Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles:

AMD B550 and A520 Lack PCIe Gen 4 Capabilities?
Apacer NOX 32GB DDR4 Memory Kit Review
ASRock B365 Pro4 Motherboard Review
Beyerdynamic Fox USB Studio Microphone Review
Displate: Make Your Game Space Awesome
Intel Ice Lake IPC Best-Case a Massive 40% Uplift Over Skylake
Lenovo Flex 6-14IBK (Kaby Lake-R) Laptop Review
Lenovo Yoga A940 Review
Memblaze PBlaze5 C916 and D916 Enterprise SSD Review
Orico 12-Port USB 3.0 Hub Review

AMD B550 and A520 Lack PCIe Gen 4 Capabilities?

Last Friday, we reported ASMedia working on new-generation socket AM4 motherboard chipsets that succeed the AMD B450 and A320, which could hopefully offer significantly cheaper alternatives to boards based on the feature-rich AMD X570 chipset. The DigiTimes story we cited was updated to clarify that the chipset only supports PCI-Express gen 3.0, and not the newer PCI-Express gen 4.0. There are two distinct ways of interpreting this information.

One, that motherboards based on B550 and A520 completely lack PCIe gen 4.0, including the main PCI-Express x16 (PEG) slot and the M.2 slot wired to the AM4 SoC; and two, that only the downstream PCIe lanes and the chipset bus are PCIe gen 3.0, while the main PEG slot and M.2 slot from the SoC remain gen 4. We lean toward the latter interpretation being more plausible, that AMD B550 and A520 motherboards will at least feature one PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot, and one M.2 slot that has PCI-Express 4.0 x4 wiring from the AM4 SoC; while the ASMedia chipset is connected to the SoC over PCI-Express 3.0 x4, and downstream PCIe lanes put out by the chipset are gen 3.0, too. These ASMedia-sourced AMD 500-series chipset motherboards could also implement the latest PCB, CPU VRM, and memory wiring specifications released by AMD that enable CPU and memory overclocking unattainable on motherboards based on older chipsets.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Apacer NOX 32GB DDR4 Memory Kit Review

Apacer NOX With many years of experience in high-performance memory, Apacer often has something exciting to show us. Their latest memory kit, simply known as Nox. Not to be confused with the Nox from Stargate SG-1. Imagine my disappointment when they didnt turn up.

Read full article @ eTeknix

ASRock B365 Pro4 Motherboard Review

Today we test on OCinside.de with the ASRock B365 Pro4 an extraordinary motherboard for Intel LGA1151 v2 processors. The ASRock B365 Pro4 offers a great basic equipment and a lot of features. However, the low Intel B365 price also has a big disadvantage regarding overclocking. In this review we show all details about the features and test the ASRock motherboard with an Intel Core i9-9900K CPU. And after this test you can even win the ASRock B365 Pro4 motherboard with a little luck!

Read full article @ OCInside.de

Beyerdynamic Fox USB Studio Microphone Review

Beyerdynamic wedges its way into the game streaming market with its impressive Fox standalone mic.

Read full article @ Tom's Hardware

Displate: Make Your Game Space Awesome

Are you looking for an affordable way to give your gaming den a facelift? As gamers, these things can be hard to find, especially if you don't want to hang a paper poster. We may have just the answer for you with Displate. It?s a site to buy custom artwork printed on metal from thousands of artists. If you want to take your space to the next level, this is a review you won't want to miss.

Read full article @ MMORPG

Intel Ice Lake IPC Best-Case a Massive 40% Uplift Over Skylake

Intel late-May made its first major disclosure of the per-core CPU performance gains achieved with its "Ice Lake" processor that packs "Sunny Cove" CPU cores. Averaged across a spectrum of benchmarks, Intel claims a best-case scenario IPC (instructions per clock) uplift of a massive 40 percent over "Skylake," and a mean uplift of 18 percent. The worst-case scenario sees its performance negligibly below that of "Skylake." Intel's IPC figures are derived entirely across synthetic benchmarks, which include SPEC 2016, SPEC 2017, SYSMark 2014 SE, WebXprt, and CineBench R15. The comparison to "Skylake" is relevant because Intel has been using essentially the same CPU core in the succeeding three generations that include "Kaby Lake" and "Coffee Lake."

A Chinese tech-forum member with access to an "Ice Lake" 6-core/12-thread sample put the chip through the CPU-Z internal benchmark (test module version 17.01). At a clock-speed of 3.60 GHz, the "Ice Lake" chip allegedly achieved a single-core score of 635 points. To put this number into perspective, a Ryzen 7 3800X "Matisse" supposedly needs to run at 4.70 GHz to match this score, and a Core i7-7700K "Kaby Lake" needs to run at 5.20 GHz. Desktop "Ice Lake" processors are unlikely to launch in 2019. The first "Ice Lake" processors are 4-core/8-thread chips designed for ultraportable notebook platforms, which come out in Q4-2019, and desktop "Ice Lake" parts are expected only in 2020.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Lenovo Flex 6-14IBK (Kaby Lake-R) Laptop Review

Today we are reviewing a really interesting notebook. The Flex series of notebooks is meant to facilitate productivity and access on the go, and in this case, we not only have a 15W U-series CPU, but also an MX 130 discrete GPU from NVIDIA.

Read full article @ TweakTown

Lenovo Yoga A940 Review

Lenovo's Yoga A940 could be called a clone of Microsoft's Surface Studio, but it's better in many ways. It has a full desktop processor, a Dolby Atmos soundbar, wireless charging, and more.

Read full article @ Neowin

Memblaze PBlaze5 C916 and D916 Enterprise SSD Review

Memblaze for a last few years has quietly shipped some of the fastest enterprise SSDs available. The company's technology and proprietary firmware spreads across the industry. You can even find it in Micron's flagship NVMe datacenter SSDs like the recently released 9300 Series.

Read full article @ TweakTown

Orico 12-Port USB 3.0 Hub Review

The underappreciated champion of our computer system is the USB port. If you run out of ports you can't add any more devices to your PC without unplugging something right? Wrong. USB hubs are a great way to increase the number of peripherals you can use at once. Enter the Orico 12 Port USB 3.0 Hub, designed to more than double your available ports and offer fast charging while it?s at it.

Read full article @ MMORPG