Overpromise, and under-deliver.

*Not our mantra

It’s

a common problem when it comes to new gadgets in the PC hardware field. Intel made some extreme claims about Optane when they first announced it, with talk of 1000% speed increases. It turns out that the end result doesn’t quite match the hyperbole… but it does deliver real benefits in very specific hardware scenarios. You can read more about it in our Optane feature.

AMD has also just released a refresh of its RX400 series of cards, and we managed to get our hands on the top two models. As you’ll see, once again it’s more of a marketing ploy than any meaningful performance increase, but we’ve just received their low-end RX500 series a day before going to press. We’ll be presenting their performance in PCPP’s Annual Tech Special, where we’ve benchmarked basically every GPU on the market – hopefully the RX550 and RX560 do deliver on the promises of better performance at the entry-level of the market.

Just two days after I’m writing this, the PCPP crew are headed to Taipei for Computex. Think four days of back to back 30 minute meetings with the biggest hardware companies on the planet to check out what they’ve got in store for the year. Last year was a bit of a fizzer, but this year is looking very different – with AMD’s Ryzen CPU launch there’s going to be a motherlode of motherboards, as well as hopefully some info on their new high end Vega graphics chipset. Meanwhile there are plenty of rumours of Intel launching a new chipset, so hopefully we’ll see more than just a few old products prettied up with RGB lighting. Check in to the next issue of PCPP to see a full, detailed report – if we make it back in one piece.