TechPowerUP NEWS

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ASRock showcased customized Radeon RX 7600 XT 16 GB GPU offerings at CES 2024—only a couple days after AMD's official unveiling of its expanded lower mid-range RDNA 3 line. ASRock was among a select few Team Red board partners with finalized units (based on Navi 33 XT) on display—it seems that the Taiwanese manufacturer is preparing for a retail launch of its Radeon RX 7600 XT Steel Legend 16 GB OC and Challenger 16 GB OC graphics card models. ASRock's website has been updated with product pages for the latest Radeon RX 7000-series entries, but press material for an imminent product launch has not been published (at the time of writing).

ASRock's mid-tier triple-fan Steel Legend and entry-level dual-fan Challenger designs are a familiar sight across the company's Radeon RX 7000 and 6000 product lines—last September, customized Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT models were unveiled as sporting these shrouds, along with higher-end Phantom Gaming OC options. A slightly overclocked Radeon RX 7600 XT GPU is not expected to be a heat producing monster, so expensive cooling solutions are not a necessity for a cost-conscious audience—likely targeting a decent level of 1080p gaming performance. The ASRock Radeon RX 7600 XT Challenger 16 GB OC model is expected to launch at an MSRP of $329 (AMD's official guide SEP), while the fancier Steel Legend OC is believed to be only marginally more expensive.

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[NextPowerUP]

If you like Japanese games, then the fourth week of the new year is for you, as we have no less than four new Japanese games being released this week, which almost has to be something of a record for simultaneous releases in a week. The AA title this week is one of the famous 3D fighting titles and if that's not your cup of matcha, then we have plenty of other games on offer for you. As for the rest of this week, we have some pirates, gates to other worlds, an open world co-op RPG and the aforementionedJapanese games.

Tekken 8 / This week's AA Title / Friday 26 January
Get ready for the next chapter in the legendary fighting game franchise, Tekken 8.
Completely redesigned character visuals. Elaborate, highly-detailed models built from the ground and high-fidelity graphics break the limits of new-generation hardware by adding a new weight and atmosphere to Tekken's signature battles. Vivid environments and destructible stages combine to create an overwhelming sense of immersion, creating the ultimate play experience.
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[NextPowerUP]

As you may have seen during our latest Developer_Direct, there's no lack of passion for gaming to be found when walking the halls at Oxide Games. The studio is full of game industry veterans who would probably bleed strategy board game pieces if you were to so much as nick them on the arm. This team has been crafting in this space for decades and has no shortage of ideas on what makes a compelling strategy game experience. Now, with Ara, they're looking to carve out their place at the top table with their own take on one of the most beloved genres in PC gaming. Ara: History Untold bills itself as a grand strategy game that's working to evolve the genre of historical grand strategy. But trying to usher in the next chapter of such a well-established space is a daunting task. Where does one even start? That's easy - look at what bothers you, and go from there.

"One of the first things we did when we started (Ara) was to identify key aspects of the [grand strategy] genre space that have always annoyed us, like areas we could improve upon—one of those is optimal strategy," explains Oxide Games Design Director Michelle Menard. "Something that plagues the genre space is that once you've kind of figured out how to win or how the game works, you've mastered it. You stop playing because you solved the problem; it was a binary problem because one of the key drivers of something like a tech tree is a static, solvable problem."
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[NextPowerUP]

Memory PC GmbH has unveiled an exclusive reskin of Sapphire Technology's standard PULSE RX 7800 XT graphics card—the German e-tailer is advertising this special edition model as a "world first," with a design that is both "unique and eye-catching." We reckon that there is some marketing spiel + exaggeration in effect here, although Memory PC's branding, messaging and extra swathes of red and white do add up to be a more visually appealing package. Sapphire's PULSE card designs tend to focus on function rather than fancy livery—the normal PULSE RX 7800 XT card is almost entirely black, save for some red line accents on its shroud and backplate, plus white text on the twin cooling fans.

This special model sports white PULSE fans with abbreviated Memory PC logo branding, while the shroud has red and white stealth-effect polygonal patterning. This effect adorns almost the entire stretch of backplate, a pixellated heart graphic and a "WE LOVE GAMING" statement sit within an island of black. The Memory PC + Sapphire Technology Navi 32 XT GPU collaboration is only available in pre-built PC systems—starting at €999, with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X build.

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[NextPowerUP]

Hello, Dom here, Studio Head at Ninja Theory. As I write this, we are now in the final few months of development on Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, preparing for our launch Day One on Xbox Game Pass and across Xbox Series X|S, Windows and Steam on May 21. It was a pleasure to give you all a deeper insight into Senua's next journey, our studio and our talented team in Developer Direct.

Since the release of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Ninja Theory has transitioned from being an independent team to one that sits within Xbox Game Studios. Although this has seen change for Ninja Theory, particularly in terms of the support now available to us for striving towards our ambitions, what has not changed is our passion and commitment to our studio mission - to craft life-changing art with game changing tech.
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[NextPowerUP]

ASUS finalized its adoption of the Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC) product lines at a special autumn 2023 handover event. A post-ceremony statement outlined the company's vision going forward: "ASUS kicked-off its NUC business and started to take orders for NUC 10th to 13th generation systems on September 1. The new business is generating a wide variety of exciting opportunities for the company and the transition has progressed smoothly for NUC customers. The vision of the newly established ASUS NUC BU is to provide the most impactive edge computing with comprehensive commercial and AIoT solutions that can sustain the industry and businesses." Just over a week ago, TechPowerUp was granted access to next generation NUC devices at CES 2024—including ROG NUC, as well as NUC 14 Pro and NUC 14 Pro+ models. Many folks in attendance noticed a complete absence of NUC Extreme products at the ASUS Las Vegas showroom.

Online publication, Fudzilla, has investigated this matter—Fuad Abazovic (Editor-in-Chief) managed to chase down an ASUS spokesperson. It seems that the Taiwanese manufacturer is integrating some if its best known branding into the NUC ecosystem, and Team Blue nomenclature is on the chopping block: "the company won't have an update to the NUC Extreme 7.5 liter device. The Raptor Canyon remains the last NUC of its kind, as ASUS has ROG Strix systems in the same ballpark. Fudzilla already covered the announcement of the NUC and NUC pro, and the ROG NUC. We were assured that the 2.5L ROG NUC will remain the fastest gaming-oriented device and that, at this plan, the company doesn't plan to develop the successor of NUC Extreme 7.5 liter. ASUS has announced ROG Strix G16CHR, its 7.5-liter desktop that comes with an air and water cooler and hosts up to Intel Core i7-14700KF Processor 3.4 GHz (33M Cache, up to 5.5 GHz, 20 cores), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB GDDR6X 3x DP, 2x HDMI, and up to 64 GB RAM in 4x DDR5 U-DIMM slots."

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[NextPowerUP]

This new journey starring the legendary archaeologist comes from the award-winning team at MachineGames—the minds behind Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus—in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games and executive produced by Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is coming later this year to Xbox Series X|S and PC and will be available day one on Game Pass. Check out the full announce from the Developer_Direct and get more insights from the team at MachineGames below.

Set between "Raiders of the Lost Ark " and "The Last Crusade," Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a first-person, single-player adventure that will take you all over the world, uncovering clues and solving an ancient mystery. Become the adventurer in a race against sinister forces. Your journeys will take you from the hallowed halls of the Vatican and the arid deserts of Egypt to the lush and sunken temples of Sukhothai and the frigid peaks of the Himalayas.
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[NextPowerUP]

AMD unveiled its Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE) Radeon RX 7900 GPU last summer—this Navi 31 XL-based card was first launched in China, with only a handful of customized options and a reference model (produced by XFX) available at the starting line. It later emerged that Team Red's special SKU (celebrating the Year of the Rabbit) would be heading West; by Autumn-time, system integrators in Europe started to sell full PC systems outfitted with Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics cards. By late 2023, a small smattering of board partner versions hit the European market in proper retail form—you no longer had to shell out €1500+ for a pre-built system in order to gain access to an exclusive model. Team Red's almost parallel launch of its Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU has overshadowed the slightly more powerful RDNA 3 model's limited release.

VideoCardz has received tips about price cuts affecting certain Radeon RX 7900 GRE models, and a new retail entry for an ASRock custom design. AMD has started to adjust its pricing at the higher mid-tier and flagship GPU level, in reaction to NVIDIA rolling out GeForce RTX 40 SUPER cards this month. This initiative has affected the Radeon RX 7900 GRE as well, despite its very restricted availability in Western markets. The article points to an example of the reference design with its price falling by ~€60 (over a two month period)—Italy's PSK Mega Store's offer currently sits at €542.66. The lowest price in Spanish and German markets appears to be €579—CoolMod Espagna has Sapphire's Pulse Radeon RX 7900 GRE Gaming OC 16 GB card listed at €579.95; it also qualifies for the AVATAR: Frontiers of Pandora promotion. Mindfactory DE lists a mysterious ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Challenger 16 GB OC Edition model (SKU 90-GA52ZZ-00UANF), ready to purchase and ship out immediately at €579. Photos of this twin-fan custom model can be viewed at Skinflint UK.

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[NextPowerUP]

Courtesy of X/Twitter user @yuuki_ans, we now have what should be very detailed information on Intel's next generation consumer desktop platform, assuming the leaked information is real. The leaker not only provided confirmation on the CPU specs of the Arrow Lake-S desktop CPUs, which will feature up to an 8+16+1 core configuration. However, it appears that it's not all smooth sailing for Intel to get Arrow Lake-S up and running, as a note points out that the pre-alpha hardware has the performance cores disabled due to a hardware bug that is expected to be fixed in a future hardware revision. We can also see that the official memory support is DDR5-6400 from the block diagram, which is quite a jump from DDR5-5600 which is what the current 14th gen CPUs officially support.

That said, the rest of the documentation shared is very detailed and provides us with a ton of details in terms of the various platform interfaces we can expect. For starters, the Arrow Lake-S CPUs will feature native Thunderbolt 4/USB4 support (once again an odd mistake here stating USB4.0), as well as DisplayPort 2.0 (UHBR20 only) and HDMI 2.1 support. The CPU is said to deliver 24 PCIe lanes, of which 16 are PCIe 5.0 lanes for the GPU and the remaining eight are for NVMe SSDs, with half being PCIe 5.0 and half PCIe 4.0.
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[NextPowerUP]

Hold on to your seats—this week's GFN update is unleashing dinosaurs, crowns and more in the cloud. Catch it all on Capcom's Exoprimal and Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, leading 10 new games joining the GeForce NOW library this week.

Suit Up, Adapt, Survive
Don cutting-edge exosuit technology and battle ferocious dinosaurs on an Earth overrun with waves of prehistoric predators. Capcom's online team-based action game Exoprimal is now supported in the cloud. Face velociraptors, T. rex and mutated variants called Neosaurs using the exosuit's unique weapons and abilities. Join other players in the game's main mode, Dino Survival, to unlock snippets and special missions from the original story, piecing together the origins of the dinosaur outbreak. Change exosuits on the fly, switching between Assault, Tank and Support roles to suit the situation. Catch the game in the cloud this week alongside the release of Title Update 3, which brings a new mission and special Monster Hunter collaboration content, a new map, new rigs, plus the start of the third season. Ultimate members can enjoy it all at up to 4K resolution and 120 frames per second, and new players can purchase the game on Steam at 50% off for a limited time.
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TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular graphics sub-system information, monitoring, and diagnostic utility for gamers, engineers, and enthusiasts alike. Version 2.57.0 comes with support for all of the big new GPU releases this month. These include the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, RTX 4080 SUPER, and RTX 4090D; and AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT. Support is also added for the Radeon 760M iGPU, the Steam Deck OLED iGPU; Tesla T4G, and A100 40 GB processors. We've also added detection for AV1 Profile 2 under the DXVA menu in the Advanced tab. The release also fixes BIOS extraction from some NVIDIA cards. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.57.0
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The PC master race has yielded many interesting activities for enthusiasts alike, with perhaps the pinnacle of activities being overclocking. Usually, subjects for overclocking include CPUs, GPUs, and RAM, with other components not actually being capable of overclocking. However, the enthusiast force never seems to settle, and today, we have proof of overclocking an off-the-shelf 2.5-inch SATA III NAND Flash SSD thanks to Gabriel Ferraz, a Computer Engineering graduate, and TechPowerUp's SSD database maintainer. He uses the RZX Pro 256 GB SSD in the video, a generic NAND Flash drive. The RZX Pro uses the Silicon Motion SM2259XT2 single-core, 32-bit ARC CPU running up to 550 MHz. It has two channels at 400 MHz, each with eight chip enable interconnects, allowing up to 16 NAND Flash dies to operate. The SSD doesn't feature a DRAM cache or support a host memory buffer. It has only one NAND Flash memory chip from Kioxia, uses BiCS FLASH 4 architecture, has 96 layers, and has 256 GB capacity.

While this NAND Flash die is rated for up to 400 MHz or 800 MT/s, it only ran at less than half the speed at 193.75 MHz or 387.5 MT/s at default settings. Gabriel acquired a SATA III to USB 3.0 adapter with a JMS578 bridge chip to perform the overclock. This adapter allows hot swapping of SSDs without the need to turn off the PC. He shorted two terminals in the drive's PCB to get the SSD to operate without its default safe mode. Mass Production Tools (MPTools), which OEMs use to flash SSDs, were used to change the firmware settings. Each NAND Flash architecture has its own special version of MPTools. The software directly shows control of the Flash clock, CPU clock, and output driving. However, additional tweaks like Flash IO driving with subdivisions need modifications. Control and Flash On-Die Termination (ODT) and Schmitt window trigger (referring to the Schmitt trigger comparator circuit) also needed a few modifications to make it work.
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[NextPowerUP]

Back at Computex last year we got a look at the first USB4 add-in card, which was from MSI. Some six months later, ASUS has finally revealed its USB4 add-in card that simply goes by the name of USB4 PCIe Gen4 Card. The general design of the two cards appear to be more or less identical, at least in terms of outputs and inputs. As such, both cards feature two USB4 outputs and two DP 1.4 inputs for those that want to use the USB4 ports to connect to a display. Other inputs include a USB 2.0 header, a custom USB4 header for communication with the motherboard—similar to Thunderbolt add-in cards—and a 6-pin graphics card type power input. The card supports up to two monitors and three devices or one monitor and four devices when daisy chained.

ASUS has gone for a shroud on its card, so it's impossible to make out any real details, but based on the manual, ASUS has installed a heatsink on the ASM4242 USB4 host controller from ASMedia, albeit a smaller one than MSI. However, ASUS has only gone for 60 W USB Power Delivery compared to 100 W for the MSI card. If this makes any useful difference in a desktop PC is up for discussion though and would depend on specific use cases. On the other hand, ASUS allows for 60 W through both ports, whereas MSI only delivers 27 W through its secondary port. The card should work with any ASUS motherboard that has a TB/USB4 header. As ASUS has only just put up the product page, there's no word on pricing.

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[NextPowerUP]

AQIRYS, is pleased to introduce the latest addition to its keyboard range—LIBERTAS. Thoughtfully engineered for enhanced silence and smooth operation, this keyboard represents a thoughtful evolution in our mechanical keyboard design. The LIBERTAS keyboard, featuring specially tailored HaiMu x AQIRYS Silent 5-pin mechanical switches, provides an exceptionally quiet and smooth typing experience. These switches are meticulously pre-lubricated, which plays a crucial role in reducing both friction and operational noise, enhancing each keystroke's feel. This precision in lubrication not only contributes to a quieter keyboard but also ensures each key press is fluid and effortless. The silent and smooth characteristics of these switches make them particularly advantageous for gamers who require stealth and precision, as well as for professionals in environments where noise minimization is essential. Such thoughtful design details underscore the LIBERTAS keyboard's commitment to combining performance with user comfort.

The keyboard's 75% form factor skillfully merges the minimalism of a 60% keyboard with the key functions of a full-size model, favored for its space efficiency and ergonomic advantages in competitive gaming and everyday use. This design offers easier access to essential keys, optimizing comfort and response time during extended gaming sessions.
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[NextPowerUP]

Mark Zuckerberg has shared some interesting insights about Meta's AI infrastructure buildout, which is on track to include an astonishing number of NVIDIA H100 Tensor GPUs. In the post on Instagram, Meta's CEO has noted the following: "We're currently training our next-gen model Llama 3, and we're building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap, including 350k H100s by the end of this year -- and overall almost 600k H100s equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs." That means that the company will enhance its AI infrastructure with 350,000 H100 GPUs on top of the existing GPUs, which is equivalent to 250,000 H100 in terms of computing power, for a total of 600,000 H100-equivalent GPUs.

The raw number of GPUs installed comes at a steep price. With the average selling price of H100 GPU nearing 30,000 US dollars, Meta's investment will settle the company back around $10.5 billion. Other GPUs should be in the infrastructure, but most will comprise the NVIDIA Hopper family. Additionally, Meta is currently training the LLama 3 AI model, which will be much more capable than the existing LLama 2 family and will include better reasoning, coding, and math-solving capabilities. These models will be open-source. Later down the pipeline, as the artificial general intelligence (AGI) comes into play, Zuckerberg has noted that "Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit." So, expect to see these models in the GitHub repositories in the future.

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