The 43rd edition of the Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits, held annually in Kyoto Japan, is charting the way forward for the devices of the future. Held between June 11-16, 2023, this year's symposium will see structured presentations, Q&A, and discussions on some of the biggest technological developments in the logic chip world. The lead (plenary) sessions drop a major hint on the way the wind is blowing. Leadning from the front is an address by Suraya Bhattacharya, Director, System-in-Package, A*STAR, IME, on "Multi-Chiplet Heterogeneous Integration Packaging for Semiconductor System Scaling."

Companies such as AMD and Intel read the tea-leaves, that Moore's Law is buckling, and it's no longer economically feasible to build large monolithic processors at the kind of prices they commanded a decade ago. This has caused companies to ration their allocation of the latest foundry node to only the specific components of their chip design that benefit the most from the latest node, and identify components that don't benefit as much, and disintegrate them into separate dies build on older foundry nodes, which are then connected through innovative packaging technologies.

TechPowerUp is looking for a talented and motivated individual to work for us, as our reviewer of PC power supplies (PSUs). Our outgoing PSU reviewer, Aris Mpitziopoulos (crmaris) is among the world's very best in this trade, and is the brains behind the Cybenetics PSU Certification Program. We have grown together over our decade-long association. Aris has decided to focus on his full-time job with Cybenetics, and we wish him only the best. The PSU is a vital component in a desktop PC, as it provides power and electrical protection for everything else. It's essential to invest in a good PSU that can deliver clean power for years. Thanks to Aris, TechPowerUp established itself as a definitive source of highly technical PSU reviews, and we would like for a new reviewer to take over the reins. The new reviewer will need a solid command on the subject. This includes understanding and identifying the various under-the-hood components, switching topologies, electrical domains, and controllers.

Earlier this month, AMD wrapped up the launch of its incredible Ryzen 7000X3D processor series, which storms the company's gaming performance competitiveness against Intel back to the top, setting it up for the crucial Spring-Summer season, when PC gamers tend to upgrade and play the latest games. The 3D Vertical Cache memory deployed on the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 7900X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, supercharges the gaming performance of these processors, and our testing has shown that the 7800X3D is all that an elite gaming PC build needs if all you're doing is playing games with some domestic productivity on the side; whereas the 7950X3D is for those into heavy content creation and application workloads besides gaming, which means AMD levels up to Intel on both fronts.

We have extensively covered the technical aspects of what 3D Vertical Cache is, and how it works, in our reviews of the 7950X3D and 7800X3D. It is a fast 64 MB slice of SRAM cache stacked on top of the 32 MB on-die L3 cache of "Zen 4" chiplets, which extends the L3 cache size to 96 MB. This has a profound impact on gaming workloads, as the CPU cores have more amount of game data at much lower latency than DRAM. As part of our coverage of the Ryzen 7000X3D processor series, we had the opportunity to interview AMD on some of the technical aspects of Ryzen 7000X3D processor series. We also took the opportunity to ask a few general questions about the Ryzen 7000 desktop processor series itself. You can also catch our interview with Robert Hallock, the former technical marketing head, for some additional questions that you may find relevant.

Today, we are releasing the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular graphics sub-system information and diagnostic utility. Version 2.53.0 adds support for a large number of new and rare GPUs. Among the NVIDIA GPUs support is added for include the GeForce RTX 4070, RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 4060, and RTX 4050; pro-vis RTX 6000 Ada, RTX 3060 Laptop GPU (based on GA104), RTX 3050 Laptop GPU 6 GB, RTX 2050; and compute accelerators Hopper H100 PCIe AIC, and a rare engineering sample of the RTX 2080 Ti. From the AMD camp, support is added for Radeon RX 7600S, Radeon Pro W6900X, Pro V620, and the iGPU of Ryzen "Mendocino" laptop processors. From the Intel side, we've added support for Intel "Raptor Lake-HX," "Alder Lake-N," "Alder Lake-U," and the UHD P750 iGPU found with certain "Rocket Lake" processors.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.53.0

Resident TechPowerUp hardware database overseer T4C Fantasy has divulged some early information about a custom version of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU card - Colorful's catchily named iGame RTX 4060 Ti Ultra White OC model has been added to the TPU GPU database, and T4C Fantasy has revealed a couple of tidbits on Twitter. The GPU has been tuned to have a maximum boost clock of 2580 MHz, jumping from a base clock of 2310 MHz. According to past leaks the reference version of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti has a default boost clock of 2535 MHz, so Colorful's engineers have managed to add another 45 MHz on top of that with their custom iteration - so roughly 2% more than the reference default.

T4C Fantasy also confirmed that the Colorful iGame RTX 4060 Ti Ultra W OC will be appointed with 8 GB of VRAM, which also matches the reference model's rumored memory spec. T4C Fantasy points out that brands have the option to produce RTX 4060 Ti cards with a larger pool of attached video memory, but launch models will likely stick with the standard allotment of 8 GB of VRAM. The RTX 4060 Ti is listed as being based on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture (GPU variant AD106-350-A1), and T4C Fantasy expects that Team Green will stick with a 5 nm process size - contrary to reports of a transition to manufacturing on 4 nm (chez TSMC foundries).

At TechPowerUp we are currently looking for one, maybe two additional news editors to strengthen our ranks. This is a paid, part-time, remote position. You will be publishing news stories and press releases on our frontpage under minimal supervision.

As candidate you should bring a drive to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the tech industry, and a passion to write. Your written English should be excellent; non-native writers are welcome. Some basic image editing skills are required.

If you are interested, send the following to w1zzard@techpowerup.com:

• Some personal info. Who? Where? Age? A bullet list will do.
• Pick any recent hardware news topic, write your own news story about it. Length should be similar to TPU news posts (between 150 to 200 words).
• Write a second story, an opinion piece on a different hardware news topic of your choosing. 200 to 250 words.

Please proofread your submissions properly. The deadline for applications is in two weeks (Feb 12).

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp NVCleanstall, a handy utility that lets you take greater control over your NVIDIA GeForce software installation. NVCleanstall lets you disable stuff you probably don't need, such as Telemetry, or legacy components, giving your PC a leaner set of system software from NVIDIA. Version 1.15.0 introduces several handy changes. To begin with, the title screen shows whether the currently installed driver is a Studio driver (optimized for creators). A crash during the background update check for new NVIDIA drivers has been fixed.

We've added two more installer tweaks with this release. The first one lets you disable Multiplane Overlay (MPO)—doing so is known to fix certain rare system stuttering issues. Another tweak lets you disable the NVENC concurrent session encoding limits, so you can encode more than two streams in parallel. This tweak uses keylase's patch scripts from GitHub. The "build package" option has been improved to ensure it runs well on systems with more than 20 CPU cores, and better error reporting has been added. Grab TechPowerUp NVCleanstall v1.15.0 from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp NVCleanstall 1.15.0

TechPowerUp wishes all our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous 2023! The year gone by has been quite a mix for tech, with graphics card prices finally getting sane, some interesting game releases, and next-generation platforms and architectures for the gaming PC; however there's more to life than just tech. While the world began to wake up from the horrors of the pandemic, conflict and famine affected millions. We pray that sanity, wisdom, and penance prevails over all. Here's hoping for a peaceful, healthy, awe inspiring, and joyous 2023 for all!

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular PC graphics information, monitoring, and diagnostics utility. Version 2.52.0 adds support for AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 XT, RX 6300 OEM; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, and a few rare "Ampere" based GPUs in circulation these days, including the RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB, RTX 3070 Ti based on GA102 silicon, RTX 3050 based on GA107, and the PCIe AIC version of the A800 80 GB accelerator. Detection is improved for the Xe LP-based iGPU of Intel Core "Raptor Lake" processors. NVIDIA GPUs with ECC memory now have ECC status reported in the Advanced panel. On GPUs where the boost frequency can't be read, the base frequency will be used to calculate fillrates. Clock speed detection for Intel Arc "Alchemist" GPUs has been improved. Vendor detection has been added for several new graphics card brands such as Corsair (gaming notebooks), Maxsun, and Wingtech.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.52.0

Welcome to a new addition to TechPowerUp! where we give you an overview of new games that are set to launch in the coming week. This will be a weekly feature and it'll contain a short blurb about each game, some screenshots and maybe a video as well. We're open to feedback about this format and we'll make adjustments as we go along.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition / This week's AAA title / Wednesday December 14
Enhanced with the power of next-gen consoles and modern PC hardware in mind, the upcoming release of CD Projekt Red's award-winning role-playing game will feature dozens of visual, performance, and technical enhancements over the original. These include ray tracing support, faster loading times on consoles, as well as a variety of mods integrated into the experience, among many others. Along with new additional content inspired by The Witcher series from Netflix, these will be covered next week in a dedicated REDstreams event on Twitch, where the studio will present gameplay from the next-gen version of the game.

TechPowerUp and Team Group brought you the T-Force Giveaway earlier this month, with a chance to win a T-Force Delta RGB DDR5-6400 CL40 32 GB (2x 16 GB) memory kit, or one of five Vulcan Z 1 TB SSDs! The Delta RGB DDR5-6400 CL40 32 GB is an incredible start to your next-generation desktop build, with its incredible speeds that can supercharge an AMD "Zen 4" or Intel "Raptor Lake" desktop build; while the Vulcan Z 1 TB SSD is a great game storage drive. Without further ado, the winners:

• Jack from Australia, wins the Delta RGB DDR5-6400 32 GB memory kit
• The Vulcan Z 1 TB SSD is won by:
  • Anthony from Belgium
  • Elea from Romania
  • Andrei from the United States
  • Jari from Finland
  • Andres from Chile

A huge congratulations, TechPowerUp and Team Group will return with more such interesting giveaways.

The ideal price for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 "Ada" graphics card is around USD $700 to $800, according to results from a recent TechPowerUp Front-page poll surveying our readers. Our poll "How much would you pay for RTX 4080 at most?" received over 11,000 responses. At the number 1 spot with 22% of the vote is $800, closely followed by $700. Together, this range represents 44% of the voters. 14% of our readers think $600 is an ideal price, followed by "less than $400" at 13%. 9% think $500 seems fair, followed by 7% willing to spend as much as $900. 5% is happy to spend $1,100. 2% or less feel that the current $1,200 MSRP is justified or are willing to spend more than MSRP. There's more to a majority finding sanity with the $700 to $800 price-range.

With NVIDIA cancelling the RTX 4080 12 GB, the RTX 4080 16 GB became the only SKU to bear the name "RTX 4080." This $1,200 MSRP GeForce RTX 4080 is the successor to the RTX 3080, which debuted at $700, marking a $500 MSRP increase generation-over-generation (or +71%). You begin to see why most readers prefer the $700-800 range to be the ideal MSRP, and are willing to tolerate a $100 increase. For even more context, the RTX 3080 "Ampere" launched at the same $700 MSRP that its successor, the RTX 2080 "Turing" launched at. The GTX 1080 "Pascal" came out at $600 ($700 for the Founders Edition), which explains the interest for $600 in our poll.

TechPowerUp in partnership with Team Group are giving away six pieces of Team Group T-Force gaming hardware. We've actually been at this since November 14, and entries close tomorrow, November 25. That leaves you with a day to fill up a tiny form and answer a couple of quizzy questions on Team Group; for a chance to win a T-Force Delta RGB DDR5-6400 CL40 32 GB (2x 16 GB) memory kit, or one of five Vulcan Z 1 TB SSDs! The Delta RGB DDR5 would be a great addition to your next-generation desktop build, as its DDR5-6400 frequency goes great with the latest "Raptor Lake" and "Zen 4" processors! The Vulcan Z 1 TB makes for a decent game storage drive to add some room to your game library. Both look great when powered up and viewed through a tempered glass panel! Hurry up!

For more details, and to participate, visit this page. Entries close November 25 (tomorrow).

We are announcing the latest addition to our PC enthusiast databases, the new TechPowerUp SSD Specs Database. Modeled along the lines of our immensely popular GPU Database, CPU Database, and hardware Reviews Database, the new SSD Specs Database, curated by Gabriel Ferraz, aims to be a definitive repository of information on solid-state drive (SSD) hardware specs, for all to freely access. Here, you'll find a growing collection of client SSD hardware specs across all relevant form-factors and information. The database also helps you identify multiple hardware revisions of the same SSD model, so you're aware of any bait-and-switch incidents, or vague specs by manufacturers.

The TechPowerUp SSD Specs Database has individual info pages on each capacity variant of an SSD model; besides any hardware variants it may have. You can have quick, actionable information on specs such as controller, NAND flash, DRAM cache, advanced NAND flash specs, interface, protocol, controller hardware specs, and known performance numbers from our testing. We are constantly adding new drives to this database, and you can help us grow, not just by suggesting improvements to the database itself, but for additions to the database, please reach out to the curator on the main page. But for now, enjoy what we've built for you!

TechPowerUp SSD Specs Database

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular graphics sub-system information, diagnostic, and monitoring utility. Version 2.51.0 adds full support for the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card, including support for BIOS extraction from RTX 4090 and RTX 4080. Besides these, it supports the new RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X variant, and RTX 3060 based on GA104. We've added the ability to monitor real-time power draw from 16-pin ATX 12VHPWR connector on graphics cards with it. Memory temperature sensors for RTX 40-series has also been added. The transistor-count of the AD102 silicon has been fixed. The DLSS Scan in the Advanced tab no longer starts automatically, and waits for you to select the drives first. It now properly indicates that a search operation has been stopped, when you click on "stop." A crash with crash in Glenfly's Advanced panel has been fixed. The Vulkan and OpenGL tabs have visual improvements. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.51.0

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of the TechPowerUp NVCleanstall, the definitive utility for taking greater control over your NVIDIA GeForce software installation and update processes. NVCleanstall gives you a far greater degree of control over the various low-level driver components you want to install or skip, letting you disable things you don't need, such as Telemetry. These options aren't available in the "Custom install" page of the NVIDIA installer. Our latest version 1.14.0 comes with a few handy changes.

We've fixed an issue that caused driver update check to not work. We added the ability to not disturb an active gaming session when a new version of GeForce drivers is detected, and wait for the game session to end before prompting you to update. NVCleanstall deconstructs and reconstructs the GeForce software package to your exact specifications, if rebuilding the digital signature of this this fails due to the KeyISO service being disabled, a proper error message will be shown now. The "unsigned driver" error message by Windows can now be skipped when an EAC-compatible signature mode is selected. Grab NVCleanstall from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp NVCleanstall v1.14.0The change-log follows.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference design graphics card features an innovative new real-time monitoring feature, the Fan Intake Temperature Sensors. The reference-design RX 7900 XTX cooler has the ability to report individual fan-speeds to software (which isn't new, given that each fan will independently connect to the PCB); but what's new is that each of the fans has a temperature sensor that can detect the temperature of the air as it's being drawn in, before reaching the heatsink.

The temperature measurement of the fan intake sensors should give you a fair idea of what is the ambient temperature inside your case. At this point we don't know if the feature is exclusive to the AMD reference design, or if the company has shared the know-how with its add-in board (AIB) partners to add to their custom-design products. This sensor should be accessible by AMD Software, the utilities included by AIB partners, and we will try to add ability to read from this sensor to TechPowerUp GPU-Z. The reference RX 7900 XTX cooler also features addressable RGB LEDs, first ever for a reference-design graphics card (they've had single-color lighting).

TechPowerUp partners with Team Group to bring you the year's Black Friday + Cyber Monday (BFCM) Giveaway. Open worldwide (wherever legal), we give you a chance to pick up one of six pieces of premium Team Group hardware to spice up your gaming PC with. Up for grabs are one Team Group Delta RGB DDR5-6400 CL40 32 GB (2x 16 GB) memory kit; and five Team Group Vulcan Z 1 TB SATA SSDs. To participate, answer five quiz questions related to the various Team Group gaming hardware brands; and give us your contact details. Entries close on November 24, and the winners will be announced shortly after. All the best!

For more information and to participate, visit this page.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular graphics sub-system information and diagnostics utility for PC enthusiasts and gamers. Version 2.50.0 adds support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, and improved support for Intel Arc A770, and Arc A750. Video memory chip temperature monitoring has been added for Arc "Alchemist," and the overall temperature sensors for the Arc series have been fixed. The DLSS game scanning has been improved to tell if no DLSS-compatible games have been found.

While the number "2.50" might sound special, it is not, it is simply 49+1. We also had to get this build out quickly so that reviewers can do their jobs playing with the latest hardware from Intel and NVIDIA.

Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.50.0

TechPowerUp released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular graphics information and diagnostics utility for gamers and PC enthusiasts. Version 2.49.0 adds support for the iGPU of the upcoming Ryzen 7000-series "Zen 4" desktop processors, codenamed "Raphael." CPU temperature monitoring for these processors works the same way as it does for older Ryzens, so no changes needed in that regard. The GPU model reporting for Intel Arc A750/A770 has been fixed. Support is added for the Intel Arc A580. Some rare application crashes with AMD Radeon cards have been fixed. The NVIDIA DLSS game scan we introduced with the previous version doesn't actually "use" DLSS in any way, it only scans for games supporting DLSS, so we made it available on all systems.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.49.0

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the handy graphics sub-system information, diagnostic, and monitoring utility for gamers, developers, and enthusiasts. Version 2.48.0 introduces several new features. To begin with, we've added a new DLSS section to the Advanced Tab, which has the ability to find all installed games on your machine, and report their DLSS library version. You can use this information to try and replace the library with the latest one from our collection. GPU-Z will no longer send any traffic to "www.techpowerup.com," but instead to the "www.gpu-z.com" URL, so IT administrators can easily block traffic originating from GPU-Z across a large organization. Previous endpoints on "techpowerup.com" will be disabled soon. Also, on NVIDIA's request, we have programmed GPU-Z to disable all its network activity (automatic and manual) when an Engineering Sample is detected.

Intel Arc "Alchemist" detection, sensors, specs, and reporting, have undergone numerous improvements as we've had more time to spend with these GPUs. Intel's discrete-GPU power sensor is now labeled "GPU chip power draw," to let you know that it only measures the ASIC power, and not the total board power. Vendor ID has been added for Advantech. Numerous information-related errors have been fixed. Among the new GPUs supported with this release are the NVIDIA RTX 3050 OEM, MX550 (TU117-A), RTX A5500, A5500 Mobile, A4500 Mobile, A3000 12 GB Mobile, and A1000 Embedded; and several Arc "Alchemist" SKUs. Support is also added for the legacy AMD FireStream 9170.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.48.0The change-log follows.

TechPowerUp partnered with Creative, the pioneers of PC gaming audio, to bring you the "Hearing is Believing" Giveaway. Under Creative's technological leadership, PC gaming audio evolved with the times, and is now squarely in the era of game streamers and content creators. With the company's Sound Blaster GC7, not only do you get the highest quality audio tuned by experts, but also DSPs optimized for various game genres, and audio controls for content creators. We're giving away three prizes from the Creative stable, and without further ado, here they are:

• @truehighroller1 from the US, wins the Creative Sound Blaster GC7
• Gabriele from Italy, wins the Creative Sound Blaster X4
• Jeff from the US, wins the Creative Sound BlasterX G6

A huge Congratulations to you three! TechPowerUp and Creative with more such interesting giveaways!

TechPowerUp is looking for a content proofreader with a strong command of U.S. English. This is a remote, part-time position, the job entails proofreading our written content, like reviews. The position is paid and open worldwide, expect 1-2 hours of work per day, Mon-Fri. Besides excellent language skills, it's a big plus if you understand the topics we're writing about. No need to get all the technical details, but it will help a lot if you know the difference between Mb and MB, NVMe and SATA, and can catch other similar mistakes, in addition to spelling and grammar. We're looking to fill this position by August.

Interested? Write to w1zzard@techpowerup.com. If you can, do tell us a bit about yourself, like age, location, time constraints, etc.

The TechPowerUp and Creative "Hearing is Believing" Giveaway is well underway, with just a day before entries close! All it takes is a minute to drop your hat in, with details that help us get back to you if you've won! Creative is as old as PC gaming itself, and is one of the pioneers of PC audio, always being at the forefront of gaming audio innovation. They're out to be the leaders in audio for the latest generation of gamers that like to stream their gameplay, and are serious creators in their own might. We are giving away three such pieces of Creative engineering—the Sound Blaster GC7, the Sound Blaster X4, and the Sound BlasterX G6 portable sound card. The Giveaway is open worldwide. What are you waiting for?

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

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z. Version 2.47.0 adds support for new GPUs and improves on several fronts. To begin with, it adds support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1630, RTX 3050 Laptop, MX570, A1000, A2000, A3000, and other pro-vis GPUs; on the AMD front, it can detect RX 6700 or "Radeon 6700" cards. Support is also added for Intel Core "Alder Lake-H," "Alder Lake-U," and "Alder Lake-HX" processors and their iGPUs.

TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.47.0 comes with many improvements to the detection of Intel Arc "Alchemist" GPUs. The fake GPU detection was expanded to cover knockoffs based on NVIDIA G98, GT200, and GK104. A workaround was added to fix broken clock-speed detection for AMD GPUs with some recent driver versions this year. Non-LHR reporting of the RTX 3080 12 GB has been fixed. You now have the ability to no longer resume logging on GPU-Z restart, by unchecking a checkbox. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.47.0The change-log follows.