Items tagged with Skylake
When it comes to impactful processor vulnerabilities, the two most well-known attacks announced the year are Spectre and Meltdown. The hardware and software industry scrambled to push out fixes to prevent these, and Microsoft is still working to minimize the performance impact of its mitigations.
Today, however...
Read more...
Intel continues to plug along with microcode updates for its vast stable of processors. Two weeks ago, the company released revised microcode updates with Spectre mitigations that were limited to mainstream Skylake mobile and desktop platforms. This week, the company has expanded the microcode updates to cover...
Read more...
Intel has had a rough time patching the Meltdown and Spectre chip exploits that were first publicized in early January. The company issued microcode updates that helped to mitigate the exploits on processor architectures dating back to Broadwell. However, Intel quickly found out that not all was well, with customers...
Read more...
The PC industry is still trying to come to grips with the fallout from the revelation of the Meltdown and Spectre chip vulnerabilities. Meltdown only affects Intel processors, while Spectre -- the more serious exploit -- affects processors from Intel, AMD, and ARM. Hardware OEMs and OS manufactures have banded...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
A pair of researchers from Positive Technologies claim that Intel's newest generation processors are susceptible to a USB port debugging vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take over full control of a system. Starting with Skylake (and presumably Kaby Lake, though the researchers do not specifically mention...
Read more...
‘Tis the season to stomp on your enemies with the help of new gaming hardware, so we jumped at the chance to fire up a couple of Lenovo’s top gaming machines, a burly 17-inch gaming laptop and a gaming desktop PC designed in conjunction with Razer. Just a small side note: we're actually giving away these machines in...
Read more...
Intel's first generation Compute Stick turned quite a few heads, including ours, as it was a remarkable thing to consider that a fully functioning PC could be crammed onto a device roughly the size of a bloated USB flash drive. It wasn't especially powerful—Intel pairing an Atom processor based on its Bay Trail-T platform with just 2GB of...
Read more...
Today we are going to take a look at Gigabyte’s Z170X-Designare motherboard, one of the company's more recent Socket 1151-based boards for Intel's 6th Generation Skylake-based processors. At first glance this is an unassuming board, at least in terms of its appearance. It features a dark and subdued black...
Read more...
Asus is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand this year. The manufacturer launched its ROG line in 2006 and has since developed a wide range of gaming products under the brand, including some monstrous gaming notebooks like the one we'll be showing you here. With the arrival of NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture...
Read more...
We have another premium Z170-based motherboard on the test bench today, by way of MSI. The MSI Z170A Gaming M9 ACK motherboard is the company’s top end gaming board for use with Intel 6th Generation Skylake-based Core series processors. The MSI Z170A Gaming M9 is packed with a host of premium features aimed at...
Read more...
A good rule of thumb when purchasing a gaming laptop is to buy one with the fastest GPU you can afford. Unlike desktop PCs, you usually can't rip out the graphics adapter and upgrade to something faster (not in most cases, anyway), so when that once shiny and fast laptop starts feeling a little sluggish, you're...
Read more...
As longtime enthusiasts, we tend to get most excited for the latest, big, bad, benchmark-busting specimens of PC hardware to hit the lab. However, there’s something about ultra-small form factor devices that’s intriguing as well. The focus on power efficiency and performance-per-watt from virtually all semi-conductor manufacturers over the...
Read more...
Microsoft set off a nuclear blast in the PC enthusiast community this past January when it announced that it would cut off support for Intel Skylake-based machines running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on July 17th, 2017. This was ostensibly a move to force more users to upgrade to Windows 10, or else face the possibility...
Read more...
CybertronPC is hoping to hit a sweet spot for gamers with its new 14-inch laptop, the CLX Osiris 14. The system is light and slim for a gaming laptop, but it packs an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M and Intel Skylake quad-core CPU under its hood, so this machine is clearly not messing around. The Osiris 14 is a member of CybertronPC’s CLX...
Read more...
The Alienware brand is as venerable a name as any in the gaming space. As Alienware celebrates over twenty years in business, its computers have become instantly recognizable thanks to distinctive, out-of-this-world styling, and science-fiction references. Dell purchased Alienware in 2006 to complement its own competing line of XPS-branded...
Read more...
Acer has a new laptop line for small and medium sized business professionals looking for a thin and light solution that blends style with modern technology. It's the new TravelMate X3 series, the first of which is the TravelMate X349 bound in an brushed aluminum chassis that measures less 0.7 inches thin and weighs...
Read more...
In addition to being lots of fun, LAN parties also afford hardcore gamers and enthusiasts a forum to show off their rigs. Dusty, ho-hum home systems are the norm, of course, but there are also some modded systems, decked out with custom cooling, lighting and paint jobs. And, of course, there are the high-end...
Read more...
Apple hoped to revolutionize the thin and light category with its 12-inch MacBook in early 2015. Not everyone was convinced, however, given the notebook’s meager performance, single USB-C port that was used both for charging and expansion, and $1,299 entry point. The 2016 update didn’t move the bar much further, which...
Read more...
Hewlett-Packard is struttin’ its stuff in the ultrabook class with the brand new EliteBook 1030, which slots in nicely between the lower-end EliteBook Folio 1020 and the range-topping EliteBook 1040. In fact, the EliteBook 1030 is actually based on the 12.2-inch CNC-machined aluminum body of the EliteBook Folio 1020...
Read more...
ASUS is expanding its ROG Strix Series with a two new products, the most important of which is the first laptop to bare the Strix name: the GL502. Accompanying the new gaming laptop is the ROG Strix Wireless gaming headset, which is the perfect companion accessory for gamers.
But let’s get the most exciting product...
Read more...
