Following a deluge of leaks, AMD’s 2nd-gen Ryzen ‘Pinnacle Ridge’ CPUs have landed. These new ‘Zen+’ chips are built on a 12nm process, and bring in a brand-new chipset (even though the older chipset will work just fine!). Read on as we take a look at both the 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X, and 6-core Ryzen 5 2600X.

It’s been a while since we last took a look at some fresh performance numbers from AMD’s Radeon ProRender plugin for 3ds Max, and as you may have assumed, that’s going to be rectified in this article. We’ve pit 12 graphics cards against each other to see which reigns supreme – and the results may or may not surprise you.

NVIDIA’s annual GPU Technology Conference took place last week in San Jose, California, and as always, the event has given us a lot to think about upon returning home. Some things stand out more than others, and it’s those that will be talked about here: from GPUs and ray tracing to deep-learning and artificial intelligence.

As we discovered a couple of weeks ago, Chaos Group has been hard at work on its next-gen V-Ray renderer, and fortunately for users, a performance-boosting beta has already been released. We’re taking a preliminary look at performance from the new renderer, both on the CPU and GPU side (spoiler: the chips also join forces!).

When the keyboard market experienced a deluge of mechs a handful of years ago, we began to wonder what vendors would do to set themselves apart. For some, optical switches have become a big part of their solution, offering super-low latencies and a satisfying feel. Bloody’s B975-LK RGB proves that there’s definitely some room left for differentiation in the market.

With games getting bigger and movies switching to 4K resolutions, the amount we need to store for our digital lives is forever increasing. While cloud services help, sometimes you need something local to keep everything on. We take a look at one of Seagate’s highest density drives on the market, the Barracuda Pro 12TB.