MSI is very well-known for their gaming products for the PC market, from motherboards, accessories, and right up to gaming laptops and desktops. The company was one of the first to focus almost exclusively on their gaming lineup, and that focus has made them very successful in that market. In the laptop space, MSI’s gaming lineup are some of the best systems around, even if they do often come with a price premium. But, while the gaming market has been strong even throughout some PC sales

Even though the 2021 edition of CES will be an entirely virtual affair due to the ongoing coronoavirus pandemic, a number of major companies have still been lining up to schedule presentations as part or around the event. This has included Intel, AMD, and now NVIDIA, who today is announcing an event for January 12 ^th .

Dubbed “GeForce RTX: Game On”, the broadcasted event will be presented by Jeff Fisher, NVIDIA’s Senior VP for GeForce. NVIDIA has set aside an hour for

Many computing use-cases require out-of-band management. For example, rack-mounted servers have dedicated LAN ports that connect to a baseboard management controller (BMC) chip for this purpose. PCs used in SMBs / SMEs and business applications do not accommodate a dedicated LAN port for this functionality. Instead, one of the in-band NICs (i.e, one used to provide the primary networking functionality of the system) helps in this aspect.

The DMTF (formerly, Distributed Management Task Force)

There are two very important levels of graphics performance in modern systems to consider – one is if the graphics system is sufficient for seamless use, and the second is such that it meets a substantial standard for gaming. On one side we use integrated graphics, which take advantage of a unified processor to simplify the system, and on the other we look to a range of options, such as smartphones, consoles, and discrete graphics options. Somewhere in there we have a middle ground – can an integrated option have enough thermal

Today Intel is announcing updates to most of their SSD product lines. Their products based on 3D NAND are being updated to use Intel's 144-layer QLC and TLC NAND. On the Optane side of the business, we have detailed specifications for the first product to use second-generation 3D XPoint memory, and an updated Optane Memory caching solution for client PCs. Intel has also revealed the code name for their third-generation Optane persistent memory modules, which will be launching along Sapphire Rapids Xeon

For the lucky few who can get their hands on a GeForce RTX 3090 or 3080 card during a very competitive holiday shopping season, NVIDIA has opted to sweeten the pot by extending their Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War game bundle . Previously scheduled to end on December 10 ^th , the bundle has now been extended to January 11 ^th – which also happens to be the start of CES.

NVIDIA has offered Call of Duty bundles a few times in the past, so including

Biostar has launched its latest AMD B550-based board, the B550M-Silver. Aimed at gamers looking to use AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 processors, it brings a host of premium features to the micro-ATX form factor with USB 3.2 G2 connectivity, a Realtek 2.5 Gb Ethernet controller, Wi-Fi 6, and PCIe 4.0 support.

Over the last couple of years, premium AMD micro-ATX boards have been few

The external storage market has shown renewed vigor in recent years, thanks in part to growth fueled by bus-powered flash-based storage solutions. The introduction of 3D NAND, coupled with the increasing confidence of manufacturers in QLC (4-bits per cell) has brought down the cost of these drives to the point where even a reasonably spacious external SSD can be had for an equally reasonable price. And though this means that NAND manufacturers like Western Digital, Samsung, and Crucial/Micron have an inherent advantage in

Following up from our recent look at 8TB QLC SSDs, today we're taking a look at the 1TB Corsair MP400. This is a QLC NVMe SSD using the Phison E12 controller, which puts it a step up from earlier QLC SSDs that used four-channel Silicon Motion controllers. However, at the more affordable 1TB capacity point, the downsides of QLC NAND are more pronounced, and there is much more competition from budget TLC drives that make very different tradeoffs.