MSI Rolling Out AGESA v.1.1.9.0 BIOS’ for X570/B550

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MSI confirmed that it has initiated the first phase rollout of its new X570 & B550 BIOS based on the AGESA 1.1.9.0 firmware. The AGESA 1.1.9.0 is the official BIOS firmware that will enable support for AMD’s brand new Curve Optimizer feature. In addition to the Curve Optimizer feature support, the BIOS also fixes compatibility issues with NVIDIA cards when enabling Resizable BAR. Although there is no official support for BAR at the moment from NVIDIA motherboard makers have supported the feature on their Intel & AMD current-gen products.

Read more @ WCCFTech

Intel 11th Gen Core i9-11900 – Bench Test w/B560 Board

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The 11900 engineering sample was run under several benchmarks including Cinebench R15, R20, and power consumption tests with AIDA64 with the AVX2 and AVX-512 (AVX3) instruction sets.

For Cinebench R15, the Core i9-11900 (ES) scored 217 in the single-threaded test and 1929 in the multi-threaded test. That’s a similar result to a Core i9 9900K from a few years ago. In Cinebench R20 the 11900 scored 529 points for the single-threaded benchmark and 4683 in the multi-threaded test.

Read more @ Tom’s Hardware

ASRock W480 Creator

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After we already reviewed the motherboards of the Steel Legend series and B460, H470 and Z490 chipsets on OCinside.de, today we take a look at a motherboard for Content Creator with W480 chipset, the ASRock W480 Creator. This is mainly aimed at professional PC application areas and offers special support for Xeon processors, like the recently tested Intel Xeon W-1290. What other features it has to offer, we show in the following review.

Read more @ OCInside

New Article: Onboard Audio Software, Friend or Foe?

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Without a doubt, onboard audio has come a long way over the years, relegating discrete PCIe or other solutions to the the more discerning consumers. We now commonly see better trace routing and isolation for onboard audio solutions, even at the budget end, and in the case of higher end motherboards we may even seen high quality DACs included. While working on our upcoming review of the new ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PRO (WI-FI), we ran into a common problem with newer onboard audio solutions, the software. The best hardware in the world means exactly nothing if it’s paired up with mediocre software. What problem did we encounter?

Let’s take a look in the full article.

ASUS TUF GAMING Z490-PLUS (WI-FI)

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Over the past few years, the ASUS TUF hardware series has undergone metamorphoses, like, perhaps, no other series of motherboards from any other motherboard manufacturer. Initially, The Ultimate Force is a series positioned as ultra-reliable and not too far behind the top Republic of Gamers. Well-worn radiators, a special approach to the quality of elements, often full protection of the PCB with a casing and plugs for all slots, a paper certificate of passing all tests according to the military standard for each copy – that’s what I understand.

Read more @ OC Club (Russian)

NZXT N7 Z490

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Intel platforms have almost become a niche as AMD has stolen a lot of market share over the last few years. NZXT combats this with a fantastic looking motherboard, complete with thermal armor available in black and white colorways. On past solutions, we did note NZXT offered special edition motherboard plates, so we hope to see some of those come over to the Z490 platform as well.

The move to ASRock as the manufacturer has increased the build quality of the NZXT motherboard platform as a whole, the biggest difference coming in BIOS/EFI where we now have a legit solution for overclocking.

Read more @ TweakTown

MSI MEG X570 UNIFY

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This is a properly outfitted motherboard with three full PCI slots available. You can see two 8-pin power connectors and onboard power button and reset buttons, as well as a 2.5 Gbps ethernet jack and AX WIFI6. MSI has been focusing a lot on cooling, including the three M2 slots having heatsinks. The chipset fan is based on ZeroFrozer technology; ergo is passively cooling at normal load levels (to be honest, we haven’t even seen the chipset fan spin up once.

Read more @ Guru3D

SuperMicro SuperO C9Z490-PGW

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Supermicro is one of the most recognizable brands in the server and workstation market. Still, as we saw in our review of the C9Z390-PGW, Supermicro is consistently injecting its ‘server’ grade DNA into its desktop models. The difference between Z390 and Z490 isn’t as stark as it could be, with the main attribute coming in the way of networking support, with an integrated Wi-Fi 6 MAC, which allows users to utilize CNVi modules.

Read more @ AnandTech

ASRock X570 PG Velocita

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For gamers that don’t go with an enthusiast-level Taichi or Extreme4 motherboard platform, ASRock offers a third option in its portfolio. PG or Phantom Gaming has been extremely popular and quite reliable with a BOM that most often resembles a Taichi motherboard offering. With the PG Velocita, we have an updated platform for the AMD Ryzen 5000 series that includes a more robust set of power stages for VCore and SoC, along with feature upgrades we will go over below.

Read more @ TweakTown

Intel 11th Gen TDPs – 65W/125W?

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Purported TDPs for the Intel 11th Gen “Rocket Lake-S” processors have surfaced in the always reliable realm that is Twitter. Right now, we’re seeing a listing of parts from all 3 Core-iX lines showing expected TDPs of either 65W or 125W. The unlocked K / KF models are all showing a reported, but believable, 125W TDP rating with the remainder hitting 65W. Time will tell how accurate these reports are.

Core i9-11900K – 125W
Core i9-11900 – 65W
Core i9-11900F – 65W
Core i7-11700K – 125W
Core i7-11700KF – 125W
Core i7-11700 – 65W
Core i7-11700F – 65W
Core i5-11600K – 125W
Core i5-11600KF – 125W
Core i5-11400 – 65W
Core i5-11400F – 65W