ARCTIC, a leading manufacturer of low-noise PC coolers and components, is pleased to announce that all AM4-compatible ARCTIC coolers will also be compatible with AMD's new AM5 socket. AMD is expected to release the next-generation AMD Ryzen 7000 desktop processors (Zen 4) at the end of 2022. Since all mechanical dimensions remain identical, ARCTIC is able to guarantee compatibility with our coolers on AMD's new processors. Among the compatible ARCTIC coolers are its award-winning Liquid Freezer II series, the fan-favorite Freezer 34 eSports air cooler, and many more.

Sapphire looks set to launch one of the first low-profile RDNA2 graphics cards with the single-slot Radeon RX 6400 PULSE that has recently been leaked by VideoCardz. The card features a nearly identical design to the companies existing low-profile Radeon PRO W6400 product offering a single HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 port along with an optional half-height bracket. The Sapphire Radeon RX 6400 PULSE features 768 Stream Processors and 12 Ray Accelerators along with 4 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 16 Gbps. The card doesn't require any additional power connectors with a TDP of 53 W which could make it a good option for low-power builds. The Radeon RX 6400 was first announced by AMD in January for the OEM market with DIY market products set to launch in a few days on April 20th.

Pricing for AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards has been evolving positively for the last seven months, experiencing a downtrend that has brought street prices closer to the actual MSRP on the best graphics cards. According to 3D Center's price analysis of the Austrian and German markets, GPU pricing for both AMD and NVIDIA's latest GPUs have reached historical lows - although these lows are still at a premium over MSRP. Anyone looking to buy an AMD graphics card is now looking at an average markup of 12% over MSRP, while NVIDIA cards seem to be holding their inflated values slightly better, and still stand at 119% of MSRP.

The price action comes on the back of months of increasing supply at retailers, alongside reduced demand from Ethereum miners due to falling ETH prices ($2,912.54 at time of writing) and the expectation for Ethereum's passage to Proof of Stake (PoS) through The Merge, which is still slated for later this year. It's also likely that most customers who still haven't bought into the latest generation of GPUs from either AMD or NVIDIA are waiting for the release of Intel's competing Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs, not to mention AMD's mid-year RX 6*50 refresh and NVIDIA's next-generation graphics solutions. An exploding ETH price might bring GPU prices back up again; but until then, and at the rate prices are seemingly (at least locally) falling, it seems that consumers might finally be able to purchase GPUs at MSRP sometime after May.

Supply issues seem to continue to affect Intel's ambitious desktop GPU launch plans, with the Arc "Alchemist" line of desktop discrete GPUs now launching at "late Q2 or early Q3," sources tell VideoCardz. This would put the launch toward the end of June, or some time in July. This follows a similar trend with availability of notebooks powered by Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs, which are expected to be available in June, despite a March product launch.

A mid-year launch risks putting Intel's nascent dGPU lineup perilously close to AMD's RX 6x50 refresh, and NVIDIA's RTX 40-series "Ada Lovelace" graphics cards, expected to debut across the second half of 2022. At launch, Intel's desktop graphics card lineup will include as many as five SKUs, including the Arc A380, the Arc A580, the Arc A770, and the flagship Arc A780, which is probably a Limited Edition SKU. With the rumored performance numbers we're seeing, These SKUs have the potential to impress gamers, provided they aren't obsolete at launch by next-generation models from NVIDIA and AMD.

AMD is readying to refresh its Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 graphics card series with the new RX 6x50 series that use faster memory, and possibly higher engine clock speeds; and Sapphire is preparing updates to its entire custom-design graphics card product-stack. The top-dog RX 6950 XT will receive the company's highest-end TOXIC Limited Edition treatment, according to an Italian retail ready with listings. This SKU, like its RX 6900 XT-based predecessor (pictured below), will feature an all-in-one liquid cooling solution, with a pump+block that pulls heat from the GPU, ventilated by a large 360 mm radiator. Custom-design RX 6900 XT cards already use triple-8 pin PCIe power connector setup, and so it will be interesting to see if AMD implements the ATX 3.0 16-pin connector NVIDIA did with its RTX 3090 Ti.

Based on a pair of screenshots posted on Twitter by leaker @momomo_us, it appears that AMD's refreshed graphics cards aren't that far away, as Italian retailer Breakpoint has listed several Radeon RX 6x50XT cards on its website, alongside pricing. The cards in question are all from Sapphire and consist of Toxic, Nitro+ and Pulse cards. The listings have already been removed, but it might not matter too much, as the pricing isn't exactly affordable. For example, the Toxic RX 6950 XT LE Gaming OC was listed for €3,133.83, although that does include an AIO cooler.

The Nitro+ RX 6950XT model was listed at over €3,000, whereas the Nitro+ RX 6750XT was listed at over €1,400, or around €200 more than an RX 6800. The Nitro+ version of the RX 6650XT was listed north of €850, but even the two Pulse versions of the RX 6750XT and RX 6650XT are in the same crazy ballpark. Even the upcoming entry level RX 6400 model is listed at over €360 and you'd have to be mad to pay that kind of money for such a basic card. These prices are simply pure nonsense and should not be taken as an indicator of what these upcoming cards will cost. AMD is said to be launching the refreshed cards on the 10th of May, but the company might make an announcement later this month, where it will reveal the specs.

One of the largest cloud providers in China, Alibaba, has today announced a preview for a new instance powered by Yitian 710 processor. The new processor is a collection of Alibaba's efforts to develop a home-grown design capable of powering cloud instances and the infrastructure needed for it and its clients. Without much further ado, the Yitian 710 is based on Armv9 ISA and features 128 cores. Ramping up to 3.2 GHz, these cores are paired with eight-channel DDR5 memory to enable sufficient data transfer. In addition, the CPU supports 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes for IO with storage and accelerators. These are most likely custom designs, and we don't know if they are using a blueprint based on Arm's Neoverse. The CPU is manufactured at TSMC's facilities on 5 nm node and features 60 billion transistors.

Alibaba offers these processors as a part of their Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance called g8m, where users can select 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128 vCPUs, where each vCPU is equal to one CPU core physically. Alibaba is running this as a trial option and notes that users should not run production code on these instances, as they will disappear after two months. Only 100 instances are available for now, and they are based in Alibaba's Hangzhou zone in China. The company notes that instances based on Yitian 710 processors offer 100 percent higher efficiency than existing AMD/Intel solutions; however, they don't have any useful data to back it up. The Chinese cloud giant is likely trying to test and see if the home-grown hardware can satisfy the needs of its clients so that they can continue the path to self-sustainability.

AMD is slowly gearing up to launch the latest 7000 series Ryzen processors codenamed "Raphael." Thanks to the famous hardware leaker @9550pro on Twitter, we have evidence of B650 motherboards for the next-generation hardware. According to the image posted by the leaker, it appears like AMD's Ryzen 7000 series Raphael processor is running on MSI's MAG B650 motherboard at a very high voltage of 1.5 Volts VCore. While we don't know the exact SKU running here, we see a note referring to it as an Engineering Sample, meaning that this is not a final product. It is expected to see the new AM5 platform make a debut alongside DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 technology, so we have to wonder what the B650 chipset can support.

CPU-Z is one of the most widespread tools for profiling and monitoring, gathering information from the system, and presenting it in a user-readable UI. Today, the application has reached another milestone with the release of the CPU-Z 2.01 version, which brings support for additional upcoming processors from AMD and Intel. One of the software highlights is the inclusion of AMD's forthcoming processor designs, codenamed Rembrandt and Raphael. These processors are what AMD is bringing to the market now and in the near future, meaning that the software ecosystem has to prepare. Additionally, CPU-Z has been updated with preliminary support for Intel's upcoming 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors, alongside Intel ARC 3/5/7 DG2 designs. CPU-Z developers also improved validation process for high-frequency overclocking submissions of over 6 GHz. The full changelog is listed below.

Download CPU-Z 2.01 here.

AMD's first desktop processor with DDR5 memory support, the Ryzen 7000 series "Raphael," based on the "Zen 4" microarchitecture, will come with a design focus on DDR5 memory overclocking capabilities, with the company claiming that the processors will be capable of handling DDR5 memory clock speeds "you maybe thought couldn't be possible," according to Joseph Tao who is a Memory Enabling Manager at AMD.

Tao stated: "Our first DDR5 platform for gaming is our Raphael platform and one of the awesome things about Raphael is that we are really gonna try to make a big splash with overclocking and I'll just kinda leave it there but speeds that you maybe thought couldn't be possible, may be possible with this overclocking spec." We are hearing reports of AMD innovating a new overclocking standard for DDR5 memory, which it calls RAMP (Ryzen Accelerated Memory Profile), which it is positioning as a competing standard to Intel's XMP 3.0 spec.

ID-COOLING today announced IS-47S 47 mm height low profile CPU air cooler. At a total height including the fan of 47 mm, this cooler would be a good choice for your A4 cases. Designed with an overall dimension of 100x93x47mm, it has no conflict of the RAM or PCI-E slots. The heatsink is solid built with a pure copper base and 4 heatpipes and massive aluminium fins. The heatsink itself is measured at 35 mm height. Adding a powerful 12 mm PWM fan, this cooler is capable of handling processors with a maximum TDP of 95 W. In terms of mounting kit, two separate backplates are provided in the box for Intel and AMD respectively. The sockets list includes Intel LGA1700/1200/1151/1150/1155/1156 and AMD AM4.

The bundled thermal grease is named FROST X25, which has a thermal conductivity of 10.5 W/m-K.

A Steam Deck enthusiast has done what Steam would not (at least not in the first rendition of its popular Steam Deck handheld console): he went and added an external GPU to the mix. The owner of the ETA Prime YouTube channel managed to increase the Steam Deck's APU-powered graphical oomph with a much more powerful AMD RX 6900 XT graphics card. To do so required sacrifices however: since the SteamDeck doesn't feature a proper Thunderbolt 3/4 connector, ETA Prime had to remove the Steam Deck's SSD from its M.2 port, instead mounting a special M.2 to PCIe adapter in the SSD slot itself.

This, of course, required that installed games be run off memory cards, which generally offer lower speeds (a less than stellar experience) than the onboard SSD. It also required butchering the Steam Deck's OS by replacing it with Windows 11. But it did allow the Steam Deck's APU to tap onto power otherwise unavailable to it, unlocking playable framerates with maxed out detail settings on games such as God of War, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and others.

AMD Socket AM5 (LGA1718) is the next-generation socket designed to support next-generation AMD Ryzen 7000 desktop processors (Zen 4). AMD Socket AM5 uses the same liquid cooler bracket as Socket AM4. This allows you to upgrade to and enjoy AM5 without buying a new liquid cooler. MSI liquid coolers all support AMD Socket AM5, for specifics please refer to the chart below:

ASRock Industrial announces the 4X4 BOX-5000 Series Mini PCs 4X4 BOX-5800U, 4X4 BOX-5600U, and 4X4 BOX-5400U, with enhancement powered by AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 U-Series APUs- Ryzen 7 5800U, Ryzen 5 5600U, and Ryzen 3 5400U up to 8 cores/16 threads to energize performance, energy efficiency, and lower latency. Featuring a powerful yet compact design, the 4X4 BOX-5000 Series supports quad display outputs up to 4K with AMD Radeon Graphics for the enhanced visual experience. The Series also includes dual LAN ports up to 2.5 Gigabit with one DASH function and Wi-Fi 6E support of 6 GHz band for real-time connections. Moreover, it can uphold one M.2 Key M, one SATA 3.0 for storage, and five USB ports (three USB 3.2 Gen 2, two USB 2.0) for ultra-connectivity. The energized features make it the world's most advanced core for a wide range of home and business applications such as gaming, content creation, working from home, KIOSK, digital signage, and many more.

With AMD Ryzen 5000U Series Processors- Zen 3 Core Architecture, the 4X4 BOX-5000 Series Mini PCs deliver energized performance and reduced latency with up to 17% single-thread and multi-thread performance compared to Zen 2 along with improved graphics capabilities with AMD Radeon Graphics. Spanning from the flagship 4X4 BOX-5800U, 4X4 BOX-5600U, and 4X4 BOX-5400U, the new Series is powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5800U, Ryzen 5 5600U, Ryzen 3 5400U to increase power efficiency with lower power consumption- 6.7 W at idle. The 4X4 BOX-5000 Series also supports dual-channel DDR4 3200 MHz SO-DIMM memory up to 64 GB for uncompromised multitask computing capabilities.

XanxoGaming has finally released its complete set of benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and it's been tested against an Intel Core i9-12900KF. This time both platforms are tested using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and four times 8 GB of 3200 MHz CL14 DDR4 memory. The only difference appears to be the OS drive, motherboard and cooling, although both systems rely on a 360 mm AIO cooler. Both systems were running Windows 10 21H2. The site has a full breakdown of the components used for those interested in the exact details.

The two platforms were tested in 11 different games at 720p and 1080p. To spoil the excitement, it's a dead race between the two CPUs in most games at 1080p, with Intel being ahead by about 1-3 FPS in the games where AMD loses out. However, in the games AMD takes the lead, it's by a good 10 FPS or more, with games like the Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy XV seeing an advantage of 40-50 FPS. AMD often has an advantage when it comes to the one percent low numbers, even when Intel is ahead when it comes to the average FPS, but this doesn't apply to all of the games. It's worth keeping in mind that the Intel CPU should gain extra performance when paired with DDR5 memory in some of these games, but we'll have to wait for more reviews to see by how much. The benchmarks displayed are mostly the games TPU normally tests with, but aren't the entirety of games tested by XanxoGaming.

Here is the first picture of a next-generation AMD EPYC "Genoa" processor with its integrated heatspreader (IHS) removed. This is also possibly the first picture of a "Zen 4" CPU Complex Die (CCD). The picture reveals as many as twelve CCDs, and a large sIOD silicon. The "Zen 4" CCDs, built on the TSMC N5 (5 nm EUV) process, look visibly similar in size to the "Zen 3" CCDs built on the N7 (7 nm) process, which means the CCD's transistor count could be significantly higher, given the transistor-density gained from the 5 nm node. Besides more number-crunching machinery on the CPU core, we're hearing that AMD will increase cache sizes, particularly the dedicated L2 cache size, which is expected to be 1 MB per core, doubling from the previous generations of the "Zen" microarchitecture.

Each "Zen 4" CCD is reported to be about 8 mm² smaller in die-area than the "Zen 3" CCD, or about 10% smaller. What's interesting, though, is that the sIOD (server I/O die) is smaller in size, too, estimated to measure 397 mm², compared to the 416 mm² of the "Rome" and "Milan" sIOD. This is good reason to believe that AMD has switched over to a newer foundry process, such as the TSMC N7 (7 nm), to build the sIOD. The current-gen sIOD is built on Global Foundries 12LPP (12 nm). Supporting this theory is the fact that the "Genoa" sIOD has a 50% wider memory I/O (12-channel DDR5), 50% more IFOP ports (Infinity Fabric over package) to interconnect with the CCDs, and the mere fact that PCI-Express 5.0 and DDR5 switching fabric and SerDes (serializer/deserializers), may have higher TDP; which together compel AMD to use a smaller node such as 7 nm, for the sIOD. AMD is expected to debut the EPYC "Genoa" enterprise processors in the second half of 2022.

Here's the first picture of AMD Socket SP5, the huge new CPU socket the company is building its next-generation EPYC "Genoa" enterprise processors around. "Genoa" will be AMD's first server products to implement the new "Zen 4" CPU cores, and next-gen I/O, including DDR5 memory and PCI-Express Gen 5. SP5, much like its predecessor SP3, is a land-grid array (LGA) socket, and has 6,096 pins.

The vast pin-count enables power to support CPU core-counts of up to 96 on the EPYC "Genoa," and up to 128 on the EPYC "Bergamo" cloud processor; a 12-channel DDR5 memory interface (24 sub-channels); and up to 128 PCI-Express 5.0 lanes. The socket's retention mechanism and processor installation procedure appears similar to that of the SP3, although the thermal requirements of SP5 will be entirely new, with processors expected to ship with TDP as high as 400 W, compared to 280 W on the current-generation EPYC "Milan." AMD is expected to debut EPYC "Genoa" in the second half of 2022.

XanxoGaming has now posted its first game benchmark with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, paired with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition. They put it up against an Intel Core i9-12900KS and Core i9-12900K. However, as you might have deduced from the headline of this news post, so far, they've only run a single game, but are promising to deliver more results shortly. That single game so far is Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 720p and using low settings, which means that this is a far cry from a real world scenario, but it does at least give a first taste of what's to come. For whatever reason, the Core i9 systems are using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and the CPUs are paired with DDR5 memory rated at 4800 MHz CAS 40. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D has been given another pair of 8 GB modules, so it's now using dual rank memory, but still at 3200 MHz and CAS 14.

In their test, the Core i9-12900K averages around 190 FPS, which they place as their baseline. The Core i9-12900KS manages around 200 FPS, or a bit over a five percent improvement. These benchmark numbers are provided by CapFrameX that claims that due to the low resolution used, the GPU doesn't really matter and although it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, it's very close. So what about the Ryzen 7 5800X3D? Well, it gets an average FPS number of 231, which is a bit odd, since the Intel CPU benchmarks are rounded and the AMD ones are not. Regardless, that's over a 20 percent increase over the Core i9-12900K and over 15 percent of the Core i9-12900KS. XanxoGaming is promising more benchmarks and those will be delivered at 1080p at Ultra settings according to the publication. In other words, this is still not what most of us have been waiting for.

An early retail unit of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 5800X3D has made its way to a Peruvian site called XanxoGamging, who put it through its paces in a few benchmarks, of which none so far are game related. The tests run on the upcoming CPU suggests that it's about as fast as a Ryzen 7 5700X in most single and multi-core tests. This should largely be down to the slower clock speeds of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which holds it back in these benchmarks compared to the older Ryzen 7 5800X.

However, it seems like some benchmarks can take advantage of the extra cache and the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is outperforming the 5800X in Blender, by a small margin. That said, the Cinebench R23 results are not overly impressive, neither are the CPU-Z or Geekbench 5 numbers. None of this is really unexpected though, especially as AMD has specifically mentioned that the 3D V-Cache doesn't bring additional performance to most software. XanxoGaming has promised more benchmarks and game tests tomorrow, but mentions that it feels strange losing performance in normal software due to the lower clocks, but that they hope the performance can be improved over time by an improved UEFI/AGESA.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced a new enterprise-grade motherboard, MC62-G41, for AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3000WX and next generation processors, and another board for the Intel platform, MW34-SP0, featuring enterprise features such as ECC memory support for 12th Gen Intel Core processors. Both platforms will ensure a high level of productivity, availability, and security for professional workstations.

AMD recently drew the curtain on AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO next generation workstation processors. For this new series of processors, GIGABYTE launched the MC62-G41 using the WRX80 platform that is also backwards compatible with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3000 WX Series processors. The WRX80 chipset supports CPUs up to 64 cores and 128 threads, along with 8-channel memory (ECC/non-ECC) DDR4-3200 and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

Although not yet available directly from AMD, its latest chipset drivers, version 4.03.03.624, have been released by Gigabyte and possibly other motherboard partners and it contains a couple of interesting additions. The first one is support for USB4, albeit only for 64-bit versions of Windows 10 at this point in time. This part really only applies to the Zen 3+ "Rembrandt" mobile Ryzen 6000-series CPUs so far, as they're the only products from AMD that supports USB4 at this point in time.

The other interesting part is that AMD has included a 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver for both the 64-bit version of Windows 10 and Windows 11. As to what this driver does, is anyone's guess at this point in time, but it's likely to be some kind of cache scheduler, or possibly a means for AMD to allocate software that can't take advantage of the 3D V-Cache to the CPU native cache. We should be finding out in a couple of weeks time, as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is scheduled for retail availability on the 20th of April.

AMD today released the latest version of AMD Software Adrenalin. Version 22.4.1 beta comes with optimization for the Unreal Engine 5 tech-demo dubbed "CitySample." A handful bugs were also fixed with this release. These include visual artifacts observed in "Horizon Zero Dawn" when playing with RDNA2-based GPUs; a misaligned cursor in "Horizon Zero Dawn" with Radeon Super Resolution enabled; and a bug that caused Performance Metrics Overlay to misalign when the game window is snapped to either side of the desktop. Grab AMD Software Adrenalin 22.4.1 beta from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 22.4.1 beta

According to the latest investigation made by a German publication, Igor's Lab, AMD's Adrenalin GPU software could experience unexpected behavior when Ryzen Master software is integrated into it. Supposedly, the combination of the two would allow AMD Adrenalin GPU software to misbehave and accidentally change CPU PBO and Precision Boost settings, disregarding the user's permissions. What Igor's Lab investigated was a case of Adrenalin software automatically enabling PBO or "CPU OC" setting when applying GPU profiles. This also happens when the GPU is in the Default mode, which is set automatically by the software.

Alterations can happen without user knowledge. If a user applies custom voltage and frequency settings in BIOS, Adrenalin software can and sometimes will override those settings to set arbitrary ones, potentially impacting the CPU's stability. The software can also alter CPU power limits as it has the means to do so. This problem only occurs when AMD CPU is combined with AMD GPU and AMD Ryzen Master SDK is installed. If another configuration is present, there is no change to the system. There are ways to bypass this edge case, and that is going back to BIOS to re-apply CPU settings manually or disable PBO. A Reddit user found that creating new GPU tuning profiles without loading older profiles will also bypass Adrenalin from adjusting your CPU settings. AMD hasn't made comments about the software, and so far remains a mystery why this is happening.

AMD's Radeon RX product stack refresh for Spring-Summer, is reportedly set to launch on May 10, 2022. Here's the first picture of what a reference-design RX 6950 XT flagship, RX 6750 XT, and the mid-range RX 6650 XT, could look like. These reference board designs are essentially identical to the original RX 6000 made-by-AMD (MBA) reference designs, but ditch the two-tone silver+black color-scheme for an all-black scheme with some diamond-cut edges around the fan vents, and some piano-black accents.

At this point it is not known if this refresh sees the Navi 20-series ASICs optically-shrunk to the TSMC N6 (6 nm) silicon fabrication node, or if it's the existing 7 nm ASICs with their total graphics power (TGP) values dialed up to make room for increased engine clocks, and faster 18 Gbps-rated GDDR6 memory chips. It's interesting to see the RX 6750 XT now come with a triple-fan cooler that resembles the RX 6800 (non-XT) cooler in design, if not color. We're not sure if the RX 6650 XT reference design will ever make it to the real-world, or if it's just a concept, and the SKU is an AIB-exclusive (custom-designs only).

AMD's Spring 2022 desktop processor product-stack went live (for the most part). AMD had announced as many as seven new Socket AM4 processor models on March 15. Six of these go on sale today, while the Ryzen 7 5800X3D hits the shelves on April 20. Among the models going on sale today are the Ryzen 7 5700X, an 8-core/16-thread part positioned a notch below the 5800X, and priced at $299; the Ryzen 5 5600 (non-X), a 6-core/12-thread part that's slightly a down-clocked 5600X priced at $199; the Ryzen 5 5500, which is essentially a 5600G "Cezanne" 6-core/12-thread APU with its iGPU disabled and clocked lower; at $159; and a trio of cost-effective Ryzen 4000 series parts based on the Renoir silicon and "Zen 2" architecture, priced under the $150-mark. As of this writing, we see most of these SKUs on sale with US retailer Newegg.