Even though the NDA still isn't up on AMD's second volley of Ryzen-based CPUs, some lucky buyers are already running some of the upcoming Ryzen 5 processors after some sellers jumped the gun. Now, a YouTube video by user "Santiago Santiago." is making the rounds in which he compares gaming performance between the Ryzen 5 1400 (4-core, 8-thread part @ 3.2 GHz base, 3.4 GHz boost), Intel's i5 7400 (4-cores @ 3.0 GHz base, 3.5 GHz boost), and the Pentium G4560, a Kaby Lake dual-core CPU with Hyper Threading @ 3.5 GHz base clocks. The user even snapped a picture proving he has his hands on this chip.

Over 12 hours ahead of its unveiling, Guru3D accidentally (timezone confusion) posted some juicy details about AMD's exciting Ryzen 5 desktop processor lineup. What makes these chips particularly exciting is that they occupy several sub-$250 price points, and offer the kind of gaming performance you'd expect from the larger 8-core Ryzen 7 series chips, since not a lot of games need 8 cores and 16 threads. The Ryzen 5 series will launch with two 6-core, and two 4-core SKUs, all four of which feature SMT (simultaneous multi-threading), and unlocked base-clock multipliers.

The Ryzen 5 series is topped by the Ryzen 5-1600X, priced at USD $249. This 6-core/12-thread chip features the full 16 MB of L3 cache available on the 14 nm "Summit Ridge" silicon, and backs it with clock speeds of 3.60 GHz core and 4.00 GHz TurboCore, with the XFR (extended frequency range) feature enabling higher clocks depending on the effectiveness of your CPU cooling. This chip could be AMD's power move against the Intel Core i5-7600K. Next up, is the Ryzen 5-1600 (non-X), priced at $219. This chip lacks the XFR feature, and comes with slightly lower clocks out of the box, with 3.20 GHz core, and 3.60 GHz TurboCore. You still get an unlocked base-clock multiplier, which Intel's $220-ish competitor to this chip, the Core i5-7500, sorely lacks.

Ahead of its launch, specifications of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti STRIX graphics card by ASUS, appeared on the web thanks to a leaked press-deck. The one spec on most people's minds is the factory-overclock. Out of the box, in the so-called "gaming mode," the card is clocked at 1569 MHz core, 1683 MHz GPU Boost, and an untouched 11 GHz (GDDR5X-effective) memory. The "OC Mode," a clock-speed preset that you activate with the included GPUTweak II software, runs the card at 1594 MHz core, 1708 MHz GPU Boost, and 11.1 GHz memory.

It turns out that the DirectCU III cooler deployed on the GTX 1080 Ti STRIX is indeed beefier than the one found on the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 STRIX cards; with ASUS claiming up to 30% lower temperatures, thanks to a 40% increase in surface area of the heatsink. ASUS took advantage of the heavier heatsink to lower fan-noise, which it claims to be significantly lower than the reference-design card. The company is also using a newer thermal interface material (TIM) called "MaxContact," which due to its particle density, can get up to 10 times flatter than conventional TIMs, for lower thermal resistance posed by the TIM, and higher conductivity. Display outputs of this card include two each of HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4 ports.

Another day, another leak: the folks at XFastest have indeed been the fastest to leak images of an actual Ryzen 7 1700X processor, with pictures of the processor's IHS and pin area running rampant throughout the Internet (the Ryzen chip is located to the right in both pictures, with a sample of AMD's previous-generation FX CPUs on the left side for comparison sake).

While revealing shots may have their appeal, it's the benchmarking portion that most of us are expectant about. Until actual reviews are out, we're left nothing more than these leaks (which should be taken with appropriate amounts of salt). In this case, benchmarks of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 1700X have been released, showing just how the upcoming CPU delivers in 3D Mark Fire Strike, CPU Mark and Cinebench R15.

Feast your eyes on these trays of AMD Ryzen processors. Someone (likely an OEM gaming desktop builder) leaked pictures of several 12-unit trays of AMD Ryzen processors, revealing their package designs. A prominent "Ryzen" branding is printed on the integrated heatspreaders (IHS), besides the part numbers, and the various serial numbers.

The chips boast of "diffused in USA, made in China" markings, denoting that the dies (the actual chips) are made in the USA, at GlobalFoundries' swanky new fab, in upstate New York. The chips are then shipped as wafers to GloFo's facility in China, where the dies are bumped and packaged (mated with the pinned substrate and IHS). AMD is expected to launch the Ryzen line of high-performance desktop processors on the 28th February, 2017.

The leaks and details regarding AMD's Ryzen processors just don't seem to - and really won't - stop these days. Now, it's the enclosing piece of cardboard in which these processors will ship that's made the rounds, and AMD seems to have continued with an understated look to its overall box design.

The box art was posted through a listing of AMD's upcoming Ryzen processors on a Thailand-based retail outlet, alongside pre-order pricing (which seems to carry a slight premium (for example: a Ryzen 7 1800X is listed at 18,790 Baht, which would roughly amount to $537, a little higher than the reported $499). But a picture is worth a thousand words, and as such, I'll just leave you with those.

Benchmarks have leaked on AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPUs, and if accurate, these are the ones that will change the name of the game from "Hype Train" to "Reality Check". Part of a verified Passmark entry, the test system consisted of an AMD Ryzen 8-core, 16-thread ES clocked at 3.4 GHz (which puts it closely on the Ryzen 7 1700X territory, though it isn't known whether Turbo to its rated 3.8 GHz was active or not), seated on an entry-level MSI A320 AM4 motherboard (absent of overclocking functionality) and 16GB of 2400MHz DDR4 memory.

The tests include integer math, floating point performance, prime numbers, encryption, compression, sorting, SSE performance and physics. The AMD Ryzen 7 1700X outperformed every other CPU in 5 out of the 8 tests, including Intel's fastest 8-core chip, the $1099 Broadwell-E i7 6900K. When put side by side against Intel's slightly less expensive $999 8 core extreme edition Haswell-E i7 5960X, Ryzen was faster in 6 out of the 8 tests. The 1700X showed particularly good performance in integer math and encryption, workloads typically associated with server workloads (and where the bulk of the profit is).

Other information to surface from WCCFTech's leak on the upcoming Radeon Software Crimson ReLive drivers, is its dual nature, for both consumers and professionals. The Radeon Technologies Group is seemingly on a crusade to bolster AMD's software support recognition with customers, and that naturally extends towards the professional side of the equation as well.

As such, the first immediate feature to be introduced is AMD's Pro Renderer, a physically-based rendering engine that enables production of photorealistic images, with both plugin and native integration support from the big names in professional workflows, such as Autodesk's 3DS Max, Autodesk Maya, and Blender (just to name a few), along with game-engine integration and support through the Unity Engine and Stingray. LiquidVR support is also headed for professionals, enabling professional VR workflows in design, engineering, animation, filmmaking, and VR game engines.

The crew at WCCFTech have just leaked AMD's now annual major software update release (with Catalyst Omega in 2014 and Crimson Edition in 2015). The new 2016 release is apparently dubbed the "Crimson ReLive" release, and these are purported to bring a lot of features and performance improvements across the board for AMD products, as has been historically achieved by AMD with these annual driver releases. This time, there's just one other thing: game recording and streaming through a built-in app.

Since its inception, the Radeon Software division has released 29 drivers of which 8 were WHQL releases, with support and optimizations for over 28 gaming titles, having been downloaded over 85 million times. AMD seems to put newfound interest in consumer satisfaction with their driver releases, considering how a leaked slide mentions that they have achieved a 4.5/5 rating in customer satisfaction in recent times (AMD had already given us at TPU a glimpse of that at the Computex event in Macau, pre-Polaris days, and this seems to be it). AMD is putting much stock in their DX12 performance thanks to features such as asynchronous compute, and the staples of supported platforms and projects. AMD also seems to have a new-found claim towards it being one of the most important players in the graphics industry, chalking up their market dominance by including gaming consoles in their portfolio.

As we inch ever closer to AMD's Zen launch, more and more information seems to be slipping through the cracks. This time, MAXSUN, an AMD China partner (poised to provide customers with AM4 platform motherboards) is the source of the proverbial leak, with information that, if true, is sure to stir the pot of bubbling Zen excitement even more.

According to MAXSUN, Zen's initial release date is pegged for January 17th, which, if true, would probably mean a product announcement around CES 2017 (scheduled from the 5th of January through the 8th) - at the same time as Intel is expected to fully unveil their Kaby Lake parts. The company also reports a second release window at March 2017, which lends further credence to AMD's expected staggered launch of Zen-based processors, first for the High-Performance-Desktop (HEDT) market, and trickling down from there. MAXSUN also confirms the pricing scheme we reported yesterday, with regards to the companies' SR7 processors (the top-of-the-line parts in the Zen line-up, and whose naming scheme I think isn't the final one) - the company states these are expected to be priced at around 1500-2000 Yuan SKU ($250-$300).

Recent reports peg AMD's upcoming line of microprocessors based on Zen micro-architecture as being labelled SR3, SR5 and SR7 for different hardware tiers (with the SR3 being the lowest-performing, and SR7 being, naturally, the highest-performing). A recent post on Chip Hell claims that a leaked slide from an AMD presentation give us these insights, with further information on pricing: it's shown in the roadmap that all Zen SR (Summit Ridge) processors will sell for higher than RMB 1500 ($220).

AMD is expected to offer either four-core or eight-core designs on their lineup (with eventual Simultaneous Multi Threading differentiation, like Intel does between their i5 and i7 lines) still being up in the air. And in what would mark a divergence from their recent movement in the GPU space, where AMD introduced their latest Polaris architecture at the highest-volume market of about $200, AMD's Zen efforts are expected to begin from the top, with the dubbed "SR7" enthusiast-grade products first, and trickling down the market scale eventually.

If AMD's plans come to fruition, the company's efforts with its Zen micro-architecture will bring it back towards competitiveness with Intel not only on consumer chips, but also on the enterprise segment. While the company's consumer efforts are, by and large, the most visible from a consumer standpoint, with great hopes being pinned on it as a means to inject some much-needed dynamism and innovation in the CPU landscape, the most important vector for AMD arguably stands with the enterprise segment - where margins are usually much greater than in the consumer market.

News and specifications about Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake-based desktop CPUs are thin, but a recent leak has made it possible to discern at least some details, due to an Intel product change notification (PCN) document.

A PCN is a document issued by a manufacturer to inform customers about a change to a mass-produced product or its manufacturing process. In this PCN, Intel details a new factory in Vietnam which will work in order to "ensure a continuous supply of the Select Intel Xeon Processor E3-1205, Intel Core i5-7400 Processor, Intel Core i5-7400T Processor, Intel Core i5-7500 Processor, Intel Core i5-7500T Processor, Intel Core i5-7600 Processor, Intel Core i5-7600K Processor, Intel Core i5-7600T Processor, Intel Core i7-7700 Processor, Intel Core i7-7700T Processor and Intel Core i7-7700K Processor products".

According to a press-deck slide leaked by VideoCardz, NVIDIA could surprise with pricing of its GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards. The GTX 1050 could be offered at $109, cheaper than the previously-rumored $119; while the faster and better-endowed GTX 1050 Ti could be offered at $139, cheaper than the $149 price-tag touted in older articles. Both SKUs, as previously reported, could be available from 25th October, 2016. The leaked slide also confirms specifications of the GTX 1050 to include 640 CUDA cores, and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, while the GTX 1050 Ti will feature 768 CUDA cores, and double the memory amount, at 4 GB.

The Intel-Micron joint collaboration in the development of what is promised to be the next step in storage technology is inching ever closer to reality. According to Bench Life, which published a leaked specifications list for the upcoming Intel Optane Memory products, the first application for consumer-grade 3D XPoint technology straddles the line between an SSD and system RAM. Intel calls it a "System Accelerator" solution, and it's meant to operate as an intermediate caching solution between a system's RAM and storage. Codenamed "Stony Beach", Intel's 8000p (and entire 3D XPoint-based products) support is still up in the air, but it's expected that only Kaby Lake and subsequent platforms will be compatible with the technology - which, if true, is sure to limit the product's market penetration.

The consumer products will initially sport capacities of either 16GB or 32GB, leveraging the NVMe protocol at PCIe Gen 3.0 x2 bandwidth in the M.2 form-factor. Mirroring NAND technology, the greater capacity solution will sport the highest performance: with the 16GB part coming in at 1400 MB/s read and 300 MB/s write speeds, against the 32 GB's 1600 MB/s and 400 MB/s, respectively. We see similar results in regards to IOPS, with the 16GB solution offering up to 285,000 read and 70,000 write operations per second, against the 32 GB's solution respective 300,000 read and 120,000 write. As usual with new technologies, expect all these metrics to only go up in time.

A leaked slide from NVIDIA press-deck for the imminent launch of the GeForce GTX 1060 confirmed the reference board design, which first surfaced in Hong Kong. The slide also reveals clock speeds, and other key specs of the card. While it doesn't reveal the GPU nominal clocks, it mentions that the GPU Boost frequency will be set as high as 1.70 GHz. The memory is clocked at 8 Gbps, which over the GPU's 192-bit GDDR5 interface, puts out 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The chip features 1,280 CUDA cores based on the "Pascal" architecture. The card draws power from a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, its TDP is rated even lower than that of the AMD Radeon RX 480, at 120W (vs. 150W of the RX 480). NVIDIA has been making huge (and successful) performance claims for its "Pascal" GPUs so far. The GTX 1060 is claimed to be faster than the GeForce GTX 980 from the previous generation, and "much faster" than the RX 480, which means that NVIDIA intends to price this card competitively to the RX 480.

According to a leaked company slide doing rounds on the web, Intel plans to launch its workstation-grade Xeon "Broadwell-EP" processors by March 31, 2016. These chips will be branded under the Xeon E5-2600 V4 series. HP is ready with a workstation based on these chips, the HP Z640, which succeeds the Z620 that's driven by "Haswell-EP" Xeon chips. Dollar-for-Dollar, Intel is positioning the "Broadwell-EP" to offer at least "20% more cores and last-level cache" than "Haswell-EP."

This would mean Intel leveraging the 14 nm process to cram 10-core chips at the price of an 8-core chip from the previous generation, 8-core chips at the price of 6-core ones, and so on. The same slide mentions that "Broadwell-EP" offers, on average, 18% more performance than "Haswell-EP." Intel is also hinting at native support for DDR4-2400 MHz. Haswell-EP supports DDR4-2133 MHz.

Ahead of its launch, press-shots of the upcoming flagship graphics card of MSI, the OC-series GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning, leaked to the web. The pictures reveal a card that MSI threw all its engineering expertise into. It retains the yellow+black design scheme of its predecessors, and is characterized by an even larger Tri-Frozr triple-fan cooling solution. The cooler consists of a large nickel-plated copper base, from which five 8-10 mm thick heat pipes make their way to two dense aluminium fin-stacks, ventilated by a trio of 100 mm spinners.

The cooler only makes up part of this product, a bigger chunk of engineering went into its custom-design 10-layer PCB, with a 15-phase VRM that draws power from a combination of one 6-pin and two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and a plethora of overclocker-friendly features such as voltage measurement points, dual-BIOS with an LN2-friendly secondary BIOS, the ability to control speeds of individual fans, and more. The MSI GTX 980 Ti ships with a factory-overclock of 1203 MHz core, 1303 MHz GPU Boost, and 7.10 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory; which certainly isn't the highest factory-OC out of the box, but this is probably MSI's way of inviting users to overclock it to Kingdom come.

Here are some of the first pictures of ASUS Radeon R9 Fury STRIX, detailed in no less than AMD's own [leaked] press-deck for the R9 Fury. It appears that only two AIB partners are going to launch the R9 Fury for whatever reason. These are the Sapphire, with its R9 Fury Tri-X card, and ASUS, with its R9 Fury STRIX. ASUS' card features the same new-generation triple-fan DirectCU III cooling solution that made its debut with the GTX 980 Ti STRIX, and is featured on the R9 390X STRIX. This cooler is mated to what appears to be the first custom-design PCB for AMD's "Fiji" silicon (Sapphire's card uses the reference AMD PCB carried over from the R9 Fury X). This card is firmly in the 30 cm-ish territory. Its display output configuration includes a DVI connector, apart from three DisplayPorts, and an HDMI connector. The cooler offers 0 dBA idle. AMD claims that the R9 Fury will offer higher performance than the GeForce GTX 980, and is hence expected to be priced in that range.

Alienware leaked the first images of AMD's upcoming Radeon R9 370 graphics card and R9 390M GPU. The card's design looks a lot like the liquid-cooled Fiji-XT "Radeon Fury" board that's being pictured around these days. If the picture Alienware is from AMD, then it's safe to assume that both the R9 370, and the R9 390M will be based on the 28 nm Curaçao silicon. The only major change here, will be the standard memory amount, which has been bumped to 4 GB from 2 GB, thanks to the 4 Gbit GDDR5 chips that are becoming commonplace. AMD is expected to launch these cards a little later this month. The Curaçao silicon features 1,280 GCN stream processors, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

In the latest picture leaked of AMD's upcoming flagship graphics card, codenamed "Fiji-XT," we get a final confirmation of the reference-design card's length, particularly its short PCB. Since this card uses a factory-fitted AIO liquid cooling solution, and since the Fiji XT package is effectively smaller than that of Hawaii, with the surrounding memory chips gone (moved to the GPU package as HBM stacks), the PCB is extremely compact, with just the GPU package, and its VRM. Speaking of which, the card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The coolant tubes stick out from the rear of the card, making their way to a 120 x 120 mm radiator, with a single included 120 mm PWM fan. With this card, AMD is doing away with DVI altogether. Connectors will be a mixture of DisplayPort 1.2a and HDMI 2.0.

As a quick follow up to our older report on AMD's upcoming "Zen" CPU core micro-architecture being a reversion to the monolithic core design, and a departure from its "Bulldozer" multicore module design which isn't exactly flying off the shelves, a leaked company slide provides us the first glimpse into the core design. Zen looks a lot like "Stars," the core design AMD launched with its Phenom series, except it has a lot more muscle, and one could see significant IPC improvements over the current architecture.

To begin with, Zen features monolithic fetch and decode units. On Bulldozer, two cores inside a module featured dedicated decode and integer units with shared floating-point units. On Zen, there's a monolithic decode unit, and single integer and floating points. The integer unit has 6 pipelines, compared to 4 per core on Bulldozer. The floating point unit has two large 256-bit FMAC (fused-multiply accumulate) units, compared to two 128-bit ones on Bulldozer. The core has a dedicated 512 KB L2 cache. This may be much smaller than the 2 MB per module on Bulldozer, but also indicate that the core is able to push through things fast enough to not need cushioning by a cache (much like Intel's Haswell architecture featuring just 256 KB per core). In a typical multi-core Zen chip, the cores will converge at a large last-level cache, which routes data between them to the processor's uncore, which will feature a DDR4 IMC and a PCI-Express 3.0 root complex.

It turns out that our older report suggesting that the most affordable of Intel's new Core i7 "Haswell-E" HEDT processors will feature a slimmer PCI-Express root complex, even if it gives you 6 cores at a [hopefully] sub-$400 price-point, holds true, after all. Intel's wacky approach to its latest HEDT processor lineup was confirmed by leaked manuals of Gigabyte's socket LGA2011-3 motherboards, based on the Intel X99 Express chipset. The manual confirms that while Intel's $500-$750 Core i7-5930K and >$1,000 Core i7-4960X offer bigger 40-lane PCI-Express Gen 3.0 root complexes; the Core i7-5820K features a narrower 28-lane one. This means that multi-GPU configurations on systems running the chip won't be too different from those on LGA1150 "Haswell" platforms.

On motherboards with, say, three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, the i7-5930K and i7-5960X will let you run two slots at full x16 bandwidth, and a third slot at x8. On systems with the i7-5820K, the second slot won't go beyond x8, and the third one will cap out at x4. On boards with four slots, one of them will run out of bandwidth. The trade-off for this narrower PCI-Express interface is the fact that you're getting six "Haswell" cores, twelve logical CPUs enabled with HyperThreading, about 12 MB of L3 cache, and a quad-channel DDR4 memory interface, at a price-point not too far off from the Core i7-4790K. So for enthusiasts with no more than two high-end graphics cards, the i7-5820K could provide an attractive gateway option to Intel's new HEDT platform. You can find the leaked manuals in this thread.

Here are the first pictures a HIS branded Radeon R9 285, the third in a series of leaked press-shots of cards based on AMD's new performance-segment GPU, designed to take on NVIDIA's bestselling GeForce GTX 760 in not just performance, but also energy-efficiency. The card is based on a new ASIC, codenamed "Tonga," which is rumored to feature a stream processor count identical to one of the variants of "Tahiti," and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory. HIS' card features a compact variant of the company's IceQ X² cooling solution. Its pictures also reveal that the R9 285 "Tonga" will feature XDMA CrossFire, much like the R9 290 series.

Intel Core i7 "Haswell-E" HEDT (high-end desktop) processors, along with compatible motherboards based on the Intel X99 Express chipset, are expected to launch on September 14, 2014, according to a leaked Intel supply chain document scored by VR-Zone. The Core i7 "Haswell-E" series succeeds current Core i7 "Ivy Bridge-E," and its compatible X79 Express chipset. The new chips will be built in the new LGA2011-3 package (incompatible with current LGA2011), and will be the first client desktop platform to support the new DDR4 system memory standard. The series will include three parts, the six-core Core i7-5820K and i7-4930K; and the eight-core i7-5960X. The three are detailed in our older article, here.