**Tech Briefs**

As we wait for the new OLED gaming monitors to arrive, it's time to dive into some exciting tech news. RTX 4090 owners, beware - your GPU may not be as powerful as you think. Recently, an RTX 4090 was brought to its knees while attempting to run Cyberpunk 2077's new RT overdrive mode, which uses full path tracing instead of the workarounds that current games employ. With a whopping 16 frames per second, this feature might not be suitable for everyone's taste.

**AMD and Zen 5**

Jim Keller, the CEO of AI chip startup TensTorrent, recently gave a keynote in India showcasing detailed performance numbers for a range of data center CPUs, including Zen 5. The test was conducted on the integer-based spec CPU 2017 into rate one Benchmark, and it showed a massive 30% improvement for Zen 5 over Zen 4, which translates to a 23% IPC Improvement and higher clock speeds. This suggests that Zen 5 might arrive with a significant boost in performance.

**Data Breach**

Unfortunately, data breaches can happen anytime, and this week was no exception. Western Digital announced on Monday that there was a network security incident identified on Sunday, March 26th. Internal company data was compromised, although the details are still scarce. What's even more concerning is that their My Cloud storage service for WD clients went offline, causing countless users to lose access to their personal data. The service remains offline as of Thursday, and it's unclear when it will be restored.

**Asus Rog Ally Handheld Gaming Device**

In a surprising turn of events, Asus confirmed the existence of its Rog Ally handheld gaming device after posting an April Fool's joke eight days prior. The device features a custom Zen 4-based SOC and RDNA3 GPU, a 7-inch 120Hz 1080p display, Micro SD card slot, and more. It also boasts the ability to connect to an Asus XG Mobile external GPU. The launch is expected to be in October 2023, but no pricing has been disclosed yet.

**Charity Fundraiser**

In a heartwarming turn of events, a charity fundraiser was launched on Wednesday this week to support Travis Peacock and his family. Travis might be familiar to you from his charity work through Shellback Tech, but he's had an extremely challenging past year or so, forcing him to shut down his charity with some help from Thermaltake. To make matters worse, his family has been barely scraping by due to medical expenses and other setbacks. The fundraiser aims to provide them with the necessary support, and it's already blown past its initial goal of $2500. If you'd like to contribute or learn more about Travis' situation, check out the build video for some 7800X 3D benchmarks and more information on the charity's progress.

**Stay Connected**

That's all for this week's Tech Briefs. If you liked it, be sure to click that like button or leave a comment below. You can also check out my store at paulshardway.net for high-quality merchandise, including t-shirts, hoodies, beer sets, and more. Subscribing to my channel is always a good call too, as I'll make sure to bring you the latest tech news and updates on a regular basis. Thanks again to everyone who has donated so far, and we'll see you next week!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to Paul's Tech news the April Hardware launches have begun to rain down upon us and while not everyone had yet another CPU that's really good for PC gaming on their Wanted list the 7800x 3D embargo lift on Wednesday precipitated a deluge of reviews that were overall quite positive PC Gamers who had been left out in the cold because they couldn't afford a 13 900k or a 7950x3d now have a sub 500 am5 option that's also quite power efficient pair it up with a high-end GPU assuming you can afford one and you're golden showers and Scattered storms are predicted to continue this month though with the imminent launch of the RTX 4070 and we even have some awesome new OLED panels in the forecast as well as a drizzle of early Zen 5 performance estimates so bust out that umbrella and strap on your galoshes it's time to get wet with this week's Tech news excellent today's video is brought to you by the Corsair Xenon Flex OLED gaming monitor which can bend from completely flat up to 800 R curvature but there's a lot more to this display which features an ultra wide 45 inch 3440x1440 panel with a 240 hertz refresh rate and .03 millisecond grade degree response time the spec list also includes Nvidia g-sync compatibility AMD freesync premium certification Auto HDR with up to 1000 nit brightness 99 DCI P3 color gamut coverage a sophisticated burning prevention system and an integrated stand with a range of connectivity click the sponsor Link in the video description for more on the Corsair Xenia on Flex it's nice to have a CPU that's good at everything but not everyone can afford the current 600 to 700 flagships you've used from Intel and AMD likewise many PC Gamers out there would be hard-pressed to make use of all the cores and threads in a 3900k or 7950x3d so the 7800x 3D which saw reviews go live Wednesday and a retail launch on Thursday offers an enticing alternative save a few hundred dollars and get yourself gaming performance that's right in line with those flagships sometimes even surpassing them depending on the title and resolution but it was the chips efficiency stats that really pushed it into the glowing review territory since many games only saw the 7800x 3D drawing 50 to 80 watts of package power while also keeping up with a GPU like the RTX 4090 and that's when the slow realizations begin to happen so you're telling me that this CPU performs as well as if not better than the seven to eight hundred dollar 7950x and 3900k while costing hundreds less using way less power so you don't need to spend another 150 to 200 bucks on a 360 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler and you can get away with a lower end am5 motherboard that doesn't cost 500 plus because it has every overclocking feature imaginable oh and hey you can also get by just fine with cheaper ddr5 5600 to 6000 speed Ram which has come way down in price too and then just maybe you might have saved enough money to buy one of those thousand dollar plus gpus that currently populate the high end of the market okay so GPU prices are a downside still yes and mixed use Builders should also consider that the 7800x 3DS CPU performance outside of gaming is more in line with the ryzen 7 700 which goes for 330 bucks but this launch will undoubtedly encourage some fence sitting PC Gamers to finally drop some cash on an am5 setup and fortunately for them it looks like the 7800x3d did not immediately sell out to scalpers that was the case earlier today it's still 450 bucks at Newegg although it has switched to Auto notify whereas over on Amazon they want a cool Grand forage from Marketplace seller Sky Ross because Marketplace sellers are soulless greedy parasites who assume that we are all morons speaking of soulless greed though Nvidia they are gearing up to launch another 40 series GPU the RTX 4070 and as discussed last week we're expecting a 600 MSRP for base model cards and while 600 bucks Falls somewhere between oh hey not that bad and Nvidia is forcibly removing all the money from our bank accounts with this horrific pricing it does look to be true as far as we can tell RTX 4070 news was all rumors up until Thursday when The Verge published a story about Counter-Strike 2 getting an update to support Nvidia reflex which reduces latency while gaming and oopsie the slide that Nvidia sent over included RTX 4070 Benchmark results the first official confirmation that this card exists and while video was likely Keen to show that you'll get even better latency reduction via reflex with the 40 series GPU thereby encouraging people to spend more money to buy one there is also close to zero chance that this was an accident Nvidia is quite familiar with how this game is played and pre-launch hype building via official or unofficial leaks is par for the course the rumored launch date is still April 13th so we should find out one way or another this week while also hopefully determining if the RTX 4070s performance is enough to Merit that 600 price tag OLED displays are generally quite nice which I can confirm personally as I've had the chance to try out quite a few now but along with the q1 rollouts of several new panels this year including the 45 inch 240 hertz Ultra wide panel used in the Corsair xeni on Plex and the LG Ultra gear 45gr95qe I kept hearing the same sentiment they're not perfect yet at least in terms of raw stats particularly when it comes to pixel density and people did have a point there so here you go OLED elitists LG and Samsung panels in development as revealed in TFT Central's March update for Ultra wides LG has 34 inch and 39 inch variants in the works with 240Hz refresh rates expected in q1 2024 which will be more pixel dense than the current 45 inch panels and there's a 45 inch 5120 by 2160 resolution display with a 165 Hertz refresh rate that won't arrive until 2025. as for 16x9 there is a 27 inch 1440p panel that hits 480 Hertz a 27 inch 4K 240 hertz option that I know has been highly requested although it is still just under consideration for now and then there are also 42 inch and 31.5 inch 4K panels with 240Hz refresh rates the 31.5 inch panel in particular is interesting because it will probably come with what is known as dfr or dynamic frequency and resolution support meaning it can push 240 hertz at 4K or 480 Hertz at 1080p Samsung meanwhile has a handful of panels in development 2 although there's less info here a 34 inch Ultra wide 34 40 by 1448 240 hertz a 31.5 inch panel at 3840x2160 4K resolution and 240 hertz and two 27 inches one 4K one at 240 hertz and one 1440p option at 360 Hertz so more OLED gaming monitors are coming with some drool-worthy stats to be sure and all we have to do is be patient and wait until 2024 for them to arrive I hate wheat but you won't have to wait much longer for the rest of the tech news because it's time for Tech briefs which are getting briefier every week RTX 4090 owners often consider themselves to be better than everyone else myself included but our hubris will be our undoing if we think our gpus can take on all covers kind of like your mom indeed an RTX 4090 was brought to its knees also like your mom when attempting to run cyberpunk 2077's new RT overdrive mode which uses full path tracing instead of many of the workarounds that current games employ 16 frames per second might be a bit choppy for your taste but just look at all those shiny shiny Reflections RT overdrive mode should be available on April 11th if you'd like to see how poorly your graphics card performs with it enabled too the CEO of AI chip startup tens torrent is Jim Keller you might have heard of him as he has an extensive CPU designing resume and formally headed the team at AMD who developed the Zen architecture that ryzen CPUs use during a recent keynote in India Keller showed a slide with detailed performance numbers for a range of data center CPUs including Zen 5 which has not been released amd's current ryzen 7000 series CPUs are on Zen 4. and while the test was the integer-based spec CPU 2017 into rate one Benchmark it did show a massive 30 Improvement for Zen 5 over Zen 4 or 23 percent better when adjusted for clock speeds so Zen 5 might arrive with a 23 IPC Improvement and higher clock speeds cool what's not cool is when data breaches happen that compromise cloud storage services this time the target was Western Digital who announced Monday that there was a network security incident identified on Sunday March 26th it sounds like internal company data was compromised although they haven't given many details on that but one week ago the my cloud storage service for WD clients went offline meaning countless users lost access to their personal data WD hasn't provided a timeline for when the service will be restored and as of Thursday it was still offline perhaps indicating that the breach was more far-reaching than initial reports lit on I have an idea of who the culprit may have been though it was Eastern analog Western digital's mortal enemy Asus was one of the many companies who posted an April Fool's joke eight days ago and a lot of people said that the fake product they announced actually sounded pretty cool and it turns out it wasn't a fake product the Rog Ally handheld gaming device was confirmed with teaser videos from Linus Tech tips and dave2d on Monday and sports a custom Zen 4 based SOC and rdna3 GPU a 7-inch 120 hertz 1080p display a Micro SD card slot and more including the ability to connect to an Asus XG mobile external GPU we're probably looking at an October 2023 launch for this device and no pricing has been disclosed yet but please Asus don't do product announcements on April Fool's Day it's a confusing enough day already lastly a charity fundraiser kicked off on Wednesday this week Gathering donations to help support Travis peacock and his family you might recognize Travis from his charity work through shellback Tech but he's had an extremely challenging past year or so and he's been forced to shut down his charity with some help from thermaltake I put together a PC with a 7800 X 3D and an RTX 4070 TI which is currently up for grabs in a giveaway so if you haven't had a chance yet check out the build video for some 7800x 3D benchmarks and a bit more info on Travis situation I wanted to say thank you to all who have donated so far though because we have already blown way way past our initial 2500 goal and Travis has told me that this is both inspiring for him and absolutely vital as they've been barely scraping by due to medical expenses and other setbacks so from Travis his family and myself thank you all for your generosity and support but there you have it guys Tech news for the week and if you liked it click that like button or leave me a comment down below while you're down there all the articles that I talked about today are linked in the description if you're interested you can also check out my store at paulshardway.net for high quality merchandise t-shirts hoodies beer sets and more subscribing to my channel is always a good call too thanks again everyone and we'll see you next week foreign\n"