Another MSI interpretation of AMD's RX 5700 graphics card has been taken out of the bag. This time, on the form of the Mech OC series, which carries a dual-slot, dual-fan configuration not dissimilar to MSI's Ventus graphics cards, but with a darker color palette. The design is appealing, even if fully in plastic save for the backplate, which is full black and has some white strips to add a little more interest to the otherwise blank surface. The MSI Radeon RX 5700 Mech OC graphics card ships with 3x DisplayPort 1.4 and 1x HDMI 2.0 ports, and will join other MSI custom design mainstays in the company's portfolio for AMD-based hardware.

Users that don't want to play the silicon lottery game have been using services that offer pre-binned and pre-overclocked chips for a while now. Silicon Lottery is one of the most well known players in this game, but German retailer Caseking is now offering the same for AMD's latest Ryzen 3000 processors. AMD's work on automatic overclocking and boost clocks for their Ryzen chips has rendered manual overclocking almost (read: almost) obsolete, and in some cases it may even be detrimental to the CPU's performance to set a manual overclock that overrides AMD's boost clock algorithm. This is because AMD's boost increases speed on a single core, with subsequent cores being clocked slightly lower according to their capabilities. In effect, this means that manually overclocking all cores to, say, 4.0 GHz can sometimes render lower performance in particular tasks, since the all-core overclock is, by necessity, handicapped by the least-overclockable core.

Caseking's offerings have been pre-overclocked, and are guaranteed to hit stable overclocks at the claimed frequency, thus saving users from getting a "bad" overclocker CPU from AMD. Caseking's offerings have been tested by their own King Mod team and overclocking superstar Roman "der8auer" Hartung, with Prime95 26.6 software being used to test the overclocked chips' stability with a FFT length of 1344 for at least one hour. This practice is backed by a two-year limited warranty on the CPU. Sadly, most CPUs are out of stock at the moment, so keep on checking availability, unless one of the offerings is exactly up your alley.

AMD this Monday in a blog post demystified the boosting algorithm and thermal management of its new Radeon RX 5700 series "Navi" graphics cards. These cards are beginning to be available in custom-designs by AMD's board partners, but were only available as reference-design cards for over a month since their 7th July launch. The thermal management of these cards spooked many early adopters accustomed to seeing temperatures below 85 °C on competing NVIDIA graphics cards, with the Radeon RX 5700 XT posting GPU "hotspot" temperatures well above 100 °C, regularly hitting 110 °C, and sometimes even touching 113 °C with stress-testing application such as Furmark. In its blog post, AMD stated that 110 °C hotspot temperatures under "typical gaming usage" are "expected and within spec."

AMD also elaborated on what constitutes "GPU Hotspot" aka "junction temperature." Apparently, the "Navi 10" GPU is peppered with an array of temperature sensors spread across the die at different physical locations. The maximum temperature reported by any of those sensors becomes the Hotspot. In that sense, Hotspot isn't a fixed location in the GPU. Legacy "GPU temperature" measurements on past generations of AMD GPUs relied on a thermal diode at a fixed location on the GPU die which AMD predicted would become the hottest under load. Over the generations, and starting with "Polaris" and "Vega," AMD leaned toward an approach of picking the hottest temperature value from a network of diodes spread across the GPU, and reporting it as the Hotspot.

AMD today released Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.8.1 drivers as the first custom-design Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards took to the shelves. The drivers add Microsoft PlayReady 3.0 DRM support for the RX 5700 series. The drivers also fix several issues but don't even acknowledge the elevated idle fan-speeds on reference RX 5700-series graphics cards, in what is shaping up to be a bait-and-switch tactic that's unbecoming of a company like AMD. Among the resolved bugs are color corruption noticed upon install of Radeon Software on Windows 10 May 2019 Update (1903) without Windows Update KB4505903 in place.

A black screen noticed on RX 5700 series with automatic memory overclocking enabled in games with full-screen display settings, has also been fixed. The drivers also fix Radeon Chill settings not being in sync with game profiles changed in-game using Radeon Overlay. Radeon AntiLag slightly impacting performance in some games has also been fixed. Uninstalling RX 5700 drivers on Windows 7 machines resulting in a black-screen has also been fixed. ReLive recording not working correctly on Windows 7 with RX 5700 series has also been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.8.1 Beta

The change-log follows.

With ever increasing number of exploits, processor manufacturers are finding new and improved ways to secure their system against such dangers. Exploits can be found on hardware and software level, but ones on hardware level are harder to patch and protect against. If you remember Spectre and Meltdown, they used CPU's branch speculation to enforce unwanted instruction stream. At software/firmware level we also got a fair number of exploits like recent "Screwed Drivers" incident, where drivers signed and approved by Microsoft are susceptible to privilege escalation.

However, AMD has patented a new way for protecting GPU memory instruction against faults by using a new system method. The proposed method uses system's "master and slave" devices and manipulates their instruction streams and check for any errors in the process. Firstly, the proposed system converts "slave" device request to dummy operations like NOP (No OPeration) is, and modifies the memory arbiter to issue N master and N slave global/shared memory instructions per cycle, sending master memory requests to memory system. Then it uses slave requests to check for errors and enter master requests in to memory FIFO aka First In First Out memory buffer. Slave request is stored in a register. Finally two values from register, where slave request was stored, and FIFO are compared to see if there are any differences.

AMD over the weekend updated the product-pages of its Ryzen processors on the company website to be very specific about what they mean by "Max Boost Clocks," that are advertised almost as extensively as the processor's main nominal clock-speeds. AMD describes it has "the maximum single-core frequency at which the processor is capable of operating under nominal conditions." We read into this as the highest boost-clock given to one of the cores on the processor.

If you've been reading the "clock-frequency and boost analysis" charts in our processor reviews, you'll know that AMD processors spread their boost frequency progressively across cores during a multi-threaded workload that scales across all cores. At any given time, only one of the cores is awarded the highest boost clock, and while the other cores too get boosted beyond the nominal clock-speeds, they are in slight decrements of 25-50 MHz. The graph below is from our Ryzen 7 3700X review. The second graph below is from our Core i9-9900K review, which too shows only one of the cores getting the max boost frequency, and the remaining cores getting lower boost clocks, although the graph looks flatter.

GIGABYTE has prepared its Gaming OC variant of AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card. The card features a PCB that is very similar to the reference model with 8+6 pin power connectors. However, it features an updated triple-fan cooler design in a 2.5 slot thick body and standard set of I/O, meaning that three DisplayPorts and one HDMI port are present. The card also has applied factory overclock, but exact details of frequency and card's availability are unknown so far. The AORUS model is yet to be released, nonetheless, we can hope to see it soon as well.

HIS is ready with its Radeon RX 5700 XT IceQ X2 graphics card. The card combines a custom-design cooling solution with a PCB designed by Pine Group (XFX' parent company). It has the same exact PCB as the one the XFX RX 5700 XT THICC II comes with. The PCB is close-to-reference in design, with small changes near the power-connector area. It also features dual-BIOS. The card's cooling solution, too, resembles the XFX THICC II, with the exception for its shroud and back-plate design. The shroud and back-plate don't fuse over a metal extension like it does on the XFX card. The back-plate is dominated by a HIS "roaring lion" graphic. The card ticks at AMD-reference speeds of 1905 MHz boost and 14 Gbps (GDDR6-effective) memory. Like most other custom-design RX 5700-series graphics cards, this one will launch mid-August.

We're willing to bet that whoever came up with the name "Fatboy" for a 3-slot thick RX 590 graphics card at XFX, is also behind the new Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC II. This 3-slot "thick" RX 5700 XT is characterized by a symmetric combination of cooler shroud and back-plate, which fuse at the card's tail end into a chrome grille, which probably explains the name THICC (a slang for people voluptuous below the waist). Under all this, the card uses a custom-design PCB that's somewhat similar to the reference-design, with minor modifications near the power inputs (upside down connectors to help with clearance with the tall cooler), and the use of conventional cylindrical capacitors.

A pair of 100 mm fans ventilate a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink underneath the shroud. The card probably features idle fan-stop. The heatsink consists of two aluminium fin-stacks arranged along the ends of a few copper heat pipes that make direct contact with the GPU. The clock-speeds of this card are not known, since the box doesn't appear to have any "OC" markings. Like most other AMD add-in board (AIB) partners, XFX is expected to launch the Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC II and its other cost-effective sibling some time mid-August.

Samsung Electronics, Ltd., has taken its leadership position in the memory market a step further today by announcing support of the Samsung PM1733 PCIe Gen4 Solid State Drive (SSD) and high density RDIMM and LRDIMM dynamic random access memory (DRAM) for the AMD EPYC 7002 Generation Processors. AMD launched the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor in San Francisco yesterday.

"AMD has listened to the needs of its customers in developing the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors and has worked closely with us to integrate the best of our cutting-edge memory and storage products," said Jinman Han, senior VP of Memory Product Planning, Samsung Electronics. "With these new datacenter processors, AMD is providing customers with a processor that enables a new standard for the modern datacenter."

AMD in its 2nd generation EPYC processor launch event announced that it has completed the design phase of its next-generation "Zen 3" CPU microarchitecture, and is currently working on its successor, the "Zen 4." AMD debuted its "Zen 2" microarchitecture with the client-segment 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processor family, it made its enterprise debut with the 2nd generation EPYC. This is the first x86 CPU microarchitecture designed for the 7 nanometer silicon fabrication process, and is being built on a 7 nm DUV (deep ultraviolet) node at TSMC. It brings about double-digit percentage IPC improvements over "Zen+."

The "Zen 3" microarchitecture is designed for the next big process technology change within 7 nm, EUV (extreme ultraviolet), which allows significant increases in transistor densities, and could facilitate big improvements in energy-efficiency that could be leveraged to increase clock-speeds and performance. It could also feature new ISA instruction-sets. With "Zen 3" passing design phase, AMD will work on prototyping and testing it. The first "Zen 3" products could debut in 2020. "Zen 4" is being designed for a different era.

Ahead of its launch, the press-deck of ASUS' premium custom-design Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card, the ROG Strix RX 5700 XT OC, was leaked to the web by VideoCardz, revealing some fascinating details. Out of the box, the card ships with clock-speeds of 1770 MHz base, 1905 MHz "game clock," and 2010 MHz boost clock, which are closer to AMD's reference-design boost clocks. A software-activated "OC mode," which requires you to install the GPU Tweak software, runs the card at 1840 MHz base, 1965 MHz game clock, and 2035 MHz boost clock. The card features dual-BIOS, which have identical clock-speeds, but change the fan-behavior. Both BIOSes enable idle fan-stop, but one of them reduces fan-speeds when gaming, compared to the other, trading temperatures for noise.

The ROG Strix RX 5700 XT OC is a purely custom-design RX 5700 XT graphics card, with a custom-design PCB that's larger than AMD's reference-design, and features a 14-phase VRM (11-phase vGPU and 3-phase vMem). ASUS deployed its latest Super Alloy Power II (SAP II) component selection, consisting of chokes that don't buzz or whine; and high quality DrMOS. The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and features a combination of three DisplayPorts and one HDMI. The card also puts out a 4-pin/3-pin RGB/ARGB header, and two 4-pin PWM case-fan headers. The DirectCU III cooling solution features a mirror-finish base that makes contact with the GPU. ASUS claims that the card is 32 percent quieter than the reference-design, and runs 18 percent cooler. It's also 4.7 percent faster than the reference-design

Update Aug 12th: Our review of the ASUS Radeon RX 5700 XT STRIX OC is live now.More slides follow.

SK Hynix Inc. announced today that its DRAM and Enterprise SSD (eSSD) solutions, including the up-to-date 1Y nm 8 Gb DDR4 DRAM, have been fully tested and validated with the new AMD EPYC 7002 Generation Processors, which were unveiled during AMD's launch event on August 7. The Company has worked closely with AMD to provide memory solutions fully compatible with the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Processors, targeting high performance data centers.

The SK Hynix DDR4 DRAM supports the maximum speed of 3200 Mbps of the 2nd Gen EPYC Processors, which will increase memory performance more than 20% compared to the 1st Gen AMD EPYC Processors. The Company's various DDR4 DRAM solutions, based on the 1Xnm and 1Y nm technology with density of 8 Gb and 16 Gb, have been fully tested and validated with the 2nd Gen EPYC Processors. SK Hynix provides high-density DIMMs with density over 64 GB to support up to 64 cores per socket in the 2nd Gen EPYC.

SK Hynix also provides a full line-up of SATA and PCIe from 480 GB to 8 TB, which have also been validated and tested with the 2nd Gen EPYC. SK Hynix's eSSD solutions are optimized for the latest data center's read-intensive and mixed workload environment.

ENERMAX, a leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance PC hardware products, introduces LIQMAX III RGB, which is an extended product from LIQMAX III series. LIQMAX III RGB features a luminous RGB fan and Aurabelt water block designed to support synchronizable RGB lighting with RGB motherboards from ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI. Compatible with both Intel and AMD CPU sockets (except socket TR4/SP3), LIQMAX III RGB would be your top choice to experience the harmonious RGB lighting effects.

The premium Aurabelt water block and hub-lighting RGB fan provide vivid RGB illumination and are able to support RGB lighting synchronization with motherboards that come with 4 pin RGB header(s) (12V/G/R/B). Users can select the preferred lighting styles via the RGB motherboard software.

At a launch event today, AMD was joined by an expansive ecosystem of datacenter partners and customers to introduce the 2nd Generation AMD EPYC family of processors that deliver performance leadership across a broad number of enterprise, cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors feature up to 64 "Zen 2" cores in leading-edge 7 nm process technology to deliver record-setting performance while helping reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 50% across numerous workloads. At the event, Google and Twitter announced new 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor deployments and HPE and Lenovo announced immediate availability of new platforms.

"Today, we set a new standard for the modern datacenter with the launch of our 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors that deliver record-setting performance and significantly lower total cost of ownership across a broad set of workloads," said Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. "Adoption of our new leadership server processors is accelerating with multiple new enterprise, cloud and HPC customers choosing EPYC processors to meet their most demanding server computing needs."

AMD invited TechPowerUp to their launch event and editor's day coverage of Zen 2 EPYC processors based on the 7 nm process. The event was a day-long affair which included product demos and tours, and capped off with an official launch presentation which we are able to share with you live as the event goes on. Zen 2 with the Ryzen 3000-series processors ushered in a lot of excitement, and for good reason too as our own reviews show, but questions remained on how the platform would scale to the other end of the market. We already knew, for example, that AMD secured many contracts based on their first-generation EPYC processors, and no doubt the IPC increase and expected increased core count would cause similar, if not higher, interest here. We also expect to know shortly about the various SKUs and pricing involved, and also if AMD wants to shed more light on the future of the Threadripper processor family. Read below, and continue past the break, for our live coverage.21:00 UTC: Lisa Su is on the stage at the Palace of Fine Arts events venue in San Francisco to present AMD's latest developments on EPYC for datacenters, using the Zen 2 microarchitecture.21:10 UTC: AMD focuses not just on delivering a single chip, but it's goal is to deliver a complete solution for the enterprise.

Here are some of the first pictures of the PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil graphics card. This is the company's most premium custom-design product based on the RX 5700 XT, and combines a custom-design PCB with a large triple-slot cooling solution that features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a trio of 80 mm spinners.

The card offers idle-fan stop, dual-BIOS, voltage measurement points, and addressable-RGB LED embellishments along the card's top and back-plate. The card is also expected to feature the company's highest factory-overclock. The card pulls power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, while display outputs include three DisplayPorts and an HDMI.

Update: PowerColor hopes to launch the RX 5700 XT Red Devil graphics card by August 13th.

Update Aug 15th: Our review of the Powercolor RX 5700 XT Red Devil is posted now.

AMD's latest AGESA update, which is being seeded to motherboard manufacturers, culls efforts to implement support for PCIe 4.0 in boards not carrying the latest X570 chipset. Some motherboard manufacturers had enabled support for the new standard on existing B450 and X470 motherboards - some with limited support, as was the case on some of ASUS' motherboards, others with full support. However, these efforts from motherboard manufacturers went against AMD's strategy with their X570 platform - all in all, these "rogue additions" reduced one additional feature of new X570 motherboards over their older counterparts.

The new AGESA code carries the part number AM4 1.0.0.3 ABB, and will likely be reflected in manufacturers' release notes for new BIOS versions that incorporate the code - and remove added PCIe 4.0 functionality. Other changes in this AGESA code release include fixes for Destiny 2 gamers' woes, which were having a hard time getting the game to run properly on Ryzen 3000 processors. If you're an avid Destiny 2 player and want PCIe 4.0 support, you'll likely be reminded of Rick and Morty's pickle episode. If not, you can always defer these AM4 1.0.0.3 ABB updates, if your system is behaving properly.

Yet another CPU vulnerability was discovered today, called SWAPGS, revealed under the code CVE-2019-1125, as it is referred to in the industry. The vulnerability was discovered twelve months ago and got privately reported to Intel by a security researcher. It's supposedly present on both AMD and Intel CPUs, but was only proven to work on Intel platforms by Bitdefender security researchers. Red Hat issued a statement which states that both platforms are affected and that users should upgrade their systems as soon as possible. Microsoft already implemented a fix with its "Patch Tuesday" update for last month, so if you updated your OS recently, you are already protected against SWAPGS.

AMD issued as statement as well, in which it says: "AMD is aware of new research claiming new speculative execution attacks that may allow access to privileged kernel data. Based on external and internal analysis, AMD believes it is not vulnerable to the SWAPGS variant attacks because AMD products are designed not to speculate on the new GS value following a speculative SWAPGS. For the attack that is not a SWAPGS variant, the mitigation is to implement our existing recommendations for Spectre variant 1."

Ahead of its launch, TechPowerUp scored an exclusive picture of MSI's premium custom-design Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card, the RX 5700 XT EVOKE. The EVOKE is a completely new card design and brand-extension making its debut with the RX 5700-series. MSI drew some visual cues from the NVIDIA TITAN RTX, as the card features a solid metal cooler shroud holding a pair of 90 mm fans, with a champagne gold finish and diamond-cut edges. The shroud binds seamlessly with the matching metal back-plate. Underneath it, MSI appears to be using a similar aluminium fin-stack heatsink to its Twin Frozr VII cooling solution, which uses four 6 mm-thick copper heat pipes t, and a single fin-stack that spans the entire length of the card.

It's not just the heatsink, even the two fans are similar 90 mm TorX spinners. The card offers idle fan-stop, a must-have especially for this GPU. Interestingly, underneath this custom cooling solution, our sources tell us that MSI is using AMD's reference-design PCB for the RX 5700-series, which draws power from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors. In terms of monitor connectivity, the card has three DisplayPort outputs and one HDMI port. It remains to be seen what factory-overclocked speeds MSI offers for these cards. The card should hit the shelves on August 15, our review sample is already on its way.

Update: MSI distributed one image each to several websites. In addition to ours, we collected four more so far (IgorsLab, Guru3D, TweakTown, WCCFTech).

Update Aug 15th: Our review of the MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT Evoke is live now.

News made the rounds recently of AMD's Lisa Su's reported plans of leaving the company in favor of a #2 position at IBM. The report, which was broken by WCCFTech, pegged Lisa Su as already being sprucing up her successor in the form of Rick Bergman, who recently joined AMD after leaving his CEO position with Synaptics.

Now, Lisa Su herself has come out on Twitter to say that there was zero truth to the report, and that she plans to stay with AMD, where "the best is yet to come". Of course, no CEO would confirm such a report from a media outlet - these things take their time and are done in their own corporate way, and there's really no other response that Lisa Su could have given that wouldn't damage AMD's current outlook. Her presence and confidence in her delivery is part of the reason for investor confidence in AMD. That said, I doubt there would be a better time for Lisa Su to actually move higher up in her own career perspectives than from AMD's current state.

Here are some of the first pictures of one of Sapphire's custom-design Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards, the RX 5700 XT Pulse. The Pulse brand has traditionally been associated with Sapphire's cost-effective custom-design products, while the company reserves the Nitro brand with its premium offerings. With the RX 5700-series, Sapphire is rumored to bring back some of its more iconic brands, such as Toxic, and perhaps even Atomic. The RX 5700 Pulse combines a custom-design cooling solution by Sapphire, with AMD's reference-design PCB for the RX 5700 XT, and likely reference clock-speeds. Sapphire has utilized the dual-BIOS preparation of the reference PCB by adding a second SPI flash chip and a 2-way BIOS selector switch.

The cooling solution of the RX 5700 XT Pulse features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that uses nickel-plated copper heat-pipes that make direct contact with the GPU at the base; we expect Sapphire to reserve exotic tech such as vapor-chambers for its premium Nitro products. The heatsink is ventilated by a pair of large (90-100 mm) fans. Since the card uses reference-design PCB (and the fan-interface that comes with it), we're not entirely sure if it offers idle fan-stop. Overclockers.uk has this card already listed at £428.99 including taxes, which is about £30 pricier than reference-design cards sold by it.Update Aug 12th: Our review of the Sapphire RX 5700 XT Pulse is posted now.

AMD sent out a press release earlier today confirming that Rick Bergman has rejoined the company after eight years as president and CEO of Synaptics. He was, as the grizzled veterans of TechPowerUp may recall, with the AMD/ATI conglomeration for a decade before then. Rick, in AMD's own words, "brings extensive semiconductor experience, a deep technology understanding from a platform and product perspective, and extensive general management experience" and will take over as the external VP of Computing and Graphics from Sandeep Chennakeshu, who leaves AMD at the end of August after a short stint with the company for unnamed reasons.

Marvell today released the industry's lowest power PCIe Gen4 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) controller portfolio. Marvell's newest SSD controllers are designed to meet the need for lower power and higher performance in next-generation data centers and edge devices as artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G gain momentum. This breakthrough technology delivers unparalleled performance in an ultra-compact footprint, leveraging the company's complex system-on-chip (SoC) design expertise and groundbreaking storage IP to help data center, notebook, tablet, gaming and edge computing platform architects advance their solutions for the highly distributed data era.

"Marvell's latest family of storage controllers has been architected to optimally address edge computing and data center pain points of power-performance and capacity-performance," said Nigel Alvares, vice president of marketing for the Flash Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. "With today's launch, we're once again demonstrating Marvell's leadership in storage, delivering the industry's first 4-Channel PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD controllers with the industry's lowest power consumption that will help revolutionize SSD solutions for the data economy."

AMD's add-in board (AIB) partners are preparing to launch custom-design Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards leading up to mid-August, 2019. Although it wouldn't take dates, PowerColor revealed that its custom-design Radeon RX 5700 XT cards would start at USD $399. This is the same price at which all AIB partners sell AMD's reference-design RX 5700 XT.

PowerColor's parent company, TUL, has designed custom-design Radeon graphics cards for recent entrant ASRock. It's fairly possible that PowerColor's $399 RX 5700 XT will bear physical resemblance to ASRock's RX 5700 XT Challenger with differences in the form of color-scheme, cooler shroud, and decal designs. Nearly all AIB partners could have custom-design RX 5700 XT cards starting at $399, but innovating pricier, beefier premium designs that have superior cooling solutions, such as the ASRock Taichi. It will be very interesting to see what factory-overclocked speeds they ship with.