ASUS has released version one of a BIOS update tool for its ultra-premium air-cooled ROG Astral graphics cards, OC and standard flavors. Yesterday's update advertises an improved "Quiet Mode," that implements a "more silent fan curve." TechPowerUp reviewed the quad-fan configured ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 OC Edition cards late last month. Resident GPU evaluator, W1zzard, awarded the astronomically-priced flagship model with an "Editor's Choice" badge, but simultaneously pinned on a "But Expensive" honor. The lesser (GB203-based) Astral did not receive any accolades. Both models have courted criticism for louder than expected operation; W1zzard did not enjoy listening to the Astral GeForce RTX 5090 OC Edition's collective fan concerto. "Out of the box" settings were not great, and the quiet BIOS mode did not "help much" in reducing the highest-end Astral's cacophony.

TPU's GPU guru elaborated further: "the second BIOS runs a more relaxed fan curve, but it's not much quieter and achieves 36.5 dBA with 70°C. Sure, good temperature, but isn't the point of a 'quiet' BIOS that isn't quiet, even if temperatures are higher? MSI's Suprim lineup does much better noise-wise, with temperatures that aren't that much higher." The ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC Edition seems to be a less noisy prospect, given that its cooling solution is not dealing with the largest "Blackwell" GPU die. Its sound signature was less offensive, but W1zzard reckoned that there was room for improvement. On this subject he stated: "with the default (performance) BIOS, temperatures are extremely low, but noise levels are a little bit on the high side with 36 dBA. I would have preferred a more balanced setting. Good thing that ASUS includes a secondary quiet BIOS with their card. Now the card runs whisper quiet, emitting only 26 dBA, which is highly impressive for a card in this performance segment. It is not the quietest card though, the MSI Suprim SOC is a tiny bit quieter, and it is so out of the box, without requiring a manual BIOS switch change." ASUS has seemingly absorbed initial feedback from review outlets (plus early adopters)—yesterday's update arrived just under two weeks from launch time. Watch out for possible upcoming reassessments.

User preference to super resolution technologies such as NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS, beat playing games without them, at native resolution, in the latest TechPowerUp Frontpage Poll. Spanning nearly a month of polling and over 29,260 votes, the poll provides an interesting insight into the minds of today's gamers. It suggests that gamers are willing to explore super resolution technologies to make their games playable with higher eye-candy, as opposed to playing at native resolutions with watered down settings. The question we asked was what setting of super resolution do gamers use, with "native" suggesting a lack of super resolution. Native could include presets such as DLAA or FSR Native, which render the game at native resolution while using the upscaler to work like an AA technology, smoothing out edges.

Native resolution scored 13,024 votes, or 44.5% of the votes. It is the single largest response, but given that every other response is tied to some form of super resolution, it becomes a minority response. Native is followed by "Quality" preset at 38.8% or 11,341 votes. The "Balanced" present, which tends to be the default super resolution preset in most games, trails "Quality" by a significant margin, scoring just 8.9% of the vote, or 2,593 votes. Only trace sections of our users pick "performance" and "ultra performance" presets that tend to render the game at significantly lower resolutions to make it playable. "Performance" got 4.7% (1,376 votes), followed by "Ultra Performance" at 3.2% or 930 votes.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the graphics sub-system information and monitoring utility for PC gamers and enthusiasts. The latest version 2.62.0 introduces full support for NVIDIA "Blackwell" generation of GPUs, which should cover not just the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 that were recently released, but also preliminary support for upcoming SKUs such as the RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070. Support is also added for the NVIDIA H200 NVLink compute GPU, and RTX 5000 Ada Generation Embedded pro-vis graphics card. Subvendor detection for Maxsun has been fixed. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.62.0

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp NVCleanstall, our lightweight utility that lets you take control of your NVIDIA GeForce software installation, giving you fine control over which of its components and subcomponents you want installed, many of which the "Custom" option in NVIDIA's installer doesn't expose. It also simplifies the process of keeping your GeForce software up to date. Version 1.18.0 adds full support for NVIDIA App, the new software configuration frontend application for gamers by NVIDIA. NVCleanstall now lets you fetch the latest version of the NVIDIA App, or lets you opt out of its installation altogether. The release also fixes a compatibility issue we've been facing with GeForce Software version 566.36 WHQL and later. Grab NVCleanstall from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp NVCleanstall 1.18.0

TechPowerUp and Chieftec brought our readers in the EU the Winter 2024 Mega Giveaway. Up for grabs were a Chieftec Iceberg 360 RGB AIO liquid CPU cooler; a Chieftec Iceberg 360 Black AIO liquid CPU cooler; a Chieftec APEX E-ATX mid-tower case, a Chieftec M2 Micro-ATX tower case; a Chieftec PowerPlay 1200 W power supply; and a Chieftec Atmos 850 W power supply—a comprehensive list of prizes spanning the company's cases, power supplies, and cooling products. The Giveaway closed recently, and we have our winners!

• Parham from France—wins a Chieftec Iceberg 360 AIO CLC-360-RGB cooler
• Arne from Germany—wins a Chieftec Iceberg 360 AIO CLC-360-BLK cooler
• Kristijan from Croatia—wins a Chieftec Apex Case GA-01B-TG-OP case
• Andreas from Denmark—wins a Chieftec M2 Case GM-02B-OP Micro-ATX case
• Pepe from Spain—wins a Chieftec PowerPlay PSU GPU-1200FC power supply, and
• MonteCristo from Greece—wins a Chieftec Atmos PSU CPX-850FC power supply

A huge Congratulations to the winners! Chieftec and TechPowerUp will return with more such interesting Giveaways.

HAVN brings a breath of fresh air in the PC case market with its new HS 420 line of cases aimed to maximize the view of your gaming PC build. The lineup is led by the HAVN HS 420 VGPU series, and the regular HS 420 series. We had both cases and their color variants up for grabs in our recent Giveaway, for a total of four amazing prizes for our readers in the US and most of Europe. After a great response of over 3,000 entries, we have four lucky winners, and here they are!

• Paolo from Italy
• Lucian from Romania
• Boyan from Bulgaria
• Marcin from USA

Huge congratulations to the four of you! TechPowerUp and HAVN will return with more such interesting giveaways.

MSI introduced its groundbreaking NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics card range earlier today—hot on the heels of NVIDIA's formal unveiling of its brand-new Blackwell architecture. TechPowerUp staffers on the ground at this year's CES managed to wade through MSI's enviable collection of custom cards showcased on the showroom floor—taking up-close photos and discussing the latest designs with company representatives. An entry-level family has debuted—in the form of INSPIRE—alongside a new high-end series dubbed "VANGUARD." In addition, TPU was treated to the usual suspects including top-of-the-range SUPRIM cards. MSI has also tinkered with its design aesthetic for the VENTUS GAMING product line.

We will start with the upper echelon—MSI's new GeForce RTX 5090 32G SUPRIM LIQUID SOC model. Well-heeled gaming enthusiasts will likely be handing over a hefty premium for this well appointed dual-slot card. Its stealthy "diamond-cut inspired" premium shroud houses a micro-fin copper base and MSI's patented water block array—ensuring that the GPU and VRAM are kept cool during the most demanding of gaming or professional sessions. The 360 mm aluminium radiator is coupled with the latest STORMFORCE fans in a triple unit configuration. It should be noted that the Ada Lovelace generation MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID model sported a dual-fan radiator setup. MSI reps did not divulge any details regarding extreme overclocking and boost figures for this top-tier Blackwell model, but we suspect that the extra fan will be doings its best to temper Team Green's "massive" GB202 die.

HAVN and TechPowerUp bring our readers from the US and most of Europe a fantastic chance to bring home a cutting-edge HAVN HS 420 series PC case, designed to maximize the visual impact of your gaming hardware, without compromising on cooling performance. The Giveaway has been up for a week now, but entries close in two days! If you haven't dropped in your hat yet, hurry! Here's what's up for grabs: a HAVN HS 420 VGPU Black, a HAVN HS 420 VGPU White, a HAVN HS 420 Black, and a HAVN HS 420 White. In all, there will be four lucky winners. Our Giveaway is hosted on Gleam, so you not only have four prizes to win from, but can increase your chances of winning by sharing the Giveaway on your social media accounts. What are you waiting for?

For more information, and to participate, visit this page.

TechPowerUp today released latest version of ThrottleStop by Kevin Glynn. A nifty tool that gives you greater control over the power-management features of your processor, which should prove particularly useful for notebooks, letting you override several OEM power limitations to bring out the best in your hardware. Version 9.7 introduces several changes. To begin with, ThrottleStop adds per-profile adjustment of the turbo power limits, Speed Shift Min Max, and PROCHOT offset values. Core and cache V/F tuning have been added to the FIVR window for unlocked Core HX-segment processors (10th Gen or later). BD PROCHOT is now automatically locked when it is disabled. The DDR memory speed monitoring method has been improved. Windows 11 tray icons have been improved. Power plan selection fields have increased from 8 to 12. Safe Start feature can now be toggled on/off.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp ThrottleStop 9.7 by Kevin Glynn

From all of us at TechPowerUp, we wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas! We are deeply grateful for your support in making 2024 an amazing year in the tech world. This year brought new-generation computing platforms, and our content team worked tirelessly to keep you informed with lightning-fast news and in-depth product reviews. As we prepare to welcome the New Year, we wish you success, joy, and prosperity. And don't forget to share what surprises awaited you under the tree!

2025 promises to begin with a Bang, as we prepare to fly to Vegas to bring you the very latest from the 2025 International CES!

TechPowerUp partners with HAVN, the year's hot new entrant to the PC case, cooling, and power industry, to bring you one of the season's biggest giveaways ahead of Holiday 2024. Open to our readers from the US and (most of) Europe, the giveaway gives four lucky winners a chance to bring home a HAVN HS 420 series case. We have a HAVN HS 420 VGPU Black, a HAVN HS 420 VGPU White, a HAVN HS 420 Black, and a HAVN HS 420 White. We recently reviewed the HS 420 VGPU, and found it to be spacious, practical, and contemporary unit. To win one of these, simply fill up a form, so we can get back to you if you've won. You can increase your chances of winning by sharing the Giveaway on your social media.

For more information, and to participate, visit this page.

Chieftec and TechPowerUp partner to bring our readers from the EU a bonanza Giveaway. It's been up for over a week, and entries close tomorrow (December 19)! If you live in the EU and haven't dropped in your hat yet, you better hurry! Up for grabs are a Chiefec Iceberg 360 ARGB AIO CPU cooler, a Chieftec Iceberg 360 Black AIO CPU cooler; a Chieftec Apex ATX mid-tower case, a Chieftec M2 Micro-ATX cube-shaped case; a Chieftec PowerPlay 1200 W PSU, and a Chieftec Atmos 850 W PSU. That's an insane 6 prizes to be won! All you need to do is fill up a short form to help us get back to you, if you've won.

For more information, and to participate, visit this page.

TechPowerUp today released the latest update to TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the graphics sub-system information and monitoring utility for PC gamers and enthusiasts. Version 2.61.0 adds support for the new Intel Arc B580 and B570 "Battlemage" graphics cards. Preliminary support is also added for AMD "Navi 48" RDNA 4. This is also the first version of GPU-Z to support detection of Qualcomm Adreno 540, 630, 640, and 642L. GPU-Z is an x86 application, although you can run it on Windows on Arm platforms, where the operating system's emulation allows GPU-Z to detect the underlying hardware.

Among the other GPUs we've added support for, include the iGPU of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, NVIDIA H100 80 GB HBM3, A4000H, A800 40 GB Active, RTX 5880 Ada, and Tesla K40st. We've also added PCI vendor detection for ONIX, the new Intel Arc board partner, and Shangke. A crash on some AMD Ryzen systems with older drivers, an installed discrete GPU, and disabled iGPU, has been fixed. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.61.0

TechPowerUp partners with PC case, cooling, and power brand Chieftec to announce the Winter 2024 Mega Giveaway, for our readers in the EU. Chieftec has been in the industry for over 30 years, specializing in server, workstation, and commercial desktop hardware, but is now looking to expand in the DIY gaming PC space. The company brings its expertise in case design, power, and cooling, to the gaming PC space, and has a comprehensive lineup of cases, CPU coolers, fans, and power supplies, catering to a broad range of prices. Today, we have as many as six prizes from the Chieftec lineup, open to our readers in the European Union.

Up for grabs are a Chieftec Iceberg 360 RGB AIO liquid CPU cooler; a Chieftec Iceberg 360 Black AIO liquid CPU cooler; a Chieftec APEX E-ATX mid-tower case, a Chieftec M2 Micro-ATX tower case; a Chieftec PowerPlay 1200 W power supply; and a Chieftec Atmos 850 W power supply.

For more information, and to participate, visit this page.

Fractal and TechPowerUp partner to bring you the 2024 Holiday Giveaway, which has been going strong for over a week now, but entries close in 2 days! Open to our readers from the US and Canada, the Giveaway puts two of the company's best pieces of hardware up for grabs. The first winner gets a Fractal Refine gaming chair, and gets to choose between dark or light mesh; or dark or light fabric trims. The second winner gets a Fractal North XL, a spacious mid-tower case that can take E-ATX motherboards, and enthusiast-segment graphics cards, besides modern liquid cooling solutions. The winner gets to pick between Charcoal and Walnut or White and Oak, TG or Mesh side panel trims.

For more details and to participate, visit this page.

TechPowerUp and Team Group T-Force, the brand of expertly crafted memory and SSD products for gamers and PC enthusiasts, brought you the 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) Giveaway. Up for grabs were two of the company's best DDR5-8000 memory kits, and an M.2 Gen 4 NVMe SSD. Up for grabs were a T-Force Xtreem ARGB DDR5-8000 48 GB (2x 24 GB) CL38 memory kit, a T-Force Xtreem White DDR5-8000 32 GB (2x 16 GB) CL38 kit; and a T-Force G70 PRO 2 TB M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSD with heatsink. The Giveaway was open worldwide. The entries are in, and we have the winners!

• Jason from the United States wins the T-Force Xtreem ARGB Black DDR5-8000 48 GB (2x 24 GB) CL38 memory kit
• Rami from the United Arab Emirates wins the T-Force Xtreem White DDR5-8000 32 GB (2x 16 GB) CL38 memory kit
• Marcelo from Brazil wins the T-Force G70 PRO 2 TB Gen 4 NVMe SSD with Heatsink

A Huge Congrats to the Winners. Get ready to live life at 8000 MT/s! TechPowerUp and Team Group will return with more such interesting Giveaways!

TechPowerUp partners with Fractal to bring our readers from the US and Canada a chance to bring home one of Fractal's best pieces of engineering and industrial design. We have two prizes—the first one is a Fractal Refine gaming chair. The winner gets to choose the trim they want—dark or light mesh; or dark or light fabric. The prize is valued at $550. The second winner gets a Fractal North XL spacious gaming PC case, and choose from its various trims—Charcoal and Walnut or White and Oak, TG or Mesh side panel. The case is valued at $180. To participate, simply fill up a short form to help us get back to you, if you've won. We will not share your data otherwise. You can increase your chances of winning by sharing the Giveaway on your social media accounts. The winners are chosen at random.

For more information, and to participate, visit this page.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of NVCleanstall, our nifty little utility that lets you download and install NVIDIA GeForce drivers with a much higher level of customization than NVIDIA's installer permits. This utility lets you disable (or enable) several components in the GeForce driver package that you can't find in the NVIDIA installer's "Custom install" page, including important settings such as telemetry. Version 1.17.0 introduces several improvements and fixed. To begin with, driver signature rebuild not working on Windows 11 24H2 has been fixed. The startup page now has a "what's new" link that takes you to the driver change-log from the Release Notes. We fixed an issue where the "automatically click driver unsigned warning" option was not working under certain conditions.

The messaging in the "Finished" page of NVCleanstall has been fixed. The driver dropdown now indicates "Windows 10/11" instead of simply "Windows 10." We improved the "build package" screen with a tip that the "-y" argument allows unattended installation. The overall interface has been improved to help with systems that have very low screen resolution. The "experimental" label has been removed from the GitHub-based NVENC Video Encoding Session Limit Patch in the options list. A rare error encountered when unpacking installers has been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp NVCleanstall 1.17.0The change-log follows.

TechPowerUp partnered with Team Group T-Force to bring you the 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) Giveaway. Entries opened a couple of weeks ago, and close on November 28, that's 2 days from now. If you haven't dropped your hat in already, hurry! Up for grabs are a T-Force Xtreem ARGB DDR5-8000 48 GB (2x 24 GB) memory kit; a T-Force Xtreem White DDR5-8000 32 GB (2x 16 GB) memory kit, and a T-Force G70 Pro 2 TB M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSD. DDR5-8000 is the new DDR5-6000, and is the sweetspot memory speed for the latest Core Ultra "Arrow Lake-S" processor, as well as the performance speed for the Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" desktop processors. You can either bag the 48 GB kit with ARGB, or the 32 GB kit with white heatspreaders. Then there's also the G70 with an aluminium heatsink, which you can just drop into a PlayStation 5.

For more information and to participate, visit this page.

HYTE's launch of the Y70 Silver Wolf PC case, a collaboration with Honkai: Star Rail, brings the in-game hacker character Silver Wolf to your desk with distinctive design elements. Unveiled at Micro Center in Tustin, CA, the case features bold artwork of the character, lavender accents, and a sleek aesthetic that caters to fans and PC builders alike. During an interview with TechPowerUp, Ish from HYTE noted the seamless collaboration with HoYoverse, explaining, "As fans ourselves, we're inspired by the anime subculture and distinct art style of Honkai: Star Rail. Silver Wolf was a natural choice given her gamer and hacker persona, resonating strongly with our audience." The Y70 was chosen for this collab due to its full-size ATX form factor, providing ample space for hardware and extensive design elements.

Looking forward, HYTE has a number of things planned, "We have more collaborations planned for 2025, with exciting new products set to debut at CES." Some of those products were on display at the event, including the upcoming Y70 Touch Infinite, Silver Wolf keycaps for their Keeb TKL RGB keyboard, and their magnetic USB hub. The Y70 Silver Wolf case bundle, priced at $299, is available at major retailers including Micro Center and Canada Computers and directly from HYTE. The complete RDY Y70 Silver Wolf Edition system should be available from iBUYPOWER.com sometime in November.Check out the TechPowerUp Review of the HYTE Y70 here.
The Full Interview with Ish from HYTE and Steven from iBUYPOWER is below.

TechPowerUp partners with the PC enthusiast and creator memory experts over at Team Group to bring you the 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) Giveaway, open worldwide. 2024 sees the advent of high frequency DDR5 memory, with both Intel and AMD supporting speeds as high as DDR5-8000 using their latest Core Ultra "Arrow Lake" and Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" processors. To celebrate this, we are giving away two of Team Group's latest T-Force Xtreem DDR5-8000 memory kits. Up for grabs is a T-Force Xtreem ARGB DDR5-8000 48 GB (2x 24 GB) CL38 memory kit, and a T-Force Xtreem White DDR5-8000 32 GB (2x 16 GB) CL38 kit. But wait, there's more. There is also a T-Force G70 PRO 2 TB M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSD with heatsink. This giveaway is open world-wide. To win, all you need to do is fill up a tiny form to help us get back to you if you've won. Entries are open till November 28, Hurry!

For more details, and to participate, visit this page.

TPU is looking to hire a PC enthusiast or professional to review PC power supplies (PSUs) part-time. Our current reviewer suvirintojas put out some great work with us since 2023, but has changes in his life that require his attention. We thank him for the wonderful work and hope we find a replacement of equal caliber. TechPowerUp PSU reviews tend to be highly technical, as we dive into the finer aspects of the PSU's switching performance, and quality of electrical output across various voltage domains. We also focus on noise levels and efficiency.

The PSU industry is in a state of transition toward newer standards such as ATX 3.1, PCIe Gen 5 CEM, and perhaps even ATX12VO, which means we'll never run out of new PSUs to review for at least the next few years. This is where you step in—we are looking for a PSU reviewer with fairly high availability for a significant output of reviews. We can help arrange as many PSU samples as you can handle.

NVIDIA has officially released its Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct model. Based on META's Llama3.1 70B, the Nemotron model is a large language model customized by NVIDIA in order to improve the helpfulness of LLM-generated responses. NVIDIA uses fine-tuning structured data to steer the model and allow it to generate more helpful responses. With only 70 billion parameters, the model is punching far above its weight class. The company claims that the model is beating the current top models from leading labs like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which are the current leaders across AI benchmarks. In evaluations such as Arena Hard, the NVIDIA Llama3.1 Nemotron 70B is scoring 85 points, while GPT-4o and Sonnet 3.5 score 79.3 and 79.2, respectively. Other benchmarks like AlpacaEval and MT-Bench spot NVIDIA also hold the top spot, with 57.6 and 8.98 scores earned. Claude and GPT reach 52.4 / 8.81 and 57.5 / 8.74, just below Nemotron.

This language model underwent training using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), specifically employing the REINFORCE algorithm. The process involved a reward model based on a large language model architecture and custom preference prompts designed to guide the model's behavior. The training began with a pre-existing instruction-tuned language model as the starting point. It was trained on Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Reward and HelpSteer2-Preference prompts on a Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct model as the initial policy. Running the model locally requires either four 40 GB or two 80 GB VRAM GPUs and 150 GB of free disk space. We managed to take it for a spin on NVIDIA's website to say hello to TechPowerUp readers. The model also passes the infamous "strawberry" test, where it has to count the number of specific letters in a word, however, it appears that it was part of the fine-tuning data as it fails the next test, shown in the image below.

Back in July, we polled our readers to find out what PC main memory type they are using, with the choices consisting of DDR5, DDR4, and DDR3. Nearly two months into the poll and close to 36,000 responses later, an interesting picture is emerging. DDR4 memory emerged a clear winner, with a simple majority of our readers—58.2% of them—responding that they're using it. The latest DDR5 memory type is a distant second, with close to one-third of the respondents or 32.5% picking it. The old DDR3 memory type attracted an impressive 9.3% of the vote.

There could be many reasons why DDR4 remains the king—the AMD AM4 platform remains current, as AMD continues to release processors for this platform. Intel's LGA1700 platform supports DDR4, and there's a fairly wide selection of DDR4 motherboards for this platform, letting enthusiasts save on memory costs by carrying over their old memory or opting for cheaper memory. DDR5 at 32% isn't too discouraging, considering that the standard has been around just 3 years now, compared to the 9 years of DDR4.

TechPowerUp, in partnership with GIGABYTE, brought our readers in the US, Canada, and the EU, a chance to bring home the GIGABYTE GS34WQC curved gaming monitor. This fine piece of GIGABYTE engineering offers a great balance of features and value for the premium gaming desktop of today and tomorrow! The 34-inch monitor comes with a 1500R curvature, 21:9 aspect-ratio, and WQHD resolution (3440 x 1440 pixels), with plenty of speed for your fast-paced gameplay—120 Hz normal refresh-rate that's overclockable to 135 Hz, and 1 ms MPRT response time. The entries have closed, and GIGABYTE has chosen two winners. Without further ado, here they are!

• Maria Y.
• Wyatt M.

A huge congratulation to Maria and Wyatt! TechPowerUp and GIGABYTE will return with more such interesting giveaways!