According to a VideoCardz report, NVIDIA is implementing a very last minute time shift with its GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER review program—embargo conditions have been delayed by a day to January 31, which coincides with the official retail launch day. We already know about non-specific sample units reaching reviewers a week (or more) in advance of Team Green's embargo date—thanks to various graphical benchmarks appearing prematurely on the Geekbench Browser database. VideoCardz states the Founders Edition GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER model was not received in a timely manner by a number of media outlets, thus dismissing rumors about driver issues being a main factor behind the sudden rescheduling. Hardware evaluators have been busy this month with trade event coverage, and spending analytical time with Team Green's previous batches of RTX 40 SUPER cards.

ASUS China has distributed Tianxuan 5 Pro laptop review samples to media outlets in the region—a video evaluation was uploaded to Bilibili yesterday, as discovered and shared by 9550pro. The reviewer, "Wheat Milk Mitsu," put his sampled laptop's AMD Ryzen 9 7940HX processor through the proverbial wringer—with benchmarking exercises conducted in Cinebench R23, PCMark 10, Counter Strike 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus and more. The Ryzen 9 7940HX "Dragon Range" APU was last spotted in the specification sheets for ASUS TUF Gaming A16 (2024) laptop models—the mobile processor is essentially an underclocked offshoot of Team Red's Ryzen 9 7945HX. AMD's Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" series has received most of the attention in Western markets—we only see occasional coverage of older Zen 4 "Dragon Range" parts.

AMD's slightly weaker Ryzen 9 7940HX processor is no slouch when compared to its higher clock sibling, despite a lower base clock (2.4 GHz) and Turbo (5.2 GHz)—the Tianxuan (China's equivalent to TUF Gaming) branded laptop was outfitted with a GeForce RTX 4070 mobile GPU and 16 GB of DDR5 5600 RAM. Synthetic benchmark results in Cinebench R23 indicate a marginal 3.7% difference, and multi-core figures show an even smaller difference; 1%. The two Dragon Range APUs exhibited largely the same performance in gaming scenarios, although the 7945HX pulls ahead in Counter-Strike 2 frame rate stakes—328 vs. 265 at 1440p, and 378 vs. 308 at 1080p. AMD's convoluted naming schemes make it difficult to keep track of its many mobile offerings—a 7840HX SKU could join the Dragon Range family in Q1 2024. A few Western media outlets believe that a smattering of these parts are destined for global markets, but Team Red's Marketing HQ has not bothered to announce them in any official capacity. Strange times.

The first press reviews of Framework Laptop 16 are now live. Check out some of the early feedback. This is the largest batch of review units we've ever shipped, and we expect more reviews to trickle in over the next week. For context on our press units, many companies ramp into production, manufacture a large quantity to fill retail channels, and cherry pick some golden units from that as review samples. For us, because we're entirely direct to consumer, our ramp is extremely fast, and units go to customers' hands immediately. That means to get press units out weeks ahead of time to provide a sufficiently long review period, we send out production-intent qualification units. The "intent" part of that is that these are usually functionally identical to what ships to consumers.

With Framework Laptop 16 though, the product is complex enough that we identified issues during manufacturing qualification that we've since fixed. Changes and improvements we've made on all customer systems include resolving some instances of audible electrical noise in the Mainboard and the Graphics Module, reducing sliding friction on the Touchpad Module, optimizing the thermal resistance of the CPU heatsink, making improvements to the liquid metal application process, fixing a couple of instances where a firmware bug could result in a blue screen on Windows, resolving an issue where the left or right speaker channel could be attenuated in Windows, improving the fan control algorithm on the Graphics Module, and a number of smaller fit and finish refinements related to the Bezel and Input Modules. In retrospect, we would have loved to get these improvements into the units we sent to reviewers, but it's most important that our customers have a system that works smoothly.

The first review of a Chinese-exclusive "RTX 4090D" GPU model hit the internet last week—Expreview received a sample GALAX RTX 4090 D Metal Master model not long ago, and their testing team proceeded to find out whether the nerfed version of NVIDIA's flagship gaming GPU was truly compromised in terms of performance. Effective October 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission placed restrictions on Team Green—thus blocking trade of units based on the "Ada Lovelace" AD102-300 GPU in China. In turn, a variant—AD102-250-A1—was prepared in order to confirm to new policies.

NVIDIA's China-specific GeForce RTX 4090D launched officially right at the end of 2023. Board partner GALAX seems to be leading the pack, with customized versions being sent out for evaluation. The GeForce RTX 4090D GPU arrives with a lesser configuration: 14,592 CUDA, 456 Tensor, and 114 RT cores—but the first review indicates that this only trails behind its uncompromised sibling by roughly 5 to 6% across sixteen games. It lags behind in Stable Diffusion benchmarks—an AI workload at 512x512 resolution shows a 10% difference, although the gaps narrows at 768x768 and 1024x1024.

NVIDIA is reported to be taking a hands off approach prior to the launch of its GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB GPU next week—rumored to take place on July 18. Murmurs from last week posited that add-in card (AIC) partners were not all that confident in the variant's prospects, with very little promotional activity lined up. NVIDIA itself is not releasing a Founders Edition GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB model, so it will be relying on board partners to get custom design units sent out to press outlets/reviewers. According to Hardware Unboxed, as posted on Twitter earlier today, no hardware will be distributed to the media: "Now there's no official review program for this model, there will be no FE version and it seems that NVIDIA and their partners really don't want to know about it. Every NVIDIA partner I've spoken to so far has said they won't be providing review samples, and they're not even sure when their model will be available."

Their announcement continued: "So I don't know when you'll be able to view our review, but I will be buying one as soon as I can. I expect coverage will be pretty thin and that's probably the plan, the release strategy here is similar to that of the RTX 3080 12 GB." TPU can confirm that test samples have not been sent out by NVIDIA's board partners, so a retail unit will be purchased (out of pocket) for reviewing purposes. Previous reports have theorized that not many custom models will be available at launch, with the series MSRP of $499 not doing it many favors in terms of buyer interest. MSI has prepared a new white GAMING X design for the 16 GB variant, so it is good to see at least one example of an AIB putting the effort in...but it would be nice to get a press sample.

AMD is late in releasing its Phoenix Zen 4 lineup of mobile APUs - the original April launch has been missed, and laptops bearing Ryzen 7000HS & H-series are expected to arrive at some point this month. Preview hardware has made its way into the hands of testers, and one particular outlet - Golden Pig Upgrade, a content creator on the Chinese Bilibili video site - has performed benchmark tests. He seems to be the first reviewer to get hands-on time with AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APUs, and his findings point to class leading performance results in terms of graphical capabilities - the 7840HS (packing a Radeon 780M RDNA3 iGPU) is compared to the Rembrandt-based 7735H, as well as a pair of Intel Raptor Lake CPUs - the 13700H and 13500H models.

AMD's newest Phoenix APU is the group leader in GPU performance stakes, but the jump up from the last-gen Rembrandt (RDNA2 iGPU) chip is not all that significant. VideoCardz reckons that the Radeon 780M integrated GPU is roughly equivalent to an NVIDIA GeForce MX550 dGPU and not far off from a GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics card (in terms of benchmark performance). According to AMD's internal documentation the RDNA 3 core architecture utilized in Phoenix APUs is referred to as "2.5" so this perhaps explains why the 780M is not doing laps around its older silbing(s).

Intel tends to send out elaborate media kits with their pre-launch processor review samples. One such kit landed with Caseking, which posted a reveal of what it could look like. A large cardboard box roughly the size of an ATX motherboard box shimmers with holographic film on all its sides. You open its lid to reveal a giant picture of a "Raptor Lake-S" (8P+16E) die. In real life, this die is roughly 260 mm² in area (about that of a postage stamp). The bottom end of this "die" opens out in two segments, one reveals an acrylic memento with another enlarged "Raptor Lake" die, which you can hang on a wall or as a backdrop in your streams; while the other half reveals two paperboard jewel-cases, one contains the Core i9-13900K (8P+16E), and the other a Core i5-13600K (6P+8E). Fancy media kits aren't new, and most hardware companies send them with their major product releases, so sites can optionally do an unboxing preview at a date before that of the review. You can watch Caseking's unboxing video from the source link below.

An Overclock.net member, "shilka", posted late last month over the failure of power protection in EVGA's SuperNova B3 power supplies, specifically the 450 and 850 W models. This adds to the concerns first raised by Tom's Hardware, one of whose review units created fireworks. Normally, for a product that has been on the market for some time, as the B3 series has, one could chalk up such incidents to a faulty batch. But it appears that might not be the case, considering JonnyGuru also reviewed EVGA's B3 and did not encounter any fire hazards.

It has subsequently emerged that the sample provided by EVGA to JonnyGuru was manufactured by Super Flower, whose Leadex platform is well known for its performance and high quality. Aris of Tom's Hardware (and TechPowerUp), however, bought their review sample from a retail outlet. The manufacturing of the latter had been outsourced to RSY, with (in this case) a resulting decline in build quality. It remains unclear whether Super Flower outsourced its production, or if EVGA is using multiple suppliers or switched manufacturers all together. Regardless, lesser quality PSUs would appear to be in stores in comparison to what was reviewed at JonnyGuru, arguably the most influential review site for PSUs.

The folks at Techgage have already put out some unboxing pictures on AMD's RX Vega 64 review sample. There's not much more new information here - however, it's an opportunity to see how lavish AMD has become with their review sampling. Gone are the times of cardboard boxes, it seems. AMD may be spending more on packaging and presentation for the review samples than for actual R&D on the graphics cards (I kid, obviously.)

The team at Sweclockers have already received their Threadripper review kit. We know this because there was a short-lived video uploaded by the team, unboxing and perusing the contents of one of AMD's delicious Threadripper review kits. Videocardz, however, managed to snag some screenshots of the act, and that content is what we are bringing to you now. Also, kudos for that Dinklebot shirt - that wizzard might have come from the moon, but ours certainly hasn't.