Amidst breaking news about PowerColor designing what could be the first custom-design Radeon VII graphics card, the company also unveiled its reference-design Radeon VII card, the AXVII 16GBHBM2-3DH. This card sticks to AMD's reference design clock speeds of up to 1750 MHz boost, and up to 1800 MHz "peak" clock speeds, with the memory ticking at 1000 MHz. It implements the slick, solid-aluminium triple-fan stock cooling solution AMD designed for this card. Drawing power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, the card puts out three DisplayPort 1.4 and an HDMI 2.0b. Based on the 7 nm "Vega 20" silicon, the Radeon VII packs 3,840 stream processors, 240 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 4096-bit wide HBM2 memory interface, holding 16 GB of memory. It's likely that PowerColor will sell this card close to AMD's MSRP for this card, USD $699.

PowerColor, one of AMD's foremost AIB (Add-in-Board) partners, is preparing at least as many as five different SKUs based on the latest, upcoming AMD graphics chip. While AMD did say that initial availability of the new, shrunk-down Vega graphics card would be limited to base design models, it's clear that at least PowerColor wants to bring its years of R&D on cooling solutions to bear.

The product codes for PowerColor's in-development SKUs stand as AXVII 16GBHBM2-3DH (reference model), AXVII 16GBHBM2-2D2H (RedDragon Triple Fan), AXVII 16GBHBM2-2D2HD (RedDevil Triple Fan), AXVII 16GBHBM2-2D2H/OC (RedDragon Triple Fan OC, and AXVII 16GBHBM2-2D2HD/OC (RedDevil Triple Fan OC). Whether PowerColor is moving the fastest, has the best relations with AMD, or is just the one company whose beans have been spilled is uncertain for now, but you can expect other brands to join in on the SKU development, if they aren't doing so already (highly, highly doubtful at that).Update (30/01): A PowerColor representative on Reddit stated that the company is not planning to launch any custom-design Radeon VII in the immediate future. "We did clarify to the media, that at this moment we will only carry AMD reference design and at the moment we do not have custom model planned in the immediate future," they said. PowerColor didn't completely shut off the possibility of a "Red Devil" branded Radeon VII. "Obviously there's quite of you guys out there wanting our Red Devil series on the Vega VII and we will always consider the option. Just not at this point," the statement read.

Benchmarks of AMD's upcoming Radeon VII graphics card have surfaced, courtesy of the one and only, graphics card info and results leaker extraordinaire Tum Apisak. In these scores, and looking purely at the graphics portion of the benchmarks, AMD's solution really does seem to bring the fight to NVIDIA's RTX 2080 - no small feat, considering that it's mostly a shrunk-down version of AMD's previous-gen Vega with overcharged memory and core clocks.

The Radeon VII scores, according to Tum Apisak (take it with a grain of salt), 27400 on the FireStrike test; 13400 on the FIreStrike Extreme bench; 6800 on the FireStrike Ultra test; and finally, 8700 points on Time Spy. Consulting 3D Mark's database, it seems that factory-overclocked RTX 2080 graphics cards usually score around 27000 points on the FIreStrike base and 6400 points on the FireStrike Ultra tests, which means that at least in this synthetic scenario, AMD's graphics card ekes out a win.

Sometime mid-2019, AMD will launch its 3rd generation Ryzen "Zen 2" processors with core counts of up to 16 cores in the AM4 package. These processors will launch alongside the new AMD 500-series desktop chipset family, led by the X570. AMD assures backwards compatibility of these processors with older chipsets provided motherboard vendors support their customers with BIOS updates. You'll probably need a 500-series chipset motherboard to use PCI-Express gen 4.0 connectivity, while older chipsets will limit connectivity to gen 3.0 (not that there are any GPUs that use gen 4.0).

ASRock is developing as many as nine motherboard models based on the AMD X570, according to a list scored by VideoCardz. These include the X570 Phantom Gaming X and X570 Taichi leading the top-end; X570 Phantom Gaming 6, X570 Phantom Gaming 4, and X570 Extreme4 covering the mid-range, and the entry-level of the lineup consisting of the X570 Pro4/R2.0 and X570M Pro4/R2.0.

The leading global motherboard and graphics card manufacturer, ASRock, pleasure to announce the world's first AMD based Mini STX Platform - DeskMini A300 at CES 2019. It adopts with AMD A300 chipset, not only supports AMD AM4 65W APU, but also provides up to 32GB DDR4-2933MHz high-speed memory, which leads to outstanding computing power and 3D performance. DeskMini A300 offers up to 4 storage interfaces, supports three display outputs simultaneously, M.2 Wi-Fi module and various accessories within 1.9 Liter compact size. DeskMini A300 is an ideal choice to build a home entertainment PC and mini data center.

DeskMini A300 features the brand new A300M-STX motherboard. Continuing the design of the ASRock DeskMini series, the AMD AM4 socket is able to support the Bristol Ridge and Raven Ridge's 65W APU, as well as two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, which can support up to 32GB of capacity. With overclocking memory module, it will power up 20% of 3D gaming performance even more . Moreover, the DeskMini A300 supports three display outputs simultaneously, greatly improves the user experience.

The leading global motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, is proud to introduce the new ASRock Steel Legend motherboard series. ASRock Steel Legend motherboards are built around the most demanding specs and features to provide a wide array of materials, components, and features that ensure stable and reliable performance. Steel Legend motherboards stand out from the crowd through its massive and luscious XXL Aluminum Alloy Heatsinks, I/O Armor, PCI-E Steel Slot, Polychrome Sync (Addressable RGB LED) support, and detailed PCB print on Sapphire Black PCB for mainstream users, gamers, and professionals that choose to work and play in style. With support for the latest AMD Ryzen processors, as well as high-quality audio featuring the highest quality Nichicon golden audio caps and signal shielding integrated into the PCB.

ASRock has gone to great lengths to ensure optimum stability and protection. With ASRock Full Spike Protection on all USB, Audio and LAN ports, users are always protected from Lightning/ESD damage, which is a comforting thought when using Steel Legend motherboards in challenging environments. Use of Premium 60A Power Chokes and Nichicon 12K Black Caps means not only that the B450 Steel Legend and B450M Steel Legend will remain rock solid no matter the task, but it also keeps your system stable when overclocking, for extra performance, whether you're gaming or rendering professional content.

Let me be the first to say that the two may not be directly related, but it is an awfully strong coincidence that both pieces of news come out on the same day. Indeed, earlier in the day AMD put out a press release (full release past the break) announcing "multiple organizational changes focused on strengthening the company's senior leadership team and accelerating growth." Several familiar names have been promoted within the company to be in charge of more products and visions across their CPU and GPU business units. Mark Papermaster, for example, is now an executive VP as well as CTO of AMD, and the company has also hired in new talent, including industry veteran Sandeep Chennakeshu, as executive VP of "Computing and Graphics responsible for the company's high-performance PC, gaming and semi-custom businesses".

Perhaps all this re-structuring and new hiring comes in handy, at a time when we have seen several people leave AMD for Intel or otherwise. Indeed, shortly after that press release went out, word got to us that James Prior, Senior Product Manager for AMD, and an ardent employee for nearly 6 years, is no longer working for the company. We have no word yet on what is next for James, but it was more than a small surprise to know that the person you just spoke with at CES, and had a long conversation of AMD's desktop processors, is gone just like that. We have known James for many years now, and can attest to his work ethics as well as being a great guy all-round. We wish him the best in his future ventures, and look forward to also seeing how AMD's re-structuring turns out.

AMD yesterday released the latest version of their Radeon Adrenalin Graphics Drivers. Version 19.1.2 adds support for the remaster of Resident Evil 2, a long-awaited title, as well as for Tropico 6 and Anthem's Early Access build. Anthem support brings with it an additional 7% performance uplift at 1080p resolution with AMD's RX 580 graphics card. Some issues such as black screens on reboot and flickering issues in rocket League with FreeSync have also been fixed. Follow the link below to download the drivers, and check after the break for additional fixes and known bugs in this release.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.1.2 Beta

ASRock is a relatively new entry into the graphics card market with its Phantom gaming brand, but has already delivered on AMD's previous-generation hardware with interesting solutions. The company, alongside Sapphire, has been one of the first to showcase their take on AMD's upcoming Radeon VII high-performance graphics card, which will slot in above the company's RX 580 graphics cards in terms of performance.

This is a reference design through and through, so it's more of a question of whether or not you like AsRock's stickers better than their competitors', though some changes to the backplate could have been made as well, in order to expand on ASRock's branding. The Asrock version of AMD's Radeon VII should be available come launch, on February 7h (see what they did there?) for $699.

A new development could shake up our expectations on AMD's new Ryzen 2 CPUs, which if true, could mean that previous rumors of much increased core-counts at the top of AMD's offerings were true. User TUM Apisak, who has been involved in multiple information leaks and scouting for the hardware world, has digged enough to find a submitted UserBenchmark that screams of a 12-core, 24-thread AMD Matisse part (an engineering sample at that, so keep your hats on for the presented clock speeds).

The benchmark list the used CPU via product code 2D3212BGMCWH2_37 / 34_N (H2 is indicative of a Matisse CPU The benchmark is listing a base clock speed of 3.4 GHz and an average boost clock speed of 3.6 GHz. The rest of the system specs are very, very basic, with 4 GB of 1333 MHz DDR4 memory being used on a new AMD platform, based on the Myrtle-MTS based chipset. The processor is listed having a 105 watts TDP and 32 MB of L3 cache.

Sapphire is among the first AMD add-in-board (AIB) partners to launch a Radeon VII graphics card. The card sticks to AMD reference board design, which the company unveiled at its CES 2019 keynote. Interestingly, its GPU engine boost frequency is set at 1750 MHz, which is less than the 1800 MHz boost frequency figure that was mentioned by the company earlier. Could it be that AMD is reserving 1800 MHz for cards directly sold on AMD.com? The memory frequency is unchanged at 1000 MHz, which works out to an HBM2 memory bandwidth of 1 TB/s. Sapphire's box for this card lists out key specifications upfront, and also features the Vega II logo. It's likely that the card will be sold at the baseline price of $699, given that there are no other variants of this card, not even custom-design.

BIOSTAR, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices, introduces a solution for edge computing, the BIOSTAR A10N-8800E system-on-chip (SoC) mini-ITX motherboard, for faster data access and computing over traditional cloud solutions. The BIOSTAR A10N-8800E integrates the AMD FX-8800P processor, typically found in AMD mobile computing, for superb processing performance and power efficiency. Even with a mini-ITX form factor, it includes features such as dual channel DDR 4 2133 support, USB3.1 Gen. 1, PCI-e M.2 16Gb/s and HDMI output. The BIOSTAR A10N-8800E is an excellent motherboard for edge computing applications for home, office or online gaming.

AMD in 2012 launched the FX-8150, the "world's first 8-core desktop processor," or so it says on the literal tin. AMD achieved its core-count of 8 with an unconventional CPU core design. Its 8 cores are arranged in four sets of two cores each, called "modules." Each core has its own independent integer unit and L1 data cache, while the two cores share a majority of their components - the core's front-end, a branch-predictor, a 64 KB L1 code cache, a 2 MB L2 cache, but most importantly, an FPU. There was much debate across tech forums on what constitutes a CPU core.

Multiprocessor-aware operating systems had to be tweaked on how to properly address a "Bulldozer" processor. Their schedulers would initially treat "Bulldozer" cores as fully independent (as conventional logic would dictate), until AMD noticed multi-threaded application performance bottlenecks. Eventually, Windows and various *nix kernels received updates to their schedulers to treat each module as a core, and each core as an SMT unit (a logical processor). The FX-8350 is a 4-core/8-thread processor in the eyes of Windows 10, for example. These updates improved the processors' performance but not before consumers started noticing that their operating systems weren't reporting the correct core-count. In 2015, a class-action lawsuit was filed against AMD for false marketing of FX-series processors. The wheels of that lawsuit are finally moving, after a 12-member Jury is set up to examine what constitutes a CPU core, and whether an AMD FX-8000 or FX-9000 series processor can qualify as an 8-core chip.

System software code used for detecting and installing AMD's upcoming Radeon "Navi" family of graphics processors surfaced in the latest Apple MacOS "Mojave" beta. Version 14.2 beta of the operating system packs preparation for AMD's next-generation GPUs through a device identifier "0x73101002." A similar piece of code surfaced on early versions of MacOS "Sierra" some 6 months prior to Radeon "Vega" family launch, which perfectly aligns with this release of Mojave preceding the speculated mid-2019 launch of "Navi."

The code makes four references, Navi 16, Navi 12, Navi 10, and Navi 9. We're not quite sure if these are brand names or ASIC codes pointing to the number of next-generation compute units enabled on the silicon. If they are the latter, and assuming AMD hasn't changed the number of stream processors per NGCU, we're looking at the possibility of these chips being mid-range performance successors to the "Polaris" family, and it's likely they'll find place in Apple's upcoming generation of iMac, and possibly even MacBooks.Many Thanks to theoneandonlymrk for the tip.

AMD late Monday released WHQL-signed Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.1.1 drivers. These drivers are identical in features and changes to January 11 release of Adrenalin 19.1.1 as a Beta. Among the key changes over the previous 18.12.3 drivers include performance optimization for "Fortnite," bug fixes for Virtual Super Resolution (VSR), graphics card fan zero-fan mode not correctly engaging when toggled on/off in Radeon Settings, incorrect software update notifications in Radeon Settings Advisor, and multi-monitor systems experiencing a mouse pointer lag when one of the displays is enabled but powered off.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.1.1 WHQL

The change-log follows.

EK , the leading premium liquid cooling gear manufacturer, announces the global launch of their new Classic Product Line. It includes an NVIDIA RTX 2000 series GPU block, CPU blocks for both the most popular AMD and Intel platforms, and a pump-reservoir combo unit. Whether you only care about cooling performance, or just prefer the clean and timeless design of EK, the Classic Line will fulfill all your needs.

For users who want to experience the core essence of liquid cooling, the EK CLassic Line of products will offer excellent value regarding performance that is accompanied with simple and minimalistic looks. While designing and engineering the portfolio of the Classic Lineup, the performance of the products was not compromised at any moment.

It looks like RTX technology won't make it to sub-$250 market segments as the GPUs aren't fast enough to handle real-time raytracing, and it makes little economic sense for NVIDIA to add billions of additional transistors for RT cores. The company is hence carving out a sub-class of "Turing" GPUs under the TU11x ASIC series, which will power new GeForce GTX family SKUs, such as the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, and other GTX 1000-series SKUs. These chips offer "Turing Shaders," which are basically CUDA cores that have the IPC and clock-speeds rivaling existing "Turing" GPUs, but no RTX capabilities. To sweeten the deal, NVIDIA will equip these cards with GDDR6 memory. These GPUs could still have tensor cores which are needed to accelerate DLSS, a feature highly relevant to this market segment.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will no doubt be slower than the RTX 2060, and be based on a new ASIC codenamed TU116. According to a VideoCardz report, this 12 nm chip packs 1,536 CUDA cores based on the "Turing" architecture, and the same exact memory setup as the RTX 2060, with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface. The lack of RT cores and a lower CUDA core count could make the TU116 a significantly smaller chip than the TU106, and something NVIDIA can afford to sell at sub-$300 price-points such as $250. The GTX 1060 6 GB is holding the fort for NVIDIA in this segment, besides other GTX 10-series SKUs such as the GTX 1070 occasionally dropping below the $300 mark at retailers' mercy. AMD recently improved its sub-$300 portfolio with the introduction of Radeon RX 590, which convincingly outperforms the GTX 1060 6 GB.

During our visit with ECS at CES 2019, we had the opportunity to check out some of their Mini-PCs. The first one we looked at during our tour was the M520 which comes equipped with an Intel Apollo Lake SoC and support for up to 8 GB of DDR3L via 2 SODIMM slots. Expansions options consist of an M.2 E key 2230 slot (PCIe, USB) and an M.2 M key 2242/2280 PCIe x1 slot. It offers HDMI and mDP for video output and even has two Gigabit LAN ports along with wireless connectivity and Bluetooth 4.0. Onboard storage consists of eMMC configured as 64 GB or 32 GB, and a 2.5-inch HDD/SSD as an option. It also has 4x USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports for peripherals and device connectivity along with an ES-232/422/485 port. In general, this particular system is quite tiny, but even with that in mind, we have to wonder why a 32 GB version is also an option considering Microsoft has gone so far as to say 32 GB of storage is inadequate for Windows 10.

Next up was the LIVA M520 not to be confused with the model previously discussed this option is quite a bit larger but features similar specifications. It comes equipped with a Celeron N3350 and up to 8 GB of DDR3L via 2x SODIMM slots. Storage consists of the same 32 GB, or 64 GB of eMMC and a 2.5-inch HDD/SSD is optional. The rest of the specifications are also quite similar with the LIVA M520 having an HDMI + mDP for video output, 4x USB ports, and 2x Gigabit LAN ports. Where it differs is the USB ports are only USB 3.0, not 3.1. For expansion, it includes the same M.2 E key and M.2 M key slots as the other M520 system.

More news coming in on AMD's upcoming high-end graphics card, the Radeon VII, with Chinese media reporting that AMD's initial production run for the card is set to ship just 5,000 pieces worldwide. This comes hot on the heels of another report that the Radeon VII won't come in custom-designs by AMD's add-in board (AIB) partners, and that only the reference design will be repackaged and sold by them. What's worse, the source which leaked this production size also revealed that AMD is selling the card below cost-price, i.e., with each card sold, AMD is losing money. This probably explains Wall Street's cold response to the Radeon VII launch, but with a batch size of just 5,000 (roughly $3.5 million in sales at $699 a piece), this card has a negligible impact on AMD's bottom-line.

AMD posted a swift denial to both pieces of news, the size of its production run and the product's profitability. In a statement to MyDrivers, AMD said (translated): "We will not release production figures, but when released on February 7, AMD.com official website and AIB vendor partners will have products on sale, and we expect the supply of Radeon VII to meet the needs of gamers." In short, Radeon VII is shaping up to be the card you'd want to buy if you've sworn a blood-oath never to buy an NVIDIA product, and you need something to play games in 2019 at 4K with.

A report via Tom's Hardware.de says that AMD's plans for the upcoming Radeon VII are somewhat one-dimensional, in that only reference designs will be available for this particular rendition of the Vega architecture. And this doesn't mean"initial availability" only on reference cards, like NVIDIA has been doing with their Founder's editions; the report claims that at no point in time will there actually be a custom-designed Radeon VII. The quantity of Radeon VII GPUs will apparently be "strictly limited" come launch - a likely result of the decision to make use of TSMC's 7 nm process, which will have to serve not only AMD's Ryzen 3000 and Epyc CPUs when those are actually launched, but all of TSMC's other clients.

This is in contrast with AMD CEO Lisa Su's words during her CES keynote, who said that Radeon VII would be available from "several leading add-in board partners plan to offer the cards". According to a Tom's Hardware.de Taiwanese source, "You cannot leak anything that does not exist" in regards to third-party designs. And another Chinese source said "the quantity of Radeon VII is strictly limited… not sure if AMD wants to open AIB to have an own design later".

Display specialist AOC is proud to announce the arrival of the curved AG273QCG (Nvidia G-SYNC) and AG273QCX (AMD FreeSync 2 HDR) monitors of the third AGON generation. AOC's revamped and redesigned premium gaming monitor series is available starting from January 2019.

Designed for hardcore gamers, the AGON 3 models carry on with features of the past AGON displays such as refresh rates of up to 165 Hz, a high responsiveness of 1 ms, and now includes latest technologies such as AMD FreeSync 2 HDR and a refreshed sleek design, which in case of the AG273QCG has contributed to winning the "Red Dot Design Award 2018". Thanks to very high refresh rates of 165 Hz (AG273QCG) and 144 Hz (AG273QCX), very fast response times and variable refresh rate technologies both monitors are suited for fast-paced games.

AMD's upcoming Radeon VII high-end consumer graphics card lacks full FP64 compute capabilities available to the company's other products targeting the enterprise-compute market, such as the Radeon Instinct MI60. Radeon VII offers an FP32 peak compute throughput of 13.8 TFLOP/s single-precision, which, given its hardware resources, should normally work out a double-precision throughput of 6.7 TFLOP/s. However, with the feature disabled for the Radeon VII, the FP64 throughput will be closer to 860 GFLOP/s. Disabling FP64 capabilities for client-segment graphics cards is a common practice among both AMD and NVIDIA.

For gamers, PC enthusiasts, and even creative professionals, double-precision floating-point performance of a graphics card remains completely irrelevant. The disabling of DPFP ensures gamers have access to Radeon VII, lest every cloud compute provider and their dog would soak up Radeon VII inventory owing to its $699 list price, had it offered 6.7 TFLOP/s rivaling compute accelerators 10-15 times more. Radeon VII is the world's first consumer graphics processor built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process, with company-claimed performance rivaling NVIDIA's RTX 2080. It will be available from February 7.

AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster, in an interview with TheStreet, confirmed AMD's plans with 7 nm for their graphics offerings are just beginning with Radeon VII. When inquired on AMD's plans for their graphics division, Papermaster said that "What we do over the course of the year is what we do every year. We'll round out the whole roadmap." he then added that "We're really excited to start on the high-end... you'll see the announcements over the course of the year as we round out our Radeon roadmap."

So these comments form papermaster seemingly confirm two things: first, that AMD plans to "round out" its lineup using the 7 nm process technology, which means increasing offerings at different price points. The use of the word "refresh" almost takes the breath away, since refreshes are usually based on the same previous architectures. However, AMD does have plans for a new mid-range chip to finally succeed Polaris in Navi, which should become the next AMD launch in the 7 nm process for graphics technologies.

AMD pulled off a surprise at its CES 2019 keynote address, with the announcement of the Radeon VII client-segment graphics card targeted at gamers. We went hands-on with the card earlier this week. The company revealed a few more technical details of the card in its press-deck for the card. To begin with, the company talks about the immediate dividends of switching from 14 nm to 7 nm, with a reduction in die-size from 495 mm² on the "Vega 10" silicon to 331 mm² on the new "Vega 20" silicon. The company has reworked the die to feature a 4096-bit wide HBM2 memory interface, the "Vega 20" MCM now features four 32 Gbit HBM2 memory stacks, which make up the card's 16 GB of memory. The memory clock has been dialed up to 1000 MHz from 945 MHz on the RX Vega 64, which when coupled with the doubled bus-width, works out to a phenomenal 1 TB/s memory bandwidth.

We know from AMD's late-2018 announcement of the Radeon Instinct MI60 machine-learning accelerator based on the same silicon that "Vega 20" features a total of 64 NGCUs (next-generation compute units). To carve out the Radeon VII, AMD disabled 4 of these, resulting in an NGCU count of 60, which is halfway between the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64, resulting in a stream-processor count of 3,840. The reduced NGCU count could help AMD harvest the TSMC-built 7 nm GPU die better. AMD is attempting to make up the vast 44 percent performance gap between the RX Vega 64 and the GeForce RTX 2080 with a combination of factors.

While AMD has enjoyed tremendous success in regards to their Ryzen, Threadripper, and EPYC processors penetration into the mobile market has been a bit slow. However, judging by the number of systems on display at CES 2019 that is about to change. Models from Honor, Acer, Samsung, Lenovo, Dell, ASUS, and HP. The one that immediately caught our eye was the Acer Nitro 5 which packs an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 560X GPU. It also comes configured with 8 GB of memory, 256 GB SSD, IPS display and a backlit keyboard. Overall it looks to be a reliable entry level gaming system.

Next up was Dell's two offerings which were the Inspiron 5000 15 and 5000 14 2-in-1. The Inspiron 5000 15 was equipped with a 4c/8t Ryzen 5 3500U with Radeon Vega 8 graphics (512 shaders). It was also fully kitted out with 32 GB of DDR4 memory, 512 GB SSD, and a 1TB HDD making it an excellent option for productivity and heavy multitasking. Meanwhile, the 2-in-1 was equipped with a Ryzen 7 3700U which is a 4c/8t processor with Vega 10 graphics (640 shaders). It also came loaded with 16 GB of DDR4, 2 TB HDD and a 256 GB SSD giving it plenty of memory and storage space considering its more compact size.