Items tagged with kaby lake
Things have been relatively quiet on the Microsoft Surface hardware front for the past few months (at least with regards to new releases). Earlier this summer, Microsoft performed a brain transplant on the Surface Pro convertible and introduced the all-new Surface Laptop. However, an update for the Surface Book, which was first introduced in late 2015, was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, Microsoft has revealed that it will hold a keynote on October 31st at its “Future Decoded” event in London. As you might expect for a major announcement relating to Surface, division chief Panos Panay will be the chief presenter. Sources for The Verge indicate that at least once new product will be...
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The sound of silence -- there’s nothing like it, especially when it comes to a media PC. The last thing anyone wants while binging on the new season of Game of Thrones is the distracting drone of a fan or whir of a hard drive. Silence is precisely what the Streacom DB-4 chassis we'll be featuring here has to offer. I’ve been wanting to build a Home Theater PC (HTPC) for years now. My current rig actually started life as an HTPC, but was soon upgraded for gaming and workstation tasks and now lives under my desk instead of in my living room. When Streacom reached out to us to review the DB-4, I was eager for the opportunity to give a proper HTPC another go. The DB-4 is not your average computer...
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ASUS is looking to appease mobile professionals who might partake in some light gaming on the side with its latest thin and light notebook, the VivoBook Pro N580. While it’s not being aimed at hardcore gamers that crave the ultimate in graphics muscle, the VivoBook Pro N580 has more than enough power to ensure that eSports fanatics will be more than satisfied when they are on the go. Powering the notebook is a potent Intel Core i7-7700HQ Kaby Lake processor, which is backed by 16GB of DDR4 2400 memory (taking up two DIMM slots). Your window into the gaming world (or productivity tasks) is through a 15.6-inch Full HD touch screen with a 72.57 percent screen-to-body ratio. An NVIDIA GeForce GTX...
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EVGA is well known in the enthusiast community for its motherboards, video cards, power supplies and countless other PC peripherals (among other things). The hardware company just announced its upgraded SC17 1080 G-SYNC Gaming Laptop (which is quite a mouthful), but we’ll just call it the SC17 for brevity’s sake. As its name implies, the SC17 features a big, gorgeous 17.3-inch 4K NVIDIA G-SYNC panel, which is much appreciated in this class of gaming notebooks. We’ve been seeing 17-inch notebooks “saddled” with 1080p displays for far too long, so it’s nice to see that EVGA has equipped this notebook with a resolution worthy of the gaming muscle lurking within. Powering the notebook is a burly...
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About a month ago we talked about a critical HyperThreading flaw that had been found in Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake processors. As we noted at that time, the flaw is very hard to trigger and is limited in scope. In fact, many people running processors affected by the flaw probably never noticed any stability issues with their machines as a result. With that said, no PC enthusiast wants a system that has any critical flaws lurking about, so Intel has fixed the issue with a new update. The first indication that the flaw has been fixed comes from the Debian Linux user lists, the group that was initially credited with reporting the flaw. The message to the user list states that "Intel has...
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Amid the spectacle of new CPU and GPU architectures that have been dominating the headlines for the past several weeks, Intel has gone and quietly added a handful of new processors to its Kaby Lake and Xeon stacks. These can be seen in the latest update to Intel's 7th generation Core processor family specifications datasheet, which is a compilation of device and document errata, specification clarifications, and changes to Intel's product family. The latest update sees the addition of a several new Core i3 desktop processors based on Intel's Kaby Lake architecture, along with several more mobile oriented Kaby Lake-U series system-on-chip (SoC) options for thin and light laptops, certain all-in-one...
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Dell updated its Alienware 17 gaming laptop at PAX West 2016 with NVIDIA Pascal graphics, but at the time Intel’s quad-core Kaby Lake mobile processors weren’t available yet. It was a short-lived update, however, as the Kaby Lake-powered Alienware 17 was announced a short time later at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show this past January. Today, we’re checking out the newest Alienware 17 R4 gaming laptop featuring the latest of both technologies. The chassis may look familiar, but its all-new on the inside with two 7th-Generation Intel Core i7 processor and four NVIDIA Pascal graphics options. The Alienware 17 R4 is a full-fledged desktop replacement that packs serious hardware...
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Update: 6/26/2017, 8:59PM EST - Our contacts at Intel have responded to our requests for further detail on this issue with the following statement: "We have already identified this issue and addressed it with a fix that started rolling out in April 2017. As always, we recommend checking to make sure your BIOS is up to date, but the chance of encountering this issue is low, as it requires a complex number of concurrent micro-architectural conditions to reproduce."And so it's clear that Intel feels this issue is limited in scope and very hard to trigger. Further, the fix was documented and released to OEMs and motherboard vendors in April. However, it's of course incumbent upon system...
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The slim, sleek Razer Blade gaming laptop we'll be looking at here is an interesting beast that does its best to perform a balancing act of sorts. The gaming laptop arena is a landscape full of compromises. Gamers generally crave the most powerful technologies on the market, but until we can cram 8K displays into a fanless 13-inch form factor with dual Titan X GPUs and physics-defying thermal headroom, sacrifices obviously must be made. And we love high-end, 10 pound gaming battle stations, don't get us wrong, but sometimes situations and use cases call for something actually portable. Now, there are a plethora of gaming notebooks to rival even the best desktops, though many...
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If you are a fan of the Blade Stealth family of gaming notebooks, Razer is back at it again with a new model that ditches the 12.5-inch display in favor of a more spacious 13.3-inch unit. As before, the Blade Stealth is milled from aircraft-grade aluminum, but is now available in both black or gunmetal gray finishes. The 13.3-inch IGZO display features a Quad HD+ screen resolution (3200x1800), which is actually not as dense as the 4K (3840x2160) display found on the 12.5-inch Blade. The larger display, however, is enhanced by 50 percent thinner bezels and captures 100 percent of the sRGB color space. The new Blade Stealth is of course powered by Intel’s Kaby Lake-based Core i7-7500U and comes...
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Historically speaking, all-in-one systems have not been known for their upgradeability. That has changed somewhat in recent years, with newer AIOs sporting swappable components, at least on the enthusiast end of the spectrum. The same is true of Apple's latest 21.5-inch iMac with a Retina 4K display. A teardown shows that users can access (and upgrade) both the CPU and RAM.The feasibility of upgrading these components is another matter entirely. Unlike some AIO systems that make things easy with a rear panel that pops right off, Apple glues its iMac shut. Getting inside is not unlike opening an iPad or iPhone device—there is some prying to be done. Things are a little bit easier once you know...
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MSI is one of the biggest players in the gaming laptop market with a wide range of models that cover the spectrum from thin and light notebooks that pack a punch, on up to desktop replacement systems with unbridled power inside. The company added to both market segments at Computex by announcing the new GT75VR, a monster laptop with three GPU options, and the GS63VR and GS73VR, a pair of slim gaming laptops with a GeForce GTX 1070 GPU inside. Starting with the meatier of the two, the GT75VR is a muscular laptop that can be outfitted with a single GeForce GTX 1080 GPU, two GeForce GTX 1070 GPUs in SLI, or a single GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. It also features a burly Intel Core i7-7820HK processor, an...
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The new Surface Pro is here, and it looks nearly identical to the old Surface Pro 4. Microsoft has dropped the numerical suffix to its popular convertible, which explains why Microsoft’s Panos Panay remarked earlier this month that there would be no “Surface Pro 5”, but it has also added over 800 “new custom parts” to the winning formula. First and foremost, the new Surface Pro includes Kaby Lake processors, which replace the Skylake chips that were getting a bit long in the tooth on the Surface Pro 4. Customers can choose from Core m3, Core i5 and Core i7 models, with the first two being completely fanless. Even though Core i7 models have a fan, Microsoft says that the device can barely...
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Microsoft disrupted the hardware space when it took matters into its own hands and developed the Surface to showcase its vision for Windows 8. That feels like an millennia ago, and while Microsoft's hardware partners have stepped up to the plate with similar designs since then, the Surface lives on. Its latest model, the Surface Pro 4, is even expected to get a refresh next week.The form factor has not changed much since the original Surface, though the landscape sure has. These days it is all about Windows 10, which brings the focus back to the desktop while still offering a tablet interface for those who want it. The Surface Pro 4 is an extension of Microsoft's original vision and can still...
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