ECS has introduced a new model into their Liva series of Mini PCs - this time, powered by AMD Ryzen APUs. The ECS LIVA A320 is a 1-liter Mini Pc (book-sized, according to the company, but I guess that depends on the books you prefer to read), and makes use of either an AMD Ryzen 3 or Ryzen 5 APU with up to 35 W TDP.

There's a lot to like about this little Mini PC that could, which ECS is marketing at light gaming workloads and all other content consumption and office-related shenanigans. There is a tooless design for easy upgradeability, 2x DDR4 support in the SO-DIMM form factor, internal support for an M.2 drive (which helps save space in such a small enclosure, even though a 2.5" HDD or SSD is still supported). A VESA mount means this can be installed in the back of a monitor or television for your content consumption needs.

TechPowerUp GPU-Z is a handy graphics subsystem information, diagnostic, and monitoring utility no enthusiast can leave home without, and today we bring you its latest version. The new TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.21.0 adds support for NVIDIA Quadro P500. More importantly, it fixes sensor data readouts being broken for the Radeon VII with Radeon Software 19.5.1 (or later) installed. A broken GPU load sensor for AMD "Raven Ridge" APUs has also been fixed. Lastly, OpenCL support detection has been added for Radeon VII and other graphics cards based on the "Vega 20" MCM. Grab it from the link below.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z

The change-log follows.

With AMD expected to launch its 3rd generation Ryzen processor family at the 2019 Computex, the show is expected to have unveilings of several compatible motherboards based on the new AMD X570 chipset. ASUS posted a collage picture that teases its upcoming X570 lineup. This appears to include boards from pretty much all of ASUS's brands, including the high-end ROG Crosshair, the upper mainstream ROG Strix, the mainstream TUF Gaming, and the sober Prime series. From this, the ROG Strix board appears to be the first one we've come across that doesn't use a fan-heatsink to cool the 15W TDP X570 chipset. The Ryzen 3000 "Matisse" processor and X570 chipset make up AMD's "Valhalla" desktop platform.

AMD today posted its latest version of the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition. Version 19.5.2, signifying the second release for the month of May 2019, comes with release-date optimization for "Total War : Three Kingdoms." Among the issues fixed are multi-display screen flickering problems noticed on Radeon VII, incorrect maximum temperature values reported by Radeon WattMan for certain GPUs, GPU Utilization showing up for unsupported products on Radeon Performance Metrics Overlay; and HDR video freezing or experiencing corruption on certain Ryzen APUs. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.5.2 betaThe change-log follows.

AMD X570 is the company's first in-house design socket AM4 motherboard chipset, with the X370 and X470 chipsets being originally designed by ASMedia. With the X570, AMD hopes to leverage new PCI-Express gen 4.0 connectivity of its Ryzen 3000 Zen2 "Matisse" processors. The desktop platform that combines a Ryzen 3000 series processor with X570 chipset is codenamed "Valhalla." A rough platform diagram like what you'd find in motherboard manuals surfaced on ChipHell, confirming several features. To maintain pin-compatibility with older generations of Ryzen processors, Ryzen 3000 has the same exact connectivity from the SoC except two key differences.

On the AM4 "Valhalla" platform, the SoC puts out a total of 28 PCI-Express gen 4.0 lanes. 16 of these are allocated to PEG (PCI-Express graphics), configurable through external switches and redrivers either as single x16, or two x8 slots. Besides 16 PEG lanes, 4 lanes are allocated to one M.2 NVMe slot. The remaining 4 lanes serve as the chipset bus. With X570 being rumored to support gen 4.0 at least upstream, the chipset bus bandwidth is expected to double to 64 Gbps. Since it's an SoC, the socket is also wired to LPCIO (SuperIO controller). The processor's integrated southbridge puts out two SATA 6 Gbps ports, one of which is switchable to the first M.2 slot; and four 5 Gbps USB 3.x ports. It also has an "Azalia" HD audio bus, so the motherboard's audio solution is directly wired to the SoC. Things get very interesting with the connectivity put out by the X570 chipset.Update May 21st: There is also information on the X570 chipset's TDP.
Update May 23rd: HKEPC posted what looks like an official AMD slide with a nicer-looking platform map. It confirms that AMD is going full-tilt with PCIe gen 4, both as chipset bus, and as downstream PCIe connectivity.

Can you believe it's been 10 years since MSI launched its flagship Lighting brand of graphics cards? Turns out we reviewed our first MSI Lightning card more than a decade ago! An MSI Lightning card has always been the indicator that a flagship GPU by NVIDIA or AMD has succeeded in winning the hearts, minds, and wallets of gamers, lest MSI wouldn't bother with one. MSI already released the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lighting Z, and we reviewed it. Sources tell us that the MSI could be working on a second Lightning product based on the RTX 2080 Ti, which isn't a variation of the original, such as the RTX 2080 Ti Lighting Z with a water-block bolted on.

Named something along the lines of RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z 10th Anniversary Special Edition, the card will look significantly different than the RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z, and will ship with an on-card OLED display that puts out real-time monitoring data of the card's temperatures, clock-speeds, fan-speeds, voltages, memory utilization, or pretty much whatever you program it to. The card's cooler will also feature a more richly detailed RGB LED embellishment all around, and will be designed like a piece of jewelry. MSI may also touch up the card's electricals, BIOS, and overclocking-headroom to rival EVGA RTX 2080 Ti KINGPIN. MSI will unveil this card at the 2019 Computex exhibition.

Microsoft earlier today released to market its latest version of Windows 10, the May 2019 Update (version 1903). There was quite some talk about Microsoft tweaking the kernel to improve CPU performance. Other gamer-relevant changes include updates to WDDM (display driver model), and an updated DirectX 12, which now supports variable-rate shading. A similar technology is available on Vulkan, and has already been implemented in games such as "Wolfenstein: The New Colossus." With much talk about the latest Windows being better for games than the previous Windows 10 Fall 2018 Update (1809), we decided to take it for a spin.

After backing-up our 1809 installation onto a disk image, we updated to 1903 using Windows Update, with the same driver- and game versions as our recently-updated setup (details here). We then put the machine through our entire selection of 21 games, and two high-end graphics cards, the AMD Radeon VII and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. We used driver versions 19.5.1 for AMD, and 430.64 for NVIDIA, both of which support Windows 1903. Our tests span 1920x1080 (Full HD), 2560x1440 (1440p), and 3840x2160 pixels (4K) resolutions. We present our data as percentage gain/loss over Windows 1809, with three data-points per game, each representing the three resolutions in the order "Full HD", "1440p", and "4K". The first graph below covers the RTX 2080 Ti, and the second one Radeon VII.

ZADAK announced today the immediate worldwide release of their latest ultra-high-performance RGB gaming memory module, the SPARK RGB DDR4. Firmly aimed at the high-end PC enthusiasts and gamers market, the SPARK RGB DDR4 brings together powerful memory module, overclocking capability and top-notch design elements to form a valuable addition to the ZADAK DDR4 family that is compatible with high-end motherboards.

SPARK RGB DDR4 modules are available in kits ranging from 16GB (2x8GB) up to 64GB (4x16GB) with the top-end models running at 4133 MHz. Overclocking is made simple with XMP 2.0 support allowing users to select their preferred profile for stable and reliable overclocking.

Eliovp, who describes himself on GitHub as a Belgian [crypto] mining enthusiast, created what could go down as the best thing that happened to AMD Radeon users all decade. The AMD Memory Tweak Tool is a Windows and Linux based GUI utility that lets you not just overclock AMD Radeon graphics card memory on the fly, but also lets you tweak its memory timings. Most timings apply live, while your machine is running within Windows/Linux GUI, some require memory retraining via a reboot, which means they can't be changed at this time, because rebooting reverts the timings to default. The author is trying to figure out a way to run memory training at runtime, which would let you change those timings, too, in the future. While you're at it, the tool also lets you play with GPU core frequency and fan-control.

The AMD Memory Tweak tool supports both Windows and Linux (GUI), and works with all recent AMD Radeon GPUs with GDDR5 and HBM2 memory types. It requires Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.4.1 or later in case of Windows, or amdgpu-pro ROCM to be actively handling the GPU in case of Linux. The Linux version further has some dependencies, such as pciutils-dev, libpci-dev, build-essential, and git. The source-code for the utility is up on GitHub for you to inspect and test.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Memory Tweak Tool by Eliovp

As if the mother of all ironies, prior to its effective death-sentence dealt by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Huawei's server business developed an ambitious product roadmap for its Fusion Server family, aligning with Intel's enterprise processor roadmap. It describes in great detail the key features of these processors, such as core-counts, platform, and I/O. The "Sapphire Rapids" processor will introduce the biggest I/O advancements in close to a decade, when it releases sometime in 2021.

With an unannounced CPU core-count, the "Sapphire Rapids-SP" processor will introduce DDR5 memory support to the data-center, which aims to double bandwidth and memory capacity over the DDR4 generation. The processor features an 8-channel (512-bit wide) DDR5 memory interface. The second major I/O introduction is PCI-Express gen 5.0, which not only doubles bandwidth over gen 4.0 to 32 Gbps per lane, but also comes with a constellation of data-center-relevant features that Intel is pushing out in advance as part of the CXL Interconnect. CXL and PCIe gen 5 are practically identical.

AMD's 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon may finally address two architectural shortcomings of its performance-segment GPUs, memory bandwidth, and render-backends (deficiency thereof). The GPU almost certainly features a 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface, bringing about a 50-75 percent increase in memory bandwidth over "Polaris 30." According to a sketch of the GPU's SIMD schematic put out by KOMACHI Ensaka, Navi's main number crunching machinery is spread across eight shader engines, each with five compute units (CUs).

Five CUs spread across eight shader engines, assuming each CU continues to pack 64 stream processors, works out to 2,560 stream processors on the silicon. This arrangement is in stark contrast to the "Hawaii" silicon from 2013, which crammed 10 CUs per shader engine across four shader engines to achieve the same 2,560 SP count on the Radeon R9 290. The "Fiji" silicon that followed "Hawaii" stuck to the 4-shader engine arrangement. Interestingly, both these chips featured four render-backends per shader engine, working out to 64 ROPs. AMD's decision to go with 8 shader engines raises hopes for the company doubling ROP counts over "Polaris," to 64, by packing two render backends per shader engine. AMD unveils Navi in its May 27 Computex keynote, followed by a possible early-July launch.

The trade ban imposed on Chinese tech giant Huawei by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and ratified through an Executive Order by President Donald Trump, is cutting both ways. Not only are U.S. entities banned from importing products and services from Huawei, but also engaging in trade with them (i.e. selling to them). U.S. tech firms stare at a $11 billion revenue loss by early estimates. Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs compiled a list of companies impacted by the ban, and the extent of their revenue loss. It turns out that AMD isn't a small player, and in fact, stands to lose more revenue in absolute terms than even Microsoft. It earns RMB 268 million (USD $38.79 million) from Huawei, compared to Microsoft's RMB 198 million ($28.66 million). Intel's revenue loss is a little over double that of AMD at RMB 589 million ($84 million), despite its market-share dominance.

That's not all, AMD's exposure is higher than that of Intel, since sales to Huawei make up a greater percentage of AMD's revenues than it does Intel's. AMD exports not just client-segment products such as Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics, but possibly also EPYC enterprise processors for Huawei's server and SMB product businesses. NVIDIA is affected to a far lesser extent than Intel, AMD, and Microsoft. Qualcomm-Broadcom take the biggest hit in absolute revenue terms at RMB 3.5 billion ($508 million), even if their exposure isn't the highest. The duo export SoCs and cellular modems to Huawei, both as bare-metal and licenses. Storage hardware makers aren't far behind, with the likes of Micron, Seagate, and Western Digital taking big hits. Micron exports DRAM and SSDs, while Seagate and WDC export hard drives.

A Sapphire product manager and PR director, speaking to the Chinese press spilled the beans on AMD's upcoming Radeon Navi graphics card lineup. It looks like with Navi, AMD is targeting the meat of the serious gamer market, at two specific price points, USD $399 with a "Pro" (cut-down) product, and $499 with an "XT" (fully-fledged) product. AMD has two NVIDIA products in its crosshairs, the GeForce RTX 2070, and the RTX 2060. In the interview, the Sapphire rep mentioned "stronger than 2070", when talking about performance numbers, which we assume is for the Navi XT variant - definitely promising. The $399 Navi "Pro" is probably being designed with a performance target somewhere between the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, so you typically pay $50 more than you would for an RTX 2060, for noticeably higher performance.

Sapphire also confirmed that AMD's Navi does not have specialized ray-tracing hardware on the silicon, but such technology will debut with "next year's new architecture". They also suggested that AMD is unlikely to scale up Navi for the enthusiast segment, and that the Vega-based Radeon VII will continue to be the company's flagship product. On the topic of Radeon VII custom designs, Sapphire commented that "there is no plans for that". On the other hand, Sapphire is actively working on custom designs for the Navi architecture, and mentioned that "work on a "Toxic" version of Navi is complete, and it is watercooled". Many people have speculated that AMD will unveil Navi at its Computex keynote address on May 27. Sapphire confirmed that date, and also added that the launch will be on 7th of July, 2019.

The Fortune 500 lists the top 500 companies in the worold in terms of revenue. These are the most significant movers in the markets, be it of real estate, mining, hedge fund, or semiconductor nature (among others). AMD was "kicked" out of the Fortune 500 back in 2015, when the company was struggling with its Bulldozer-based processors and had an increasingly small marketshare - and thus revenue - that Zen came on to save. Now, thanks to the efforts of everyone involved in the company, they've been listed again on the #460 spot.

The company has been winning minds and wallets when it comes to their CPU solutions in both the mainstream and professional segments, with the company making very important forays into the HPC world mostly thanks to the strength of their CPU lineup - which, in some cases, like with the Frontier Supercomupter (expected to be the world's fastest), can bring wins in the GPU computing department as well. For comparison's sake, Intel stands at a commanding #43, while NVIDIA enjoys a comfortable #268 place.

The folks over at Videocardz have treated us to a leak on MSI's upcoming X570 motherboards. The company's mid-tier MPG motherboards usually include the likes of the Gaming Carbon and Gaming Plus motherboards, and this round of motherboard development is no different. Both motherboards join leaked designs from other brands that showed active cooling being mounted on top of the chipset, a throwback to another era.

The leaked Gaming Plus is the lower-tier of the two leaked solutions of today, cutting on reinforcements on some expansion ports (such as the PCIe 16x slot). The Gaming Pro Carbon features a fancier design (with RGB lighting); the chipset hroud also serves as cooling for M.2 slots you can populate underneath (or so it seems). The Gaming Pro Carbon has more attention to detail on the placement of connectors such as SATA, and seems to have a slight advantage on the overall motherboard power delivery circuits, but these are just being eyeballed. One thing we can see is that while the Gaming Pro Carbon features MSI's Audio Boost feature, the Gaming Plus doesn't. Expect more details to be available closer to launch.

The Hot Chips conference is one of the leading-edge grounds for discussion of new silicon-bound technologies, and AMD will, as usual, take to its grounds in an effort to detail their efforts in their technology fields. The conference's organization has already confirmed a number of participants in its conference schedule, which includes the likes of Intel, Microsoft, Alibaba, NVIDIA, Tesla and of course, AMD.

AMD will be delivering two keynotes: the first, on August 19th, is simply titled "Zen 2", and will therefore deal with the underpinnings of the Zen 2 microarchitecture, which will be pervasive to all of AMD's CPU product lines. A second conference will be held on the same day by AMD's CEO Lisa Su herself, and is titled "Delivering the Future of High-Performance Computing with System, Software and Silicon Co-Optimization". On the next day, August 20th, another AMD keynote is simply titled "7 nm Navi GPU", and we expect it to follow in the footsteps of the Zen 2 conference. So, with AMD diving deep into both architectures come August... it's extremely likely the company will have launched both product lines by then. Fingers crossed. You can find the abstract on AMD's CEO Lisa Su's conference after the break.

AMD is giving finishing touches to its Ryzen 3000 "Picasso" family of APUs, and Thai PC enthusiast TUM_APISAK has details on their CPU clock speeds. The Ryzen 3 3200G comes with 3.60 GHz nominal clock-speed and 4.00 GHz maximum Precision Boost frequency; while the Ryzen 5(?) 3400G ships with 3.70 GHz clock speeds along with 4.20 GHz max Precision Boost. The "Picasso" silicon is an optical shrink of the 14 nm "Raven Ridge" silicon to the 12 nm FinFET process at GlobalFoundries, the same one on which AMD builds "Pinnacle Ridge" and "Polaris 30."

Besides the shrink to 12 nm, "Picasso" features upgraded "Zen+" CPU cores that have improved Precision Boost algorithm and faster on-die caches, which contribute to a roughly 3% increase in IPC on "Pinnacle Ridge," but significantly improved multi-threaded performance compared to 1st generation Ryzen. Clock speeds of both the CPU cores and the integrated "Vega" iGPU are expected to increase. Both the 3200G and 3400G see a 100 MHz increase in nominal clock-speed, and 300 MHz increase in boost clocks, over the chips they succeed, the 2200G and 2400G, respectively. The iGPU is rumored to receive a similar 100-200 MHz increase in engine clock.

GeIL (Golden Emperor International Ltd.), one of the world's leading PC components and peripheral manufacturers, has announced a partnership with ASRock to expand their gaming product line and launch the EVO SPEAR Phantom Gaming Edition Memory. This new memory module delivers the hardcore gaming experience gamers and enthusiasts demand for their SFF (small form factor) systems.

The all-new EVO SPEAR Phantom Gaming Edition Memory is fully compatible with ASRock Phantom Gaming motherboards, including the latest Z390 Phantom Gaming X, Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 and X399 Phantom Gaming 6. It is available as single modules and kits up to 64GB and runs as low as 1.2V and at max 1.35V, thereby resulting in less power consumption and higher reliability. Featuring a stylish and stealthy standard-height heat spreader, EVO SPEAR Phantom Gaming Edition Memory can be used in most case designs especially the SFF (small form factor) systems and full-sized gaming PCs. It's ideal for gamers, enthusiasts, and case modders looking to maximize gaming performance with minimum investment.

During AMD's annual shareholder meeting today, AMD president and CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed the launch of next-generation AMD Ryzen, EPYC CPUs and Navi GPUs for the third quarter of this year. The expected products are going to be manufactured on TSMC's 7 nm process and will be using new and improved architectures.

Ryzen 3000 series CPUs are rumored to have up to as much as 16 cores in Ryzen 9 SKUs, 12 cores in Ryzen 7 SKUs and 8 cores in Ryzen 5 SKUs. EPYC server CPUs will be available in models up to 64 cores. All of the new CPUs will be using AMD "Zen 2" architecture that will offer better IPC performance and, as rumors suggest for consumer models, are OC beasts. Navi GPUs are the new 7 nm GPUs that are expected to be very competitive both price and performance wise to NVIDIA's Turing series, hopefully integrating new technologies such as dedicated Ray Tracing cores for higher frame rates in Ray Tracing enabled games. No next generation ThreadRipper launch date was mentioned, so we don't yet know when and if that will that land.

AMD in a statement confirmed that its processors are unaffected by the RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load) and Fallout vulnerabilities. The company however worded its statement in CYA language, just to be safe. "...we believe our products are not susceptible to 'Fallout' or 'RIDL' because of the hardware protection checks in our architecture. We have not been able to demonstrate these exploits on AMD products and are unaware of others having done so," reads the AMD statement put out late Tuesday (14th May).

AMD came to these conclusions on the basis of its own testing and discussions with the researchers who discovered RIDL. It's important to note here, that the "Fallout" vulnerability AMD is referring to in this statement is the one which is part of four MDS vulnerabilities Intel disclosed yesterday, and not the identically named "Fallout" vulnerability discovered by CTS Labs in 2018, allegedly affecting secure memory management of AMD "Zen" processors.

BIOSTAR,a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices offers piece of mind for its customers, announcing the BIOSTAR AMD AM4 300-series and 400-series motherboardswill be compatible with upcoming 3rd Gen AMD RYZEN CPUs. BIOSTAR's engineering team have been working relentlessly prior to the availability of the upcoming CPUs to ensure BIOSTAR products keep their promise of ensuring customers get the best value without worrying about future upgrades.

Among the motherboard models eligible for BIOS update are: B350ET2, B350GT3, B350GT5, B350GTN, B450GT3, X370GT3, X370GT5, X370GT7, X370GTN, X470GT8, X470GTN, A320MD PRO, A320MH PRO, TA320-BTC, TB350-BTC, A320MY-Q7, A320MH, B45M2, B450MHC, B450MH, and Hi-Fi B350S1. You should be able to find the BIOS updates in the downloads section of the product pages of these motherboards on the BIOSTAR website.

Just in time for the release of Bethesda's open-world first-person shooter Rage 2 (find our performance analysis here), AMD has released their latest installment of the Radeon Adrenalin 2019 edition drivers for their graphics cards to make the most of the game. Indeed, AMD claims an improvement in game performance of up to 16% on the Radeon VII relative to last month's 19.4.3 drivers, and this is in addition to added support for the big Windows 10 May 2019 update and instruction tracing for AMD's GPU Profiler version 1.5.X. There is a plethora of fixed issues listed as well, and the usual list of known bugs, all of which can be seen past the break. We have also hosted the drivers installer for your convenience, which can be found at the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.5.1

One of our readers discovered an interesting entry in the INF file of AMD's Adrenalin 19.4.3 graphics drivers. It includes two instances of "Radeon RX 640," and has the same device ID as the Radeon RX 550X from the current generation. The branding flies in the face of reports suggesting that with its next-generation "Navi" GPUs, AMD could refresh its client-segment nomenclature to follow the "Radeon RX 3000" series, but it's possible that the RX 600 series was carved out to re-brand the existing "Polaris" based low-end chips one step-down (i.e. RX 550X re-branding as RX 640, RX 560 possibly as RX 650, etc.).

The move to create the RX 600 series could also be driven by AMD's need to contain all "Navi" based SKUs in the RX 3000 series, and re-branded "Polaris" based ones in the RX 600, so that, at least initially, consumers aren't led to believe they're buying a re-branded "Polaris" SKU opting for an RX 3000-series graphics card. It's also possible that AMD may not create low-end chips based on "Navi" initially, and focus on the performance-segment with the highest sale volumes among serious gamers, the $200-400 price-range. Based on the 14 nm "Lexa" silicon, the RX 550X is equipped with 640 stream processors, 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus. Given the performance gains expected from Intel's Gen11 "Ice Lake" iGPU and AMD's own refreshed "Picasso" APU, the RX 640 could at best be a cheap iGPU replacement for systems that lack it.Image Credit: Just Some Noise (TechPowerUp Forums)

MSI, without naming its product, teased its MEG X570 Ace motherboard late last week, obeying the cardinal rules of a teaser, such as not putting out clear pictures or names. BIOSTAR probably wanted to do something similar, but ended up leaking glaring details and pictures of its flagship socket AM4 motherboard based on the AMD X570 chipset, the Racing X570GT8. The X570 is AMD's first in-house design chipset for the AM4 socket after "Promontory" and FM2-based "Bolton," supplied by ASMedia. It was necessitated by the need to get downstream PCIe connectivity from the chipset to be certified for the latest generations (gen 3.0 or later), by AMD, and overcome many of the connectivity limitations of ASMedia "Promontory," from which AMD carved out previous socket AM4 chipsets.

Design compulsions of being a flagship product aside, there are signs of a clear focus on strengthening the CPU VRM on the Racing X570GT8, to cope with the rumored Ryzen 9 series 16-core "Zen 2" processor. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8+4 pin EPS connectors, conditioning it for the processor with a 12-phase VRM. There are two metal-reinforced PCI-Express x16 slots wired to the AM4 SoC, and we get the first glimpse of the PCI-Express gen 4.0 lane switching and re-driver circuitry. We haven't seen anything to suggest that the downstream PCIe lanes from the X570 chipset are gen 4.0, yet, but we expect them to at least be gen 3.0. The presence of three M.2 slots bodes well for the downstream PCIe lane count. ASMedia "Promontory" puts out a paltry eight gen 2.0 lanes. It's also interesting to see an active fan-heatsink cooling the X570 chipset, indicating a rather high TDP compared to the 3-5 Watt TDP of the 400-series "Promontory" low-power variant chipsets. The component choices by BIOSTAR look premium and are a callback to its T-Power glory days enthusiasts remember.

AMD's 3rd generation Ryzen (3000-series) processors will overcome a vast number of memory limitations faced by older Ryzen chips. With Zen 2, the company decided to separate the memory controller from the CPU cores into a separate chip, called "IO die". Our resident Ryzen memory guru Yuri "1usmus" Bubliy, author of DRAM Calculator for Ryzen, found technical info that confirms just how much progress AMD has been making.

The third generation Ryzen processors will be able to match their Intel counterparts when it comes to memory overclocking. In the Zen 2 BIOS, the memory frequency options go all the way up to "DDR4-5000", which is a huge increase over the first Ryzens. The DRAM clock is still linked to the Infinity Fabric (IF) clock domain, which means at DDR4-5000, Infinity Fabric would tick at 5000 MHz DDR, too. Since that rate is out of reach for IF, AMD has decided to add a new 1/2 divider mode for their on-chip bus. When enabled, it will run Infinity Fabric at half the DRAM actual clock (eg: 1250 MHz for DDR4-5000).