Daily Tech News 20 February 2023

• AMD's new 7745HX laptop CPU looks pretty good. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 8 core chip - a separate family with 12 and 16 core versions will come later - is as fast as Intel's 14 core 12900HK from last year, 12% faster than Apple's 12 core M2 Max, and 32% faster than the previous generation 6900HX.
  
  It can't keep up with Intel's new (and power hungry) 24 core 13900HX, but you wouldn't really expect it to. That's the job of the upcoming 12 and 16 core parts.
  
  Will anyone make a laptop based on this chip that isn't horribly flawed in multiple ways?
  
  <shake shake>
  
  Signs point to "fat chance".

• Need a motherboard for your new Intel workstation CPU which you don't have because they're not out yet?
  
  ASRock has the W790 WS.
  Asus has the Pro WS W790 Ace at the low end, and the Pro WS W790E Sage SE at the high end.
  
  The ASRock and the Ace are designed more for the W-2400 range, with four channel RAM and only five PCIe slots, while the Sage is designed specifically for the more expensive W-3400 range of chips.
  
  Couple of things worth knowing: The two families of CPUs use the same socket and the same chipset, and any chip will work in any of these motherboards. If you use a W-2400 chip in the Sage only half the DIMM slots will work, and only four of the seven PCIe slots. On the other hand, if you put a W-3400 in the other boards, everything on the board will work, but half the memory channels and 3/7ths of the PCIe lanes on the CPU won't be wired up to anything.
  
  Overall it's a good deal; you can start with a $359 6 core CPU and scale up to a 56 core CPU without changing motherboards.
  
  The other thing is that memory. AMD Threadripper motherboards let you use either desktop or server memory - not both at the same time, but whichever one makes sense for you. These motherboards use DDR5 server RAM only, and a quick look around regular retailers like Amazon, Newegg, and Micro Center didn't find much of that available. Zero, in fact.
  
  It exists, but going to Kingston directly didn't really help except for telling me they have a four module per customer limit. That Sage motherboard has eight memory channels.
  
  
  
• Is Nvidia doing it again? (WCCFTech)
  
  Leaked model numbers from Gigabyte indicate three different models of the RTX 4070 - with 10GB, 12GB, or 16GB of RAM. That necessarily means different bus widths, and likely different performance levels.
  
  The 4070 Ti is a 12GB card already, so a 16GB card seems a bit odd here, but there's already the example of the 3060 which has more RAM than the 3060 Ti, 3070, 3070 Ti, and the regular version of the 3080.
  
  
  
• How to keep your Twitter secure without giving Elon Musk any money. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Follow the instructions on Twitter. Seriously. That's what these idiots are bitching about.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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