Computer Hardware

Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver 381.89 WHQL
“Provides the optimal gaming experience for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, Heroes of the Storm 2.0, Batman: Arkham VR, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, and Wilson’s Heart.”
Release notes

On sale at Amazon for $114.50 (28% off).
WD 4TB Black My Passport Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0 Color=Black
Other colors $119.00 (I bought a red one.)
Outstanding deal!

AMD Ryzen
AMD’s newest CPU platform was this week. It didn’t seem to live up to the hype, things never do in the tech world. Still, it seems to be a solid product. Consensus seems to be it rocks for everything but gaming.
User radosuaf let me know that despite earlier reports, there is Windows 7 support!
There also seems to be some good results under Linux.

Here are some reviews and snipets:

[H]ardOCP – AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU Review
“First and foremost, for most HardOCP readers, you are going to find that Ryzen simply has a huge clock deficit to overcome compared to Intel. If you are looking to build a system for desktop gaming alone, there is simply no way to suggest that Ryzen is your CPU as the Intel 7600K and 7700K still hold a great advantage especially if you are overclocking…Once you get past desktop gaming, the AMD Ryzen starts to look a lot more promising. In fact, when you look at video encoding, decoding, and content creation, the AMD Ryzen is an extremely impressive CPU showing that it can even best the $1000 Intel 6900K in some workloads. Even where the Ryzen does not “win,” it still remains extremely competitive. All of its 8 cores do work, and do work very well. If you are building a machine with these applications in mind, there is no way I can suggest you build with Intel. It has been a long long time since we have made a statement like that.”

Phoronix – AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Linux Benchmarks: Great Multi-Core Performance For $329
“The same operating system as used throughout testing was the Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 development snapshot with the Linux 4.10 kernel and GCC 6.3.0. …The Ryzen 7 1700 has a damn nice showing when it comes to the heavily threaded benchmarks like C-Ray, Smallpt, and code compilation. Ryzen does great for these multi-core tests but lets down the user in many of the single-threaded tests, in which case for $350 you can get the Core i7 7700K Kabylake from Intel. But if you are routinely compiling code on your system or engaging in other highly parallel tasks, the Ryzen 7 1700 performs rather well and in those cases can outperform the $400+ Core i7 6800K.”

PCWorld – AMD’s CEO says patches will boost Ryzen gaming performance: It ‘will only get better’
“We hear people on wanting to see improved 1080p performance and we fully expect that Ryzen performance in 1080p will only get better as developers get more time with ‘Zen”

Intel released a new line of CPU’s. Very few in the tech enthusiast community are, well, enthused about this new lineup.
My take from the reviews, Kaby Lake is a smidge faster at stock speeds and they don’t overclock for squat.

ARSTechnica – Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake review: Is the desktop CPU dead?
“With identical performance to Skylake, Intel brings desktop performance to a standstill…
As it stands, what we have with Kaby Lake desktop is effectively Sandy Bridge polished to within an inch of its life, a once-groundbreaking CPU architecture hacked, and tweaked, and mangled into ever-smaller manufacturing processes and power envelopes. Where the next major leap in desktop computing power comes from is still up for debate—but if Kaby Lake is any indication, it won’t be coming from Intel.”

Anandtech – The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) Review: The New Out-of-the-box Performance Champion
“In most of our benchmarks, the results are clear: a stock Core i7-7700K beat our overclocked Core i7-4790K in practically every CPU-based test (Our GPU tests showed little change). When overclocked, the i7-7700K just pushed out a bigger lead for only a few more watts. Technically one could argue that because this part and the i7-6700K are equal in IPC, a similar overclock with the i7-6700K achieves the same performance. But the crucial matter here is how lucky a user is with the silicon lottery – based on our testing, the Core i7-7700K CPUs tend to overclock rather nicely (although +300 MHz isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things).”

LegitReviews – Intel Core i7-7700K Processor Review
“For months we’ve heard people talking about how Kaby Lake is going to suck and that there is no reason to upgrade to it since it’s basically just an updated Skylake processor. We can understand that some people might look at the specifications and minor architecture changes and come to that conclusion, but the benchmark results look good. For those running older Intel Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge Processors the time to upgrade is looking pretty good right now…For now Intel Kaby Lake is as good as it gets for gamers and enthusiasts and we’d easily recommend it to anyone looking to upgrade their system.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_CPU_microarchitectures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake
https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/82879/Kaby-Lake#@All

The Samsung Magician SSD management utility has been updated. [Read more…] about Samsung Magician 5.0