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Minisforum N5 Pro NAS

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The Minisforum N5 Pro NAS has specifications far more advanced than we’re used to see in a NAS.  It will feature AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370 Strix Point processor, it can be equipped with up to 96GB of ECC RAM, a 10 GbE LAN port, and it has PCIe 4.0 x4 connections (internal and OCuLink port for external connections).  This could be not only your NAS but your home server as well.  It’s nice to have companies challenging QNAP and Synology as their products sometimes feel a bit overpriced.

However, competing with the likes of Synology on the software side is a whole other matter and no easy task.  Many of the less established NAS companies fall far short when trying to provide a total NAS experience because they don’t have the years of experience nor funding that the larger companies have.  And this truly matters in the NAS experience because if the software isn’t flawless it can create major problems including data loss.

We’re very happy to see the competition heating up.

Discuss on the Gear Rumors Forum

Lenovo Legion Go 2

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Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 is looking pretty damn good as a handheld gaming device.  Let’s start with the screen: 8.8-inch, 1600p, 144hz, OLED, and VRR.  What more could you want?

It uses the new and excellent AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme mobile CPU, features 32gb of of 7500MHz LPDDR5X RAM, various storage size options, and a larger battery.  Unless you want something smaller and more portable, we expect this device to be a hit.

Unfortunately it seems like this device will come later in the year than the Lenovo Legion Go S which will likely ship in May.

Discuss on the Gear Rumors Forum

Legion Go S

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Lenovo has shown us their Legion Go S featuring an 8-inch display, Ryzen Z2 Go processor, and 512GB storage.  Priced at $499 for the Steam OS version and $599 for the Windows 11 version, this appears to be a promising handheld as long as its somewhat less powerful (but efficient) processor meets all of your gaming needs.

It is true that the Legion Go has better specifications but that makes sense as the S version is the lite version.

Discuss on the Gear Rumors Forums

 

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Video Cards

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AMD announced the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 video cards featuring their new RDNA 4 architecture.  These cards are aimed at the market of the 4070 Ti Super and the 4070 Ti/4070.  These could be the best value gaming cards depending on how AMD prices them. Anything that puts price pressure on Nvidia’s cards is a good thing so we’re hoping that AMD does the right thing here.

But even if AMD doesn’t offer a very competitive price, early indications suggests that their 9070 XT beats NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 SUPER In TimeSpy Extreme.  That is impressive if true.

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Nintendo Switch 2

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The Nintendo Switch was released on March 3, 2017.  That’s 7 years and 10 months ago.  That’s a long time to wait.  An announcement from Nintendo about the new Switch is expected within the first quarter of this year and the actual shipping of the console will be in May or June.  Some leaks have even suggested there will be some kind of teaser coming out tomorrow, January 16th.

The officially confirmed facts are that the Nintendo Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with original Nintendo Switch games and it will have Nintendo Switch Online.

We have seen $399 thrown around as the price but that appears to be speculation.

Discuss on the Gear Rumors Forum

AMD Ryzen 9950X3D and 9900X3D

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We all knew these models were coming so it’s nice to have them finally announced:

Model Cores/Threads Max boost TDP L3 Cache
Ryzen 9 9950X3D 16/32 5.7GHz 170W 144MB
Ryzen 9 9900X3D 12/24 5.5GHz 120W 140MB

 

Price has not yet been announced but they won’t be cheap. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2 GHz 16-Core AM5 Processor is presently listed at $700 at B&H Photo.  Unfortunately, we’re not expecting these to be that much faster than the 7000 series equivalents.  Perhaps 10% at best.  But we would be happy to be wrong on this front.

Discuss on the Gear Rumors Forums

M4 Macbook Air

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We’re getting various reports about an imminent M4 Macbook Air launch.  We’re hearing anything from late January to March.  March seems more plausible as last March was the release of the M3 Macbook Air.

What should you expect to be different in this generation of the Macbook Air? The following is what we have gleaned so far (since the M4 chip is already out in other Apple products):

  • Around a 20%+ performance improvement
  • Better battery life (maybe an extra half-hour compared to the previous Macbook Air)
  • Same starting price
  • Same body

So not an exciting improvement, but for someone trying to decide whether or not they should wait the performance boost is not trivial and is likely worth waiting for if you don’t need a laptop today.

Discuss on the Gear Rumors Forums

Nvidia RTX 5000 Series

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The Nvidia RTX 5000 series has been announced.  We are disappointed by the lack of VRAM upgrades in several of the models.  However, we are not surprised as Nvidia has a good hold on the market and can get away with a lot.  We really want to see some more affordable models with 24gb of RAM.  Instead, we get only 16gb of RAM unless you go up to the $1,999 32GB of RAM flagship RTX 5090 video card.

The following table summarizes our current knowledge:

Model Cuda Ram Memory Speed Bus Power
RTX 5090 21,760 32GB 28Gbps 512-bit 600W
RTX 5070 Ti 8,960 16GB 28Gbps 256-bit 285W
RTX 5070 6,400 12GB 28Gbps 192-bit 250W
RTX 5060 Ti TBC 16GB 28Gbps ? 200W
RTX 5060 TBC 8GB 28Gbps ? ?
RTX 5080 10,752 16GB 30Gbps 256-bit 400W

 

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Nvidia Digits $3000 AI Supercomputer

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With VRAM being king in the AI world, people started buying Apple computers as their RAM is integrated and used both by the CPU and GPU.  How else would you get 128gb of RAM so “cheaply” where a good portion of that could be used by the GPU?  This seemed like a more cost effective way of getting a large pool of VRAM, and as a plus you could do so in a smaller size with less power and technical hurdles (like when trying to build a 4 GPU rig).

Nvidia surprised us by announcing an ARM based computer for $3000 that comes with 128gb of unified memory at a price about $1700 less than you would pay from Apple.

This computer is said to be able to handle models up to 200 billion parameters in size, which is simply great.

We hope this product won’t be in so high demand that it will be hard to get a hold of.

Discuss on the Gear Rumors Forum

New Camera Coming from DJI

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DJI Support has stated:

Hi there, thank you so much for your attention. Please stay tuned with us as our mysterious new product will be launched soon. For more details, you will find out on the launch date.

It’s funny to see a company refer to their own product as mysterious.  We truly hope this a full-frame camera as DJI likely has the freedom to be a bit more disruptive and innovative in what they release.  They’ve certainly made things interesting in regards to lower-end cine cameras.

Discuss on the Gear Rumors Forums