Szdani88

Still half baked. 

Sony has warned owners of its Vaio systems not to upgrade to Windows 10 yet.

The hardware maker has admitting that the driver testing has not been completed yet despite having had plenty of warning from Microsoft.

In a message posted to its support site, Sony has told owners of its Vaio-branded systems that 'regardless of the Windows 10 upgrade availability, Sony recommends you wait to install Windows 10 on your Vaio computer.

This will give Sony the chance to complete testing for supported Vaio models.'

A schedule included with the document advises that driver and application testing will be completed in October for devices sold with Windows 8.1 preinstalled, and November for older devices shipped with Windows 8.

Those sold with Windows 7 have no schedule published and will probably have the official designation of "one of these days."

It is pretty silly for Sony to be caught out, but then the outfit is not that interested.

With sinking sales Sony left the PC market in February 2014, allowing a Japanese company to sell selected Vaio models to the local market.

But still it is interesting to note that Windows 10 does have problems with drivers, something that many people seem to be in denial about.

High factory-overclock and custom design expected

MSI has released its first teaser for the upcoming Geforce GTX 980 Ti Lightning.

The same report also suggest that we might also see some high factory-overclock with GPU Boost frequency of 1342MHz, which is just shy away from 1355MHz on the highest-factory overclocked GTX 980 Ti on the market, the Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme.

MSI might also skip the usual yellow color scheme seen on earlier Lightning series graphics cards and rather go for the same white/black color seen on its flagship Z170A XPower Gaming Titanium Edition motherboard. We also would not be surprise if we saw an integration of the OC Dashboard on the graphics side as well.

MSI will hopefully reveal a bit more details soon and we will surely keep an eye for it.

Automotive helped 

Nvidia just announced its financial Q2 2016 scores and they are better than anyone expected, thanks mostly to a sterling performance from Geforce. 

Nvidia booked a $1.153 billion revenue which is five per cent better than a year before. In it had $1.103 billion revenue and the gross margin of 56.1 per cent.

Its gross margin in second quarter was 55 percent which was 1.1 percent less than year ago. It is interesting to note that Nvidia did two million more sales than in the first quarter.

Operating expenses increased to $558 mainly due to the Icera modem write off. This is a 17 percent increase from the last quarter when Nvidia had $477 million expense and 22 percent more than a year ago $456 million.

Net income was $26 million or eighty percent year on year. Nvidia's earning per share dropped 77 percent down from $0.22 in Q2 2015 to $0.05 in current quarter.

The income and expenses were hurt as Nvidia failed to find a buyer for Icera modem business unit. The Shield tablet recall might account for $0.02 loss per diluted share. The Samsung and Qualcomm lawsuit cost Nvidia $24 million.

On the bright side, Jeff Fisher's GPU division did exceptionally well. Revenue from Geforce GPU grew 51 percent and the high end sales grew significantly.

GPU sales accounted for $959 million sales in Q2 or two percent more than $940 in Q1 . Year over year Nvidia had nine percent better sales, up from $878 million in Q2 last year. Nvidia claims that its gaming revenue rose 59 percent year on year to $661 million.

Nvidia's enterprise graphics and virtualisation revenues declined 14 per cent  year on year to $187 million. Quadro business declined 14 per cent year on year to $187. Nvidia blames a weak refresh cycle on  the workstation market.  

Tegra processor sales fell twelve percent from $145 in Q1 to $128 in Q2. It fell 19 percent year over year from $159, while the other sales accounted for flat $66 million year over year, last quarter and current quarter.

Nvidia had 15 percent decline year on year in HPC and Cloud, reflecting lumpiness from major deep learning projects.  

Automotive revenues rose 76 percent year on year to $71 million. Nvidia claims that 50 companies are interested in using Nvidia Drive PX in their autonomous driving efforts.

Colette M. Kress Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President said. 

In the face of challenges on both the macro and semiconductor fronts, NVIDIA is executing well. Helped by our sharp focus and strong market positions, our strategy for creating platforms for gaming, enterprise graphics and virtualization, HPC and cloud, and automotive continues to serve us well as visual computing becomes increasingly more important in these industries. In Q2, these four platforms contributed 85% of our revenue, up from 68 per cent  a year earlier.

Nvidia expects to have 1.18 billion revenue +/- 2 percent in financial Q3 with margins of 56.2% to 56.5%. Q4 might be good for Nvidia with some cool games coming. Nvidia did quite well considering that the PC industry is hurting and that everyone except Apple did  badly this this year.

Noone can say that Nvidia is a gaming company, it is becoming an automotive company too. 

Core i5 6600K and Z170 boards also seen in the wild

Intel has just announced its first products based on the Skylake 14nm technology and we have met two of them.

Intel has just announced Core i7 6700K and this one will replace Core i7 4790K based on the Haswell upgrade, Devil's Canyon.

The Core i7 6700K, as we previously revealed, is a 4GHz processor that can reach 4.2GHz at its maximal turbo frequency. It has 8MB of cache and four cores and eight tread support. It supports 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes and two channel DDR4 2133 or DDR3L 1600. Powerwise, it sports a 91W TDP which is 3W higher than the Core i7 4790K and it uses the new LGA 1151 socket. It will sell at $350 and is available today.

The new CPU comes with Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 that promises better overclocking and a new graphics core dubbed Intel HD Graphics 530, which is clocked at 1150 MHz.

We don't have much details about the graphics performance at this time, but the name is correct. We have no idea how you come from Intel HD Graphics 4600 to Core i7 4790K to HD Graphics 530 branding.The most important change with Core i7 6700K and Core i5 6600K is that the boxes are completely redesigned and splashy and they will make all your friends jealous. If your friends get jealous about such things.

The runner up is called Core i5 6600K and this one works at 3.5GHz base clock, and a single core can get a peak turbo frequency of 3.9GHz. It has four cores, four threads and 6MB cache. It also comes with 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes and dual channel DDR4 2133 or DDR3L 1600 memory support. It shares the same 91W TDP and comes in the LGA 1151 socket.

They both need Intel Z170 for its full overclocking potential. The Core i5 6600K will sell for $243.

Intel is promising up to 30 percent better performance than your three year old PC. Intel based this claim on SPECint*_rate_base2006(8 copy rate) IC14 scores comparing Core i7-6700K to Intel Core i7-3770K processor. In other words, there is at least one benchmark that will show 30 percent difference.

Intel also claims that Skylake S is 20 percent faster than a two year old PC and it uses the same test for comparison between Core i7-6700K and Intel Core i7-4770K, the original Haswell.

This means that if you had the Haswell Refresh aka. Devil's Canyon based Core i7 4790K you can expect some 10 percent better performance.  

The new Core i7 6700K and Core i5 6600K should bring the new levels of Memory Overclocking with finer grain tuning and full Range Base Clock (BCLK) Tuning. You should know by now that the K processors including Core i7 6700K and Core i5 6600K are fully unlocked.

The Z170 chipset provides 40 percent more high speed I/O lanes for USB 3.0 and PCIe over Intel 9 series of chipsets. It comes with a PCI express 3.0 storage support with Intel Rapid Storage Technology.

Overclockers will love the fact that the full range 1MHz increment overclocking is back. This was one of the main complaints with Core i7 4790 Haswell refresh as that one came with 100, 125 or 166 ratio based base clock (BCLK). Intel claims that you can increase the memory frequency with DDR4 up to 4133 MT/s. It also promises finer grain increments in memory overclocking with Skylake. We will have to see for ourselves how this one goes, as we didn’t get a sample to test just yet. 

Cost-effective GTX 980 Ti

MSI has introduced yet another graphics card in its Geforce GTX 900 series lineup, the MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Armor2X graphics card.

To be available in factory-overclocked version, the new MSI Geforce GTX 980 Ti Armor2X features a dual-fan cooler that should go well with MSI's Krait motherboards, due to black and white cooler and black PCB.

The factory-overclocked version of the MSI's new GTX 980 Ti Armor2X graphics card works at 1178MHz for the GPU base and 1279MHz for the GPU Boost clock while 6GB of GDDR5 memory, paired up with a 384-bit memory interface, ended up at reference 7010MHz. In case you missed it earlier, the GTX 980 Ti is based on Nvidia's GM200 GPU with 2816 CUDA cores.

The display output configuration still features single DVI, single HDMI and three DisplayPort outputs and it still needs 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-Express connectors for power.

Unfortunately, MSI did not reveal any details regarding the price or the availability date but you can expect it to retail at around €680.