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Source Corsair is really going hard on hitting all the parts of the PC market which is great from a brand perspective. My only fear is that they start using lots of generic products from ODM's and just putting the Corsair logo on them and then only getting a year or two of actual proper tech support.

Tech Power-up Source Phoronix Source Hardware Luxx Source This could be quite the boon for Chromebooks for the general populous who just consumes media or doing remote learning in a mostly web-based environment.

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Source It is a beautiful PCB, but I was a little skeptical myself on the density of the components, but I don't really have the means to test it, let alone get myself a 3080, I did try and was promptly met with broken web stores. This is to be expected when you cram that many components in to a small PCB. Hopefully this doesn't mean any long term damage of pre-mature failures of DRAM chips for the Founder's Cards.

Yeah, Microsoft could lock all the games and new ones to requiring Windows 10 to "help force upgrades to Windows 10" from all those users still on Windows 7. This would be easy if they just put them all as Windows Store apps, but that would also require packaging the games up as UWP's, but if that gets more users on Windows 10, I wouldn't put it past them. Windows 7 is long in the tooth and has way more exploits then Windows 10 even though Windows 10 is far from perfect as well. I can understand some people needing to stick on Windows 7 for certain programs maybe, but you could also just grab Windows 10 and use VMWare or something to run a Windows 7 VM or dual-boot.

One other thing to note about Plex is that it can have a /transcode folder mapped to somewhere else like a really fast SSD that's just used to store the few minutes of transcoded buffer before it sends it out to players. This can be a huge help on media server that just have spinning hard disks. I don't have a link handy, but I remember some people just adding really fast USB 3.0 drives, or M.2 SSD's in a USB 3.0 enclosure to their servers and mapping the Plex transcode directory to that when all their internal SATA ports were used up by spinning bulk storage drives. Also just having Plex installed on an SSD for all the metadata, thumbnails, posters, etc. can really make a huge difference for browsing through the library, especially if the hard drives are mainly used to store the media files and stay in a spun-down state most of the time.

New source from ArsTechnica added to first post Has some more interesting information

Source More great work on playing DirectX 12 games through Vulkan

Oh yeah, these for sure will not fit in a lot of lower M.2 slots that could get covered by 2+ slot PCIe cards. But I think that the majority of users with ATX boards that have two M.2 slots probably don't have massive cards in the lower slots that would actually have a problem with these SSD's.

Only benefit I can see is a larger heat soak, so it would take longer to fully heat up giving the drive a little longer to run at full speeds before thermal throttling, and its design is more friendly to a little bit of case airflow inline with the heatsink lengthways. As most M.2 SSD's installed in desktops are front to back, the air from a potential front intake or rear exhaust fan would create a slight airflow in that direction already.

It's going to give Microsoft a lot of cards to play: Better DirectX support Hard requirements for Windows 10 (this could be good for Linux gaming too though with Microsoft's recent focus on supporting a lot of Linux things) Turning the Windows 10 MS store into a competitor for other game store platforms (Steam, Epic Games, Activision/Blizzard, etc.) Better Windows Integrations (Game Mode, or something like Games for Windows Live)

Honestly can't remember, but at the time when I decided to rebuild my Plex server, it was taking up more space then just meta data, so I turned it off.

I run Plex on my UnRaid server where it has direct access to the media. Plex has access to a GTX 1050 Ti for transcoding that can handle 2 4k transcodes at just a little over real-time or 2 1080p streams with plenty of speed and buffering. Plex will always need a full CPU thread for the audio processing, just a small annoyance to keep in mind for any transcoding. If playing form your LAN, or remotely and using direct stream of the file itself, then the server itself shouldn't really be doing much at all aside form serving the file. I sort out my media by type as well: TV_Shows Anime_Dubbed Anime_Subbed Movies Music HD_Demos I chose not to use the chapter thumbnails feature of Plex as that steals way too much hardware space and processing time for no tangible benefit for me. File naming can be taken care of by lots of different tools, but I always try to use S##E#### with leading 0's to allow for shows that might get more than 9 seasons, or use weird episode numbering and go over 999. It's a couple extra characters in a filename and more of a personal preference to make things look nicer if I even need to manage the files themselves.

Source This is great news for DRM content (video and in the future games) that Linux is finally getting the development required to support DRM.

Source That's some speed and some substantial heat sink size. There isn't a whole lot of surface area for natural heat dissipation, so some lateral air flow through the fins will definitely be needed to get full use of that heatsink under long write sessions. Kind of makes me wonder how laptops will evolve to include M.2 Heatsinks integrated in to their chassis and the hot-spots that could create on those silly people that throw their laptop on a bed or some to use it without proper ventilation underneath.

Tech Power-up Source Ars Technica Source That's a lot of external hard drives. At first when I saw this I thought those all might be PCIe x1 lanes via USB 3.0 cables to be used with external adapters, but nope, that's just a lot of USB ports. Stick a 40 Gig network card in there and you've got quite a fancy ingest station for workplaces that need to upload/download lots of data to USB based devices. Big arrays of DVD/Blu-ray writers for backups of ripping SD/CompactFlash/RedMag's ingesting to a storage server External Hard Drive testing USB sensors

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Source This is great, having pre-launch support is going to help a lot with getting the new Zen3 parts rolled out. From what I've seen, most of the kernel already supports the functions of Zen3 but some of the power plan related things still need to be plumbed in, assuming there are some new improvements that can be activated, otherwise it will just fall back to the rest of Zen support. I'm still interested in seeing better PBO and Ryzen Master support in Linux to save BIOS tweaking.

I think the difference here, at least from my understanding, is that the larger 20 GB variant will be doubling up on memory chips per channel which could affect the memory bandwidth, but not as much as the 1060 saga wher I believe some of the RAM was actually running at lower speeds or using lower speed RAM on the smaller models. Hopefully I remember that correctly, but anyone please correct me if I'm wrong. Would be nice if all corporations were properly rated on this kind of thing, it does give even more reason to wait for independent third-party reviews of new tech though.

That's unfortunate about the CPU, hopefully they get you taken care of and you find a good replacement that works for you.

While I'm completely for having 10 GB and 20 GB assuming a $50-100 price difference to help meet more price points, I'm not a fan of how much Nvidia hyped the launch to then only launch the lower size one with no indication (outside of rumors) that there was a larger size variant coming for those who might actually want the higher VRAM.

Small Update: Managed to get all the gear moved in to the full case today. I have power coming in the bottom cable hold and all data cables coming out the top cut-out, picture to follow. Thanks for the feedback. I was planning on covering up with some low restriction foam to more help with noise but you bring up some good points. I was going to attempt to somewhat seal the rails to the side of the case and put in blank plates in all the unused rack spaces so that the equipment all creates a negative pressure in the front space which could help pull in air through a loose filter. That will come down to some testing. I also ordered some Arctic 80mm fans for the UPS to quiet them down along with the extended battery module for that UPS that adds another 12 cells, just a casual 109 kg added to this thing... Battery life will not be an issue in an outage anymore.

Thanks for that, I will check that out for sure. My first idea was to source some large pieces of foam similar to that Fractal puts in the front of the Meshify-C or some really large commercial furnace filters (the wire mesh ones) and use magnets to secure them form the inside of the case and add some large 200+ mm fans if required for airflow. This would be on the front door at least. The side panels could probably make due with just some old black pillow cases as well as the rear then use those top two 120mm fans with my two remaining Gentle Typhoons as exhaust fans. Yeah, in my case with all quiet fans installed, its perfectly fine in my home office beside my desk. For some people, that could be a problem, but then I would like do that Linus Sebastian did in this video with Long Thunderbolt cables through the wall to the adjacent room:

It is on wheels with leveling pegs and it is 25" Depth from Rail to Rail. I need to figure out a material to use as filter for the side and doors to help with dust and noise levels, if anyone has recommendations before I go scour Reddit, let me know please I just spent the night with my new Chenbro case that just arrived, not really worth a review and not going to recommend it unless you just want a barebones case that can support a gaming rig. It does fit a 360mm as most 4U cases would but I ned to come up with a proper mounting bracket for it and some sort of mesh front.

What I can't stand is SLI/NVLink was a perfect solution for Game streamers to have dual GPU's, one for the gameplay and one for just encoding/decoding. Now the only options really are: Use Encode/Decode engines on the gamins GPU itself which does have a performance hit Use a second GPU/Software in the same system where now you have more traffic over the PCIe bus, again a performance hit Build a second streaming rig with a capture card and deal with some potential HDCP and quality issues