MAINGEAR — an award-winning PC system integrator of custom gaming desktops, notebooks, and workstations — today launched the MAINGEAR VECTOR, a sleek and powerful 15" gaming notebook that delivers high-performance functionality for an unbeatable value.

Combining a weight-saving hybrid aluminium and polycarbonate chassis with an Intel 9th Gen Core i7-9750H 6-core mobile processor and new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, the MAINGEAR VECTOR packs considerable power into a stealthy compact black design that's.78" inches thick and weighs just 4.16 lbs. The MAINGEAR VECTOR meets the needs of gamers and content creators on the go, capable of delivering jaw-dropping game experiences and high-quality game streaming via Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). No stone was left unturned in the pursuit of speed; the VECTOR offers incredibly fast storage options with the addition of top-tier NVMe M.2 SSDs and 16 GB of premium DDR4 memory. A vibrant anti-glare 1080p 144hz 15.6" display and back-lit RGB gaming keyboard complete the overall look of the VECTOR, continuing MAINGEAR's tradition of style and substance.

Today an article was posted on Intel's internal employee-only portal called "Circuit News". The post, titled "AMD competitive profile: Where we go toe-to-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs" goes into detail about the recent history of AMD and how the company achieved its tremendous growth in recent years. Further, Intel talks about where they see the biggest challenges with AMD's new products, and what the company's "secret sauce" is to fight against these improvements.The full article follows:

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today released the newest 300 series motherboards BIOS to fully support the newest Intel 9th Gen. Core processors with new stepping. The updates prevent the inability to boot the system during installation of the CPUs, providing full support for the next generation CPUs and ensuring that users can upgrade their processors without compatibility issues.

In Q2, Intel is set to launch new 9th Gen. Core processors with new stepping and motherboard manufacturers will upgrade their BIOS to improve the compatibility of their motherboards with these new processors. GIGABYTE has already upgraded all BIOS at first notice and uploaded the newest updates and all related information to its official website so that users can conveniently and successfully upgrade the BIOS for their GIGABYTE 300 series motherboards. With professional validation and testing carried forth by GIGABYTE engineers, the newest BIOS updates enhance compatibility with these new processors so that users can maximize performance with excellent system stability.DOWNLOAD: GIGABYTE Intel 300-series Motherboard BIOS Updates.

The world leading motherboard and mini PC manufacturer - ASRock, announces DeskMini 310 supports Intel the latest 9th Generation Core series 65-watt LGA1151 processors. ASRock DeskMini 310 adopts with Intel H310 chipset, supports up to 32GB DDR4-2666MHz memory, dual 2.5-inch hard drive and one M.2 (2280) PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe SSD. ASRock provides various optional accessories of DeskMini 310, includes USB 2.0 cable, VESA mount kit, and Wi-Fi ac kit. With comprehensive accessories, DeskMini 310 can satisfy diverse demands from all users.

Years after year, MSI dominates the memory frequency record to show the strength on overclocking performance. Just in the beginning of 2019, MSI's in-house overclocker, Toppc, pushes the DDR4 speeds to 5.6GHz, setting another barrier using Kingston memory and the MSI Z390I GAMING EDGE AC motherboard by liquid nitrogen cooling. Undoubtedly, this is a revolutionary breakthrough for the Intel 9th generation processors for the first time. This world record not only shows MSI's dominant position on performance for Intel 9th generation processors by using MSI MPG Z390I GAMING EDGE AC and MSI's unique and patented DDR4 Boost technology, but also reveals team-up power with Kingston DDR4 memory.

More information on the record can be found here.

Intel finally disclosed specifications of its entire 9th generation Core "F" extension desktop processor SKUs. The ARK pages confirm the lack of integrated graphics solutions, although they won't mention if the iGPU is merely disabled or physically absent. Among these SKUs are the Core i9-9900KF, Core i7-9700KF, and Core i5-9600KF, which have the same exact CPU clock speeds as the the i9-9900K, i7-9700K, and i5-9600K, respectively.

The Core i3-9350K is a new kid on the block. This 4-core/4-thread chip ticks at 4.00 GHz, with 4.60 GHz Turbo Boost, and features 8 MB of shared L3 cache. The Core i5-9400F, again, is practically the same CPU as the i5-9400, with the exception of iGPU. Another interesting specification to note with these SKUs is their maximum memory amount, which has been reduced to 64 GB from 128 GB on the original "K" SKUs. As Intel announced in its Monday evening presentation, These six new SKUs will be rolled out over Q1-2019, beginning with the i5-9400 later this month. The "KF" and "F" SKUs will only come out after January, but before April.

The specsheet of a Lenovo IdeaPad S530-13IWL has allowed us to know the existence of the new Intel 9000 series mobile CPUs. These are the Core i7-9550U, i5-9250U and i3-9130U. The laptop datasheet, spotted on Twitter by @momomo_us, confirms new members of that family , with "IWL" at the end of the model name meaning "Intel Whiskey Lake", a family launched last October with the Core i7-8565U, Core i5-8265U and Core i3-8145U. There is no confirmation from Intel on this rumor, and there aren't much details about the CPUs either: clock speeds and core counts are not specified, though should remain quite similar to the previous members of the 8000 series.

This information points to a light rebadge of Whiskey Lake CPUs according to NotebookCheck given that there is no mention of the 9th generation of processors. This is weird because the 8000 series is basically a synonym of the 8th Gen and the same happens with the 9000 series and the 9th generation. It seems the Core i7 will be a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading support and 8 MB of L3 cache, while the Core i5, with the same core count, will have 6 MB of L3 cache. The Core i3 CPU would be a dual-core chip with 4 MB of L3 cache. We'll have to wait for an official confirmation to confirm the specs and advantages over the older models.

It seems that by the time NDA drops on Intel's latest and greatest mainstream processor platform, we will have known more about it than ever before with similar launches. GIGABYTE joined the club with the release of their Z390 overclocking (OC) guide specific to their AORUS-branded motherboards. This contains a lot of useful information in general, and we certainly recommend taking a look at it in the source linked in the full post. As it is, a few items in the guide caught our eye- in particular, a direct quote saying "As you can tell from the last screenshots, the CPU temperature of the i9-9900k is quite high. This is something that we've noticed on almost all the processors. For this reason we suggest you to use a custom water-cooling and adjust the TjMAX Temperature to 110°C."

The quote references their guide to achieve a stable 5 GHz overclock on all cores on the Core i9-9900K, which was cooled via a custom watercooled setup and a Vcore ranging from 1.3-1.4 V. GIGABYTE's internal testing thus indicates that these higher end, unlocked 9000-series CPUs will run incredibly hot if you wish to push them, and the soldered IHS may not be as effective in cooling these dense processors as we may have hoped. Indeed, with news of the 28-core Xeon using thermal paste for the IHS, it appears that Intel may be conflicted on optimal cooling when battling the Core Wars with AMD.