ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high performance DRAM modules and NAND Flash products, today launched the XPG SX9000, its fastest consumer SSD yet. The SX9000 caters to gamers and PC overclockers. It arrives in an M.2 2280 form factor and uses the PCIe3x4 interface to deliver up to 2800MB/s read and 1450 MB/s write. ADATA has selected a new Marvell controller to ensure consistently optimized performance, while in-house ADATA manufacturing, assembly, and quality control result in up to a 1000TB terabytes/total bytes written (TBW) rating. The SX9000 uses MLC NAND Flash and ships in 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB capacities.

The SX9000 goes even beyond the XPG SX8000 thanks to balanced ADATA design and the integration of a new Marvell controller. It reaches 2800MB/s read and 1450 MB/s write, leveraging the PCI Express Gen 3x4 interface and the NVMe 1.2 protocol. A compact M.2 2280 drive, the SX9000 also manages 310K/140K IOPS random 4K read/write. For fast boot, reduced cross-drive transfer times, shorter game loads, and quicker in-game asset delivery, the SX9000 offers an excellent foundation.

There are two kinds of desktop CPU platforms. The mainstream tier runs from two cores up to eight, and it's great for gaming and general use. Its high-end sibling takes everything up a level with more cores, more memory channels, and more bandwidth for graphics and storage. A considerable upgrade in every regard, this high-end desktop platform appeals to power users, content creators, and prosumers who want to blur the line between desktop and workstation. AMD's Threadripper CPU is the latest addition to the desktop's heavyweight division, and it walks into the ring with an entourage of SocketTR4 motherboards in tow. This guide explains the ASUS and ROG family to help you pick the best X399 motherboard for your high-end desktop or gaming PC.

All of our X399 boards share core DNA that includes one-touch overclocking, refined cooling control, and improved RGB lighting. Yet they each have their own distinct flavor as well. The ROG Zenith Extreme brings Threadripper into the world of premium dream PCs with provisions for custom liquid cooling and 10G networking. With the Strix X399-E Gaming, hardcore gamers can build stylish rigs with power to spare for high-quality streaming. And then there's the Prime X399-A and its well-rounded foundation channeling the professional side of the platform's prodigious power. Which X399 motherboard should you buy for your build? Let's find out.

AMD is organizing the "Meet the Experts" webinar, which will focus on AMD's upcoming Ryzen Threadripper motherboard designs and offerings from AMD partners. As we inch closer to AMD's HEDT X399 platform launch, we've gotten confirmation from AMD on Threadripper's specs and pricing. However, the actual motherboards where you're expected to sit your awe-inducing 12 and 16-core processors have largely been absent from the show.

And since AMD knows that processors without a motherboard don't really equate to anything much, the company has invited ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock to detail at least some of their X399 motherboards. So far, the motherboards we have some info are the GIGABYTE X399 AORUS Gaming 7 (which has 5x PCIe x16 slots, no PCIe x1 slots, and 3x M.2 slots in an ATX form-factor); the ASUS X399 ROG ZENITH EXTREME (EATX, 4x PCIe x16 slots, 1x PCIe x1 slots, and 2x M.2 slots); the ASROCK X399 Professional Gaming (ATX, 4x PCIe x16 slots, 1x PCIe x1 slots, and 3x M.2 slots); and finally, the ASROCK X399 TAICHI, which counts with the usual ATX form-factor, and offers 4x PCIe x16 slots, 1x PCIe x1 slots, and 3x M.2 slots. All of these seem to be marketed toward gamer enthusiasts, though we'll see some increasingly workstation-geared motherboards closer to or after the launch.

GIGABYTE today announced its latest generation of servers based on Intel's Skylake Purley architecture. This new generation brings a wealth of new options in scalability - across compute, network and storage - to deliver solutions for any application, from the enterprise to the data center to HPC. (Jump ahead to system introductions).

This server series adopts Intel's new product family - officially named the 'Intel Xeon Scalable family' and utilizes its ability to meet the increasingly diverse requirements of the industry, from entry-level HPC to large scale clusters.. The major development in this platform is around the improved features and functionality at both the host and fabric levels. These enable performance improvements - both natively on chip and for future extensibility through compute, network and storage peripherals. In practical terms, these new CPUs will offer up to 28 cores, and 48 PCIe lanes per socket.

PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2017 - PCI-SIG, the organization responsible for the widely adopted PCI Express (PCIe) industry-standard input/output (I/O) technology, today announced 32GT/s as the next progression in speed for the PCIe 5.0 architecture, targeting high-performance applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, gaming, visual computing, storage and networking. Slated for completion in 2019, the specification development is well underway with Revision 0.3 already available to PCI-SIG member companies.

"In our 25-year history, PCI-SIG has maintained its commitment to our rigorous specification development process, while delivering specifications that are in lock-step with industry requirements for high-performance I/O," said Al Yanes, PCI-SIG Chairman and President. "PCIe 5.0 technology is the next evolution that will set the standard for speed, and we are confident that its 32GT/s bandwidth will surpass industry needs."

The preceding PCIe 4.0 specification is designed with key functional enhancements that future-proof the PCIe architecture design, thereby accelerating future specification development. This undertaking, along with improved silicon design processes, serves as the foundation for the PCIe 5.0 specification.

ECS took to Computex to showcase seven different motherboards from both AMD and Intel. First up we have the Z270 Lightsaber, which is great at deflecting laser blaster shots. It's an LGA 1151 socket motherboard, features 8-channel audio courtesy of a Realtek ALC 1150 audio chip, a Killer E2500 Gigabit controller, 1x M.2 slot with support for SATA, NVMe, and Intel Optane. There are 3x PCIe x16 slots, which work at x8 x8 x4 when all slots are populated, as is usual with Z270 motherboards.

In a bid to increase options for budget-minded gamers, Acer has introduced the Nitro 5 gaming laptop, whose wealth of configurations start at a respectable $800. Choosing any kind of gaming-focused laptop over building your own desktop will always look like bad business, but how much one values mobility mays edge the decision towards one side or the other.

Specs-wise, it's a mix of respectable with the bare minimum: it features a 15.6-inch FHD IPS display, up to 32 GB of DDR4 2400 MHz memory, and is available in configurations featuring Intel's Core i5 or Core i7 processors paired with an NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, or your choice of an AMD 7th-gen A-series FX, A12 or A10 APUs, paired a Radeon RX550 GPU. Some models will include PCIe SSDs (up to 512GB) with up to 2TB of optional HDD storage. Ports include 1x Gigabit Ethernet, 1x USB 3.1 Type-C, 1x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0 ports, and 1x HDMI output. The Nitro 5 also supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi with a 2x2 MIMO antenna. The Nitro 5 will be available in North America starting July 1. Acer did not release detailed pricing, so there's no idea of what the $800 configuration will net you spec-wise (though an AMD and RX 550 are pretty much guaranteed). The Nitro 5 will also be available in the EMEA in August, starting at a much less interesting €1,139.

AMD Ryzen 9 "Threadripper" series 12-core, 14-core, and 16-core client desktop processors, which will form the company's next-generation high-end desktop (HEDT) lineup, which goes against Intel Core i9 "Skylake-X" series, could come in a brand new socket. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the chips have higher electrical requirements, besides double the I/O of socket AM4 Ryzen processors, such as a 44-lane PCIe gen 3.0 root complex, quad-channel DDR4 memory interface, and more. This socket, according to a "HotHardware" report, is an LGA (land-grid array) with 4,094 pins.

The new LGA-4094 socket, so-called SP3r2, will be slightly scaled up from the SP3 socket AMD has been selling enterprise Opteron-brand multi-socket CPUs on (pictured below). The consumer version of this socket could feature a more user-friendly retention mechanism that shouldn't require a screwdriver to fasten. Motherboards based on this distinctively rectangular socket will feature up to eight DDR4 DIMM slots to hold quad-channel DDR4 memory, and over four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, with support for 3-way and 4-way multi-GPU solutions. The motherboards will also feature copious amounts of onboard devices, M.2 slots, and other storage connectivity. Since "Threadripper" is rumored to be a multi-chip module of two 14 nm "Summit Ridge" dies linked together on-package with with an Infinity Fabric interconnect, only one of the two dies links to the motherboard chipset (AMD X399 chipset), while all the PCIe lanes of the second die (including those which would make up the chipset bus) are freed up.

Two days, two leaks on an upcoming Intel platform (the accelerated release dates gods are working hard with the blue giant, it would seem.) Now, it's Intel's own i7-7740K, a Kaby Lake-X HEDT processor that packs 4 cores and 8 threads, which is interesting when one considers that AMD's latest mainstream processors, Ryzen, already pack double the cores and threads in a non-HEDT platform. Interesting things about the Kaby Lake-X processors is that they are rumored to carry 16x PCIe 3.0 lane from the CPU (which can be configured as a singularly populated 16x or as a triple-populated 1x @ 8x and 2x @ 4x PCIe ports. Since these parts are reported as being based of on consumer, LGA-1151 Kaby Lake processors, it would seem these eschew Intel's integrated graphics, thus saving die space. And these do seem to deliver a quad-channel memory controller as well, though we've seen with Ryzen R7 reviews how much of a difference that makes for some of the use cases.

The rumor mill turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. However, some of those really do turn to reality, like recent accounts of an AMD Polaris 20 chip surfacing in the latest RX 500 series. This time, Intel is in the crosshairs, with the company's high-performance Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X desktop components being pegged for release between June 19th and July 9th. This would place an announcement on the new chipset and CPUs debut to drop around Computex 2017, which kicks off on May 30 and runs through June 3 in Taipei.

Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X parts are supposed to use the same LGA 2066 socket, with Skylake-X said to include anywhere between six to 10 cores, support quad-channel DDR4 memory and have a metric ton of PCIe 3.0 lanes. Kaby Lake-X parts, meanwhile, are reportedly limited to just four cores, dual-channel memory and just 16 PCIe lanes from the CPU - which gives an impression of a simple, Kaby Lake desktop CPUs being repackaged for the new socket.(And yes, inquisitive readers, that was a random reference to Robert Jordan's "The Wheel of Time" in the first line of this article.)

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high performance DRAM modules and NAND Flash products, today launched theSX7000 SSD as part of its growing XPG gaming brand. The SX7000 uses an M.2 2280 form factor and carefully-sorted 3D TLC NAND Flash, paired with an SMI controller. The SX7000 interfaces with motherboards via PCI Express 3.0 x4 and meets NVMe 1.2 specifications to deliver 1800MB/s read, 850MB/s write, and 130K/140K IOPS. The SX7000 is available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB, making the most of the flexibility of 3D NAND to present consumers with greater choice based on budget and need.

Market intelligence analysis company TRENDFOCUS revealed in its latest blog post how SSD market has increased by up to 36% in the last four quarters, with price hikes after prices hikes accompanying increasing demand (and sales) of the speedy storage media. And TRENDFOCUS warns that these price hikes are like here to stay until 2017 has run its course, with projections of price reductions only materializing in early 2018. This should put some brakes towards the trend of including SSD storage on mainstream OEM computers and laptops, as the price increase from adding this type of storage would bring prices beyond the mainstream. Likewise, the aggressive ratio at which SSDs were replacing HDDs as storage media as correspondingly declined a bit, though this move still stays strong and isn't likely to (nor should it) fully subside.

The company also sees an increasing pricing delta between conventional SATA-based solutions and their higher-performing PCIe counterparts, with the pricing of PCIe-based SSDs increasing more than those that leverage SATA connections. TRENDFOCUS reports how 2017 pricing hinges on 3D NAND ramping as predicted this year, with higher prices in the demand-heavy back-to-school season) if this ramp fails. The company still feels confident about an eventual return to quarterly takedowns on SSD pricing, coeteris paribus, come 2018.

Several months have passed since the original announcement, but FSP's Dagger line of SFX PSUs are now finally seeing the light of day. These are fully modular, highly efficient (80+ Gold), small form-factor PSUs, which look to deliver outstanding power quality to your small form factor experiments. The Dagger's platform uses DC-DC converters for the generation of the minor rails, and FSP announces the usage of Japanese electrolytic capacitors. Connector-wise, the Dagger PSUs deliver 1x EPS; 2x PCIe; 5x SATA, 2x Peripheral, and 1x Berg connectors, whose numbers are reasonable for a SFX PSU.

Dimension-wise, the Dagger PSUs come in at 125 mm (W) x 63.5 mm (H) x 110 mm (D), and both models are cooled by a 80 mm Dual Ball-Bearing Fan. The Dagger line of SFX PSUs will be embodied, at least at first, by the Dagger SDA500 ($99) and Dagger SDA600 ($109), both carrying 5-year warranties.

NAND has come here to stay, and it's market penetration still has a lot of leeway. Samsung, bar none the biggest and best player in the NAND field, is in a uniquely privileged position to develop new technologies and capitalize on them. Remember that Samsung has so many distinct product lines on which to monetize its advancements that any new investment is hardly a make it or break it affair.

Z-NAND is Samsung's answer to other developing technologies such as 3D XPoint, of which Intel has just announced the first commercial product. Z-NAND looks to stand at the intersection between NAND and DRAM, and is more of an evolution of the NAND design than it is a totally new technology (thus distancing itself from the likes of 3D XPoint.)

Only AMD's top-of-the-line X370 chipset will support competing NVIDIA's SLI technology. AMD's next-in-line B350 eschews SLI support but retains CrossFire compatibility, while the low-end A320 chipset will offer no support for any such multi-GPU technologies. While this may seem a move by AMD to purposely gimp NVIDIA products on its platforms, it stands to reason that even enthusiasts tend to stay away from multi-GPU solutions and their associated problems. Besides, AMD will surely avoid any way of giving NVIDIA more funds than the company already has, by way of paying the "SLI Tax" on every chipset it ships. By limiting SLI support to its highest-end chipsets, AMD shaves some expenses from licensing efforts, whilst keeping SLI support to those that are, in truth, more likely to use them: power users, who will certainly spare no expense in springing to a X370-based platform.

As of now, some details remain unclear in the overall feature-set and compatibility differences between AMD's upcoming AM4 chipsets, but it would seem that only AMD's X370 chipset manages to leverage the full 20 PCIe lanes (18x if you run 2x SATA connections) delivered by AMD's Ryzen CPUs. This would look like a way for AMD to impose a "motherboard tax" on users, by limiting the number of PCIe lanes available on lower-end motherboards, and thus urging them to take the next step to their own X370. Apparently, PCIe lanes are not a differentiating factor between AMD chipsets (with X370, B350 and A320 all offering 4 native lanes), only their ability to access (or not) Ryzen's own 20.

Not much time until all of this is adequately cleared up, though.

To strangely low pomp and fanfare, MSI has further increased its line-up of offerings for the RX 460 family of graphics cards, with the launch of the Radeon RX 460 4GT LP (4GB), as well as a 2GT (2GB) version. Based on AMD's Olaris 11 "Baffin" graphics chip, these graphics cards feature a 75 W TDP, thus eschewing any auxiliary PCIe power connectors. That TDP being tamed by a dual-fan cooling solution and the usage of MIL-STD-810G certified components mean that this is a card where MSI feels comfortable about its lifespan.

Connectivity-wise, the boards offer 1x DL-DVI-D, as well as 1x HDMI 2.0 with HDCP 2.2 support, which makes any of these a relevant choice for an HTPC. MSI has not revealed a MSRP for any of these cards, but considering the segment at which they fit in like a jigsaw puzzle, one can surely expect their pricing to not be that far off from those recommended by AMD ($109 for the 2 GB version, and $139 for the 4 GB one).

NVM Express, Inc., the organization that developed the NVM Express specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus, today announced the results of its recent board elections. Elected to Promoter positions were Facebook, Micron, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Facebook and Toshiba are new to the Promoter level, and the others are incumbents. The election winners join existing Promoters Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Microsemi, NetApp and Oracle, whose current terms expire at the end of 2017.

Representatives from the 13 Promoter companies form the NVM Express, Inc. Board of Directors, which governs the organization, including setting strategic direction. All Contributor and Promoter member companies are eligible to run for Promoter positions, where there are elections each year for roughly half the positions.

"We're very pleased to welcome Toshiba and Facebook to the NVM Express, Inc. Board, to help shape the future direction of NVM Express technology and the organization," said Amber Huffman, NVM Express President. "In 2016, we marked major milestones, such as publishing the NVM Express over Fabrics specification. We look forward to publishing revision 1.3 in the first half of this year - with much more to come later in 2017."

Adding to their SSD lineup, Mushkin, which makes some really interesting, good price-performance ratio products has recently announced the upcoming availability of their Helix line of M.2 2280 SSDs. Based on Silicon Motion's SM2260 controller paired with 3D MLC NAND, Mushkin positions the Helix line as a premium, high-performance offering for desktops and laptops alike. Models will vary from a 250 GB entry-level offering thorugh a 2 TB high-end SKU, with the 2 TB version offering sequential read performance at up to 2.5 GB/s and write performance at up to 1.1 GB/s, when Silicon Motion's pseudo-SLC caching technology is used to its best effect.

Colorful Technology Company Limited, professional manufacturer of graphics cards and motherboards, is proud to announce its latest motherboard for enthusiasts and gamers featuring the latest Intel Z270 chipset to support LGA1151 processors including the newly announced 7th generation Core processors from Intel with their new iGame Z270 Gamer. Customization motherboard. This latest products joins the family of iGame enthusiast and performance series of motherboards and graphics cards which focuses on not just the needs of gamers for a faster and robust system but serves as a canvas to promote their creativity and idea with great customization options.

Western Digital has announced the WD Black PCIe SSD, their first PCIe SSD for the consumer market. This particular SSD is aimed at the cheaper half of the M.2 PCIe SSD market rather than competing for the highest performance: it will be available in 256GB and 512GB capacities for $109 and $199.99 respectively, making it cheaper than any currently available M.2 PCIe SSD except the Intel 600p.

Gigabyte announced six new Z270 motherboards as part of its Aorus product line - and all of them feature RGB LED lighting and swappable LED overlays. Apparently, Gigabyte opted for the standardization of their RGB Fusion LED lighting up and down their Aorus product line - all of the boards have at least two areas that are RGB LED backlit, including a space on the right edge beside the RAM slots. This RAM RGB lighting can be removed and replaced with different overlays according to the users' taste, and each motherboard is also equipped with a LED strip header. Dubbed the Z270X-Gaming 9, Z270X-Gaming 8, Z270X-Gaming 7 , Z270X-Gaming K7, Z270X-Gaming 5, and the Z270X-Gaming K5, these Gigabyte Aorus motherboards are quite well-rounded, as you can see after the break.

Lenovo has recently released the specifications for their 2017 Thinkpad series line-up, with several models (T470p, L470, L570, T470, T570, X270 and Yoga 370) featuring the usual, evolutionary hardware improvements, such as being equipped with Intel's latest generation Kaby Lake processors and increased screen resolutions. However, one of the hardware announcements for the new Thinkpad series goes a little further than your usual, run-of-the-mill updates: these solutions will feature what is expected to be the first consumer-level adaptations of Intel's Optane technology.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced the TS-831X - a new cost-effective 8-bay business NAS with a quad-core 1.70 GHz CPU to provide users with enhanced system performance for daily business operations. Alongside the standard models with 8 GB or 16 GB RAM, there is also a model with 4 GB RAM (TS-831X-4G) to provide an affordable option for budget-conscious users.

"The TS-831X features a highly-competitive specification, including built-in 10GbE ports, containerized apps, and SSD caching, making it a favorable choice for small and medium-sized organizations," said Jason Hsu, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "The TS-831X-4G option provides an accessible choice for budget-constrained organizations to benefit from the TS-831X's amazing functionalities without breaking the bank."

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today unveiled its strategy to accelerate the machine intelligence era in server computing through a new suite of hardware
and open-source software offerings designed to dramatically increase performance, efficiency, and ease of implementation of deep learning workloads. New Radeon Instinct accelerators will offer organizations powerful GPU-based solutions for deep learning inference and training. Along with the new hardware offerings, AMD announced MIOpen, a free, open-source library for GPU accelerators intended to enable high-performance machine intelligence implementations, and new, optimized deep learning frameworks on AMD's ROCm software to build the foundation of the next evolution of machine intelligence workloads.

Inexpensive high-capacity storage, an abundance of sensor driven data, and the exponential growth of user-generated content are driving exabytes of data globally. Recent advances in machine intelligence algorithms mapped to high-performance GPUs are enabling orders of magnitude acceleration of the processing and understanding of that data, producing insights in near real time. Radeon Instinct is a blueprint for an open software ecosystem for machine intelligence, helping to speed inference insights and algorithm training.

Western Digital Corp. today further expanded its data center SSD and HDD portfolio with the introduction of next-generation storage solutions designed to help IT managers address the intensive data and extreme performance demands of today's enterprise, cloud and hyperscale workloads.

The new solutions include the blazingly fast HGST-branded Ultrastar SN200 NVMe-compatible PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) series, which offers class-leading random read performance of up to 1.2 million IOPS in key workloads, and the company's fastest and highest capacity SAS SSD to date, the HGST-branded Ultrastar SS200 Series SSD. The company also introduced its fourth-generation helium-based HelioSeal enterprise-class hard disk drive (HDD), the 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 drive. Additionally, the company announced it will extend the He12 platform to 14TB, leveraging Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR).