graphics card was cooled by... air cooler? Indeed it was. Lucky has managed to clock the RX 6800 XT at 2650 MHz using the reference air cooler. With that system, he managed to score 47932 points in 3DMark FireStrike.

The overclocker has modified 3DMark's tessellation to presumably give the Radeon card more performance, so the score isn't valid on the official 3DMark charts. What gives the overclocker an idea of a world record is the fact that HWBOT actually accepts those numbers, which ranks it higher than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card that scored 47725 points. Despite the modifications, it is impressive to see AMD's card rank that high, and as more overclockers are getting their hands on these cards, it is a question if we are going to see the 3 GHz barrier broken by a Radeon card.

MSI, a world-leading motherboard manufacturer, announces support for AMD's new SMART ACCESS MEMORY feature. SMART ACCESS MEMORY is an innovative feature. It allows the system to access the full capacity of the VRAM on the graphics card. Compare to the current solution which has 256 MB access limitation, this feature will provide the users better gaming experience.

For MSI motherboard users, enabling SMART ACCESS MEMORY is quite simple. It only takes a few clicks after updating the BIOS. Go to "Settings > Advanced > PCI Subsystem Settings", enable "Re-size BAR" and "Above 4G memory/Crypto Currency mining", press "F10", to save the settings and reboot. The requirement of this feature is pairing the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card with AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop processor. And don't forget to update the graphics card driver to the latest version as well. After these steps, this feature is online and ready to boost the gaming performance.

Alphacool presents the first Eisblock Aurora Acryl GPX-A block for the Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT reference graphics cards. The blocks offer outstanding cooling performance thanks to the full cover design. The new backplate, which is included with the coolers, also contributes to this. This stabilizes the graphics card and ensures an even contact pressure of the cooler. The cold plates are made of solid nickel-plated copper. The coolers cover all relevant components such as voltage converters and the graphics memory.

GIGABYTE launched the BRIX S line of desktop mini PCs powered by AMD Ryzen 4000U "Renoir" 15 W mobile processors. These mini-PCs are almost NUC-sized, measuring 46.8 mm x 119.5 mm x 119.5 mm (HxWxD), and pack a 2.5-inch SATA drive-bay in addition to an M.2-2280 slot with both PCI-Express 3.0 x4 and SATA 6 Gbps wiring. Connectivity is highlighted by four display outputs—one each of HDMI 2.0a, DisplayPort, and two USB-C with DP passthroughs. Networking connectivity includes 2.5 GbE and 802.11ax + Bluetooth 5.1 WLAN.

As for the specific models, the GB-BRR7H-4700 is powered by a Ryzen 7 4700U, the GB-BRR5H-4500 by a Ryzen 5 4500U, and the GB-BRR3H-4300 by the Ryzen 3 4300U. All three feature two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, and a vacant M.2-2280 slot, so you're expected to drop in your own memory and storage. All three include VESA mounting brackets, so you can tuck them behind your monitor, if it has VESA wall-mounts. The power bricks included with all three can put out 135 W of power. The company didn't reveal pricing.

The title says it all, really. We've only just been able to add AMD's latest RX 6800 and 6800 XT graphics cards to our shopping carts in multiple etailers, but the cat is already out of the bag and into scalpers' pockets. This has been a recurring event for all gaming-related tech, from DIY PC parts to the latest-gen games consoles from both Microsoft and Sony. At this point, it becomes moot to talk about availability issues, or demand issues, or reaching a conclusion between the two - the stock just isn't there for anything gaming-related, period.

Some etailers are only selling their graphics cards in-person, as a way to both control flow of stock and protect themselves from scalpers buying up the entire inventory with recourse to some digital sidekicks that automate the purchase process, and then allow them to resell anything from graphics cards from NVIDIA to AMD, passing through AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series and the Xbox Series X and PS5 gaming consoles.

EK, a leading computer cooling solutions provider, is proud to announce several Special Edition products that will mark the launch of the new AMD Radeon RX 6800 Series and Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards. As an official launch partner, EK has prepared, in close coordination with AMD, a special GPU water block, a heavy-duty AIO GPU cooling unit, and an entire liquid cooling kit. With the recent launch of the highly anticipated AMD Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processors that bring incredible IPC gains, EK made a special AM4 socket CPU water block as well.

"EK and AMD have combined forces to provide gamers with the liquid-cooled performance they are looking for with the new AMD Radeon graphics cards," said Scott Herkelman, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Graphics Business Unit at AMD. "EK's award-winning liquid cooling solutions are designed to offer a significant boost in thermal performance while staying silent, providing incredible gaming experiences for our customers."

Hot on the heels of its massive Radeon RX 6800 series graphics card launch, AMD released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.11.2 WHQL drivers. These drivers add support for the newly launched Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 graphics cards. It also adds optimization of "World of Warcraft: Shadowlands." The Vulkan ICD is expanded with a new extension, "VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate."

AMD also fixed a handful new bugs. To begin, hitching or stuttering caused by Radeon Instant Replay during fullscreen video playback has been fixed. Certain RX 500 series graphics cards not remembering fan settings after sleep has been fixed. With multiple multiple high refresh rate Radeon FreeSync displays connected to certain RX 500 series graphics cards, glitching was being noticed, which has been fixed. A case of stuttering when disabling performance metrics overlay in-game has also been fixed. Performance issues RX 5700 series cards were noticing with "Xuan-Yuan Sword VII" have been fixed. Mouse corruption in "Serious Sam 4," when changing graphics options in Vulkan API mode, has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.11.2 WHQLThe change-log follows.

AMD is launching their next-generation RX 6800 series of graphics cards on November 18th, these will be the first cards from AMD featuring the new RDNA 2 architecture. To coincide with the launch of RDNA 2 in consumer graphics cards AMD is launching a new tech demo titled "Hangar 21", the new demonstration will highlight the power of RDNA 2 with real-time raytracing effects enabled by AMD FidelityFX and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate. The "Hangar 21" tech demo will be launching on November 19th and you can view a short trailer of the tech demo down below.

AMDComing November 19, the "Hangar 21" Technology Demo Video will let you see the breakthrough AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture in action, the foundation of the AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards that power the next generation of gaming with mind-blowing visuals featuring realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections enabled by AMD FidelityFX and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate.

The security of PCs has been an issue in the past few years as cyber-attack methods have been undergoing a transformation to hardware-specific malware that exploits different vulnerabilities of CPUs. That is why Microsoft, the developer of the most popular operating system, Windows 10, decided to engineer a hardware processor that will protect the OS and its user by having a specific job of maintaining the platform security. In collaboration with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, Microsoft is today introducing the Pluton security processor. The collaborator companies are going to integrate the new Pluton processor inside their CPUs and thus embed a new level of security in their PCs.

MicrosoftOur vision for the future of Windows PCs is security at the very core, built into the CPU, where hardware and software are tightly integrated in a unified approach designed to eliminate entire vectors of attack. This revolutionary security processor design will make it significantly more difficult for attackers to hide beneath the operating system, and improve our ability to guard against physical attacks, prevent the theft of credential and encryption keys, and provide the ability to recover from software bugs.

HyperX, the gaming division of Kingston Technology, Inc., today announced new single rank 16Gbit1 based HyperX FURY DDR4 RGB memory SKU additions. FURY DDR4 RGB memory delivers a boost of performance and style with sleek heat spreaders and dynamic, synchronized RGB lighting effects using patented HyperX Infrared Sync Technology.

HyperX FURY DDR4 RGB memory offers a Plug N Play feature for automatic overclocking to the highest published frequency within the system speed allowance, eliminating the need for manual tuning. Offering seamless compatibility, FURY DDR4 RGB is certified Ready for AMD Ryzen and Intel XMP-ready. Users can also customize RGB lighting effects using HyperX NGENUITY software.

PowerColor today has finally taken the lid off most of its RX 6800 XT Red Devil graphics card. As expected, we're looking at a triple-fan custom cooling solution with black looks and red and orange LED accents (whether or not these can be customized according to your rig's color scheme remains unclear). The front of the card really does look like the teeth of some devilish creature.

Rumor place the PowerColor RX 6800 XT Red Devil as launching as early as next week, a very sort amount of time since the first, AMD reference-designed graphics cards hit the market (that's tomorrow, by the way). The RX 6800 XT has been painted by AMD as delivering comparable performance to NVIDIA's RTX 3080 graphics card at a better thermal design power and with a more robust memory subsystem, so PowerColor, as one of AMD's most recognizable board partners, should be in for huge demand if events so unfold.

The global leading motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, launched its AMD Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards, including Taichi, Phantom Gaming, and the Challenger product series. From the high-end Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X 16G OC, the mid-level Radeon RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming D 16G OC and Radeon RX 6800 Phantom Gaming D 16G OC, to the mainstream Radeon RX 6800 Challenger Pro 16G OC, the complete product line gives users the most variety of choices.

ASRock's AMD Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards leverage 7 nm process technology and AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture, and support the DirectX 12 Ultimate software standard and hardware-accelerated raytracing. The product line features 16 GB of 256-bit GDDR6 memory, and also supports the latest PCI Express 4.0 bus standard. It adopts ASRock's custom "Striped Axial Fan" and Polychrome SYNC ARGB LEDs, with outstanding pre-overclocked GPU clock settings and rich additional features. The performance of ASRock's AMD Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards provide gamers with an excellent 4K gaming experience.

The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve. Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all 500 systems grew from 2.22 exaflops in June to just 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. Likewise, average concurrency per system barely increased at all, growing from 145,363 cores six months ago to 145,465 cores in the current list.

Der8auer has picked up Intel's latest TEC cooler, built in conjunction with EKWB, and unceremoniously plopped it right into an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU. Well, not completely unceremoniously - there were many accommodations that had to be made in order to achieve this. For one, as this is a solution designed specifically for Intel CPUs and sockets, Der8auer had to Frankenstein his way through a number of cooling parts to be able to adapt the TEC solution to the AM4 socket. Not only that, but Intel's TEC requires deep software control for it to work properly - software control which only works with Intel silicon, of course. Der8auer thus had to have a second machine running an Intel 10900K CPU to control the software on the Intel cryo cooler.

All in all, the results were interesting, to say the least. The 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X saw single-core-load CCD temperatures in the 90 °C department with the TEC solution disabled - which promptly dropped down to only 50 °C with the cryo cooler actually operating. With a game load, the 5959X achieved up to 5.050 GHz in single-cores on its automatic boost profile. The entire chip often boosted to 4.8 - 4.9 GHz on all cores at once (with variances between the CCDs) whilst under this cooling solution and workload. With the TEC operating in its unregulated mode - which means, with no considerations for CPU operating temperature and power usage for the cooling process - saw the Ryzen 9 5950X achieving 2 °C core temperature results, and boosted frequencies up to a staggering 5323 MHz on all cores - before crashing. An interesting piece of work which you catch on video after the break; one can rest assured that most PC cooling specialists are already working on their own TEC-based cooling solutions following Intel's achievement in this field.

AMD today announced the new AMD Instinct MI100 accelerator - the world's fastest HPC GPU and the first x86 server GPU to surpass the 10 teraflops (FP64) performance barrier. Supported by new accelerated compute platforms from Dell, Gigabyte, HPE, and Supermicro, the MI100, combined with AMD EPYC CPUs and the ROCm 4.0 open software platform, is designed to propel new discoveries ahead of the exascale era.

Built on the new AMD CDNA architecture, the AMD Instinct MI100 GPU enables a new class of accelerated systems for HPC and AI when paired with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors. The MI100 offers up to 11.5 TFLOPS of peak FP64 performance for HPC and up to 46.1 TFLOPS peak FP32 Matrix performance for AI and machine learning workloads. With new AMD Matrix Core technology, the MI100 also delivers a nearly 7x boost in FP16 theoretical peak floating point performance for AI training workloads compared to AMD's prior generation accelerators.

Colorful, a Chinese manufacturer of PC components known for its graphics cards, is apparently preparing a special RAM version for AMD's Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. The new arrival is part of the iGame series that Colorful offers. Thanks to SMZDM forums, we have specifications of the upcoming iGame RAM tuned specifically for Ryzen 5000 series processors. Coming in with all white PCB without a heat spreader, the new Colorful iGame memory features Samsung's B-dies designed for maximum speed and performance. The dies are running at 4000 MT/s with some very strict timings. The memory features C14 (14-14-14-35) timings that are supposed to bring the system latency down and improve performance even further. It is estimated that such a configuration will require 1.5 Volts to power it. While the exact name, launch date, and pricing is unknown, we can only wait and see how Colorful plays it out.

As part of its road towards release of their Radeon RX 6000 series, AMD has posted a video showcasing the raytracing effects that are being baked into World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. This comes as a result of a strategic partnership between the two companies. World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will be making use of AMD's FidelityFX Ambient Occlusion, where Blizzard says they were able to achieve "(...)a perfect balance between quality and performance..." which allowed them to achieve "(...)a significant performance advantage over our previous ambient occlusion applications."

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will also be making use of DXR Raytracing technology as well as Variable Rate Shading (VRS). Raytracing is being used to calculate light interactions between light sources, objects and characters on the screen, while VRS will enable the game to reduce shading resolution on areas closer to the corners of the frame, or in fast-moving objects, where detail would be lost either way, to achieve higher frame rates. The higher the resolution, the more impactful the benefits of VRS. So it seems that Blizzard has decided to implement two performance-increasing and one performance-decreasing features available from the DXR repository. Catch the video explaining these features and showcasing their implementation after the break.

AMD's Smart Access Memory (SAM) is a new technology that AMD decided to launch with its Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs. The technology aims to solve the problem where a CPU can only access a fraction of GPU VRAM at once, making some bottlenecks in the system. By utilizing the bandwidth of PCIe, the SAM expands its data channels and uses all the speed that the PCIe connection offers. However, it appears that AMD might not be the only company offering such technology. Thanks to Gamer's Nexus, they got a reply from NVIDIA regarding a technology similar to AMD's SAM.

NVIDIA responded that: "The capability for resizable BAR is part of the PCI Express spec. NVIDIA hardware supports this functionality and will enable it on Ampere GPUs through future software updates. We have it working internally and are seeing similar performance results." And indeed, it has been a part of the PCIe specification since 2008. This document dating to 2008 says that "This optional ECN adds a capability for Functions with BARs to report various options for sizes of their memory mapped resources that will operate properly. Also added is an ability for software to program the size to configure the BAR to." Every PCIe compatible device can enable it with the driver update through the software.

AMD's Executive Vice President Rick Bergman in an interview with The Street shed some light on the company's future plans for Zen 4 and RDNA 3, even as we are still reeling from (or coming in to) Zen 3 and RDNA 2's launches. Speaking on RDNA 3, Rick Bergman mentioned the company's commitment to achieve the same 50% performance-per-watt increase they achieved with RDNA 2, and had some interesting takes on the matter of why this is actually one of the most important metrics:

Rick BergmanIt just matters so much in many ways, because if your power is too high -- as we've seen from our competitors -- suddenly our potential users have to buy bigger power supplies, very advanced cooling solutions. And in a lot of ways, very importantly, it actually drives the [bill of materials] of the board up substantially. This is a desktop perspective. And invariably, that either means the retail price comes up, or your GPU cost has to come down. We focused on that for RDNA 2. It's a big focus on RDNA 3 as well.

XFX, via its official Twitter account, has started teasing their own interpretation of AMD's upcoming Navi 21-based graphics cards, in the form of the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800. XFX has fallen into slight obscurity ever since its NVIDIA-exclusive days, but the company still manages to hold on to a somewhat cult following for its products. It appears XFX is staying with its THICC series nomenclature for this upcoming generation of graphics cards, as the cooler shroud mostly follows the same design philosophy as that found on the company's RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 graphics cards - with some minimal aesthetic changes.

We're seemingly looking at a full-custom triple-fan design, with a shortened PCB compared to the entire shroud's size. We'll have to wait an additional one or two weeks after November 18th, the official release for AMD's next generation of graphics cards. Only a week to go.

AMD has just recently announced its next-generation Radeon RX 6000 series GPU based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. The architecture is set to compete with NVIDIA Ampere architecture and highest offerings of the competing company. Today, thanks to the well-known leaker TUM_APISAK, we have some Geekbench OpenCL scores. It appears that some user has gotten access to the system with the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs, running Cinebench 4.4 OpenCL tests. In the tests, the system ran on the Intel platform with Core i9-10900K CPU with 16 GB DDR4 RAM running at 3600 MHz. The motherboard used was ASUS top-end ROG Maximus XII Extreme Z490 board.

When it comes to results, the system with RX 6800 GPU scored anywhere from 347137 points to 336367 points in three test runs. For comparison, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 scores about 361042 points, showcasing that the Radeon card is not faster in any of the runs. When it comes to the higher-end Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU, it scored 407387 and 413121 points in two test runs. Comparing that to GeForce RTX 3080 GPU that scores 470743 points, the card is slower compared to the competition. There has been a Ryzen 9 5950X test setup that boosted the performance of Radeon RX 6800 XT card by quite a lot, making it reach 456837 points, making a huge leap over the Intel-based system thanks to the Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology that all-AMD system provides.

According to the unknown manufacturer (AIB) based in Taiwan, NVIDIA is preparing to launch the new GeForce RTX 3000 series "Ampere" graphics card. As reported by the HKEPC website, the Santa Clara-based company is preparing to fill the gap between its top-end GeForce RTX 3090 and a bit slower RTX 3080 graphics card. The new product will be called GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. If you are wondering what the specification of the new graphics card will look like, you are in luck because the source has a few pieces of information. The new product will be based on GA102-250-KD-A1 GPU core, with a PG133-SKU15 PCB design scheme. The GPU will contain the same 10496 CUDA core configuration as the RTX 3090.

The only difference to the RTX 3090 will be a reduced GDDR6X amount of 20 GB. Along with the 20 GB of GDDR6X memory, the RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards will feature a 320-bit bus. The TGP of the card is limited to 320 Watts. The sources are reporting that the card will be launched sometime in January of 2021, and it will come at $999. This puts the price category of the RTX 3080 Ti in the same range as AMD's recently launched Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card, so it will be interesting to see how these two products are competing.