Thread: Anandtech News

This is a review of a $500 motherboard for Skylake processors. For some readers, there’s going to an instant reaction of a series of question marks, confused emoji and an interrobang or two. You might ask why would anyone want to spend this much on a Skylake motherboard, when at this price point with a K-series processor, one could flip it around and go for a six-core Haswell-E and motherboard, get more cores and more PCIe lanes? The answer is usually simple – more cores only helps with certain non-gaming workloads, and the Z170 chipset has the potential to offer more than X99. With the GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming G1, that means full quad-SLI while also using dual M.2 at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds, with three Killer networks in tow, up to four USB 3.1 ports, ten SATA ports, and due to a recent update, all this comes with Thunderbolt 3 as well as numerous overclocking features and customizable lighting. It’s the first list of features on a motherboard that stretches the Z170 chipset to the limit.

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NVIDIA is continuing their efforts to provide game ready drivers on launch day throughout the AAA/holiday season. Without missing a beat they are giving us a two for one today with game ready support for both Just Cause 3 and Rainbow Six Siege.
Being a game ready driver, updates in the realm of stability and bug fixes are scarce. This time we are left with a bug fix for Call of Duty Black Ops III crashing on NVIDIA hardware under Windows Vista through Windows 8.1. No bug fixes are listed for Windows 10.
Today's driver update also brings us game ready support for Just Cause 3 and Rainbow Six Siege, both of which were just released. Just Cause 3 is the latest in open world madness and appears to need all the help it can get while being a demanding title (NVIDIA themselves recommend a GeForce GTX 970 for 60 fps at 1080p). Rainbow Six Siege has also arrived and along with catering to fans of tactical shooters is also the other half of NVIDIA's Bullets or Blades promotion which began in October and will be continuing for only two more weeks. While not 'game ready' this driver also provides driver optimizations for the Civilization Online closed beta.
Anyone interested can download the updated drivers through GeForce Experience or on the NVIDIA driver download page.

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HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, has been shipping hard drives sealed with helium for a couple of years now. Their helium drives have so far come in two flavors - the Ultrastar He drives using platters with traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology and the Ultrastar Archive Ha drives using platters with shingled magnetic recording (SMR). There are two main patented innovations behind the helium drives, HelioSeal and 7Stac. The former refers to placement of the platters in a hermetically sealed enclosure filled with helium instead of air. The latter refers to packaging of seven platters in the same 1" high form factor of traditional 3.5" drives.
The Ultrastar He6 6TB drive was introduced in November 2013, and this was followed by the He8 8TB drive late last year. In June 2015, the Ultrastar Ha10 SMR drive with HelioSeal technology was introduced. Around the same time, HGST also made it known that more than 1M HelioSeal units had been deployed. 1.33 TB platters have become available in air drives now, and HGST is taking advantage of that in the 10TB Ultrastar He10. The launch of the Ultrastar He10 PMR drive today also brings the news that more than 4M HelioSeal units have been deployed in various datacenters - pointing to the rapid rise in adoption rate of this technology.

We have already seen in our reviews that the helium drives offer the best performance to power ratio and watts per TB metric amongst all the drives in their capacity class. HGST also claim a 2.5M hour MTBF - much higher than traditional enterprise PMR drives. The initial cost of the helium drives have been substantially higher compared to the standard drives of the same capacity, but the TCO (total cost of ownership) metric is highly in favor of these drives - particularly for datacenter customers who need the drives to be active 24x7. HGST's press briefing included a slide that presented the potential TCO benefits that come about due to the increased capacity per rack, lower consumption per rack and lower power consumption per TB of the new He10 drives.

HGST indicated that the ramp in volume should help the initial cost to approach that of the air drives in the near future. For datacenter customers, that would mean an acceleration in obtaining the TCO benefits.

Coming to the core specifications, the Ultrastar He10 will come in both SATA 6Gbps and SAS 12Gbps varieties. The drives have 4KB sectors, though SKUs with 512-byte emulation are also available. Various data security options such as instant secure erase, self-encryption, secure erase and TCG encryption with FIPS are available.

The standard Ultrastar He drive features such as rotational vibration safeguard (for better RV tolerance in multi-drive servers) and the rebuild assist mode (for faster RAID rebuild) are retained. The drives come with a 256MB DRAM buffer.

Hard drives are struggling to reach the 10TB capacity point with traditional PMR technology. While Seagate did announce a few 8TB PMR drives earlier this quarter, it really looks like vendors need to move to some other technology (shingled magnetic recording or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)) in order to keep the $/TB metric competitive against the upcoming high-capacity SSDs. As of now, helium seems to be the only proven solution causing minimal performance impact and HGST appears to have a strong hold in this particular market segment.

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Huawei has been a company which over the past few years has visibly increased its presence in western markets. The Chinese vendor has in particular executed a big push into European markets over the last year as devices have become increasingly available in the usual electronics shops. Following the high-key introduction of the Mate 7 last year, Huawei seems to have settled on a Samsung-like release cadence where we see the smaller P-series introduced in spring and the Mate phablet series in autumn.
This year Huawei launched the Mate S - not a direct sucessor to the Mate 7, but still clearly a device that continues the design language of the Mate lineup. First up, let's go over the specifications and see what the new hardware provides in terms of upgrades.

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Today Samsung announced that updated versions of their Galaxy A3, A5, and A7 smartphones are about to be released. The original Galaxy A7 launched at the very beginning of this year, and both it and the other Galaxy A smartphones represented Samsung's attempt at bringing quality smartphone construction and design to lower price points than what you would pay for a flagship phone like the Galaxy S6. With it being nearly a year since the original announcement of the Galaxy A7, it makes sense that Samsung would want to refresh the lineup. Below you can find the specs for all three of Samsung's new smartphones.

	Samsung Galaxy A3	Samsung Galaxy A5	Samsung Galaxy A7
SoC	1.5GHz Quad Core	1.6GHz Octa Core
RAM	1.5GB	2GB	3GB
NAND	16GB NAND + microSD
Display	4.7" 1280x720 AMOLED	5.2" 1920x1080 AMOLED	5.5" 1920x1080 AMOLED
Camera	13MP Rear-facing, F/1.9, OIS on A5 and A7 5MP Front-facing, F/1.9
Dimensions / Mass	134.5 x 65.2 x 7.3mm 132g	144.8 x 71.0 x 7.3mm 155g	151.5 x 74.1 x 7.3mm 172g
Battery	2300 mAh	2900 mAh	3300 mAh
OS	Android 5.1 Lollipop
Network	Category 4 LTE	Category 6 LTE
Other Connectivity	2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n + BT 4.1, USB2.0, NFC, GPS/GNSS	2.4 / 5GHz 802.11a/b/g/n + BT 4.1, USB2.0, NFC, GPS/GNSS, MST for Samsung Pay
Fingerprint scanner	No	Yes	Yes

As you can see, all three devices have a degree of similarity. The Galaxy A5 and A7 in particular seem to be the most closely related, with many of the differences simply coming down to the difference in size between the two, and the drop to 2GB of RAM on the A5. The Galaxy A3 is clearly the more low end device, with a 4.7" 1280x720 display, no 5GHz WiFi support, and additional reductions to RAM, the SoC, and the cellular connectivity. Because the Galaxy A3 omits the fingerprint scanner present on the A5 and A7 it's also unable to use Samsung Pay.
Of course, some details like the specific SoCs in use are unknown, although one can speculate based on the limited number of offerings on the market that fit the descriptions. Whether or not the Galaxy A3's display uses a PenTile subpixel arrangement will also be an important detail to consider once it's revealed.

As for the design of the phones, they take inspiration from the industrial design of the previous Galaxy A devices but adopt some of the changes made with Samsung's Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note5, such as the use of glass on both the front and back of the devices. All of the phones are quite thin, and both the design and materials used mean that these definitely won't be targeting the sub-$100 part of the smartphone market. Samsung is also introducing a pink gold color which wasn't available with the last generation models.
While I don't think any of these phones are going to have extremely low prices, it's clear that they'll be competing at price brackets lower than the one occupied by Samsung's flagship phones. The launch prices for the Galaxy A3, A5, and A7 are currently unknown. According to Samsung, the phones will be launching in China later this month, with an expansion to global markets coming in 2016. We'll have to wait and see how much the phones go on sale for in the Chinese market before we're able to guess how much they'll cost elsewhere, and interested buyers will have to wait and see when their availability expands to their country.
Source: Samsung

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Congratulations are in order this evening for one of AnandTech’s most esteemed colleagues and peers, Scott Wasson. Scott founded The Tech Report back in 1999 and has lead it since, and in those years has operated one of the best deep technical websites in the business. However after 16 years at the helm of The Tech Report, this evening Scott has announced that he is retiring from the site at the start of next year and will be joining AMD.
Among his accomplishment, Scott was instrumental in bringing the matter of GPU frame pacing and overall frame rate consistency to the attention of the wider world of technology. And at the same time he has been equally responsible for holding AMD to task on the subject – a position that isn’t always easy – ultimately driving AMD to improve their drivers and frame delivery mechanisms to the benefit of all users. So to find out that he is joining AMD, though undoubtedly a loss to technical journalism, is wonderful news for both parties, as now AMD will have a strong advocate for quality and user experience within their ranks who can push for even more.
So with that in mind, I wish Scott congratulations and the best of luck in his new position.
As for The Tech Report, Scott has announced that his managing editor and right-hand man Jeff Kampman will be taking over the site. Jeff has done a great deal for the site since joining, so I am happy to hear that Jeff will be continuing the Report's tradition of quality journalism.

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Back in June at WWDC 2015 Apple surprised a number of people by announcing that they would be making their Swift programming language open source in the near future. Swift is, in a way, a successor to Apple's Objective-C programming language. It opens up development for iOS and OS X to developers that may have struggled with some of the idiosyncrasies of Objective-C, while also including a number of features that have become common among modern programming languages.
Today it appears that everything relating to licensing has been sorted out, and with version 2.2 the Swift programming language will now be made available under the Apache License 2.0, which is the same open source license used by the Android operating system. With Swift going open source, any member of the community can now propose additions to the language. The project is now available on the Apple Github account, along with some other repositories that are home to supporting tools like versions of the LLVM compiler and LLDB debugger for Swift.
Along with today's announcement of Swift going open source, there are some notices regarding the development of Swift 3. With Swift still being very much in development, Apple is giving developers a heads up that anything they write now is liable to break with future updates and will need to be fixed to support new coding styles, syntax, etc. There are some other announcements as well, such as a new package manager for sharing and distributing Swift code which would be great to see integrated into OS X in the future. Developers who are interested in some of today's Swift-related developments can get more info from the official Swift website.

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Our Build-A-Rig project is a place where PC hardware manufacturers (memory companies, case companies, GPU, CPU, power supply, storage et al.) are given an imaginary budget and a rough guideline on what system they should build fo that budget. Then we at AnandTech, with our partners Newegg, get the components in, build the system, interview the person that provided the spec list, give a run down of the components, test the system and then offer it as a giveaway to our readers.
This iteration was our second round, featuring Tony Ou from SilverStone Technology and Jeremy Mortenson from Cruicial Memory. The goal for this round was a Back-to-School build for $800. Both systems focused on different areas of CPU power, GPU grunt, storage and form factor.

Follow these links to read the interviews with Tony and Jeremy, as well as the component rundowns for SilverStone's Mighty Milo build and Crucial's Ballistix Bantam. We then built both the SilverStone and Crucial machines, then gave them a good run down in our test suite.
A full run down of both systems is as follows:

Build-A-Rig Round 2 Comparison
Component	SilverStone's Mighty Milo	Crucial's Ballistix Bantam
Processor (CPU)	Intel Pentium G3258 (2C/2T, 3.2 GHz)	Intel Core i3-4170 (2C/4T, 3.7 GHz)
Motherboard	ASRock H97M-ITX/ac	GIGABYTE B85N Phoenix-WiFi
Graphics Cards (GPU)	Zotac GeForce GTX 960 OC	EVGA GeForce GTX 950
Memory (DRAM)	Crucial Ballistix Sport XT 2x4GB DDR3-1600 C9	Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer 2x4GB DDR3-1600 C8
Storage (SSD)	Crucial BX100 120GB	Crucial MX200 mSATA 250GB
Storage (HDD)	Western Digital Blue 2.5-inch 1TB 5400RPM 8MB Cache	Seagate Barracuda 3.5-inch 1TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache
Power Supply (PSU)	SilverStone ST45SF 450W Bronze SFF	Thermaltake TR2 600W
Chassis	SilverStone Milo ML08B-H (with handle)	Thermaltake Core V1 Extreme Cube
CPU Cooling	SilverStone Argon AR06	None
Operating System	Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM	Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-bit - OEM
Extras	None	LG USB 2.0 Portable DVDRW
Total	$811.90	$793.90

After sifting through the entries of what has been another successful round for our Build-A-Rig project, we are ready to announce the winners. This time around each of our winners is receiving one of the two systems. The winners are as follows:

• SilverStone’s Mighty Milo: Patrick Weisgarber of Southlake, TX
• Crucial’s Ballistix Bantam: Nicholas Wood of Carthage, NY

Both winners will be contacted shortly for their shipping details at the email address provided.

Build-A-Rig Round 3 is currently on hold due to external factors beyond our control, but we have plenty of ideas in the running when we're ready to get going again. Congratulations to our two winners, and thanks to all who participated.

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Sometimes the only way to develop a relationship with a technology manufacturer beyond a simple press release exchange with a media relations team, and the odd limited-time product review sample, is to meet the people responsible for designing, managing and marketing the products. This November, we were given the chance to visit two of Huawei’s facilities and speak to a number of important individuals at both Huawei and HiSilicon.

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Mechanical keyboards are all the rage among enthusiasts nowadays, with most of them offering advanced features such as fully programmable keys and RGB lighting. However, there are also those that want these features and do not really care about the mechanical keys themselves. Razer's solution for this is the DeathStalker Chroma, an advanced programmable keyboard with RGB lighting, featuring chiclet keys.

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