Under The Hood: This Week In PC, Component And Software News

Thinking of building a new gaming PC? Struggling with whatever random error your desktop is throwing up this week? Under The Hood gives you a quick and concise run-down of the most important things that happened to the PC master race in the last seven days.

The Samsung Galaxy TabPro S 4G Is Now Available In Australia

Samsung’s flagship 2-in-1 Windows tablet, the Galaxy TabPro S, has been available in Australia since 1 April (you can check out our review here). But now you can pick up the shiny new 4G LTE model for $1,799.

Samsung says the Galaxy TabPro S 4G variant will “support greater mobility for work and life on-the-go” with LTE capability, as well as “greater productivity” through a combination of Samsung’s premium Galaxy experience and Microsoft Windows 10 Pro.

“The Galaxy TabPro S 4G is the perfect productivity tool designed to support Australians with a connected tablet experience from anywhere a 4G LTE mobile network can operate,” said Prasad Gokhale, Vice President of IT and Mobile at Samsung.

“The launch of a premium LTE capable 2-in-1 Galaxy tablet extends our commitment to provide Australians with technology that supports greater mobility, productivity and connected experience in a beautifully crafted form.”

You’ll Be Able To Buy Nvidia’s Founder’s Edition GeForce GTX 1080 In Australia

When Nvidia’s new, powerful and surprisingly affordable GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card was announced, the graphics chipmaker did something interesting: it said it would sell its own, premium Founder’s Edition cards alongside the usual brands like Gigabyte, MSI and Asus. And you’ll be able to buy them in Australia, too.

Nvidia told us that the card would primarily be sold online through its Nvidia.com online store, and you can already sign up to be notified when it goes on sale, but that storefront should include the option for international shipping to Australia.

While you’ll be paying in US dollars, there’s no explicit extra price hike for Australians like we’ve seen with the HTC Vive. You can also use an international freight forwarding company, of course.

MSI’s X99 Gaming Pro Carbon Motherboard Gives You USB-C Front Ports On Your PC

USB Type-C is (thankfully) becoming more and more popular around the tech world — we’re seeing it appear in new phones like the LG G5 and HTC 10, as well as in laptops like the new Razer Blade Stealth and Apple’s own MacBook. Hardcore desktop PCs are getting it on their rear I/O panels, too, but this new top-of-the-line gaming motherboard from MSI is the first with pin-outs for a USB Type-C port on the front of your machine. Now we just have to wait for a case to put it in.

The MSI X99 Gaming Pro Carbon, in all its black-on-black-on-black glory, is built around Intel’s LGA 2011-3 socket and the X99 chipset — it’s made for the ridiculously powerful octa-core Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition CPU, as well as the hexa-core i7-5820K. Supporting eight sticks of DDR4 and with four SLI slots, this is for the hardcore system builder that’s either creating the world’s most powerful 4K or VR gaming rig or something for some incredibly intensive video editing, CAD or post-production work.

Nvidia’s New GeForce GTX 1080 Is ‘The Largest Processor Endeavour In The History Of Humanity’

Nvidia has a new graphics card, and it is doubling down on virtual reality as the reason for hardcore gamers to upgrade their rigs. Several. Billion. Dollars went into R&D for this card — it’s faster than two GTX 980 cards in SLI, and it’s even faster than the Titan X as well.

The new GeForce GTX 1080 also integrates new physics-based audio support, physically-accurate object manipulation using VR hand controllers, and a whole other bunch of goodies to entice you to part with your hard-earned dollars.

Teasing the assembled crowd and Twitch stream with a series of software hints before actually revealing the card, Nvidia then dumped info wholesale — the card is built on the world’s first 16-nanometre FinFet manufacturing process for graphics, and uses the world’s first implementation of 10GHz GDDR5X memory built by Micron. Default clock speeds for the card are 1733MHz for the GTX 1080 core, although there are boost functions, and 8GB of onboard memory is standard.

The standard card will have a very surprisingly low $US599 RRP, with a “crazy overclockable” founder’s edition card $699. Both editions will be available around the world on May 27th. We’ll update you with Australian prices as soon as we’re able.

Ansel Is A Hi-Res Digital Camera For Your PC Games

Gamers have become pretty accustomed to the functionality of tools like GeForce Experience and Raptr for years now. Press a button and you can record gameplay without much of an overhead. Optimise your image settings. Update drivers. Run games at inordinately high resolutions.

The simplicity is cool. The world and art of in-game photography has still been buried behind SweetFX profiles, custom Cheat Engine tables, INI hacks and more for a while. But NVIDIA is trying to change that. As part of their Pascal reveal over the weekend, NVIDIA has lifted the lid on a new program called Ansel.

The idea is to enable gamers to take in-game pictures and photos of whatever they want, unrestricted by camera angles, field of view, resolution or more.

A Quick Refresher On How Computer Memory Works

RAM, DRAM, SRAM, SSD, HDD. The language of computer memory, like most other components of computers and smartphones, is a collection of alphabet soup. So it can be difficult to wrap your brain around what exactly those collection of letters mean and, more importantly, what the hell they do.

Thankfully, this TED-Ed video breaks down the surprisingly human-like properties of computer RAM, or random access memory. Never knew the difference between DRAM and SRAM was? Confused why you should care if your new laptop uses solid-state drives instead of other out-of-date storage tech? This five-minute video explains it all.


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