Today, Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Intel Corporation and Microsoft announce the incorporation of the Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium, and unveiled the names of its newly-elected members to its Board of Directors. The core group of key industry partners announced their intent to incorporate in March 2019, and remain dedicated to advancing the CXL standard, a new high-speed CPU-to-Device and CPU-to-Memory interconnect which accelerates next-generation data center performance.

The five new CXL board members are as follows: Steve Fields, Fellow and Chief Engineer of Power Systems, IBM; Gaurav Singh, Corporate Vice President, Xilinx; Dong Wei, Standards Architect and Fellow at ARM Holdings; Nathan Kalyanasundharam, Senior Fellow at AMD Semiconductor; and Larrie Carr, Fellow, Technical Strategy and Architecture, Data Center Solutions, Microchip Technology Inc.

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high-performance DRAM modules, NAND Flash products, and mobile accessories today announces the launch of the XPG SX8100 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 Solid State Drive (SSD). Utilizing PCIe Gen3x4, 3D NAND Flash, and featuring 3500/3000MB/s read and write, the SX8100 M.2 2280 SSD gives DIY enthusiasts, overclockers and graphics professionals the performance they seek.

Supporting PCIe Gen3x4 and the NVMe 1.3 standard the SX8100 delivers read and write speeds of up to 3500/3000MB per second and random read and write of 300K/240K IOPS. Along with 3D NAND Flash, it offers high capacities, efficiency, and durability, while the M.2 2280 form factor supports the latest Intel and AMD platforms. With SLC caching and a DRAM cache buffer the SX8100 accelerates PC performance for quick access to files and game loading.

At the European launch in Rome, Italy AMD today highlighted the growing adoption of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors across cloud, enterprise and HPC customers. "Today, we are proud to have new platforms from Dell and new customers adopting 2nd Gen AMD EPYC for cloud, enterprise computing and HPC," said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Business Group. "We continue to take the AMD EPYC processor to new heights and are thrilled to have the ecosystem supporting us across hardware, software and cloud providers as we face the challenges of the modern data center head-on."

AMD also announced a new addition to the 2nd Generation AMD EPYC family, the AMD EPYC 7H12 processor. The 64 core/128 thread, 2.60 GHz base frequency, 3.30 GHz max boost frequency, 280 W TDP processor is specifically built for HPC customers and workloads, using liquid cooling to deliver leadership supercomputing performance. In an ATOS testing on their BullSequana XH2000, the new AMD EPYC 7H12 processor achieved a LINPACK score of ~ 4.2 TeraFLOPS, ~11% better than the AMD EPYC 7742 processor.

TSMC is on the vanguard of chipset fabrication technology at this exact point in time - its 7 nm technology is the leading-edge of all large volume processes, and is being tapped by a number of companies for 7 nm silicon. One of its most relevant clients for our purposes, of course, is AMD - the company now enjoys a fabrication process lead over arch-rival Intel much due to its strategy of fabrication spin-off and becoming a fabless designer of chips. AMD's current product stack has made waves in the market by taking advantage of 7 nm's benefits, but it seems this may actually become a slight problem in the not so distant future.

TSMC has announced a threefold increase in its delivery lead times for 7 nm orders, from two months to nearly six months, which means that orders will now have to wait three times longer to be fulfilled than they once did. This means that current channel supplies and orders made after the decision from TSMC will take longer to materialize in actual silicon, which may lead to availability slumps should demand increase or maintain. AMD has its entire modern product stack built under the 7 nm process, so this could potentially affect both CPUs and GPUs from the company - and let's not forget AMD's Zen 3 and next-gen RDNA GPUs which are all being designed for the 7 nm+ process node. TSMC is expected to set aside further budget to expand capacity of its most advanced nodes, whilst accelerating investment on their N7+, N6, N5, and N3 nodes.

Microsoft has been using Intel hardware exclusively on its Surface lineup ever since it came out with the first Surface device. The choice was clear - Intel offered much better energy efficiency than anything AMD could offer at the time, besides the strong bond between the two companies. However, it seems that AMD might have done enough with its Ryzen 3000 series to sway big Microsoft into using some of its hardware (Ryzen 3000H or U) on upcoming Surface devices, if reports are to be believed.

Microsoft should be refreshing its Surface Laptop 2 with a 15-inch variant packing AMD hardware. It's uncertain if this will happen, and much less likely to happen for the entirety of Microsoft's Surface product stack (which includes potential refreshes for Surface Pro 6, Surface Book 2, Surface Go or Surface Studio 2). However, that AMD is now being considered alongside Intel in what can be said to be the ultimate Windows experience in Microsoft's usually excellently-designed products is a prestige in and of itself, and means an empowered brand standing for the red camp. Oh and Microsoft might finally be introducing that dual-screen device we've been hearing rumblings about for a while. Project "Centaurus" has already been seeded among Intel insiders, it seems, so it might see the light of day in the upcoming Microsoft Surface event taking place in New York on October 2nd.

AMD is expected to bring back its low-power APU family in 2020 with the new "Dali" silicon. Updated company roadmap slides see the inclusion of "Dali" as a "value mobile APU," positioned under "Renoir," a performance APU targeting both the mainstream notebook and desktop (socket AM4) platforms. AMD looks keen to branch out its APU business in two directions.

"Renoir" is expected to be a "Zen 2" based APU with CPU performance matching at least the Ryzen 5 3600 or 3700X, and a faster "Vega" based iGPU. It wouldn't surprise us if "Dali" is a monolithic 7 nm die with two "Zen 2" CPU cores and a tiny iGPU with 3-4 compute units. "Renoir," on the other hand, could be an MCM with an 8-core "Zen 2" chiplet and an enlarged I/O controller die that has the iGPU. "Dali" could see the light of the day only in 2020, by which time TSMC could substantially increase its 7 nm volumes and clear the decks for its new 7 nm EUV mass-production.

AMD late Thursday released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.9.2 beta drivers. These drivers add optimization for "Borderlands 3," with up to 16 percent improvement in frame-rates compared to the older 19.9.1 drivers, as tested with a Radeon RX 5700. The drivers also introduce support for Radeon Image Sharpening on graphics cards based on the "Polaris" architecture (such as RX 580, RX 480, etc), for DirectX 12 and Vulkan games. Among the issues fixed with 19.9.2 are frame-rates getting locked to 30 with V-sync enabled on some displays with 75 Hz refresh-rate set; system instability when watching videos in a web-browser on some machines with RX 5700 series graphics cards; audio in ReLive desktop capture being corrupted; and problems with Enhanced Sync. Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.9.2The change-log follows.

The leading global motherboard, graphics card and mini PC manufacturer, ASRock, announces their new Taichi X series graphics cards - the Radeon RX 5700 XT Taichi X 8G OC+, which is ASRock's first Taichi X series graphics card featuring AMD's latest Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU and 8 GB 256-bit GDDR6 memory, brings exceptional computing power and an immersive experience nested within an elegant design.

In Chinese culture, "Taichi" represents the philosophical state of yin and yang. ASRock's Taichi graphics cards are designed for tech geeks and power users who care about products' design and quality, and comes with premium features that can fulfill every geek's dream and fulfill power user's important task. To carry forward Taichi's spirit, which symbolizes the balance between elegance and stability; Taichi graphics cards are formed with two main elements in mind - "design" and "quality".

CORSAIR, a world leader in PC gaming peripherals and enthusiast components, today announced the availability of a new kit of its award-winning CORSAIR VENGEANCE LPX DDR4 Memory, setting a new record for commercially available high-frequency DRAM with clock speeds up to an incredible 4,866 MHz. This blazingly fast memory is now available in a 2x 8 GB kit, reaching its full potential in systems with new 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Desktop Processors and X570 motherboards.

VENGEANCE LPX has long pushed the limits of performance memory, and continues that tradition today thanks to the partnership between CORSAIR and AMD. While fully compatible with most modern platforms, the new modules have been specifically designed and fully tested to achieve their record-breaking maximum frequency of 4,866 MHz on the Ryzen 3000 platform in ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula, MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE, and MSI PRESTIGE X570 CREATION motherboards using their included automated overclocking utilities.

AMD updated its technology roadmaps to reflect a 2020 launch window for its upcoming CPU and graphics architectures, "Zen 3" and RDNA2. The two will be based on 7 nm+ , which is AMD-speak for the 7 nanometer EUV silicon fabrication process at TSMC, that promises a significant 20 percent increase in transistor-densities, giving AMD high transistor budgets and more clock-speed headroom. The roadmap slides however hint that unlike the "Zen 2" and RDNA simultaneous launch on 7th July 2019, the next-generation launches may not be simultaneous.

The slide for CPU microarchitecture states that the design phase of "Zen 3" is complete, and that the microarchitecture team has already moved on to develop "Zen 4." This means AMD is now developing products that implement "Zen 3." On the other hand, RDNA2 is still in design phase. The crude x-axis on both slides that denotes year of expected shipping, too appears to suggest that "Zen 3" based products will precede RDNA2 based ones. "Zen 3" will be AMD's first response to Intel's "Comet Lake-S" or even "Ice Lake-S," if the latter comes to fruition before Computex 2020. In the run up to RDNA2, AMD will scale up RDNA a notch larger with the "Navi 12" silicon to compete with graphics cards based on NVIDIA's "TU104" silicon. "Zen 2" will receive product stack additions in the form of a new 16-core Ryzen 9-series chip later this month, and the 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper family.

VIPER GAMING, a trademarked brand of PATRIOT and a global leader in performance memory, solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash storage solutions, is releasing their new PCIe 4.0 SSD, the VIPER VP4100 M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 x 4 SSD.

VP4100 M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 x 4 SSD is an excellent M.2 SSD choice for hardcore gamers, PC enthusiasts, content creators, and video rendering professionals who are looking into blazingly fast startup times and instantaneous access for superior productivity. VIPER VP4100's blazing transfer speeds empower the user to access and get back into their games faster while accelerating the overall responsiveness of the system. The VP4100 is ten times faster than the traditional SATA III SSD speeds and deliver remarkable sequential Read speeds of up to 5 GB/s and Write speeds of up to 4.4 GB/s. The drive also provides up to 800K random Read and Write IOPs for massive throughput. 4K Aligned Random Read and Write optimizes the SSD for multi-threaded and data-intensive applications for when the system is accessing multiple applications at once.

AMD is giving final touches to an AGESA microcode update that fixes the issue of underwhelming Precision Boost behavior on its 3rd generation Ryzen processors. Version ComboAM4 1.0.0.3ABBA is being pushed to motherboard manufacturers to integrate with their UEFI firmware, and one such dispatch to MSI got leaked to the web on ChipHell. Tom's Hardware grabbed the BIOS as it was compatible with the MEG X570 Creator motherboard they have, and tested the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X with it.

In its testing, posted in a mini-review article, Tom's Hardware observed that with AGESA 1.0.0.3ABBA, their 3700X sample was correctly hitting 4.40 GHz across the board at stock settings. With the older 1.0.0.3AB, it would touch 4.375 GHz. The Ryzen 9 3900X behaves slightly differently with this microcode. Tom's Hardware was able to raise its peak boost frequency from 4.575 GHz to 4.625 GHz (above the 4.60 GHz specification), but in certain tests such as POV-Ray and Cinebench, its boost frequency decays down to 4.250 GHz. Overall, the reviewer tabulated improved performance on the chips with the new microcode. The new microcode also apparently changes the processor's thermal thresholds.Update (10/9) AMD posted an elaborate release detailing the AGESA 1.0.0.3ABBA update.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the definitive graphics subsystem information, diagnostic, and monitoring utility. Version 2.25.0 adds several new features, support for more GPUs, and fixes various bugs. To begin with, you'll notice that the main screen displays a second row of APIs supported by your graphics card. These include Vulkan, DirectX Raytracing, DirectML, and OpenGL. The last one in particular help you figure out if your graphics drivers have been supplied by Microsoft of your computer's OEM (and lack OpenGL or Vulkan ICDs). Among the new GPUs supported are Quadro P2200, Quadro RTX 4000 Mobile, Quadro T1000 Mobile; AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200, Barco MXRT 7600, 780E Graphics, HD 8330E; and Intel Gen11 "Ice Lake."

With GPU-Z 2.25.0, we've improved AMD Radeon "Navi" support even further, by making the clock-speed measurement more accurate, and displaying base, gaming, and boost clocks in the "Advanced" tab. A workaround is added for the AMD bug that causes fan-speeds to lock when idle fan-stop is engaged on custom-design "Navi" graphics cards; and a faulty "65535 RPM" fan-speed reading for "Navi." A BSOD caused in QEMU/KVM machines by MSR register access has also been fixed. Grab it from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.25.0The change-log follows.

ASUS started selling its premium Mini-ITX motherboard based on the AMD X570 chipset, the Republic of Gamers (ROG) Strix X570-I Gaming. The board was announced as part of ASUS' X570 motherboard lineup back in July, but is only now reaching selves, with an MSRP of USD $220. The board features an elaborate thermal solution that cools the CPU VRM, the fiesty X570 chipset, and an M.2-2280 SSD over a network of interconnected heatsinks that are ventilated by two 30 mm fans. Despite crippling space constraints, ASUS managed to cram in a 10-phase VRM to power the socket AM4 CPU, which is wired to two DDR4 DIMM slots, an M.2-2280 slot, and the board's sole expansion slot, a PCI-Express 4.0 x16.

Storage connectivity on the ASUS ROG Strix X570-I Gaming includes not one, but two M.2-2280 slots, one wired to the AM4 socket, and the other from the X570 chipset. The two M.2 slots are stacked one on top of the other, with a metal heatspreader between them, pulling heat from the drive below to the board's heatsink network. Four SATA 6 Gbps ports make the rest of the storage connectivity. Networking includes WiFi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.0 from an Intel "Cyclone Peak" AX200 card; and 1 GbE wired Ethernet pulled by an Intel i211-AT chip. The onboard audio solution features a Realtek ALC1200A CODEC with dual OPAMPs.

If our review of CORSAIR's Hydro X series XG7 GPU water block for the NVIDIA GTX 1080 interested you and made you want to look into their offerings for newer cards, then you may be just as interested in knowing that AMD's latest and greatest in the discrete GPU market gets some Hydro X love too. CORSAIR has added to their custom watercooling product portfolio with the new RX-SERIES GPU block which is compatible with all reference design AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT offerings. The block has the same feature set as with their other XG7 GPU blocks, with full coverage (GPU, VRM, VRAM), integrated dRGB lighting supported by iCUE, pre-applied thermal pads and paste for easy installation, a full-length aluminium backplate included in the package, and a transparent top coupled with a flow indicator wheel. It costs $149.99 for customers in the USA, and is available immediately as of the time of this post.

Bitspower informed us earlier today that they have a new mono block out for the ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero motherboard based on AMD's X570 chipset. Titled the BP-MBASX570CVIIIH, it features an acrylic top to allow the end user to see through into the cooling engine and the coolant flow in use and a nickel-plated copper coldplate. The latter, as with any mono block, is massive relative to just a CPU water block since it covers the CPU in addition to the critical power delivery section of the motherboard to ensure no thermal throttling, be it direct or indirect.

The direct injection of the coolant over the microfins via the split central-inlet flow design allows for the CPU to be cooled first, before a parallel split through the VRM section and also a flow indicator wheel as seen in the images below. The mono block also has integrated lighting support via Bitspower's digital RGB LEDs, which in turn are compatible with ASUS Aura Sync and onboard LED headers in addition to Bitspower's TouchAqua dRGB controller. Bitspower also teased more mono blocks on the way, with owners of the ASRock X570 Taichi and Gigabyte X570 Auros Master going to see support coming up shortly.

BIOSTAR, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices, is proud to announce a new addition to its AMD socket AM4 motherboards with the BIOSTAR X470MH. Built for office workers looking to smoothly cruise through their daily tasks without setbacks and for home users looking for a strong and stable platform to run their HTPC, the X470MH is equipped with the latest features the PC industry has to offer while maintaining an affordable price point. And for those looking to push the limit, the X470MH offers overclocking possibilities giving the user the added performance benefit for faster gaming and task management without risking to damage their investment.

The BIOSTAR X470MH, equipped with AMD's X470 chipset and AMD AM4 CPU socket, brings support for AMD's latest 3rd Gen Ryzen 7 nm processors. Built to make your daily computer needs a breeze, the X470MH is a Micro ATX motherboard featuring USB 3.1 Gen1 support (5 Gb/s) providing fast transfer speeds and support to a wide array of peripherals, PCI-e M.2 at 32 Gb/s for increased system responsiveness, as well as HDMI 4K resolution to sooth the eye while watching Netflix or Youtube, and a VGA port for a wider range of monitor compatibility. In addition, the Internet and network connectivity will not be a drag with the onboard Realtek GbE LAN. Overclockers are not left out either with enough room for 2x DDR4 RAM slots which support up to 32 GB and overclocks at 3200 MHz, making multitasking a pleasant experience.

Intel as part of its IFA Berlin client-segment presentation resorted to some very juvenile marketing tactics, inviting criticism from noted PC enthusiast Der8auer. Intel scampered to reclaim its market position in the PC gaming space with the announcement of the Core i9-9900KS 8-core processor, which armed with a 5.00 GHz all-core Turbo Boost frequency, is expected to cement the company's gaming performance leadership. The company didn't leave it at that, and went on to attack AMD's creator performance leadership.

Der8auer observed something curious about a few slides in particular that Intel used to discredit AMD's high-end desktop processors, relating to its Creator performance as tested in Maxon Cinema 4D's benchmark program, Cinebench. Intel claimed that AMD cannot use Cinebench data to represent "real-world" performance as "only 0.22 percent" of users polled by Intel's "Software Improvement Program" respondents use Maxon Cinema 4D. And who are these respondents? Close to 11 million of them, _all_ of whom are notebook and tablet users, and a majority of whom have Software Improvement Program part of OEM bloatware. This, according to Der8auer, is fundamentally dishonest on Intel's part as Maxon Cinema 4D is less likely to be used on portable computers, and more likely on premium desktops or HEDTs. You can watch Der8auer's vlog here (English) or here (German).The complete slide-deck follows.

ASRock is pleased to announce a very special product launch: the new X570 AQUA motherboard, which is already highly anticipated for its unprecedented features and performance.

The X570 AQUA is the only completely water-cooled X570 motherboard - its unique all-copper cooling block covers the CPU, VRM and X570 Chipset to provide unbelievable performance and stability. This exclusive product is being manufactured in a very limited production run of just 999 boards and made available on a first come first served basis. X570 AQUA is the ultimate selection for the AMD X570 chipset and Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors - to be enjoyed only by a select few worldwide. With the top choice CPU for DIY PC enthusiasts - AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors paired with ASRock's super high-end X570 AQUA motherboard will definitely be your ideal partner.

AMD today posted the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition drivers. Version 19.9.1 beta comes with day-one optimization for "Gears 5," with up to 5 percent performance improvement in the DirectX 12 mode. It also expands the Vulkan API feature-set with four new extensions, "VK_AMD_device_coherent_memory," "VK_EXT_calibrated_timestamps," "VK_EXT_line_rasterization," and "VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation." Lastly, the drivers address a bug that causes GIGABYTE RGB Fusion 2.0 software to hang the system on graphics cards based on RX 5700-series GPUs. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.9.1 betaThe change-log follows.

"Control" by Remedy is the season's hottest AAA release, not just because it's an above-average story-driven action RPG, but also because it's an eye candy-shop. With the ability to use NVIDIA RTX real-time raytracing across a multitude of features, the game is particularly heavy on graphics hardware. Tweaktown tested the game's stability at extremely high display resolutions, including 8K, and found that the game can use up to 18.5 GB of video memory, when running in DirectX 12 with RTX enabled. There's only one client-segment graphics card capable of that much memory, the $2,499 NVIDIA TITAN RTX, which ships with 24 GB of GDDR6 memory. Its nearest client-segment neighbor is the AMD Radeon VII, but it only packs 16 GB of HBM2.

When a game needs more video memory than your graphics card has, Windows has an elaborate memory management system that sheds some of that memory onto your system's main memory, and the swap file progressively (at reduced performance, of course). Video memory usage drops like a rock between 8K and 4K UHD (which is 1/4th the pixels as 8K). With all RTX features enabled and other settings maxed out, "Control" only uses 8.1 GB of video memory. What this also means is that video cards with just 8 GB of memory are beginning fall short of what it takes to game at 4K. The $699 GeForce RTX 2080 Super only has 8 GB. The RTX 2080 Ti, with its 11 GB of memory has plenty of headroom and muscle. Find other interesting observations in the source link below.

After AMD's Ryzen 3rd generation launch many users have reported that they are not seeing the advertised boost clocks that AMD promises in their specifications. This has been an ongoing issue, with various tweaks tried, with limited success. This lead to serious allegations about "false advertising", and all AMD had to say up to this point was that these clocks are "up to".

AMD has now issued a statement regarding these lower than expected clock frequencies on Zen 2 processors, and it looks like there is indeed an underlying BIOS issue that's responsible. Let's hope that this new firmware gets released quickly and is able to restore faith in AMD's otherwise excellent track-record.

AMD's next-generation "Renoir" APU, which succeeds the company's 12 nm "Picasso," will be the company's truly next-generation chip to feature an integrated graphics solution. It's unclear as of now, if the chip will be based on a monolithic die, or if it will be a multi-chip module of a 7 nm "Zen 2" chiplet paired with an enlarged I/O controller die that has the iGPU. We're getting confirmation on two key specs - one, that the iGPU will be based on the older "Vega" graphics architecture, albeit with an updated display engine to support the latest display standards; and two, that the processor's memory controller will support the latest LPDDR4X memory standard, at speeds of up to 4266 MHz DDR. In comparison, Intel's "Ice Lake-U" chip supports LPDDX4X up to 3733 MHz.

Code-lines pointing toward "Vega" graphics with an updated display controller mention the new DCN 2.1, found in AMD's new "Navi 10" GPU. This controller supports resolutions of up to 8K, DSC 1.2a, and new resolutions of 4K up to 240 Hz and 8K 60 Hz over a single cable, along with 30 bits per pixel color. The multimedia engine is also suitably updated to VCN 2.1 standard, and provides hardware-accelerated decoding for some of the newer video formats, such as VP9 and H.265 at up to 90 fps at 4K, and 8K up to 24 fps, and H.264 up to 150 fps at 4K. There's no word on when "Renoir" comes out, but a 2020 International CES unveil is likely.

ASRock is ready with its flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card, which is among its first fully in-house graphics card designs. The Radeon RX 5700 XT Taichi features a board design that was teased at the 2019 Computex show as a high-end graphics card cooling solution concept. It's since been mated with a custom-design RX 5700 XT PCB. The card features a triple-slot cooling solution with an aluminium fin-stack heatsink, and a cooler shroud that holds three fans. The smaller central fan features an RGB LED embellishment. A tiny LED segment display along the top of the cooler appears to display real-time monitoring. ASRock's signature Taichi gearwheel aesthetic carries over not just to the cooler, but also its backplate.

The PCB is noticeably taller than the AMD reference PCB, pulls power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, offers dual-BIOS with a toggle between an "OC BIOS" and a "Silent BIOS," an LED lighting master control switch, and possibly a strong VRM solution to keep the juices flowing to "Navi." The clock-speeds of the card are still under the wraps, but it's likely that only the OC BIOS features factory-overclocked speeds, while the Silent BIOS ticks at reference clock speeds to favor an aggressive fan-control. Both BIOSes could offer idle fan-stop. The display connectivity is particularly interesting - four DisplayPorts, and two HDMI connectors, all along the rear I/O. There's no word on the availability, but at least the box-art proves this card isn't a tradeshow unicorn.

World famous overclocker Der8auer published his survey of boost clocks found on 3rd generation Ryzen CPUs. Collecting data from almost 3,000 entries from people around the world, he has found out that a majority of the 3000 series Ryzen CPUs are not hitting their advertised boost speeds. Perhaps one of the worst results from the entire survey are for the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, for which only 5.6% of entries reported have managed to reach the boost speeds AMD advertises. However, the situation is better for lower-end SKUs, with about half of the Ryzen 5 3600 results showing that their CPU is boosting correctly and within advertised numbers.

Der8auer carefully selected the results that went into the survey, where he discarded any numbers that used either specialized cooling like water chillers, Precision Boost Overdrive - PBO or the results which were submitted by "fanboys" who wanted to game the result. Testing was purely scientific using Cinebench R15 and clock speeds were recorded using HWinfo (which got recommendation from AMD), so he could get as precise data as possible.