Month: January 2021

Intel Discontinues 300-Series Chipsets

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Intel isn’t slow to pull the curtain down on its products when replacements are waiting in the wings. Last month, the company discontinued its entire 9th-gen Coffee Lake Refresh line, including the still-excellent Core i9-9900K. Its predecessor, the 8th-gen Coffee Lake CPUs, were discontinued in June 2020.

The announcement comes just before the start of CES 2021 next week, where Intel will likely reveal its 500-series motherboards. These feature an LGA1200 socket, so both the 10th-gen Comet Lake-S and upcoming 11th-gen Rocket Lake-S chips are supported.

Read more @ TechSpot

MSI MEG Z490 UNIFY

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The MEG Z490 Unify, built around the LGA1200 socket and Intel’s Z490 chipset for its mainstream desktop CPUs, features an almost entirely black color scheme, with the only traces of contrasting color coming from capacitors and power phases on the board and the steel-reinforced PCI Express slots. If you’ve looked at motherboards over the last few years, it may come off a bit flat for your tastes.

Read more @ PC Magazine

AMD AGESA 1.1.9.0 Update – Infinity Fabric OC Improved?

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AMD announced a new update to 1.1.9.0 AGESA code for Ryzen 5000 platforms that offers improved fabric overclocking stability and supports Windows 10’s s0i3 sleep state. The update also adds support for passively-cooled X570 motherboards. The new AGESA code will come as future BIOS/UEFI updates for Ryzen 5000 series motherboards. 

AMD has enhanced fabric overclocking support to improve stability with 1800-2000 MHz fabric clocks. That’s a nice jump over the typical limit of 1600 MHz. This expanded support will allow users to run their higher-clocked memory, like DDR4-3800 and DDR4-4000, in the 1:1:1 mode that offers the lowest latency (and thus best performance in most apps). 

Read more @ Tom’s Hardware

BIOSTAR Racing Z490GTN

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Biostar is a familiar brand in the lower end of the price segment for Mini-ITX boards. The Racing Z490GTN is the company’s answer for anyone looking to build a compact system with 10th and 11th Gen Intel processors. It makes good use of Intel’s Z490 chipset, though you will notice some omissions compared to premium full-sized boards.

The Racing Z490GTN came in at $200 at launch, though you can easily find one for much less. The price is a little high even though it rocks the Z490 chipset. It’s possible to find a Mini-ITX for a little less if you are on a strict budget and don’t mind slightly downgrading to the Intel B460 chipset.

Read more @ Windows Central

MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK

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As with the MSI MPG B550 Gaming Carbon WiFi, the MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk was also compared with its predecessor in the following. The first obvious difference is a thicker power supply and support for faster RAM. There are also differences in the slots – there are now two M.2 slots in particular. There are further upgrades to report on the network, the sound processing and the USB ports, albeit only minimally in the latter. 

Read more @ Hardware Journal (German)

NZXT N7 Z490

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The NZXT N7 Z490 is based on Intel’s Z490 Express chipset and supports all current LGA 1200 (10th generation) Intel CPU’s. It utilizes a 4-layer PCB and sports a 10-phase power design which we’ll talk about shortly. The motherboard is somewhat stripped feature-wise. That being said, it does offer a couple of things such as 2.5GbE LAN and WiFi 6 support. 

Read more @ The FPS Review

Review Roundup: 1/5/21

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Cases: DeepCool Macube 110 @ Modders Inc

Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB White DDR4-3200 32GB @ ThinkComputers, Patriot Viper Steel DDR4 16GB 2666MHz 2x16GB CL18 SODIMM @ [M]adShrimps

Storage: TerraMaster F5-221 NAS @ Guru3D, WD Blue SN550 @ Hot Hardware, Silicon Power US70 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD @ NikKTech, addlink S92 2TB QLC M.2 PCIe SSD @ TweakTown, WD My Passport SSD @ ThinkComputers

GPU: Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 NITRO+ @ Guru3D, MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X TRIO @ Guru3D, MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X @ Hot Hardware, ASUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti TUF Gaming OC @ Hexus, EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FTW3 Ultra Gaming @ Hexus

Cooling: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo V2 @ OCInside, DEEPCOOL AS500 @ TweakTown

Z590 Motherboards – PCIe 4.0 Compatible w/11th Gen CPUs Only

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While perhaps not a surprise, by way of WCCFTech we’ve learned that multiple Z590 motherboards are noting that PCIe 4.0 support for GPUs and M.2 devices is limited to 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S CPUs. This will come with great disappointment for 10th Gen owners, limited to PCIe 3.0 lanes without upgrading their CPU.

As per the previously leaked information which covered all Intel Rocket Lake SKUs, the lineup will consist of Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5 chips. The rest of the lineup which includes Core i3, Pentium & Celeron series will not offer PCIe Gen 4.0 support and will retain Gen 3.0 compliancy since they are part of the Comet Lake family. Only Intel’s Rocket Lake CPUs have the architectural upgrades necessary to support PCIe Gen 4.0.

– WCCFTech

Intel 500 Series Chipset Logos, Info Revealed

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Over at VideoCardz, they’ve posted some information on the forthcoming Intel 500 series of chipsets for the Rocket Lake-S platform. We have logos for the Z590, B560, and H510. They also have a slide outlining some key details of the 500 series. To start things off, 4 new PCIe lanes have been added to the CPU, upping the count to 20 similar to Zen 3. We also, finally, have an update to PCIe 4.0 for these 20 CPU lanes, allowing for support of PCIe 4 M.2 storage devices, as well as a direct PCIe 4.0 x16 GPU connection.

The DMI bus between the CPU and the chipset is now x8, doubling the bandwidth available currently to 64Gb/s each way. The 500 series chipsets themselves support additional PCIe lanes, as you’d expect, but they’re still limited to PCIe 3.0. That’ll do the job, but it’s a hit against the platform vs the full PCIe 4.0 support of the the AMD X570. Some other information notes increased DDR4 speeds. One would assume this means DDR4-3200, but time will tell. As will the “new overclocking features”. Head on over to read more.

B460/H410 Chipset Shortages?

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There’s a report out from MyDrivers states that Intel is having problems supplying the market with mainstream B460 and H410 chipsets. This could lead to price hikes among these boards reflecting rising costs to get these chipsets:

Sources from the supply chain claim that the supply of motherboard chipsets has become tight at the end of the year. On the one hand, PCBs and various electronic components are out of stock and price increases, and the other is that Intel ’s 400 series chips are tight.

Specifically, the supply of high-end Z490 series chipsets is acceptable, but the mainstream B460 , H410 and other chipsets are seriously out of stock. Motherboard manufacturers have already limited supply during Double 11 this year . December is the last wave of shipments. Supply will be severely short after January.

Read more @ MyDrivers via Tom’s Hardware