Author: batteryforpc

NZXT is having a fire sale of sorts, with discounts on a whole bunch of stuff. One that stands out is its H700 mid-tower chassis. This is similar in design to the H710i, one of the best PC cases around, except you’re trading built-in smart functionality for a lower price tag.

In this case, we’re talking about an even $80. That’s $49.99 below its most recent list price. Though it could sometimes be found for below its MSRP earlier this year, we’ve never seen this case dip below the $100 mark. So, you’re saving a decent chunk of change on this one.

You may recall that we compared the H700 to the H500. Our only real knock against the H700 was the price. This sale shoves that concern to the side. The H700 is a clean-looking case made of steel, with a large tempered side-glass panel to show off your handiwork. There’s room for lots of storage, too—you get seven 2.5-inch drive bays and a pair of 3.5-inch drive bays.

NZXT also deserves kudos for bundling four fans with this case. All too often, case makers skimp out in this regard, and it’s unfortunately not uncommon to only get a single fan. The H700, however, includes three Aer F120 (120mm) fans installed in the front and the an Aer F140 (140mm) fan in the rear.

That’s sufficient to keep your PC cool (and adds value to this case), though you can add up to three 120mm for two 140mm fans up top (or go with up to a 360mm radiator for a liquid cooling setup).

There are newer options out there, but with this discount, the H700 deserves consideration as one of the best mid-tower cases for the money. This sale ends on 12/27, so if you’ve been looking for a new case, grab it while you can.

Affordable, fast and with excellent dual-fan cooling, NVIDIA’s two new ray-tracing cards (the RTX 2060 Super and the 2070 Super) took the place of the company’s excellent Ti lineup. NVIDIA’s release of the GPUs was, according to senior editor Devindra Hardawar, “clearly a response to AMDs new midrange” cards. Dev managed to get impressive frame rates and gaming performance out of each, awarding the 2060 Super a score of 87 and the 2070 an 86.

Last week, we asked users who had chosen from AMD’s GPU lineup to share their experiences with the cards. This week we want to hear from those who bought an NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super or 2070 Super instead. What kind of frame rates did you get from the 2070 Super? How well did those dual fan coolers work for you? Is the real-time ray tracing worth it? And, of course, why did you choose NVIDIA over AMD? As someone who owns the component, you know it better than anyone else so weigh in with what impressed you, what didn’t and any other details potential buyers should know. Remember, your review could get included in an upcoming user review roundup article!

Note: As usual, comments are off for this post. Please contribute your thoughts and opinions on our NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super or 2070 Super product pages!

Rewound is a music player app that uses skins and haptic feedback to recreate the feeling of using an iPod Classic.

The catch is that the app doesn’t offer up the skin – something that would immediately get it flagged given that Apple doesn’t allow the use of images of its products or UI by people that aren’t Apple. It’s up to you to download the skin, and you can use any image you like, so it’s a just a matter of doing it after the fact.

“You can program physical appearance of a device,” developer Louis Anslow told The Verge. “It could become anything.” Currently, that ‘anything’ is an iPod Classic because that’s how the app is being positioned at the moment.

Rewound only supports Apple Music at the moment, but Anslow says that Spotify support is on the way.

Over the summer, details of a MediaTek-powered Chrome OS tablet codenamed Kodama appeared, and there’s strong evidence to suggest that this new tablet will be brought to market by Lenovo. Back in August, Chrome Unboxed found the first code commits for Kodama, noting it could be the first ARM-powered detachable Chrome OS tablet. Keep in mind the image above is an old Lenovo 10.1-inch Windows tablet, not the actual Kodama device.

Based on a number of code commits and some other circumstances, I believe that the August report is correct. And I’ve found some additional information.

Let’s talk about the circumstances first and then go over some of the device details. 

Earlier this month, a Chrome OS subreddit showed a post asking for beta testers for an upcoming Lenovo Chrome tablet. The original post came from an official Lenovo email account and was found to be verified by Reddit. The post has been removed, but not after many folks signed up to be a tester.

Today I found a Chrome OS bug for Kodama. The issue has to do with screen orientation when the device is connected to external monitors, but that’s not the important part. Of interest are the email addresses of the Google hardware partners. They’re all from Bitland. More on that in a second.

Now the “very tight” timeline and date of 12/13 could mean anything. But when taken into consideration with the recent request for beta testers on a Lenovo Chrome tablet, I smell smoke. And when there’s smoke, there’s usually a fire. So I did a little more sniffing around.

Searching for Bitland on the web yielded a China-based hardware manufacturer, which doesn’t mean much on its own. But when I looked around for what products and brands that Bitland has produced devices for, I found these two products, which hit the market with Lenovo branding:

And although I can’t confirm that this is Kodama form the test reports or other documents, it’s worth noting that Lenovo received FCC certification just yesterday for “Portable Tablet Computer” that looks like this. I’d say those look like pogo pins on the right side of the image — the bottom of the tablet in landscape mode — for a detachable keyboard, something we’ve long known Kodama will support.

That’s a bunch of timely evidence suggesting that Kodama will come from Lenovo in my book.

So what else do we know of Kodama, regardless of the brand that gets slapped on it?

Yes, it will have a detachable keyboard, as previously noted. The touchscreen may use one of two different TFT panels from a pair of vendors, but both are 1920 x 1200 resolution:

There will not be an ambient light sensor on the tablet. And powering it all will be a MediaTek MT8193 eight-core processor. There’s no doubt about that since the CPU number is listed in numerous related commits, most of which show MediaTek email addresses in the listings.

I haven’t yet been able to confirm other important aspects such as memory, storage and more, although I’ve seen clues that this will have 4 GB of memory. That wouldn’t be surprising as a device this size, powered by an ARM processor isn’t likely to have super high-end internals such as 16 GB of memory or 128 GB of storage, for example.

All of the evidence I’ve seen so far suggests that this will be a Lenovo tablet in the low- to mid-range pricing. Given that we haven’t seen many other new Chrome OS tablets hit the market, color me intrigued.

Western Digital has been promoting its microwave assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology for over a couple of years now, yet surprisingly, its upcoming 18 TB and 20 TB drives are not really using the tech. The reason for this lies in the company’s decision to use what they consider to be the right technology at the right time. To that end, Western Digital not only plans to use MAMR in the future, but is open to use heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology when time comes.

Energy assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies will enable future nearline hard drives with extreme capacity and areal density, there are no doubts in the industry about that. But HDD manufacturers have different opinions about when to introduce these technologies. Seagate believes that heating the platters using laser (HAMR) is the way to go now, whereas Western Digital is confident that using microwaves to change their coercivity (MAMR) better for the foreseeable future. And both agree, at least, that in the long run HAMR will enable a higher areal density.

Having invested an ample amount of R&D money into various EAMR technologies, Western Digital discovered that transition to HAMR is a hard one as it requires the introduction of new heads as well as use all-new platters, whereas MAMR needs new heads and slightly different platters. While working on MAMR, Western Digital found that it was possible to only partially implement the technology and still get the desired result – an increase in areal density. In fact, the company’s Ultrastar HC550 HDDs (and 20 TB drives) will be the first products to use this type of EAMR technology that is currently called energy-enhanced PMR (EPMR).

According to Western Digital, EPMR is particularly easy to incorporate into hard drives, especially considering the fact that it does not use a spin-torque oscillator, which is a key element of Western Digital’s MAMR technology.

And while EPMR has changed Western Digital’s roadmap slightly, at the end of the day the company says it hasn’t changed the development philosophy: the various magnetic recording technologies that they’re researching will be used once they are needed to hit certain capacities. For the moment, then, the company has indicated that they’re looking at their options for 24 TB and 30 TB drives, and what they’ll need to do to make those capacities practical.

Here is what Siva Sivaram, president of technology and strategy at Western Digital, said at the Wells Fargo Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit earlier this month:

“The 18 TB product that is going out this December will use a variant of the MAMR technology. We are agnostic as to which technology we will have to succeed in the long term. We will introduce the right technology at the right point when it gets to 24 TB and 30 TB. We see a path to get to 50 TB in our hard drive roadmap. As we go to 50 TB, we will introduce the right technology at the point when it actually makes sense.”